The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  Meanwhile, I told Will to go through the entire ship millimeter by millimeter to see if there were any other nasty little surprises planted here or there.

  “Don’t sleep, don’t eat, don’t even waste time breathing,” I told him. “From now on you’re my bug inspector. Look everywhere.”

  He gave me a sly grin. “Even under the beds?”

  “And in them, if you have to,” I said. “For every bug you find I’ll give you a bonus—say, a week’s salary?”

  “How about a month’s?”

  I nodded an okay. It’d be worth it, easy.

  I DON’T KNOW whose idea it was to have a continuous banquet until all the food that was about to spoil was eaten up. Probably Darling’s. Kind of thing his perverted brain would think up.

  For the past three days and nights the seven of them have been stuffing themselves like ancient Romans during Saturnalia. Ship of Bulemics. They must know that everything they upchuck is going into the reprocessor, but it looks like they just don’t care. Not right now.

  Of course, they’re drinking all the wine on board, too. My only joy is that they’re going to be so sick when they get to the end of the food that they’ll just lay in their sacks for a long time and let me get on with the real job of this mission.

  I’m staying up here at the command center for the duration of their orgy. I’ve got some old synthesized Dixieland playing on the intercom so

  I can’t hear their laughing and shouting from down in the dining room. Or their puking. I’ve ordered the crew to stay out of the passengers’ area.

  “Let ‘em bust their guts,” I told my men. “We’ve got work to do.”

  When you read that there’s millions of asteroids out in the Belt you get the mental picture of a kind of forest of chunks of rock and metal, you know, clustered so thick that you can’t sail a ship through without getting dinged.

  No such luck.

  Sure, there’s millions of asteroids in the Belt. Some as big as mountains; a few of ‘em are a couple of hundred kilometers wide. But most of ‘em are the size of pebbles, even grains of sand. And they’ve got a tremendously wide volume of space to wander around in, out there between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. You could put all the planets and moons of the solar system in that region and it’d still be almost entirely empty space.

  The first thing I’m looking for is a nice little nickel-iron asteroid, maybe a couple hundred meters across. Nothing spectacular; a piece as small as a Little League baseball field will do fine. She’ll contain more high-grade iron ore than the whole Earth’s steel industry uses in ten years. Maybe fifty to seventy-five tons of platinum, an impurity that’d set a man up for life. To say nothing of the gold and silver that’s sprinkled around in her.

  Such an asteroid is worth trillions of dollars. Maybe hundreds of trillions.

  Then there’s the carbonaceous-type rocky asteroids. They contain something more valuable than gold, a lot more valuable. They contain water.

  There’s a new frontier being built in cislunar space, the region between low Earth orbit and the Moon’s surface. We’ve got zero-gee factories in orbit and mining operations on the Moon. We’ve got big condominium habitats being built in the L-4 and L-5 libration points. More than fifty thousand people live and work in space now.

  They get most of their raw materials from the Moon. Lunar ores give our frontier workers aluminum and titanium, even some iron, although it’s lowgrade stuff and expensive as hell to mine and smelt. There’s plenty of silicon on the Moon; they’ve got a thriving electronics industry growing there.

  But the people on the space frontier have got to import their heavy metals from Earth. And their water. They buy high-grade steels from outfits like Rockledge International, and pay enormous prices for lifting the tonnage up from Earth. Same thing for water, except the corporate bastards charge even more for that than they do for steel or even platinum.

  Which is why Rockledge and the other corporate giants don’t want to see me succeed on this venture. If I come coasting back to the Earth-Moon system with several thousand tons of high-grade steel and enough water to start building swimming pools in Moonbase—and undercutting the corporations’ Earth-based prices—I’ll have broken the stranglehold those fat-cat bastards have on the space settlements.

  They don’t like that. Which is why they’re out to stop me. I’ve got to be on the lookout for their next attempt. They can’t launch anything to intercept us or attack us outright; the IAA would know that they’d done it and there’d be criminal charges filed against them.

