by Ben Bova
Tourism trickled down to nothing except the extremely wealthy, who lived on their financial mountaintops in ease and comfort despite the woes of their brethren.
Hotel Luna became virtually a ghost facility, but it was never shut down. Grimly, hopefully, foolishly, one owner after another tried to make at least a modest success of it.
To a discerning visitor, the lavish, sprawling lobby of the hotel would appear slightly seedy: the carpeting was noticeably threadbare in spots, the oriental tables and easy chairs were scuffed here and there, the ornate artificial floral displays drooped enough to show that they needed to be replaced.
But to Lars Fuchs’s staring eyes, Hotel Luna’s lobby seemed incredibly posh and polished. He and Amanda were riding down the powered stairway from the hotel entrance up in the Grand Plaza. Glistening sheets of real, actual water slid down tilted slabs of granite quarried from the lunar highlands. The water was recycled, of course, but to have a display of water! What elegance!
“Look,” Fuchs exclaimed, pointing to the pools into which the waterfalls splashed. “Fish! Live fish!”
Beside him, Amanda smiled and nodded. She had been brought to the hotel on dates several times, years ago. She remembered the Earthview Restaurant, with its hologram windows. Martin Humphries had taken her there. The fish in those pools were on the restaurant’s menu. Amanda noticed that there were far fewer of them now than there had been back then.
As they reached the lobby level and stepped off the escalator, Fuchs recognized the music wafting softly from the ceiling speakers: a Haydn quartet. Charming. Yet he felt distinctly out of place in his plain dark gray coveralls, like a scruffy student sneaking into a grand palace. But with Amanda on his arm, it didn’t matter. She wore a sleeveless white pantsuit; even zippered up to the throat it could not hide her exquisitely-curved body.
Fuchs didn’t pay any attention to the fact that the spacious lobby was practically empty. It was quiet, soothing, an elegant change from the constant buzz of air fans and faint clatter of distant pumps that was part of the everyday background of Ceres.
As they reached the registration desk, Fuchs remembered all over again that Martin Humphries was footing their hotel bill. Humphries had insisted on it. Fuchs wanted to argue about it as they rode a Humphries fusion ship from Ceres to Selene, but Amanda talked him out of it.
“Let him pay for the hotel, Lars,” she had advised, with a knowing smile. “I’m sure he’ll take it out of the price he pays you for Helvetia.”
Grudgingly, Fuchs let her talk him into accepting Humphries’s generosity. Now, at the hotel desk, it rankled him all over again.
When it had originally opened as the Yamagata Hotel, there had been uniformed bellmen and women to tote luggage and bring room service orders. Those days were long gone. The registration clerk seemed alone behind his counter of polished black basalt, but he tapped a keyboard and a self-propelled trolley hummed out of its hidden niche and rolled up to Fuchs and Amanda. They put their two travel bags onto it and the trolley obediently followed them into the elevator that led down to the level of their suite.
Fuchs’s eyes went even wider once they entered the suite.
“Luxury,” he said, a reluctant smile brightening his normally dour face. “This is real luxury.”
Even Amanda seemed impressed. “I’ve never been in one of the hotel’s rooms before.”
Suddenly Fuchs’s smile dissolved into a suspicious scowl. “He might have the rooms bugged, you know.”
“Who? Martin?”
Fuchs nodded gravely, as if afraid to speak.
“Why would he bug the rooms?”
“To learn what we plan to say to him, what our position will be in the negotiation, what our bottom figure will be.” There was more, but he hesitated to tell her. Pancho had hinted that Humphries videotaped his own sexual encounters in the bedroom of his palatial home. Would the man have cameras hidden in this bedroom?
Abruptly, he strode to the phone console sitting on an end table and called for the registration desk.
“Sir?” asked the clerk’s image on the wallscreen. A moment earlier it had been a Vickrey painting of nuns and butterflies.
“This suite is unacceptable,” Fuchs said, while Amanda stared at him. “Is there another one available?”
The clerk grinned lazily. “Why, yessir, we have several suites unoccupied at the moment. You may have your pick.”
Fuchs nodded. Humphries can’t have them all bugged, he thought.
