And I was right, of course, although it didn’t exactly develop the way I thought it would.
I wanted to get there first. Start mining the Moon, grab an asteroid or two. Mega-fortunes awaited the person who could strike those bonanzas.
But the goddamned honeymoon hotel was bleeding me to death. Unless and until somebody came up with a cure for space sickness, Heaven was going to be a financial bottomless pit. I was losing a bundle trying to keep the hotel open, and the day D’Argent became Rockledge’s Chief of Space Operations, he doubled my rent, sweetheart that he is.
But I knew something that D’Argent didn’t want me to know. Rockledge was working on a cure for space sickness. Right here aboard the space station! If I could get my hands on that, my troubles would be over. Pretty much.
It occurred to me, as I headed for the Lunar Eclipse, that maybe Jill could do me still another favor. Maybe her being here on the station might work out okay, after all.
I pushed along the tube that went down to the inner ring. You had to be careful, heading from the hub towards the various rings, because you were effectively going downhill. Flatlanders coming up for the first time could flatten themselves but good if they let themselves drop all the way down to the outermost wheel. The Coriolis force from the stations spin would bang them against the tube’s circular wall as they dropped downward. The farther they dropped, the bigger the bangs. You could break bones.
That’s why Rockledge’s engineers had designed ladder rungs and safety hatches in the tubes that connected the hub to the wheels, so you had something to grab on to and stop your fall. I had even thought about padding the walls, but D’Argent nixed my idea: too expensive, he claimed. He’d rather see somebody fracture a leg and sue me.
I was almost at the lunar level. In fact, I was pulling open the hatch when I hear a yell. I look up and a bundle of screaming baby comes tumbling past me like a miniature bowling ball with arms and legs.
“Catch him! Stop him!”
I look around and here comes Larry Karsh, flailing around like a skinny spider on LSD, trying to catch up with his kid.
“Sam! Help!”
If I had thought about it for half a microsecond I would’ve let the kid bounce off the tube walls until he splattered himself on the next set of hatches. And Larry after him.
But, no—instinct took over and I shot through the hatch and launched myself after the baby like a torpedo on a rescue mission. S. Gunn, intrepid hero.
It was a long fall to the next set of hatches. I could see the kid tumbling around like a twenty-pound meteoroid, bare-ass naked, hitting the wall and skidding along it for a moment, then flinging out into midair again. His size worked for him: a little guy like he was didn’t hit the wall so hard—at first. But each bump down the tube was going to be harder, I knew. If I didn’t catch him real fast, he’d get hurt. Bad.
There was nobody else in the damned tube, nobody there to grab him or break his fall or even slow him down a little.
I started using the ladder rungs to propel myself faster, grabbing the rungs with my fingertips and pushing off them, one after another, faster and faster. Like the Lone Ranger chasing a runaway horse. Damned Coriolis force was getting to me, though, making me kind of dizzy.
As I got closer and closer, I saw that little T.J. wasn’t screaming with fear. He was screeching with delight, happy as a little cannonball, kicking his arms and legs and tumbling head over bare ass, laughing hard as he could.
Next time he hits the wall he won’t be laughing anymore, I thought. Then I wondered if I could reach him before he slammed into the hatch at the bottom of this level of the tube. At the speed I was going I’d come down right on top of him, and the kid wouldn’t be much of a cushion.
Well, I caught up with him before either of us reached the next hatch, tucked him under one arm like he was a wriggling football, and started trying to slow my fall with the other hand. It wasn’t going to work, I saw, so I flipped myself around so I was coming down feet-first and kept grabbing at rungs with my free hand, getting dizzier and dizzier. Felt like my shoulder was going to come off, and my hand got banged up pretty good, but at least we slowed down some.
The baby was crying and struggling to get loose. He’d been having fun, dropping like an accelerating stone. He didn’t like being saved. I heard Larry yelling and looked up; he was clambering down the ladder, all skinny arms and legs, jabbering like a demented monkey.
I hit the hatch feet-first like I’d been dropped out of an airplane. I mean, I did my share of parachute jumps back when I was in astronaut training, but this time I hit a hell of a lot harder. Like my shinbones were shattering and my knees were trying to ram themselves up into my ribcage. I saw every star in the Milky Way, and the wind was knocked out of me for a moment.
So I was sprawled on my back, kind of dazed, with the kid yelling to get loose from me, when Larry comes climbing down the ladder, puffing like he’d been trying to save the kid, and takes the yowling little brat in his arms.
“Gee, thanks, Sam,” he says. “I was changing his diaper when he got loose from me. Sorry about the mess.”
That’s when I realized that the ungrateful little so-and-so had peed all down the front of my shirt.
So I was late for my lunch date with Senator Meyers. My hand was banged up and swollen, my legs ached, my knees felt like they were going to explode, and the only other shirt I had brought with me was all wrinkled from being jammed into my travel bag. But at least it was dry. Even so, I got to the restaurant before she did. Jill was one of those women who has a deathly fear of arriving anywhere first.
I was so late, though, that she was only half a minute behind me. I hadn’t even started for a table yet; I was still in the restaurant’s teeny little foyer, talking with my buddy Omar.
“Am I terribly late?” Jill asked.
I turned at the sound of her voice and, I’ve got to admit, Jill looked terrific. I mean, she was as plain as vanilla, with hardly any figure at all, but she still looked bright and attractive and, well, I guess the right word is radiant. She was wearing a one-piece zipsuit, almost like the coveralls that we used to wear back on the NASA shuttle. But now her suit was made of some kind of shiny stuff and decorated with color accents and jewels. Like Polonius said: rich, not gaudy.
Her hair was a darker shade than I remembered it from the old days, and impeccably coiffed. She was dyeing it, I figured. And getting it done a lot better than she did when she’d been a working astronaut.
“You look like a million dollars,” I said as she stepped through the hatch into the restaurant’s foyer.
She grinned that freckle-faced grin of hers and said, “It costs almost that much to look like this.”
“It’s worth it,” I said.
Omar, my buddy from years back, was serving as the maitre d’ that afternoon. He was the general manager of the hotel, but everybody was pulling double or triple duty, trying to keep the place afloat. He loomed over us, painfully gaunt and tall as a basketball star, his black pate shaved bald, a dense goatee covering his chin. In the easy lunar gravity Omar could walk normally with nothing more than the lightest of braces on his atrophied legs. Omar had more to lose than I did if the hotel went bust. He’d have to go back to Earth and be a cripple.
As he showed us to our table, all dignity and seriousness, Jill cracked, “You’re getting gray, Sam.”
“Cosmic rays,” I snapped back at her. “Not age. I’ve been in space so much that primary cosmic rays have discolored my pigmentation.”