The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Isolation Area

Sam was a feisty little bastard—Malone reminisced—full of piss and vinegar. If there was ten different ways in the regulations to do a job, he’d find an eleventh, maybe a twelfth or a fourteenth, just because he couldn’t abide being bound by the regs. A free spirit, I guess you’d call him.

He’d had his troubles with the brass in Houston and Washington. Why he ever became an astronaut in the first place is beyond me. Maybe he thought he’d be like a pioneer out on the frontier, on his own, way out in space. How he made it through training and into flight operations is something I’ll never figure out. I just don’t feature Sam sitting still long enough to get through kindergarten, let alone flight school and astronaut training.

Anyway, when I first met him he was finished as an astronaut. He had put in seven years, which he said was a Biblical amount of time, and he wanted out. And the agency was glad to get rid of him, believe me. But he had this cold in the head and they wouldn’t let him go back Earthside until it cleared up.

“Six billion people down there with colds, the flu, bad sinuses and postnasal drips and those assholes in Houston won’t let me go back until this goddamned sniffle clears up.”

Those were the first words Sam ever said to me. He had been assigned to my special isolation ward, where I had reigned alone for nearly four years. Alpha was under construction then. We were in the old Mac-Dac Shack, a glorified tin can that passed for a space station back in those primitive days. It didn’t spin, it just hung there. Everything inside was weightless.

My isolation ward was a cramped compartment with four zero-gee sleep restraints Velcroed to the four walls together with lockers to stow personal gear. Nobody but me had ever been in it until that morning. Sam shuffled over to the bed next to mine, towing his travel-bag like a kid with a sinking balloon.

“Just don’t sneeze in my direction, Sniffles,” I growled at him.

That stopped Sam for about half a second. He gave me that lopsided grin of his—his face sort of looked like a scuffed-up soccer ball, kind of round, scruffy. Little wart of a nose in the middle of it. Longest hair I ever saw on a man who works in space; hair length was one of the multitudinous points of contention between Sam and the agency. His eyes sparkled. Kind of an odd color, not quite blue, not really green. Sort of in-between.

“Malone, huh?” He read the name-tag clipped over my sleep restraint.

“Frederick Mohammed Malone,” I said.

“Jesus Christ, they put me in with an Arab!”

But he stuck out his hand. Sam was really a little guy; his hand was almost the size of a baby’s. After a moment’s hesitation I swallowed it in mine.

“Sam,” he told me, knowing I could see his last name on the tag pinned to his coveralls.

“I’m not even a Muslim,” I said. “My father was, though. First one in Arkansas.”

“Good for him.” Sam disengaged his Velcro shoes from the carpeting and floated over to one of the sleeping bags. His travel-bag hung alongside. He ignored it and sniffed the air. “Goddamned hospitals all smell like somebody’s dying. What’re you in for? Hangnail or something?”

“Something,” I said. “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”

His eyes went round. “AIDS?”

“It’s not contagious. Not unless we make love.”

“I’m straight.”

“I’m not.”

“Terrific. Just what I need, a gay black Arab with AIDS.” But he was grinning at me.

I had seen plenty of guys back away from me once they knew I had AIDS. Some of them had a hang-up about gays. Others were scared out of their wits that they’d catch AIDS from me, or from the medical personnel or equipment. I had more than one reason to know how a leper felt, back in those days.

Sam’s grin faded into a puzzled frown. “How the hell did the medics put me in here if you’ve got AIDS? Won’t you catch my cold? Isn’t that dangerous for you?”

“I’m a guinea pig….”

“You don’t look Italian.”

“Look,” I said, “if you’re gonna stay in here, keep off the ethnic jokes, okay? And the puns.”

He shrugged.

“The medics think they got my case arrested. New treatment that the gene therapy people have come up with.”

“I get it. If you don’t catch my cold, you’re cured.”

“They never use words like ‘cured.’ But that’s the general idea.”

“So I’m a guinea pig too.”

“No, you are a part of the apparatus for this experiment. A source of infection. A bag of viruses. A host of bacteria. Germ city.”

Sam hooked his feet into his sleep restraint’s webbing and shot me a dark look. “And this is the guy who doesn’t like ethnic jokes.”

The Mac-Dac Shack had been one of the first space stations that the agency had put up. It wasn’t fancy, but for years it had served as a sort of research laboratory, mainly for medical work. Naturally, with a lot of MDs in it, the Shack sort of turned into a floating hospital in orbit. With all the construction work going on in those days there was a steady stream of injured workmen and technicians.

Then some bright bureaucrat got the idea of using one module of the Shack as an isolation ward where the medics could do research on things like AIDS, ebola, the New Delhi virus, and some of the paralytic afflictions that required either isolation or zero gravity. Or both. The construction crew infirmary was moved over to the yet-unfinished Alpha while the Shack was turned into a pure research facility with various isolation wards for guinea pigs like me.

