The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Nursery Sam

Trying to hide her excitement, Jade slipped the thumb-sized disk that Larry Karsh handed her into her digital player and wormed it into her ear.

I was trying to get away from the Senator who wanted to marry me. (Sam’s voice was a sharp-edged tenor; Jade pictured his freckled, snub-nosed face as she listened.)

So I’m sitting in the Clipper—riding tourist fare—waiting for the engines to light off and fly us to my zero-gee hotel, when who traipses into the cabin but Jack Spratt and his wife.

With a baby.

I scrunched way down in my seat. I didn’t want them to see me. I had enough troubles without a pissed-off former employee staring daggers at me for the whole ride up to orbit.

His name wasn’t really Jack Spratt, of course. It was Larry Karsh, and he had been a pretty key player in my old company, VCI. But that god-damnable Pierre D’Argent, the silver-haired slimeball, had hired him away from me, and Larry wouldn’t have gone to work at Rockledge if he hadn’t been sore at me for some reason. Damned if I knew what.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have called them the Spratts. But you know, Larry was so skinny he hardly cast a shadow and Melinda was—well, the kindest word is zaftig, I guess. She could just look at a potato chip and gain two kilos. Larry could clean out a whole shopping mall’s worth of junk food and never put on an ounce. So with him such a classic ectomorph and Melinda so billowy despite every diet in the world, it just seemed natural to call them Jack Spratt and his wife.

I guess it irritated Larry.

Well, I didn’t like the idea of bringing a baby up to my zero-gee hotel. Business was lousy enough up there without some mewling, puking ball of dirty diapers getting in everybody’s way. Heaven—that was my name for the hotel—was supposed to be for honeymooners. Oh, I’d take tourists of any sort, but I always thought of Heaven as primarily a honeymoon hotel. You know, sex in free fall; weightless lovemaking.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why people didn’t flock to Heaven. I thought I had a terrific motto for the hotel: “If you like water beds, you’ll love zero-gee.”

Okay, okay, so most people got sick their first day or so in weightlessness. It’s a little like seasickness: you feel kind of nauseated, like you’re coming down with the flu. You feel like you’re falling all the time; you want to upchuck and just generally die. Of course, after a while it all goes away and you’re floating around in zero-gee and you start to feel terrific. Scientists have even written reports about what they call “microgravity euphoria.” It’s wonderful!

But first you’ve got to get over the miseries. And I knew damned well that Rockledge was working on a cure for space sickness, right there in the same space station as my Hotel Heaven. But even if they found the cure, who do you think would be the last person in the solar system that Pierre D’Argent would sell it to?

That’s right. Sam Gunn, Esq. Me.

Me, I love weightlessness. God knows I’ve spent enough time in zero-gee. The idea for the honeymoon hotel came out of plenty of practical experience, believe me. In fact, the Senator who wanted to marry me had been one of my first datum points in my research on zero-gee sex, years ago. She had been a fellow astronaut, back in the days when we both worked for the old NASA.

But it only takes a few newlyweds tossing their cookies when free-fall first hits them to sour the whole damned travel industry on the idea of honeymooning in Heaven. As one travel agent from North Carolina told me, sweetly, “Even if you don’t get sick yourself, who wants to spend a vacation listening to other people puking?”

I tried beefing up the acoustical insulation in the suites, but Heaven got the reputation of being like an ocean liner that’s always in rough seas. And to this day I’m still convinced that D’Argent used Rockledge’s high-powered public relations machine to badmouth Heaven. D’Argent hated my guts, and the feeling was mutual.

And now Jack Spratt and his wife were bringing a baby up to Heaven. Perfect.

They sat two rows in front of me: Larry Karsh, Melinda, and a squirming dribbling baby that couldn’t have been more than nine or ten months old. Larry had filled out a little in the couple of years since I had last seen him, but he still looked like an emaciated scarecrow. Melinda had slimmed down a trace. Maybe. They still looked like Jack Spratt and his wife. And baby.

I could feel my face wrinkling into the grandfather of all frowns. A baby aboard a space station? That’s crazy! It’s sabotage! Yet, try as I might, I couldn’t think of any company rules or government regulations that prohibited people from bringing babies to Heaven. It just never occurred to me that anybody would. Well, I’ll fix that, I told myself. What the hell kind of a honeymoon hotel has a baby running around in it? Upchucking is bad enough; we don’t need dirty diapers and a squalling brat in orbit. They’re going to ruin the whole idea of Heaven.

The Clipper took off normally; we pulled about three gs for a minute or so. The cabin was less than half full; plenty of empty seats staring at me like the Ghost of Bankruptcy To Come. I scrunched deeper in my seat so Jack Spratt and his wife wouldn’t see me. But I was listening for the yowling that I knew was on its way.

Sure enough, as soon as the engines cut off and we felt weightless, the baby started screaming. The handful of paying passengers all turned toward the kid, and Larry unbuckled himself and drifted out of his seat.

“Hey, T.J., don’t holler,” he said, in the kind of voice that only an embarrassed father can put out. While he talked, he and Melinda unbuckled the brat from his car seat.

The baby kicked himself free of the last strap and floated up into his father’s arms. His yowling stopped. He gurgled. I knew what was coming next: his breakfast.

But instead the kid laughed and waved his chubby little arms. Larry barely touched him, just sort of guided him the way you’d tap a helium-filled balloon.

“See?” he cooed. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

The baby laughed. The passengers smiled tolerantly. Me, I was stunned that Jack Spratt had learned how to coo.

Then he spotted me, slumped down so far in my seat I was practically on the floor. And it’s not easy to slump in zero-gee; you really have to work at it.

“Sam!” he blurted, surprised. “I didn’t know you were on this flight.” And Melinda turned around in her chair and gave me a strained smile.

“I didn’t know you had a baby,” I said, trying not to growl in front of the paying customers.

Larry floated down the aisle to my row, looking so proud of his accomplishment you’d think nobody had ever fathered a son before. “Timothy James Karsh, meet Sam Gunn. Sam, this is T.J.”

He glided T.J. in my direction, the baby giggling and flailing both his arms and legs. For just the flash of a second I thought of how much fun it would be to play volleyball with the kid, but instead I just sort of held him like he was a Ming vase or something. I didn’t know what the hell to do with a baby!

But the baby knew. He looked me straight in the eye and spurted out a king-sized juicy raspberry, spraying me all over my face. Everybody roared with laughter.

I shoved the kid back to Larry, thinking that baseball might be more fun than volleyball.

In the fifty-eight minutes it took us to go from engine cutoff to docking with the space station, T.J. did about eleven thousand somersaults, seventy-three dozen midair pirouettes, and God knows how many raspberries. Everybody enjoyed the show, at first. The women especially gushed and gabbled and talked baby talk to the kid. They reached out to hold him, but little T.J. didn’t want to be held. He was having a great time floating around the tourist cabin and enjoying weightlessness.

I had feared, in those first few moments, that seeing this little bundle of dribble floating through the cabin would make some of the passengers queasy. I was just starting to tell myself I was wrong when I heard the first retching heave from behind me. It finally caught up with them; the baby’s antics had taken their minds off that falling sensation you get when zero-gee first hits you. But now the law of averages took its toll.

One woman. That’s all it took. One of those gargling groans and inside of two minutes almost everybody in the cabin is grabbing for their whoopie bags and making miserable noises. I turned up the air vent over my seat to max, but the stench couldn’t be avoided. Even Melinda started to look a little green, although Larry was as unaffected as I was and little T.J. thought all the noise was hysterically funny. He threw out raspberries at everybody.

When we finally got docked we needed the station’s full medical crew and a fumigation squad to clean out the cabin. Three couples flatly refused to come aboard Heaven; green as guacamole, they cancelled their vacations on the spot, demanded their money back, and rode in misery back to Earth. The other eight couples were all honeymooners. They wouldn’t cancel, but they looked pretty damned unhappy.

I went straight from the dock to my cubbyhole of an office in the hotel.

“There’s gotta be a way to get rid of that baby,” I muttered as I slid my slippered feet into their restraint loops. I tend to talk to myself when I’m upset.

My office was a marvel of zero-gee ergonomic engineering: compact as a fighter plane’s cockpit, cozy as squirrel’s nest, with everything I needed at my fingertips, whether it was up over my head or wherever. I scrolled through three hours worth of rules and regulations, insurance, safety, travel rights, even family law. Nothing there that would prevent parents from bringing babies onto a space station.

I was staring bleary-eyed at old maritime law statutes on my display screen, hoping that as owner of the hotel I had the same rights as the captain of a ship and could make unwanted passengers walk the plank. No such luck. Then the phone light blinked. I punched the key and growled, “What?”

