The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Grandfather Sam

It looked extremely rocky for the New Chicago cubs that day. Okay, so I stole the line from “Casey at the Bat.” But it really was the bottom of the ninth, and the New White Sox were ahead of us, 14-13, there were two out, and little Sam Gunn was coming up to bat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What do they care?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their eyes met. She turned away first.

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

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

“What’s wrong with a gambling casino?” asked Pete Nostrum, sitting next to Cole. “We don’t have one yet, do we?”

Cole gave him a look that would shrivel Mount Everest, but it just bounced off Nostrum’s silly face.

Nostrum couldn’t get respect if he paid for it. God knows he’d tried that route. Nostrum was a mental lightweight who’d won a seat on the Zoning Board by spending enough money to buy a majority of the community council that appointed the Board. He wanted any public office he could find, so he could have a platform to push his one, single-minded passion: holiday bonfires. No matter how many times the safety people nixed the idea, no matter how many times the New Chicago council of directors pushed his nose into the habitat’s book of regulations, Nostrum still pushed for bonfires in the big central park to celebrate every holiday from Christmas to Bastille Day to the return of Halley’s Comet.

“Surely this board won’t permit a gambling casino to be erected in New Chicago!” Hornsby protested in a high, almost girlish voice, raising a chubby hand over his head as he spoke. He was badly overweight, a fact that his coral pink micromesh suit emphasized; he had piggy little eyes set deep in a puffy-cheeked pink face and tight little ears plastered flat against the sides of his head.

“It’s not a gambling casino,” Sam corrected.

“Mr. Hornsby, you are out of order,” said Chairperson McDougal, but so sweetly that Hornsby just sort of grinned foolishly and muttered an apology.

Turning to Sam, she said, “Your application is very vague as to just what this ‘amusement center’ is to be, Mr. Gunn.”

Sam got his feet, all five-four or thereabouts of him, and announced grandly, “Because, oh most gracious of chairpersons, I want to leave it to the good citizens of New Chicago to decide for themselves what kind of entertainments they would like to have.”

John Morris, the crafty-eyed board member at the end of the table, steepled his fingers in front of his face as he asked, “And just what do you mean by that, Mr. Gunn?”

Morris had recently been accused of accepting bribes in return for his vote. He’d denied the charge, claiming that the sudden spurts in his bank account had been all pure luck in the stock market.

“I mean, sir,” Sam replied, “that I intend to furnish a fifty-storey building in which each floor consists of an open area in which all four walls are covered with hologrammic smart screens. The floors and ceilings, too. The citizens of New Chicago will be able to program their amusement center for whatever kinds of recreation they seek….”

Sam strode out from behind the applicants’ table as he talked, his voice rising in fervor as he extolled the wonders of his idea: “Think of it! The finest symphony orchestras of Earth can perform here. The greatest sports teams! Pop singers! Ballet! Great dramas, dance, athletic competitions, virtually anything at all! In the amusement complex.”

“We can get all that in our own homes,” Arrant groused, “through virtual reality.”

“Without having to buy a ticket from you, or anyone else,” Cole added.

“Yes, that’s true,” Sam replied, sweetly reasonable. “But home entertainment doesn’t provide the thrill of the crowd, the amplified excitement of being together with thousands of other people, the sheer exhilaration of interacting with other people.”

Sam spread his stubby arms as wide as they would go. “Study after study has shown that home entertainment doesn’t compare in emotional impact with theater performances. Let me show…”

And on he talked, on and on and on. He gave a one-man performance that I’ve never seen equaled in its sheer bravado, vigor, and elan. The board members sat mesmerized by Sam’s leather-lunged presentation. He didn’t use slides or videos or VR simulations. He just talked. And talked. Even grouchy old Arrant had stars in his eyes before long. Hell, Sam pretty nearly had me convinced.

Bonnie McDougal brought us all down to earth. “So the essence of your proposal, Mr. Gunn, is to establish a hologrammic facility with full VR capability?”

