The Sam Gunn Omnibus (9 page)

Jade grinned. “Gee, maybe
I ought to check it out.”

“A nice young lady such as yourself should not go to Hell Crater,” Sanchez
said firmly.

“Besides, you wouldn’t be able to afford it on your salary,” the bartender
added.

Jade saw that they were slightly embarrassed. She allowed the subject to
drop.

Sanchez finished his latest beer and put the pilsner glass on the bar a
trifle unsteadily. One of the robot bartenders trundled to it and replaced it
with a filled glass, as it had been doing all during his narrative.

“Poor old Sam prob’ly thought that Bronx Ball-Breaker was falling for him,
didn’t he?” the bartender asked, watching the robot roll smoothly toward the
knot of customers further down the bar.

Sanchez seemed happy to return to Sam’s story. “I suppose he did, at
first. Funny thing is, I think he was actually starting to fall for her. At
least a little. Maybe more sympathy than anything else, but Sam was a very
empathetic guy, you know.”

“Did he ever see her again?” Jade asked.

“No, not her. He tried to call her a few times but she never responded.
Not a peep.”

“Poor Sam.”

“Oh, don’t feel so bad about him. Sam had plenty of other fish to fry. He
was never down for long. Not Sam.”

The bartender gave a hand signal to the nearer of the two robots and it
quickly brought a fresh Coke for Jade and a thimble-sized glass of amber-colored
liqueur for the bartender himself.

He raised his glass and said with utter seriousness, “To Sam Gunn, the
best sonofabitch in the whole goddamned solar system.”

Jade felt a little foolish repeating the words, but she did it, as did
Sanchez, and then sipped at her new drink.

“Y’know,” Sanchez said, after smacking his lips over the beer, “nobody
gives a damn about Sam any more. Here he is, dead and gone, and just about
everybody’s forgotten him.”

“Damn shame,” the bartender agreed.

“I wouldn’t have my business if it wasn’t for Sam,” Sanchez said. “He set
me up when I needed the money to get started. Nobody else would even look at me!
The banks—hah!”

“I was helping my Daddy at his bar down in Florida when I first met Sam,”
said the bartender. “He’s the one who first gave me the idea of opening a joint
up here. It was still called Moonbase when I started this

place. He had to argue a
blue streak to get the base administrators to okay a saloon.”

Jade, her own troubles
pushed to the back of her mind, told them, “You two guys—and Zach, my boss—you’re
the first I’ve ever heard say a decent word about Sam. Everything I ever heard
from the time I was a kid has been ... well, not very flattering.”

“That’s because the
stories about him have mostly been spread by the guys who tangled with him,”
said the bartender.

“The big corporations,”
Sanchez agreed.

“And the government.”

“They hated Sam’s guts.
All those guys with suits and ties.”

“Why?” asked Jade.

The bartender made a
sound halfway between a grunt and a snort. “Why? Because Sam was always f
i
ghting against them. He was the little guy,
trying to get ahead, always bucking the big boys.”

Sanchez smiled again. “Don’t
get the idea that he was some kind of Robin Hood,” he said, glancing at the
bartender, then fixing his gaze once again on Jade’s lustrous green eyes.

The bartender guffawed. “Robin
Hood? Sam? Hell no! All he wanted to do was to get rich.”

“Which he did. Many
times.”

“And threw it all away,
just as often.”

“And
helped a lot of little
guys like us, along the way.”

The bartender wiped at
his eyes. “Hey, Felix, you remember the time...”

Jade did not think it
was possible to get drunk on Coca-Cola, so the exhilarated feeling she was
experiencing an hour or so later must have been from the two men’s tales of Sam
Gunn.

“Why doesn’t somebody do
a biography of him?” she blurted. “I mean, the networks would love it, wouldn’t
they?”

Both men stopped the
reminiscences in mid-sentence. The bartender looked surprised. Sanchez
inexplicably turned glum.

“The networks? Pah!”
Sanchez spat.