A familiar voice said coyly, “Senator Meyers would like the pleasure of your company.”

“Jill? Is that you?” I cleared my display screen and punched up the phone image. Sure enough, it was Sen. Jill Meyers (R-NH).

Everybody said that Jill looked enough like me to be my sister. If so, what we did back in our youthful NASA days would have to be called incest. Jill had a pert round face, bright as a new penny, with a scattering of freckles across her button of a nose. Okay, so I look kind of like that, too. But her hair is a mousy brown and straight as a plumbline, while mine is on the russet side and curls so tight you can break a comb on it.

Let me get one thing absolutely clear. I am taller than she. Jill is not quite five-foot three, whereas I am five-five, no matter what my detractors claim.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Roughly fifty meters away from you,” she said, grinning.

“Here? In Heaven?” That was not the best news in the world for me. I had come up to my zero-gee hotel to get away from Jill.

See, I had been sort of courting her down in Washington because she’s a ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee and I needed a favor or two from her. She was perfectly happy to do me the favor or two, but she made it clear she was looking for a husband. Jill had been widowed maybe ten years earlier. I had never been married and had no intention of starting now. I like women way too much to marry one of them.

“Yes, I’m here in Heaven,” Jill said, with a big grin. “Came up on the same flight you did.”

“But I didn’t see you.”

“Senators ride first class, Sam.”

I made a frown. “At the taxpayers’ expense.”

“In this case, it was at the expense of Rockledge International Corporation. Feel better?”

No, I didn’t feel better. Not at all. “Rockledge? How come?”

“I’ve been invited to inspect their research facilities here at their space station,” Jill said. “Pierre D’Argent himself is escorting me.”

I growled.

Maybe I should tell you that the Rockledge space station was built of three concentric wheels. The outermost wheel spun around at a rate that gave it the feeling of regular Earth gravity: one g. The second wheel, closer to the hub, was at roughly one-third g: the gravity level of Mars. The innermost wheel was at one-sixth g, same as the Moon. And the hub, of course, was just about zero gravity. The scientists call it microgravity but it’s so close to zero-gee that for all intents and purposes you’re weightless at the hub.

I had rented half the hub from Rockledge for my Hotel Heaven. Zero-gee for lovers. Okay, so it’s not exactly zero-gee, so what? I had built thirty lovely little mini-suites around the rim of the hub and still had enough room left over to set up a padded gym where you could play anything from volleyball to blind man’s bluff in weightlessness.

Once I realized that most tourists got sick their first day or so in orbit, I tried to rent space down at the outermost wheel, so my customers could stay at normal Earth gravity and visit the zero-gee section when they wanted to play—or try weightless sex. No dice. D’Argent wouldn’t rent any of it to me. He claimed Rockledge was using the rest of the station—all of it—for their research labs and their staff. Which was bullcrap.

I did manage to get them to rent me a small section in the innermost wheel, where everything was one-sixth g. I set up my restaurant there, so my customers could at least have their meals in some comfort. Called it the Lunar Eclipse. Best damned restaurant off Earth. Also the only one, at that time. Lots of spilled drinks and wine, though. Pouring liquids in low gravity takes some training. We had to work hard to teach our waiters and waitresses how to do it. I personally supervised the waitress training. It was one of the few bright spots in this black hole that was engulfing me.

“How about lunch?” Jill asked me, with a bright happy smile.

“Yeah,” I said, feeling trapped. “How about it?”

“What a charming invitation,” said Jill. “ ’Til see you at the restaurant in fifteen minutes.”

Now here’s the deal. The first big industrial boom in orbit was just starting to take off. Major corporations like Rockledge were beginning to realize that they could make profits from manufacturing in orbit.

They had problems with workers getting space sick, of course, but they weren’t as badly affected as I was with Heaven. There’s a big difference between losing the first two days of a week-long vacation because you’re nauseated and losing the first two days of a ninety-day work contract. Still, Rockledge was searching for a cure. Right there on the same space station as my Hotel Heaven.

Anyway, I figured that the next step in space industrialization would be to start digging up the raw materials for the orbital factories from the Moon and the asteroids. A helluva lot cheaper than hauling them up from Earth, once you get a critical mass of mining equipment in place. The way I saw it, once we could start mining the Moon and some of the near-approach asteroids, the boom in orbital manufacturing would really take off. I’d make zillions!

And I was right, of course, although it didn’t exactly develop the way I thought it would.

I wanted to get there first. Start mining the Moon, grab an asteroid or two. Mega-fortunes awaited the person who could strike those bonanzas.

But the goddamned honeymoon hotel was bleeding me to death. Unless and until somebody came up with a cure for space sickness, Heaven was going to be a financial bottomless pit. I was losing a bundle trying to keep the hotel open, and the day D’Argent became Rockledge’s Chief of Space Operations, he doubled my rent, sweetheart that he is.

But I knew something that D’Argent didn’t want me to know. Rockledge was working on a cure for space sickness. Right here aboard the space station! If I could get my hands on that, my troubles would be over. Pretty much.

It occurred to me, as I headed for the Lunar Eclipse, that maybe Jill could do me still another favor. Maybe her being here on the station might work out okay, after all.

I pushed along the tube that went down to the inner ring. You had to be careful, heading from the hub towards the various rings, because you were effectively going downhill. Flatlanders coming up for the first time could flatten themselves but good if they let themselves drop all the way down to the outermost wheel. The Coriolis force from the stations spin would bang them against the tube’s circular wall as they dropped downward. The farther they dropped, the bigger the bangs. You could break bones.

That’s why Rockledge’s engineers had designed ladder rungs and safety hatches in the tubes that connected the hub to the wheels, so you had something to grab on to and stop your fall. I had even thought about padding the walls, but D’Argent nixed my idea: too expensive, he claimed. He’d rather see somebody fracture a leg and sue me.

I was almost at the lunar level. In fact, I was pulling open the hatch when I hear a yell. I look up and a bundle of screaming baby comes tumbling past me like a miniature bowling ball with arms and legs.

“Catch him! Stop him!”

I look around and here comes Larry Karsh, flailing around like a skinny spider on LSD, trying to catch up with his kid.

“Sam! Help!”

If I had thought about it for half a microsecond I would’ve let the kid bounce off the tube walls until he splattered himself on the next set of hatches. And Larry after him.

But, no—instinct took over and I shot through the hatch and launched myself after the baby like a torpedo on a rescue mission. S. Gunn, intrepid hero.

It was a long fall to the next set of hatches. I could see the kid tumbling around like a twenty-pound meteoroid, bare-ass naked, hitting the wall and skidding along it for a moment, then flinging out into midair again. His size worked for him: a little guy like he was didn’t hit the wall so hard—at first. But each bump down the tube was going to be harder, I knew. If I didn’t catch him real fast, he’d get hurt. Bad.

There was nobody else in the damned tube, nobody there to grab him or break his fall or even slow him down a little.

I started using the ladder rungs to propel myself faster, grabbing the rungs with my fingertips and pushing off them, one after another, faster and faster. Like the Lone Ranger chasing a runaway horse. Damned Coriolis force was getting to me, though, making me kind of dizzy.

As I got closer and closer, I saw that little T.J. wasn’t screaming with fear. He was screeching with delight, happy as a little cannonball, kicking his arms and legs and tumbling head over bare ass, laughing hard as he could.

Next time he hits the wall he won’t be laughing anymore, I thought. Then I wondered if I could reach him before he slammed into the hatch at the bottom of this level of the tube. At the speed I was going I’d come down right on top of him, and the kid wouldn’t be much of a cushion.

Well, I caught up with him before either of us reached the next hatch, tucked him under one arm like he was a wriggling football, and started trying to slow my fall with the other hand. It wasn’t going to work, I saw, so I flipped myself around so I was coming down feet-first and kept grabbing at rungs with my free hand, getting dizzier and dizzier. Felt like my shoulder was going to come off, and my hand got banged up pretty good, but at least we slowed down some.

The baby was crying and struggling to get loose. He’d been having fun, dropping like an accelerating stone. He didn’t like being saved. I heard Larry yelling and looked up; he was clambering down the ladder, all skinny arms and legs, jabbering like a demented monkey.

I hit the hatch feet-first like I’d been dropped out of an airplane. I mean, I did my share of parachute jumps back when I was in astronaut training, but this time I hit a hell of a lot harder. Like my shinbones were shattering and my knees were trying to ram themselves up into my ribcage. I saw every star in the Milky Way, and the wind was knocked out of me for a moment.

