The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  “Oh? What else?”

  “I had to resign as president of Ecuador and name Quintana as head of the interim government.”

  “Until elections can be held,” Ric added sarcastically.

  “Who is this young man?” my father asked.

  “I am Ricorio Esteban Horacio Queveda y Diego, son of Professor Queveda, who fled from your secret police the year you became president.”

  “Ah.” My father sagged down onto the sofa and picked up his cigarette holder once again. “Then you want to murder me, too, I suppose.”

  “Papa, you’re murdering yourself with those cigarettes!”

  “No lectures today, little one,” he said to me. Then he puffed deeply on his cigarette. “I have been through much these past twenty hours.”

  “Ric did not condone assassinating you,” I told my father. “He wanted me to warn you.” That was stretching the truth, of course, and I wondered why I said it. Until I took a look at Ric, so serious, so handsome, so brave.

  For his part, Ric said, “So you have joined forces with this gringo imperialist.”

  “Imperialist?” Sam laughed.

  “I have invested my private monies in the orbital hotel project, yes,” my father admitted.

  “Drug money,” Ric accused. “Cocaine money squeezed from the sweat of the poor farmers.”

  “We’re going to make those farmers a lot richer,” Sam said.

  “Yes, of course.” Ric looked as if he could murder them both.

  “Listen to me, hothead,” said Sam, jabbing a stubby finger in Ric’s direction. “First of all, I’m no flogging imperialist.”

  “Then why have you claimed the equatorial orbit for yourself?”

  “So that nobody else could claim it. I don’t give a crap whether the UN recognizes our claim or not, I’m giving all rights to the orbit to the UN itself. That orbit belongs to the people of the world, not any nation or corporation.”

  “You’re giving... ?”

  “Yeah, sure. Why let the lawyers spend the next twenty years wrangling over the legalities? I claim the orbit, then voluntarily give up the claim to the people of the world, as represented by the United Nations. So there!” And Sam stuck his tongue out at Ric, like a self-satisfied little boy.

  Before either of us could reply, Sam went on, “There’s big money to be made in space, kids. VCI’s just the beginning. OrbHotel’s gonna be a winner, and with Carlos bankrolling it, I won’t have to fight with VCI’s stockholders for the start-up cash.”

  “And how are you going to make the farmers of Ecuador rich?” Ric asked, still belligerent.

  Sam leaned back in the plush chair and clasped his hands behind his head. His grin became enormous.

  “By making the government of Ecuador a partner in Sam Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited.”

  Ric’s face went red with anger. “That will make Quintana rich, not the people!”

  “Only if you let Quintana stay in office,” Sam said smugly.

  “A typical gringo trick.”

  “Wait a minute. Think it out. Suppose I announce that I’m willing to make a democratically elected government of Ecuador a partner in my corporation? Won’t that help you push Quintana out of power?”

  “Yes, of course it would,” I said.

  Ric was not so enthusiastic. “It might help,” he said warily. But then he added, “Even so, how can a partnership in your corporation make millions of poor farmers rich?”

  “It won’t make them poorer,” replied Sam. “It may put only a few sucres into their pockets, but that’ll make life a little sweeter for them, won’t it?”

  Sam had made a bilingual pun! I was impressed, even if Ric was not.

  “And we’ll be buying all our foodstuffs for OrbHotel from Ecuadorian producers, naturally,” Sam went on. “And I’ll sell Ecuadorian produce to the other orbital facilities, too. Make a nice profit from it, I betcha. Sure, there’s only a few hundred people living in orbit right now but that’s gonna grow. There’ll be thousands pretty soon, and once the Japanese start building their solar power satellites they’re going to need food for a lot of workers.”

  Without seeming to draw a breath Sam went on, “Then there’s the hotel training facility we’re gonna build just outside Quito. We’ll hire Ecuadorians preferentially, of course. Your father drove a hard bargain, believe me, Esmeralda.”

  My father smiled wanly.

  “And one of these days we could even build a skyhook, an elevator tower up to GEO,” Sam continued. “That’d make Ecuador the world’s

  center for space transportation. People won’t need rockets; they’ll ride the elevator, starting in Ecuador. It’ll cost peanuts to get into space that way.”