Sam teetered for a moment like a man who’d just stopped himself from falling over a cliff. “Yes, Madam Chairperson,” he said at last. “That’s putting it very succinctly.”

McDougal smiled brightly at him. “Thank you for your presentation, Mr. Gunn. And it’s Miss Chairperson.”

Sam’s face lit up.

“Now then,” McDougal said, glancing at the display screen built into the tabletop before her, “it’s your turn, Mr. Hornsby.”

Hornsby had slides and videos aplenty. The developers he represented, Woodruff and Dorril, wanted to build a three-hundred-unit condo complex on the ground in question, complete with three swimming pools, tennis courts, and a running track for joggers. There were no structures higher than four storeys in the entire New Chicago habitat, but Hornsby extolled the high-rise approach as being environmentally friendly.

“If you put three hundred condo units into four-storey buildings, it would cover the entire parcel and even spill over into the adjacent properties.”

Pete Nostrum found this amusing. Looking down the table to fellow board member Morris, Nostrum said loudly, “Hey, you own property abutting this parcel, don’t you Johnny? What’s this gonna do to your property’s value?”

Morris curled his lip at the laughing Nostrum.

McDougal said softly, “Mr. Hornsby, the issue here is not how we house three hundred additional families. New Chicago is not actively seeking more population.”

“But you should, Madam Chairperson,” Hornsby said earnestly, sweat trickling down his fat cheeks. “You must! A community must grow or wither! There’s no third choice.”

McDougal sighed. Cole snapped, “That’s flatland thinking, Mr. Hornsby. We’re quite content with a stable population here.”

“Maybe you are,” said Morris, “but I tend to agree with Mr. Hornsby. A little growth would be beneficial.”

“A little growth? Three hundred new families?”

“A drop in the bucket.”

Arrant spoke up. “A foot in the door, you mean. If we let this outfit build new housing, how can we deny the same opportunity to other builders?”

“I don’t see it as a precedent,” said Morris.

“Of course you don’t….”

“Gentlemen,” said McDougal, “Mr. Christopher is waiting to make his proposal.”

“Why don’t we break for lunch first?” Arrant suggested.

“Let’s hear out Mr. Christopher before lunch,” McDougal said, pleasant but firm.

I got to my feet, feeling nervous. “Uh … this won’t take long. What I’d like to do with the parcel is … well, leave it alone. In perpetuity.”

“Leave it alone?” Morris was shocked.

“Undeveloped?” Arrant asked.

“Forever?” Barney Wilhelm, sitting at the other end of the table, stared at me in disbelief.

“Yessir…. uh, sirs. And lady. Leave it alone forever. Zone it as a public playground in perpetuity.”

“We have plenty of public parks in New Chicago.”

“Lots of green space.”

“That’s true,” I admitted, “but there’s no open place where kids can play—”

“What do you mean?” Cole snapped. “There’s the Little League baseball field, the Hallas football field—”

“Olympic Stadium,” Nostrum jumped in, “the soccer field, tennis courts, four golf courses. And not one of them permits bonfires!”

“I know all that,” I said. “But all those fields are for organized sports. You have to be a member of a team. They all have strict rules about who can play on them, and at what time.”

“So what do you want?” Wilhelm asked.

“Just a playground. No regulations. Open all the time to any kids who want to have a catch, or play a pickup game, or just run around and have fun.”

“No regulations?”

“No set hours of operation?”

“Just anybody could come in and play, whenever they felt like it?”

I nodded. “That’s exactly what I’m asking for.”

I could tell from their faces that they thought I was crazy. As I sat down, Hornsby smirked at me, looking superior. But Sam looked thoughtful.

He leaned toward me and whispered, “They’d never pick me for a team when I was a kid. I always had to be the batboy.”

Bonnie McDougal looked up and down the table at her fellow Zoning Board members and said, “Shall we vote on the three proposals now, gentlemen? That would finish today’s agenda and we could take the rest of the day off.”