So I was sprawled on my back, kind of dazed, with the kid yelling to get loose from me, when Larry comes climbing down the ladder, puffing like he’d been trying to save the kid, and takes the yowling little brat in his arms.

“Gee, thanks, Sam,” he says. “I was changing his diaper when he got loose from me. Sorry about the mess.”

That’s when I realized that the ungrateful little so-and-so had peed all down the front of my shirt.

So I was late for my lunch date with Senator Meyers. My hand was banged up and swollen, my legs ached, my knees felt like they were going to explode, and the only other shirt I had brought with me was all wrinkled from being jammed into my travel bag. But at least it was dry. Even so, I got to the restaurant before she did. Jill was one of those women who has a deathly fear of arriving anywhere first.

I was so late, though, that she was only half a minute behind me. I hadn’t even started for a table yet; I was still in the restaurant’s teeny little foyer, talking with my buddy Omar.

“Am I terribly late?” Jill asked.

I turned at the sound of her voice and, I’ve got to admit, Jill looked terrific. I mean, she was as plain as vanilla, with hardly any figure at all, but she still looked bright and attractive and, well, I guess the right word is radiant. She was wearing a one-piece zipsuit, almost like the coveralls that we used to wear back on the NASA shuttle. But now her suit was made of some kind of shiny stuff and decorated with color accents and jewels. Like Polonius said: rich, not gaudy.

Her hair was a darker shade than I remembered it from the old days, and impeccably coiffed. She was dyeing it, I figured. And getting it done a lot better than she did when she’d been a working astronaut.

“You look like a million dollars,” I said as she stepped through the hatch into the restaurant’s foyer.

She grinned that freckle-faced grin of hers and said, “It costs almost that much to look like this.”

“It’s worth it,” I said.

Omar, my buddy from years back, was serving as the maitre d’ that afternoon. He was the general manager of the hotel, but everybody was pulling double or triple duty, trying to keep the place afloat. He loomed over us, painfully gaunt and tall as a basketball star, his black pate shaved bald, a dense goatee covering his chin. In the easy lunar gravity Omar could walk normally with nothing more than the lightest of braces on his atrophied legs. Omar had more to lose than I did if the hotel went bust. He’d have to go back to Earth and be a cripple.

As he showed us to our table, all dignity and seriousness, Jill cracked, “You’re getting gray, Sam.”

“Cosmic rays,” I snapped back at her. “Not age. I’ve been in space so much that primary cosmic rays have discolored my pigmentation.”

Jill nodded as if she knew better but didn’t want to argue about it. The restaurant was almost completely empty. It was the only place aboard the station to eat, unless you were a Rockledge employee and could use their cafeteria, yet still it was a sea of empty tables. I mean, there wasn’t any other place for the tourists to eat—it was lunch hour for those who came up from the States—but the Eclipse had that forlorn look. Three tables occupied, seventeen bare. Twelve human waiters standing around with nothing to do but run up my salary costs.

As Omar sat us at the finest table in the Eclipse (why not?) Jill said, “You ought to get some new clothes, Sam. You’re frayed at the cuffs, for goodness’ sake.”

I refrained from telling her about T.J.’s urinary gift. But I gave her the rest of the story about my thrilling rescue, which nobody had witnessed except the butterfingered Jack Spratt.

“My goodness, Sam, you saved that baby’s life,” Jill said, positively glowing at me.

“I should’ve let him go and seen how high he’d bounce when he hit the hatch.”

“Sam!”

“In the interest of science,” I said.

“Don’t be mean.”

“He’s supposed to be a bouncing baby boy, isn’t he?”

She did not laugh.

“Dammit, Jill, they shouldn’t have brought a kid up here,” I burst. “It’s not right. There ought to be a regulation someplace to prevent idiots from bringing their lousy brats to my hotel!”

Jill was not helpful at all. “Sam,” she told me, her expression severe, “we made age discrimination illegal half a century ago.”

“This isn’t age discrimination,” I protested. “That baby isn’t a voting citizen.”

“He’s still a human being who has rights. And so do his parents.”

I am not a gloomy guy, but it felt like a big rain cloud had settled over my head. Little T.J. was not the only one pissing on me.

But I had work to do. As long as Jill was here, I tried to make the best of it. I started spinning glorious tales of the coming bonanza in space manufacturing, once we could mine raw materials from the Moon or asteroids.

I never mentioned our weightless escapades, but she knew that I held that trump card. Imagine the fuss the media would make if they discovered that the conservative Senator from New Hampshire had once been a wild woman in orbit. With the notorious Sam Gunn, of all people!

“What is it you want, Sam?” Jill asked me. That’s one of the things I liked best about her. No bull-hickey. She came straight to the point.

So I did, too. “I’m trying to raise capital for a new venture.”

Before I could go any farther, she fixed me with a leery eye. “Another new venture? When are you going to stop dashing around after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Sam?”

I gave her a grin. “When I get my hands on the gold.”

“Is that what you’re after, money? Is that all that you’re interested in?”

“Oh no,” I said honestly. “What I’m really interested in is the things money can buy.”

She frowned; it was part annoyance, part disappointment, I guess. Easy for her. She was born well-off, married even better, and now was a wealthy widowed United States Senator. Me, I was an orphan at birth, raised by strangers. I’ve always had to claw and scrabble and kick and bite my way to wherever I had to go. There was nobody around to help me. Only me, all five foot three—excuse me, five foot five inches of me. All by myself. You’re damned right money means a lot to me. Most of all, it means respect. Like that old ballplayer said, the home-run hitters drive the Cadillacs. I also noticed, very early in life, that they also get the best-looking women.

“Okay,” I backpedaled. “So money can’t buy happiness. But neither can poverty. I want to get filthy rich. Is there anything wrong with that?”

Despite her New England upbringing, a faint smile teased at the corners of Jill’s mouth. “No, I suppose not,” she said softly.

So I went into the details about my hopes for lunar mining and asteroid prospecting. Jill listened quietly; attentively, I thought, until I finished my pitch.

She toyed with her wine glass as she said, “Mining the Moon. Capturing asteroids. All that’s a long way off, Sam.”

“It’s a lot closer than most people realize,” I replied, in my best-behaved, serious man of business attitude. Then I added, “It’s not as far in the future as our own space shuttle missions are in the past.”

Jill sighed, then grinned maliciously. “You always were a little bastard, weren’t you?”

I grinned back at her. “What’s the accident of my birth got to do with it?”

She put the wine glass down and hunched closer to me. “Just what are you after, Sam, specifically?” I think she was enjoying the challenge of dealing with me.

I answered, “I want to make sure that the big guys like Rockledge and Yamagata don’t slit my throat.”

“How can I help you do that?”

“You’re on the Commerce Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee, right? I need to be able to assure my investors that the Senate won’t let my teeny little company be squashed flat by the big guys.”

“Your investors? Like who?”

I refused to be rattled by her question. “I’ll find investors,” I said firmly, “once you level the playing field for me.”

Leaning back in her chair, she said slowly, “You want me to use my influence as a United States Senator to warn Rockledge and the others not to muscle you.”

I nodded.

Jill thought about it for a few silent moments, then she asked, “And what’s in it for me?”

Good old straight-from-the-shoulder Jill. “Why,” I said, “you get the satisfaction of helping an old friend to succeed in a daring new venture that will bring the United States back to the forefront of space industrialization.”

She gave me a look that told me that wasn’t the answer she had wanted to hear. But before I could say anything more, she muttered, “That might win six or seven votes in New Hampshire, I guess.”

“Sure,” I said. “You’ll be a big hero with your constituents, helping the little guy against the big, bad corporations.”

“Cut the serenade, Sam,” she snapped. “You’ve got something else going on in that twisted little brain of yours; I can tell. What is it?”

She was still grinning as she said it, so I admitted, “Well, there’s a rumor that Rockledge is developing an anti-nausea remedy that’ll stop space sickness. It could mean a lot for my hotel.”

“I hear your zero-gee sex palace is on its way to bankruptcy.”

“Not if Rockledge will sell me a cure for the weightless whoopies.”

“You think they’d try to keep it from you?”

“Do vultures eat meat?”

She laughed and started in on her plate of soyburger.

After lunch I took Jill down to her mini-suite in the hub and asked how she liked her accommodations.

“Well,” she said, drawing the word out, “it’s better than the old shuttle mid-deck, I suppose.”

“You suppose?” I was shocked. “Each one of Heaven’s rooms is a luxurious, self-contained mini-suite.” I quoted from our publicity brochure.

Jill said nothing until I found her door and opened it for her with a flourish.

“Kind of small, don’t you think?” she said.

