The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Einstein

Goodman leaned even deeper into the couch, head tilted back, eyes focused on something, someplace far beyond the ceiling of his office.

You can’t pace the floor in zero gravity—he said, almost to himself. So Sam was flitting around the cramped circular control center of our ship like a crazed chipmunk, darting along madly, propelling himself by grabbing at handgrips, console knobs, viewport edges, anything that could give him a moment’s purchase as he whirled by.

I was sweating over my instruments, but every nine seconds Sam whizzed past me like a demented monkey, jabbering, “It’s gotta be there. It’s gotta be there!”

“There’s something out there,” I yelled over my shoulder, annoyed with him. Angry at myself, really. It was my calculations that had put us into this fix.

The instruments were showing a definite gravitational flux, damned close to what I had calculated when I was still back on campus. But out here, well past the orbit of Pluto—farther than anybody had gone before—what I needed to see was a planet, a fat little world orbiting out in that darkness more than seven billion miles from Earth.

Planet X. The tenth planet. Not a cometary body, an icy dirtball like so many of the objects out there in the Kuiper Belt. A planet, a real solid body with a gravitational flux considerably stronger than Earth’s.

I mean, they can argue about whether Pluto or those other icy bodies should be considered planets. But from the gravitational flux I’d detected, this one had to be a real, sizeable planet. Bigger than Earth, most likely.

Astronomers had been searching for Planet X since before Percival Lowell’s time, but I had worked out exactly where it should be, me and the CalTech/MIT/Osaka linked computers. And Sam Gunn had furnished the money and the ship to go out and find it.

Only, it wasn’t there.

“It’s gotta be there.” Sam orbited past me again.”Gotta be.”

The first time I met Sam, I thought he was nuts. Chunky little guy. Hair like a nest of rusted wire. Darting, probing eyes. Kind of shifty. The eyes of a politician, maybe, or a confidence man.

“Fly out there?” I had asked him. “Why not just rent time on an orbital telescope, or use the lunar observa—”

“To claim it, egghead!” Sam had snapped. “A whole planet. I want it.”

He couldn’t have been that dumb, I thought. He’d amassed several fortunes, and lost all but the latest one. To fly out beyond Pluto would cost every penny he had, and more.

“You can’t claim a planet,” I explained patiently. “International agreements from back in …”

“Puke on international agreements!” he shouted. “I’m not a national government. I’m S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. And a whole planet’s gotta be worth a fortune.”

Sam had a reputation for shady schemes, but I couldn’t for the life of me see how he planned to profit from claiming Planet X. Nor any reason for me to leave my home and job at the university to go out to the end of the solar system with him.

I didn’t reckon on Sam’s persuasiveness. He didn’t have a silver tongue. Far from it. His language was more often crude, even obscene, rather than eloquent. But he was a nonstop needier, wheedler, pleader, seducer. In the language of my forefathers, he was a nudge. His tongue didn’t have to be silver; it was heavy-duty, long-wearing, blister-proof, diamond-coated solid muscle.

So I found myself ducking through the hatch of the special ship he had commissioned. Only the two of us as crew; I was to do the navigating, while Sam did everything else, including the cooking. Before I could ask myself why I was doing this, I was being flattened into the acceleration couch as we roared out into the wild black yonder.

But Planet X wasn’t there.

Sam slowed down, puffing, until he was dangling right behind me, his feet half a meter off the floor. My softboots were locked in the foot restraints and still he barely came up to my height. He was wheezing, and I realized there was a lot of gray in his reddish hair. His face looked tired, old, eyes baggy and sad.

“Of all the eggheads in all the universities in all the solar system,” he groaned, “you’ve …”

Suddenly I realized what the instruments were telling me. I shouted, “It’s a black hole!”

“And I’m the tooth fairy.”

“No, really! It’s not a planet at all. It’s a black hole. Look!”

Sam snarled, “How in hell can I see something that’s invisible by definition?”

With trembling fingers I pointed to the gravitational flux meters and the high-energy detectors. We even went over to the optical telescope and bumped our heads together like Laurel and Hardy, trying to squint through the eyepiece together.

Nothing to see. Except a faint violet glow, the last visible remains of the thin interplanetary gas that was being sucked into the black hole on a one-way trip to oblivion.

