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 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 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.