“Yeah,” I said gloomily. “The day after this hotel closes, that’s when they’ll put it on the market.”
I was watching D’Argent and his troupe as they sat at the biggest table in the restaurant. Laughing softly among themselves, happy, relaxed, their biggest worry was how to evade the taxes that were due on their enormous profits. The more they ate and drank, at their discount prices, the deeper into the red they pushed me.
Jill shook me by my wrist and made me look at her. She had a kind of pixie grin on her face. Almost evil. “Suppose I could get D’Argent to use your hotel customers as a field trial for their new drug?”
“Suppose you could get the Pope to pee off the roof of the Vatican.”
“Wouldn’t that help you?” she insisted.
I had to admit that it might.
“Then that’s what I’ll do,” Jill said, as firmly as a US Senator announcing she was running for reelection.
I had no romantic interest in Jill, and for the life of me I couldn’t figure out why she was interested in me. What did it matter? I was in such a funk over those brats infesting my hotel that I wouldn’t have noticed if Helen of Troy had been sitting naked in my bed with her arms out to me. Well, maybe.
What was going through my mind was an endless vicious circle. The hotel is failing. When the hotel goes down the tubes it’ll drag my company, VCI, down with it. VCI was technically in the black, making steady money selling magnetic bumpers that protected space facilities from orbiting debris. But legally, VCI owned Hotel Heaven and the hotel’s accumulated debts would force VCI into bankruptcy. I would be broke. Nobody would lend me a cent. There went my dreams for mining the Moon and making myself the tycoon of the asteroids. I’d have to find a job someplace.
Unless—there was only one way I could see out of the black pit that was staring at me. I had to swallow hard several times before I could work up the nerve to even put out a feeler. But it was either that or bankruptcy, the end of all my dreams. So the next morning I gritted my teeth (having swallowed hard several times) and took the first little step on the road to humiliation.
“Hi, Larry old pal, how’s it going?” The words almost stuck in my throat, but I had to get started somehow.
Oh, that’s right, I haven’t told you about Larry and Melinda and the Gunn Shield. Here’s the story.
I had first started VCI, years earlier, to build magnetic bumpers for space stations, to protect them against the orbiting junk whizzing around up there. Larry designed them for me. They’re called Gunn Shields, of course. Without them, a space station would get dinged constantly from the crap zipping around in orbit. Even a chip of paint hits with the impact of a high-power bullet, and there’s a helluva lot more than paint chips flying around in the low orbits.
The Russians finally had to abandon their original Mir space station because it was starting to look like a target in a shooting gallery. And the more stations and factories people built in orbit, the more debris they created and the more they needed Gunn Shields. A nice, steady, growing market. Not spectacular, not enough to bring in the kind of cash flow I needed, but dependable.
Back in those days Melinda had a crush on me. Just a kid’s crush, that’s all it was, but Larry loved her madly and hated me for it. She was kind of pretty underneath her avoirdupois, but not my type.
That surprises you? You heard that Sam Gunn chases all types of women, didn’t you. No discrimination at all. Weil, that’s about as true as all the rest of the bull manure they spread about me.
Melinda was not my type. But she had this thing about me and Larry had his heart set on her. So I hired Melinda to come to work for me at VCI, and then kind of offhand asked Larry if he’d like to come along too. Larry was the guy I needed, the one I had to have if VCI was going to be a success. He was the semi-genius who thought up the idea for magnetic bumpers in the first place. Poor fish rose to the bait without even stopping to think. They both moved to Florida and together we put VCI into business.
So while Larry was designing the original bumper, I was touting Melinda off me and onto Larry. Cyrano de Gunn, that’s me. Made her fall in love with him. Voila. Once we tested the original bumper and it worked, I got it patented and Larry got Melinda to marry him. Everybody was happy, I thought. Wrong!
For some unfathomable reason, Larry got pissed at me and went off to work for D’Argent, the sneaky sleazoid, over at Rockledge. And when he quit VCI, Melinda did, too.
Oh, yeah, we almost got into a shooting war over the rights to the geocentric orbit. But that’s another story. Larry only played a minor role in that one.
Anyway, I had spent a sleepless night tussling over my problems and couldn’t see a way out. Except to sell the goddamned hotel to Rockledge. And the rights to the Gunn Shield, too. Dump it all for cash. D’Argent had tried before to sneak the magnetic bumper design away from me. He had tried bribery and even theft. Hell, he had hired Larry with the idea of getting the kid to figure out a way to break my patent. I knew that, even if Larry himself didn’t.
So now I toadied up to Larry, in the middle of the mayhem of the station’s gym. The kids had taken it over completely. Larry and I were the only adults among the yowling, zooming, screeching, barfing little darlings. Even the two teenaged girls who were supposed to be watching the kids were busy playing free-fall tag and screaming at the top of their considerable voices.
Larry gave me a guarded look. He was feeding T.J., who was happily spraying most of his food in weightless droplets that hovered around him like tiny spheres of multi-colored glop before drifting slowly toward the nearest ventilator grid.
“Where’s Melinda?” I asked, trying to radiate good cheer and sincerity while dodging the goo that the baby was spewing out.
“She’s down in the second wheel, doing aerobics,” he said. He spooned a bit of puke-colored paste out of a jar and stuck it in front of T.J.’s face. The baby siphoned it off with a big slurping noise and even managed to get some of it past his two visible teeth and into his mouth.
Gradually, with every ounce of self-control and patient misdirection I could muster, I edged the topic of conversation to the Gunn Shields. All the time we were both dodging flying kids and the various missiles they were throwing at each other, as well as T.J.’s pretty constant spray of food particles. And I had to shout to make myself heard over the noise the brats were making.
I only hoped that none of them figured out the combinations for the electronic locks on the zero g minisuites. I could just see the little SOBs breaking into the minibars and throwing bottles all over the place or scalding themselves in the saunas. Come to think of it, boiling a couple of them might have been fun.
But I had work to do.
The more I talked to Larry about the magnetic shields, though, the more he seemed to drift away from me. I mean, literally move away. He kept floating backward through the big, padded zero g compartment and I kept pushing toward him. We slowly crossed the entire gym, with all those kids whooping and zooming around us. Finally I had him pinned against one of the padded walls, T.J. floating upside-down above him and the jar of baby food hovering between us. It was only then that I realized Larry was getting red in the face.
“What’s the matter?” I asked, earnestly. “Are you getting sick?”
“Dammit, Sam, they shouldn’t be called Gunn Shields!” Larry burst out. “I designed the bumpers, not you! They ought to be called Karsh Shields!”
I was stunned. I had never even thought of that. And he certainly had never mentioned it to me before.