  No, Rockledge and any partners-in-crime they may have are working from within. They’ve got an agent on board my ship and they’ve got a plan for wrecking this expedition. This sabotage of the food freezers is just their first shot. Will hasn’t found any more time bombs yet, but that doesn’t mean the ship’s clean. Not by a long shot. They could hide a ton of surprises aboard the Argo; I just hope Will digs ‘em up before they go off.

  I know it sounds paranoid, but even paranoids have enemies.

  KAY TARANTO FlNALLY answered me today. We’re so far beyond the orbit of Mars by now that messages take nearly an hour to travel from Earth, even at the speed of light. So two-way conversations are out of the question.

  I took her call in my personal quarters, just off the command center. The transmission was scrambled, of course, and it took a little coaxing of the computer before I got a clear picture on my screen. Kay had never been a great beauty: she’s got a lean, scruffy, lantern-jawed look to her. The only time I’ve ever seen her smile was when she nailed a victim who was trying to escape Disney’s clutches. Now her face in my screen was unsmiling, dead serious.

  “No joy, Sam,” she said. “Far as I can tell, Darling is virginally pure, money-wise. No large sums deposited in any of his accounts. No deposits at all in the past four years. He’s been living off the income from several nice chunks of blue-chip stocks. No accounts in Liechtenstein that I could find. No Rockledge stock in his portfolio, either. He just about cleaned out his piggy bank to raise the ten mill for your wacky venture. And that’s all there is to it.”

  Then she let a faint glimmer of a smile break her iron-hard facade. “That’ll be seventy-five thou pal. And dinner’s on you when you get back.”

  Thanks a friggin’ lot, I said silently to her image on the screen. Por nada.

  OKAY, SO WE found a carbonaceous chondrite first.

  From everything the astrogeologists had told me, metallic asteroids are much more plentiful than the carbonaceous stones. But it’s just happened that our sensors picked up a carbonaceous rock, bang! right off the bat. I fired two automated probes at it as soon as we got close enough. This morning Lonz initiated the course change we need to match orbit with the rock and rendezvous with it. We’ll catch up to it in ten days.

  The passengers—partners—have finally recovered from their food orgy. For a week or so they were pretty hung over, and pretty shamefaced. It’s a pity I didn’t think to make a video of their antics. I could blackmail them for the rest of their lives if I had it all on disk.

  Anyway, I called a meeting in the lounge. They all looked pretty dreary, worn out, like they were recuperating from some tropical disease. All except Darling, who seemed pink and healthy. And a lot heavier than he was before. He’s ditched his normal clothing and he’s now wearing some kind of robe that looks like he stitched it together himself. It took me a couple of minutes of staring at it before I recognized what it was: two tablecloths from the dining lounge, with some designs hand-painted on them.

  Shades of the Emperor Nero! Was he wearing eye makeup, too?

  “We’ve located a carbonaceous asteroid,” I announced, turning away from Darling. “We’ll make rendezvous with it in ten days.”

  Hubble’s ears perked up. “I’d like to see the data, if I may.” His voice was still hoarse from all the Roman feather-throating he’d gone through. You’d think that his being an older man, a scientist and all that, he wou
ld’ve set a better example for the other bubbleheads. But no, he’d been just as wild as the rest of them.

  I noticed, though, that Sheena was no longer sitting next to him. His father image had apparently gone down the toilet along with everything else.

  “Sure,” I said to him. “Come on up to the command center afterward. Right now, though, I thought it’d be a good idea if we came up with a proper name for the rock.”

  “You can’t claim it, can you?” Grace asked.

  Bo Williams shook his bald head. “No one can claim any natural object in space. That’s international law.”

  “You can use it, though,” Hubble said. “There’s no law against mining or otherwise utilizing an astronomical body, even if you can’t claim ownership.”

  “First come, first served,” said Rick Darling. With a smirk.

  “You’re all well-versed on interplanetary law,” I said, making myself smile at them. “But I still think we ought to give this rock a name. It’s going to make us rich; the least we can do is name it.”

