Jill nodded as if she knew better but didn’t want to argue about it. The restaurant was almost completely empty. It was the only place aboard the station to eat, unless you were a Rockledge employee and could use their cafeteria, yet still it was a sea of empty tables. I mean, there wasn’t any other place for the tourists to eat—it was lunch hour for those who came up from the States—but the Eclipse had that forlorn look. Three tables occupied, seventeen bare. Twelve human waiters standing around with nothing to do but run up my salary costs.
As Omar sat us at the finest table in the Eclipse (why not?) Jill said, “You ought to get some new clothes, Sam. You’re frayed at the cuffs, for goodness’ sake.”
I refrained from telling her about T.J.’s urinary gift. But I gave her the rest of the story about my thrilling rescue, which nobody had witnessed except the butterfingered Jack Spratt.
“My goodness, Sam, you saved that baby’s life,” Jill said, positively glowing at me.
“I should’ve let him go and seen how high he’d bounce when he hit the hatch.”
“Sam!”
“In the interest of science,” I said.
“Don’t be mean.”
“He’s supposed to be a bouncing baby boy, isn’t he?”
She did not laugh.
“Dammit, Jill, they shouldn’t have brought a kid up here,” I burst. “It’s not right. There ought to be a regulation someplace to prevent idiots from bringing their lousy brats to my hotel!”
Jill was not helpful at all. “Sam,” she told me, her expression severe, “we made age discrimination illegal half a century ago.”
“This isn’t age discrimination,” I protested. “That baby isn’t a voting citizen.”
“He’s still a human being who has rights. And so do his parents.”
I am not a gloomy guy, but it felt like a big rain cloud had settled over my head. Little T.J. was not the only one pissing on me.
But I had work to do. As long as Jill was here, I tried to make the best of it. I started spinning glorious tales of the coming bonanza in space manufacturing, once we could mine raw materials from the Moon or asteroids.
I never mentioned our weightless escapades, but she knew that I held that trump card. Imagine the fuss the media would make if they discovered that the conservative Senator from New Hampshire had once been a wild woman in orbit. With the notorious Sam Gunn, of all people!
“What is it you want, Sam?” Jill asked me. That’s one of the things I liked best about her. No bull-hickey. She came straight to the point.
So I did, too. “I’m trying to raise capital for a new venture.”
Before I could go any farther, she fixed me with a leery eye. “Another new venture? When are you going to stop dashing around after the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, Sam?”
I gave her a grin. “When I get my hands on the gold.”
“Is that what you’re after, money? Is that all that you’re interested in?”
“Oh no,” I said honestly. “What I’m really interested in is the things money can buy.”
She frowned; it was part annoyance, part disappointment, I guess. Easy for her. She was born well-off, married even better, and now was a wealthy widowed United States Senator. Me, I was an orphan at birth, raised by strangers. I’ve always had to claw and scrabble and kick and bite my way to wherever I had to go. There was nobody around to help me. Only me, all five foot three—excuse me, five foot five inches of me. All by myself. You’re damned right money means a lot to me. Most of all, it means respect. Like that old ballplayer said, the home-run hitters drive the Cadillacs. I also noticed, very early in life, that they also get the best-looking women.
“Okay,” I backpedaled. “So money can’t buy happiness. But neither can poverty. I want to get filthy rich. Is there anything wrong with that?”
Despite her New England upbringing, a faint smile teased at the corners of Jill’s mouth. “No, I suppose not,” she said softly.
So I went into the details about my hopes for lunar mining and asteroid prospecting. Jill listened quietly; attentively, I thought, until I finished my pitch.
She toyed with her wine glass as she said, “Mining the Moon. Capturing asteroids. All that’s a long way off, Sam.”
“It’s a lot closer than most people realize,” I replied, in my best-behaved, serious man of business attitude. Then I added, “It’s not as far in the future as our own space shuttle missions are in the past.”
Jill sighed, then grinned maliciously. “You always were a little bastard, weren’t you?”
I grinned back at her. “What’s the accident of my birth got to do with it?”
She put the wine glass down and hunched closer to me. “Just what are you after, Sam, specifically?” I think she was enjoying the challenge of dealing with me.
I answered, “I want to make sure that the big guys like Rockledge and Yamagata don’t slit my throat.”
“How can I help you do that?”
“You’re on the Commerce Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee, right? I need to be able to assure my investors that the Senate won’t let my teeny little company be squashed flat by the big guys.”
“Your investors? Like who?”
I refused to be rattled by her question. “I’ll find investors,” I said firmly, “once you level the playing field for me.”
Leaning back in her chair, she said slowly, “You want me to use my influence as a United States Senator to warn Rockledge and the others not to muscle you.”
I nodded.
Jill thought about it for a few silent moments, then she asked, “And what’s in it for me?”
Good old straight-from-the-shoulder Jill. “Why,” I said, “you get the satisfaction of helping an old friend to succeed in a daring new venture that will bring the United States back to the forefront of space industrialization.”
She gave me a look that told me that wasn’t the answer she had wanted to hear. But before I could say anything more, she muttered, “That might win six or seven votes in New Hampshire, I guess.”
“Sure,” I said. “You’ll be a big hero with your constituents, helping the little guy against the big, bad corporations.”
“Cut the serenade, Sam,” she snapped. “You’ve got something else going on in that twisted little brain of yours; I can tell. What is it?”
She was still grinning as she said it, so I admitted, “Well, there’s a rumor that Rockledge is developing an anti-nausea remedy that’ll stop space sickness. It could mean a lot for my hotel.”
“I hear your zero-gee sex palace is on its way to bankruptcy.”
“Not if Rockledge will sell me a cure for the weightless whoopies.”
“You think they’d try to keep it from you?”
“Do vultures eat meat?”
She laughed and started in on her plate of soyburger.
After lunch I took Jill down to her mini-suite in the hub and asked how she liked her accommodations.
“Well,” she said, drawing the word out, “it’s better than the old shuttle mid-deck, I suppose.”
“You suppose?” I was shocked. “Each one of Heaven’s rooms is a luxurious, self-contained mini-suite.” I quoted from our publicity brochure.
Jill said nothing until I found her door and opened it for her with a flourish.
“Kind of small, don’t you think?” she said.
“Nobody’s complained about the size,” I replied. Then I showed her the controls that operated the minibar, the built-in sauna, the massage equipment, and the screen that covered the observation port.
“A real love nest,” Jill said.
“That’s the idea.”
I opened the observation port’s screen and we saw the Earth hanging out there, huge and blue and sparkling. Then it slid past as the station revolved and we were looking at diamond-hard stars set against the velvet black of space. It was gorgeous, absolutely breathtaking.