The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  “Call Dr. O’Toole back from Europa,” Sam said. “Or watch the video I made of her in my quarters aboard Joker. Call Professor Fossbinder in from Zurich. Call Brandon O’Toole, for Pete’s sake; he’s right here in Selene City. He knows that his wife was engineering lichen before she shipped out to Europa. He’ll tell you all about it, if he isn’t besotted by our Beryllium Blonde here.”

  And he quickly raised his fists into a boxer’s defensive posture.

  The Blonde just stood there, her lovely mouth hanging open, her eyes wide and darting from Sam to the Toad and back again.

  Weatherwax heaved an enormous sigh, then croaked, “I move that we adjourn this hearing for half an hour while we discuss this new ... allegation, in chambers.”

  The chief judge nodded, tight-lipped. We all rose and the judges swept out; the courtroom was so quiet I could hear their black robes rustling. The audience filed out, muttering, whispering; but Sam and I sat tensely at the defendants’ table, he drumming his fingers on the tabletop incessantly, his head turned toward the prosecution’s table and the Blonde. She was staring straight ahead, sitting rigid as an I-beam—a gorgeously curved I-beam. Her four cohorts sat flanking her, whispering among themselves.

  After about ten minutes, a clerk came out and told us that we were wanted in the judges’ chambers. I felt surprised, but Sam grinned as if he had expected it. The clerk went over and conferred briefly with the prosecution lawyers. They all got up and filed out of the courtroom, looking defeated. Even the Blonde seemed down, tired, lost. I felt an urge to go over and try to comfort her, but Sam grabbed me by the collar of my tunic and pointed me toward the slightly open door to the judges’ chambers.

  Weatherwax was sitting alone on an imitation leather couch big enough for four; the other two judges were nowhere in sight. He had taken off his judicial robe, revealing a rumpled pale green business suit that made him look more amphibious than ever.

  “What do you want, Gunn?” he growled as we sat on upholstered armchairs, facing him.

  “I want my ships released and my business reopened,” Sam said immediately.

  Weatherwax slowly blinked his bulging eyes. “Once this case is dismissed, that will be automatic.”

  Dismissed? I was startled. Was it all over?

  “And,” Sam went on, “I want full disclosure about the lichenoids. I want the scientists cleared of any attempt to hoodwink the public.”

  Again the Toad blinked. “We can always blame the PR people; say they got the story slightly askew.”

  Sam gave a short, barking laugh. “Blame the media, right.”

  “Is that all?” Weatherwax asked, his brows rising.

  Sam shrugged. “I’m not out to punish anybody. Live and let live has always been my motto.”

  “I see.”

  “Of course,” Sam went on, grinning impishly, “once you admit publicly that the lichenoids on Europa are a genetic experiment and not native life-forms, then the embargo on commercial development in the Jupiter system ends. Right?”

  This time Weatherwax kept his froggy eyes closed for several moments before he conceded, “Right.”

  Sam jumped to. his feet. “Good! That oughtta do it.”

  The Toad remained seated. There was no attempt on the part of either of them to shake hands. Sam scuttled toward the door and I got up and went after him.

  But Sam stopped at the door and turned back to the Toad. “Oh, yeah, one other thing. Now that we’ve come to this agreement, there’s no further need for you to keep the scientists bottled up on Europa. Let Dr. O’Toole come back here.”

  Weatherwax tried to glare at Sam but it was pathetically weak.

  “And tell your sexy lawyer underling to take her claws off O’Toole’s husband,” Sam added, with real iron in his voice. “Give those two kids a chance to patch up their marriage.”

  Without even waiting for a response from the Toad, he yanked the door open and stepped outside. With me right behind him.

  BY DINNERTIME THAT evening the media were running stories about how Wankle’s chief public-relations consultant, Dr. Clyde Erskine of the University of Texas at Austin, had made a slight misinterpretation about the lichenoids on Europa. Sam whooped gleefully as we watched the report in our hotel suite.

  He switched to the business news, which was also about the Europa “misinterpretation,” but which included the fact that the IAA had decided to lift the embargo on commercial development of the Jupiter system.

