I grabbed his shoulder and dug my cleats into the corridor’s floor grid. 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? He was torn in half. 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 seated 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. She smiled a dazzling smile and Sam gave a little moan and rose right off the floor.
He would have launched himself at her like a missile if I hadn’t grabbed his belt and yanked him down into the nearest chair. Wishing there were safety harnesses on the seats, I sat down next to Sam, keeping 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 bubbling 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 Sam could make his voice work. «It’s… not that. I… I… I want to go 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 Global Technologies, 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 whenever he wants to.»
«But he’ll lose all his pension benefits and health-care provisions.»
«He knows that.»
She turned those heartbreakingly blue eyes on Sam again. «It will be a big disappointment to us if you leave, Sam. It will be a personal disappointment to me.»
To his credit, Sam found the strength within himself to hold his ground. «I’m awfully sorry… but I’ve worked very hard to create this opportunity and I can’t let it slip past me now.»
She nodded once, as if she understood. Then she asked, «This opportunity you’re speaking about: does it have anything to do with the prospect of opening a tourist hotel on space station Alpha?»
«That’s right. Not just a hotel, a complete tourist facility. Sports complex, entertainment center, zero-gravity honeymoon suites.»
He stopped abruptly and his face turned red. Sam blushed! He actually blushed.
Miss Beryllium smiled her dazzling smile at him. «But Sam, that idea is the proprietary property of Global Technologies. Global owns the idea, not you.»
For a moment the little conference room was absolutely silent. I could hear nothing except the faint background hum of the air-circulation fans. Sam seemed to have stopped breathing.
Then he squawked, «What?»
With a sad little shake of her gorgeous head, the Blonde replied, «Sam, you developed that idea while an employee of Global Technologies. We own it.»
«But you turned it down!»
«That makes no difference, Sam. Read your employment contract. It’s ours.»
«But I made all the contacts. I raised the funding. I worked everything out—on my own time, goddammit! On my own time!»
She shook her head again. «No, Sam. You did it while you were a Global employee. It’s not your possession. It belongs to us.»
Sam leaped from his chair and bounded to the ceiling. This time he was ready to make war, not love. «You can’t do this to me!»
The Blonde looked completely unruffled by his display. She sat there patiently, a slightly disappointed little frown on her face, while I calmed Sam down and got him back into his chair.
«Sam, dear, I know how you must feel,» she said. «I don’t want us to be enemies. We’d be happy to have you take part in the tourist hotel program—as a Global employee. There could even be a raise in it for you.»
«It’s mine, dammit!» Sam screeched. «You can’t steal it from me! It’s mine!»
She shrugged. «Well, I expect our lawyers will have to settle it with your lawyers. In the meantime, I suppose there’s nothing for us to do but accept your resignation. With reluctance. With my personal and very sad reluctance.»
That much I saw and heard with my own eyes and ears. I had to drag Sam out of the conference room and take him back to his own quarters. She had him whipsawed, telling him that he couldn’t claim possession of his own idea, and at the same time practically begging him to stay on with Global and run the tourist project for them.
What happened next depends on whom you ask. There are as many different versions of the story as there are people who tell it. As near as I can piece it all together, though, it went this way:
The Beryllium Blonde had figured that Sam’s financial partners would go along with Global Technologies once they realized that Global had muscled Sam out of the tourist business. But she probably wasn’t as sure of everything as she tried to make Sam think. After all, those backers had made their deal with the little guy; maybe they wouldn’t want to do business with a big multinational corporation. Worse still, she didn’t know exactly what kind of deal Sam had cut with his backers; if Sam had a legally binding contract with them that named him as their partner, they might scrap the whole project when they learned that Global had cut Sam out.
So she showed up at Sam’s door that night. He told me that she was still wearing the same jumpsuit, with nothing underneath it except her own luscious body. She brought a bottle of incredibly rare and expensive wine with her. «To show there’s no hard feelings.»
The Blonde’s game was to keep Sam with Global and get him to go through with the tourist hotel idea. Apparently, once Global’s management got word that Sam had actually closed a deal for building a tourist facility on Alpha, they figured they might as well go into the tourist business for themselves. Alpha was still underutilized; a tourist facility suddenly made sense to those jerkoffs.
So instead of shuttling back to Phoenix, as we had thought she would, the Blonde knocked on Sam’s door that night. The next morning I saw him floating along the Shack’s central corridor. He looked kind of dazed.
«She’s staying here for a few more days,» Sam mumbled. It was like he was talking to himself instead of to me. But there was a happy little grin on his face.
Everybody in the Shack started to make bets on how long Sam could hold out. The best odds had him capitulating in three nights. Jokes about Delilah and haircuts became uproariously funny to everybody—except me. My future was tied up with Sam’s; if the tourist hotel project collapsed, it wouldn’t be long before I was shipped back Earthside, I knew.
After three days there were dark circles under Sam’s eyes. He looked weary. The grin was gone.
After a week had gone by, I found Sam snoring in the Blue Grotto. As gently as I could I woke him.
«You getting any food into you?» I asked.
He blinked, gummy-eyed. «Chicken soup. I been taking chicken soup. Had some yesterday… I think it was yesterday …»