  “What will we get from it?” Sheena asked.

  “Water,” responded five or six voices simultaneously, including mine.

  “Is that all?”

  “Tons of water,” I said. “Water sells for about one million U.S. dollars per ton at Lagrange One. Considering the size of this asteroid and its possible water content, we ought to clear a hundred million, easy.”

  “That would pay back our investment!” Marj Dupray piped.

  “With a profit,” added Jean Margaux, the first time I had seen her say something spontaneous.

  “There’ll be other valuables on a carbonaceous chondrite, as well,” Hubble said, taking out his pipe for the first time. “Carbon, of course. A fair amount of nitrogen, I would suppose. It could be quite profitable.”

  Not bothering to explain to them the difference between gross income and net profit, I said, “So let’s pick a name for the rock and register it with the IAA.”

  They fell silent.

  “I was sort of thinking we might name it Gunn One,” I suggested modestly.

  They booed and hooted. Each and every one of them.

  “Aphrodite,” said Sheena, once the razzing had quieted down.

  Everybody turned to stare at her. Aphrodite?

  She blinked those gorgeous eyes of hers; they were emerald green this morning. “I remember some painting by some old Italian of the birth of Venus, coming out of the sea. You know, like she’s the gift of the sea.”

  “But what’s that got to do with ...”

  “And that’s Venus. There’s already a planet named Venus.”

  “I know,” Sheena said. “That’s why I thought we could use her Greek name, Aphrodite.”

  I had never realized she knew anything at all about anything at all. But she knew about the goddess of love’s different names. I went behind the bar to the computer terminal and checked on the names already registered for asteroids. There was a Juno and a Hera, a Helena and even a Cleopatra. But no Aphrodite.

  “Aphrodite looks good,” I said.

  “I still fail to see what it has to do with a lump of rock floating around in space,” Jean complained.

  But we voted her down and sent a message to the IAA headquarters in Geneva: a new asteroid has been discovered and its name is Aphrodite.

  A HUNDRED AND twenty-seven tons of water. Boy, do I feel good about that! A hundred and twenty-seven million bucks safely stowed in our inflatable tanks!

  We’ve been working hard for a solid month, chewing up Aphrodite and baking the volatiles out of her rocks. The grinding equipment worked fine; so did the ovens. No sabotage there, thank God.

  There isn’t much of old Aphrodite left. Sheena got kind of upset when she realized we were tearing up the rock and grinding it and baking the pieces. We left a small chunk so the name’s still valid, although we’ve perturbed its orbit so much that Hubble claims she’ll fall in toward the Sun and cross the orbit of Mars and maybe even Earth’s orbit.

  Thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and fifty gallons of water, according to the volume of tankage we’ve filled. That masses out to one hundred and twenty-seven tons. Plus an almost equal amount of ammonia and methane. We’ve got an even dozen of our inflatable storage tanks hanging outside the ship’s hub. I’ve already made a contract with Moonbase Corporation to buy the whole kit and kaboodle at ten percent below Rockledge’s price. They’ll process the ammonia and methane for the nitrogen and carbon, then mix the leftover hydrogen with oxygen from lunar ores to make still more water.

  We’re gonna drown Rockledge!

  My partners have been happy and pretty well-behaved this past month. The news media back home have been interviewing them almost constantly; they’re all becoming famous. This isn’t the Ship of Fools anymore. The media’s describing us now as “the grandest entrepreneurial venture in history.”

  I love the publicity, because the more attention the media pays us the harder it’ll be for Rockledge or one of those other big corporate monsters to attack us.

  And Lonz has found a bee-yoo-tiful nickel-iron asteroid hanging out there just two weeks from where we are. Laser measurements show she’s a little over a hundred meters by thirty by twenty or so. Enough high-grade iron ore in her to give us a corner on the steel market for all the Lagrange construction jobs!

  We’re gonna be rich!

  I NEED THE guidance counselor.

  [Computer]: How may I help you?

