Short fiction complete, p.241
Short Fiction Complete, page 241
“Catch him! Stop him!”
I look around and here comes Larry Karsh, flailing around like a skinny spider on LSD, trying to catch up with his kid.
“Sam! Help!”
If I had thought about it for half a microsecond I would’ve let the kid bounce off the tube walls until he splattered himself on the next set of hatches. And Larry after him.
But, no—instinct took over and I shot through the hatch and launched myself after the baby like a torpedo on a rescue mission. S. Gunn, intrepid hero.
It was a long fall to the next set of hatches. I could see the kid tumbling around like a twenty-pound meteoroid, his little T-shirt flapping in the breeze, hitting the wall and skidding along it for a moment, then flinging out into midair again. He didn’t hit the wall so hard, at first, but each bump down the tube was going to be harder. I knew. If I didn’t catch him real fast, he’d get hurt. Bad.
There was nobody else in the damned tube, nobody there to grab him or brake his tall or even slow him down a little.
I started using the ladder rungs to propel myself faster, grabbing the rungs with my fingertips and pushing off them, one after another, faster and faster. Like the Lone Ranger chasing a runaway horse. Damned Coriolis force was getting to me, though, making me kind of dizzy.
As I got closer and closer, I saw that little T.J. wasn’t screaming with fear. He was screeching with delight, happy as a little cannonball, kicking his arms and legs and tumbling head over diaper, laughing hard as he could.
Next time he hits the wall he won’t be laughing anymore, I thought. Then I wondered if I could reach him before he slammed into the hatch at the bottom of this level of the tube. At the speed I was going I’d come down right on top of him and the kid wouldn’t be much of a cushion.
Well, I caught up with him before either of us reached the next hatch, tucked him under one arm like he was a wriggling football, and started trying to slow my fall with the other hand. It wasn’t going to work, I saw, so I flipped myself around so I was coming down feet-first and kept grabbing at rungs with my free hand, getting dizzier and dizzier. Felt like my shoulder was going to come off, and my hand got banged up pretty good, but at least we slowed down some.
The baby was crying and struggling to get loose. He’d been having fun, dropping like an accelerating stone. He didn’t like being saved. I heard Larry yelling and looked up; he was clambering down the ladder, all skinny arms and legs, jabbering like a demented monkey.
I hit the hatch feet first like I’d been dropped out of an airplane. I mean, I did my share of parachute jumps back when I was in astronaut training, but this time I hit a hell of a lot harder. Like my shinbones were shattering and my knees were trying to ram themselves up into my ribcage. I saw every star in the Milky Way and the wind was knocked out of me for a moment.
So I was sprawled on my back, kind of dazed, with the kid yelling to get loose from me, when Larry comes climbing down the ladder, puffing like he’d been trying to save the kid, and takes the yowling little brat in his arms.
“Gee, thanks, Sam,” he says. “I was changing his diaper when he got loose from me. Sorry about the mess.”
That’s when I realized that T.J.’s diaper had been loose and the ungrateful little so-and-so had peed all down the front of my shirt.
So I was late for my lunch date with Senator Meyers. My hand was banged up and swollen, my legs ached, my knees felt like they were going to explode, and the only other shirt I had brought with me was all wrinkled from being jammed into my travel bag. But at least it was dry. Even so, I got to the restaurant before she did. Jill was one of those women who has a deathly fear of arriving anywhere first.
I was so late, though, that she was only half a minute behind me. I hadn’t even started for a table yet; I was still in the restaurant’s teeny little foyer, talking with my buddy Omar.
“Am I terribly late?” Jill asked.
I turned at the sound of her voice and. I’ve got to admit, Jill looked terrific. I mean, she was as plain as vanilla. with hardly any figure at all, but she still looked bright and attractive and, well. I guess the right word is radiant. She was wearing a one-piece zipsuit, almost like the coveralls that we used to wear back on the NASA shuttle. But now her suit was made of some kind of shiny stuff and decorated with color accents and jewels. lake Polonius said: rich, not gaudy.
