The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Takes Two to Tangle

One Sam Gunn is bad enough—said professor Townes. But now there’s at least two of them, maybe more, and it’s all my fault.

Well, mostly my fault. Sam had something to do with it, of course. More than a little, as you might suspect if you know anything about Sam.

And, if you know anything about Sam, you know that of course there was a woman involved. A beautiful, statuesque, golden-haired Bishop of the New Lunar Church, no less.

I didn’t know anything about Sam except the usual stuff that the general public knew: Sam Gunn was a freewheeling space entrepreneur, a little stubby loudmouthed redheaded guy who always found himself battling the big boys of huge interplanetary corporations and labyrinthine government bureaucracies. Sam was widely known as a womanizer, a wiseass, a stubby Tasmanian Devil with a mind as sharp as a laser beam and a heart as big as a spiral galaxy.

He had disappeared years earlier out on some wild-ass trek to the Kuiper Belt. Everybody thought he had died out in that frozen darkness beyond Pluto. There was rejoicing in the paneled chambers of corporate and government power, tears shed among Sam’s legion of friends.

And then after his long absence he showed up again, spinning a wild tale about having fallen into a black hole. He was heading back to Earth, coming in from the cold, claiming that friendly aliens on the other side of the black hole had showed him how to get back to our space-time, back to home. Sam’s enemies nodded knowingly: of course the aliens would want to get rid of him, they said to each other.

And they sent just about every lawyer on Earth after Sam. He owed megabucks to dozens of creditors, including some pretty shady characters. He was so deeply in debt that there was no place on Earth he could land his spacecraft without having umpteen dozen eager lawyers slam him with liens and lawsuits.

Which is why Sam landed not on Earth, but on the Moon. At Selene, which was now an independent nation and apparently the only human community in the solar system that didn’t have Sam at the head of its “most wanted” list.

He came straight to the underground halls of Selene University. To my office!

Imagine my surprise when Sam Gunn showed up at my doorway, all one hundred sixty-some centimeters of him.

And asked me to invent a matter transmitter for him.

“A matter transmitter?” I must have sputtered, I was so shocked. “But that’s nonsense. It’s kiddie fantasy. It’s nothing but—”

“It’s physics,” Sam said. “And you’re a physicist. Right?”

He had me there.

I am Daniel C. Townes IV, PhD. I am a particle physicist. I was on the short list last year for the Nobel Prize in physics. But that was before I met Sam Gunn.

Sam had popped into my office unannounced, sneaking past the department secretary during her lunch break. (Which, I must confess, often takes a couple of hours.) He just waltzed through my open doorway, walked up to my desk, stuck out his hand and introduced himself. Then he told me he needed a matter transmitter. Right away.

I sagged back in my desk chair while Sam perched himself on the only bare corner of my desk, grinning like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern. His face was round, with a snub nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Wiry reddish hair; I think they call that color auburn. His eyes were light, twinkling.

“Physics is one thing,” I said, trying to regain my dignity. “A matter transmitter is something else.”

“Come on,” Sam said, wheedling, “you guys have transmitted photons, haven’t you? You yourself just published a paper about transmitting atomic particles from one end of your lab to the other.”

He had read the literature. That impressed me.

You have to understand that I was naive enough to think that I might be the youngest person ever to receive the physics Nobel. I had to be careful, though. More than one young genius had been cut down by the knives that whirl through academia’s hallowed halls in the dark of night.

Sam aged me, though.

I think he had roosted on my desk because that made him taller than I was, as long as I remained sitting in my swivel chair. I have to confess, though, that there wasn’t any place else he could have sat. My office was littered with reports, journals, books, even popular magazines. The visitor’s chair was piled high with memos that the secretary had printed out from the department’s unending file of meaningless trivia. There might be no paper on the Moon, but we sure do pile up the monofilament plastic sheets that we use in its place.

“So how about it, Dan-o?” Sam asked. “Can you make me a matter transmitter? It’s worth a considerable fortune and I’ll cut you in on it, fifty-fifty.”

“What makes you think—”

“You’re the expert on entanglement, aren’t you?”

I was impressed even more. Entanglement is not a subject your average businessman either knows or cares about.

Curiosity is a funny thing. It not only kills cats, it makes physicists forget Newton’s Third Law, the one about action and reaction.

I heard myself ask him, “Did you really survive going through a black hole?”

Grinning even wider, Sam nodded. “Yep. Twice.”

“What’s it like? What did you experience? How did it feel?”

Sam shrugged. “Nothing to it, really. I didn’t see or feel anything all that unusual.”

“That’s impossible.”

Sam just sat there on the corner of my desk, grinning knowingly.

“Unless,” I mused, “the laws of physics change under the intense gravitational field…”

“Or I’m telling you a big, fat lie,” Sam said.

“A lie?” That stunned me. “You wouldn’t—”

“Look,” Sam said, bending closer toward me, “I need a matter transmitter. You whip one up for me and I’ll give you all the data in my ship’s computer.”

I could feel my eyes go wide. “Your ship? The one that went through the black hole?”

“Twice,” said Sam.

Thus began my partnership with Sam Gunn.

Ingrid Mactavish was something else. A missionary from the New Morality back Earthside, she had come to Selene to be installed as a Bishop in the New Lunar Church. She was nearly two meters tall, with bright golden hair that glowed and cascaded down past her shoulders, and eyes the color of perfect sapphires. A Junoesque goddess. A Valkyrie in a virginal white pants suit that fit her snugly enough to send my blood pressure soaring.

I’ll never forget my first encounter with her. She just stormed into my office and, without preamble, demanded, “Is it true?”

It’s hard to keep a secret in a community as small and intense as Selene. Rumors fly along those underground corridors faster than kids on jetblades. Sam wanted me to keep my work on the matter transmitter absolutely, utterly, cosmically top-secret. But the word leaked out, of course, after only a couple of weeks. I was surprised that nobody blabbed about it before then.

That’s what brought Bishop MacTavish into my office, all one hundred and eighty-two centimeters of her.

“Is it true?” she repeated.

She was practically radiating righteous wrath, those sapphire eyes blazing at me.

I swallowed as I got politely to my feet from my desk chair. I’m accustomed to being the tallest person in any crowd. I’m just a tad over two meters; I’d been a fairly successful basketball player back at Cal-Tech, but here on the Moon even Sam could jump so high in the light gravity that my height wasn’t all that much of an advantage.

Bishop MacTavish was not accustomed to looking up at anyone, I saw.

“Is what true?” I asked mildly. A soft answer turneth away wrath, I reasoned.

