Ben Bova: Nursery Sam

Illustration by Kelly Freas

I was trying to get away from the senator who wanted to marry me. So I’m sitting in the Clipper—riding tourist fare—waiting for the engines to light off and fly us to my zero g hotel, when who traipses into the cabin but Jack Spratt and his wife.

With a baby.

I scrunched way down in my seat. I didn’t want them to see me. I had enough troubles without a pissed-off former employee staring daggers at me for the whole ride up to orbit.

His name wasn’t really Jack Spratt, of course. It was Larry Karsh, and he had been a pretty key player in my old company, VCI. But that goddamnable Pierre D Argent, the silver-haired slimeball, had hired him away from me and Larry wouldn’t have gone to work at Rockledge if he hadn’t been sore at me for some reason. Damned if I knew what.

OK, maybe I shouldn’t have called them the Spratts. But you know, Larry was so skinny he hardly cast a shadow and Melinda was—well, the kindest word is zaftig, I guess. She could just look at a potato chip and gain two kilos. Larry could clean out a whole shopping mall’s worth of junk food and never put on an ounce. So with him such a classic ectomorph and Melinda so billowy despite every diet in the world, it just seemed natural to call them Jack Spratt and his wife.

I guess it irritated Larry.

Well, I didn’t like the idea of bringing a baby up to my zero g hotel. Business was lousy enough up there without some mewling, puking ball of dirty diapers getting in everybody’s way Heaven—that was my name for the hotel—was supposed to be for honeymooners. Oh, I’d take tourists of any sort, but I always thought of Heaven as primarily a honeymoon hotel. You know, sex in free-fall; weightless lovemaking.

For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why people didn’t flock to Heaven. I thought I had a terrific motto for the hotel: “If you like water beds, you’ll love zero g.”

OK, OK, so most people got sick their first day or so in weightlessness. It’s a little like seasickness: you feel kind of nauseous, like you’re coming down with the flu. You feel like you’re falling all the time; you want to upchuck and just generally die. Of course, after a while it all goes away and you’re floating around in zero g and you start to feel terrific. Scientists have even written reports about what they call “microgravity euphoria.” It’s wonderful!

But first you’ve got to get over the miseries. And I knew damned well that Rockledge was working on a cure for space sickness, right there in the same space station as my Hotel Heaven. But even if they found the cure, who do you think would be the last person in the Solar System that Pierre D’Argent would sell it to?

That’s right. Sam Gunn, Esq. Me.

Me, I love weightlessness. God knows I’ve spent enough time in zero g. The idea for the honeymoon hotel came out of plenty of practical experience, believe me. In fact, the senator who wanted to marry me had been one of my first datum points in my research on zero g sex, years ago. She had been a fellow astronaut, back in the days when we both worked for the old NASA.

But it only takes a few newlyweds tossing their cookies when free-fall first hits them to sour the whole damned travel industry on the idea of honeymooning in Heaven. As one travel agent from North Carolina told me, sweetly, “Even if you don’t get sick yourself, who wants to spend a vacation listening to other people puking?”

I tried beefing up the acoustical insulation in the suites, but Heaven got the reputation of being like an ocean liner that’s always in rough seas. And to this day I’m still convinced that D’Argent used Rockledge’s high-powered public relations machine to bad-mouth Heaven. D Argent hated my guts, and the feeling was mutual.

And now Jack Spratt and his wife are bringing a baby up to Heaven. Perfect.

They sat two rows in front of me: Larry Karsh, Melinda, and a squirming dribbling baby that couldn’t have been more than nine or ten months old. Larry had filled out a little in the couple of years since I had last seen him, but he still looked like an emaciated scarecrow. Melinda had slimmed down a trace. Maybe. They still looked like Jack Spratt and his wife. And baby I could feel my face wrinkling into the grandfather of all frowns. A baby aboard a space station? That’s crazy! It’s sabotage! Yet, try as I might, I couldn’t think of any company rules or government regulations that prohibited people from bringing babies to Heaven. It just never occurred to me that anybody would. Well, I’ll fix that, I told myself. What the hell kind of a honeymoon hotel has a baby running around in it? Upchucking is bad enough; we don’t need dirty diapers and a squalling brat in orbit. They’re going to ruin the whole idea of Heaven.

The Clipper took off normally; we pulled about three g s for a minute or so. The cabin was less than half full; plenty of empty seats staring at me like the Ghost of Bankruptcy To Come. I scrunched deeper in my seat so Jack Spratt and his wife wouldn’t see me. But I was listening for the yowling that I knew was on its way.

Sure enough, as soon as the engines cut off and we felt weightless, the baby started screaming. The handful of paying passengers all turned toward the kid, and Larry unbuckled himself and drifted out of his seat.

“Hey, T.J., don’t holler,” he said, in the kind of voice that only an embarrassed father can put out. While he talked, he and Melinda unbuckled the brat from his car seat.

The baby kicked himself free of the last strap and floated up into his father’s arms. His yowling stopped. He gurgled. I knew what was coming next: his breakfast.

But instead the kid laughed and waved his chubby little arms. Larry barely touched him, just sort of guided him the way you’d tap a helium-filled balloon.

“See?” he cooed. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”

The baby laughed. The passengers smiled tolerantly. Me, I was stunned that Jack Spratt had learned how to coo.

Then he spotted me, slumped down so far in my seat I was practically on the floor. And it’s not easy to slump in zero g; you really have to work at it.

“Sam!” he blurted, surprised. “I didn’t know you were on this flight.” And Melinda turned around in her chair and gave me a strained smile.

“I didn’t know you had a baby,” I said, trying not to growl in front of the paying customers.

Larry floated down the aisle to my row, looking so proud of his accomplishment you’d think nobody had ever fathered a son before. “Timothy James Karsh, meet Sam Gunn. Sam, this is TJ.”

He glided T.J. in my direction, the baby giggling and flailing both his arms and legs. For just the flash of a second I thought of how much fun it would be to play volleyball with the kid, but instead I just sort of held him like he was a Ming vase or something. I didn’t know what the hell to do with a baby!

But the baby knew. He looked me straight in the eye and spurted out a king-sized juicy raspberry, spraying me all over my face. Everybody roared with laughter.

I shoved the kid back to Larry, thinking that baseball might be more fun than volleyball.

In the fifty-eight minutes it took us to go from engine cut-off to docking with the space station, T.J. did about eleven thousand somersaults, seventy-three dozen midair pirouettes, and god knows how many raspberries. Everybody enjoyed the show, at first. The women especially gushed and gabbled and talked baby-talk to the kid. They reached out to hold him, but little T.J. didn’t want to be held. He was having a great time floating around the tourist cabin and enjoying weightlessness.