  I’ve got a problem.

  [Computer]: Yes?

  About a woman. Two women, really.

  [Computer]: Go on.

  It’s Grace Harcourt and Sheena Chang. They’re snarling and spitting at each other like a pair of cats.

  [Computer]: Why do you think they’re behaving that way?

  It’s over me, stupid! Why else?

  [Computer]: Tell me what happened.

  We’re cruising toward this nickel-iron asteroid, going to make rendezvous in a few days. So I call the partners together in the lounge again to decide on a name for the rock.

  And Sheena pipes up, “I don’t think it’s right for us to be destroying these asteroids.”

  That surprised me. But coming from her, I tried to explain things gently.

  “Look, Sheena,” I said. “The whole reason we’re out here, the reason you and everybody else joined this expedition, is to get the natural resources that these asteroids contain and bring them back home, where people need them.”

  “You smashed up Aphrodite until there’s practically nothing left of her, and now she’s going to crash into Mars or the Earth or maybe even fall into the Sun and burn to death!”

  “Sheena, it’s just a hunk of rock.”

  “It’s part of nature. It’s part of the natural environment. We shouldn’t be tampering with the environment. That’s wrong.”

  “Oh good Christ!” said Grace, with a huff like a disgusted steam engine. She was sitting on one side of Sheena; Hubble was sitting on the other, sucking on his smokeless pipe.

  “There’s nothing alive on these asteroids,” Hubble told her, back to his patient fatherly voice once more. “It doesn’t hurt anyone to mine them.”

  “I still think it’s wrong,” Sheena insisted. I saw tears in her eyes.

  “How long are we going to put up with this drivel?” Grace snarled.

  Sheena went almost rigid in her chair, like somebody had wired it with a couple thousand volts.

  Grace said, “I’ve spent most of my working days listening to airheaded actors and actresses attach themselves to causes.’ Sheena, what the hell’s the matter with your brain? We’re talking about a dead chunk of rock. There’s millions of them out here. Get real!”

  Sheena just sat there for a minute or so, looking shocked. Jean Margaux was sitting right behind Grace; she had a funny kind of eager grin on her face, like she was waiting to see the gladiators rip each other’s guts open. And Rick Darling was right beside Jean, with a cynical smirk on h
is bloated puss.

  [Computer]: His cat was smirking?

  Puss! Face! It’s slang, you dumb pile of germanium.

  [Computer]: You are expressing your suppressed hostilities; good.

  I’ve never suppressed a goddamned hostility in my whole goddamned life!

  [Computer]: Go on.

  Where was I—oh, yeah. I was just as surprised at Grace’s outburst as any of the others. Marj and Bo Williams were sitting in the back of the lounge. Bo started to say something but Sheena got there first.

  “Listen, Miss High-and-Mighty Columnist,” she said to Grace, “I had to kiss your backside when I was in the acting business, but now I’m going to be independently wealthy, thanks to Sam, and you can go scribble yourself!”

  “You plasticized bitch,” Grace shot back, “I’ll bet my backside is the only one in southern California you haven’t kissed.”

  “Jealous?”

  “Of you? Take away the implants and what’ve you got?”

  “A dumpy broad with cellulite on her hips, like you.”

  “At least I’ve got a brain in my head!”

  “So does a rat!”

  They were nose-to-nose now, yelling, starting to get out of their chairs.

  I jumped between them. “Hey, hey! Calm down, both of you!”

  “Get this airhead out of here, Sam,” Grace said. “There’s nothing going on above her neck anyway.”

  Sheena’s eyes were blazing fury. “She’s jealous, jealous, jealous! Look at her, she’s turning green all over!”

  Hubble got up and coaxed Sheena back toward her quarters. I held Grace by the shoulders until they left. She was trembling with rage.

  “This meeting’s over,” I told the others. “We’ll pick a name for the asteroid later.”

  I walked Grace forward, toward the command center, away from the other passengers’ quarters where Sheena and Hubble had gone.