I think it was my height that softened her attitude. “That you’re working on a device to transmit people through space instantaneously,” she replied, her voice lower, gentler.

“No, that is not true,” I replied. Honestly.

She sank down into the chair in front of my desk, which I had cleaned off since Sam’s first visit. There were hardly more than three or four slim reports resting on it.

Bishop MacTavish looked startled for a moment; then she slipped the reports out from beneath her curvaceous rump and let them fall to the floor in the languid low gravity of the Moon.

“Thank God,” she murmured. “That’s one blasphemy we won’t have to deal with.”

“Blasphemy?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

She blinked those gorgeous eyes at me. “A matter transmitter, if it could be made successfully, could also be used as a matter duplicator, couldn’t it?”

It took me a moment to understand what she was saying; I was rather hypnotized by her eyes.

“Couldn’t it?” she repeated.

“Duplicator? Yes, I suppose it might be feasible….”

“And every time you use it you’d be murdering a human being.” “What?” That truly stunned me. “What are you talking about?”

“When someone goes into your transporter his body is broken down into individual atoms, isn’t it? The pattern is sent to the receiver, where the body is reconstituted out of other atoms. The original person has been destroyed. Just because a copy comes out of the receiver—”

“No, no, no!” I interrupted. “That’s fantasy from the kiddie shows. Entanglement doesn’t work that way. Nothing gets destroyed.”

“It doesn’t?”

I shook my head. “It’s rather complicated, but essentially the process matches the pattern of the thing to be transported and reproduces that pattern at the other end of the transmission. The original is not destroyed; it isn’t harmed in any way.”

She cocked a suspicious brow at me.

“It takes a lot of energy, though,” I went on. “I doubt that it will ever be practical.”

“But such a machine would be creating living human beings, wouldn’t it? Only God can create people. A matter duplicator would be an outright blasphemy, clearly.”

“Maybe so,” I muttered. But then I came back to my senses. “Uh … although, that is, well, I thought that people create people. You know… uh, sexually.”

“Of course.” She smiled and lowered her lashes self-consciously. “That’s doing God’s work.”

“It is?”

She nodded, then took a deep breath. I nearly started hyperventilating.

“But if you’re not working on a matter transmitter,” she said, breaking into a happy smile as she started to get up from the chair, “then there’s no cause for alarm.”

The trouble with being a scientist is that it tends to make you honest. Oh, sure, there’ve been cheats and outright frauds in science. But the field has a way of winnowing them out, sooner or later. Honesty is the bedrock of scientific research. Besides, I didn’t want her to leave my office.

So I confessed, “I am working on a matter transmitter, I’m afraid.”

She looked shocked. “But you said you weren’t.”

“I’m not working on a device to transport people. That would be too dangerous. My device is intended merely to transmit documents and other lightweight, nonorganic materials.”

She thumped back into the chair. “And you’re doing this for Sam Gunn?” “Yes, that’s true.”

She took an even deeper breath. “That little devil. Blasphemy means nothing to him.”

“But the transmitter won’t be used for people.”

“You think not?” she said sharply. “Once Sam Gunn has a matter transmitter in his hands he’ll use it for whatever evil purposes he wants.”

“But the risks—”

“Risks? Do you think for one microsecond that Sam Gunn cares about risks? To his body or his soul?”

“I… suppose not,” I replied weakly.

“This has got to be stopped,” she muttered.

I finally came to my senses. “Why? Who wants to stop this work? Who are you, anyway?”

“Oh!” She looked suddenly embarrassed. “I never introduced myself, did I?”

I tried to smile at her. “Other than the fact that you’re worried about blasphemy and you’re the most incredibly beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, I know nothing at all about you.”

Which wasn’t entirely true. I knew that she believed the act of procreation was doing God’s work.

“I am Bishop Ingrid MacTavish,” she said, extending her hand across my desk, “of the New Lunar Church.”

“You must be a newcomer to Selene,” I said as I took her hand in mine. Her grip was firm, warm. “I’d have noticed you before this.”

“I arrived yesterday,” she said. Neither one of us had released our hands. “Actually, I’m an ethicist.”

“Ethicist?”

“Yes,” she said. “There are certain ethical inconsistencies between accepted moral practice on Earth and here in Selene.”

That puzzled me, but only for a moment. “Oh, you mean nanotechnology.”

“Which is banned on Earth.”

“And common practice here on the Moon. We couldn’t survive without nanomachines.”

“That’s one of the reasons why I decided to set up my ministry here on the Moon.”

Interesting, I thought. “And the other reason?”

She hesitated, then answered, “I’ve been hired temporarily by a consortium of law firms to find Sam Gunn and serve him with papers for a large number of major lawsuits.”

At that moment, with impeccable timing, Sam bounced into my office.

“Hey, Dan-o, I’ve been thinking—”

Ingrid jumped to her feet, stumbling clumsily because she was unaccustomed to the light lunar gravity.

Sam rushed over to help her and she lurched right into his arms. With her height, and Sam’s lack of same, Sam’s face got buried in Ingrid’s commodious bosom momentarily while I stood behind my desk, too stunned to do anything more than gape at the sight.

Sam jerked away from her, his face flame-red. The little guy was actually embarrassed! Ingrid’s face was red, too, with anger. She swung a haymaker at Sam. He ducked; she staggered off-balance. I came around my desk like a shot and grabbed Ingrid by her shoulders, steadying her.

Sam backed away from us, stuttering, “I didn’t mean to … that is, it was an accident…I was only trying …” Then he seemed to see Ingrid for the first time, really see her in all her statuesque beauty. His eyes turned into saucers.

“Who … who are you?” Sam asked, his voice hollow with awe.

Ingrid pulled free of me, but I noticed that she placed one hand lightly on my desktop. “I’m your worst nightmare,” she hissed.

“No nightmare,” Sam said. “A dream.”

She wormed a hand into the hip pocket of her snug-fitting trousers and pulled out a wafer-thin data chip. “Sam Gunn, I hereby serve you legal notification of—”

Sam immediately clasped his hands behind his back. “You’re not serving me with anything, lady. You’ve got no jurisdiction here in Selene. You have to go through the international court and even then you can only serve me if I’m on Earth, in a nation that’s got an extradition treaty with the North American Alliance. Which Selene hasn’t.”

Ingrid smiled thinly at him. “Well, you know your law, I must admit.”

Sam made a little bow, his hands still locked behind his back. “How’d you get in here, anyway? Selene doesn’t allow Earthside lawyers to come here. Legal issues with Earth are handled electronically.”