  He talked on and on until even Ric was at least halfway convinced that Sam would be good for the people of Ecuador.

  It was growing dark before Sam finally said, “Why don’t we find a good restaurant and celebrate our new partnership?”

  I looked at Ric. He wavered.

  So I said, for both of us, “Very well. Dinner tonight. But tomorrow Ric and I leave for Quito. We have much work to do if Quintana is to be prevented from cementing his hold on the government.”

  Sam smiled at us both. “You’ll be going to Quito as representatives of Sam Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. I don’t want this Quintana character to think you’re revolutionaries and getting you kids getting into trouble.”

  “But we are revolutionaries,” Ric insisted.

  “I know,” said Sam. “The best kind of revolutionaries. The kind that’re really going to change things.”

  “Do you think we can?” I asked.

  My father, surprisingly, said, “You must. The future depends on you.”

  “Don’t look so gloomy, Carlos, old buddy,” Sam said. “You’ve got to understand the big picture.”

  “The big picture?”

  “Sure. There’s money to be made in space. Lots of money.”

  “I understand that,” said my father.

  “Yeah, but you gotta understand the rest of it.” And Sam looked squarely at Ric as he said, “The money is made in space. But it gets spent here on Earth.”

  My father brushed thoughtfully at his mustache with a fingertip. “I see.”

  “So let’s spread it around and do some good.”

  Ric almost smiled. “But I think you will get more of the money than anyone else, won’t you?”

  Sam gave him a rueful look. “Yeah, that’s right. And I’ll spend it faster than anybody else, too.”

  So Ric and I returned to Ecuador. General Quintana reluctantly stepped aside and allowed elections. Democracy returned to Ecuador, although Ric claimed it arrived in our native land for the first time. Quintana retired gracefully, thanks to a huge bribe that Sam and my father provided. My father actually was voted back into the presidency, in an election that was mostly fair and open.

  Spence and Bonnie Jo eventually were divorced, but that happened years later. By that time I had married Ric and he was a rising young politician who would one day be president of Ecuador himself. The country was slowly growing richer, thanks to its investment in space industries. Sam’s orbital hotel was only the first step in the constantly growing commerce in space.

  I never saw Sam again. Not face-to-face. Naturally, we all saw him in the news broadcasts time and again. Just as he said, he spent every penny of the money he made on OrbHotel and went broke.

  But that is another story. And, gracias a dios, it is a story that does not involve me.

  Habitat New Chicago

  “SURE, I KNEW SAM—BRIEFLY,” RUSSELL CHRISTOPHER SAID as he and Jade stood on the edge of the playground. “This ball field wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Sam.”

  Jade was at Solar News’s virtual reality center. Like Christopher, she was wearing a full-sensor VR helmet and gloves. While she was still in the low lunar gravity of Selene, she could see and feel everything that Christopher saw and felt, standing at the playground in the New Chic
ago habitat, a quarter-million miles from the Moon.

  “You said something about Sam being a grandfather?” Jade asked. Then she had to wait for an annoying three seconds for Christopher’s reply to reach her.

  He was a good-looking man, Jade thought: tall and lean, with an earnest, honest-looking face and clear light blue eyes. He reminded Jade of Spence.

  “Grandfathered,” Christopher replied at last. “I said Sam was grandfathered, not a grandfather.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Again the interminable three-second delay.

  “It’s kind of complicated,” said Christopher.

  I’ll never get the story out of him like this, Jade thought. It’ll take a week, with this time lag.

  “Look,” she said, “why don’t you just tell me the whole story in your own words. Can you do that?”

  “Sure,” Christopher answered, after another three seconds.

  Grandfather Sam

  IT LOOKED EXTREMELY ROCKY FOR THE NEW CHICAGO CUBS that day. Okay, so I stole the line from “Casey at the Bat.” But it really was the bottom of the ninth, and the New White Sox were ahead of us, 14-13, there were two out, and little Sam Gunn was coming up to bat.

