The Best of Bova

by Ben Bova

  When he finally left the isolation ward, it seemed as if we had been friends for years. And it was damned quiet in there without him. I was alone again. I missed him. I realized how many years it had been since I’d had a friend.

  I sank into a real depression of self-pity and despair. I had caught Sam’s cold, sure enough. I was hacking and sneezing all day and night.

  One good thing about zero gravity is that you can’t have a postnasal drip. One bad thing is that all the fluids accumulate in your sinuses and give you a headache of monumental proportions. The head nurse seemed to take special pleasure in inflicting upon me the indignity of forcing tubes up my nose to drain the sinuses.

  The medics were overjoyed. Their guinea pig was doing something interesting. Would I react to the cold like any normal person, and get over it after a few days? Or would the infection spread and worsen, turn into pneumonia or maybe kill me? I could see them writing their learned papers in their heads every time they examined me, four times a day.

  I was really unfit company for anyone, including myself. I went on for months that way, just wallowing in my own misery. Other patients came and went: an African kid with a new strain of polio; an asthmatic who had developed a violent allergy to dust; a couple of burn victims from the Alpha construction crew. I stayed while they were treated and sent home. Then, without any warning, Sam showed up again.

  “Hello, Omar, how’s the tent-making business?” My middle name had become Omar as far as he was concerned.

  I gaped at him. He was wearing the powder-blue coveralls and shoulder insignia of Global Technologies, Inc., which in those days was just starting to grow into the interplanetary conglomerate it has become.

  “What the hell you doing back here?” My voice was a full octave higher than normal, I was so surprised. And glad.

  “I work here.”

  “Say what?”

  He ambled over to me in the zero-gee strides we all learn to make: maintain just enough contact with the grillwork on the floor to keep from floating off toward the ceiling. As Sam approached my bunk, the head nurse pushed through the ward’s swinging doors with a trayful of the morning’s indignities for me.

  “Global Technologies just won the contract for running this tin can. The medical staff still belongs to the government, but everybody else will be replaced by Global employees. I’ll be in charge of the whole place.”

  Behind him, the head nurse’s eyes goggled, her mouth sagged open, and the tray slid from her hand. It just hung there, revolving slowly, as she turned a full one-eighty and flew out of the ward without a sound.

  “You’re in charge of this place?” I laughed. “No shit?”

  “Only after meals,” Sam said. “I’ve got a five-year contract.”

  We got to be really friends then. Not lovers. Sam was the most heterosexual man I have ever seen. One of the shrinks aboard the station said he had a Casanova complex: he had to take a shot at any and every female creature he saw. I don’t know how good his batting average was, but he surely kept busy—and happy.

  “The thrill is in the chase, Omar, not the capture,” he said to me many times. Then he would always add, “As long as you get laid.”

  But Sam could be a true friend, caring, understanding, bringing out the best in a man. Or a woman, for that matter. I saw him help many of the station’s female employees, nurses, technicians, scientists, completely aside from his amorous pursuits. He knew when to put his Casanova complex in the backseat. He was a helluva good administrator, and a leader. Everybody liked him. Even the head nurse grew to grant him a grudging respect, although she certainly didn’t want anybody to know it, especially Sam.

  Of course, knowing Sam, you might expect that he would have trouble with the chain of command. He had gotten himself out of the space agency, and it was hard to tell who was happier about it, him or the agency. You could hear sighs of relief from Houston and Washington all the way up where we were, the agency was so glad to be rid of the pestering little squirt who never followed regulations.

  It didn’t take long for Sam to find out that Global Technologies, Inc., had its own bureaucracy, its own set of regulations, and its own frustrations.

  “You’d think a multibillion-dollar company would want to make all the profits it can,” Sam grumbled to me about six months after he had returned to the Shack. “Half the facilities on Alpha are empty, right? They overbuilt, right? I show them how to turn Alpha into a tourist resort and they reject the goddamned idea. ‘We’re not in the tourism business,’ they say. Goddamned assholes.”