“Which is why you’re hiding here in Selene,” Ingrid replied.

With a Huck Finn grin, Sam acknowledged, “Until I can recoup my fortune and deal with all those malicious lawsuits.”

“Malicious?” Ingrid laughed. “You owe Masterson Aerospace seven hundred million for the spacecraft you leased. Forty-three million—and counting—to Rockledge Industries for expenses on the orbital hotel that you haven’t paid for in more than two years. Nine million—”

“Okay, okay,” Sam conceded. “But how can I settle with them when they’ve got all my assets frozen?”

“That’s your problem,” said Ingrid.

“Why don’t we discuss it over dinner?” Sam suggested, his grin turning sly.

“Dinner? With you? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Scared?”

She hesitated, then glanced at me. I caught her meaning. She didn’t want to be alone with Sam.

“Sam,” I said, “we have a lot to talk about. I’ve got a working model just about finished, but to build a real machine I’m going to need some major funding and—”

Sam’s no dummy. He caught on immediately. “Okay, okay. You come to dinner, too.”

Turning back toward Ingrid, he asked, “Is that all right with you? Now you’ll have a chaperone.”

Ingrid smiled brightly. “That’s perfectly fine with me, Mr. Gunn.”

The earthview is the oldest and, to my mind, still the best restaurant in Selene. On Earth, the higher you are in a building the more prestigious and expensive; that’s why penthouses cost more than basement apartments—on Earth. On the Moon, though, the surface is dangerous: big temperature swings between sunlight and shadow, ionizing radiation constantly sleeting in from the Sun and stars, micrometeoroids peppering the ground and sandpapering everything exposed to them.

So in Selene, prestige and cost increase as you go down, away from the surface. The Earthview took in four full levels: its main entrance was on the third level below the Grand Plaza, and an actual human maitre d’ guided you to tables set along the winding descending rampway that led all the way down to the seventh level.

The place got its name from the oversized screens that studded the walls, showing camera views of the surface with the Earth hanging big and blue and majestic in the dark lunar sky. I never got tired of gazing at Earth and its ever-changing pattern of dazzling white clouds shifting across those glittering blue oceans.

Sam had reserved the best table in the place, down at the very lowest level. While we waited for Ingrid to arrive, Sam and I had a drink: lunar “rocket fuel” with carbonated water for me and plain South Pole water for Sam. He pumped me for everything I knew about her.

“I didn’t realize she’s working for lawyers at first,” I said. “She told me she’s an ethicist, and a Bishop in the New Lunar Church.”

“A Bishop? That’s enough to give a man religion, almost,” Sam mused.

“I never heard of the New Lunar Church before. Must be something new.”

“Fundamentalist,” Sam said knowingly. “Connected to the New Morality back Earthside.”

“She did say something about blasphemy.”

“Blasphemy?”

“In connection with the matter transmitter.”

“Blasphemy,” Sam muttered.

I took a sip of my drink. “Sam, there’s something I’ve got to ask you.”

“Ask away,” he said blithely.

“Why do you want a matter transmitter? I mean, what in the world do you plan to do with it? You can’t use it for people—”

“Why not?”

“It’s too dangerous. We don’t know enough about entanglement to risk people. Not even volunteers.”

“Maybe there are some pets in Selene we can test it with,” Sam muttered.

“Pets?” I shuddered at the idea of sending a dog or cat into the device I was building. Even a goldfish. Maybe the bio labs have some mice, I thought.

“Relax,” Sam said, smiling easily. “I don’t want to send people through space. Or pets. Just certain kinds of paperwork.”

“Paperwork?”

“Legal tender. Money.” He screwed up his face in a thoughtful frown for a moment. Then, “Legal documents too, I guess.”

“Why?”

“Tax haven.” Sam smiled his happiest, sunniest smile. “I’m going to turn Selene into a tax haven for all those poor souls down on Earth who’re trying to hide their assets from their money-grabbing governments.”

“A tax shelter? Selene?”

“Sure. Earthside governments won’t let you carry your money off-planet. They won’t even allow you to bring letters of credit or any other papers that can be transformed into money.”

“It’s all done electronically,” I murmured, reaching for my drink again.

“Right. And taxed electronically. Every goddamned financial transaction between Earth and the Moon is monitored by those snake-eyed tax collectors and their computers.”

“That’s Earthside law, Sam.” “Yeah, sure. But if a person could send money or its equivalent from Earth to the Moon through a matter transmitter, privately, instantaneously, with nobody else knowing about it…” He leaned back in his chair and gave me that sly smile of his.

“Money would stream into Selene,” I realized. “Money that people want to hide from their tax collectors.”

“Selene could get very wealthy, very fast.”

“The governments on Earth would be furious,” I said.

“Right again. But what can they do about it? They tried to muscle Selene once with Peacekeeper troops and got their backsides whipped.”

“But…”

“Besides, the richer Selene gets, the more Earthside politicians we can buy.”

“Bribery?”

“Lubrication,” Sam corrected. “Money is the oil that smoothes the machinery of government.”

“Bribery,” I said, firmly.

Sam shrugged.

A tax haven. A shelter for the fortunes that wealthy Earthsiders wanted to hide from their governments. It was wrong. Insidious. Definitely evil. But it could work!

And it could even result in more funding being available for Selene University. More funding for my research.

If I could make a matter transmitter.

“So how’s the zapper coming along?” Sam asked, reaching for his South Pole water.

For the next fifteen minutes or so I nattered on about entanglement and the bench model I was almost ready to test. Sam appeared to listen closely; he asked questions that showed he understood most of what I was telling him.

Then all of a sudden he looked past my shoulder and his eyes went wide as pie plates. I turned in my chair. Ingrid MacTavish was coming down the rampway toward our table.

Even in the modest pure white floor-length outfit she was wearing she looked spectacular. Radiant. Heads turned as she followed the maitre d’ past the other tables. And not just men’s heads, either. Ingrid looked like a glowing golden-haired empress proceeding regally toward her throne. She was even followed by a quartet of acolytes, all of them women, all of them dressed in unadorned white suits. Compared to Ingrid they looked like four dumpy troglodytes.

Sam bounded to his feet and held her chair for her, making the normally impassive maitre d’ frown at him. The acolytes seated themselves at the next table.

“Bishop MacTavish,” Sam murmured as she sat down.

“Mr. Gunn,” she replied. Then, with a nod toward me, “Dr. Townes.”

I swallowed hard and tried to say something but no words came out. All I could do was smile and hope I didn’t look like a complete idiot.

