By the tenth day, more money had changed hands among the bettors than on Wall Street. Sam looked like a case of battle fatigue. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes haunted.
«She’s a devil, Omar,» he whispered hoarsely. «A devil.»
«Then get rid of her, man!» I urged.
He smiled wanly. «And quit show business?»
Two weeks to the day after she arrived, the Blonde packed up and left. Her eyes were blazing anger. I saw her off at the docking port. She looked just as perfectly radiant as she had the day she first arrived at the Shack. But what she was radiating now was rage. Hell hath no fury … I thought. But I was happy to see her go.
Sam slept for two days straight. When he managed to get up and around again, he was only a shell of his old self. He had lost ten pounds. His eyes were sunken into his skull. His hands shook. His chin was stubbled. He looked as if he had been through hell and back. But his crooked little grin had returned.
«What happened?» I asked him.
«She gave up.»
«You mean she’s going to let you go?»
He gave a deep, soulful, utterly weary sigh. «I guess she figured she couldn’t change my mind and she couldn’t kill me—at least not with the method she was using.» His grin stretched a little wider.
«We all thought she had you wrapped around her… eh, her little finger,» I said.
«So did she.»
«You outsmarted her!»
«I outlasted her,» Sam said, his voice low and suddenly sorrowful. «You know, at one point there, she almost had me convinced that she had fallen in love with me.»
«In love with you?»
He shook his head slowly, like a man who had crawled across miles of burning sand toward an oasis that turned out to be a mirage.
I said, «You had me worried, man.»
«Why?» His eyes were really bleary.
«Well… she’s a powerful hunk of woman. Like you said, they sent her up because you’re susceptible.»
«Yeah. But once she tried to steal my idea from me, I stopped being susceptible anymore. I kept telling myself, ‘She’s not a gorgeous hot-blooded sexpot of a woman, she’s a company stooge, a bureaucrat with boobs, an android they sent here to nail you.’»
«And it worked,» I said.
«By a millimeter. Less. She damned near beat me. She damned near did. She should have never mentioned marriage. That woke me up.»
What had happened, while Sam was fighting the Battle of the Bunk, was that when Sam’s partners realized that Global was interested in the tourist facility, they become absolutely convinced that they had a gold mine and backed Sam to the hilt. Their lawyers challenged Global’s lawyers, and once the paper-shufflers in Phoenix saw that, they realized that Miss Beryllium’s mission at the Shack was doomed to fail. The Blonde left in a huff when Phoenix ordered her to return. Apparently, either she was enjoying her work or she thought that she had Sam weakening.
«Now lemme get another week’s worth of sleep, will you?» Sam asked me. «And, oh, yeah, find me about a ton of vitamin E.»
So Sam became the manager and part-owner of the human race’s first extraterrestrial tourist facility. I was his partner and, the way he worked things out, a major shareholder in the project. Global got some rent money out of it. Actually, so many people enjoyed their vacations aboard the Big Wheel so much that a market eventually opened up for low-gravity retirement homes. Sam beat Global on that, too. But that’s another story.
Malone was hanging weightlessly near the curving transparent dome of his chamber, staring out at the distant Moon and the cold, unblinking stars.
The reporter had almost forgotten her fear of weightlessness. The black man’s story seemed finished; she blinked and adjusted her attention to here and now. Drifting slightly closer to him, she turned the recorder off with an audible click, then thought better of it and clicked it on again.
«So that’s how this facility came into being,» she said.
Malone nodded, turning in midair to face her. «Yep. Sam got it built, got it started, and then lost interest in it. He had other things on his mind. He went into the advertising business, you know.»
«Oh, yes, everybody knows about that,» she replied. «But what happened to the woman, the Beryllium Blonde? And why didn’t Sam ever return to Earth again?»
«Two parts of the same answer,» Malone said. «Miss Beryllium thought she was playing Sam for a fish, using his Casanova complex to literally screw him out of the hotel deal. Once she realized that he was playing her, fighting a delaying action until his partners got their lawyers into action, she got damned mad. Powerfully mad. By the time it finally became clear back at Phoenix that Sam was going to beat them, she took her revenge on Sam.»
«What do you mean?»
«Sam wasn’t the only one who could riffle through old safety regulations and use them for his own benefit. She found a few early NASA regs, then got some bureaucrats in Washington—from the Office of Safety and Health, I think—to rewrite them so that anybody who’d been living in zero gee for a year or more had to undergo six months’ worth of retraining and exercise before he could return to Earth.»
«Six months? That’s ridiculous!»
«Is it?» Malone smiled without humor. «That regulation is still on the books, lady. Nobody pays any attention to it anymore, but it’s still there.»
«She did that to spite Sam?»
«And she made sure Global put all its weight behind enforcing it. Made people think twice before signing an employment contract for working up here. Stuck Sam, but good. He wasn’t going to spend any six months retraining! He just never bothered going back to Earth again.»
«Did he want to go back?»
«Sure he did. He wasn’t like me. He liked it back there. There were billions of women on Earth! He wanted to return, but he just couldn’t take six months out of his life for it.»
«That must have hurt him.»
«Yeah, I guess. Hard to tell with Sam. He didn’t like to bleed where people could watch.»
«And you never went back to Earth,» the reporter said.
«No,» Malone said. «Thanks to Sam, I stayed up here. He made me manager of the hotel, and once Sam bought the rest of this Big Wheel from Global, I became the manager of the entire Alpha station.»
«And you’ve never had the slightest yearning to see Earth again?»
Malone gazed at her solemnly for long moments before answering. «Sure I get the itch. But when I do, I go down to the one-gee section of the Wheel here. I sit in a wheelchair and try to get around with these crippled legs of mine. The itch goes away then.»
«But they have prosthetic legs that you can’t tell from the real thing,» she said. «Lots of paraplegics—»
«Maybe you can’t tell them from the real thing, but I guarantee you that any paraplegic who uses those things can tell.» Malone shook his head. «No, once you’ve spent some time up here in zero gee, you realize that you don’t need legs to get around. You can live a good and useful life here, instead of being a cripple hack down there.»
«I see,» the reporter said.
«Yeah. Sure you do.»
An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. She turned off the recorder on her belt, for good this time. Finally Malone softened. «Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be nasty with you. It’s just that… thinking about Sam again. He was a great guy, you know. And now he’s dead and everybody thinks he was just a trouble-making bastard.»
«I don’t, not anymore,» she said. «A womanizing sonofabitch, like you said. A male chauvinist of the first order. But after listening to you tell it, even at that he doesn’t sound so terrible.»