Sam stayed in my ward for three-four days; I forget the exact time. He was like an energetic little bee, buzzing all over the place, hardly ever still for a minute. In zero-gee, of course, he could literally climb the curved walls of the ward and hover up on the ceiling. He terrified the head nurse in short order by hanging near the ceiling or hiding inside one of the sleeping bags and then launching himself at her like a missile when she showed up with the morning’s assortment of needles.

Never once did Sam show the slightest qualm at having his blood sampled alongside mine, although he watched the nurses taking the samples very closely. I’ve seen guys get violent from the fear that they’d get a needle contaminated by my blood and catch what I had. But Sam never even blinked. Me, I never liked needles. Couldn’t abide them. Couldn’t look when the nurse stuck me; couldn’t even look when she stuck somebody else. Sam looked. He told me so.

By the end of the first day Sam noticed something. “All the nurses are women.”

“All six of them,” I affirmed.

“The doctors are all males?”

“Eight men, four women.”

“That leaves two extra women for us.”

“For you. I’m on the other side.”

“How come all women nurses?” he wondered.

“I think it’s because of me. They don’t want to throw temptation in my path.”

Sam started to frown at me but it turned into that lopsided grin. “They didn’t think about my path.”

He proceeded to cause absolute havoc among the nurses. With the single-minded determination of a sperm cell seeking blindly for an ovum, Sam pursued them all: the fat little redhead, the cadaverous ash-blonde, the really good-looking one, the kid who still had acne—all of them, even the head nurse, who threatened to inject him with enough estrogen to grow boobs on him if he didn’t leave her and her crew alone.

Nothing deterred Sam. He would be gone for long hours from the ward, and when he’d come back he would be grinning from ear to ear. As politely as I could I’d ask him how he made out.

“It matters not if you win or lose,” he would say. “It’s how you play the game…. as long as you get laid.”

When he finally left the isolation ward it seemed as if we had been friends for years. And it was damned quiet in there without him. I was alone again. I missed him. I realized how many years it had been since I’d had a friend.

I sank into a real depression of self-pity and despair. I had caught Sam’s cold, sure enough. I was hacking and sneezing all day and night. One good thing about zero gravity is that you can’t have a postnasal drip. One bad thing is that all the fluids accumulate in your sinuses and give you a headache of monumental proportions. The head nurse seemed to take special pleasure in inflicting upon me the indignity of forcing tubes up my nose to drain the sinuses.

The medics were overjoyed. Their guinea pig was doing something interesting. Would I react to the cold like any normal person and get over it in a few days? Or would the infection spread through my body and worsen, turn into pneumonia or maybe kill me? I could see them writing their learned papers in their heads every time they examined me, which was four times a day.

I was really unfit company for anyone, including myself. I went on for months that way, just wallowing in my own misery. Other patients came and went: an African kid with a new strain of polio; an asthmatic who had developed a violent allergy to dust; a couple of burn victims from the Alpha construction crew who had to be suspended in zero-gee. I stayed while they were treated in the other wards and sent home.

Then, without any warning at all, Sam showed up again.

“Hello, Omar, how’s the tent-making business?” My middle name had become Omar, as far as he was concerned.

I gaped at him. He was wearing the powder-blue coveralls and shoulder insignia of Rockledge Industries, Inc., which in those days was just starting to grow into the interplanetary conglomerate it has become.

“What the hell you doing back here?” My voice came out a full octave higher than normal, I was so surprised. And glad.

“I work here.”

“Say what?”

He ambled over to me in the zero-gee strides we all learn to make: maintain just enough contact with the carpeted flooring to keep from floating off toward the ceiling. As Sam approached my bunk the head nurse pushed through the ward’s swinging doors with a trayful of the morning’s indignities for me.

“Rockledge Industries just won the contract for running this tin can. The medical staff still belongs to the government, but everybody else will be replaced by Rockledge employees. I’m in charge of the whole place.”

Behind him, the head nurse’s eyes goggled, her mouth sagged open, and the tray slid from her hand. It just hung there, revolving slowly as she turned a full one-eighty and flew out of the ward without a word. Or maybe she was screaming so high that no human ear could hear it, like a bat.

“You’re in charge of this place?” I was laughing at the drama that had been played out behind Sam’s back. “No shit?”

Sam seemed happy that I seemed pleased. “I got a five-year contract.”

We got to be really friends then. Not lovers. Sam was the most heterosexual man I have ever seen. One of the shrinks aboard the station told me Sam had a Casanova complex: he had to take a shot at any and every female creature he saw. I don’t know how good his batting average was, but he surely kept busy—and grinning.

“The thrill is in the chase, Omar, not the capture,” he said to me many times. Then he would always add, “As long as you get laid.”

But Sam could be a true friend, caring, understanding, bringing out the best in a man. Or a woman, for that matter. I saw him help many of the station’s female employees, nurses, technicians, scientists, completely aside from his amorous pursuits. He knew when to put his Casanova complex in the back seat. He was a surprisingly efficient administrator and a helluva good leader. Everybody liked him. Even the head nurse grew to grant him a grudging respect, although she certainly didn’t want anybody to know it, especially Sam.