“Nobody’s complained about the size,” I replied. Then I showed her the controls that operated the minibar, the built-in sauna, the massage equipment, and the screen that covered the observation port.

“A real love nest,” Jill said.

“That’s the idea.”

I opened the observation port’s screen and we saw the Earth hanging out there, huge and blue and sparkling. Then it slid past as the station revolved and we were looking at diamond-hard stars set against the velvet black of space. It was gorgeous, absolutely breathtaking.

And then we heard somebody vomiting in the next compartment. The hotel’s less than one-quarter full and my crackbrained staff books two zero-gee compartments next to one another!

But Jill just laughed. “This hotel isn’t going to prosper until somebody comes up with a cure for space sickness.”

“That’s what Rockledge is doing,” I grumbled. “Right aboard this station.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Jill pursed her lips. Then, “Let me ask D’Argent about that. Unofficially, of course. But maybe I can find out something for you.”

My eyes must have widened. “You’d do that for me?”

Jill touched my cheek with cool fingertips. “Of course I would, Sam. You have no idea of the things I’d do for you, if you’d only let me.”

That sounded dangerous to me. So I bid her a hasty adieu and pushed through her doorway, heading for my cubbyhole of an office. Jill just gave me a sphinx-like inscrutable smile as I floated out of her compartment.

When I got back to my office there was more depressing news on my computer screen. A contingent of Rockledge board members and junior executives were scheduled for a tour of the station and its facilities. They would be staying for a week and had booked space in my hotel—at the discount prices Rockledge commanded as my landlord. Those prices, negotiated before I had ever opened Heaven, were lower than the rent D’Argent was now charging me. If I filled the hotel with Rockledge people I could go bankrupt even faster than I already was.

And they were all bringing their wives. And children! Larry, Melinda, and their bouncing baby boy were just the first wave of the invasion of the weightless brats. I began to think about suicide. Or murder.

I can’t describe the horrors of that week. By actual count there were only twenty-two kids. The oldest was fifteen and the youngest was little T.J., ten months or so. But it seemed like there were hundreds of them, thousands. Everywhere I turned there were brats getting in my way, poking around the observation center, getting themselves stuck in hatches, playing tag along the tubes that connected the station’s hub with its various wheels, yelling, screaming, tumbling, fighting, throwing food around, and just generally making my life miserable.

Not only my life. Even the honeymooners started checking out early, with howls of protest at the invasion of the underage monsters and dire threats about lawsuits.

“You’ll pay for ruining our honeymoon,” was the kindest farewell statement any of them made.

The brats took over the zero-gee gym. It looked like one of those old martial arts films in there, only in weightlessness. They were swarming all over the padded gym, kicking, thrashing, screaming, arms and legs everyplace, howls and yelps and laughing and crying. One five-year-old girl, in particular, had a shriek that could cleave limestone.

I tried to get the three teenagers among them to serve as guardians—guards, really—for the younger tots. I offered them damned good money to look after the brats. The two girls agreed with no trouble. The one boy—fourteen, sullen, face full of zits—refused. He was the son of one of the board members. “My mother didn’t bring me up here to be a babysitter,” he growled.

As far as I could see, the only thing the pizza-faced jerk did was hang around the hub weightlessly and sulk.

I couldn’t blame the honeymooners for leaving. Who wants to fight your way through a screaming horde of little monsters to get to your zero-gee love nest? It was hopeless. I could see D’Argent smiling that oily smile of his; he knew I was going down in flames and he was enjoying every minute of it.

And right in the middle of it were Larry and Melinda and their bouncing baby boy—who really did bounce around a lot off the padded walls of the gym. T.J. loved it in there, especially with all the other kids to keep him company. The two teen-aged girls made him their living doll. And T.J. seemed to look out with his ten-month-old eyes at the whole noisy, noisome gang of kids as if they were his personal play-toys, a swirling, riotous, colorful mobile made up of twenty-two raucous, runny-nosed, rotten kids.

Make that twenty-one kids and one fourteen-year-old moper.

I found that Larry and Melinda started feeding the baby in the gym. “It’s easier than doing it in the restaurant or in our own quarters,” Melinda said, as T.J. gummed away at some pulpy baby goop. “Practically no mess at all.”

I could see what she meant. They just hovered in midair with the baby. Three-fourths of what they aimed at the brat’s mouth wound up in his ear or smeared over his face or spit into the air. Being weightless, most of the stuff just broke into droplets or crumbs and drifted along in the air currents until they stuck on one of the intake ventilator screens. At the end of the meal Larry would break out a hand vacuum and clean off the screens while Melinda cleaned the baby with pre-moistened towels. Not bad, I had to admit. Didn’t have to mop the floor or clean any furniture.

The other kids liked to eat in zero-gee, too. Made their food fights more interesting. It was okay with me; anything that kept them out of the restaurant or the other areas where adult human beings lived and worked was a score for our side, far as I was concerned. But zero-gee sex was a thing of the past as long as they held the station’s gym in their grubby little paws. My honeymoon hotel had turned into an orbital camp for tots.

“You were right, Sam,” Jill told me over dinner the third or fourth night of Hell Week.

The restaurant was almost empty. Nearly every one of Rockledge’s junior executives took their meals in their rooms. Too cheap for the restaurant, they used the fast-food dispensers and the cafeteria in the Rockledge research facility.

At least the Eclipse was quiet. No kids. I had thought about trying to make a rule that nobody under twenty-one was allowed into the Lunar Eclipse, but Omar, my long-suffering hotel manager, had convinced me that it would just cause a ruckus with the parents. They were happy as Torquemada in a synagogue to be in the restaurant without their little darlings. But if I said they weren’t allowed to bring their kids to the Eclipse they’d get pissed off and demand their rights.

So the restaurant was nice and quiet and civilized with all the kids up in the gym dashing around and playing zero-gee games.

“I was right about what?” I asked. I must have looked as miserable as I felt. My mind was echoing with the screeches of all those brats yowling at the top of their lungs and the somber prediction of my accountant that the hotel would sink beneath the financial waves in another two weeks. All day long I had been receiving cancellation notices from travel agencies. The word was going around at the speed of light.

Jill nudged her chair a little closer to mine. “Rockledge really is working on a preventative for space sickness. Pierre D’Argent showed me the laboratory studies they’ve done so far. It looks as if they’ve got it.”

No sooner had she mentioned D’Argent’s name than the silver-haired sonofabitch showed up at the restaurant’s door, leading a contingent of six senior Rockledge board members and their trophy wives. The men all looked like grumpy old farts, white-haired or bald; the women were heavy with jewelry. I wondered which one of them owned that fourteen-year-old sourpuss.

“What lovely women,” Jill said.

I made no response.

“Don’t you think they’re beautiful, Sam?”

I grunted. “Who cares.”

Jill gave me a funny expression. I didn’t realize it at the time, but her expression was a mixture of surprise and admiration. She thought I had finally matured to the point where I didn’t salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs every time I saw a good-looking woman. What Jill didn’t realize was that I was too down in the dumps to be interested in a bevy of expensively dressed advertisements for cosmetic surgery who were already married. I never chased married women. Never. That’s a point of honor with me. It also saves you a lot of threats, fights, lawsuits and attempts on your life.

Jill returned to her original subject. “Didn’t you hear me, Sam? Rockledge is going to market a skin patch that prevents space sickness.”

“Yeah,” I said gloomily. “The day after this hotel closes, that’s when they’ll put it on the market.”

I was watching D’Argent and his troupe as they sat at the biggest table in the restaurant. Laughing softly among themselves, happy, relaxed, their biggest worry was how to evade the taxes that were due on their enormous profits. The more they ate and drank, at their discount prices, the deeper into the red they pushed me.

Jill shook me by my wrist and made me look at her. She had a kind of pixie grin on her face. Almost evil. “Suppose I could get D’Argent to use your hotel customers as a field trial for their new drug?”

“Suppose you could get the Pope to pee off the roof of the Vatican.”

“Wouldn’t that help you?” she insisted.

I had to admit that it might.

“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Jill said, as firmly as a U.S. Senator announcing she was running for reelection.

I had no romantic interest in Jill, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why she was interested in me. What did it matter? I was in such a funk over those brats infesting my hotel that I wouldn’t have noticed if Helen of Troy had been sitting naked in my bed with her arms out to me. Well, maybe.

