by Ben Bova
“By their fruits ye shall know them,” the angel replied.
“What are you talking about?”
Still smiling, the angel replied, “When the devil makes a deal for a soul, what does he promise? Temporal gifts, such as power, wealth, respect, women, fame.”
“I have all that,” the man said. “I’m on top of the world, everyone knows that.”
“Indeed.”
“And I didn’t sign any deals with the devil to get there, either,” he added smugly.
“None that you know of,” the angel warned. “A man in your position delegates many decisions to his staff, does he not?”
The man’s face went gray. “Oh my God, you don’t think . . .”
With a shrug, the angel said, “It doesn’t matter. The deal that I offer guarantees your soul’s salvation, if you meet the terms.”
“How? What do I have to do?”
“You have power, wealth, respect, women, fame.” The angel ticked each point off on his slender, graceful fingers.
“Yes, yes, I know.”
“You must give them up.”
The man lurched forward in the wingchair. “Huh?”
“Give them up.”
“I can’t!”
“You must, if you are to attain the Kingdom of Heaven.”
“But you don’t understand! I just can’t drop everything! The world doesn’t work that way. I can’t just. . .walk away from all this.”
“That’s the deal,” the angel said. “Give it up. All of it. Or spend eternity in hell.”
“But you can’t expect me to—” He gaped. The angel was no longer in the room with him. For several minutes he stared into empty air. Then, knees shaking, he arose and walked to the closet. It too was empty of strange personages.
He looked down at his hands. They were trembling.
“I must he going crazy,” he muttered to himself. “Too much strain. Too much tension.” But even as he said it, he made his way to the telephone on the bedside table. He hesitated a moment, then grabbed up the phone and punched a number he had memorized months earlier.
“Hello. Chuck? Yes, this is me. Yes, yes, everything went fine tonight. Up to a point.”
He listened to his underling babbling flattery into the phone, wondering how many times he had given his power of attorney to this weakling and to equally venal deputies.
“Listen, Chuck,” he said at last. “I have a job for you. And it’s got to be done right, understand? Okay, here’s the deal—” He winced inwardly at the word. But, taking a deep manly breath, he plunged ahead.
“You know the Democrats are setting up their campaign quarters in that new apartment building—what’s it called, Watergate? Yeah. Okay. Now I think it would serve our purposes very well if we bugged the place before the campaign really starts to warm up . . .”
There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. But from far, far away, he could hear a heavenly chorus singing.
ISOLATION AREA
Here’s Sam Gunn again, the leather-lunged, sawed-off, skirt-chasing entrepreneur who bends the rules into pretzels in his quest to strike it rich.
“Isolation Area” deals with the period of Sam’s life when he takes that first scary step toward becoming the solar system’s premier big-time space entrepreneur. In a subtler way it is also the story of the friendship between two men, and of the new freedoms that we will find as we begin to live and work—and love—in space.
They faced each other suspiciously, floating weightlessly in emptiness.
The black man was tall, long-limbed, loose, gangling; on Earth he might have made a pro basketball player. His utilitarian coveralls were standard issue, frayed at the cuffs and so worn that whatever color they had been originally had long since faded into a dull gray. They were clean and pressed to a razor sharpness, though. The insignia patch on his left shoulder said Administration. A strictly nonregulation belt of royal blue, studded with rough lumps of meteoric gold and clamped by a heavy gold buckle, cinched his narrow waist and made him look even taller and leaner.
He eyed the reporter warily. She was young, and the slightly greenish cast to her pretty features told him that she had never been in orbit before. Her pale blond hair was shoulder length, he judged, but she had followed the instructions given to groundlings and tied it up in a zero-gee snood. Her coveralls were spanking new white. She filled them nicely enough, although she had more of a figure than he cared for.
