“I understand you’re looking for me,” he said, folding his long-legged figure into the little plastic chair in front of Jade’s desk.
She almost leaped across the desk. “Do you know where Sam Gunn is?”
He frowned slightly. “I know where one of them is,” said Townes.
Takes Two to Tangle
One Sam Gunn is bad enough—said professor Townes. But now there’s at least two of them, maybe more, and it’s all my fault.
Well, mostly my fault. Sam had something to do with it, of course. More than a little, as you might suspect if you know anything about Sam.
And, if you know anything about Sam, you know that of course there was a woman involved. A beautiful, statuesque, golden-haired Bishop of the New Lunar Church, no less.
I didn’t know anything about Sam except the usual stuff that the general public knew: Sam Gunn was a freewheeling space entrepreneur, a little stubby loudmouthed redheaded guy who always found himself battling the big boys of huge interplanetary corporations and labyrinthine government bureaucracies. Sam was widely known as a womanizer, a wiseass, a stubby Tasmanian Devil with a mind as sharp as a laser beam and a heart as big as a spiral galaxy.
He had disappeared years earlier out on some wild-ass trek to the Kuiper Belt. Everybody thought he had died out in that frozen darkness beyond Pluto. There was rejoicing in the paneled chambers of corporate and government power, tears shed among Sam’s legion of friends.
And then after his long absence he showed up again, spinning a wild tale about having fallen into a black hole. He was heading back to Earth, coming in from the cold, claiming that friendly aliens on the other side of the black hole had showed him how to get back to our space-time, back to home. Sam’s enemies nodded knowingly: of course the aliens would want to get rid of him, they said to each other.
And they sent just about every lawyer on Earth after Sam. He owed megabucks to dozens of creditors, including some pretty shady characters. He was so deeply in debt that there was no place on Earth he could land his spacecraft without having umpteen dozen eager lawyers slam him with liens and lawsuits.
Which is why Sam landed not on Earth, but on the Moon. At Selene, which was now an independent nation and apparently the only human community in the solar system that didn’t have Sam at the head of its “most wanted” list.
He came straight to the underground halls of Selene University. To my office!
Imagine my surprise when Sam Gunn showed up at my doorway, all one hundred sixty-some centimeters of him.
And asked me to invent a matter transmitter for him.
“A matter transmitter?” I must have sputtered, I was so shocked. “But that’s nonsense. It’s kiddie fantasy. It’s nothing but—”
“It’s physics,” Sam said. “And you’re a physicist. Right?”
He had me there.
I am Daniel C. Townes IV, PhD. I am a particle physicist. I was on the short list last year for the Nobel Prize in physics. But that was before I met Sam Gunn.
Sam had popped into my office unannounced, sneaking past the department secretary during her lunch break. (Which, I must confess, often takes a couple of hours.) He just waltzed through my open doorway, walked up to my desk, stuck out his hand and introduced himself. Then he told me he needed a matter transmitter. Right away.
I sagged back in my desk chair while Sam perched himself on the only bare corner of my desk, grinning like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern. His face was round, with a snub nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Wiry reddish hair; I think they call that color auburn. His eyes were light, twinkling.
“Physics is one thing,” I said, trying to regain my dignity. “A matter transmitter is something else.”
“Come on,” Sam said, wheedling, “you guys have transmitted photons, haven’t you? You yourself just published a paper about transmitting atomic particles from one end of your lab to the other.”
He had read the literature. That impressed me.
You have to understand that I was naive enough to think that I might be the youngest person ever to receive the physics Nobel. I had to be careful, though. More than one young genius had been cut down by the knives that whirl through academia’s hallowed halls in the dark of night.
Sam aged me, though.
I think he had roosted on my desk because that made him taller than I was, as long as I remained sitting in my swivel chair. I have to confess, though, that there wasn’t any place else he could have sat. My office was littered with reports, journals, books, even popular magazines. The visitor’s chair was piled high with memos that the secretary had printed out from the department’s unending file of meaningless trivia. There might be no paper on the Moon, but we sure do pile up the monofilament plastic sheets that we use in its place.
“So how about it, Dan-o?” Sam asked. “Can you make me a matter transmitter? It’s worth a considerable fortune and I’ll cut you in on it, fifty-fifty.”
“What makes you think—”
“You’re the expert on entanglement, aren’t you?”
I was impressed even more. Entanglement is not a subject your average businessman either knows or cares about.
Curiosity is a funny thing. It not only kills cats, it makes physicists forget Newton’s Third Law, the one about action and reaction.
I heard myself ask him, “Did you really survive going through a black hole?”
Grinning even wider, Sam nodded. “Yep. Twice.”
“What’s it like? What did you experience? How did it feel?”
Sam shrugged. “Nothing to it, really. I didn’t see or feel anything all that unusual.”
“That’s impossible.”
Sam just sat there on the corner of my desk, grinning knowingly.
“Unless,” I mused, “the laws of physics change under the intense gravitational field…”
“Or I’m telling you a big, fat lie,” Sam said.
“A lie?” That stunned me. “You wouldn’t—”
“Look,” Sam said, bending closer toward me, “I need a matter transmitter. You whip one up for me and I’ll give you all the data in my ship’s computer.”
I could feel my eyes go wide. “Your ship? The one that went through the black hole?”
“Twice,” said Sam.
Thus began my partnership with Sam Gunn.
Ingrid Mactavish was something else. A missionary from the New Morality back Earthside, she had come to Selene to be installed as a Bishop in the New Lunar Church. She was nearly two meters tall, with bright golden hair that glowed and cascaded down past her shoulders, and eyes the color of perfect sapphires. A Junoesque goddess. A Valkyrie in a virginal white pants suit that fit her snugly enough to send my blood pressure soaring.
I’ll never forget my first encounter with her. She just stormed into my office and, without preamble, demanded, “Is it true?”
It’s hard to keep a secret in a community as small and intense as Selene. Rumors fly along those underground corridors faster than kids on jetblades. Sam wanted me to keep my work on the matter transmitter absolutely, utterly, cosmically top-secret. But the word leaked out, of course, after only a couple of weeks. I was surprised that nobody blabbed about it before then.
That’s what brought Bishop MacTavish into my office, all one hundred and eighty-two centimeters of her.
“Is it true?” she repeated.
She was practically radiating righteous wrath, those sapphire eyes blazing at me.
I swallowed as I got politely to my feet from my desk chair. I’m accustomed to being the tallest person in any crowd. I’m just a tad over two meters; I’d been a fairly successful basketball player back at Cal-Tech, but here on the Moon even Sam could jump so high in the light gravity that my height wasn’t all that much of an advantage.