Sam was at his charming best all through dinner. Not a word about his legal troubles. Or about the matter transmitter. He regaled us both with improbable tales of his past misadventures.

Despite myself, I felt intrigued. “Tell us about the black hole, Sam,” I begged. “What really happened to you?”

Ingrid seemed equally curious. “Did you actually meet truly intelligent alien creatures?”

“Very intelligent aliens,” Sam said.

“What were they like? Did they have souls? Were they able to—”

“We didn’t talk religion,” Sam replied. “They were little guys. Smaller than me. Smart, though. High level of technology. I want to go back and learn how they operate that black hole.”

“Do you?” Ingrid asked. “Wouldn’t that be dangerous?”

Sam gave her his what-the-hell grin. “Lady, danger’s my middle name.”

“You’re not worried about the danger to your soul?”

Sam blinked at her. “My soul’s in decent shape. It’s my finances that I’m worried about.”

Ingrid scoffed, “What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world…”

“I don’t want the whole world,” Sam replied. “I just want my assets unfrozen and all you lawyers off my back.”

“What would you give in return for that?”

That stopped Sam. But only for a moment. “You could make all these lawsuits go away?”

“I think a settlement could be arranged,” she said.

“A settlement?”

“A settlement.”

“Forgive me my debts,” Sam mused, “as I forgive my debtors.”

“Even the Devil can quote scripture,” Ingrid retorted.

They were talking as if I wasn’t there. I felt like a spectator at a tennis match; my eyes shifted back and forth from one to the other.

“Mr. Gunn, the New Morality—” “Sam,” he said. “Call me Sam.”

Ingrid smiled. “Very well. Sam.”

“May I call you Ingrid?” he asked her.

Her smile widened slightly. “Bishop MacTavish, Sam.”

“No,” Sam replied, not taken aback at all. “I’ll call you Aphrodite: the goddess of beauty.”

I saw anger flare in her deeply blue eyes, but only for the flash of a second. She controlled it immediately.

“That’s the name of a pagan goddess.”

“It’s the only name I can think of that fits you,” Sam said, looking totally sincere.

And then I heard myself blab, “Galileo said, ‘Names and attributes must be accommodated to the essence of things, and not the essence to the names, for things come first and names afterward.’ ”

They both stared at me.” Whaat?”

“Well, I mean … that is …” I was back in the conversation, but floundering like a particle in Brownian motion.

“Galileo was a notorious heretic,” Ingrid said.

“The Church apologized for that, er… misunderstanding,” I said. Then I added, “Three hundred and fifty-nine years afterward.”

“What’s Galileo got to do with anything?” Sam demanded.

“Well, he said names should be given based on the observable attributes of the thing being named.” Turning to Ingrid, I said, “I think naming you Aphrodite is completely appropriate.”

She looked thoughtfully at me. Then, her face totally serious, “You mean that as a compliment, Dr. Townes. And I accept it as such. Thank you.”

“Dan,” I said. “Please call me Dan.”

She nodded, then turned back to Sam. “But you, Sam, you’re trying to seduce me, aren’t you?”

“Me?” The innocence on Sam’s face was about as obvious as a flying elephant. And as phony.

“You,” Ingrid said sternly.

Gesturing toward the next table, Sam asked, “Is that why you brought the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse? For protection?”

“I don’t need protection from you, Sam. I can take care of myself.”

Sam hmmfed. “I bet you’re still a virgin.”

“That’s none of your business.”

He shrugged. “Now what was this about forgiving me my debts?”

It took her a moment to get her mind back on business. At last she folded her hands on the tabletop and said slowly, carefully, “The New Morality is willing to intervene on your behalf in the various lawsuits against you.”

“The New Morality, huh?” If this surprised Sam he certainly didn’t show it. “They own a lot of stock in Masterson, and Rockledge too, don’t they?”

“That’s neither here nor there.”

“And what do I have to do to get the New Morality to save my ass?”

Her eyes flared again at Sam’s crudity. I figured he had chosen his words precisely to rattle her.

“You will give up this effort of yours to create a matter transmitter.”

“Wait a minute!” I yelped. “That’s my work you’re talking about!”

“It is blasphemous presumption,” said Bishop MacTavish. “You are both placing your souls in grave danger.”

“Bullsnorts!” Sam snapped. “The New Morality doesn’t want a matter transmitter because it would loosen their control over people.”

“This is a matter of religion, Sam,” Ingrid said. “The state of your soul—”

“Stow it, Aphrodite. This is a matter of politics. Power. The New Morality isn’t worried about my soul, but they’re scared that a matter transmitter might let people do things they don’t want them to do.”

Ingrid turned to me. She actually reached across the table and took my hands in hers. “Daniel, you understand, don’t you? You can see that I’m trying to save your soul.”

I was thinking more about my body. And hers.

“Ingrid,” I said, my voice nothing more than a husky whisper, “we’re talking about my work. My life.”

“No,” she replied softly. “We’re talking about your soul.”

Up to that moment I hadn’t even considered that I might possess a soul. But gazing into those incredible eyes, with her hands in mine, I started thinking about how wonderful it would be to please her, to make her smile at me, to be with her for all eternity.

“Hey! Break it up!” Sam said sharply. “I’m supposed to be the seducer here.”

At that, all four of the women at the next table got to their feet. I saw that they were all pretty hefty; they looked like professional athletes.

“Bishop MacTavish,” one of them said in a sanctimonious whisper, “it’s time to leave.”

Ingrid looked up at her quartet of bodyguards as if breaking free of a trance. She pulled her hands away from me and nodded. “Yes. I must go.”

And she left me there, staring after her.

I thought I knew as much about entanglement as any person living. More, in fact. But all I knew was about subatomic particles and quantum physics. Not about people. And I got myself entangled with Bishop Ingrid MacTavish so completely that I couldn’t even see straight half the time.

We had dinners together. She visited my lab several times and we had lunch with my grad student assistants. She and I took long walks up in the Main Plaza, strolling along the bricked lanes that curved through the greenery so lovingly tended up there beneath the massive concrete dome of the Plaza. I kissed her and she kissed me back. I fell in love.

But she didn’t.

“I can’t let myself love you, Daniel,” she told me one evening, as we sat on a park bench near the curving shell of the auditorium. We had attended a symphonic concert: all Tchaikovsky, lushly romantic music.

“Why not?” I asked. “I love you, Ingrid. I truly do.”

“We live in different worlds,” she said.

“You’re here on the Moon now. We’re in the same world.”

“No, it’s your work. Your soul.”