Frederick Mohammed Malone was skeptical to the point of being hostile toward this female interloper. The reporter could see the resentment smoldering in the black man’s eyes. Malone’s face was narrow, almost gaunt, with a trim little Vandyke jutting out from his chin. His forehead was high, receding; his hair cropped close to the skull. She guessed Malone’s age at somewhere in the early forties, although she knew that living in zero gravity could make a person look much younger than his or her calendar age.
She tried to restart their stalled conversation. “I understand that you and Sam Gunn were, uh, friends.”
“Why’re you doing a story on Sam?” Malone asked, his voice low and loaded with distrust.
The two of them were in Malone’s “office”: actually an observation blister in the central hub of space station Alpha. Oldest and still biggest of the Earth-orbiting stations, Alpha was built on the old wheels-within-wheels scheme. The outermost rim, where most of the staff lived and worked, spun at a rate that gave it almost a full Earth gravity. Two thirds of the way toward the hub there was a wheel that spun at the Moon’s one-sixth gee. The hub itself, of course, was for all practical purposes at zero gee, weightless.
Malone’s aerie consisted of one wall, on which were located a semicircular sort of desk and communications center, a bank of viewing screens that were all blankly gray at the moment, and an airtight hatch that led to the spokes that radiated out to the various wheels. The rest of the chamber was a transparent plastic bubble, from which Malone could watch the station’s loading dock—and the overwhelming majesty of the huge, curved, incredibly blue and white-flecked Earth as it slid past endlessly, massive, brilliant, ever-changing, ever-beautiful.
To the reporter, though, it seemed as if they were hanging in empty space itself, unprotected by anything at all, and falling, falling, falling toward the ponderous world of their birth. The background rumble of the bearings that bore the massive station’s rotation while the hub remained static sounded to her like the insistent bass growl of a giant grinding wheel that was pressing the breath out of her.
She swallowed bile, felt it burn in her throat, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.
She said to Malone, “I’ve been assigned to do a biography of Mr. Gunn for the Solar Network.”
Despite himself, Malone suddenly grinned. “First time I ever heard him called Mr. Gunn.”
“Oh?” The reporter’s microchip recorder, clipped to her belt, was already on, of course. “What did the people here call him?”
That lean, angular face took on an almost thoughtful look. “Oh. . .Sam, mostly. ‘That tricky bastard,’ a good many times.” Malone actually laughed. “Plenty times I heard him called a womanizing sonofabitch.”
“What did you call him?”
The suspicion came back into Malone’s eyes. “He was my friend. I called him Sam.”
Silence stretched between them, hanging as weightlessly as their bodies. The reporter turned her head slightly and found herself staring at the vast bulk of Earth. Her mind screamed as if she were falling down an elevator shaft. Her stomach churned queasily. She could not tear her eyes away from the world drifting past, so far below them, so compellingly near. She felt herself being drawn toward it, dropping through the emptiness, spinning down the deep swirling vortex. . .
Malone’s long-fingered hand squeezed her shoulder hard enough to hurt. She snapped her attention to his dark, unsmiling face as he grasped her other shoulder and held her firmly in his strong hands.
“You were drifting,” he sa
id, almost in a whisper.
“Was I. . .?”
“It’s all right,” he said. “Gets everybody at first. Don’t be scared. You’re perfectly safe.”
His powerful hands steadied her. She fought down the panic surging inside.
“If you got to upchuck, go ahead and do it. Nothing to be ashamed of.” His grin returned. “Only, use the bags they gave you, please.”
He looked almost handsome when he smiled, she thought. After another moment, he released her. She took a deep breath and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her forehead. The retch bags that the technicians had attached to her belt were a symbol to her now. I won’t need them, she insisted to herself. I’m not going to let this get me.
“Feel better?” he asked. There was real concern in his eyes.
“I think I’ll be all right. Thanks.”
“De nada,” he said. “I appreciate your coming out here to the hub for the interview.”
His attitude had changed, she saw. The sullenness had thawed. He had insisted on conducting the interview in the station’s zero-gravity area. He had allowed no alternative. But she was grateful that the shell of distrust seemed to have cracked.