They voted, using the keyboards built into the table before each seat. The tally came up on McDougal’s screen, flush with the tabletop.

I knew my proposal didn’t have a chance. It was between Sam and Hornsby, and with Sam s reputation, I figured Hornsby’s high-rise condo complex was a shoo-in.

I was wrong.

McDougal blinked several times at her screen, then looked up at us and announced, “We have a tie. Two votes for each applicant. We’ll have to reconvene after lunch and work this out.”

We got up and left the meeting room. I was surprised, but not very hopeful. After all, I only got two votes out of six. I had nothing to offer that would sway the other four. They’d ditch me after lunch, when they got down to the serious wheeling and dealing.

Sam was at my elbow as we walked out into the sunlight. “Sonofabitch,” he muttered. “I expected better.”

“Did you?” I said, heading for the sandwich joint on the corner of the courthouse square.

Sam kept stride with me, despite my longer legs. “Yeah. I bought Arrant and Cole. I know Hornsby’s bought Morris and Wilhelm.”

“Bought?” I was aghast. “You mean bribed?”

Sam grinned up at me, a freckled and crafty Huck Finn. “Don’t look so shocked, Straight Arrow. Happens all the time.”

“But.. . bribery? In New Chicago?”

With a laugh, Sam told me, “You’re missing the point. McDougal and Nostrum voted for you. Why? What’re they after?”

“Maybe they’re honest,” I said.

“McDougal, maybe,” Sam replied. “Now, if I could figure out a way to turn Nostrum around…” Sam snapped his fingers. “Virtual bonfires! That’d get him!”

I strode away from him and had my lunch alone.

It only took five minutes to gobble down a sandwich. The Zoning Board wasn’t set to reconvene for another hour and a half. Inevitably, I drifted over to the open lot that we were debating over. A gaggle of teenagers were playing baseball on the threadbare grass. Younger kids were flying kites over in what passed for center field. They were laughing, running, calling back and forth to one another. Having a good time, relaxed, with no regimentation, no pressure to win or set a new record.

“They sure seem to be having fun, don’t they?”

It was Sam. He had come up behind me.

I sighed. “They won’t, once your amusement center gets built. Or Hornsby’s condo complex.”

Sam squinted up at the kites. Beyond them I could see the curve of the habitat: the long solar window running the length of the structure, the landscaped hills and winding bicycle paths. What had originally been neat little villages was already growing into sprawling towns. There was still a good deal of green space, but it was dwindling. And you had to belong to an official team to use any of it; you had to show up at a specific time and compete in organized leagues where parents screamed in vicarious belligerence, teaching their kids that winning is more important than playing, outdoing the other guy more important than having fun.

“I used to play a pretty good third base.”

We both turned, and there was Bonnie McDougal. She was nearly my height; much taller than Sam. But he grinned up at her, his eyes alight with what I thought was obvious lust.

“Instead of reconvening the meeting,” Sam said, “why don’t we settle this business with a baseball game!”

McDougal and I both said, “A baseball game?”

“Sure, why not? Isn’t it better out here in the sunshine than in that dusty old meeting room?”

“It’s not a dusty old room,” McDougal protested.

“Sam,” I pointed out, “how can we settle a three-way tie with a ball game?”

He looked at me as though I had missed the point entirely. “Because, oh noble sportsman, I’ve decided to withdraw my application. It’s you against Hornsby now.”

“Withdraw… ?” I turned to McDougal. “Can he do that?”

She nodded at me and smiled at Sam, all at the same time. “He certainly can. But it will call for a new vote of the board.”

“Vote, schmote,” Sam said. “Let’s play ball!”

So that’s how we got to the bottom of the ninth, the White Sox ahead of us, 14-13, two out, and Sam coming up to bat.

I was standing on first, trying to get my breathing back to normal after running out my infield hit. Funny how quickly the body falls out of condition. I’d been an athlete all my life, and now I was puffing after digging hard for ninety lousy feet.