  To everybody except Hornsby and me it was just a pickup game being played on the last unzoned open space in New Chicago. Nobody was playing for anything except fun. Except him and me. And Sam, although I didn’t know it then.

  We had acquired quite a crowd, considering this was just a sandlot game. Not even sandlot. There wasn’t a real infield, nothing but grass and a few odd pieces to mark the bases. Sam’s expensive suede jacket was second base, for instance. My old cap was home plate. You didn’t need a cap to play baseball in New Chicago, or sunglasses, either. Sunlight comes into the habitat through long windows; it’s not a big glaring ball in the sky, except once in a while when a window happens to be facing directly sunward.

  New Chicago was—is—an O’Neill-type space habitat. You know, a big cylinder built along the Moon’s orbit at the L-5 point, just hanging there like an oversized length of pipe. About the length of Manhattan island and a couple of kilometers in diameter, New Chicago spins along its central axis a lazy once per minute; that’s enough to produce an artificial gravity inside that’s almost exactly the same as Earth’s.

  Newcomers get a little disconcerted the first time they come out into the open and look up. Instead of sky, there’s more of New Chicago up there. The landscaped ground just curves up along the inside of the cylinder, all the way around. With binoculars you can see people standing upside-down up there, staring at you through their binoculars because you look upside-down to them.

  New Chicago is really a lovely place, or it was until the real-estate tycoons got their hooks into it. It was nowhere as big as sprawling Old Chicago had been before the greenhouse floods, of course. It was beautifully landscaped on the inside with hills and woods and small, livable villages scattered here and there with plenty of open green space in between.

  It was that green space that had attracted Sam and me and the other applicant—Elrod Hornsby, a lawyer representing a big construction firm from Selene City—to this morning’s meeting of the Zoning Board. To developers like Sam and Hornsby, open green space was an open invitation to making money. Convert the green space into something profitable, like an extra condo complex or an amusement center. Why not? New Chicago was originally spec’d to hold fifty thousand families, with plenty of living space for everybody.

  But the builders, developers, lawyers, politicians, they all saw that the habitat could actually hold a lot more people. Millions, if they had the same average living space that people once had in Old Chicago. Tens of millions, if they were packed in the way they were in Delhi or Mexico City or Port Nairobi.

  Go on, pack ‘em in! That’s what the developers wanted. They made their money by overbuilding in the space habitats and then moving back Earthside, to some quiet little gated community on a mountaintop where nobody but megamillionaires were allowed in, while the communities they wrecked sank into slums rife with crime and disease.

  What do they care?

  Like I said, Sam and Hornsby both had their eyes on this open green field. I did too, but for a very different reason.

  So there I was, standing on first base, puffing hard from running out a dribbler of a ground ball to shortstop. A real ballplayer would have pegged me out by twenty feet, but the teenager playing short for the White Sox had a scattergun for an arm; when he threw the ball, the crowd behind first base hit the ground. I think maybe even the people watching from overhead through their binoculars might have ducked. That’s how I got to first.

  Now, Sam wasn’t much of a hitter. So far, he’d produced a couple of pop flies to the infield, struck out once (but got to first when he dropped his bat on the catcher’s foot and the poor kid, howling and hopping in pain, dropped the ball) and had a pair of bunt singles. Hadn’t hit the ball farther than forty feet, except for the pop-ups, which went pretty high, but not very far.

  Oh yeah, and Sam had walked a couple of times. After all, he was a small target up there at the plate.

  Board member Pete Nostrum was grinning like a clown from the pitcher’s mound. It wasn’t a mound, really, just a scuffed-up part of the grass field. See, Hornsby and the whole Zoning Board were on the White Sox side of the game, while Sam and I were on the Cubs. Both sides filled in their teams with some of the kids who’d been playing when the Zoning Board meeting adjourned to this open field.

  So there was Nostrum on the mound, Bonnie McDougal creeping in toward the plate from her position at third base, anticipating another bunt, and the rest of the Zoning Board scattered through the field.

