So there was Nostrum on the mound, Bonnie McDougal creeping in toward the plate from her position at third base, anticipating another bunt, and the rest of the Zoning Board scattered through the field.
This was all Sam’s idea. The morning had started in the Zoning Board’s regular meeting chamber, with Sam, me, and Hornsby all petitioning the Board for a zoning change for this chunk of open ground. Hornsby wanted to build a fancy high-rise condo complex, with towers that went up a hundred flights, almost up to the habitat’s centerline, where the spingrav dwindled down to almost nothing.
Sam wanted permission to build what he called an amusement center. And he’d had the gall to start his presentation by referring to Old Chicago.
“I was born and raised in Old Chicago, y’know,” Sam said to the assembled savants of Zoning Board. “That’s why I want to settle here and add something to the community.”
The assembled savants, up there behind their long table, said nothing, although grumpy old Fred Arrant, at the end of the table, looked as if he wanted to puke.
I myself thought the “born in Chicago” line was probably a bit much. Sam Gunn must have been born somewhere, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t in Old Chicago.
Sam Gunn was a legend and he knew it. He just sat there between me and Hornsby, the third applicant, with a choirboy’s angelic smile on his round hobgoblin’s face. He was wearing a faun-tan collarless suede jacket and neatly pressed slacks, with an open-necked shirt of pale lemon. It made my faithful old olive-drab coveralls look positively crummy, by comparison. Hornsby, overweight and completely bald, wore an awful micromesh suit of coral pink; it made him look like a giant newborn rat.
Being a legend carries a great deal of freight with it. Sam was known throughout the settled parts of the solar system as a pioneer, an entrepreneur, a guy with a vision as wide as the skies and a heart to match. He had made who knew how many fortunes and lost every last one of them, usually because he was such a soft touch that he couldn’t refuse a friend in need. But he was also known as a loudmouthed, womanizing, scheming wheeler-dealer who wouldn’t think twice about bending the law to the snapping point if he thought he could get away with it. He’d left a trail of broken hearts and fuming, furious tycoons, lawyers, corporate bigwigs and government officials all the way out to Saturn and back again.
His friends—who were few but loyal—said that Sam’s one big weakness was that he couldn’t stand by and let the big guys in business or government push the little guys around. His enemies—who were legion and powerful—howled that Sam was a king-sized pain in the butt.
I had to laugh about the “king-sized.” Sam was tiny, an elf, a chunky, fast-talking little guy with bristling red hair and a sprinkling of Huck Finn freckles across his nub of a nose. His eyes were sort of hazel, sometimes they looked blue, sometimes green, sometimes something in between. Shifty eyes, the kind a gambler or cat burglar might have.
“So naturally,” he was saying to the Zoning Board, “I thought that New Chicago would be the ideal place for me to build my amusement center.”
The members of the Zoning Board glanced back and forth among themselves.
“Amusement center, Mr. Gunn?” asked the chairperson, Bonnie McDougal. She was an elegant blonde, tall, cool, very much in possession of herself. No doubt Sam wanted to possess her, too. There was hardly a woman he’d ever met that he didn’t try to bed—according to his legend.
“Aren’t you the guy who built that orbital whorehouse a few years back?” growled Arrant, who was known as the Zoning Board’s bulldog. His first reaction to any request was always a loud, “No!” Then he’d get really negative.
“It was a zero-gravity honeymoon hotel,” Sam replied politely. “Perfectly legitimate, sir. Our motto was, ‘If you like waterbeds, you’ll love zero-gee.’ ”
“Zero-gee?” McDougal asked, a cool smile on her lips. “Like we have along the centerline here in New Chicago?”
Sam smiled back at her; it looked more like a leer. “Exactly the same. Precisely. You can float around weightlessly up there.”
Their eyes met. She turned away first.
“You see,” Sam went on in his oh-so-reasonable manner, “I really want to give this community something it needs, something that will be useful.”
“Like a gambling casino,” Rick Cole said. Cole had a reputation for being the smartest member of the five-person board. He was about my own age: pushing eighty, calendar-wise, but physically as youthful as a thirty-year-old, thanks to rejuvenation therapy. A former lawyer who had renounced the legal profession when he came up to New Chicago and took up a new career in public service. In other words, he’d made his money, and now he wanted respect.
“What’s wrong with a gambling casino?” asked Pete Nostrum, sitting next to Cole. “We don’t have one yet, do we?”
Cole gave him a look that would shrivel Mount Everest, but it just bounced off Nostrum’s silly face.
Nostrum couldn’t get respect if he paid for it. God knows he’d tried that route. Nostrum was a mental lightweight who’d won a seat on the Zoning Board by spending enough money to buy a majority of the community council that appointed the Board. He wanted any public office he could find, so he could have a platform to push his one, single-minded passion: holiday bonfires. No matter how many times the safety people nixed the idea, no matter how many times the New Chicago council of directors pushed his nose into the habitat’s book of regulations, Nostrum still pushed for bonfires in the big central park to celebrate every holiday from Christmas to Bastille Day to the return of Halley’s Comet.
“Surely this board won’t permit a gambling casino to be erected in New Chicago!” Hornsby protested in a high, almost girlish voice, raising a chubby hand over his head as he spoke. He was badly overweight, a fact that his coral pink micromesh suit emphasized; he had piggy little eyes set deep in a puffy-cheeked pink face and tight little ears plastered flat against the sides of his head.
“It’s not a gambling casino,” Sam corrected.
“Mr. Hornsby, you are out of order,” said Chairperson McDougal, but so sweetly that Hornsby just sort of grinned foolishly and muttered an apology.
Turning to Sam, she said, “Your application is very vague as to just what this ‘amusement center’ is to be, Mr. Gunn.”
Sam got his feet, all five-four or thereabouts of him, and announced grandly, “Because, oh most gracious of chairpersons, I want to leave it to the good citizens of New Chicago to decide for themselves what kind of entertainments they would like to have.”
John Morris, the crafty-eyed board member at the end of the table, steepled his fingers in front of his face as he asked, “And just what do you mean by that, Mr. Gunn?”
Morris had recently been accused of accepting bribes in return for his vote. He’d denied the charge, claiming that the sudden spurts in his bank account had been all pure luck in the stock market.
“I mean, sir,” Sam replied, “that I intend to furnish a fifty-storey building in which each floor consists of an open area in which all four walls are covered with hologrammic smart screens. The floors and ceilings, too. The citizens of New Chicago will be able to program their amusement center for whatever kinds of recreation they seek….”
Sam strode out from behind the applicants’ table as he talked, his voice rising in fervor as he extolled the wonders of his idea: “Think of it! The finest symphony orchestras of Earth can perform here. The greatest sports teams! Pop singers! Ballet! Great dramas, dance, athletic competitions, virtually anything at all! In the amusement complex.”