Of course, knowing Sam you might expect that he would have trouble with the chain of command. He had gotten himself out of the space agency, and it was hard to tell who was happier about it, him or the agency. You could hear sighs of relief from Houston and Washington all the way up to where we were, the agency was so glad to be rid of the pestering little squirt who never followed regulations.

It didn’t take long for Sam to find out that Rockledge Industries, Inc. had its own bureaucracy, its own sets of regulations, and its own frustrations.

“You’d think a multibillion-dollar company would want to make all the profits it can,” Sam grumbled to me, about six months after he had returned to the Shack. “Half the facilities on Alpha are empty, right? They overbuilt, right? So I show them how to turn Alpha into a tourist resort and they reject the goddamned idea. ‘We are not in the tourism business,’ they say. Goddamned assholes.”

I found it hard to believe that Rockledge didn’t understand what a bonanza they could reap from space tourism. It’s not just twenty-twenty hindsight; Sam had me convinced then and there that tourism would be worth a fortune to Alpha. But Rockledge just failed to see it, no matter how hard Sam tried to convince them. Maybe the harder he tried the less they liked the idea. Some outfits are like that. The old Not-Invented-Here syndrome. Or more likely, the old If-Sam’s-For-It-I’m-Against-It syndrome.

Sam spent weeks muttering about faceless bureaucrats who sat on their brains, and how much money a zero-gravity honeymoon hotel could make. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing.

The big crisis was mostly my fault. Looking back on it, if I could have figured out a different way to handle things, I would have. But you know how it is when your emotions are all churned up; you don’t see any alternatives. Truthfully, I still don’t see how I could have done anything else except what I did.

They told me I was cured.

Yeah, I know I said they never used words like that, but they changed their tune. After more than five years in the isolation ward of the station, the medics asked me to join them in the conference room. I expected another one of their dreary meetings; they made me attend them at least once a month, said it was important for me to “maintain a positive interaction with the research staff.” So I dragged myself down to the conference room.

They were all grinning at me, around the table. Buckets of champagne stood at either end, with more bottles stashed where the slide projector usually hung.

I was cured. The genetic manipulations had finally worked. My body’s immune system was back to normal. My case would be in the medical journals; future generations would bless my memory (but not my name: they would protect my anonymity). I could go back home, back to Earth.

Only, I didn’t want to go.

“You don’t want to go?” Sam’s pudgy little face was screwing up into an incredulous expression that mixed equal amounts of surprise, disapproval, and curiosity.

“Back to Earth? No, I don’t want to go,” I said. “I want to stay here. Or maybe go live on Alpha or one of the new stations they’re building.”

“But why?” Sam asked.

We were in his office, a tiny cubbyhole that had originally been a storage locker for fresh food. I mean, space in the Shack was tight. I thought I could still smell onions or something faintly pungent. Sam had walled the chamber with blue-colored spongy plastic, so naturally it came to be known as the Blue Grotto. There were no chairs in the Grotto, of course; chairs are useless in zero-gee. We just hung in midair. You could nudge your back against the slightly rough wall surfacing and that would hold you in place well enough. There wasn’t any room to drift around. Two people were all the chamber could hold comfortably. Sam’s computer terminal was built into the wall; there was no furniture in the Grotto, no room for any.

“I got nothing to go back for,” I answered, “and a lot of crap waiting for me that I’d just as soon avoid.”

“But it’s Earth,” he said. “The world …”

So I told him about it. The whole story, end to end.

I had been a soldier, back in that nasty little bitch of a war in Mexico. Nothing glamorous, not even patriotism. I had joined the Army because it was the only way for a kid from my part of Little Rock to get a college education. They paid for my education and right afterward they pinned a lieutenant’s gold bars on my shoulders and stuck me inside a heavy tank.

Well, you know how well the tanks did in those Mexican hills. Nothing to shoot at but cactus, and we were great big noisy targets for those smart little missiles they brought in from Korea or wherever.

They knocked out my tank, I was the only one of the crew to survive. I wound up in an Army hospital in Texas where they tried to put my spine back together again. That’s where I contracted AIDS, from one of the male nurses who wanted to prove to me that I hadn’t lost my virility. He was a very sweet kid, very caring. But I never saw him again once they decided to ship me to the isolation ward up in orbit.

Now it was five years later. I was cured of AIDS, a sort of anonymous hero, but everything else was still the same. Earth would be still the same, except that every friend I had ever known was five years’ distance from me. My parents had killed themselves in an automobile wreck when I was in college. I had no sisters or brothers. I had no job prospects. Soldiers coming back five years after the war weren’t greeted with parades and confetti, and all the computer stuff I had learned in college was obsolete by now. Not even the Army used that generation of software any more.

And Earth was dirty, crowded, noisy, dangerous—it was also heavy, a full one g. I tried a couple days in the one-g wheel over at Alpha and knew that I could never live in Earth’s full gravity again. Not voluntarily.

Sam listened to all this in complete silence, the longest I had ever known him to go without opening his mouth. He was totally serious, not even the hint of a smile. I could see that he understood.