She meant the matter transmitter, of course. I spread my hands in a halfhearted gesture and said, “My soul isn’t in any danger. The damned experiment isn’t working. Not at all.”

She looked hopefully at me. “It is damned! It’s that devil Sam Gunn. He’s leading you down the road to perdition.”

“Sam? He’s no devil. An imp, maybe.”

“He’s evil, Daniel. And this matter transmitter he wants you to make for him—it’s the Devil’s work.”

“Come on, Ingrid. That’s what they said about the telescope, for God’s sake.”

“Yes, for God’s sake,” she murmured.

“Do you really think what I’m doing is evil?”

“Why do you think your experiment won’t work? God won’t allow you to succeed.”

“But—”

“And if you do succeed, if you should somehow manage to make the device work the way Sam Gunn wants it to, it will only be because the Devil has helped you.” “You mean it’ll be witchcraft?” My voice must have gone up two octaves.

Ingrid nodded, her lips pressed into a tight line. “Don’t you see, Daniel? I’m struggling to save your very soul.”

And there it was. She was attracted to me, I knew she was. But my work stood in the way. And her medieval outlook on life.

“Ingrid, I can’t give up my work. It’s my career. My life.”

She bowed her head. Her voice so low I could barely hear her, she said, “I know, Daniel. I know. I can’t even ask you to give it up. I do love you, dearest. I love you so much that I can’t ask you to make this sacrifice. I won’t ruin your life. I should do everything in my power to get you away from this devilish task you’ve set yourself. But I can’t bring myself to do it. I can’t hurt you that way. Even if it means both our souls.”

She loved me! She admitted that she loved me! But nothing would come of it as long as I worked on Sam’s matter transmitter.

I told Sam about it the following morning. Actually, he ferreted the information out of me.

Sam was already in my lab when I came in that morning. He was always bouncing into the lab, urging me to make the damned bench-top model work so we could go ahead and build a full-scale transmitter.

“Why isn’t it working yet?” he would ask, about twenty thousand times a day.

“Sam, if I knew why it isn’t working I’d know how to make it work,” I would always reply.

And he would buzz around the lab like a redheaded bumblebee, getting in everybody’s way. My three technicians—graduate student slave labor—were getting so edgy about Sam’s presence that they had threatened to go to the dean and complain about their working conditions.

This particular morning, after that park bench confession from Ingrid the evening before, I had to drag myself to the lab. Sam, as I said, was already there.

He peered up at me. “What bulldozer ran over you?”

I blinked at him.

“You look as if you haven’t slept in a week.”

“I haven’t,” I muttered, heading for the coffee urn the techs had perking away on one of the lab benches.

“The good Bishop MacTavish?” Sam asked, trailing after me.

“Yep.”

“She still trying to save your soul?”

I whirled around, my anger flaring. “Sam, I love her and she loves me. Stay out of it.”

He put up his hands in mock surrender. “Hey, I’m just an innocent bystander. But take it from me, pal, what she really wants from you is to give up on the transmitter.”

“You want her yourself, don’t you? That’s why—”

“Me?” Sam seemed genuinely astounded by the idea. “Me and that religious fanatic? You’ve gotta be kidding!”

“You’re not attracted to her?”

“Well, she’s gorgeous, true enough. But there are too many other women in the world for me to worry about a psalm-singing bishop who’s working for lawyers that’re trying to skin me alive.” He took a breath. “Besides,” he added, “she’s too tall for me.”

“She loves me. She told me so.”

Sam hoisted himself up onto the lab bench beside the coffee urn and let his stubby legs swing freely. “Let me give you a piece of priceless wisdom, pal. Hard-earned on the field of battle.”

I grabbed the cleanest-looking mug and poured some steaming coffee into it. Sam watched me, his expression somewhere between knowing and caring.

“What wisdom might that be?” I asked.

“It’s about love. Guys fall in love because they want to get laid. Women fall in love because they want something: it might be security, it might be their own sense of self-worth, it might even be because they pity the guy who’s coming on to them. But to women, sex is a means to an end, not an end in itself.”

I felt like throwing the coffee in his face. “That’s the most cynical crap I’ve ever heard, Sam.”

“But it’s true. Believe me, pal. I know. I’ve got the scars to prove it.”

“Bullshit,” I snapped, heading for the nonworking model on the bench across the lab. I noticed that one of the grad students had hung a set of prayer beads from the ceiling light over the equipment. A cruel joke, I thought.

“Okay,” Sam said brightly, hopping down from his perch. “Prove that I’m wrong.”

“Prove it? How?”

“Make the dingus work. Then see if she really loves you, or if she’s just trying to make you give up on the experiment.”

Talk about challenges! I stared at the clutter of equipment on the lab bench. Wires and heavy insulated cables snaked all over the place, hung in festoons from the ceiling (along with the prayer beads) and coiled across the floor. They say a neat, orderly laboratory is a sign that no creative work’s being done. Well, my lab was obviously a beehive of intense creativity.

Except that the damned experiment refused to work.

Make the transmitter work, and then see if Ingrid still says she loves me. What was that old Special Forces motto? Who dares, wins. Yeah. But I thought there was a damned good chance of my daring and losing.

Yet I had to do it. To prove to Ingrid that the transmitter wouldn’t destroy my soul, if for no other reason.

So I fiddled around with the power feeds and the connections between the plasma chamber and the thin mesh grid in the middle of the platform that served for the beam’s focus. The same damned flimsy sheet of monofilament that I wanted to transmit to the other side of the lab sat on the grid just as it had for the past two weeks, like a permanent symbol of frustration.

Entanglement. All the equipment had to do was to match the quantum states of the monofilament’s atoms and transmit that information to the receiver across the lab. That’s a lot of information to juggle, but I had six oversized quantum computers lined up against the lab’s wall, more than enough qubits to handle the job. In theory.

I checked the computers; they were connected in parallel, humming nicely, awaiting the command to go to work.

Everything checked, just as it had for the past two weeks. I went to the master control on the other side of the bench. I noticed my three grad students edging toward the door. They weren’t worried about the equipment exploding; they knew from experience that I was the one who blew up when the system failed to work.

Sam was standing by the door, arms folded across his chest, a curious expression on his face: kind of crafty, devious.

“Ready,” I called out. Then, “Stand clear.”

The latter call was strictly routine. The nearest human body to the equipment was several meters away, by the door. Except for me, and I made sure I was on the other side of the apparatus from the focus grid, shielded by the bulk of the plasma chamber.

As if I needed protection. I pushed the keypad that activated the equipment. It buzzed loudly. The plasma chamber glowed for a moment, then went dark. The sheet of monofilament stayed right there on the focus grid, just as it had since the first time I tried to make the godforsaken junk-pile perform.