  Sam howled and yelped and danced across our dinner table.

  “Weatherwax moved fast,” I said, still sitting on the hard-backed chair while Sam did a soft-shoe around our dinner plates.

  We had already been notified by the IAA that Sam’s ore carriers were no longer embargoed and Asteroidal Resources, Inc. was back in business.

  Sam deftly jumped down to the floor and sat on the edge of the table, facing me.

  “He’s got the power to move fast, Orville. The Toad has a reputation for good-deed-doing, but he’s really a power-clutching sonofabitch who’s spent the past ninety years or so worming his way into the top levels of a dozen of the solar system’s biggest corporations.”

  “And the IAA,” I added.

  “And he founded DULL to serve as a cloak for his plan to grab the whole Jupiter system for himself,” Sam went on, a little more soberly. “This plot of his has been years in the making. Decades.”

  “And now it’s unraveled, thanks to you.”

  Sam pretended to blush. “I am quietly proud,” he said softly.

  I leaned back in my chair. “To think that none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for the Porno Twins....”

  Sam’s face went quizzical. “Oh, it would have happened, one way or the other,” he said, with a puckish grin. “The Twins just provided the opportunity.”

  I gaped at him. “You mean you were after Weatherwax all along? From before ...” His grin told me more than any words. “Then your testimony was a fabrication?”

  “No, no, no,” Sam insisted, jumping to his feet so he could loom over me. That’s hard to do, at his height, so I stayed seated and let him loom. “The Twins’ emergency was real and the only way I could save them was to make that dash out to Jupiter, just like I testified.”

  “Really?”

  He shrugged. “More or less.”

  “You had this all scoped out from the beginning, didn’t you? You knew the whole business and ...” I stopped talking, lost in stunned admiration for Sam’s long-range planning. And guts.

  He was making like a Jack-o’-lantern again. “Why do you think Weatherwax got himself appointed a judge?”

  “So he could make sure you were found guilty,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe, if things worked out the way he wanted them to. But he also wanted to be on the judge’s panel so that if things didn’t work out his way, he could stop the trial and cut a deal with me.”

  “Which is what he did.”

  “You betcha!”

  “But why didn’t you take Dr. O’Toole back with you? You left her on Europa.”

  “Had to,” Sam said. “Majerkurth showed up with his team and threatened to blow holes in Joker if I didn’t let her go. I tried to drop an empty oxygen bottle on him, but it missed him and hit one of the PR flacks he had brought along with him.”

  I laughed. “So that was the basis of the assault charge.”

  “And the attempted murder, too. I would’ve offed Majerkurth if I’d thought it would’ve helped Anitra. As it was, I was outgunned. So I had to let her go—after promising her that I’d fix everything toot sweet.”

  “Well, you did that, all right. I’ll bet she’s on her way home to her husband right now.”

  “I hope so.”

  I reached for my glass of celebratory champagne and took a sip. Then I remembered:

  “The Twins! What happened to them?”

  THAT WAS KINDA sad—Sam told me.

  I zoomed back to Vesta at three-plus gs with Cle
mentine full of European ice that Jokers electrolysis system was converting into oxygen for them and hydrogen for her own fusion torch.

  (I noticed that Sam didn’t slip in a sales pitch for Joker. He was feeling much better now.)

  Once I got there, I could’ve patched their leaky air tank and booted up their recycling system and even fixed their stupid maintenance robot—all from the comfort of my bridge in Joker. But I wanted to see them! In the flesh! I was so doggone close to them that I fibbed a little and told them I had to come aboard to make the necessary repairs.

  Mindy and Cindy stared at me from my display screen for a long time, not moving, not even blinking. All I could see of them was their beautiful identical faces with their cascading red hair and their bare suggestive shoulders. It was enough to start me perspiring.

  “We never let anyone come aboard our ship, Mr. Gunn,” said the one on the left. The one on the right shook her head, as if to reinforce her twin’s statement.