“Down there I’ll be just another nobody, an ex-soldier with no place to go. I can’t handle the gravity, no matter what the physical therapists think they can do for me. I want to stay here, Sam. I want to make something of myself and I can do it here, not back there. The best I can be back there is another veteran on a disability pension. What kind of a job could I get? I can be somebody up here, I know I can.”

He put his hand on my shoulder. Had to rise up off the floor a ways to do it, but he did it. “You’re sure? You’re absolutely certain that this is what you want?”

I nodded. “I can’t go back, Sam. I just can’t.”

The faintest hint of a grin twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Okay, pal. How’d you like to go into the hotel business with me?”

You see, Same had already been working for some time on his own ideas about space tourism. If Rockledge wouldn’t go for a hotel facility over on Alpha, complete with zero-gee honeymoon suites, then Sam figured he could get somebody else interested in the idea. The people who like to bad-mouth Sam say that he hired me to cover his ass so he could spend his time working on his tourist hotel deal while he was still collecting a salary from Rockledge. That isn’t the way it happened at all; it was really the other way around.

Sam hired me as a consultant and paid me out of his own pocket. To this day I don’t know where he got the money. I suspect it was from some of the financial people he was always talking to, but you never know, with Sam. He had an inexhaustible fund of rabbits up his sleeves. Whenever I asked him about it he just grinned at me and told me not to ask questions.

I was never an employee of Rockledge Industries. And Sam worked full time for them, eight hours a day, six days a week, and then some. They got their salary’s worth out of him. More. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t spend nights, Sundays, and the odd holiday here and there wooing financiers and lawyers who might come up with the risk capital he needed for his hotel. Sure, sometimes he did his own thing during Rock-ledge’s regular office hours. But he worked plenty of overtime hours for Rockledge, too. They got their money’s worth out of Sam.

Of course, once I was no longer a patient whose bills were paid by the government Rockledge sent word up from corporate headquarters that I was to be shipped back Earthside as soon as possible. Sam interpreted that to mean, when he was good and ready. Weeks stretched into months. Sam fought a valiant delaying action, matching every query of theirs with a detailed memorandum and references to obscure government health regulations. It would take Rockledge’s lawyers a month to figure out what the hell Sam was talking about and then frame an answering memo.

In the meantime Sam moved me from the old isolation ward into a private room—a coffin-sized cubbyhole—and insisted that I start paying for my rent and food. Since Sam was paying me a monthly consultant’s stipend he was collecting my rent and food money out of the money he was giving me himself. It was all done with the Shack’s computer system, so no cash changed hands. I had the feeling that there were some mighty weird subroutines running around inside that computer, all of them programmed by Sam.

While all this was going on the Shack was visited by a rather notorious U.S. Senator, one of the most powerful men in the government. He was a wizened, shriveled old man who had been in the Senate almost half a century. I thought little of it; we were getting a constant trickle of VIPs in those days. The bigwigs usually went to Alpha, so much so that we began calling it the Big Wheel’s Wheel. Most of them avoided the Shack. I guess they were scared of getting contaminated from our isolation ward patients. But a few of the VIPs made their way to the Shack now and then. Sam took personal charge of the Senator and his entourage and showed him more attention and courtesy than I had ever seen him lavish on a visitor before. Or since, for that matter. Sam, kowtowing to an authority figure? It astounded me at the time, but I laughed it off and forgot all about it soon enough.

Then, some six months after the Senator’s visit, when it looked as if Sam had run out of time and excuses to keep me in the Shack and I would have to pack my meager bag and head down the gravity well to spend the rest of my miserable days in some overcrowded ghetto city, Sam came prancing weightlessly into my microminiaturized living quarters, waving a flimsy sheet of paper.

“What’s that?” I knew it was a straight line but he wasn’t going to tell me unless I asked.

“A new law.” He was smirking, canary feathers all over his chin.

“First time I ever seen you happy about some new regulation.”

“Not a regulation,” he corrected me. “A law. A federal law, duly passed by the U.S. Congress and just today signed by the President.”

I wanted to play it cool but he had me too curious. “So what’s it say? Why’s it so important?”

“It says,” Sam made a flourish that sent him drifting slowly toward the ceiling as he read, “ ‘No person residing aboard a space facility owned by the United States or a corporation or other legal entity licensed by the United States may be compelled to leave said facility without due process of law.’ ”

My reply was something profound, like, “Huh?”

His scrungy little face beaming, Sam said, “It means that Rockledge can’t force you back Earthside! As long as you can pay the rent, Omar, they can’t evict you.”

“You joking?” I couldn’t believe it.

“No joke. I helped write this masterpiece, kiddo,” he told me. “Remember when old Senator Winnebago was up here, last year?”

The Senator was from Wisconsin but his name was not Winnebago. He had been a powerful enemy of the space program until his doctors told him that degenerative arthritis was going to make him a pain-racked cripple unless he could live in a low-g environment. His visit to the Shack proved what his doctors had told him: in zero-gee the pains that hobbled him disappeared and he felt twenty years younger. All of a sudden he became a big space freak. That’s how Sam was able to convince him to sponsor the “pay your own way” law, which provided that neither the government nor a private company operating a space facility could force a resident out as long as he or she was able to pay the going rate for accommodations.