I took a deep breath and started counting to one hundred.

Then I heard a scuffle behind me. Turning, I saw Sam had a hammer-lock on one of my grad students; he was dragging the kid toward me.

“He had this in his pocket,” Sam said, tossing me a slim plastic oblong from his free hand. The grad student was grimacing; Sam had his arm screwed up pretty tight behind his back.

“It’s a remote of some kind,” I muttered, turning the device over in my hand.

“He clicked it on just before you pressed the start button,” Sam said.

I turned to the student, W. W. Wilson. He was the beefy kind; I was surprised Sam could hold an arm-lock on him.

“Woody,” I asked, dumbfounded, “what the hell is this?”

Woody just glared at me, his chunky face red with either anger or pain. Maybe some of both. He was a biology graduate who had volunteered to work in my lab for a little extra spending money.

Sam hiked the Woody’s arm up a little higher and said, “You either tell us or I’ll personally pump you so full of babble juice your brain’ll shrink to the size of a walnut.”

“Go ahead and torture me!” Woody cried. “I’m prepared to suffer for my faith!”

“Let him go, Sam,” I said. “We’re not the Gestapo.”

Sam shot me a disapproving frown, but released Woody’s arm. I clicked the cover off the remote and studied its interior. It seemed simple enough. It looked somewhat like an old-fashioned cell phone. But it had no keypad, no display screen.

I looked up at Woody. “What frequency band does this work on?”

Woody just scowled at me as he rubbed his arm.

“I can find out for myself easily enough.” I started for the array of test equipment stored in the lab’s lockers.

“Microwave,” Woody muttered. “Just enough power to scramble the recognition circuitry.”

“Sabotage,” Sam growled. “A goddam saboteur planted here by the New Lunar Church.”

My heart sank.

“Not that bunch of pansies,” Woody snarled. “I was sent here by the New Morality, straight from Earthside headquarters in Atlanta.”

Sam jabbed a finger at him. “You must be doing real well in your bio classes.”

“I lead the class discussions in Intelligent Design,” Woody said, with some pride. “I can tie those Darwinians into pretzel knots.”

“And you screwed up Dan-o’s experiment.”

“I’ll do more than that!” Woody suddenly leaped past Sam and me and grabbed the cover of the plasma chamber. He ripped it off and threw it to the floor.

“I’ll wreck this Devil’s tool once and for all!” he yelled, reaching for the focal grid. The grid was oversized, much bigger than I needed it to be; I had scavenged it from a colleague’s experiment with a PET full-body scanner. Yet Woody was wrenching it out of its hold-down screws; the screech of the screws ripping out of the benchtop was enough to freeze my blood.

I was paralyzed with shock, but Sam sprang onto the kid’s back like a monkey jumping onto a racing horse, knocking him on top of the lab bench. They wrestled around on the half bent focal grid, arms and legs thrashing, grunting and swearing. Woody was much bigger, of course; he got atop Sam and started punching him with both fists.

It seemed like hours, but it was really only a few seconds. I finally came out of my surprised funk and grasped Woody by the shoulders and pulled him off Sam. I threw him to the floor; he hit with a heavy thud.

Sam sat up, a little groggily, on the focus grid. His nose was leaking a thin stream of blood; otherwise he looked okay.

“Sam, are you all right?”

He shook his head slightly. “Nothing rattles. That kid can’t punch worth shit. Hey, look out!”

I turned. Woody was on his feet. He slammed a fist onto the control panel keyboard. “Die, spawn of Satan!” he screamed.

The power thrummed, the plasma chamber pulsed, the overhead lights dimmed and then went dark. The emergency backup lights came on. But nothing else happened. Sam still sat on the focus grid, with that damned sheet of monofilament beneath his butt.

I swung around on Woody and socked him in the jaw as hard as I could. His head snapped back, his knees folded, and he collapsed to the floor, unconscious.

Sam whistled appreciatively. “That’s a helluva punch you’ve got there, Dan-o.” He jumped down from the bench and bent over Woody. “He’s out like a light.”

And from across the lab, where the receiving grid was, Sam Gunn said, “What’m I doing over here?”

I stared at Sam, clear on the other side of the lab. Then I turned back to Sam, who was still standing by the bench, right beside me.

Two of them!

I think I fainted.

When I came to, both Sams were standing over me. I was sitting on the floor next to Woody’s still-unconscious body, my back propped against the lab bench.

“Are you okay?” one of the Sams asked me.

“You need a doctor?” asked the other one.

I looked from one to the other. Identical, down to the number and location of his freckles.

“It worked,” I said. “The experiment. It worked!”

“Of course it worked,” said Sam I.

“Once this bozo stopped sabotaging it,” Sam II said, casting a frown at Woody.

My erstwhile lab assistant was groaning now, his legs shuffling back and forth. His eyes fluttered open.

Both Sams grabbed his arms and helped him up to a sitting position.

Woody looked at each of them in turn, his eyes widening with horror, his face going pasty white. He screeched like a giant fingernail scraping across a chalkboard, scrambled to his feet, and bolted for the door. My two other grad students were right behind him. They all looked terrified.

“Unclean!” Woody yelled as he tore out of the lab. “Unclean!”

Both Sams shook their heads. “He should’ve said ‘Eureka.’ ”

I struggled to my feet unassisted. I felt a little woozy, my legs rubbery, but my mind was whirling madly. I did it! I proved that entanglement can be used not merely to transmit macroscopic objects but to duplicate them: a human being, no less!

Visions of the Nobel danced through my head.

But then I thought of Ingrid. What would her reaction be?

A little unsteadily, I headed for my desk and the phone. Both Sams trailed along behind me.

Time for the moment of truth.

I phoned Ingrid right then and there, and asked her to come to my lab. In the phone’s smallish screen, her exquisite face looked more curious than anything else.

“To your lab?” she asked. “Right now?”

I nodded. “Big news. I want you to see it before anyone else does.”

Her expression changed immediately. To dread. “I’ll be there in a few moments.”

I paced the lab from one end to the other while the Sams got themselves into an argument.

“First thing we do is set up the tax shelter.”

“Better secure the spacecraft first. That Bishop MacTavish is going to try to seize it.”

“Let her! Once the tax shelter’s in operation we’ll have money pouring in.”

“Never let the enemy cut off your line of retreat.”

“We don’t need the ship anymore! We can just about print money, for God’s sake.”

“Print money?” Whichever Sam it was suddenly got a thoughtful, crafty look on his snub-nosed face. “Print money.”

