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’ll 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. Had to rise up off the floor a ways to do it, but he did it. “You’re sure? You’re absolutely certain that this is what you want?”
I nodded. “I can’t go back, Sam. 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, Same had already been working for some time on his own ideas about space tourism. If Rockledge 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 deal while he was still collecting a salary from Rockledge. 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 know, 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 Rockledge Industries. And Sam worked full time for them, eight hours a day, six days a week, and then some. They got their 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 Rock-ledge’s regular office hours. But he worked plenty of overtime hours for Rockledge, 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 Rockledge 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 regulations. It would take Rockledge’s lawyers a month to figure out what the hell Sam was talking about and then frame an answering memo.
In the meantime Sam 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 himself. It was all done with the Shack’s computer system, so no cash 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 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 on 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.
Then, some six months after the Senator’s visit, when it looked as if Sam had run out of time and excuses to keep me in the Shack and I would have to pack my meager bag and head down the gravity well to spend the rest of my miserable days in some overcrowded ghetto city, Sam came prancing weightlessly into my microminiaturized living quarters, waving a flimsy sheet of paper.
“What’s that?” I knew it was a straight line but he wasn’t going to tell me unless I asked.
“A new law.” He was smirking, canary feathers all over his chin.
“First time I ever seen you happy about some new regulation.”
“Not a regulation,” he corrected me. “A law. A federal law, duly passed by the U.S. Congress and just today signed by the President.”
I wanted to play it cool but he had me too curious. “So what’s it say? Why’s it so important?”
“It says,” Sam made a flourish that sent him drifting slowly toward the ceiling as he read, “ ‘No person residing aboard a space facility owned by the United States or a corporation or other legal entity licensed by the United States may be compelled to leave said facility without due process of law.’ ”
My reply was something profound, like, “Huh?”
His scrungy little face beaming, Sam said, “It means that Rockledge can’t force you back Earthside! As long as you can pay the rent, Omar, they can’t evict you.”
“You joking?” I couldn’t believe it.
“No joke. I helped write this masterpiece, kiddo,” he told me. “Remember when old Senator Winnebago was up here, last year?”
The Senator was from Wisconsin but his name was not Winnebago. He had been a powerful enemy of the space program until his doctors told him that degenerative arthritis was going to make him a pain-racked cripple unless he could live in a low-g environment. His visit to the Shack proved what his doctors had told him: in zero-gee the pains that hobbled him disappeared and he felt twenty years younger. All of a sudden he became a big space freak. That’s how Sam was able to convince him to sponsor the “pay your own way” law, which provided that neither the government nor a private company operating a space facility could force a resident out as long as he or she was able to pay the going rate for accommodations.
“Hell, they’ve got laws to protect tenants from eviction in New York and every other city,” Sam said. “Why not here?”
I was damned glad of it. Overjoyed, in fact. It meant that I could stay, that I wouldn’t be forced to go back Earthside and drag my ass around at my full weight. What I didn’t realize at the time, of course, was that Sam would eventually have to use the law for himself. Obviously, he had seen ahead far enough to know that he would need such protection sooner or later. Did he get the law written for his own selfish purposes? Sure he did. But it served my purpose, too, and Sam knew that when he was bending the Senator’s tin ear. That was good enough for me. Still is.
For the better part of another year I served as Sam’s leg man—a job I found interesting and amusingly ironic. I shuttled back and forth from the Shack to Alpha, generally to meet bigshot business persons visiting the Big Wheel. When Sam was officially on duty for Rockledge, which was most of the time, he’d send me over to Alpha to meet the visitors, settle them down, and talk about the money that a tourist facility would make. I would just try to keep them happy until Sam could shake loose and come over to meet them himself. Then he would weave a golden web of words, describing how fantastic an orbital tourist facility would be, bobbing weightlessly around the room in his enthusiasm, pulling numbers out of the air to show how indecently huge would be the profit that investors would make.