“Hell, they’ve got laws to protect tenants from eviction in New York and every other city,” Sam said. “Why not here?”

I was damned glad of it. Overjoyed, in fact. It meant that I could stay, that I wouldn’t be forced to go back Earthside and drag my ass around at my full weight. What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, was that Sam would eventually have to use the law for himself. Obviously, he had seen ahead far enough to know that he would need such protection sooner or later. Did he get the law written for his own selfish purposes? Sure he did. But it served my purpose, too, and Sam knew that when he was bending the Senator’s tin ear. That was good enough for me. Still is.

For the better part of another year I served as Sam’s leg man—a job I found interesting and amusingly ironic. I shuttled back and forth from the Shack to Alpha, generally to meet bigshot business persons visiting the Big Wheel. When Sam was officially on duty for Rockledge, which was most of the time, he’d send me over to Alpha to meet the visitors, settle them down, and talk about the money that a tourist facility would make. I would just try to keep them happy until Sam could shake loose and come over to meet them himself. Then he would weave a golden web of words, describing how fantastic an orbital tourist facility would be, bobbing weightlessly around the room in his enthusiasm, pulling numbers out of the air to show how indecently huge would be the profit that investors would make.

“And the biggest investors will get their own suites, all for themselves,” Sam promised, “complete with every luxury—every service that the well-trained staff can provide.” He would wink hard enough to dislocate an eyeball at that point, to make certain the prospective investor knew what he meant.

I met some pretty interesting people that way: Texas millionaires, Wall Street financiers, Hollywood sharks, a couple of bull-necked types I thought might be Mafia but turned out to be in the book and magazine distribution business, even a few very nice middle-aged ladies who were looking for “good causes” in which to invest. Sam did not spare them his “every service that the staff can provide” line, together with the wink. They giggled and blushed.

“It’s gonna happen!” Sam kept saying. Each time we met a prospective backer his enthusiasm rose to a new pitch. No matter how many times a prospect eventually turned sour, no matter how often we were disappointed, Sam never lost his faith in the idea or the inevitability of its fruition.

“It’s gonna happen, Omar. We’re going to create the first tourist hotel in orbit. And you’re going to have a share of it, pal. Mark my words.”

When we finally got a tentative approval from a consortium of Greek and Italian shipping magnates Sam nearly rocked the old Shack out of orbit. He whooped and hollered and zoomed around the place like a crazy billiard ball. He threw a monumental party for everybody in the Shack, doctors, nurses, patients, technicians, administrative staff, security guards, visitors, even the one consultant who lived there—me. Where he got the caviar and fresh brie and other stuff I still don’t know. But it was a party none of us will ever forget. The Shack damned near exploded with merriment. It started Saturday at five PM, the close of the official work week. It ended, officially, Monday at eight AM. There are those who believe, though, that it’s still going on over there at the Shack.

Several couples sort of disappeared during the party. The Shack wasn’t so big that people could get lost in it, but they just seemed to vanish. Most of them showed up by Monday morning, looking tired and sheepish. Three of the couples eventually got married. One pair of them was stopped by a technician when they tried to go out an airlock while stark naked.

Sam himself engaged in a bit of EVA with one of the nurses, a tiny little elf of fragile beauty and uncommon bravery. She snuggled into a pressure suit with Sam and the two of them made several orbits around the Shack, outside, propelled by nothing more than their own frenetic pulsations and Newton’s Third Law of Motion.

Two days after the party the Beryllium Blonde showed up.

Her real name was Jennifer Marlow, and she was as splendidly beautiful as a woman can be. A figure right out of a high school boy’s wettest dreams. A perfect face, with eyes of china blue and thickly glorious hair like a crown of shining gold. She staggered every male who saw her, she stunned even me, and she sent Sam into a complete tailspin. She was Rockledge Industries’s ace troubleshooter. Her official title was Administrative Assistant (Special Projects) to the. President. The word we got from Earthside was that she had a mind like a steel trap, and a vagina to match.

The official excuse for her visit was to discuss Sam’s letter of resignation with him.

“You stay right beside me,” Sam insisted as we drifted down the Shack’s central corridor toward the old conference room. “I won’t be able to control myself if I’m in there alone with her.”

His face was as white as the Moon’s. He looked like a man in shock.

“Will you be able to control yourself with me in there?” I wondered.

“If I can’t, rap me on the head. Knock me out. Give me a Vulcan nerve pinch. Anything! Just don’t let me go zonkers over her.”

I smiled.

“I’m not kidding, Omar!” Sam insisted. “Why do you think they sent her up here instead of some flunky? They know I’m susceptible. God knows how many scalps she’s got nailed to her teepee.”

I grabbed his shoulder and dug my Velcroed slippers into the floor carpeting. We skidded to a stop.

“Look,” I said. “Maybe you want to avoid meeting with her altogether. I can represent you. I’m not… uh, susceptible.”