The other Sam grinned at his twin. “Duplicate financial instruments. Ought to be a pile of money there.”

“Duplicate women!”

“Wow! Twins!”

“Made to order.”

“Now wait a minute,” I said. “The duplicator is mine, not yours.”

They both turned to me, their faces identically disappointed, stunned with betrayal.

“You wouldn’t refuse me the use of your contraption, would you, Dan-o?”

“After all, I’m the one who got you started on this experiment. Without me, you’d still be doodling with theory and equations.”

Before I could reply the lab door swung open and Ingrid strode in, looking like an avenging angel in a gold sweater and hip-hugging jeans. I nearly fainted again.

She said not a word, but stared at the two Sams for what seemed like an hour and a half. Both Sams grinned impishly at her and then bowed, simultaneously.

“You did it,” she said to me in a near-whisper.

“It was sort of an accident,” I began. “I had no intention of duplicating Sam.”

Ingrid sank to the nearest stool. I thought I saw tears in her eyes.

“Oh, Daniel,” she said, in a sorrowful moan. “Now all hell is going to break loose over you.”

To say that all hell broke loose would be an exaggeration, but not much of one. News of my success spread throughout Selene in a microsecond, it seemed. My grad students must have shouted it out to everyone they passed in the corridors, like Paul Revere warning of the redcoats.

Ingrid looked truly heartbroken, but when the Sams told her about Woody her chin snapped up and her eyes suddenly turned fiery.

“The New Morality?” she asked. “He said he was sent here directly by the New Morality?”

“Straight from their headquarters,” Sam I replied. Or was he Sam II?

“In Atlanta,” the other Sam added.

“They bypassed me to plant a spy in your laboratory?” Ingrid asked.

“That’s what he told us,” I said.

“They never told me about it,” she murmured. “They knew I’d be opposed to such a low trick.”

“They didn’t trust you,” said a Sam.

“No, they didn’t, did they?” Ingrid looked crestfallen, heartbroken. “They merely used me as a distraction while their spy did his best to ruin your experiment.”

“But they failed,” I said. “And I succeeded.”

She nodded, her expression turning even bleaker. “And what happens now, Daniel? What happens to you, my love? What happens to us?”

Before I could even begin to think of an answer, a quartet of Selene security police strode into the lab.

“By order of the council,” their leader pronounced, “these premises are to be evacuated and sealed until further notice.”

The Sams started to object, but the officer went on, “And Sam Gunn is hereby placed under protective custody.”

“You mean I’m going to jail?” both Sams yelped.

All four policemen fixed the two Sams with beady gazes. “Which of you is Sam Gunn?” their leader asked.

“I am,” said both Sams in unison.

The officer looked from one Sam to the other, obviously trying to decide what to do. Then he turned to his cohorts and commanded, “Bring ’em both in.”

The following morning I was awakened by a phone message inviting me to a meeting of Selene’s governing council, which would convene at eleven AM precisely. “Invite” is a relative term: when the governing council invites you, you show up, on time and ready to cooperate.

It wasn’t a trial, exactly. More of an executive hearing. It took place in a windowless conference room up in the executive office tower that rises from the middle of the Grand Plaza to the roof of the dome. The room’s walls were paneled with smart screens, much like the screens down at the Earthview restaurant, but when I entered, shortly before eleven, the walls were dead blank gray. Not a good sign, I thought.

The entire governing council of Selene was already seated at the oblong conference table, all six of them. Douglas Stavenger himself sat on one of the chairs lined along the wall. He hadn’t been on the council for years, but as the de facto leader of Selene, the man who had led the battle that resulted in Selene’s independence, he had obviously taken an interest in our case. He looked much younger than his calendar years: as everyone knew, Stavenger’s body was filled with nanomachines.

The council chairman was a prune-faced man with thinning gray hair. Obviously he didn’t take rejuvenation therapies, which led me to the conclusion that he was a religious Believer of one sort or another. He directed me to the empty chair at the foot of the table.

As I sat down I heard a raucous hullabaloo from the corridor outside. All heads turned toward the door, which burst open. Both Sams stalked in, escorted by a squad of uniformed security guards. Both Sams were yammering away like trip-hammers.

“What’s the idea of putting me in jail?”

“Who’s in charge here?”

“What’s this bull droppings about protective custody?”

“I want a lawyer!”

“I want two lawyers!”

“You can’t do this to me!”

One Sam Gunn jabbering nonstop is bad enough; here were two of them.

Pruneface, up at the head of the table, raised both his clawlike hands over his gray head. “Mr. Gunn!” he shouted, in a much more powerful voice than I’d have thought him capable of, “please shut up and sit down! There!” And he pointed to the two empty chairs flanking me.

“Why am I here?”

“What’s going on?”

“This is an emergency meeting of the governing council,” the chairman explained, in a slightly lower tone. “An informal hearing, if you will.”

Both Sams trudged grudgingly to the foot of the table and sat on either side of me.

“Now then,” the chairman said, from the head of the table, “Dr. Townes, could you kindly explain how in the world you produced a duplicate of Sam Gunn?”

I blinked at him. “You want me to explain how entanglement works?”

“In layman’s language, if you please.”

I glanced around at the other council members. Three women, two men. In their forties or older, I guessed from their appearances. Probably at least two of them were scientists or engineers: Selene’s population leans toward the technical professions.

I took a deep breath and began, “Basically, my device assesses the quantum states of the atoms in the subject and reproduces those quantum states in the atoms at the receiving end of the equipment.”

“It is a matter duplicator, then?”

“It was intended to be a transmitter, but, yes sir, it has functioned as a duplicator. There are still some details that are not quite clear, but—”

The door behind the chairman slid open and Ingrid entered the conference room, wearing a gold-trimmed white uniform with a choker collar and full-length trousers.

“I’m sorry to be late,” she said, her face deadly serious. “I wasn’t informed of this hearing until a few minutes ago.”

Everyone stood up.

“Bishop MacTavish,” murmured the chairman, indicating an empty chair halfway down the table.

Once we seated ourselves again, the chairman explained, “Bishop MacTavish is here as a qualified ethicist.”

“And a representative of the New Lunar Church,” said the councilman on the chairman’s right.

The Sam on my left squawked, “What’s the New Lunar Church got to do with this?”

“Excuse me, Mr. Chairman,” Ingrid said, “but I’m afraid you’re working under a misapprehension. I am here in my capacity as legal counsel.”

“For Rockledge Industries, et al,” muttered the Sam on my right.