Her hair was a darker shade than I remembered it from the old days, and impeccably coiffed. She was dyeing it, I figured. And getting it done a lot better than she did when she’d been a working astronaut.
“You look like a million dollars,” I said as she stepped through the hatch into the restaurant’s foyer.
She grinned that freckle-faced grin of hers and said, “It costs almost that much to look like this.”
“It’s worth it,” I said.
Omar, my buddy from years back, was serving as the maitre d’ that afternoon. He was the general manager of the hotel, but everybody was pulling double or triple duty, trying to keep the place afloat. He loomed over us, painfully gaunt and tall as a basketball star, his black pate shaved bald, a dense goatee covering his chin. In the easy lunar gravity Omar could walk normally with nothing more than the lightest of braces on his atrophied legs. Omar had more to lose than I did if the hotel went bust. He’d have to go back to Earth and be a cripple.
As he showed us to our table, all dignity and seriousness, Jill cracked, “You’re getting gray, Sam.”
“Cosmic rays,” I snapped back at her. “Not age. I’ve been in space so much that primary cosmic rays have discolored my pigmentation.”
Jill nodded as if she knew better but didn’t want to argue about it. The restaurant was almost completely empty. It was the only place aboard the station to eat, unless you were a Rockledge employee and could use their cafeteria, yet still it was a sea of empty tables. I mean, there wasn’t any other place for the tourists to eat, it was lunch hour for those who came up from the States, but the Eclipse had that forlorn look. Three tables occupied, seventeen bare. Twelve human waiters standing around with nothing to do but run up my salary costs.
As Omar sat us at the finest table in the Eclipse (why not?) Jill said, “You ought to get some new clothes, Sam. You’re frayed at the cuffs, for goodness’ sake.”
I refrained from telling her about T.J.’s urinary gift. But I gave her the rest of the story about my thrilling rescue, which nobody had witnessed except the butterfingered Jack Spratt.
“My goodness, Sam, you saved that baby’s life,” Jill said, positively glowing at me.
“I should’ve let him go and seen how high he’d bounce when he hit the hatch.”
“Sam!”
“In the interest of science,” I said.
“Don’t be mean.”
“He’s supposed to be a bouncing baby boy, isn’t he?”
She did not laugh.
“Dammit, Jill, they shouldn’t have brought a kid up here,” I burst out. “It’s not right. There ought to be a regulation someplace to prevent idiots from bringing their lousy brats to my hotel!”
Jill was not helpful at all. “Sam,” she told me, her expression severe, “we made age discrimination illegal half a century ago.”
“This isn’t age discrimination,” I protested. “That baby isn’t a voting citizen.”
“He’s still a human being who has rights. And so do his parents.”
I am not a gloomy guy, but it felt like a big rain cloud had settled over my head. Little T.J. was not the only one pissing on me.
But I had work to do. As long as Jill was here, I tried to make the best of it. I started spinning glorious tales of the coming bonanza in space manufacturing, once we could mine raw materials from the Moon or asteroids.
I never mentioned our weightless escapades, but she knew that I held that trump card. Imagine the fuss the media would make if they discovered that the conservative senator from New Hampshire had once been a wild woman in orbit. With the notorious Sam Gunn, of all people!
“What is it you want, Sam?” Jill asked me. That’s one of the things I liked best about her. No bull-hickey. She came straight to the point.
So I did, too. “I’m trying to raise capital for a new venture.”
Before I could go any further, she fixed me with a leery eye. “Another new venture? When are you going to stop dashing around after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Sam?”
I gave her a grin. “When I get my hands on the gold.”
“Is that what you’re after, money? Is that all that you’re interested in?”
“Oh no,” I said honestly. “What I’m really interested in is the things money can buy.”
She frowned; it was part annoyance, part disappointment. I guess. Easy for her. She was born well-off, married even better, and now was a wealthy widowed United States Senator. Me, I was an orphan at birth, raised by strangers. I’ve always had to claw and scrabble and kick and bite my way to wherever I had to go. There was nobody around to help me. Only me, all five foot three—excuse me, five foot five inches of me. All by myself. You’re damned right money means a lot to me. Most of all, it means respect. Like that old ballplayer said, the home-run hitters drive the Cadillacs. I also noticed, very early in life, that they also get the best-looking women.