What was going through my mind was an endless vicious circle. The hotel is failing. When the hotel goes down the tubes it’ll drag my company, VCI, down with it. VCI was technically in the black, making steady money selling magnetic bumpers that protected space facilities from orbiting debris. But legally, VCI owned Hotel Heaven and the hotel’s accumulated debts would force VCI into bankruptcy. I would be broke. Nobody would lend me a cent. There went my dreams for mining the Moon and making myself the tycoon of the asteroids. I’d have to find a job someplace.

Unless—there was only one way I could see out of the black pit that was staring at me. I had to swallow hard several times before I could work up the nerve to even put out a feeler. But it was either that or bankruptcy, the end of all my dreams. So the next morning I gritted my teeth (having swallowed hard several times) and took the first little step on the road to humiliation.

“Hi, Larry old pal, how’s it going?” The words almost stuck in my throat, but I had to get started somehow.

Oh, that’s right, I haven’t told you about Larry and Melinda and the Gunn Shield. Here’s the story.

I had first started VCI, years earlier, to build magnetic bumpers for space stations, to protect them against the orbiting junk whizzing around up there. Larry designed them for me. They’re called Gunn Shields, of course. Without them, a space station would get dinged constantly from the crap zipping around in orbit. Even a chip of paint hits with the impact of a high-power bullet, and there’s a helluva lot more than paint chips flying around in the low orbits.

The Russians finally had to abandon their original Mir space station because it was starting to look like a target in a shooting gallery. And the more stations and factories people built in orbit, the more debris they created and the more they needed Gunn Shields. A nice, steady, growing market. Not spectacular, not enough to bring in the kind of cash flow I needed, but dependable.

Back in those days Melinda had a crush on me. Just a kid’s crush, that’s all it was, but Larry loved her madly and hated me for it. She was kind of pretty underneath her avoirdupois, but not my type.

That surprises you? You heard that Sam Gunn chases all types of women, didn’t you. No discrimination at all. Well, that’s about as true as all the rest of the bull manure they spread about me.

Melinda was not my type. But she had this thing about me and Larry had his heart set on her. So I hired Melinda to come to work for me at VCI, and then kind of offhand asked Larry if he’d like to come along too. Larry was the guy I needed, the one I had to have if VCI was going to be a success. He was the semi-genius who thought up the idea for magnetic bumpers in the first place. Poor fish rose to the bait without even stopping to think. They both moved to Florida and together we put VCI into business.

So while Larry was designing the original bumper, I was touting Melinda off me and onto Larry. Cyrano de Gunn, that’s me. Made her fall in love with him. Voila. Once we tested the original bumper and it worked, I got it patented and Larry got Melinda to marry him. Everybody was happy, I thought. Wrong!

For some unfathomable reason, Larry got pissed at me and went off to work for D’Argent, the sneaky sleazoid, over at Rockledge. And when he quit VCI, Melinda did, too.

Oh, yeah, we almost got into a shooting war over the rights to the geocentric orbit. But that’s another story. Larry only played a minor role in that one.

Anyway, I had spent a sleepless night tussling over my problems and couldn’t see a way out. Except to sell the goddamned hotel to Rockledge. And the rights to the Gunn Shield, too. Dump it all for cash. D’Argent had tried before to sneak the magnetic bumper design away from me. He had tried bribery and even theft. Hell, he had hired Larry with the idea of getting the kid to figure out a way to break my patent. I knew that, even if Larry himself didn’t.

So now I toadied up to Larry, in the middle of the mayhem of the station’s gym. The kids had taken it over completely. Larry and I were the only adults among the yowling, zooming, screeching, barfing little darlings. Even the two teenaged girls who were supposed to be watching the kids were busy playing free-fall tag and screaming at the top of their considerable voices.

Larry gave me a guarded look. He was feeding T.J., who was happily spraying most of his food into weightless droplets that hovered around him like tiny spheres of multicolored glop before drifting slowly toward the nearest ventilator grid.

“Where’s Melinda?” I asked, trying to radiate good cheer and sincerity while dodging the goo that the baby was spewing out.

“She’s down in the second wheel, doing aerobics,” he said. He spooned a bit of puke-colored paste out of a jar and stuck it in front of T.J.’s face. The baby siphoned it off with a big slurping noise and even managed to get some of it past his two visible teeth and into his mouth.

Gradually, with every ounce of self-control and patient misdirection I could muster, I edged the topic of conversation to the Gunn Shields. All the time we were both dodging flying kids and the various missiles they were throwing at each other, as well as T.J.’s pretty constant spray of food particles. And I had to shout to make myself heard over the noise the brats were making.

I only hoped that none of them figured out the combinations for the electronic locks on the zero-gee mini-suites. I could just see the little SOBs breaking into the mini-bars and throwing bottles all over the place or scalding themselves in the saunas. Come to think of it, boiling a couple of them might have been fun.

But I had work to do.

The more I talked to Larry about the magnetic shields, though, the more he seemed to drift away from me. I mean, literally move away. He kept floating backward through the big, padded zero-gee compartment and I kept pushing toward him. We slowly crossed the entire gym, with all those kids whooping and zooming around us. Finally I had him pinned against one of the padded walls, T.J. floating upside-down above him and the jar of baby food hovering between us. It was only then that I realized Larry was getting red in the face.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, earnestly. “Are you getting sick?”

“Dammit, Sam, they shouldn’t be called Gunn Shields!” Larry burst out. “I designed the bumpers, not you! They ought to be called Karsh Shields!”

I was stunned. I had never even thought of that. And he certainly had never mentioned it to me before.

“You mean, all this time you’ve been sore at me over a public relations title?”

“It means a lot to me,” he said, as surly as that teenaged grump.

“Is that why you left me for Rockledge?”

Larry nodded petulantly.

It was my big chance. Maybe my only chance. I let my head droop as if I had suddenly discovered religion and was ashamed of my past life.

“Gee, Larry,” I said, just loudly enough to be heard over the screams of the kids, “I never realized how much it meant to you.”

“Well,” it’s my invention but you took out the patent and you took all the credit, too.”

I noticed that he had not spoken a word about money. Not a syllable. Larry was pure of heart, bless his unblemished soul.

I looked him in the eye with the most contrite expression I could manage. It was hard to keep from giggling; this was going to be like plucking apples off a blind man’s fruit stand.

“If that’s the way you feel about it, kid,” I said, trying to keep up the hangdog expression, “then we’ll change the name. Look—I—I’ll even license Rockledge to manufacture and sell the shields. That’s right! Let Rockledge take it over completely! Then you can call them Karsh Shields with no trouble at all!”

His eyes goggled. “You’d do that for me, Sam?”

I slid an arm around his shoulder. “Sure I would. I never wanted to hurt you, Larry. If only you had told me sooner…” I let my voice fade away. Then I nodded, as if I had been struggling inside myself. “I’ll sell Rockledge the hotel, too.”

“No!” Larry gasped. “Not your hotel.”

“I know D’Argent wants it.” That wasn’t exactly the truth. But I had a strong suspicion the silver-haired bastard would be happy to take the hotel away from me—as long as he thought it would break my heart to part with it.

Larry’s face turned red again, but this time he looked embarrassed, not angry. “Sam …” He hesitated, then went on, “Look, Sam, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the company’s been working on a cure for space sickness.”

I blinked at him, trying to generate a tear or two. “Really?”

“If it works, it should help to make your hotel a success.”

“If it works,” I said, with a big sigh.

The way I had it figured, Rockledge would pay a nice royalty for the license to manufacture and sell the magnetic bumpers. Not as much as VCI was making in profits from the shields, but the Rockledge royalties would go to me, personally, as the patent-holder. Not to VCI. The damned hotel’s debts wouldn’t touch the royalties. VCI would go down the tubes, but what the hell, that’s business. I’d be moving on to lunar mining and asteroid hunting. ET Resources, Inc. That’s what I would call my new company.

Let Larry call them Karsh Shields, I didn’t give a fart’s worth about that. Let D’Argent do everything he could to make the world forget I had anything to do with them, as long as he sent me the royalty checks on time. What I really wanted, what I desperately needed, was the money to start moving on ET Resources, Inc.

“Maybe I can talk D’Argent into letting you use their new drug,” Larry suggested. “You know, try it out on your hotel customers.”

I brightened up a little. “Gee,” I said, “that would be nice. If only I could keep my hotel.” I sighed again, heavier, heavy enough to nudge me slightly away from Larry and the baby. “It would break my heart to part with Heaven.”

Larry gaped at me while T.J. stuck a sticky finger in his father’s ear.

“It would make both of us happy,” I went on. “I could keep the hotel and Rockledge could take over the magnetic bumpers and call them Karsh Shields.”

That really turned him on. “I’ll go find D’Argent right now!” Larry said, all enthusiasm. “Would you mind looking after T.J. for a couple of minutes?”

