by Ben Bova
And popped the ball up into a monumental infield fly. I took off from second: with two outs, you run like hell no matter where the ball’s hit. But while I was heading for third I craned my neck to see where the ball was going.
Up and up, higher and higher. It seemed to hang up there, floating like a little round cloud. As I raced around third I saw Hornsby throw off his mask and stagger toward Nostrum. McDougal was coming in from third base, also staring up into the cloud-free sky. Even Arrant and the wild-armed kid shortstop were converging toward the pitcher.
“Mine!” McDougal called out.
“I got it!”
“All mine!”
I was around third by now. Sam was trotting around first, heading for second base. Suddenly Hornsby and all the others seemed to freeze in their tracks. McDougal threw her arms over her head. Arrant stumbled and fell to his knees. Nostrum yelped so loud I thought someone had put a match to his backside.
The sun, the blazing, dazzling, glorious sun was shining through the habitat window like a zillion-megawatt spotlight. The whole White Sox infield was blinded by the glare. Sam’s pop-up was coming down now, just short of second base. The kid in center field made a belated dash in for it, but the ball hit the grass after I had crossed the plate with the tying run.
And Sam was racing madly for third, his little arms pumping, stumpy legs churning, his mouth wide open sucking air, his eyes even wider.
The whole Sox infield was still staggering around, seeing sunspots in their eyes. The center fielder had the ball in his hands, but nobody to throw it to. His face flashed surprise, then consternation. Then he did the only thing he could—he started running toward home.
It was a foot race. The youngster was faster than Sam, but Sam was already around third and roaring home. The kid cut across the infield and dived at Sam just as Sam launched himself into a hook slide while the Sox infield stood around blinking and groping.
It was close, but Sam’s left foot neatly hooked my cap and carried it along for several feet while the teenager flopped on his belly so hard that the ball bounced out of his outstretched hand.
We won, 15-14. The crowd went, as they say, wild. There weren’t that many of them, but they whooped and yelled and danced little jigs and jags all across the field. I rushed over and picked Sam up off the grass. The leg of his slacks was ripped from the knee down and green with grass stain, but he was grinning like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern.
“We won! We won!” Sam danced up and down.
I went over to the kid center fielder and helped him to his feet. “Great play, kid,” I told him. “Terrific hustle.”
He grinned, too, a little weakly.
Hours later, Sam and I were having a drink at the patio of Pete’s Tavern, just off the courthouse square. We had both cleaned up after the game and the perfunctory Zoning Board meeting—held right there at the open lot—that approved my proposal.
“You must be the luckiest guy in the solar system,” I said to him, between sips on my cranberry juice.
Sam was sipping something more potent. He gave me a sly look. “Chance favors the prepared mind, Chris, old pal.”
“Sure,” I said.
“What do you think I was doing with my faithful pocket whiz-bang just before I came up to bat?” he asked.
I had forgotten about that. Before I could think of an answer, Sam told me, “I was calculating the precise time when the sun would shine through the habitat window, old Straight Arrow. That’s why I was trying to hit a pop-up.”
“You deliberately—” I couldn’t believe it.
“I had to get you home with the tying run, didn’t i? I’m no slugger; I have to use my smarts.” Sam tapped his temple.
I didn’t believe it. “Sam, nobody can deliberately hit a pop-up. Not deliberately.”
He screwed up his face a little. “Yeah, maybe you’re right. I figure you’ve got only one chance in three to get it right.”
“One chance in three,” I echoed. He had swung and missed twice, I remembered.
“So,” Sam finished his drink and put it down on the table in front of him, “you’ve got your playground, in perpetuity.”
“Thanks to you, Sam.”
He shrugged. “I guess we’re kind of partners, huh?”
“I guess so.”
He stuck his hand out across the little table. I took it and we shook hands. But even as we were doing that, Sam was looking past my shoulder. He broke into a big grin and scrambled to his feet.
I turned in my chair. Bonnie McDougal was coming along the walk, looking coolly elegant in a white sheath dress decorated with gold thread.