“OK,” I back-peddled. “So money can’t buy happiness. But neither can poverty. I want to get filthy rich. Is there anything wrong with that?”
Despite her New England upbringing, a taint smile teased at the corners of Jill’s mouth. “No, I suppose not,” she said softly.
So I went into the details about my hopes tor lunar mining and asteroid prospecting. Jill listened quietly; attentively, I thought, until I finished my pitch.
She toyed with her wine glass as she said, “Mining the Moon. Capturing asteroids. All that’s a long way off, Sam.”
“It’s a lot closer than most people realize,” I replied, in my best-behaved, serious man of business attitude. Then I added, “It’s not as far in the future as our own space shuttle missions are in the past.”
Jill sighed, then grinned maliciously. “You always were a little bastard, weren’t you?”
I grinned back at her. “What’s the accident of my birth got to do with it?”
She put the wine glass down and hunched closer to me. “Just what are you after, Sam, specifically?” I think she was enjoying the challenge of dealing with me.
I answered, “I want to make sure that the big guys like Rockledge and Yamagata don’t slit my throat.”
“How can I help you do that?”
“You’re on the commerce committee and the foreign relations committee, right? I need to be able to assure my investors that the Senate won’t let my teeny little company be squashed flat by the big guys.”
“Your investors? Like who?”
I refused to be rattled by her question. “I’ll find investors,” I said firmly, “once you level the playing field for me.”
Leaning back in her chair, she said slowly, “You want me to use my influence as a United States Senator to warn Rockledge and the others not to muscle you.”
I nodded.
Jill thought about it for a few silent moments, then she asked, “And what’s in it for me?”
Good old straight-from-the-shoulder Jill. “Why,” I said, “you get the satisfaction of helping an old friend to succeed in a daring new venture that will bring the United States back to the forefront of space industrialization.”
She gave me a look that told me that wasn’t the answer she had wanted to hear. But before I could say anything more, she muttered, “That might win six or seven votes in New Hampshire, I guess.”
“Sure,” I said. “You’ll be a big hero with your constituents, helping the little guy against the big, bad corporations.”
“Cut the serenade, Sam,” she snapped. “You’ve got something else going on in that twisted little brain of yours; I can tell. What is it?”
She was still grinning as she said it, so I admitted, “Well, there’s a rumor that Rockledge is developing an antinausea remedy that’ll stop space sickness. It could mean a lot for my hotel.”
“I hear your zero g sex palace is on its way to bankruptcy.”
“Not if Rockledge will sell me a cure for the weightless whoopies.”
“You think they’d try to keep it from you?”
“Do vultures eat meat?”
She laughed and started in on her plate of soyburger.
After lunch I took Jill down to her minisuite in the hub and asked how she liked her accommodations.
“Well,” she said, drawing the word out, “it’s better than the old shuttle mid-deck, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” I was shocked. “Each one of Heaven’s rooms is a luxurious, self-contained minisuite.” I quoted from our publicity brochure.
Jill said nothing until I found her door and opened it for her, with a flourish.
“Kind of small, don’t you think?” she said.
“Nobody’s complained about the size,” I replied. Then I showed her the controls that operated the minibar, the built-in sauna, the massage equipment, and the screen that covered the observation port.
“A real love nest,” Jill said.
“That’s the idea.”
I opened the observation port’s screen and we saw the Earth hanging out there, huge and blue and sparkling. Then it slid past as the station revolved and we were looking at diamond-hard stars set against the velvet black of space. It was gorgeous, absolutely breathtaking.
And then we heard somebody vomiting in the next compartment. The hotel’s less than one-quarter full and my crack-brained staff books two zero g compartments next to one another!
But Jill just laughed. “This hotel isn’t going to prosper until somebody comes up with a cure for space sickness.”