All my life. I’d been one of those kids: Little League, high school football, basketball and baseball in college, all the while my father hounding me, pushing me, trying to make me into the star he’d never been. I’d almost made it, too; had a tryout with the real Chicago White Sox, back in Old Chicago, before Lake Michigan drowned ancient old Comiskey Park in the greenhouse floods.

My dad was dead by then, killed in an auto wreck, driving to see me play against Notre Dame. Still I pursued his dream. And I’d almost been good enough to make it. Almost. Instead, after half a lifetime batting around the minor leagues, I finally came up to New Chicago to take up a career counseling kids who were having trouble adjusting to living off-Earth.

Well, anyway, there I was at first base, with Sam coming up to bat. Bonnie McDougal was creeping in from third, expecting another bunt, wearing a tattered old glove she’d borrowed from one of the kids. Nostrum was grinning hugely; he was enjoying himself so much I thought maybe he’d forget about bonfires. The rest of the Zoning Board was waiting for Sam to step up to the plate.

“What’re you waiting for?” yelled grouchy old Arrant. He was playing first base for the Sox; didn’t have to move much, and the throws he missed were our best offensive weapon, so far.

“Just what are you doing?” Hornsby demanded. He was the catcher for the Sox, looking even more ridiculous than before in a borrowed chest protector that barely covered his big belly and a mask that scrunched his face into a mass of wrinkles.

Sam was standing off to the side of home plate (my old cap), the game’s one and only carbon-fiber bat leaning against his hip, tapping away at his pocket computer, oblivious to their complaints.

“Play ball!” McDougal yelled in from third.

“Play ball!” the other White Sox began to holler. Even the crowd started chanting, “Play ball! Play ball!”

I was wondering what the devil Sam was doing with that computer of his. Checking the stock market? Making reservations for his flight back to Selene City? What?

At last he tucked the tiny machine back into his pants pocket and stepped up to the plate, gripping the bat right down at the end, ready to swing for the fences. Except that we didn’t have any fences, just a few kids way out in center field flying kites and playing tag.

Nostrum looked down at Hornsby behind the plate. They didn’t have any signals. Nostrum couldn’t throw anything except a medium-fast straight pitch. No curve, no change-up. I’d walloped two of them for home runs; he’d been lucky to get me to chop a grounder to short here in the bottom of the ninth.

Nostrum kicked his foot high and threw. I lit out for second base. Sam swung mightily and missed by a foot. I didn’t even have to slide into second; there was no way Hornsby could get a throw down there ahead of me.

“Hey, that’s not fair!” Nostrum yelled. “Stealing bases isn’t fair.”

“It’s part of the game,” I said, standing on second, puffing.

“Not this game,” Nostrum hollered, stamping around, red in the face.

If Sam was right, Nostrum had been one of my two votes. I didn’t want to antagonize him. Still, this game was supposed to decide whether I won the zoning decision or Hornsby did. So I stood on second base (Sam’s expensive coat) and folded my arms across my chest.

“We’re playing baseball,” I said. “Nobody said stealing bases was a no-no.”

“Nobody stole a base until now!” Nostrum shouted.

I could see he was getting really sore. Bonnie McDougal trotted over from third base to him. Hornsby came up from home. Even crabby old Arrant creaked over toward the mound from first base.

“Why don’t we make a rule that stealing bases is prohibited from now on,” McDougal said gently, “but since Mr. Christopher stole second before the rule went into effect, he can stay on second base.”

Arrant shrugged. Hornsby nodded. Nostrum glared at me for a moment, but then broke into a sheepish grin.

“Aw, all right,” he said.

“Is that all right with you, Mr. Christopher?” McDougal asked me.

I saw Sam, back near home plate, nodding so hard I thought his eyeballs would fall out.

“Okay,” I said, still standing on Sam’s coat.