  I found it hard to believe that Global Tech didn’t understand what a bonanza they could reap from space tourism. But they just failed to see it. Sam spent weeks muttering about faceless bureaucrats who sat on their brains, and how much money a zero-gravity honeymoon hotel could make. It didn’t do him a bit of good. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.

  The big crisis was mostly my fault. Looking back on it, if I could have figured out a different way to handle things, I would have. But you know how it is when your emotions are all churned up; you don’t see any alternatives. Truthfully, I still don’t see how I could have done anything else except what I did.

  They told me I was cured.

  Yeah, I know I said they never used words like that; but they changed their tune. After more than five years in the isolation ward of the station, the medics asked me to join them in the conference room. I expected another one of their dreary meetings; they made me attend them at least once a month, said it was important for me to “maintain a positive interaction with the research staff.” So I dragged myself down to the conference room.

  They were all grinning at me, around the table. Buckets of champagne stood at either end, with more bottles stashed where the slide projector usually hung.

  I was cured. The genetic manipulations had finally worked. My body’s immune system was back to normal. My case would be in the medical journals; future generations would bless my memory (but not my name, they would protect my anonymity). I could go back home, back to Earth.

  Only, I didn’t want to go.

  “You don’t want to go?” Sam’s pudgy little face was screwed up into an incredulous expression that mixed in equal amounts of surprise, disapproval, and curiosity.

  “Back to Earth? No, I don’t want to go,” I said. “I want to stay here. Or maybe go live on Alpha or one of the new stations they’re building.”

  “But why?” Sam asked.

  We were in his office, a tiny little cubbyhole that had originally been a storage locker for fresh food. I mean, space in the Shack was tight. I thought I could still smell onions or something faintly pungent. Sam had walled the chamber with a blue-colored spongy plastic, so naturally it came to be known as the Blue Grotto. There were no chairs in the Grotto, we just hung in midair. You could nudge your back against the slightly rough wall surfacing and that would hold you in place well enough. There wasn’t much room to drift around in. Two people were all the chamber could hold comfortably. Sam’s computer terminal was built into the wall; there was no furniture in the Grotto, no room for any.

  “I got nothing to go back there for,” I answered, “and a lot of crap waiting for me that I would just as soon avoid.”

  “But it’s Earth,” he said. “The world . . .”

  So I told him about it. The whole story, end to end. I had been a soldier, back in that nasty little bitch of a war in Mexico. Nothing glamorous, not even patriotism. I had joined the army because it was the only way for a kid from my part of Little Rock to get a college education. They paid for my education, and right after they pinned a lieutenant’s gold bars on my shoulders they stuck me inside a heavy tank. Well, you know how well the tanks did in those hills. Nothing to shoot at but cactus, and we were great big noisy targets for those smart little missiles they brought in from Czechoslovakia or wherever.

  They knocked out my tank. I was the only one of the crew to survive, and I wound up in an army hospital whe
re they tried to put my spine back together again. That’s where I contracted AIDS, from one of the male nurses who wanted to prove to me that I hadn’t lost my virility. He was a very sweet kid, very caring. But I never saw him again once they decided to ship me to the isolation ward up in orbit.

  Now it was five years later. I was cured of AIDS, a sort of anonymous hero, but everything else was still the same. Earth would still be the same, except that every friend I ever knew was five years’ distance from me. My parents had killed themselves in an automobile wreck while I was in college. I had no sisters or brothers. I had no job prospects: soldiers coming back home five years after the war aren’t greeted with parades and confetti, and all the computer stuff I had learned in college was obsolete by now. Not even the army used that kind of equipment anymore.

  And Earth was dirty, crowded, noisy, dangerous—it was also heavy, a full one gee. I tried a couple of days in the one-gee wheel over at Alpha and knew that I could never live in Earth’s full gravity again. Not voluntarily.

  Sam listened to all this in complete silence, the longest I had ever known him to go without opening his mouth. He was totally serious, not even the hint of a smile. I could see that he understood.