And he was off like a shot before I could say a word, out across the mayhem of all those brats flinging themselves around the gym. Just before he disappeared through the main hatch he yelled back at me, “Oh, yeah, T.J.’s going to need a change. You know how to change a diaper, don’t you?”

He ducked through the hatch before I could answer. The kids swarmed all through the place and little T.J. stared after his disappearing father.

I was kind of stunned. I wasn’t a babysitter! But there I was, hanging in midair with twenty crazed kids zipping all around me and a ten-month-old baby hanging a couple of feet before my eyes, his chin and cheeks smeared with baby food and this weird expression on his face.

“Well,” I said to myself, “what the hell do I do now?”

T.J. broke into a bawling cry. He wanted his father, not this stranger. I didn’t know what to do. I tried talking to him, tried holding him, even tried making faces at him. He didn’t understand a word I said, of course; when I tried to hold him he squirmed and shrieked so loud even the other kids stopped their games to stare at me accusingly. And when I made a few faces at him he just screamed even louder.

Then I smelled something. His diaper.

One of the teen-aged girls gave me a nasty look and said firmly, “I’m going to call his mother!”

“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll bring the kid to her myself.”

I nudged squalling T.J. weightlessly toward the hatch and started the two of us down the connector tube toward the second-level wheel, where the Rockledge gym was. It had been a stroke of genius (mine) to put their exercise facility in the wheel that rotated at about one-third gee, the gravity you’d feel on Mars. You can lift three times the weight you’d be able to handle on Earth and feel like you’ve accomplished something without straining yourself. But do you think D’Argent or any of his Rockledge minions would give me credit for the idea? When hell freezes over—maybe.

T.J. stopped yowling once I got his flailing little body through the hatch and into the tube. This was a different enough place for his curiosity to override the idea that his father had abandoned him, and whatever discomfort his loaded diaper might be causing him. He was fascinated with the blinking lights on the hatch control panel. I opened and shut the damned hatch half a dozen times, just to quiet him down. Then I showed him the color-coded guide lines on the tube’s walls, and the glowing light strips. He pointed and smiled. Kind of a goofy smile, with just two teeth to show. But it was better than crying.

By the time we reached the second wheel we were almost pals. I let him smear his greasy little hands over the hatch control panel; like I said, he liked to watch the lights blink, and there wasn’t much damage he could do to the panel except make it sticky. I even held his hand and let him touch the keypads that operated the hatch. He laughed when it started to swing open. After we went through he pointed at the control panel on the other side and made it clear he wanted to play with that one, too.

There was enough of a feeling of gravity down at this level for me to walk on the floor, with T.J. crawling along beside me. I tried to pick him up and carry him, despite his smell, but he was too independent for that. He wanted to be on his own.

Kind of reminded me of me.

Melinda was sweaty and puffing and not an ounce lighter than she had been when she entered the exercise room. T.J. spotted her in the middle of all the straining, groaning women doing their aerobics to the latest top-forty pop tunes. He let out a squeal and all the women stopped their workout to surround the kid with cooing gushing baby talk. Melinda was queen of them all, the mother of the center of their attention. You’d think the brat had produced ice cream.

I beat a hasty retreat, happy to be rid of the kid. Although, I’ve got to admit, little T.J. was kind of fun to be with. When he wasn’t crying. And if you held your breath.

True to his naive word, Larry arranged a meeting between D’Argent and me that very afternoon. I was invited to the section of the station where Rockledge had its lab, up in the lunar wheel, alongside my restaurant.

You might have thought we were trying to penetrate a top-secret military base. Between the Lunar Eclipse and the hatch to the Rockledge Laboratory was a corridor no more than ten meters long. Rockledge had packed six uniformed security guards, an X-ray scanner, three video cameras and a set of chemical sniffers into those ten meters. If we didn’t have a regulation against animals they would have probably had a few Dobermans in there, too.

“What’re you guys doing in here?” I asked D’Argent, once they had let me through the security screen and ushered me into the compartment he was using as an office. “You’ve got more security out there than a rock star visiting the Emperor of Japan.”

D’Argent never wore coveralls or fatigues like the rest of us. He was in a spiffy silk suit, pearl gray with pencil-thin darker stripes, just like he wore Earthside. He gave me one of his oily little smiles. “We need all that security, Sam,” he said, “to keep people like you from stealing our ideas”.

I sat at the spindly little chair in front of his desk and gave him a sour look. “The day you have an idea worth stealing, the Moon will turn into green cheese.”

He glared at me. Larry, sitting at the side of D’Argent’s desk, tried to cool things off. “We’re here to discuss a business deal, not exchange insults.”

I looked at him with new respect. Larry wasn’t a kid anymore. He was starting to turn into a businessman. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. I’m here to offer a trade.”

D’Argent stroked his pencil-thin mustache with a manicured finger. “A trade?”

Nodding, I said, “I’ll license Rockledge to manufacture and market the magnetic bumpers. You let me buy your space sickness cure.”

D’Argent reached for the carafe on his desk. Stalling for time, I thought. He poured himself a glass of water, never offering any to Larry or me. In the soft lunar gravity of the inner wheel, the water poured at a gentler angle than it would on Earth. D’Argent managed to get most of the water into his glass; only a few drops messed up his desk.

He pretended not to notice it. “What makes you think we’ve developed a cure for space sickness?” And he gave Larry a cold eye.

“Senator Meyers told me,” I said calmly. D’Argent looked surprised. “Jill and I are old friends. Didn’t you know?”

“You and Senator Meyers?” I could read the expression on his face. A new factor had entered his calculations.

We went around and around for hours. D’Argent was playing it crafty. He wanted the magnetic bumper business, that was clear to see. And Larry was positively avid to call them Karsh Shields. I pretended that I wanted the space sickness cure to save my hotel, while all the time I was trying to maneuver D’Argent into buying Heaven and taking it off my hands.

But he was smarter than that. He knew that he didn’t have to buy the hotel; it was going to sink of its own weight. In another two weeks I’d be in bankruptcy court.

So he blandly kept insisting, “The space-sickness cure isn’t ready for public use, Sam. It’s still in the experimental stage.”

I could see from the embarrassed red of Larry’s face that it was a gigantic lie.

“Well then,” I suggested, “let me use it on my hotel customers as a field trial. I’ll get them to sign waivers, take you off the hook, legally.”

But D’Argent just made helpless fluttering gestures and talked about the Food and Drug Administration, this law, that regulation, scientific studies, legal red tape, and enough bullcrap to cover Iowa six feet deep.

He was stalling, waiting for my hotel to collapse so he could swoop in, grab Heaven away from me, and get the magnetic bumper business at a bargain.

But while he talked in circles, I started to think. What if I could get my hands on his space-sickness cure and try it out on a few of my customers? What if I steal the damned cure right out from under D’Argent’s snooty nose and then get a tame chemist or two to reproduce whatever combination of drugs they’ve got in their cure? That would put me in a better bargaining position, at least. And it would drive the smooth-talking sonofabitch crazy!

So I decided to steal it.

It was no big deal. D’Argent and his Rockledge security types were too Earthbound in their attitudes. They thought that by guarding the corridor access to the laboratory area they had the lab adequately protected. But there were four emergency airlocks strung along that wheel of the station. Two of them opened onto the restaurant; the other two opened directly into the Rockledge research laboratory.

All I had to do was wait until night, get into a space suit, and go EVA to one of those airlocks. I’d be inside the lab within minutes and the guards out in the corridor would never know it.

Then I had a truly wicked idea. A diversion that would guarantee that the Rockledge security troops would be busy doing something else instead of guarding the access to their lab.

The meeting with D’Argent ran out of steam with neither one of Us making any real effort to meet the other halfway. Halfway? Hell, neither D’Argent nor I budged an inch. Larry looked miserably unhappy when we finally decided to call it quits. He saw his Karsh Shield immortality sliding away from him.

I went straight from D’Argent’s office to the station’s gym. Nothing had changed there, except that T.J. was gone. The place still looked like a perpetual-motion demonstration, kids flapping and yelling everywhere. All except that surly teenaged boy.

I glided over to him.

“Hi!” I said brightly.

He mumbled something.

“You don’t seem to be having a good time,” I said.

“So what?” he said sourly.

I made a shrug. “Seems a shame to be up here and not enjoying it.”

“What’s to enjoy?” he grumbled. “My mother says I have to stay here with all these brats and not get in anybody’s way.”

“Gee, that’s a shame,” I said. “There’s a lot of really neat stuff to see. You want a tour of the place?”

For the first time his face brightened slightly. “You mean, like the command center and all?”