His eyes went so wide I could see white all around the pupils. “Are you nuts? Miss a chance to be in the same room with her? I want to be protected, Omar, but not that much!”

What could I do with him? Sam was torn in half. He knew the Beryllium Blonde was here to talk him out of resigning but he couldn’t resist the opportunity of letting her try her wiles on him any more than Odysseus could resist listening to the Sirens.

Like a couple of schoolboys dragging ourselves down to the principal’s office, we made our way slowly along the corridor and pushed through the door to the conference room. She was already standing at the head of the table, wearing a Chinese red jumpsuit that fit her like skin. I gulped down a lump in my throat at the sight of her. I mean, she was something. She smiled a dazzling smile and Sam gave a weak little moan and rose right up off the floor.

He would have launched himself at her like a missile if I hadn’t grabbed his belt and yanked him down to the table level. Being in zero-gee, there was no need for chairs around the table. But I sure wished I had one then; I would have tied Sam into it. As it was, I hovered right next to him and kept the full length of the polished imitation wood table between us and the Blonde.

“I think you know why I’m here,” she said. Her voice was music.

Sam nodded dumbly, his jaw hanging open. I thought I saw a bit of saliva foaming at the corner of his mouth.

“Why do you want to leave us, Sam? Don’t you like us anymore?”

It took three tries before he could make his voice work. “It’s … not that. I… I… I want to go into … uh, into business … for myself.”

“But your employment contract has almost two full years more to run.”

“I can’t wait two years,” he said, in a tiny voice. “This opportunity won’t keep….”

“Sam, you’re a very valued employee of Rockledge Industries, Incorporated. We want you to stay with us. I want you to stay with us.”

“I… can’t.”

“But you signed a contract with us, Sam. You gave us your word.”

I stuck in my dime’s worth. “The contract doesn’t prohibit Sam from quitting. He can leave wherever he wants to.” At least, that’s what the lawyers Sam had hired had told us.

“But he’ll lose-all his pension benefits and health care provisions.”

“He knows that.”

She turned those heartbreakingly blue eyes on Sam again. “It will be a big disappointment to us if you leave, Sam. It will be a personal disappointment to me.”

To his credit, Sam found the strength within himself to hold his ground. “I’m awfully sorry… but I’ve worked very hard to create this opportunity and I can’t let it slip past me now.”

She nodded once, as if she understood. Then she asked, “This opportunity you’re speaking about: does it have anything to do with the prospect of opening a tourist hotel on Space Station Alpha?”

“That’s right! But not just a hotel, a complete tourist facility. Sports complex, entertainment center, zero-gravity honeymoon suites…” He stopped abruptly and his face turned red. Sam blushed! He actually blushed.

Miss Beryllium smiled her dazzling smile at him. “But Sam dear, that idea is the proprietary intellectual property of Rockledge Industries, Incorporated. Rockledge owns the idea, not you.”

For a moment the little conference room was absolutely silent. I could hear nothing except the faint background hiss of the air circulation fans. Sam seemed to have stopped breathing.

Then he squawked, “WHAT?”

With a sad little shake of her gorgeous head, the Blonde replied, “Sam, you developed that idea while an employee of Rockledge Industries. We own it.”

“But you turned it down!”

“That makes no difference, Sam. Read your employment contract. It’s ours.”

“But I made all the contacts. I raised the funding. I worked everything out—on my own time, goddammit! On my own time!

She shook her golden locks again. “No, Sam. You did it while you were a Rockledge employee. It is not your possession. It belongs to us.”

Sam leaped out of my grasp and bounded to the ceiling. This time he was ready to make war, not love. “You can’t do this to me!”

The Blonde looked completely unruffled by his display. She stood there patiently, a slightly disappointed little pout on her face, while I calmed Sam down and got him back to the table.

“Sam, dear, I know how you must feel,” she cooed. “I don’t want us to be enemies. We’d be happy to have you take part in the tourist hotel program as a Rockledge employee. There could even be a raise in it for you.”

“It’s mine, dammit!” Sam screeched. “You can’t steal it from me! It’s mine!”

She shrugged deliciously. “I suppose our lawyers will have to settle it with your lawyers. In the meantime I’m afraid there’s nothing for us to do but to accept your resignation. With reluctance, of course. With my own personal and very sad reluctance.”

That much I saw and heard with my own eyes and ears. I had to drag Sam out of the conference room and take him back to his own quarters. She had him whipsawed, telling him that he couldn’t claim possession of his own idea and at the same time practically begging him to stay on with Rockledge and run the tourist project for them.

What happened next depends on who you ask. There are as many different versions of the story as there are people who tell it. As near as I can piece it all together, though, it went this way:

The Beryllium Blonde was hoping that Sam’s financial partners would go along with Rockledge Industries once they realized that Rockledge had muscled Sam out of the hotel deal. But she probably wasn’t as sure of everything as she tried to make Sam think. After all, those backers had made their deal with the little guy; maybe they didn’t want to do business with a big multinational corporation. Worse still, she didn’t know exactly what kind of a deal Sam had cut with his backers. If Sam had legally binding contracts naming him as their partner they just might scrap the whole project when they learned that Rockledge had cut Sam out. Especially if it looked like a court battle was shaping up.

