The corporation never assigned me to a waterbot again. Somebody in the front office must’ve taken a good look at my personnel dossier and figured I had too much education to be stuck in a dumb job like that. I don’t know, maybe Donahoo had something to do with. He wouldn’t admit to it, and I didn’t press him about it.
Anyway, when I finally got back to Vesta, they assigned me to a desk job. Over the years I worked my way up to chief of logistics and eventually got transferred back to Selene City, on the moon. I’ll be able to take early retirement soon and get married and start a family.
Forty-niner’s been with me all that time. Not that I talk to him every day. But it’s good to know that he’s there and I can ease off the stresses of the job or whatever by having a nice, long chat with him.
One of these days, I’ll even beat him at chess.
Introduction to
“Sam and the Flying Dutchman”
Sam Gunn has been with me for a long time.
Back when I was editing Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact magazine, I got a little germ of an idea for a story. I bounced it off several of the magazine’s regular contributors, but none of them took me up on the invitation.
Still, the idea pecked away at my imagination. When I left Analog and took up writing full time, I tackled the idea myself.
The result was the first story about Sam Gunn. Today, half a lifetime later, Sam has appeared in a couple of dozen of my short fiction works. Sam is fun. Sam is like a brother to me, although we are very dissimilar in looks, attitudes, and capabilities.
Every now and then, Sam taps me on my metaphysical shoulder and tells me he has a new adventure to relate.
Here’s the latest one.
SAM AND THE FLYING DUTCHMAN
I ushered her into Sam’s office and helped her out of the bulky dark coat she was wearing. As soon as she let the hood fall back off her face, I damned near dropped the coat. I recognized her. Who could forget her? She was exquisite, so stunningly beautiful that even irrepressible Sam Gunn was struck speechless. More beautiful than any woman I had ever seen.
But haunted.
It was more than her big, soulful eyes. More than the almost frightened way she had of glancing all around as she entered Sam’s office, as if expecting someone to leap out of hiding at her. She looked tragic, lovely and doomed and tragic.
“Mr. Gunn, I need your help,” she said to Sam. Those were the first words she spoke, even before she took the chair that I was holding for her. Her voice was like the sigh of a breeze in a midnight forest.
Sam was standing behind his desk, on the hidden little platform back there that makes him look taller than his real 165 centimeters. As I said, even Sam was speechless. Leather-tongued, clatter-mouthed Sam Gunn simply stood and stared at her in stupefied awe.
Then he found his voice. “Anything,” he said in a choked whisper. “I’d do anything for you.”
Despite the fact that Sam was getting married in just three weeks’ time, it was obvious that he’d tumbled head over heels for Amanda Cunningham the minute he saw her. Instantly. Sam Gunn was always falling in love, even more often than he made fortunes of money and lost them again. But this time it looked as if he’d really been struck by the thunderbolt.
If she weren’t so beautiful, so troubled, seeing the two of them together would have been almost ludicrous. Amanda Cunningham looked like a Greek goddess, except that her shoulder-length hair was radiant golden blond. She wore a modest knee-length sheath of delicate pink that couldn’t hide the curves of her ample body. And those eyes! They were bright china blue, but deep, terribly troubled, unbearably sad.
And there was Sam: stubby as a worn old pencil, with a bristle of red hair and his gap-toothed mouth hanging open. Sam had the kind of electricity in him that made it almost impossible for him to stand still for more than thirty seconds at a time. Yet he stood gaping at Amanda Cunningham, as tongue-tied as a teenager on his first date.
And me. Compared to Sam I’m a rugged, outdoorsy type of guy. Of course, I wear lifts in my boots and a tummy tingler that helps keep my gut flat. Women have told me that my face is kind of cute in a cherubic sort of way, and I believe them—until I look in the mirror and see the pouchy eyes and the trim black beard that covers my receding chin. What did it matter? Amanda Cunningham didn’t even glance at me; her attention was focused completely on Sam.
It was really comical. Yet I wasn’t laughing.
Sam just stared at her, transfixed. Bewitched. I was still holding one of the leather-covered chairs for her. She sat down without looking at it, as if she were accustomed to there being a chair wherever she chose to sit.
“You must understand, Mr. Gunn,” she said softly. “What I ask is very dangerous . . .”
Still standing at his desk in front of his high-backed swivel chair, his eyes never leaving hers, Sam waved one hand as if to scoff at the thought of danger.
“It involves flying out to the belt,” she continued.
“Anywhere,” Sam said. “For you.”
“To find my husband.”
That broke the spell. Definitely.
Sam’s company was S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. He was involved in a lot of different operations, including hauling freight between the earth and moon, and transporting equipment out to the asteroid belt. He was also dickering to build a gambling casino and hotel on the moon,
