Ben Bova - The Sam Gunn Omnibus

“NO WONDER SAM’ S in hiding,” said Jill Meyers that evening. She had invited Jade to dinner in the suite she had rented under an assumed name: Minerva de Guerre.

“This is going to make him burrow even deeper, wherever he is,” Jade said unhappily, picking at the salad before her.

Meyers shook her head, equally dismayed. “I had a talk with Doug Stavenger this afternoon. Strictly informal, of course. You’d think in a community as small and tight as Selene it’d be impossible for Sam to hide for long.”

Jade said, “There’ve been people living in the equipment and storage levels for years, castoffs and hideaways existing on their wits. I’ve even heard that sometimes they break into the emergency shelters up on the surface and live there for as long as they dare.”

“Stavenger didn’t mention that.”

“He wouldn’t, not to a distinguished visitor. He wouldn’t want you to know there’s an underground subculture in Selene.”

“Why does the governing council permit it?”

Jade shrugged. ”It’s small enough so that it would be more trouble to root out than it’s worth. At least, that’s the official line.”

“This isn’t going to help us find Sam.”

“No,” Jade agreed. “It isn’t.”

Meyers drummed her fingers on the table top. “There’s got to be a way to find Sam.”

“But if we do, La Marlowe will get him. One way or the other.”

“What’s she really after?” Meyers wondered aloud. “I mean, Sam doesn’t have anything in the way of assets, does he? He must be pretty close to broke.”

With a slight shake of her head, Jade answered, “He must have something that she’s interested in.”

“But what could it be?”

Jumbo Jim Gradowsky was a large man, terminally untidy in his clothing and personal habits, his desk a perpetual disaster area. And he was clearly unhappy.

“You’re moping,” he said to Jade. Despite the successes of Jade’s series on Sam Gunn, Solar News’s corporate headquarters on Earth had not deigned to enlarge the office space in Selene. Profits first, was the motto in Orlando.

Sitting in front of Jumbo Jim’s messy, cluttered desk, Jade nodded despondently. “I guess I am moping,” she admitted.

“You’re going through your assignments like a sleepwalker,” Jim added, pushing aside a small mountain of reports and memos to reach for the milkshake mug on the corner of his desk. Several of the monomolecular sheets slid languidly to the floor.

“I guess I am,” Jade repeated. Then, pulling herself up straighter, she said, “It’s this Sam Gunn thing. I can’t get it out of my mind.”

Gradowsky took a long pull on his milkshake. Wiping chocolate foam from his lips with the back of his hand, he said, “All right, here’s what I’m going to do. You’re off all assignments for the next three days. You spend the time tracking Sam down.”

“Three days? Jim! Thanks!” Jade wanted to jump over the desk and kiss him.

“Three days,” Gradowsky warned, holding up three fingers. “Then I want you here with all your brains working.”

“Thanks, Jim,” she repeated, bolting from the chair and heading for the door.

Monica Bianco was sympathetic but not terribly helpful. Her office, like Jade’s, was nothing more than a cubicle with shoulder-high partitions, although she had adorned the wobbly walls with photos of her abundant family back Earthside. Every timeJade saw the pictures she thought about how much she wished she had a family. But she had no one—except, maybe, Sam Gunn.

“I don’t see how you can flush him out,” Monica was saying. “If he’s squirreled away in the maintenance level or out in one of the emergency shelters it’d take a small army to find him.”

Jade agreed gloomily. But she insisted, “There’s got to be some way.”

“Like what?”

“Like … I don’t know.”

Monica leaned back in her chair. “You’ve been following Sam’s life for the past three years. Don’t you have a feeling for how he thinks? How his mind works?”

“Well, sort of.”

“So?”

Jade thought about it for several silent moments. Then it hit her. “That’s it!” she shouted, and ran from Monica’s office, leaving the older woman sitting open-mouthed behind her desk.

Sam wouldn’t hide out in some ratty corner of a warehouse, she told herself as she slid behind the desk in her own cubicle. Not Sam!

She called up the guest list of the Selenite Hotel, the poshest hostelry on the Moon. He wouldn’t use his own name, of course, Jade told herself as she scanned the list. Some of the names were blanked out and photo IDs missing, guests who wanted complete privacy.

Then she spotted a face that was obviously phony. A gold turban wrapped around the head of a man whose luxuriant black beard was so thick that all she could see of his face was a generous beak of a nose and tiny, squinty eyes of some indeterminate light color.

Who else? Jade asked herself.

The name beneath the image read “Sri Malabar Singh Satay.” Jade laughed aloud. A phony if I ever saw one! she told herself. Just as phony as that snout and beard.

To make sure, she looked up his biography. It was impressive. If the data could be believed, Malabar Singh Satay was one of Earth’s foremost musicians, a concert pianist, and scion of a fabulously wealthy Sikh family that had fled the biowar that had depopulated the Indian subcontinent and now made their principal residence on the island of Malabar in the East Indies.

Yeah, right! Jade said to herself. So what’s he doing on the Moon?

She contacted the Selenite Hotel and was put through to Mr. Satay’s suite with only a minimum of delay. A darkly beautiful woman with large, lustrous eyes answered her call and agreed, in a silky voice that carried an exotic slightly singsong lilt, to allow Jade to interview Mr. Satay that very afternoon.

Jade laughed to herself all the way to the hotel. He thinks he can fool me with that phony beard and schnozzola, she thought. Fingering the voice analyzer she was carrying in her purse, Jade told herself, I’ve got his voiceprint on the chip; no matter what kind of crazy accent he tries to use, the analyzer will pin him down. Once it chimes, Sam’s game is up.

The same woman opened the door to Satay’s suite and welcomed Jade in with a bow and a sweeping gesture. Despite the fact that she wearing a perfectly ordinary pants suit and hardly any jewelry at all, she looked exotic and terribly beautiful to Jade. Must be the perfume, Jade told herself as she followed the woman into a sumptuously furnished living room. A massive grand piano stood in one corner, beneath a smart screen that showed a view of the long-destroyed Taj Mahal.

“I am Indra,” the young woman said. “Mr. Satay’s daughter.”

Daughter? Jade immediately felt her face flush with emotion. But before she could say a word, Malabar Singh Satay stepped into the room like a Mogul emperor entering his throne chamber.

He was much taller than Jade had expected, his skin a dark, almost coppery color. The turban adds to his height, she told herself. And the beard hides most of his face.

“Ms. Inconnu,” said Satay in a low, gravely voice. He pressed his hands together before his face and dipped his chin slightly. The voice analyzer in Jade’s purse remained silent.

She bowed back, self-consciously. “Mr. Satay,” she murmured. She saw that he was wearing white silk gloves. To protect his pianist’s hands, she thought. And not leave any fingerprints.

Satay was much taller than Sam would be, Jade realized. Tall and slim and somehow elegant-looking in a thigh-length brocaded jacket with a high, tight collar. He gestured Jade to the striped couch in the middle of the big room, then perched straight-backed on the facing armchair. Indra moved silently behind Jade; she couldn’t tell if the woman had taken a chair or left the room altogether.