“No,” Ingrid replied. “I am representing Dr. Townes.” And she smiled so sweetly at me that my heart nearly melted.

Both Sams leaned in to me and whispered, “Watch out. This could be a trap.”

Was Ingrid a Judas goat? I refused to believe it. But the possibility gnawed at me.

When the council members started asking me questions about my experiment Ingrid rose to her feet and said sternly, “This council has no legal right to question Dr. Townes, except as to how his work might affect the safety of Selene and its citizens.”

“But he’s duplicated a human being!” one of the councilwomen sputtered.

“Sam Gunn, no less,” grumbled the councilman beside her.

“I am morally opposed to such a duplication as much as any of you,” Ingrid said, still on her feet. “I regard it as little short of blasphemy. As a Believer and a Bishop of the New Lunar Church, I am appalled.”

Here it comes, I thought. She’ll recommend burning me at the stake.

But Ingrid went on, “Yet, as a woman who has lived in the freedom of a democratic civilization—and as an applicant for citizenship in your nation of Selene—I cannot support the imposition of limitations on Dr. Townes’s research, or on the intellectual freedom of any person.”

My eyebrows popped up almost to my scalp. Both Sams looked surprised; so did most of the council members. I saw Douglas Stavenger nodding his agreement, a slight smile of satisfaction on his face.

“The New Lunar Church has no objection to this work?” the council chairman asked.

“I shudder to think that a human being would aspire to usurping God’s creative powers,” Ingrid said. “But after having thought on the matter and prayed on it, I have concluded that Dr. Townes has not actually created a human being; he has merely duplicated one.”

“So the council has no moral right to object to his work?” asked the chairman.

“Not in my view, nor in the view of the New Lunar Church.”

“Very well,” said the chairman, a grin spreading across his face. “Now let’s get down to the real reason for this hearing. Dr. Townes, you caused a power outage through three-quarters of Selene. Is the university going to pay for that?”

“Power outage?” I gasped. “I thought it was only in my own lab.”

“Surely you noticed that the emergency lights were on throughout several levels for four hours after your experiment.”

“That contraption of yours drained the system,” grumped one of the councilmen, “knocked out two inverters, and overheated the coolant in the cryogenic transmission lines from our main solar panel farm, up on the surface.”

“It did?” Now that he mentioned it, I realized that after our little fracas in my lab the corridors had been lit by the emergency lamps. Even my quarters had been, when I got there after the police took Sam away.

“We can’t have that kind of drain on our power system,” said the chairman. “I think the council will agree that you must be prohibited from running your equipment again.”

“Until you can provide your own electrical power for it,” said the grumpy councilman.

Ingrid hadn’t sat down yet. Raising her voice over the murmurs of conversation buzzing around the table, she said, “If I may, I would like to take this opportunity to serve Mr. Gunn with the subpoenas I’ve been carrying.”

The chairman gestured grandly. “Go right ahead.”

“You can’t do that!” yelped one of the Sams.

The other, just as red-faced, added, “Selene’s constitution specifically states—”

“Our constitution,” said the chairman sternly, “allows specific exceptions to the extradition clause, Mr. Gunn.”

Both Sams snapped their jaws shut with audible clicks.

Turning to the Sams, Ingrid asked, “Which of you is the original?”

“He is,” said both Sams in unison, pointing at one another.

Ingrid frowned at them. “One of you is a copy. I have to serve these papers to the original.”

“That’s him,” they both said.

Ingrid looked from one of them to the other. Then she turned back to the chairman. “As you can see, although no one has the right to curtail Dr. Townes’s intellectual freedom, his experiment has created certain practical difficulties.”

I realized that I’d created a Pandora’s Box. So I compromised. Actually, I caved in. I promised the council that I’d dismantle my equipment and scrap it. I would not publish anything about my experiment. I would forget about entanglement and study other aspects of quantum physics.

Which meant I could kiss the Nobel Prize goodbye.

The council was very relieved. Ingrid, though, seemed strangely unhappy.

That evening in the cafeteria, as we nibbled at a dinner neither one of us had any appetite for, I said to her, “I thought you wanted me to scrap the duplicator.”

She gazed at me with those luminous azure eyes of hers. “I did, Daniel. But now I realize that I’ve ruined your life.”

“It’s not ruined, exactly.” “I’m dreadfully sorry.”

I tried to put a good face on the situation. “It’s a big universe, Ingrid. There are plenty of other questions for me to work on.”

“But you—”

A hubbub over by the doorway distracted us. Both Sams were scurrying through the cafeteria like a pair of spaniels hunting for a bone.

“Hey! There they are!” said Sam I to Sam II. Or vice versa.

They rushed to our table and pulled up chairs. “Gotta hurry Dan-o. My ship’s ready to leave.”

“Leave? For where?”

The other Sam replied, “Back to that black hole in the Kuiper Belt. Wanna come with me?”

Ingrid was immediately suspicious. “How did you get the money to—”

“Rockledge!” both Sams crowed. “And Masterson Aerospace and all those other big buffoons who were suing me.”

“They’re financing your mission to the Kuiper Belt?”

“Yeah.” The Sams’ grins were ear-to-ear. It was eerie: they were exactly alike. “They’re willing to pay mucho dinero to get rid of me.”

I got their meaning. “They’re hoping that this time you go away and stay away.”

Nodding and laughing, one of the Sams said, “Yeah. But what they don’t know is that only one of me is going.”

“And the other?”

They both shrugged.

“I don’t know,” said one. “Maybe I’ll go back into the zero-gee hotel business.”

“Or go back to the resort at Hell Crater,” said the other one.

“Or turn Selene into a tax shelter. How’s the Church of Rightful Investments sound to you?” They both winked at Ingrid simultaneously.

“You’ve stolen my matter transmitter!” I snapped.

A Sam raised both his hands in a gesture of innocence. “Me? Steal? No way!”

Before I could let out a satisfied sigh, though, the other Sam added, “But now that we know a transmitter can work, there oughtta be some bright physicist who’s willing to build me a new one.”

“Sam, you can’t!” Ingrid and I objected together.

They both grinned at us. “Maybe not. We’ll see.”

So I’m going out to the Kuiper Belt with one of the Sams. Much to my surprise and delight, Ingrid wants to go with me. She really does love me! We’re going to be married over an electronic link to the Vatican, no less, while we’re on our way out.

The Kuiper Belt. A mini-black hole. Maybe there really are aliens out there. Of course, that might be one of Sam’s tall tales, but what the hell, Ingrid’s with me and we’re bound to find something worth a Nobel out there.

It’s a big universe!