“You know,” she said as she came up to our table, “my fellow Zoning Board members might take our having dinner together as an inappropriate act.”
Holding a chair for her, Sam said innocently, “But I have dinner every evening.”
“Inappropriate for me, Sam,” she said as she sat down.
I was wondering when he’d had the chance to invite her to dinner.
“But the vote’s over and done with,” Sam said, returning to his chair. “This isn’t a payoff. We won the ball game, fair and square.”
“You won,” Bonnie said, smiling.
Sam grinned hugely and tapped me on the shoulder. “The gold dust twins, Chris and me. Partners.”
I grinned back at him. “Partners.”
“And the amusement center won’t interfere with the playground at all,” Sam said.
“Amusement center?” Bonnie and I both asked.
“It’ll be way up above the playground,” Sam said genially. “It’ll start roughly one hundred fifty-two point four meters above the grass and go up to the habitat’s centerline. You’ll hardly notice the support piers.”
“Sup ... support piers?” I sputtered.
“Roughly one hundred fifty-two point four meters?” Bonnie asked, with a sardonic smile.
“That’ll give me almost eighteen hundred and forty-eight meters to build in,” Sam said, pulling out his pocket computer.
“Build? Build what?”
“Our entertainment center, partner.” His fingers tapping furiously on the computer’s tiny keypad, Sam muttered, “Figuring four meters per floor, we can put in—wow! That’s enormous!”
“But, Sam, you can’t build over the park!”
“Why not? It won’t hurt anything. And it’ll protect the kids from getting the sun in their eyes.” He laughed heartily.
I sank back in my chair.
“You’ll get half the earnings, partner. Ought to be able to help a lot of kids with that kind of income.”
Bonnie’s smile vanished. “Sam, you can’t build over the playground. It’s—”
“Sure I can,” he countered. “There’s nothing in your zoning regulations that forbids it.”
“There will be tomorrow!” she snapped.
“Yes, but I’ve already registered my plan with your computer. You can’t apply a new regulation to a preexisting plan. I’m grandfathered in.”
“Sam, you ... that’s ... of all...” She ran out of words.
I looked him in his shifty eyes. “It won’t affect the playground?”
Sam raised his right hand solemnly. “I swear it won’t. Honest injun. Hope to die. The support piers will be at the corners of the field. The building will shade the playground, that’s all.”
Bonnie was still looking daggers at him.
Sam smiled at her. “The top floor of the complex, up near the centerline, will be in microgravity. Not zero-gee, exactly, but so close you’ll never tell the difference.”
“Never!” she snapped. “You’ll never get me up there. Never in a million years.”
Sam sighed. “Never?” he asked, in a small, forlorn voice. I swear there was a tear in the comer of his left eye.
“Never in a million years,” Bonnie repeated. Less vehemently than a moment before.
“Well,” he said softly, “at least we can have this one dinner togethe
r.”
With a sad little smile, Sam got to his feet again and held Bonnie’s chair as she stood.
As they walked away I heard Sam ask, “Have you ever slept on a waterbed?”
“Well, yes,” Bonnie replied. “As a matter of fact, that’s what I have in my home.”
I doubted that it would take Sam a million years.
Solar News Offices, Selene City
“BUT NONE OF THEM WILL SEE ME!” JADE BLURTED. “Not one of them!”
“Out of six survivors of the mission, not one will talk to you?” Jim Gradowsky demanded.
“Not one,” Jade replied glumly.
Jumbo Jim leveled a stern finger at her. “You mean you haven’t gotten to any of them, that’s what you’re really saying.”
“I’ve tried, Jim, I’ve really tried.”
Gradowsky leaned both his heavy forearms on his desktop, nearly flattening a chocolate bar that lay there half unwrapped. Jade, sitting tensely on the cubbyhole office’s shabby couch, unconsciously leaned back away from his ponderous form.
“They’re all on Earth, aren’t they?” he asked, his voice slightly softer.
