by Ben Bova
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 screwing up into an incredulous expression that mixed 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 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 blue-colored spongy plastic, so naturally it came to be known as the Blue Grotto. There were no chairs in the Grotto, of course; chairs are useless in zero-gee. 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 any room to drift around. 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 for,” I answered, “and a lot of crap waiting for me that I’d 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 afterward they pinned a lieutenant’s gold bars on my shoulders and stuck me inside a heavy tank.
Well, you know how well the tanks did in those Mexican hills. Nothing to shoot at but cactus, and we were great big noisy targets for those smart little missiles they brought in from Korea or wherever.
They knocked out my tank, I was the only one of the crew to survive. I wound up in an Army hospital in Texas where 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 be still the same, except that every friend I had ever known was five years’ distance from me. My parents had killed themselves in an automobile wreck when I was in college. I had no sisters or brothers. I had no job prospects. Soldiers coming back five years after the war weren’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 generation of software any more.
And Earth was dirty, crowded, noisy, dangerous—it was also heavy, a full one g. I tried a couple days in the one-g 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’ll 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. Had to rise up off the floor a ways to do it, but he did it. “You’re sure? You’re absolutely certain that this is what you want?”
I nodded. “I can’t go back, Sam. 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, Same had already been working for some time on his own ideas about space tourism. If Rockledge 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 deal while he was still collecting a salary from Rockledge. 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 know, 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 Rockledge Industries. And Sam worked full time for them, eight hours a day, six days a week, and then some. They got their 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 Rock-ledge’s regular office hours. But he worked plenty of overtime hours for Rockledge, 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 Rockledge 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 regulations. It would take Rockledge’s lawyers a month to figure out what the hell Sam was talking about and then frame an answering memo.
In the meantime Sam 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 himself. It was all done with the Shack’s computer system, so no cash 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 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 on 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 a
fter 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 today signed by the President.”
I wanted to play it cool but he had me too curious. “So what’s it say? Why’s it so important?”
“It says,” Sam 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 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 Rockledge 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-g environment. His visit to the Shack proved what his doctors had told him: in zero-gee the pains that hobbled him disappeared and he felt twenty years younger. All of a sudden he became a big space freak. That’s how Sam was able to convince 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 to 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 my ass around at my full weight. What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, was that Sam would eventually have to use the 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.
For the better part of another year I served as Sam’s leg man—a job I found interesting and amusingly ironic. I shuttled back and forth from the Shack to Alpha, generally to meet bigshot business persons visiting the Big Wheel. When Sam was officially on duty for Rockledge, which was most of the time, he’d send me over to Alpha to meet the visitors, settle them down, and talk 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—every service that the well-trained staff can provide.” He would wink hard enough to dislocate an eyeball 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 bull-necked types I thought might be Mafia but turned out to be in the book and magazine distribution business, even a few very nice middle-aged 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 a prospect eventually turned sour, no matter how often we were disappointed, Sam never lost his faith in the idea or the inevitability of its fruition.
“It’s gonna happen, Omar. We’re going to create the first tourist hotel in orbit. 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 magnates 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, 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. The Shack damned near exploded with merriment. It started Saturday at five PM, the close of the official work week. It ended, officially, Monday at eight AM. There are those who believe, though, that it’s still going on over there at the Shack.
Several couples sort of disappeared during the party. The Shack wasn’t so big that people could get lost in it, but they just seemed to vanish. Most of them showed up by Monday morning, looking tired and sheepish. Three of the couples eventually got married. One pair of them was stopped by a technician when they tried to go out an airlock while stark naked.
Sam himself engaged in a bit of EVA with one of the nurses, a tiny little elf of fragile beauty and uncommon bravery. She snuggled into a pressure suit with Sam and the two of them made several orbits around the Shack, outside, propelled by nothing more than their own frenetic pulsations and Newton’s Third Law of Motion.
Two days after the party the Beryllium Blonde showed up.
Her real name was Jennifer Marlow, and she was as splendidly beautiful as a woman can be. A figure right out of a high school boy’s wettest dreams. A perfect face, with eyes of china blue and thickly glorious hair like a crown of shining gold. She staggered every male who saw her, she stunned even me, and she sent Sam into a complete tailspin. She was Rockledge Industries’s ace troubleshooter. Her official title was Administrative Assistant (Special Projects) to the. President. The word we got from Earthside was that she had a mind like a steel trap, and a vagina to match.
The official excuse for her visit was to discuss Sam’s letter of resignation with him.
“You stay right beside me,” Sam insisted as we drifted down the Shack’s central corridor toward the old conference room. “I won’t be able to control myself if I’m in there alone with her.”
His face was as white as the Moon’s. He looked like a man in shock.
“Will you be able to control yourself with me in there?” I wondered.
“If I can’t, rap me on the head. Knock me out. Give me a Vulcan nerve pinch. Anything! Just don’t let me go zonkers over her.”
I smiled.
“I’m not kidding, Omar!” Sam insisted. “Why do you think they sent her up here instead of some flunky? They know I’m susceptible. God knows how many scalps she’s got nailed to her teepee.”
I grabbed his shoulder and dug my Velcroed slippers into the floor carpeting. We skidded to a stop.
“Look,” I said. “Maybe you want to avoid meeting with her altogether. I can represent you. I’m not... uh, susceptible.”
His eyes went so wide I could see white all around the pupils. “Are you nuts? Miss a chance to be in the same room with her? I want to be protected, Omar, but not that much!”
What could I do with him? Sam was torn in ha
lf. He knew the Beryllium Blonde was here to talk him out of resigning but he couldn’t resist the opportunity of letting her try her wiles on him any more than Odysseus could resist listening to the Sirens.
Like a couple of schoolboys dragging ourselves down to the principal’s office, we made our way slowly along the corridor and pushed through the door to the conference room. She was already standing at the head of the table, wearing a Chinese red jumpsuit that fit her like skin. I gulped down a lump in my throat at the sight of her. I mean, she was something. She smiled a dazzling smile and Sam gave a weak little moan and rose right up off the floor.
He would have launched himself at her like a missile if I hadn’t grabbed his belt and yanked him down to the table level. Being in zero-gee, there was no need for chairs around the table. But I sure wished I had one then; I would have tied Sam into it. As it was, I hovered right next to him and kept the full length of the polished imitation wood table between us and the Blonde.
“I think you know why I’m here,” she said. Her voice was music.
Sam nodded dumbly, his jaw hanging open. I thought I saw a bit of saliva foaming at the corner of his mouth.
“Why do you want to leave us, Sam? Don’t you like us anymore?”
It took three tries before he could make his voice work. “It’s ... not that. I... I... I want to go into ... uh, into business ... for myself.”
“But your employment contract has almost two full years more to run.”
“I can’t wait two years,” he said, in a tiny voice. “This opportunity won’t keep....”
“Sam, you’re a very valued employee of Rockledge Industries, Incorporated. We want you to stay with us. I want you to stay with us.”
“I... can’t.”
“But you signed a contract with us, Sam. You gave us your word.”
I stuck in my dime’s worth. “The contract doesn’t prohibit Sam from quitting. He can leave wherever he wants to.” At least, that’s what the lawyers Sam had hired had told us.