“That’s what Rockledge is doing,” I grumbled. “Right aboard this station.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Jill pursed her lips. Then, “Let me ask D’Argent about that. Unofficially, of course. But maybe I can find out something for you.”
My eyes must have widened. “You’d do that for me?”
Jill touched my cheek with cool fingertips. “Of course I would. Sam. You have no idea of the things I’d do for you, if you’d only let me.”
That sounded dangerous to me. So I bid her a hasty adieu and pushed through her doorway, heading for my cubbyhole of an office. Jill just gave me a sphinxlike inscrutable smile as I floated out of her compartment.
When I got back to my office there was more depressing news on my computer screen. A contingent of Rockledge board members and junior executives were scheduled for a tour of the station and its facilities. They would be staying for a week and had booked space in my hotel—at the discount prices Rockledge commanded as my landlord. Those prices, negotiated before I had ever opened Heaven, were lower than the rent D’Argent was now charging me. If I filled the hotel with Rockledge people I could go bankrupt even faster than I was.
And they were all bringing their wives. And children! Larry, Melinda, and their bouncing baby boy were just the first wave of the invasion of the weightless brats. I began to think about suicide. Or murder.
I can’t describe the horrors of that week. By actual count there were only twenty-two kids. The oldest was fifteen and the youngest was little T.J., ten months or so. But it seemed like there were hundreds of them, thousands. Everywhere I turned there were brats getting in my way, poking around the observation center; getting themselves stuck in hatches; playing tag along the tubes that connected the station’s hub with its various wheels; yelling, screaming; tumbling; fighting; throwing food around; and just generally making my life miserable.
Not only my life. Even the honeymooners started checking out early, with howls of protest at the invasion of the underage monsters and dire threats about lawsuits.
“You’ll pay for ruining our honeymoon,” was the kindest farewell statement any of them made.
The brats took over the zero g gym. It looked like one of those old martial arts films in there, only in weightlessness. They were swarming all over the padded gym, kicking, thrashing, screaming, arms and legs everyplace, howls and yelps and laughing and crying. One five-year-old girl, in particular, had a shriek that could cleave limestone.
I tried to get the three teenagers among them to serve as guardians—guards, really—for the younger tots. I offered them damned good money to look after the brats. The two girls agreed with no trouble. The one boy—fourteen, sullen, face full of zits—refused. He was the son of one of the board members. “My mother didn’t bring me up here to be a babysitter,” he growled.
As far as I could see, the only thing the pizza-faced jerk did was hang around the hub weightlessly and sulk.
I couldn’t blame the honeymooners for leaving. Who wants to fight your way through a screaming horde of little monsters to get to your zero g love nest? It was hopeless. I could see D’Argent smiling that oily smile of his; he knew I was going down in flames and he was enjoying every minute of it.
And right in the middle of it were Larry and Melinda and their bouncing baby boy—who really did bounce around a lot off the padded walls of the gym. T.J. loved it in there, especially with all the other kids to keep him company. The two teenaged girls made him their living doll. And T.J. seemed to look out with his ten-month-old eyes at the whole noisy, noisome gang of kids as if they were his personal play-toys, a swirling, riotous, colorful mobile made up of twenty-two raucous, runny-nosed, rotten kids.
Make that twenty-one kids and one fourteen-year-old moper.
I found that Larry and Melinda started feeding the baby in the gym. “It’s easier than doing it in the restaurant or in our own quarters,” Melinda said, as T.J. gummed away at some pulpy baby goop. “Practically no mess at all.”
I could see what she meant. They just hovered in midair with the baby. Three-fourths of what they aimed at the brat’s mouth wound up in his ear or smeared over his face or spit into the air. Being weightless, most of the stuff just broke into droplets or crumbs and drifted along in the air currents until they stuck on one of the intake ventilator screens. At the end of the meal Larry would break out a hand vacuum and clean off the screens while Melinda cleaned the baby with premoistened towels. Not bad, I had to admit. Didn’t have to mop the floor or clean any furniture.