It really was a black hole! The final grave of a star that had collapsed, God knows how many eons ago. A black hole! Practically in our backyard! And I had discovered it! Visions of the Nobel Prize made me giddy.

Sam sprang straight to the communications console and started tapping frantically at its keyboard, muttering about how he could rent time to astronomers to study the only black hole close enough to Earth to see firsthand.

“It’s worth a freakin’ fortune,” he chortled, his fingers racing along the keys like a concert pianist trying to do Chopin’s Minute Waltz in thirty seconds. “A dozen fortunes!”

He filed his claim and even gave the black hole a name: Einstein. I grinned and nodded agreement with his choice.

It took nearly eleven hours for Sam’s message to get to Earth, and another eleven for their reply to reach us. I spent the time studying Einstein while Sam proclaimed to the universe how he was going to build an orbiting hotel just outside Einstein’s event horizon and invent a new pastime for the danger nuts.

“Space surfing! A jetpack on your back and good old Einstein in front of you. See how close you can skim to the event horizon without getting sucked in! It’ll make billions!”

“Until somebody gets stretched into a bloody string of spaghetti,” I said. “That grav field out there is powerful, Sam, and I think it fluctuates….”

“All the better,” said Sam, clapping his hands like a kid in front of a Christmas tree. “Let a couple of the risk freaks kill themselves and all the others will come boiling out here like lemmings on migration.”

I shook my head in wonder.

When the comm signal finally chimed I was still trying to dope out the basic parameters of our black hole. Yes, I was thinking of Einstein as ours; that’s what being near Sam does to you.

His round little face went pugnacious the instant he saw the woman on the screen. I felt an entirely different reaction. She was beautiful, with thick platinum blonde hair and the kind of eyes that promised paradise.

But her voice was as cold as a robot’s. “Mr. Gunn, we meet again. Your claim has been noted and filed with the Interplanetary Astronautical Authority. In the meantime, I represent the creditors from your most recent bankruptcy. To date …”

She droned on while Sam’s face went from angry red to ashy grey. This far from Earth, all messages were one-way. You can’t hold a conversation with an eleven-hour wait between each transmission. The blonde went into infinite detail about how much money Sam owed, and to whom. Even though I was only half listening, I learned that our ship was not paid for, and my own university was suing Sam for taking my instrumentation without authorization!

Finally she smiled slightly and delivered the knockout. “Now Mr. Gunn—aside from all the above unpleasantness, it may interest you to realize that your claim to this alleged black hole is without merit or substance.”

Sam made a growl from deep in his throat.

“International law dating back to 1967 prohibits claiming sovereignty to any body found in space….”

“I’m not claiming sovereignty,” Sam snapped to the unhearing screen. “And this ain’t a body, it’s a black hole.”

She serenely continued,”… although it is allowed to claim the use of a body found in space, I’m afraid that the law clearly states that you must establish an operational facility on the body in question before such a claim will be recognized by the Interplanetary Astronautical Council.”

Sam snorted like a bull about to charge. Me, I thought about establishing an operational facility on the body attached to that incredibly beautiful face.

“So I’m afraid, my dear Mr. Gunn,” her smile widened to show dazzlingly perfect teeth, “that unless you establish an operational facility on your so-called black hole, your claim is worthless. And, oh yes! one more thing—an automated ship is on its way to you, filled with robot lawyers who will have authorization to take possession of your ship and all its equipment, in the name of your creditors. Good-bye. Have a nice day.”

The screen went blank.

Sam gave a screech that would make an ax-murderer shudder and flung himself at the dead screen. He bounced off and scooted weightlessly around the control center again, gibbering, jabbering, screaming insults and obscenities at the blonde, the IAA, the whole solar system in general, and all the lawyers on Earth in particular.

“I’ll show ’em!” he raged. “I’ll show ’em all!”

I stayed close to my instruments—actually, they were still the university’s instruments, I guess.

After God knows how many orbits around the control center, screaming and raging, Sam propelled himself toward the hatch in the floor that led down to the equipment bay.

“They want an operational facility, they’ll get an operational facility!”

I wrenched my feet free so fast I twisted an ankle, and went diving after him.

“Sam, what the hell are you thinking of?”