So she showed up at Sam’s door that night. He told me that she was still wearing the same skintight jumpsuit, with nothing underneath it except her own luscious body. She brought a bottle of incredibly rare and expensive cognac with her. “To show there’s no hard feelings.”

The Blonde’s game was to keep Sam with Rockledge and get him to go through with the tourist hotel deal. Apparently, once Rockledge’s management got word that Sam had actually closed a deal for creating a tourist facility on Alpha, their greedy little brains told them they might as well take the tourist business for themselves. Alpha was still badly underutilized; a tourist facility suddenly made sense to those jerkoffs.

So instead of shuttling back to Phoenix, as we had thought she would, the Blonde knocked on Sam’s door that night. The next morning I saw him floating along the Shack’s central corridor. He looked kind of dazed.

“She’s staying here for a few more days,” Sam mumbled. It was like he was talking to himself instead of to me.

But there was that happy little grin on his face.

Everybody in the Shack started to make bets on how long Sam could hold out. The best odds had him capitulating in three nights. Jokes about Delilah and haircuts became uproariously funny to everybody—except me. My future was tied up with Sam’s. If the tourist project collapsed it wouldn’t be long before I got shipped back to Earth, I knew.

After three days there were dark circles under Sam’s eyes. He looked weary. Dazed. The grin was gone.

After a week had gone by I found Sam snoring in the Blue Grotto. As gently as I could I woke him.

“You getting any food into you?” I asked.

He blinked, gummy-eyed. “Chicken soup. I been taking chicken soup. Had some yesterday…. I think it was yesterday….”

By the tenth day more money had changed hands among the bettors than on Wall Street. Sam looked like a case of battle fatigue. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes haunted.

“She’s a devil, Omar,” he whispered hoarsely. “A devil.”

“Then get rid of her, man!” I urged. “Send her packing!”

He smiled wanly, like a man who knew he was addicted. “And quit show business?” he said weakly.

Two weeks to the day after she arrived, the Blonde packed up and left. Her eyes were blazing with anger. I saw her off at the docking port. She looked just as perfectly radiant as the day she had first arrived at the Shack. But what she was radiating now was rage. Hell hath no fury… I thought. But I was happy to see her go.

Sam slept for two days straight. When he managed to get up and around again he was only a shell of his old self. He had lost ten pounds. His eyes were sunken into his skull. His hands trembled. His chin was stubbled. He looked as if he had been through hell and back. But his crooked little grin had returned.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“She gave up.”

“You mean she’s going to let you go?”

He gave a deep, soulful, utterly weary sigh. “I guess she finally figured out that she couldn’t change my mind and she couldn’t kill me—at least not with the method she was using.” His grin stretched a little wider.

“We all thought she was wrapping you around her little finger,” I said.

“So did she.”

“You outsmarted her!”

I outlasted her,” Sam said, his voice low and truly sorrowful. “You know, at one point there, she almost had me convinced that she had fallen in love with me.”

“In love with you?”

He shook his head slowly, like a man who had crawled across miles of burning desert toward an oasis that turned out to be a mirage.

“You had me worried, man.”

“Why?” His eyes were really bleary.

“Well… she’s a powerful hunk of woman. Like you said, they sent her up here because you’re susceptible.”

“Yeah. But once she tried to steal my idea from me I stopped being so susceptible. I kept telling myself, ‘She’s not a gorgeous hot-blooded sex-pot of a woman. She’s a company stooge, an android they sent here to nail you, a bureaucrat with boobs. Great boobs.”

“And it worked.”

“By a millimeter. Less. She damned near beat me. She damned near did. She should never have mentioned marriage. That woke me up.”

What had happened, while Sam was fighting the Battle of the Bunk, was that when Sam’s partners-to-be realized that Rockledge was interested in the tourist facility, they became absolutely convinced that they had a gold mine on their hands. They backed Sam to the hilt. Their lawyers challenged Rockledge’s lawyers, and once the paper-shufflers down in Phoenix saw that, they understood that Miss Berylliums mission to the Shack was doomed. The Blonde left in a huff when Phoenix ordered her to return. I guess she was enjoying her work. Or maybe she thought she had Sam weakening.

“Now lemme get another week’s worth of sleep, will you?” Sam asked me. “And, oh yeah, find me about a ton and a half of vitamin E.”

So Sam became the manager and part owner of the human race’s first extraterrestrial tourist facility. I was his partner and, the way things worked out, a major shareholder in the project. Rockledge got some rent money out of it. Actually, so many people enjoyed their vacations and honeymoons aboard the Big Wheel that a market eventually opened up for low-gravity retirement homes. Sam beat Rockledge on that, too. But that’s another story.

Malone was hanging weightlessly near the curving transparent dome of his chamber, staring out at the distant Moon and cold unblinking stars.