“They’d never do it,”
said the bartender, turning sad.

“Why not?”

“Two reasons. One: the
big corporations run the networks and they still hate Sam, even though he’s
dead. They won’t want to see him glorified. And two: guys like us will tell you
stories about Sam, but do you think we’d trust some smart-ass reporter from one
of the networks?” “Oh,” said Jade. “I see—I guess.”

The men resumed their
tales of their younger days. Jade half-listened as she sipped her Coke,
thinking to herself, But they’re talking to me about Sam. Why couldn’t I get
other people who knew him to talk to me?

IT
TOOK JADE THREE MONTHS TO GET HERSELF HIRED AS AN
assistant video editor for the
Selene office of the Solar News Network. She took crash courses in Video
Editing and News Writing from the electronic university, working long into the
nights in front of her interactive computer screen, catching a few winks of
sleep, and then going to the garage to put in her hours on the surface driving
a truck.

At first Zach Bonner,
her supervisor, scowled angrily at her baggy eyes and slowed reflexes.

“Tell your boyfriend to
let you get more sleep, little girl,” he growled at her. “Otherwise you’re
going to make a mistake out there and kill yourself—maybe kill me, too.”

Shocked with surprise,
Jade blurted the truth. “I don’t have a boyfriend, Zach. I’m studying.”

Bonner had three
daughters of his own. As swiftly as he could, he transferred Jade to a maintenance
job indoors. She gratefully accepted.

“Just remember,” he said
gruffly, “what you’re doing now is holding other guys’ lives in your hands. Don’t
mess up.”

Jade did her work
carefully, both day and night, until her certificates of course completion
arrived in her e-mail. Then she tackled the three network news offices at
Selene. Minolta/Bell, the largest, turned her down cold; they had no job
openings at the moment, they said, and they only hired people with experience.
BBC accepted her application with a polite version of the classic, “Don’t call
us; we’ll call you.”

Solar News, the smallest
of the three and the youngest, was an all-news network. They paid much less than
Jade was making as a truck driver. But they had an opening for an assistant
video editor. Jade took the job without thinking twice about it.

Zach Bonner shook his
head warily when she told him she was quitting. “You sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” Jade said. “I’m
sure.”

He gave a sigh that was
almost an exasperated snort. “Okay, kid. If things don’t work out for you, come
on back here and I’ll see what I can do for you.”

She had more than half expected him to say that, but his words still
warmed her. She stood up on tiptoes and pecked a kiss on his cheek. He
sputtered with mixed embarrassment and happiness.

Dr. Dinant was pleased that Jade was moving to a job belowground. “I still
would like to do the procedure on you,” she said, “before I finish my tour here
and return home.”

Jade put her off, hoping she would return to Earth and forget about her.
Just as her adoptive mother had.

She started her new job, surprised that there were only six people in the
entire Selene office of Solar News. Two of them were reporters, one male and
one female, who went to the same hairdressing salon and actually appeared on
screen now and then, when the network executives permitted such glory.
Otherwise, their stories were “reported” by anchorpersons in Orlando who had
never been to the Moon.

It took her nearly a year to work up the courage to tell her new boss
about her idea of doing a biography of Sam Gunn.

“I’ve heard of him,” said her boss, a middle-aged woman named Monica
Bianco. “Some sort of a con man, wasn’t he? A robber baron?”

Although Monica affected a veneer of newsroom cynicism, she could not hide
her basic good nature from Jade for very long. The two women had much in common
in addition to their jobs. Monica had come to Selene to escape pollution
allergies that left her gasping helplessly more than half the year on Earth.
When Jade confided that she could never go to Earth, her boss broke into tears
at the memory of all she had been forced to leave behind. The two of them
became true friends after that.

