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 pure research facility with various isolation wards for guinea pigs like me.