Jade had almost forgotten her fear of weightlessness. The black man’s story seemed finished. She blinked and turned her attention to here and now. Drifting slightly closer to him, she turned off the recorder with an audible click, then thought better of it and turned it on again.

“So that’s how this hotel came into being,” she said.

Malone nodded, turning in midair to face her. “Yep. Sam got it started and then lost interest in it. He had other things on his mind, bigger fish to fry. He went into the advertising business, you know.”

“Oh yes, everybody knows about that,” she replied. “But what happened to the woman, the Beryllium Blonde? And why didn’t Sam ever return to Earth again?”

“Two parts of the same answer,” Malone said tiredly. “Miss Beryllium thought she was playing Sam for a fish, using his Casanova complex to literally screw him out of his hotel deal. Once she realized that he was playing her, fighting a delaying action until his partners got their lawyers into action, she got damned mad. Powerfully mad. By the time it finally became clear back at Phoenix that Sam was going to beat them, she took her revenge.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sam wasn’t the only one who could riffle through old safety regulations and use them for his own benefit. She found a few early NASA regs, then got some bureaucrats in Washington—from the Office of Safety and Health, I think—to rewrite them so that anybody who’d been living in zero-gee for a year or more had to undertake six months’ worth of retraining and exercise before he could return to Earth.”

“Six months? That’s ridiculous!”

“Is it?” Malone smiled with humor. “That regulation is still on the books, lady. Nobody pays attention to it anymore, but it’s still there.”

“She did that to spite Sam?”

“And she made sure Rockledge put all its weight behind enforcing it. Made people think twice before signing an employment contract to work up here. Stuck Sam, but good. He wasn’t going to spend no six months retraining! He just never bothered going back to Earth again.”

“Did he want to go back?”

“Sure he did. He wasn’t like me. He liked it back there. There were billions of women on Earth! Sam wanted to return but he just could never take six months out of his life to do it.”

“That must have hurt him terribly.”

“Yeah, I guess. Hard to tell with Sam. He didn’t like to bleed where other people could watch.”

“And you never went back to Earth.”

“No,” Malone said. “Thanks to Sam I stayed up here. He made me manager of the hotel, and once Sam bought the rest of this Big Wheel from Rockledge, I became manager of the whole Alpha Station.”

“And you’ve never had the slightest yearning to see Earth again?”

Malone gazed at her solemnly for long moments before answering. “Sure I get the itch. But when I do I go down to the one-g section of the Wheel here. I sit in a wheelchair and try to get around with these crippled legs of mine. The itch goes away then.”

“But they have prosthetic legs that you can’t tell from the real thing,” she said. “Lots of paraplegics …”

“Maybe you can’t tell them from the real thing, but I guarantee you that any paraplegic who uses those legs can tell.” Malone shook his head stubbornly. “Naw, once you’ve spent some time up here in zero-gee you realize that you don’t need legs to get around. You can live a good and useful life here instead of being a cripple down there.”

“I see,” Jade said softly.

“Yeah. Sure you do.”

“Sure I do,” Jade said softly. “I can never go to Earth, either.”

“Never?” Malone sounded skeptical.

“Bone disease. I was born with it.”

An uncomfortable silence rose between them. She turned off the recorder in her belt buckle, for good this time.

Finally Malone softened. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t’ve been nasty with you. It’s just that… thinking about Sam again. He was a great guy, you know. And now he’s dead and everybody thinks he was just a troublemaking bastard.”

“I don’t,” she said. “A womanizing sonofabitch, like you said. A male chauvinist of the first order. But after listening to you tell it, even at that he doesn’t seem so awful.”

The black man smiled at her. “Look at the time! No wonder I’m hungry! Can I take you down to the dining room for some supper?”

“The dining room in the lunar-gravity section?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Won’t you be uncomfortable there? Isn’t there a galley in the micro-gravity section?”

“Sure, but won’t you be uncomfortable there?”

She laughed. “I think I can handle it.”

“Really?”

“I can try. And maybe you can tell me how Sam got himself into the retirement home business.”

“All right. I’ll do that.”

As she turned she caught sight of the immense beauty of Earth sliding past the observation dome; the Indian Ocean a breathtaking swirl of deep blues and greens, the subcontinent of India decked with purest white clouds. The people who lived there, she thought. All those people. And the two, in particular, who were hiding away from her.

“But…” She looked at Malone, then asked in a whisper, “Do you ever miss being home, being on Earth? Don’t you feel isolated here, away from …”

His booming laughter shocked her. “Isolated? Up here?” Malone pitched himself forward into a weightless somersault, then pirouetted in midair. He pointed toward the ponderous bulk of the planet and said, “They’re the ones who’re isolated. Up here, I’m free!”

Then he offered his arm to her and they floated together toward the gleaming metal hatch, their feet a good eight inches above the chamber’s floor.

Still, Jade glanced back over her shoulder at the gleaming expanse of cloud-decked blue. She thought of the two women who lived among the billions down there, the two women who would never see her, whom she could never see. There are many kinds of isolation, Jade thought. Many kinds.