  This was all Sam’s idea. The morning had started in the Zoning Board’s regular meeting chamber, with Sam, me, and Hornsby all petitioning the Board for a zoning change for this chunk of open ground. Hornsby wanted to build a fancy high-rise condo complex, with towers that went up a hundred flights, almost up to the habitat’s centerline, where the spingrav dwindled down to almost nothing.

  Sam wanted permission to build what he called an amusement center. And he’d had the gall to start his presentation by referring to Old Chicago.

  “I was born and raised in Old Chicago, y’know,” Sam said to the assembled savants of Zoning Board. “That’s why I want to settle here and add something to the community.”

  The assembled savants, up there behind their long table, said nothing, although grumpy old Fred Arrant, at the end of the table, looked as if he wanted to puke.

  I myself thought the “born in Chicago” line was probably a bit much. Sam Gunn must have been born somewhere, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t in Old Chicago.

  Sam Gunn was a legend and he knew it. He just sat there between me and Hornsby, the third applicant, with a choirboy’s angelic smile on his round hobgoblin’s face. He was wearing a faun-tan collarless suede jacket and neatly pressed slacks, with an open-necked shirt of pale lemon. It made my faithful old olive-drab coveralls look positively crummy, by comparison. Hornsby, overweight and completely bald, wore an awful micromesh suit of coral pink; it made him look like a giant newborn rat.

  Being a legend carries a great deal of freight with it. Sam was known throughout the settled parts of the solar system as a pioneer, an entrepreneur, a guy with a vision as wide as the skies and a heart to match. He had made who knew how many fortunes and lost every last one of them, usually because he was such a soft touch that he couldn’t refuse a friend in need. But he was also known as a loudmouthed, womanizing, scheming wheeler-dealer who wouldn’t think twice about bending the law to the snapping point if he thought he could get away with it. He’d left a trail of broken hearts and fuming, furious tycoons, lawyers, corporate bigwigs and government officials all the way out to Saturn and back again.

  His friends—who were few but loyal—said that Sam’s one big weakness was that he couldn’t stand by and let the big guys in business or government push the little guys a
round. His enemies—who were legion and powerful—howled that Sam was a king-sized pain in the butt.

  I had to laugh about the “king-sized.” Sam was tiny, an elf, a chunky, fast-talking little guy with bristling red hair and a sprinkling of Huck Finn freckles across his nub of a nose. His eyes were sort of hazel, sometimes they looked blue, sometimes green, sometimes something in between. Shifty eyes, the kind a gambler or cat burglar might have.

  “So naturally,” he was saying to the Zoning Board, “I thought that New Chicago would be the ideal place for me to build my amusement center.”

  The members of the Zoning Board glanced back and forth among themselves.

  “Amusement center, Mr. Gunn?” asked the chairperson, Bonnie McDougal. She was an elegant blonde, tall, cool, very much in possession of herself. No doubt Sam wanted to possess her, too. There was hardly a woman he’d ever met that he didn’t try to bed—according to his legend.

  “Aren’t you the guy who built that orbital whorehouse a few years back?” growled Arrant, who was known as the Zoning Board’s bulldog. His first reaction to any request was always a loud, “No!” Then he’d get really negative.

  “It was a zero-gravity honeymoon hotel,” Sam replied politely. “Perfectly legitimate, sir. Our motto was, ‘If you like waterbeds, you’ll love zero-gee.’“

  “Zero-gee?” McDougal asked, a cool smile on her lips. “Like we have along the centerline here in New Chicago?”

  Sam smiled back at her; it looked more like a leer. “Exactly the same. Precisely. You can float around weightlessly up there.”

  Their eyes met. She turned away first.

  “You see,” Sam went on in his oh-so-reasonable manner, “I really want to give this community something it needs, something that will be useful.”

  “Like a gambling casino,” Rick Cole said. Cole had a reputation for being the smartest member of the five-person board. He was about my own age: pushing eighty, calendar-wise, but physically as youthful as a thirty-year-old, thanks to rejuvenation therapy. A former lawyer who had renounced the legal profession when he came up to New Chicago and took up a new career in public service. In other words, he’d made his money, and now he wanted respect.