“I’m glad you decided to meet me in person,” Martin Humphries said, smiling from behind his wide desk. “I think we can settle our business much more comfortably this way.”
He leaned back, tilting the desk chair so far that Fuchs thought the man was going to plant his feet on the desktop. Humphries seemed completely at ease in his own office in the mansion he had built for himself deep below the lunar surface. Fuchs sat tensely in the plush armchair in front of the desk, feeling uneasy, wary, stiffly uncomfortable in the gray business suit that Amanda had bought for him at an outrageous price in the hotel’s posh store. He had left Amanda in the hotel; he did not want her in the same room as Humphries. She had acquiesced to his demand, and told her husband that she would go shopping in the Grand Plaza while he had his meeting.
Humphries waited for Fuchs to say something. When he just sat there in silence, Humphries said, “I trust you had a good night’s sleep.”
Suddenly Fuchs thought of hidden cameras again. He cleared his throat and said, “Yes, thank you.”
“The hotel is comfortable? Everything all right?”
“The hotel is fine.”
The third person in the room was Diane Verwoerd, sitting in the other chair in front of the desk. She had angled it so that she faced Fuchs more than Humphries. Like her boss, she wore a business suit. But while Humphries’s dark burgundy suit was threaded with intricate filigrees of silver thread, Verwoerd’s pale ivory outfit was of more ordinary material. Its slit skirt, however, revealed a good deal of her long slim legs.
Silence stretched again. Fuchs looked at the holowindow behind Humphries’s desk. It showed the lush garden outside the house, bright flowers and graceful trees. Beautiful, he thought, but artificial. Contrived. An ostentatious display of wealth and the power to flaunt one man’s will. How many starving, homeless people on Earth could Humphries help if he wanted to, instead of creating this make-believe Eden for himself here on the Moon?
At last Verwoerd said crisply, all business, “We’re here to negotiate the final terms of your sale of Helvetia Limited to Humphries Space Systems.”
“No, we are not,” said Fuchs.
Humphries sat up straighter in his chair. “We’re not?”
“Not yet,” Fuchs said to him. “First we must deal with several murders.”
Humphries glanced at Verwoerd; for just that instant he seemed furious. But he regained his composure almost immediately.
“And just what do you mean by that?” she asked calmly.
Fuchs said, “At least three prospectors’ ships have disappeared over the past few weeks. Humphries Space Systems somehow acquired the claims to the asteroids that those prospectors were near to.”
“Mr. Fuchs,” said Verwoerd, with a deprecating little smile, “you’re turning a coincidence into a conspiracy. Humphries Space Systems has dozens of ships scouting through the Belt.”
“Yes, and it’s damned expensive, too,” Humphries added.
“Then there is the out-and-out murder of Niles Ripley on Ceres by a Humphries employee,” Fuchs went on doggedly.
Humphries snapped, “From what I hear, you took care of that yourself. Vigilante justice, wasn’t it?”
“I stood trial. It was declared justifiable self-defense.”
“Trial,” Humphries sniffed. “By your fellow rock rats.”
“Your employee murdered Niles Ripley!”
“Not by my orders,” Humphries replied, with some heat. “Just because some hothead on my payroll
gets himself into a brawl, that’s not my doing.”
“But it was to your benefit,” Fuchs snapped.
Coolly, Verwoerd asked, “How do you come to that conclusion, Mr. Fuchs?”
“Ripley was the key man in our habitat construction program. With him gone, the work is stopped.”
“So?”
“So once you acquire Helvetia, the only organization capable of finishing the project will be HSS.”
“And how does that benefit me?” Humphries demanded. “Finishing your silly-assed habitat doesn’t put one penny into my pocket.”
“Not directly, perhaps,” said Fuchs. “But making Ceres safer and more livable will bring more people out to the Belt. With your company in control of their supplies, their food, the air they breathe, even, how can you fail to profit?”
“You’re accusing me—”
Verwoerd interrupted the budding argument. “Gentlemen, we’re here to negotiate the sale of Helvetia, not to discuss the future of the Asteroid Belt.”
Humphries glared at her again, but took in a breath and said grudgingly, “Right.”
