For a moment the little conference room was absolutely silent. I could hear nothing except the faint background hiss 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 Rockledge Industries. 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 golden locks again. “No, Sam. You did it while you were a Rockledge employee. It is not your possession. It belongs to us.”
Sam leaped out of my grasp 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 stood there patiently, a slightly disappointed little pout on her face, while I calmed Sam down and got him back to the table.
“Sam, dear, I know how you must feel,” she cooed. “I don’t want us to be enemies. We’d be happy to have you take part in the tourist hotel program as a Rockledge 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 deliciously. “I suppose our lawyers will have to settle it with your lawyers. In the meantime I’m afraid there’s nothing for us to do but to accept your resignation. With reluctance, of course. With my own 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 Rockledge and run the tourist project for them.
What happened next depends on who 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 was hoping that Sam’s financial partners would go along with Rockledge Industries once they realized that Rockledge had muscled Sam out of the hotel deal. 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 didn’t want to do business with a big multinational corporation. Worse still, she didn’t know exactly what kind of a deal Sam had cut with his backers. If Sam had legally binding contracts naming him as their partner they just might scrap the whole project when they learned that Rockledge had cut Sam out. Especially if it looked like a court battle was shaping up.
So she showed up at Sam’s door that night. He told me that she was still wearing the same skintight jumpsuit, with nothing underneath it except her own luscious body. She brought a bottle of incredibly rare and expensive cognac with her. “To show there’s no hard feelings.”
The Blonde’s game was to keep Sam with Rockledge and get him to go through with the tourist hotel deal. Apparently, once Rockledge’s management got word that Sam had actually closed a deal for creating a tourist facility on Alpha, their greedy little brains told them they might as well take the tourist business for themselves. Alpha was still badly 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 that 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 project collapsed it wouldn’t be long before I got shipped back to Earth, I knew.
After three days there were dark circles under Sam’s eyes. He looked weary. Dazed. 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….”
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. “Send her packing!”
He smiled wanly, like a man who knew he was addicted. “And quit show business?” he said weakly.
Two weeks to the day after she arrived, the Blonde packed up and left. Her eyes were blazing with anger. I saw her off at the docking port. She looked just as perfectly radiant as the day she had 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 trembled. 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 finally figured out that 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 was wrapping you around her little finger,” I said.
“So did she.”
“You outsmarted her!”
I outlasted her,” Sam said, his voice low and truly 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 desert toward an oasis that turned out to be a mirage.
“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 here because you’re susceptible.”
“Yeah. But once she tried to steal my idea from me I stopped being so susceptible. I kept telling myself, ‘She’s not a gorgeous hot-blooded sex-pot of a woman. She’s a company stooge, an android they sent here to nail you, a bureaucrat with boobs. Great boobs.”
“And it worked.”
“By a millimeter. Less. She damned near beat me. She damned near did. She should never have mentioned marriage. That woke me up.”
What had happened, while Sam was fighting the Battle of the Bunk, was that when Sam’s partners-to-be realized that Rockledge was interested in the tourist facility, they became absolutely convinced that they had a gold mine on their hands. They backed Sam to the hilt. Their lawyers challenged Rockledge’s lawyers, and once the paper-shufflers down in Phoenix saw that, they understood that Miss Berylliums mission to the Shack was doomed. The Blonde left in a huff when Phoenix ordered her to return. I guess she was enjoying her work. Or maybe she thought 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 and a half of vitamin E.”