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 sleep restraint.
“Frederick Mohammed Malone,” I said.
“Jesus Christ, they put me in with an Arab!”
But he stuck out his hand. Sam was really a little guy; his hand was almost the size of 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 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 Velcro shoes from the carpeting and floated over to one of the sleeping bags. His travel-bag hung alongside. He ignored it and sniffed 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’d 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 puzzled 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? And the puns.”
He shrugged.
“The medics think they got my case arrested. New treatment that the gene therapy people 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 sleep restraint’s webbing and shot me a dark look. “And this is the guy who doesn’t like ethnic jokes.”
The Mac-Dac Shack had been one of the first space stations that 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 MDs 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 one module of the Shack as an isolation ward where the medics could do research on things like AIDS, ebola, the New Delhi virus, and some of the 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.
Sam stayed in my ward for three-four days; I forget the exact time. He was like an energetic little bee, buzzing all over the place, hardly ever still for a minute. In zero-gee, of course, he could literally climb the curved walls of the ward and hover up on the ceiling. He terrified the head nurse in short order by hanging near the ceiling or hiding inside one of the sleeping bags and then launching himself at her like a missile when she showed up with the morning’s assortment of needles.
Never once did Sam show the slightest qualm at having his blood sampled alongside mine, although he watched the nurses taking the samples very closely. I’ve seen guys get violent from the fear that they’d get a needle contaminated by my blood and catch what I had. But Sam never even blinked. Me, I never liked needles. Couldn’t abide them. Couldn’t look when the nurse stuck me; couldn’t even look when she stuck somebody else. Sam looked. He told me so.
By the end of the first day Sam noticed something. “All the nurses are women.”
“All six of them,” I affirmed.
“The doctors are all males?”
“Eight men, four women.”
“That leaves two extra women for us.”
“For you. I’m on the other side.”
“How come all women nurses?” he wondered.
“I think it’s because of me. They don’t want to throw temptation in my path.”
Sam started to frown at me but it turned into that lopsided grin. “They didn’t think about my path.”
He proceeded to cause absolute havoc among the nurses. With the single-minded determination of a sperm cell seeking blindly for an ovum, Sam pursued them alclass="underline" the fat little redhead, the cadaverous ash-blonde, the really good-looking one, the kid who still had acne—all of them, even the head nurse, who threatened to inject him with enough estrogen to grow boobs on him if he didn’t leave her and her crew alone.
Nothing deterred Sam. He would be gone for long hours from the ward, and when he’d come back he would be grinning from ear to ear. As politely as I could I’d ask him how he made out.
“It matters not if you win or lose,” he would say. “It’s how you play the game…. as long as you get laid.”
When he finally left the isolation ward it seemed as if we had been friends for years. And it was damned quiet in there without him. I was alone again. I missed him. I realized how many years it had been since I’d had a friend.
I sank into a real depression of self-pity and despair. I had caught Sam’s cold, sure enough. I was hacking and sneezing all day and night. One good thing about zero gravity is that you can’t have a postnasal drip. One bad thing is that all the fluids accumulate in your sinuses and give you a headache of monumental proportions. The head nurse seemed to take special pleasure in inflicting upon me the indignity of forcing tubes up my nose to drain the sinuses.
The medics were overjoyed. Their guinea pig was doing something interesting. Would I react to the cold like any normal person and get over it in a few days? Or would the infection spread through my body and worsen, turn into pneumonia or maybe kill me? I could see them writing their learned papers in their heads every time they examined me, which was four times a day.
I was really unfit company for anyone, including myself. I went on for months that way, just wallowing in my own misery. Other patients came and went: an African kid with a new strain of polio; an asthmatic who had developed a violent allergy to dust; a couple of burn victims from the Alpha construction crew who had to be suspended in zero-gee. I stayed while they were treated in the other wards and sent home.
Then, without any warning at all, Sam showed up again.
“Hello, Omar, how’s the tent-making business?” My middle name had become Omar, as far as he was concerned.
I gaped at him. He was wearing the powder-blue coveralls and shoulder insignia of Rockledge Industries, Inc., which in those days was just starting to grow into the interplanetary conglomerate it has become.
“What the hell you doing back here?” My voice came out a full octave higher than normal, I was so surprised. And glad.
“I work here.”
“Say what?”