Jade defended herself. “But I’ve been hounding them, Jim. I could interview them by videophone, but not one of them will even answer my calls! The best I’ve gotten is a return call from one of their lawyers telling me to stop annoying them.”
“Orlando claims that some private detective agency ran a check on you.”
“To see if I’m really a Solar News reporter?”
Gradowsky knitted his brows slightly. “More than that, looks like. They wanted a complete dossier on you: age, date and place of birth, previous employment, the whole nine yards.”
“Who was the agency working for?”
“One of the people you’re trying to interview.”
“Which one?”
“The Margaux woman; the recluse who lives in Maine.”
“Why would she ... ?”
“Who the hell knows? That’s why you’ve got to get to these people, Jade. They’re trying to hide something. I can feel it in my bones. There’s something big they’re hiding down there!”
“But I can’t go to Earth, Jim. You know that. Raki knows it, too.”
Gradowsky fixed her with an unhappy frown. “How many time have I told you, kid? A reporter has to go to where the story is. You’ve got to camp on their doorsteps. You’ve got to force them to see you.”
“On Earth?”
He shrugged so hard that his wrinkled short-sleeved shirt almost pulled free of his pants.
“On Earth,” Jade repeated.
“Raki’s under pressure to get this show finished, one way or the other. What you’ve got so far is fine, but if you could get an interview with one of the survivors of that asteroid jaunt—just one of them—both of you would look like angels to the board of directors.”
“I’d have to wear an exoskeleton,” Jade said. “Get a powered wheelchair. A heart-booster pump.”
Gradowsky’s fleshy face broke into a grin. “That’s the stuff! They couldn’t turn you down if you showed up like that! They’d have to talk to you. Hell, you might drop dead right on their doorsteps!”
“Yes,” Jade muttered. “I might.”
“So? What’s keeping you?”
“There’s one survivor living off-Earth,” she said.
“Yeah, you told me. On a bridge ship. That’s too far away, kid. It’d cost a fortune to send you there, all the way out to Mars. And we can’t wait for the ship to loop back here.”
“The ship goes past Mars and on to the Belt.”
“I know.”
“The sculptress lives on an asteroid out there. The woman who worked with Sam when he got into the advertising business.”
Gradowsky shook his head. “We can’t let you spend two years tootling around on a bridge ship.”
“I could hire a high-boost shuttle. They run back and forth to the bridge ships all the time.”
With an exaggerated show of patience, Gradowsky said, “Jade, honey, there are six survivors of Sam’s first expedition to the asteroids. Five of them live on Earth. Any other reporter would be there now, chasing them down.”
“I can’t go to Earth!”
“Then you’re off the assignment,” Gradowsky said flatly. “I can’t help it, but those are the orders from Orlando. Either you get the job done or they’ll give the assignment to another reporter.”
“Is that what Raki said?”
“It’s out of his hands, kid. There’s a dozen staff reporters down there salivating for the chance to get in on this. You’ve opened a big can of worms, Jade. Now they’re all hot to grab the story away from you.”
Jade felt cold anger clutching at her heart. “So either I go to Earth or I’m off the Sam Gunn bio?”
“That’s the choice you have, yeah.” Gradowsky tried to look tough, but instead he simply looked upset.
Without another word Jade got up from the chair and made her way from Gradowsky’s office to Monica’s. There was nowhere else for her to run.
Before Jade could say anything Monica handed her palmcomp to her. “There was a call for you. From Earth. Maine, USA.”
“Jean Margaux lives in Maine,” Jade said, suddenly breathless with expectation. She sat in Monica’s spare chair and tapped the proper keys on the board.
A man’s long, hound-sad face appeared on the wall screen. He was sitting behind a huge desk of polished wood, bookcases neatly lined with leather volumes at his back. He wore a suit jacket of somber black and an actual necktie, striped crimson and deep blue.
“This message is for Ms. Jane Avril Inconnu. Would you kindly hold your right thumb up to the screen so that the scanner can check it? Otherwise this message will terminate now.”