Before Fuchs could say anything, Verwoerd added, “What’s done is done, and there’s no way of changing the past. If an HSS employee committed murder, you made him pay the full price for it.”
Fuchs searched for something to say.
“Now we should get down to business,” said Verwoerd, “and settle on a price for Helvetia.”
Humphries immediately jumped in with, “My original offer was based on your total assets, which have gone down almost to nothing since the fire in your warehouse.”
“Which was deliberately set,” Fuchs said.
“Deliberately set?”
“It was no accident. It was arson.”
“You have proof of that?”
“We have no forensics experts on Ceres. No criminal investigators.”
“So you have no proof.”
“Mr. Fuchs,” Verwoerd said, “we are prepared to offer you three million international dollars for the remaining assets of Helvetia Limited, which—frankly—amounts to the good will you’ve generated among the miners and prospectors, and not much more.”
Fuchs stared at her for a long, silent moment. So sure of herself, he thought. So cool and unruffled and, yes, even beautiful, in a cold, distant way. She’s like a sculpture made of ice.
“Well?” Humphries asked. “Frankly, three million is pretty much of a gift. Your company’s not worth half that much, in real terms.”
“Three hundred million,” Fuchs murmured.
“What? What did you say?”
“You could make your offer three hundred million. Or three billion. It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to sell to you.”
“That’s stupid!” Humphries blurted.
“I won’t sell to you at any price. Never! I’m going back to Ceres and starting all over again.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Am I? Perhaps so. But I would rather be crazy than give in to you.”
“You’re just going to get yourself killed,” Humphries said.
“Is that a threat?”
Again Humphries looked at Verwoerd, then turned back to Fuchs. He smiled thinly. “I don’t make threats, Fuchs. I make promises.”
Fuchs got to his feet. “Then let me make a promise in return. If you want to fight, I can fight. If you want a war, I’ll give you a war. And you won’t like the way I fight, I promise you that. I’ve studied military history; it was required in school. I know how to fight.”
Humphries leaned back in his desk chair and laughed.
“Go ahead and laugh,” Fuchs said, pointing a stubby finger at him. “But consider: you have a great deal more to lose than I do.”
“You’re a dead man, Fuchs,” Humphries snapped.
Fuchs nodded agreement. “One of us is.”
With that, he turned and strode out of Humphries’s office.
For several moments, Humphries and Verwoerd sat there staring at the doorway Fuchs had gone through.
“At least he didn’t slam the door,” Humphries said with a smirk.
“You’ve made him angry enough to fight,” Verwoerd said, with a troubled frown. “You’ve backed him into a corner and now he feels he has nothing to lose by fighting.”
Humphries guffawed. “Him? That little weasel? It’s laughable. He knows how to fight! He’s studied military history!”
“Maybe he has,” she said.
“So what?” Humphries replied testily. “He’s from Switzerland, for god’s sake! Hardly a martial nation. What’s he going to do, smother me in Swiss cheese? Or maybe yodel me to death.”
“I wouldn’t take it so lightly,” said Verwoerd, still looking at the empty doorway.
CHAPTER 17
“Piracy?” Hector Wilcox’s eyebrows rose almost to his silver-gray hairline.
Erek Zar looked uncomfortable, unhappy, as the two men strolled along the lane through the park just outside the IAA office building. Spring was in the air, the trees were beginning to bud, the local St. Petersburg populace was thronging the park, glad to see the sun. Women were sunbathing on the grass, their long dark coats thrown open to reveal their lumpy, thick bodies clad only in skimpy bikinis. It’s enough to make a man take a vow of celibacy, Wilcox thought, eying them distastefully.
Zar was normally a placid, cheerful, good-natured paper shuffler whose most urgent demands were for an extra day off here and there so he could nip off to his family in Poland for a long weekend. But now the man’s ruddy, round face was dead serious, flushed with emotion.
“That’s what he’s charging,” Zar said. “Piracy.” Wilcox refused to have his postprandial constitutional destroyed by an underling suddenly gone bonkers. “Who is this person?”
“His name is Lars Fuchs. Tomasselli brought the matter to me. Fuchs is accusing Humphries Space Systems of piracy, out in the Asteroid Belt.”