He was already unlocking the hatch of our EVA scooter, a little one-man utility craft with a big bubble canopy and so many extensible arms it looked like a metal spider.

“I’m gonna pop an instrument pod down Einstein’s throat. That’s gonna be our operational facility.”

“But it’ll just disappear into the black hole!”

“So what?”

“It won’t be an operational facility.”

“How do you know what it’ll be doing inside the event horizon? The gravity field will stretch out its signals, won’t it?”

“Theoretically,” I answered.

“Then we’ll be getting signals from the probe for years, right? Even after it goes past the event horizon.”

“I guess so. But that doesn’t prove the probe will be operating inside the black hole, Sam.”

“If the mother-humping lawyers want to prove that it’s not working, let ’em jump into the black hole after it. And kiss my ass on the way down!”

I argued with him for more than an hour while he got the instrument pod together and revved up the EVA craft. What he wanted to do was dangerous. Maybe adventure freaks would like to skim around the event horizon of a black hole. Me, I don’t feel really safe unless there’s good California soil shaking beneath my feet.

But Sam would not be denied. Maybe he was a danger freak himself. Maybe he was desperate for the money he thought he could make. Maybe he just wanted to screw all the lawyers on Earth, especially that blonde.

He didn’t even put on a pressure suit. He just clambered up into the cockpit of the EVA craft, slammed its hatch, and worked one of its spidery arms to pick up the instrument pod.

Reluctantly I went back to the control center to monitor Sam’s mission.

“Stay well clear of the event horizon,” I warned him over the radio. “I don’t know enough about Einstein to give you firm parameters….”

Sam was no fool. He listened to my instructions. He released the instruments well clear of the event horizon. But the pod just orbited around the faint violet haze that marked Einstein’s position. It didn’t go spiraling into it.

“Goddam mother-humping no-good son of a lawyer!”

Sam jockeyed the EVA craft into a matching orbit and gave the pod a push inward. Not enough. Then another, swearing a blue streak every instant.

“That’s close enough,” I yelled into the microphone, sweating bullets. “The event horizon fluctuates, Sam. You mustn’t…”

I swear the black hole reached out and grabbed him. The event horizon sort of burped and engulfed Sam’s craft. I know it’s impossible, but that’s what happened.

“Hey!” he yelled. “Heyyyyyy!”

According to everything we knew about black holes up to that moment, Sam was being squeezed by Einstein’s immense gravitational forces, torn apart, crushed, mashed, squashed, pulverized.

“What’s going onnnn?” Sam’s radio voice stretched out eerily, like in an echo chamber.

“What’s going on?” I asked back.

“It’s like sliding down a chuuute!”

“You’re not being pulled apart?”

“Hell nooo! But I can’t see anything. Like falling down an elevator shaaaft!”

Sam should have been crushed. But he wasn’t. His radio messages were being stretched out, but apparently he himself was not. He was falling into the black hole on a one-way trip, swallowed alive.

I started to laugh. We had named the black hole exactly right. Inside the event horizon space-time was being warped, all right. But Sam was now part of that continuum and to him, everything seemed normal. Our universe, the one we’re in, would have seemed weirdly distorted to him if he could see it.

It had all been there in old Albert’s equations all along, if we had only had the sense enough to realize it.

Sam Gunn, feisty, foulmouthed, womanizing, fast-talking Sam Gunn had discovered a shortcut to the stars, a space-time warp that one day would allow us to get around the limits of speed-of-light travel. That black hole was not a dead-end route to oblivion; it was a space-time warp that opened somewhere/somewhen else in the universe. Or maybe in another universe altogether.

But it was a one-way route.

Sam gave his life to his discovery. He was on a one-way trip to God knows where. Maybe there’d be kindly aliens at the other end of the warp to greet him and give him their version of the Nobel Prize.

I got the terrestrial Nobel, of course. And now I’m heading up an enormous team of scientists who’re studying Einstein and trying to figure out how to put black hole warps to practical use.

And Sam? Who knows where he is?

But you can still hear him. Thanks to Einstein’s time-stretching effects, you can hear Sam swearing and cussing every moment, all the way down that long, long slide to whatever’s on the other side of the warp.

And according to Einstein (Albert), we’ll be able to hear Sam yelling forever. Forever.