Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

“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!

Daniel C. Townes IV got to his feet like a long, lanky ladder unfolding.

“That’s about it,” he said. “Sam’s already aboard his torch ship. Ingrid and I will shuttle out to it an hour from now.”

Jade sputtered, “But… two Sams?”

The physicist nodded somberly. “I don’t know if one solar system is enough to hold two Sam Gunns. Maybe one of them would be better off going through that black hole.”

He turned toward the door to Jade’s office.

“Wait!” she cried, getting up and starting around her desk. “I’ve got half a million questions I need answered!”

Townes shook his head. “Sorry. No time. I just thought you ought to know what Sam’s been up to since he returned to Selene.”

He dipped his chin in a brief nod, then ducked through the door and was gone.

Leaving Jade standing in her cubbyhole office, her thoughts in a whirl.

Two Sams? she asked herself. Can I believe that? Was Townes telling the truth?

She sank back into her swivel chair. For a long while she simply sat there while her mind spun out questions to which she had no answers.

But at last she muttered to herself, “Sam’s here. In Selene. One of them is, at least. He’s here. And I’ve got to find him.”

But how? she wondered. I need help. And then it hit her: There’s somebody else who wants to find Sam really badly. Turning to her desktop console, Jade said, “Phone, find Senator Jill Meyers. I need to speak with her.”

Jade was surprised at how nervous she felt as she waited in the arrivals lounge at Selene’s Armstrong Spaceport. In ten minutes the shuttle from Space Station Epsilon would arrive, and her plan to smoke Sam Gunn out of hiding would start to unfold. She hoped.

Rocket shuttles from the space stations orbiting Earth were never delayed by weather or traffic. Once they broke orbit they were essentially in a dead fall that ended at Armstrong’s scoured and blasted concrete pads out on the floor of the giant crater Alphonsus.

Too nervous to remain seated, Jade paced along the curving glassteel window that looked out at the landing area. Two spindly-looking shuttles were standing on their pads. Beyond them the sky was as black as infinity but studded with brilliant hard pinpoints of stars and the streaming whiteness of the Milky Way. Out on the horizon she could see the low, slumped, tired-looking mountains that formed Alphonsus’s ringwall.

Jane Avril Inconnu was a petite, slim young woman with jade-green eyes and flaming red hair that she had allowed to curl down to her shoulders. In her fitted tunic and slacks of grayish green she looked almost elfin. Several of the other people waiting in the lounge seemed to recognize her from the videos she had hosted, but none of them had the courage to come up and speak to her. For which she was grateful; she had enough on her mind without trying to make friendly chitchat.

Can we do it? she asked herself for the thousandth time. Can we get him to come out into the open? Despite having spent the past several years of her life producing biographical videos about Sam Gunn, she had never met the wily, devious little imp himself.

A glint of light caught her eye. Again, another sparkle against the starry black sky. As she watched, her nose almost pressed against the cold glassteel window, she saw the shuttle take shape, its ungainly silhouette glittering in the harsh light of the distant Sun.

The shuttle touched down, feather soft, on the hot jets of its retros, blowing dust and grit across the landing pad. An access tunnel wormed out like a wheeled caterpillar and connected to its main hatch.

Jade ran to the reception area, suddenly as impatient as a schoolgirl. Working her way to the front of the small crowd waiting for the arrivals to get through customs, she wondered yet again if she could carry her plan through to success.

At last Jill Meyers appeared in the doorway, a small travel bag clutched in one hand. She saw Jade and grinned maliciously. Meyers was short and stubby, her face round and snub-nosed, with a sprinkling of freckles. Her light brown hair was cut short, and she wore a nondescript beige travel suit.

The older woman hugged Jade with her free arm while several of the other debarking passengers stared. Jill Meyers, former U.S. Senator and a respected judge on the International Court of Justice, was immediately recognizable.

Before Jade could say hello or even take a breath, Meyers whispered into her ear, “Now we get that little SOB to marry me!”

It wasn’t easy to keep Jill Meyers’s arrival in Selene a secret, but Jade figured that if Sam did find out that she was on the Moon it might help to smoke him out of hiding. She even half-expected Sam to show up in her office, sooner or later, brash and breezy, ready to embark on some twisty scheme or other.

Jade was not prepared, however, for the Beryllium Blonde.

She recognized Jennifer Marlowe immediately from the disks she had reviewed while producing her Sam Gunn bios. She was golden blonde, radiantly so, with long legs, wide innocent eyes of cornflower blue, and a figure that would drive any man to wild testosterone-soaked fantasies. Dressed in a glittering metallic sheath that hugged her curves deliciously, she swept unannounced into Jade’s cubbyhole of an office.

“Good morning,” she said, with a gleaming smile. “I’m Jennifer Marlowe, of the law firm of Raippe, Pillage and Burns.”

Astonished, Jade slowly rose from her desk chair and said, “Yes, you are, aren’t you?”

Marlowe sat on the spindly chair before Jade’s desk, still smiling enough wattage to light a shopping mall. But there was something cold behind her smile, Jade thought. Something hard and hostile.

“What can I do for you?” Jade asked, settling back into her own swivel chair.

The smile dimmed somewhat. “I’m here on a rather delicate matter, Ms. Inconnu.”

“Call me Jade; everybody does.”

“Your eyes. Of course.”

“Does this ‘delicate matter’ have anything to do with Sam Gunn?”

The Blonde sighed dramatically. “Of course. Who else?”

“I thought all those lawsuits against Sam had been settled,” said Jade.

“All but one,” the Blonde replied.

Jade raised her eyebrows a notch, waiting.

“A breach of promise suit,” the Blonde explained. “Sam promised to marry me—”

“Marry you!” Jade blurted, shocked. “Marry you?”

“That’s right,” the Blonde replied gravely. “And I’m here to see that he makes good on his promise. Or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I’ll take all his assets. Every penny. I’ll leave him with nothing but the clothes on his back. Maybe not even that much.”