  “Down there I’d be just another nobody, an ex-soldier with no place to go. I can’t handle the gravity, no matter what the physical therapists think they can do for me. I want to stay here, Sam. I want to make something of myself and I can do it here, not back there. The best I can be back there is another veteran on a disability pension. What kind of a job could I get? I can be somebody up here, I know I can.”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re sure? You’re absolutely certain this is what you want?”

  I nodded. “I can’t go back, Sam.” I pleaded. “I just can’t.”

  The faintest hint of a grin twitched at the corners of his mouth. “Okay, pal. How’d you like to go into the hotel business with me?”

  You see, Sam had already been working for some time on his own ideas about space tourism. If Global Tech wouldn’t go for a hotel facility over on Alpha, complete with zero-gee honeymoon suites, then Sam figured he could get somebody else interested in the idea. The people who like to bad-mouth Sam say that he hired me to cover his ass so he could spend his time working on his tourist hotel idea while he was still collecting a salary from Global. That isn’t the way it happened at all; it was really the other way around.

  Sam hired me as a consultant and paid me out of his own pocket. To this day I don’t know where he got the money. I suspect it was from some of the financial people he was always talking to, but you never knew, with Sam. He had an inexhaustible fund of rabbits up his sleeves. Whenever I asked him about it, he just grinned at me and told me not to ask questions. I was never an employee of Global Technologies. And Sam worked full-time for them, eight hours a day, six days a week, and then some. They got his salary’s worth out of him. More. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t spend nights, Sundays, and the odd holiday here and there wooing financiers and lawyers who might come up with the risk capital he needed for his hotel.

  Sure, sometimes he did his own thing during Global’s regular office hours. But he worked plenty of overtime hours for Global, too. They got their money’s worth out of Sam.

  Of course, once I was no longer a patient whose bills were paid by the government, Global sent word up from corporate headquarters that I was to be shipped back Earthside as soon as possible. Sam interpreted that to mean when he was good and ready. Weeks stretched into months. Sam fought a valiant delaying action, matching every query of theirs with a detailed memorandum and references to obscure government health and safety regulations. It would take Global’s lawyers a month to figure out what the hell Sam was talking about, and then frame an answer.

  In the meantime, he moved me from the old isolation ward into a private room—a coffin-sized cubbyhole—and insisted that I start paying for my rent and food. Since Sam was paying me a monthly consultant’s stipend, he was collecting my rent and food money out of the money he was giving me as his consultant. It was all done with the Shack’s computer system, no cash ever changed hands. I had the feeling that there were some mighty weird subroutines running around inside that computer, all of them programmed by Sam.

  While all this was going on, the Shack was visited by a rather notorious U.S. Senator, one of the most powerful men in the government. He was a wizened, shriveled old man who had been in the Senate almost half a century. I thought little of it; we were getting a constant trickle of VIPs in those days. The bigwigs usually went to Alpha, so much so that we began calling it the Big Wheel’s Big Wheel. Most of them avoided the Shack; I guess they were scared of getting contaminated from our isolation ward patients. But a few of the VIPs made their way to the Shack now and then.

  Sam took personal charge of the Senator and his entourage, and showed him more attention and courtesy than I had ever seen him lavish upon a visitor before. Or since, for that matter. Sam, kowtowing to an authority figure? It astounded me at the time, but I laughed it off and forgot all about it soon enough.

  Then, some six months after the Senator’s visit, when it looked as if Sam had run out of time and excuses to keep me in the Shack and I would have to pack my meager bag and head down the gravity well to spend the rest of my miserable days in some overcrowded ghetto city, Sam came prancing weightlessly into my microminiaturized living quarters, waving a flimsy sheet of paper.

  “What’s that?” I knew it was a straight line, but he wasn’t going to tell me unless I asked.

  “A new law.” He was smirking, canary feathers all over his chin.

  “First time I ever seen you happy about some new regulation.”

  “Not a regulation,” he corrected me. “A law. A federal law, duly passed by the U.S. Congress and just signed today by the President.”