With a glance at Monica, Jade pressed her right thumb against the palmcomp’s tiny screen. When she lifted it, the image of the gravely unsmiling man froze for a few seconds. Then:
“Thank you, Ms. Inconnu. I have the unpleasant task of informing you that Ms. Jean Margaux was killed yesterday in an automobile accident. As her attorney, I have been empowered by the four other partners in the Argo expedition who live on Earth to inform you that any further attempts to call, interview, photograph, or contact them in any way, by any employee of the Solar News Network, Inc., will be regarded as a breach of privacy and will result in an appropriate suit against said Solar News Network, Inc. Thank you.”
The screen went blank.
Jade felt just as blank, empty, as if her insides had just been pulled out of her, as if she had suddenly stepped out an airlock naked into the numbing vacuum of deep space.
Monica broke the spell. “Well, I’ll be a daughter of a bitch! How do you like that?”
Fifteen minutes later Jade was back in Gradowsky’s office and Raki’s handsome face shone on the display screen built into the office wall.
“Yes, we’ve been notified too,” Raki was saying. He looked annoyed, tight-lipped. Lawyers and threats to sue were taken very seriously in Orlando.
“What the hell are they trying to hide?” Gradowsky asked, his newsman’s nose twitching.
“Whatever it is, we’d better stay clear of the four remaining survivors for the time being. I’ve got the legal staff checking into this, but you know how long it takes them to come up with a recommendation.”
“That’s ‘cause you pay them by the hour,” Gradowsky said.
Raki was not amused. “They always give us the most conservative advice. They’ll tell us to avoid the risk of a lawsuit, stay away from the remaining four.”
Jade was listening with only part of her mind. An inner voice was puzzling over the fact that Jean Margaux had detectives investigate her background, and then she was killed in an auto accident. Was it an accident? Or murder? She remembered hearing somewhere that many people on Earth commit suicide by crashing their cars and making it look like an accident. That way they left their heirs the double indemnity money from their insuran
ce.
Jean Margaux was a very wealthy woman. Jade knew that from her own research into the survivors of Sam Gunn’s expedition out to the asteroids. And childless. As far as Jade could learn, she had no heirs.
I’ll have to check out the terms of her will, she told herself. Did one of the other four murder her? Not for money, maybe, but because they were afraid she would eventually talk to me?
“That finishes it,” Raki was saying, his lips turned down into an unaccustomed frown. “The Sam Gunn bio stops right here and now.”
“There’s a fifth survivor of the expedition,” Jade heard herself say. “And he isn’t part of this threatened lawsuit.”
Gradowsky immediately replied, “Yeah, but he’s all the way to hell out by Mars on a bridge ship.”
“They’re hiding something,” Jade snapped. “Something so important to them that Jean Margaux died to keep it secret.”
It took a couple of seconds for Raki to answer from Earth, “It was an accident, Jade.”
“Was it? Are we sure of that?”
Neither man replied.
Jade hunched forward in her chair. “The only other survivor of that expedition is on the bridge ship Golden Gate. The sculptress who made Sam’s statue is living out in the Belt. And the professor who was with Sam when he died is outfitting a deep-space mission at Titan. I could get to all three of them!”
“And not get back for two years,” Gradowsky grumbled.
“Okay, so what?” Jade felt eagerness trembling through her. “Raki, you can put the Sam Gunn bio on hold, can t you? Let those lawyers think we’ve dropped the project. Meantime I’ll get out to the Golden Gate and see what they’re trying to hide. And then go on to the other two. I can do it! I know I can!”
Gradowsky was staring at her. Raki had a faraway look in his eyes.
“We’d have to pay you salary for two years while you’re doing nothing,” Raki said.
“I’m getting minimum,” Jade shot back. “You won’t be losing much. Or just pay my travel costs while I’m going back and forth; put me on salary only for the time I’m actually working.”
“H’mm.”
“We could slip her aboard a high-boost shuttle,” Gradowsky said. “Trade her fare for advertising time. Get her out to the Golden Gate in a few weeks, maybe for free. Or at a reduced fare, at least.”