The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Bridge Ship Golden Gate

Jade sat in deep silence for a long while before she noticed that the robot had returned, bearing her clothing in its spindly metal arms.

She dressed absently, her thoughts literally millions of kilometers away. The robot gathered up the scattered recording disks and left her alone in the big luxurious room.

It can’t be, she told herself over and over. It just can’t be. If it’s true it means…

“Now you’ve heard Sam’s disks.”

Turning from her pale reflection in the blank screen above the disk player, she asked Darling, “How did you get them?”

He shrugged, a seismic movement of flesh beneath his robes. He had changed into a pure white costume decorated with gold and silver star bursts.

“I stole them,” Darling said. “How else?”

“From Sam?”

Laboriously, Darling lowered himself onto the same pile of pillows he had been sitting on when she had first entered his chamber. He took a deep breath, like an exhausted athlete, as he sank into the cushions.

“Oh no, not from Sam. He was far too clever to allow anyone to steal them from him. But once Sam’s will was probated, we discovered that he had left the disks to Grace Harcourt. Ever since she won the Pulitzer for her expose of Rockledge’s industrial hanky-panky, she’s been living—”

“On Pitcairn Island, I know. I tried to interview her but she wouldn’t see me.” Jade sat on the other set of cushions, facing Darling, her mind seething in growing turmoil.

“Yes, of course. I had the disks purloined from the plane that was taking them out to her.”

“Why?”

Darling’s fleshy face set almost into hardness. “You heard what he said about me. Do you think I want Grace—or anyone else in the world—to hear all that?”

“You fell in love with Sam?”

The hardness melted immediately. “I thought I did. It must have been the radiation. Or the excitement. He certainly did nothing to deserve love. Mine, or anyone else’s.”

“No one else has heard these disks?”

“No one.”

There were more questions Jade knew she would have to ask. But she dreaded them, put them off, while the enormity of what she had just learned from the disks boiled over her like a tidal wave, smothering her, drowning her. She fought to maintain her composure, her life. She did not want Darling to see what was tearing away at her innards.

Darling seemed to sense her apprehension the way a snake senses the terror it instills in a small bird. He thinks it’s because of him, Jade realized. He doesn’t know, doesn’t realize.

“Sheena married Lowell Hubble, after her Queen of the Asteroids series went into syndication,” Darling ticked off on his beringed fingers, his eyes watching her intently. “Marjorie finally retired on Bermuda. Jean Margaux died recently in a traffic accident in Maine, not far from her summer home, I understand. There was some talk about foul play, even suicide.”

Jade’s heart nearly stopped.

“I checked that out,” she said through gritted teeth. “No foul play. Suicide is possible, of course, but all that can be said for certain is that she lost control of her car and went over a cliff into the sea.”

“Strange that she’d be driving her own car, though, don’t you think? I would imagine a woman such as Jean would have a chauffeur on hand at all times. A young handsome chauffeur, undoubtedly.” He smiled wickedly.

Jade barely managed to say, “Maybe.”

“That leaves just me.” Darling heaved a titanic sigh. “Living alone here in the midst of all this splendor.”

Get him talking about himself, Jade thought desperately. Get away from Jean Margaux’s death.

“Why alone?” she asked, trying to sound inquisitive. “You’re wealthy. Your columns about art are world-famous. You could be surrounded by friends, associates, admirers.”

He made a laugh that sounded forced and self-deprecating. “It would take quite a few of them to surround me, wouldn’t it?”

“I didn’t mean …”

“Dear lady, I live the way I live because I choose to. I know my limitations. My columns are frauds; how can anyone write valid art criticism without going to see the artwork in its actual setting? I write about holograms that are sent to me. People read my pieces for the personal nasties I throw in about the artists and dealers and other critics. I’m a worse gossip columnist than Grace Harcourt ever was, on her most vicious day.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Do you know what that radiation did to me? I can never father children! That’s not bad enough. It also unbalanced my entire endocrine system so completely that I’ve blown up to this monstrous size you see!” He spread his arms and the robe billowed out like a silken cloud.

“I didn’t know that,” Jade said softly.

“Sam accused me of gluttony and called me terrible names,” Darling said, his voice shaking, “but the truth is I was a slim and handsome man when I started out on that voyage of his. You saw the pictures! Did I look anything like this?”

“No,” she admitted. “You certainly didn’t.”

“Thanks to that unkind bastard Sam I’ve become a balloon, a blimp, a mountain of fat—and it’s all his fault! I’ve got to hide myself from the rest of the human race, because of that little unloving snot of a man!”

Tears were rolling down Darling’s cheeks. “I loved him. I truly did. And he treated me worse than dirt. He turned me into this”

“He may be my father,” Jade blurted.

Darling coughed and sputtered, cleared his throat, wiped at his eyes. “What did you say?”

Shocked at her own admission, Jade sat there in stunned silence. She had not intended to tell Darling what she had learned, what she now feared was true. She had intended to remain silent, to keep her secret to herself and share it with no one.