  I wanted to play it cool, but he had me too curious. “What’s it say? Why’s it so important?”

  “It says,” he made a flourish that sent him drifting slowly toward the ceiling as he read, “No person residing aboard a space facility owned by the United States or by a corporation or other legal entity licensed by the United States may be compelled to leave said facility without due process of law.”

  My reply was something profound, like, “Huh?”

  His scrungy little face beaming, Sam said, “It means that Global can’t force you back Earthside! As long as you can pay the rent, Omar, they can’t evict you.”

  “You joking?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “No joke. I helped write this masterpiece, kiddo,” he told me. “Remember when old Senator Winnebago was up here last year?”

  The Senator was from Wisconsin, but his name was not Winnebago. He had been a powerful enemy of the space program—until his doctors told him that degenerative arthritis was going to make him a pain-racked cripple unless he could live in a low-gee environment. All of a sudden he became a big space freak. His visit to the Shack had proved what his doctors had told him: in zero gee the pains that hobbled him disappeared and he felt twenty years younger. That’s when Sam convinced him to sponsor the “pay your own way” law, which provided that neither the government nor a private company operating a space facility could force a resident out as long as he or she was able to pay the going rate for accommodations.

  “Hell, they’ve got laws that protect tenants from eviction in New York and every other city,” Sam said. “Why not here?”

  I was damned glad of it. Overjoyed, in fact. It meant that I could stay, that I wouldn’t be forced to go back Earthside and drag myself around at my full weight. What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, was that Sam would eventually have to use that law for himself. Obviously, he had seen ahead far enough to know that he would need such protection, sooner or later. Did he get the law written for his own selfish purposes? Sure he did. But it served my purpose, too, and Sam knew that when he was bending the Senator’s tin ear. That was good enough for me. Still is.

&
nbsp; For the better part of another year I served as Sam’s legman—a job I found interesting and amusingly ironic. I shuttled back and forth from the Shack to Alpha, generally to meet big-shot business persons visiting the Big Wheel. When Sam was officially on duty for Global, which was most of the time, he’d send me over to Alpha to meet the visitors, settle them down, and talk to them about the money that a tourist facility would make. I would just try to keep them happy until Sam could shake loose and come over to meet them himself. Then he would weave a golden web of words, describing how fantastic an orbital tourist facility would be, bobbing weightlessly around the room in his enthusiasm, pulling numbers out of the air to show how indecently huge would be the profit that investors would make.

  “And the biggest investors will get their own suites, all for themselves,” Sam promised, “complete with every luxury—and every service that the staff can provide.”

  He would wink hard enough to dislocate an eyelid at that point, to make certain the prospective investor knew what he meant.

  I met some pretty interesting people that way: Texas millionaires, Wall Street financiers, Hollywood sharks, a couple of bullnecked types I thought might be Mafia but turned out to be in the book and magazine distribution business, even a few very nice young ladies who were looking for “good causes” in which to invest. Sam did not spare them his “every service that the staff can provide” line, together with the wink. They giggled and blushed.

  “It’s gonna happen!” Sam kept saying. Each time we met a prospective backer his enthusiasm rose to a new pitch. No matter how many times the prospect eventually turned sour, no matter how often we were disappointed, Sam never lost his faith in the idea or in the inevitability of its fruition.

  “It’s gonna happen, Omar. We’re going to create the first tourist hotel in space. And you’re going to have a share of it, pal. Mark my words.”

  When we finally got a tentative approval from a consortium of Greek and Italian shipping people, Sam nearly rocked the old Shack out of orbit. He whooped and hollered and zoomed around the place like a crazy billiard ball. He threw a monumental party for everybody in the Shack, doctors, nurses, patients, technicians, administrative staff, security guards, visitors, and even the one consultant who lived there: me. Where he got the caviar and fresh Brie and other stuff, I still don’t know. But it was a party none of us will ever forget. It started Saturday at five p.m., the close of the official workweek. It ended, officially, Monday at eight a.m. There are those who believe, though, that it’s still going on over there at the Shack.