Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

“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.