Instead, her voice trembling, Jade said, “Sam and Jean Margaux had a fling aboard the Bosporus. Jean stayed on the Moon for nearly a year. I was born at Moonbase. An orphan.”

“But that doesn’t mean …”

“How could someone be orphaned at birth in a place like Moonbase?” Jade demanded, painful urgency in her question. “It was a small town in those days, only a few hundred people, and most of them were retirees. The medical staff didn’t allow pregnancies to come to term there; as soon as they found that a woman was pregnant they shipped her back to her home on Earth.”

“But you were born there,” Darling whispered, the truth slowly dawning on him.

“You’d have to have a lot of money to get away with it,” said Jade. “Money to keep the medics quiet. Money to erase the computer records. Money to pay off the woman who … who adopted the abandoned baby.”

“Jean Margaux … ?” Darling seemed stunned.

Jade nodded bitterly. “Twenty years later, when she heard there was a reporter looking into the time she’d spent at Moonbase, when she found out who the reporter was, where she’d been born, how old she was—she told her chauffeur to take the day off, and then drove her car off a cliff.”

“My God.”

“I’m really an orphan now,” said Jade. “Sam died off at the end of the solar system, and I killed my own mother.”

Suddenly she was crying uncontrollably. Her world dissolved and she was bawling like a baby. She found herself in Darling’s arms, wrapped and held and protected by this strange man who was no longer a stranger.

“It’s all right,” Darling was crooning to her, rocking her gently back and forth. “It’s all right. Cry all you want to. We’ll both cry. For all the love that we never had. For all the love that we’ve lost.”

She had no idea how long they cried together. Finally, though, she disengaged herself gently from his arms. Darling pointed to a door in the opulent room and suggested she freshen up. She saw that tears had runneled streaks down the makeup on his face.

By the time she returned to the main room a small meal sat steaming on the low table in front of her host and Darling’s makeup had been newly applied. Although she felt anything but hungry, Jade sat on the cushions set up opposite Darling. He poured her a cup of tea.

“Are you all right now?” he asked softly.

Jade nodded. I’ll never be all right, she knew. I made my own mother kill herself. She killed herself rather than face her own daughter. Killed herself rather than admit she had a daughter—me.

“There’s the matter of your promise,” Darling said as he uncovered a bowl of diced meat chunks. She saw that the bowl next to it was filled with bubbling melted cheese.

“Yes. My promise.” She almost laughed. Nothing he could do to her could bother her now.

“I had intended,” he said, spearing a square of meat deftly on a little skewer, “to demand that you never reveal anything you heard on Sam’s disks.”

She looked up at him. “That was going to be it?”

“Yes.” He smiled at her. “What did you think?”

Glancing at the erotic scenes on the tapestries, she smiled back. “Something more physical.”

“Dear me, no! Not at all!”

“I can understand why you’re sensitive about Sam’s disks.”

“Yes. Of course you can.”

“But I’m a reporter….”

“You don’t have to convince me. You can have the disks.”

For a moment she was not sure she had heard him correctly. “I can have them?”

Darling nodded, and a tide of ripples ran across his cheeks and chins to disappear beneath the open collar of his robe.

“It’s strange,” he said wistfully. “You nurse your own pain until there’s virtually nothing left in your life but the pain.”

“That’s a terrible way to live,” she said. But a pang of loss and sadness and guilt pulsed through her.

“When I realized how much you’ve suffered, it made me see how I’ve been flagellating myself, blaming Sam for what’s become of me.”

“I’ve got my work,” Jade said, as much to herself as Darling. “I’ve got a life.”

“And I don’t. I’ve become a hermit. I’ve withdrawn from the human race.”

“It’s not too late to come back.”

“Like this?” He looked down at himself, layer upon layer of bulging fat.

“Endocrine imbalances can be corrected,” Jade said tenderly.

“Yes, I know,” he confessed. “It’s nothing but an excuse to keep myself hidden away from the rest of the world.”

She smiled at him. “You’d need some discipline. Or a thick hide.”

“You still owe me a promise. You said you’d do whatever I asked.”

She felt no fear now. “I remember. What do you want?”

Darling took in a deep breath. His eyes studied her face, as if searching for the courage to make his request.

“Will you be my friend?” he asked at last. “You’re going to be on the Golden Gate for months. Will you come and visit me and … and help me to come out and meet other people?”

“I…” She had other commitments, a career, a longing for love and fulfillment, a gnawing guilt that burned sullenly within her like a hot coal. But in that instant of time she realized that love takes many forms, and that saving a man’s life bears an obligation for a lifetime.

She saw an automobile tumbling off a cliff into the angry sea below. She saw Sam Gunn’s round, slightly lopsided face grinning at her. She saw Raki’s darkly handsome scowl and Spence Johansen’s heart-fluttering smile and the tearful last memory of her adoptive mother as she left the Moonbase hospital forever. She saw Rick Darling staring at her with his entire life in his eyes.

“I’d be happy to be your friend,” she said. “I need a friend, too.”

The two of them—enormous overweight man and tiny elfin woman—leaned across the low table and embraced each other in newfound charity.