“Sure. Why not?”

“They threw me out of there when I tried to look in, a couple days ago.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I assured him. “I’ll get you in with no trouble.”

Sliding an arm across his skinny shoulders as we headed for the command center, I asked him, “What’s your name, anyway, son?”

“Pete,” he said.

“Stick with me, Pete, and you’ll see stuff that hardly any of the adults ever see.”

So I took him on a tour of the station. I spent the whole damned afternoon with Pete, taking him all over the station. I showed him everything from the command center to my private office. While we were in the command center I booted up the station security program and found that Rockledge didn’t even have intruder alarms or motion sensors inside their lab area. Breaking in through the airlock was going to be easy.

It would have been nifty if I could’ve used Pete as an excuse to waltz through the Rockledge lab, just to get a look at the layout, but it was off-limits, of course. Besides, Pete grandly informed me that he had already seen them. “Just a bunch of little compartments with all kinds of weird glass stuff in them,” he said.

He wasn’t such a bad kid, it turned out. Just neglected by his parents, who had dragged him up here, shown off Daddy’s place of work, and then dumped him with the other brats. Like any reasonable youth, he wanted to be an astronaut. When he learned that I had been one, he started to look up to me, at least a little bit. Well, actually he was a teeny bit taller than I, but you know what I mean.

We had a great time in one of the escape pods. I sat Pete at the little control panel and he played astronaut for more than an hour. It only took a teeny bit of persuasion to get him to agree to what I wanted him to do. He even liked the idea. “It’ll be like being a real astronaut, won’t it?” he enthused.

“Sure it will,” I told him.

While he was playing astronaut in the escape pod I ducked out to my office and made two phone calls. I invited Jill to an early dinner at the Eclipse. She accepted right away, asking only why I wanted to eat at five o’clock.

“I’ll be babysitting later,” I said.

Her face on my display screen looked positively shocked. “Babysitting? You?”

“There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” That was all I could think of to say. And at that, it was probably too much.

Then I tracked down Melinda by phone and invited her and Larry to have dinner, on me, in the Eclipse at eight o’clock.

She was back in the damned exercise room, walking on one of the treadmills. “Dinner?” she puffed. “I’d love to, Sam, but by eight T.J.’s usually in bed for the night.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” I said as casually as I could manage. “I’ll take care of him.”

“You?” Her eyes went round.

“Sure. We’re old pals now. I’ll babysit while you and Larry have a decent meal for a change. Why should D’Argent and the old farts on his board of directors be the only ones to enjoy good food?”

“I don’t know….” She wavered.

“The best cooking in the solar system,” I tempted her. “My chef is cordon bleu.” Which was almost true. He had worked in Paris one summer. As a busboy.

“I’ll have to check with Larry,” she said.

“Sure. Do that.”

I noticed that she turned up the speed on her treadmill. Like I said, taking apples off a blind man’s fruit stand.

So I had a nice, relaxed dinner with Jill early that evening. Then I escorted her back to her mini-suite in the zero-gee section. Some of the kids were still in the gym area, whizzing around and screaming at each other.

“You’re not going to get much sleep until they get put away,” I said to Jill.

She gave me a crooked grin as she opened the door to her suite. “I wasn’t planning to sleep—not yet.”

I didn’t like the sly look in her eye. “Uh, I promised Larry and Melinda I’d watch their baby….”

“When do you have to be there?” Jill asked, gliding through the doorway and into her zero-gee love nest.

I glided in after her, naturally, and she maneuvered around and shut the door, cutting off the noise of the kids playing outside.

I can recognize a trap when I see one, even when the bait is tempting. “Jill—uh, I’ve got to go. Now.”

“Oh, Sam.” She threw her arms around my neck and kissed me passionately. I’ve got to admit that while I was kissing her back a part of my brain was calculating how much time I had left before I had to show up at Larry and Melinda’s door. Which was just on the opposite side of the wailing banshees in the gym.

Reluctantly I disengaged from Jill and said, “I don’t have the time. Honest.” My voice sounded odd, like some embarrassed acne-faced teenager’s squeak.

Jill smiled glumly and said, “A promise is a promise, I suppose.”

“Yeah,” I answered weakly. And I didn’t want to make any promises to a United States Senator that I didn’t intend to keep.

So I left Jill there in her suite, looking sad and disappointed, and zipped through the gym area, heading straight for the Karshes’ suite.

Larry and Melinda were waiting for me. He was wearing an actual suit, dark blue, and a tie that kept floating loose from his shirt front. Melinda had a dress full of flounces that billowed in zero-gee like a waterfall of lace. Jack Spratt and the Missus. They’d look better in the restaurant’s lunar gravity.

Melinda floated me into the bedroom of their suite, where T.J. was zippered into a sleep cocoon. They had stuffed it with pillows because it was way too big for him. The kid was sound asleep with a thumb in his mouth. I’ve got to admit, he looked like a little angel.

“He won’t wake up for at least four hours,” she assured me. “We’ll be back by then.” Still, she gave me the whole orientation demonstration: bottle, milk, diapers, ass wipes, the whole ugly business.

I kept a smile on my face and shooed them out to their dinner. Then I went back into T.J.’s room.

“Okay, kid,” I whispered. “It’s you and me now.”

I fidgeted around their suite for more than an hour, waiting for Larry and Melinda to get through most of their meal, thinking that I might swing back to Jill’s suite and—no, no; there lay madness. Finally I went into the baby’s room and gendy, gentiy picked up T.J., blankets and all, and headed for the escape pod where I had stashed Pete.

The baby stirred and half woke up when I lifted him, but I shushed and rocked him. He kind of opened one eye, looked at me, and made a little smile. Then he curled himself into my arms and went back to sleep. Like I said, we were old pals by now.

I’ve got to admit that I felt a slight pang of conscience when I thought about how Larry and especially Melinda would feel when they came back from dinner and found their darling baby missing. I’d be missing, too, of course, and probably at first they’d be more miffed than scared. They’d phone around, trying to find me, figuring I had their kid with me, wherever I was. But after fifteen minutes, half an hour at most, they would panic and call for the security guards.

I grinned to myself at that. While the goons were searching the station I’d be in a space suit, breaking into the Rockledge lab from the outside. The one place nobody would bother looking for me because it was already so heavily guarded. Hah!

Okay, so Larry and Melinda would have a rough hour or two. They’d forget it when I returned their kid to them and they saw he was none the worse for wear. And if Larry wanted to call the bumpers Karsh Shields he owed me some kind of payment, didn’t he?

Pete was in the escape pod waiting for me. I had told him only that he could play astronaut in the pod for a couple of hours, as long as he watched the baby. I had some work to do but I’d be back when I was finished. The kid was as happy as an accordion player in a Wisconsin polka bar. Little T.J. was snoozing away, the picture of infant innocence.

“I’ll take good care of him, Mr. Gunn,” Pete assured me. He had come a long way from the surliness he had shown earlier. He was even grinning at the thought of playing inside the pod for hours.

I’m not a complete idiot, though. I carefully disconnected the pod’s controls. Pete could bang on the keyboard and yank at the T-yokes on the control panel till his arms went numb; nothing would happen—except in his imagination. I disconnected the communications link, too, so he wouldn’t be able to hear the commotion that was due to come up. Wouldn’t be able to call to anybody, either.

“Okay, captain,” I said to Pete. “You’re in charge until I return.”

“Aye, aye, sir!” And he snapped me a lopsided salute. The grin on his face told me that he knew what we were doing was not strictly kosher, and he loved it.

I carefully sealed the pod’s hatch, then closed the connecting airlock hatch and sealed it. I hustled down the corridor to the emergency airlock and my personal space suit, which I had stashed there. It was going to be a race to get into a suit and out the airlock before any of the security types poked their noses in this section of the corridor. I had disabled the surveillance cameras earlier in the afternoon and duly reported the system malfunction in the station’s log. By the time they got them fixed I’d be long gone.

As if on cue, the intercom loudspeakers in the corridor started blaring, “SAM GUNN, PLEASE REPORT TO SECURITY AT ONCE. SAM GUNN, PLEASE REPORT TO SECURITY AT ONCE.”

They had found T.J. was missing and had called security. The panic was on.

You know, the more you hurry the slower things seem to go. Felt like an hour before I had the suit sealed up, the helmet screwed on, and was opening the emergency airlock.

But once I popped outside, I got that rush I always get when I’m back in space, on my own. My suit was old and smelled kind of ripe, but it felt homey inside it. And there was the big curving ball of Earth, huge and blue and sparkling in the sunlight. I just hung there for a minute or so and watched the sunset. It happens fast from orbit, but the array of colors are dazzling.