Hornsby squeezed his face back into the catcher’s mask, but not before saying, “Okay, now can we get this game over with?”

But Sam was playing with his pocket computer again. The crowd began to chant “Play ball!” again, and Sam put the thing away and stepped up to the plate with a sly smile on his face.

Nostrum threw. I stayed on second. Sam swung mightily and missed again.

“Strike two!” Hornsby crowed. One more strike and we were dead.

Sam seemed unconcerned. I realized that both his swings had been terrible uppercuts, as if he was trying to blast the ball out of sight.

“Never mind the home run, Sam!” I yelled to him. “Just make contact with the ball!”

Nostrum cackled at that. He cranked up and threw his hardest. Sam swung, another big uppercut.

And popped the ball up into a monumental infield fly. I took off from second: with two outs, you run like hell no matter where the ball’s hit. But while I was heading for third I craned my neck to see where the ball was going.

Up and up, higher and higher. It seemed to hang up there, floating like a little round cloud. As I raced around third I saw Hornsby throw off his mask and stagger toward Nostrum. McDougal was coming in from third base, also staring up into the cloud-free sky. Even Arrant and the wild-armed kid shortstop were converging toward the pitcher.

“Mine!” McDougal called out.

“I got it!”

“All mine!”

I was around third by now. Sam was trotting around first, heading for second base. Suddenly Hornsby and all the others seemed to freeze in their tracks. McDougal threw her arms over her head. Arrant stumbled and fell to his knees. Nostrum yelped so loud I thought someone had put a match to his backside.

The sun, the blazing, dazzling, glorious sun was shining through the habitat window like a zillion-megawatt spotlight. The whole White Sox infield was blinded by the glare. Sam’s pop-up was coming down now, just short of second base. The kid in center field made a belated dash in for it, but the ball hit the grass after I had crossed the plate with the tying run.

And Sam was racing madly for third, his little arms pumping, stumpy legs churning, his mouth wide open sucking air, his eyes even wider.

The whole Sox infield was still staggering around, seeing sunspots in their eyes. The center fielder had the ball in his hands, but nobody to throw it to. His face flashed surprise, then consternation. Then he did the only thing he could—he started running toward home.

It was a foot race. The youngster was faster than Sam, but Sam was already around third and roaring home. The kid cut across the infield and dived at Sam just as Sam launched himself into a hook slide while the Sox infield stood around blinking and groping.

It was close, but Sam’s left foot neatly hooked my cap and carried it along for several feet while the teenager flopped on his belly so hard that the ball bounced out of his outstretched hand.

We won, 15-14. The crowd went, as they say, wild. There weren’t that many of them, but they whooped and yelled and danced little jigs and jags all across the field. I rushed over and picked Sam up off the grass. The leg of his slacks was ripped from the knee down and green with grass stain, but he was grinning like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern.

“We won! We won!” Sam danced up and down.

I went over to the kid center fielder and helped him to his feet. “Great play, kid,” I told him. “Terrific hustle.”

He grinned, too, a little weakly.

Hours later, Sam and I were having a drink at the patio of Pete’s Tavern, just off the courthouse square. We had both cleaned up after the game and the perfunctory Zoning Board meeting—held right there at the open lot—that approved my proposal.

“You must be the luckiest guy in the solar system,” I said to him, between sips on my cranberry juice.

Sam was sipping something more potent. He gave me a sly look. “Chance favors the prepared mind, Chris, old pal.”

“Sure,” I said.

“What do you think I was doing with my faithful pocket whiz-bang just before I came up to bat?” he asked.

I had forgotten about that. Before I could think of an answer, Sam told me, “I was calculating the precise time when the sun would shine through the habitat window, old Straight Arrow. That’s why I was trying to hit a pop-up.”

“You deliberately—” I couldn’t believe it.

“I had to get you home with the tying run, didn’t i? I’m no slugger; I have to use my smarts.” Sam tapped his temple.