Monica was good-looking despite her years, Jade thought. She admitted to
being over forty, and Jade wondered just how far beyond the Big Fou
r
-Oh she really was. Not that it mattered much.
Especially in Selene, where men still outnumbered women by roughly three to one.
Monica was a bit heavier than she ought to be, but her ample bosom and cheerful
disposition kept lots of men after her. She confessed to Jade that she had been
married twice. “I buried one and dumped the other,” she said, without a trace
of remorse. “Both bastards. I just seem to pick rotten SOBs for myself.”

Jade had nothing to confess beyond the usual teenager’s flings. So she
told Monica what she knew of Sam Gunn and asked how she might get the
decision-makers of Solar News to assign her to do a biography.

“Forget it, honey,” advised Monica. “The only ideas they go for are the
ones they think up for themselves—or steal from somebody they envy. Besides,
they’d never let an inexperienced pup like you tackle an assignment like that.”

Jade felt her heart sink. But then Monica added, “Unless ...”

So several weeks later Jade found herself at dinner with Monica and Jim
Gradowsky, the Solar News office chief. They sat at a cozy round table in a
quiet corner of the R
i
storante de la
Luna. Of Selene’s five eating establishments, the Ristorante was acknowledged
to be the best bargain: lots of good food at modest prices. It was Jumbo Jim
Gradowsky’s favorite eatery.

Monica wore a black skirt and blouse with a scooped neckline. At Monica’s
insistence, Jade had spent a week’s salary on a glittering green sheath that
complemented her eyes. Now that she saw the checkered tablecloths and dripping
candles, though, she thought that Monica had overdressed them both.

Gradowsky, who showed up in a wrinkled short-sleeved shirt and baggy
slacks, did not seem to notice what they were wearing. He was called Jumbo Jim
because of his girth. But never to his face.

“So you can never go Earthside,” Gradowsky was saying through a mouthful
of
coniglio cacciatore.
His open-collared
shirt was already stained and sprinkled with the soup and salad courses.

“It’s a bone condition,” Jade replied. “Osteopetrosis.”

Gradowsky took a tiny roasted rabbit leg in one big hand. Red gravy
dripped onto his lap. “Isn’t that what little old ladies get? Makes ‘em stoop
over?”

“That’s osteoporosis,” Jade corrected. “The bones get soft with age. I’ve
got just the opposite problem. My bones are too brittle. They’d snap under a
full Earth gravity. They call it Marble Bones.”

He shook his head and dabbed at the grease around his mouth with a
checkered napkin. “Gee, that’s too bad. I could go back Earthside if I wanted
to, but the medics say I’d hafta to lose forty-fifty pounds first.”

Jade made a sympathetic noise.

“You know, Jim,” said Monica, sitting on his other side, “Jade here’s got
a terrific idea for a special. If you could sell it back in Orlando it’d be
quite a feather in your cap.”

“Yeah? Really?”

Jade explained her hope to do a biography of Sam Gunn. Gradowsky was obviously
cool to the idea, but Monica slid her chair closer to his and insisted that it
was the kind of idea that Solar’s upper echelons would go for.

“It could mean a boost for you,” Monica said, leaning so close to
Gradowsky that Jade could see her cleavage from across the table. “A big boost.”

The two women went to the ladies’ room together as the waiter cleared
their table in preparation for dessert. Jade saw that there were greasy paw
stains on Monica’s skirt.

“You’re not throwing yourself at him for me?” Jade asked.

Monica smiled. “Don’t worry about it, honey. Jumbo’s kind of cute, if you
don’t mind his table manners.”

“Cute?”

“After three bottles of wine.”

“Monica, I can’t let you ...”

The older woman smiled sweetly at Jade. “Don’t give it another thought,
child. Who knows, I might marry the bum and try to civilize him.”

Thus it came to pass that Jim Gradowsky sold his idea of doing a biography
of Sam Gunn to the top brass of the Solar News Network. He even won the
responsibility of picking the reporter to handle the interviews.

Jade faced him alone in his office, a minuscule cubbyhole crammed with a
desk, two computer terminals, a battered pseudo-leather couch, and a whole wall
full of TV screens.