Now we were in shadow, on the night side. All the better to sneak around in. The controls to my maneuvering pack were on the equipment belt of my suit. I worked them as easily and unconsciously as a pianist playing scales and jetted over to the laboratory airlock on the innermost wheel.

I kept my suit radio tuned to the station’s intercom frequency. Plenty of jabbering going on. They were looking for me and T.J. Starting a compartment-to-compartment search. There would be plenty more disgruntled customers before this night was through, but most of them were Rockledge people staying at my hotel at a ruinous discount, so what the hell did I care?

I got to the lab’s emergency airlock with no trouble. The light was dim, and I didn’t want to use my helmet lamp. No sense advertising that I was out here. Over my shoulder the lights of night-side cities and highways twinkled and glittered like a connect-the-dots map of North America.

I was just starting to work the airlock’s control panel when the station shuddered. At first I thought I had hiccupped or something, but almost immediately I realized that the airlock hatch had shaken, shivered. Which meant that the whole damned station must have vibrated, quivered for some reason.

Which meant trouble. The station was big, massive. It wouldn’t rattle unless it had been hit by something dangerous, or somebody had set off an explosion inside it, or—

I spun around and my eyes damn near popped out of my head. An escape pod had just fired off. Somebody had set off the explosive separation bolts and detached it from the station. It was floating away like a slow-motion cannonball.

And I knew exactly which pod it was. Pete must have figured out how to override my disconnect and booted up the pod’s mother-loving systems. Now he was riding off into the sunrise, on an orbit of his own, with T.J. aboard. Son of a motherless she-dog!

I jetted after the goddamned pod. I didn’t stop to think about it, I just went out after it. Everything else dropped out of my mind. All I could think of was that little T.J. and Pete were in there and they stood a better than even chance of getting themselves killed if somebody didn’t get to them before they sailed out beyond reach. And it was all my fault.

If I had been really smart, I would have just reported the loose pod over my suit radio and gone about my business of burglarizing the Rockledge lab. The security people would have fired up another pod to go out and rescue the kids, everybody in the station would be plastered to the view ports or display screens to watch the scene, and I could pilfer away inside the lab without being disturbed.

But I’m not that smart. I went chasing after the damned pod. It was only after I had been barreling toward it for a few minutes that I realized I had damned well better reach it because I didn’t have enough juice in my jet pack to get me back to the station again.

Pete must be scared purple, I thought, floating off into his own orbit. He apparently hadn’t figured out how to reconnect the radio, because I heard nothing from the pod when I tapped into its assigned frequency. Maybe he was yelling himself hoarse into the microphone, but he was getting no response. Poor kid must have been crapping his pants by now.

Fortunately, he hadn’t lit off the pod’s main thruster. That would’ve zoomed him out so far and so fast that I wouldn’t have had a prayer of reaching him. He had just fired the explosive disconnect bolts, which blew the pod away from the station. If he fired the main thruster without knowing how to use the pod’s maneuvering jets, he’d either blast the damned cannonball down into the atmosphere so steeply that he’d burn up like a meteor, or he’d rocket himself out into a huge looping orbit that would take days or even weeks to complete.

As it was, he was drifting in an independent orbit, getting farther from the station every second. And I was jamming along after him, hard as I could.

I knew I had to save enough of my fuel to slow myself down enough to latch onto the pod. Otherwise I’d go sailing out past them like some idiotic jerk and spend the rest of my numbered hours establishing my own personal orbit in empty space. I wondered if anybody would bother to come out and pick up my body, once they knew what had happened to me.

Okay, I was on-course. The pod was growing bigger, fast, looming in front of me. I turned myself around and gave a long squirt of my maneuvering jet to slow me down. Spun around again and saw the pod coming up to smack me square in the visor. I was still coming on too fast! Christ, was my flying rusty.

I had to jink over sideways a bit, or splatter myself against the pod. As the jets slid me over, I yanked out the tether from my equipment belt and whipped it against the curving hull of the pod as I zoomed by. Its magnetized head slid along the hull until it caught on a handhold. The tether stretched a bit, like a bungee cord, and then held.

As I pulled myself hand over hand to the pod, I glanced back at the station. It was so far away now it looked like a kid’s toy hanging against the stars.

Grunting, puffing, totally out of shape for this kind of exercise, I finally . got to the pod’s airlock and lifted open its outer hatch. I was pouring sweat from every square inch of my skin. Got the hatch shut again, activated the pump, and as soon as the telltale light turned green I popped the inner hatch with one hand and slid my visor up with the other.

There sat Pete at the controls, ecstatic as a Hungarian picking pockets. And little T.J. was snoozing happily in the arms of Senator Jill Meyers.

“Hello, Sam,” she said sweetly to me. “What kept you?”

It was then that I realized I had been nothing but the tool of a superior brain.

Jill had reconnected the pod’s systems and blown the explosive bolts. She had known exactly what I was doing because she had stuck a microminiaturized video homing beacon on the back of my shirt when she had clutched me so passionately there in the doorway of her suite.

“It’s standard equipment for a U.S. Senator,” she quipped, once she had plucked it off my shirt.

For once in my life I was absolutely speechless.

“When you told me you were babysitting—voluntarily—I started to smell a rodent,” Jill said as she almost absently showed Pete how to maneuver the pod back to the station. “I knew you were up to something,” she said to me.

I just hung there in midair, all my hopes and plans in a shambles.

“I’ve got to be invisible now,” Jill said as we neared the station. She glided over to the equipment locker built into the pod’s curving bulkhead and slid its hatch open. “It’ll be a snug fit,” she said, eying it closely. “Glad I didn’t have dessert tonight.”

“Wait a minute!” I burst. “What’s going on? How did you—I mean, why—what’s going on?” I felt like a chimpanzee thrown into a chess tournament.

As she squeezed herself into the equipment locker, Jill said, “It’s simple, Sam. You were walking with the baby when Pete here accidentally set off the pod.”

Pete turned in his pilot’s chair and grinned at me.

“And then you got into your suit, with little T.J., and rescued Pierre D’Argent’s only son. You’re going to be a hero.”

“Pete is D’Argent’s son?” I must have hit high C.

“In return for your bravery in this thrilling rescue, D’Argent will let you have the space-sickness cure. So everything works out fine.”

Like I said, I was just the tool of a superior brain.

“Now,” said Jill, “you’d better help Pete to make rendezvous with the station and re-berth this pod.” And with that she blew me a kiss, then slid the hatch of the equipment locker shut.

It didn’t work out exactly as Jill had it figured. I mean, D’Argent was furious, at first, that I’d let his kid into one of the pods and then left him alone. But his wife was enormously grateful, and Pete played his role to a T. He lied with a straight face to his own father and everybody else. I figured that one day, when D’Argent realized how his son had bamboozled him, he’d be truly proud of the lad. Probably send him to law school.

In the meantime, D’Argent did indeed let me have the space-sickness cure. Grudgingly. “Only for a limited period of testing,” he growled. Mrs. D’Argent had prodded him into it, in return for my heroic rescue of their only son. She got a considerable amount of help from Jill—who sneaked off the pod after all the commotion had died down.

Larry and Melinda didn’t know whether they should be sore at me or not. They had been scared stiff when T.J. turned up missing, and then enormously relieved when I handed them their little bundle of joy, safe and sound, gurgling happily. I knew Larry had forgiven me when he reminded me, almost sheepishly, about changing the name of the magnetic bumpers to Karsh Shields.

So we all got what we wanted. Or part of it, at least.

The space-sickness cure helped Heaven a lot. The hotel staggered into the black, not because honeymooners took a sudden fancy to it, but because the word started to spread that it was an ideal spot for children! It still cost more than your average luxury vacation, but wealthy families started coming up to Heaven. My zero-gee sex palace eventually became a weightless nursery. And—many years later—a retirement home. But that’s another story.

I licensed the Karsh Shields to Rockledge. A promise is a promise, and the money was good because Rockledge had the manufacturing capacity to make three times as many of the shields as I could. And, once the hotel started showing a profit, I let D’Argent buy it from me. He’s the one who turned it into a nursery. I was long gone by then.

With Jill’s help I raised enough capital to start a shoestring operation in lunar mining. It was touch-and-go for a while, but the boom in space manufacturing that I had prophesied actually did come about and I got filthy rich.

Of course, I more or less had to marry Jill. I owed her that, she had been so helpful. Why she wanted to marry me was a mystery to me, but she was damned determined to do it.

Of course, I was just as damned determined not to get married. So I—but that’s another story.