  “Call me Sam,” I said. “And if I can’t come aboard, I can’t fix your life-support system.”

  Well, we yakked back and forth for hours. They really wanted to stick to their guns, but we all knew that the clock was ticking and they were going to run out of air. Of course, I wouldn’t have let them die. I would’ve done the repairs remotely, from Jokers bridge, if I had to.

  But I didn’t let them know that.

  “All right,” Mindy said at long last. Maybe it was Cindy. Who could tell. “You can come aboard, Mr.—”

  “Sam,” breathed Cindy. I think.

  “You can come aboard, but only if you agree to certain conditions.”

  The deal was, I could come aboard their ship but I couldn’t have any contact with them. They were going to lock themselves in their compartments and I was forbidden to even tap at their doors.

  I was disappointed, but hoped that they’d relent once I’d finished repairing their ship. They offered me virtual reality sex, of course, but I was looking forward to the real thing. The only man in the solar system to make it with the Porno Twins in person! That was a goal worthy of Sam Gunn.

  So even though I was bone-weary from being squashed by three-plus gs for several days, and still sore from the tubes that I had to insert into various parts of my anatomy, I was as eager and energetic as a teenager when I finally docked Joker to SEX069. Great stuff, testosterone.

  I went straight to their bridge like a good little boy and got their maintenance robot working again. Just a little glitch in its programming; I fixed that and within minutes the dim-witted collection of junk was welding a patch onto the puncture hole in the air tank that the meteoroid had made. There really wasn’t anything much wrong with the ship’s air recycling system, but I took my time starting it up again, thinking all the while about getting together with Cindy and Mindy for a bit of horizontal celebration.

  Once I started pumping oxygen from Clementine into their air tanks, I began wondering how I could coax the Twins out of their boudoirs. I checked out their internal communications setup and—voila!—there were the controls for the security cameras that looked into every compartment in the ship.

  The first step toward getting them to come out and meet me, I thought, would be to peek into their chambers and see what they were up to.

  Wrong! Bad mistake.

  They were both in one little compartment, huddled together on the bed, clutching each other like a pair of frightened little kids. And they were old Must’ve been in their second century, at least: white hair, pale skin that looked like parchment, skinny and bony and—well, old.

  The teeth nearly fell out of my mouth, that’s how far my jaw dropped. Yet, as I stared at them hugging each other like Hansel and Gretel lost in the forest, I began to see how beautiful they really were. Not sexy beautiful, not anymore, but the bone structure of their faces, the straight backs, the long legs. The irresistible Cindy and Mindy that we’d all seen on our comm screens were what they had really looked like a century ago.

  I should have felt disappointed, but I just felt kind of sad. And yet, even that passed pretty quickly. Here were two former knockouts who were still really quite beautiful in an elderly way. I know a sculptress who would’ve made a wonderful statue portrait of the two of them.

  They were living by themselves, doing their own thing in their own way, bringing joy and comfort to a lot of guys who might have gone berserk without them and their services. And now they were huddled together, terrified that I was gonna break in on them and find out who and what they really were.

  So I swallowed hard and tapped the intercom key and said, “I’m finished. Your ship is in fine shape now, although you ought to buy some nitrogen to mix with the oxygen I’ve left for you.”

  “Thank you, Sam,” they said in unison. Now that I could see them, I heard the quaver in their voices.

  “I’m leaving now. It’s been a pleasure to be able to help you.”

  They were enormously grateful. Grateful not only that I had saved their lives, but that I hadn’t intruded on their privacy. Grateful that they could keep up the fantasy of Mindy and Cindy, the sexy Porno Twins.

  “WOW,” I SAID, once Sam finished. “You were downright noble, Sam.”

  “Yeah,” he answered softly. “I was, wasn’t I?”

  “And that was the last you saw of the Twins?”

  “Not exactly.”

  I felt my brows rise.

  With a self-deprecating shrug, Sam admitted, “They were so super-duper grateful that they insisted on giving me a blank check: I can have a virtual reality session with the two of ‘em whenever I want to.”

  “So?”