“But that’s ridiculous!”
“I agree,” Zar said swiftly. “But Tomasselli’s taken it seriously and opened an official file on it.”
“Tomasselli,” said Wilcox, as if the word smelled bad. “That excitable Italian. He saw a conspiracy when Yamagata made that takeover offer to Astro Corporation.”
“The takeover was never consummated,” Zar pointed out, “mainly because Tomasselli got the GEC to go on record as opposing it.”
“And now he’s taking accusations of piracy seriously? Against Humphries Space Systems?”
Nodding unhappily, Zar said, “He claims there’s some evidence to substantiate the accusation, but as far as I can see it’s all circumstantial.”
“What on earth does he expect me to do about it?” Wilcox grumbled mildly. He was not the kind of man who lost his self-control. Not ever. You didn’t get as far up on the intricate chain of command of the International Astronautical Authority as he had by recklessly blowing off steam.
“It’s an open file now,” Zar said, apologetically.
“Yes. Well, I suppose I’ll have to look it over.” Wilcox sighed. “But, really, piracy? In the Asteroid Belt? Even if it’s true, what can we do about it? We don’t even have an administrator on Ceres, for goodness’ sake. There isn’t an IAA presence anywhere in the Belt.”
“We have two flight controllers at Ceres.”
“Bah!” Wilcox shook his head. “What do they call themselves out there? Rock rats? They pride themselves on their independence. They resisted the one attempt we made to establish a full-fledged office on Ceres. So now they’re crying to us about piracy, are they?”
“It’s only one person making the accusation: this man Fuchs.”
“A maniac, no doubt,” said Wilcox.
“Or a sore loser,” Zar agreed.
WLTZING MATILDA
Big George’s stomach rumbled in complaint.
He straightened up—no easy task in the spacesuit—and looked around. Waltzing Matilda hung in the star-strewn sky over his head like a big dumbbell, its habi
tat and logistics modules on opposite ends of a kilometer-long buckyball tether, slowly rotating around the propulsion module at the hub.
Been too many hours since you’ve had a feed, eh? he said to his stomach. Well, it’s gonna be a few hours more before we get any tucker, and even then it’ll be mighty lean.
The asteroid on which George stood was a dirty little chunk of rock, a dark carbonaceous ’roid, rich in hydrates and organic minerals. Worth a bloody fortune back at Selene. But it didn’t look like much: just a bleak lump of dirt, pitted all over like it had the pox, rocks and pebbles and outright boulders scattered across it. Not enough gravity to hold down a feather. Ugly chunk of rock, that’s all you are, George said silently to the asteroid. And you’re gonna get uglier before we’re finished with ya.
Millions of kilometers from anyplace, George realized, alone in this cold and dark except for the Turk sittin’ inside Matilda monitoring the controls, squattin’ on this ugly chunk of rock, sweatin’ like a teen on his first date inside this suit and me stomach growlin’ ’cause we’re low on rations.
And yet he felt happy. Free as a bloomin’ bird. He had to make a conscious effort not to sing out loud. That’d startle the Turk, he knew. The kid’s not used to any of this.
Shaking his head inside the fishbowl helmet, George returned to his work. He was setting up the cutting laser, connecting its power pack and control module, carefully cleaning its copper mirrors of clinging dust and making certain they were precisely placed in their mounts, no wobbles. It was all hard physical work, even though none of the equipment weighed anything in the asteroid’s minuscule gravity. But just raising your arms in the stiff, ungainly suit, bending your body or turning, took a conscious effort of will and more muscular exertion than any flatlander could ever appreciate. Finally George had everything set, the laser’s aiming mirrors pointing to the precise spot where he wanted to start cutting, the power pack’s superconducting coil charged and ready.
George was going to slice out chunks of the asteroid that Matilda could carry back to Selene. The prospector who’d claimed the rock wouldn’t make a penny from it until George started shipping the ores, and George was far behind schedule because the wonky laser kept malfunctioning time and again. No ores, no money: that was the way the corporations worked. And no food, George knew. It was a race now to see if he could get a decent shipment of ores off toward Selene before Matilda’s food locker went empty.