It took several moments before she could say, “I’m not here to do a hatchet job on Mr. Gunn.”
Malone made a small shrug. “Doesn’t make much difference, one way or t’other. He’s dead; nothing you say can hurt him now.”
“But we know so little about him. I suppose he’s the most famous enigma in the solar system.”
The black man made no response.
“The key question, I guess. . .the thing our viewers will be most curious about, is why Sam Gunn exiled himself up here. Why did he turn his back on Earth?”
Malone snorted with disdain. “He didn’t! Those motherfuckers turned their backs on him.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a long story,” Malone said.
“That’s all right. I’ve got as much time as it takes.” Even as she said it, the reporter wished that Malone would volunteer to return back to the outer wheel, where gravity was normal. But she dared not ask the man to leave his office. Once a subject starts talking, never interrupt! That was the cardinal rule of a successful interview. Besides, she was determined not to let weightlessness get the better of her.
“Would you believe,” Malone was saying, “that it all started with a cold?”
“A cold?”
“Sam came down with a cold in the head. That’s how the whole thing began.”
“Tell me about it.”
* * *
Sam was a feisty little bastard—Malone reminisced—full of piss and vinegar. If there were ten different ways in the regulations to do a job, he’d find an eleventh, maybe a twelfth or a fourteenth, just because he couldn’t abide being bound by the regs. A free spirit, I guess you’d call him.
He’d had his troubles with the brass in Houston and Washington. Why he ever became an astronaut in the first place is beyond me. Maybe he thought he’d be like a pioneer out on the frontier, on his own, way out in space. How he made it through training and into flight operations is something I’ll never figure out. I just don’t feature Sam sitting still long enough to get through kindergarten, let alone flight school and astronaut training.
Anyway, when I first met him, he was finished as an astronaut. He had put in seven years, which he said was a biblical amount of time, and he wanted out. And the agency was glad to get rid of him, believe me. But he had this cold in the head, and they couldn’t let him go back Earthside until it cleared up.
“Eight billion people down there with colds, the flu, bad sinuses, and postnasal drips, and the assholes in Houston won’t let me go back until this goddamned sniffle clears up.”
Those were the first words Sam ever said to me. He had been assigned to my special isolation ward, where I had reigned alone for nearly four years. Alpha was under construction then. We were in the old Mac-Dac Shack, a glorified tin can that passed for a space station back in those primitive days. It didn’t spin, it just hung there; everything inside was weightless.
My isolation ward was a cramped compartment with four zero-gee bunks jammed into it, together with lockers to stow personal gear. Nobody but me had ever been in it until that morning. Sam shuffled over to the bed next to mine, towing his travel bag like a kid with a sinking balloon.
“Just don’t sneeze in my direction, Sniffles,” I growled at him.
That stopped Sam for about half a second. He gave me that lopsided grin of his—his face sort of looked like a scuffed-up soccer ball, kind of round, scruffy. Little wart of a nose in the middle of it. Longest hair I ever saw on a man who works in space; hair length was one of the multitudinous points of contention between Sam and the agency. His eyes sparkled. Kind of an odd color, not quite blue, not really green. Sort of in between.
“Malone, huh?” He read the name tag clipped over my bunk.
“Frederick Mohammed Malone.”
“Jesus Christ, they put me next to an Arab!”
But he stuck out his hand. Sam was really a little guy; his hand was almost like a baby’s. After a moment’s hesitation I swallowed it in mine.
“Sam,” he told me, knowing I could see his last name on the name tag pinned to his coveralls.
“I’m not even a Muslim,” I said. “My father was, though. First one in Arkansas.”
“Good for him.” Sam disengaged his cleated shoes from the grillwork floor and floated up onto the cot. His travel bag hung alongside. He ignored it and sniffed at the air. “Goddamned hospitals all smell like somebody’s dying. What’re you in for? Hangnail or something?”
