“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Jill pursed her lips. Then, “Let me ask D’Argent about that. Unofficially, of course. But maybe I can find out something for you.”
My eyes must have widened. “You’d do that for me?”
Jill touched my cheek with cool fingertips. “Of course I would, Sam. You have no idea of the things I’d do for you, if you’d only let me.”
That sounded dangerous to me. So I bid her a hasty adieu and pushed through her doorway, heading for my cubbyhole of an office. Jill just gave me a sphinxlike inscrutable smile as I floated out of her compartment.
When I got back to my office there was more depressing news on my computer screen. A contingent of Rockledge board members and junior executives were scheduled for a tour of the station and its facilities. They would be staying for a week and had booked space in my hotel—at the discount prices Rockledge commanded as my landlord. Those prices, negotiated before I had ever opened Heaven, were lower than the rent D’ Argent was now charging me. If I filled the hotel with Rockledge people I could go bankrupt even faster than I was.
And they were all bringing their wives. And children! Larry, Melinda, and their bouncing baby boy were just the first wave of the invasion of the weightless brats. I began to think about suicide. Or murder.
I can’t describe the horrors of that week. By actual count there were only twenty-two kids. The oldest was fifteen and the youngest was little T.J., ten months or so. But it seemed like there were hundreds of them, thousands. Everywhere I turned there were brats getting in my way, poking around the observation center; getting themselves stuck in hatches; playing tag along the tubes that connected the station’s hub with its various wheels; yelling, screaming; tumbling; fighting; throwing food around; and just generally making my life miserable.
Not only my life. Even the honey-mooners started checking out early, with howls of protest at the invasion of the underage monsters and dire threats about lawsuits.
“You’ll pay for ruining our honeymoon,” was the kindest farewell statement any of them made.
The brats took over the zero g gym. It looked like one of those old martial arts films in there, only in weightlessness. They were swarming all over the padded gym, kicking, thrashing, screaming, arms and legs everyplace, howls and yelps and laughing and crying. One five-year-old girl, in particular, had a shriek that could cleave limestone.
I tried to get the three teenagers among them to serve as guardians—guards, really—for the younger tots. I offered them damned good money to look after the brats. The two girls agreed with no trouble. The one boy—fourteen, sullen, face full of zits—refused. He was the son of one of the board members. “My mother didn’t bring me up here to be a babysitter,” he growled.
As far as I could see, the only thing the pizza-faced jerk did was hang around the hub weightlessly and sulk.
I couldn’t blame the honeymooners for leaving. Who wants to fight your way through a screaming horde of little monsters to get to your zero g love nest? It was hopeless. I could see D’Argent smiling that oily smile of his; he knew I was going down in flames and he was enjoying every minute of it.
And right in the middle of it were Larry and Melinda and their bouncing baby boy—who really did bounce around a lot off the padded walls of the gym. T.J. loved it in there, especially with all the other kids to keep him company. The two teenaged girls made him their living doll. And T.J. seemed to look out with his ten-month-old eyes at the whole noisy, noisome gang of kids as if they were his personal play-toys, a swirling, riotous, colorful mobile made up of twenty-two raucous, runny-nosed, rotten kids.
Make that twenty-one kids and one fourteen-year-old moper.
I found that Larry and Melinda started feeding the baby in the gym. “It’s easier than doing it in the restaurant or in our own quarters,” Melinda said, as T.J. gummed away at some pulpy baby goop. “Practically no mess at all.”
I could see what she meant. They just hovered in midair with the baby. Three-fourths of what they aimed at the brat’s mouth wound up in his ear or smeared over his face or spit into the air. Being weightless, most of the stuff just broke into droplets or crumbs and drifted along in the air currents until they stuck on one of the intake ventilator screens. At the end of the meal Larry would break out a hand vacuum and clean off the screens while Melinda cleaned the baby with premoistened towels. Not bad, I had to admit. Didn’t have to mop the floor or clean any furniture.
The other kids liked to eat in zero g, too. Made their food fights more interesting. It was OK with me; anything that kept them out of the restaurant or the other areas where adult human beings lived and worked was a score for our side, far as I was concerned. But zero g sex was a thing of the past as long as they held the station’s gym in their grubby little paws. My honeymoon hotel had turned into an orbital camp for tots.
“You were right, Sam,” Jill told me over dinner the third or fourth night of Hell Week.
The restaurant was almost empty. Nearly every one of Rockledge’s junior executives took their meals in their rooms. Too cheap for the restaurant, they used the fast-food dispensers and the cafeteria in the Rockledge research facility.
At least the Eclipse was quiet. No kids. I had thought about trying to make a rule that nobody under twenty-one was allowed into the Lunar Eclipse, but Omar, my long-suffering hotel manager, had convinced me that it would just cause a ruckus with the parents. They were happy as Torquemada in a synagogue to be in the restaurant without their little darlings. But if I said they weren’t allowed to bring their kids to the Eclipse they’d get pissed off and demand their rights.
So the restaurant was nice and quiet and civilized with all the kids up in the gym dashing around and playing zero g games.
“I was right about what?” I asked. I must have looked as miserable as I felt. My mind was echoing with the screeches of all those brats yowling at the top of their lungs and the somber prediction of my accountant that the hotel would sink beneath the financial waves in another two weeks. All day long I had been receiving cancellation notices from travel agencies. The word was going around at the speed of light.
Jill nudged her chair a little closer to mine. “Rockledge really is working on a preventative for space sickness. Pierre D’Argent showed me the laboratory studies they’ve done so far. It looks as if they’ve got it.”
No sooner had she mentioned D’Argent’s name than the silver-haired sonofabitch showed up at the restaurant’s door, leading a contingent of six senior Rockledge board members and their trophy wives. The men all looked like grumpy old farts, white-haired or bald; the women were heavy with jewelry. I wondered which one of them owned that four-teen-year-old sourpuss.
“What lovely women,” Jill said.
I made no response.
“Don’t you think they’re beautiful, Sam?”
I grunted. “Who cares.”
Jill gave me a funny expression. I didn’t realize it at the time, but her expression was a mixture of surprise and admiration. She thought I had finally matured to the point where I didn’t salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs every time I saw a good-looking woman. What Jill didn’t realize was that I was too down in the dumps to be interested in a bevy of expensively-dressed advertisements for cosmetic surgery who were already married. I never chased married women. Never. That’s a point of honor with me. It also saves you a lot of threats, fights, law suits, and attempts on your life.
Jill returned to her original subject. “Didn’t you hear me, Sam? Rockledge is going to market a skin patch that prevents space sickness.”