“What’s the matter?” I asked, earnestly. “Are you getting sick?”
“Dammit, Sam, they shouldn’t be called Gunn Shields!” Larry burst out. “I designed the bumpers, not you! They ought to be called Karsh Shields!”
I was stunned. I had never even thought of that. And he certainly had never mentioned it to me before.
“You mean, all this time you’ve been sore at me over a public relations title?”
“It means a lot to me,” he said, as surly as that teenaged grump.
“Is that why you left me for Rockledge?”
Larry nodded petulantly.
It was my big chance. Maybe my only chance. I let my head droop as if I had suddenly discovered religion and was ashamed of my past life.
“Gee, Larry,” I said, just loudly enough to be heard over the screams of the kids, “I never realized how much it meant to you.”
“Well,” it’s my invention but you took out the patent and you took all the credit, too.”
I noticed that he had not spoken a word about money. Not a syllable. Larry was pure of heart, bless his unblemished soul.
I looked him in the eye with the most contrite expression I could manage. It was hard to keep from giggling; this was going to be like plucking apples off a blind man’s fruit stand.
“If that’s the way you feel about it, kid,” I said, trying to keep up the hangdog expression, “then we’ll change the name. Look—I—I’ll even license Rockledge to manufacture and sell the shields. That’s right! Let Rockledge take it over completely! Then you can call them Karsh Shields with no trouble at all!”
His eyes goggled. “You’d do that for me, Sam?”
I slid an arm around his shoulder. “Sure I would. I never wanted to hurt you, Larry. If only you had told me sooner…” I let my voice fade away. Then I nodded, as if I had been struggling inside myself. “I’ll sell Rockledge the hotel, too.”
“No!” Larry gasped. “Not your hotel.”
“I know D’Argent wants it.” That wasn’t exactly the truth. But I had a strong suspicion the silver-haired bastard would be happy to take the hotel away from me—as long as he thought it would break my heart to part with it.
Larry’s face turned red again, but this time he looked embarrassed, not angry. “Sam …” He hesitated, then went on, “Look, Sam, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but the company’s been working on a cure for space sickness.”
I blinked at him, trying to generate a tear or two. “Really?”
“If it works, it should help to make your hotel a success.”
“If it works,” I said, with a big sigh.
The way I had it figured, Rockledge would pay a nice royalty for the license to manufacture and sell the magnetic bumpers. Not as much as VCI was making in profits from the shields, but the Rockledge royalties would go to me, personally, as the patent-holder. Not to VCI. The damned hotel’s debts wouldn’t touch the royalties. VCI would go down the tubes, but what the hell, that’s business. I’d be moving on to lunar mining and asteroid hunting. ET Resources, Inc. That’s what I would call my new company.
Let Larry call them Karsh Shields, I didn’t give a fart’s worth about that. Let D’Argent do everything he could to make the world forget I had anything to do with them, as long as he sent me the royalty checks on time. What I really wanted, what I desperately needed, was the money to start moving on ET Resources, Inc.
“Maybe I can talk D’Argent into letting you use their new drug,” Larry suggested. “You know, try it out on your hotel customers.”
I brightened up a little. “Gee,” I said, “that would be nice. If only I could keep my hotel.” I sighed again, heavier, heavy enough to nudge me slightly away from Larry and the baby. “It would break my heart to part with Heaven.”
Larry gaped at me while T.J. stuck a sticky finger in his father’s ear.
“It would make both of us happy,” I went on. “I could keep the hotel and Rockledge could take over the magnetic bumpers and call them Karsh Shields.”
That really turned him on. “I’ll go find D’Argent right now!” Larry said, all enthusiasm. “Would you mind looking after T.J. for a couple of minutes?”
And he was off like a shot before I could say a word, out across the mayhem of all those brats flinging themselves around the gym. Just before he disappeared through the main hatch he yelled back at me, “Oh, yeah, T.J.’s going to need a change. You know how to change a diaper, don’t you?”
He ducked through the hatch before I could answer. The kids swarmed all through the place and little T.J. stared after his disappearing father.
I was kind of stunned. I wasn’t a babysitter! But there I was, hanging in midair with twenty crazed kids zipping all around me and a ten-month-old baby hanging a couple of feet before my eyes, his chin and cheeks smeared with baby food and this weird expression on his face.
“Well,” I said to myself, “what the hell do I do now?”
T.J. broke into a bawling cry. He wanted his father, not this stranger. I didn’t know what to do. I tried talking to him, tried holding him, even tried making faces at him. He didn’t understand a word I said, of course; when I tried to hold him he squirmed and shrieked so loud even the other kids stopped their games to stare at me accusingly. And when I made a few faces at him he just screamed even louder.
Then I smelled something. His diaper.
One of the teen-aged girls gave me a nasty look and said firmly, “I’m going to call his mother!”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll bring the kid to her myself.”
I nudged squalling T.J. weightlessly toward the hatch and started the two of us down the connector tube toward the second-level wheel, where the Rockledge gym was. It had been a stroke of genius (mine) to put their exercise facility in the wheel that rotated at about one-third gee, the gravity you’d feel on Mars. You can lift three times the weight you’d be able to handle on Earth and feel like you’ve accomplished something without straining yourself. But do you think D’Argent or any of his Rockledge minions would give me credit for the idea? When hell freezes over—maybe.
T.J. stopped yowling once I got his flailing little body through the hatch and into the tube. This was a different enough place for his curiosity to override the idea that his father had abandoned him, and whatever discomfort his loaded diaper might be causing him. He was fascinated with the blinking lights on the hatch control panel. I opened and shut the damned hatch half a dozen times, just to quiet him down. Then I showed him the color-coded guide lines on the tube’s walls, and the glowing light strips. He pointed and smiled. Kind of a goofy smile, with just two teeth to show. But it was better than crying.
By the time we reached the second wheel we were almost pals. I let him smear his greasy little hands over the hatch control panel; like I said, he liked to watch the lights blink, and there wasn’t much damage he could do to the panel except make it sticky. I even held his hand and let him touch the keypads that operated the hatch. He laughed when it started to swing open. After we went through he pointed at the control panel on the other side and made it clear he wanted to play with that one, too.
There was enough of a feeling of gravity down at this level for me to walk on the floor, with T.J. crawling along beside me. I tried to pick him up and carry him, despite his smell, but he was too independent for that. He wanted to be on his own.
Kind of reminded me of me.
Melinda was sweaty and puffing and not an ounce lighter than she had been when she entered the exercise room. T.J. spotted her in the middle of all the straining, groaning women doing their aerobics to the latest top-forty pop tunes. He let out a squeal and all the women stopped their workout to surround the kid with cooing gushing baby talk. Melinda was queen of them all, the mother of the center of their attention. You’d think the brat had produced ice cream.