I didn’t believe it. “Sam, nobody can deliberately hit a pop-up. Not deliberately.”

He screwed up his face a little. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. I figure you’ve got only one chance in three to get it right.”

“One chance in three,” I echoed. He had swung and missed twice, I remembered.

“So,” Sam finished his drink and put it down on the table in front of him, “you’ve got your playground, in perpetuity.”

“Thanks to you, Sam.”

He shrugged. “I guess we’re kind of partners, huh?”

“I guess so.”

He stuck his hand out across the little table. I took it and we shook hands. But even as we were doing that, Sam was looking past my shoulder. He broke into a big grin and scrambled to his feet.

I turned in my chair. Bonnie McDougal was coming along the walk, looking coolly elegant in a white sheath dress decorated with gold thread.

“You know,” she said as she came up to our table, “my fellow Zoning Board members might take our having dinner together as an inappropriate act.”

Holding a chair for her, Sam said innocently, “But I have dinner every evening.”

“Inappropriate for me, Sam,” she said as she sat down.

I was wondering when he’d had the chance to invite her to dinner.

“But the vote’s over and done with,” Sam said, returning to his chair. “This isn’t a payoff. We won the ball game, fair and square.”

“You won,” Bonnie said, smiling.

Sam grinned hugely and tapped me on the shoulder. “The gold dust twins, Chris and me. Partners.”

I grinned back at him. “Partners.”

“And the amusement center won’t interfere with the playground at all,” Sam said.

“Amusement center?” Bonnie and I both asked.

“It’ll be way up above the playground,” Sam said genially. “It’ll start roughly one hundred fifty-two point four meters above the grass and go up to the habitat’s centerline. You’ll hardly notice the support piers.”

“Sup … support piers?” I sputtered.

“Roughly one hundred fifty-two point four meters?” Bonnie asked, with a sardonic smile.

“That’ll give me almost eighteen hundred and forty-eight meters to build in,” Sam said, pulling out his pocket computer.

“Build? Build what?”

“Our entertainment center, partner.” His fingers tapping furiously on the computer’s tiny keypad, Sam muttered, “Figuring four meters per floor, we can put in—wow! That’s enormous!”

“But, Sam, you can’t build over the park!”

“Why not? It won’t hurt anything. And it’ll protect the kids from getting the sun in their eyes.” He laughed heartily.

I sank back in my chair.

“You’ll get half the earnings, partner. Ought to be able to help a lot of kids with that kind of income.”

Bonnie’s smile vanished. “Sam, you can’t build over the playground. It’s—”

“Sure I can,” he countered. “There’s nothing in your zoning regulations that forbids it.”

“There will be tomorrow!” she snapped.

“Yes, but I’ve already registered my plan with your computer. You can’t apply a new regulation to a preexisting plan. I’m grandfathered in.”

“Sam, you … that’s … of all…” She ran out of words.

I looked him in his shifty eyes. “It won’t affect the playground?”

Sam raised his right hand solemnly. “I swear it won’t. Honest injun. Hope to die. The support piers will be at the corners of the field. The building will shade the playground, that’s all.”

Bonnie was still looking daggers at him.

Sam smiled at her. “The top floor of the complex, up near the centerline, will be in microgravity. Not zero-gee, exactly, but so close you’ll never tell the difference.”

“Never!” she snapped. “You’ll never get me up there. Never in a million years.”

Sam sighed. “Never?” he asked, in a small, forlorn voice. I swear there was a tear in the comer of his left eye.

“Never in a million years,” Bonnie repeated. Less vehemently than a moment before.

“Well,” he said softly, “at least we can have this one dinner together.”

With a sad little smile, Sam got to his feet again and held Bonnie’s chair as she stood.

As they walked away I heard Sam ask, “Have you ever slept on a waterbed?”

“Well, yes,” Bonnie replied. “As a matter of fact, that’s what I have in my home.”

I doubted that it would take Sam a million years.