“Something,” I said. “Acquired immune deficiency syndrome.”
His eyes went round. “AIDS?”
“It’s not contagious. Not unless we make love.”
“I’m straight.”
“I’m not.”
“Terrific. Just what I need, a gay black Arab with AIDS.” But he was grinning at me.
I had seen plenty of guys back away from me once they knew I had AIDS. Some of them had a hang-up about gays. Others were scared out of their wits that they would catch AIDS from me, or from the medical personnel or equipment. I had more than one reason to know how a leper felt, back in those days.
Sam’s grin faded into a frown. “How the hell did the medics put me in here if you’ve got AIDS? Won’t you catch my cold? Isn’t that dangerous for you?’
“I’m a guinea pig.”
“You don’t look Italian.”
“Look,” I said, “if you’re gonna stay in here, keep off the ethnic jokes, okay?”
He shrugged.
“The medics think they’ve got my case arrested. New treatment that the genetic researchers have come up with.”
“I get it. If you don’t catch my cold, you’re cured.”
“They never use words like ‘cured.’ But that’s the general idea.”
“So I’m a guinea pig, too.”
“No, you are a part of the apparatus for this experiment. A source of infection. A bag of viruses. A host of bacteria. Germ city.”
Sam hooked his feet into his bunk’s webbing and gave me a dark look. “And this is the guy who doesn’t like ethnic jokes.”
The Mac-Dac Shack was one of the first space stations the agency had put up. It wasn’t fancy, but for years it had served as a sort of research laboratory, mainly for medical work. Naturally, with a lot of M.D.s in it, the Shack sort of turned into a floating hospital in orbit. With all the construction work going on in those days, there was a steady stream of injured workmen and technicians.
Then some bright bureaucrat got the idea of using the Shack as an isolation ward, where the medics could do research on things like AIDS, Legionnaires’ disease, the New Delhi virus, and various paralytic afflictions that required either isolation or zero gravity or both. The construction-crew infirmary was moved over to the yet-unfinished Alpha, while the Shack was turned into a p
ure research facility with various isolation wards for guinea pigs like me.
Sam stayed in my ward for three, four days: I forget the exact time. He was like an energetic little bee, buzzing all over the place, hardly ever still for a minute. In zero gee, of course, he could literally climb the curved walls of the ward and hover up on the ceiling. He terrified the head nurse in short order by hanging near the ceiling or hiding behind one of the bunks and then launching himself at her like a missile when she showed up with the morning’s assortment of needles.
Never once did Sam show the slightest qualm at having his blood sampled alongside mine. I’ve seen guys get violent from their fear that they’d get a needle contaminated by me, and catch what I had. But Sam never even blinked. Me, I never liked needles. Couldn’t abide them. Couldn’t look when the nurse stuck me; couldn’t even look when she stuck somebody else.
“All the nurses are women,” Sam noticed by the end of his first day.
“All six of them,” I affirmed.
“The doctors are all males?”
“Eight men, four women.”
“That leaves two extra women for us.”
“For you. I’m on the other side.”
“How come all women nurses?” he wondered.
“I think it’s because of me. They don’t want to throw temptation in my path.”
He started to frown at me but it turned into that lopsided grin. “They didn’t think about my path.”
He caused absolute havoc among the nurses. With the single-minded determination of a sperm cell seeking blindly for an ovum, Sam pursued them all: the fat little redhead, the cadaverous ash-blonde, the really good-looking one, the kid who still had acne—all of them, even the head nurse, who threatened to inject him with enough estrogen to grow boobs on him if he didn’t leave her and her crew alone.
Nothing deflected Sam. He would be gone for long hours from the ward, and when he’d come back, he would be grinning from ear to ear. As politely as I could, I’d ask him if he had been successful.
“It matters not if you win or lose,” he would say. “It’s how you play the game. . .as long as you get laid.”