  Sam’s grin went from ear to ear. “So I gave in and tried it. I’ve never been a fan of VR sex; I prefer the real thing.”

  “So?” I repeated.

  His grin got even wider. “So I’m heading back to Ceres tomorrow. I mean, a blank check is just too good to ignore!”

  And that’s how Sam Gunn beat the rap on the charge of genocide and opened the Jupiter system for development. He went out to Ganymede and set up a new corporation to scoop helium-three from the clouds of Jupiter and sell it for fuel to fusion power plants all over the solar system.

  Then he dumped every penny he had, and a lot he didn’t legally have, into zipping out past Pluto to find Planet X. You know the rest: he found a mini-black hole out there and fell into it and found aliens and all that.

  Now he’s on his way back. You know, despite everything, it’s going to be great to see him again. Life was pretty dull without Sam around! Productive, of course, and safe and comfortable. But dull.

  Me, I never left Selene City. I’m still running Sam’s old company, Asteroidal Resources, Inc., from our new corporate headquarters here on the Moon.

  Of course, Sam wanted me to return to Ceres after the trial, but I happened to run into the Beryllium Blonde in Selene City and she seemed so dejected and lonely—but that’s another story.

  Pierre D’Argent

  “I’M GETTING ENOUGH MATERIAL FOR A FOLLOW-ON SERIES,” Jade said to Jim Gradowsky’s image on the wall screen of her compartment. She wasn’t actually having a dialog with her boss; the distance between Selene and the torch ship Hermes made that impossible. Instead she was giving Jumbo Jim a report on what she had come up with since the Sam Gunn bio had been aired.

  Spence Johansen sat on the king-sized bed, studiously reading a manual on Hermes’s fusion propulsion system. A former astronaut, Spence had buddied up with several of the ship’s officers and was learning all he could about the massive torch ship.

  Jade was telling Gradowsky about her newfound friendship with Jill Meyers when she noticed the yellow light at the bottom of the wall screen blinking. She cut her report short and called out to the screen, “Show incoming message, please.”

  To her surprise, Jumbo Jim’s face filled the screen, grinning lopsidedly. “Hi, Jade. Hope everything’s okay with you on your honeymoon trip.” Before Jade could reply that she was working (n
ot that Gradowsky would have received her reply for an hour or more), Jumbo Jim added, “Hey, Monica sends love and kisses. Says she misses you.”

  Jade realized that Gradowsky didn’t send a call across the solar system just for social chitchat.

  Sure enough, her boss’s face grew serious. “Uh, Jade, you know that Rockledge’s lawyers have been threatening to sue us for libel or something, ‘cause of the series. Well, Raki got our own lawyers to threaten ‘em right back, infringing freedom of the press or something like that.

  “So yesterday we get a long message from Pierre D’Argent, you know, Rockledge Industries’s CEO. He’s waving an olive branch. Says he’ll drop the suit if we’ll run his story in a follow-on series. Says he can show the world what a rotten no-good crook Sam was.”

  Jade felt her cheeks flaming with anger.

  “Well, anyway, here’s D’Argent’s story. I’ve listened to it and it’s damned interesting, even if he hates Sam’s guts. I think we could go with it. And it would make the lawyers on both sides very happy.

  “Lemme know what you think.”

  Controlling her anger, Jade glanced at Spence, his nose still buried in the propulsion manual. She leaned back in the compartment’s padded little desk chair and waited for D’Argent’s story to begin.

  Piker’s Peek

  I KNOW SAM GUNN’S SUPPOSED TO BE SOME SORT OF FOLK hero, a space-age Robin Hood or something, but let me tell you, he’s nothing more than a cheating, womanizing, loudmouthed little scoundrel. And those are his good points!

  Take the business about Hell Crater, for example.

  I was perfectly happy running Rockledge Industries’s space operations despite the fact that Sam Gunn was always causing us trouble. True, we had euchred him out of that orbital honeymoon hotel he had started, but we knew how to make a profit out of it and Sam didn’t. And we paid him a decent price for it; not as much as he had expected, but more than he deserved, certainly.