by Ben Bova
Sam came in, his helmet already off. I propelled myself over to him and kissed him warmly on the lips. He reacted in a typical Sam Gunn way. He gave a whoop and made three weightless cartwheels, literally heels over head, with me gripped tightly in his arms.
For all his exuberance and energy, Sam was a gentle, thoughtful lover. Hours later, as we floated side-by-side in my darkened quarters, the sweat glistening on our bare skins, he murmured:
“I never thought I could feel so ... so ..
Trying to supply the missing word, I suggested, “So much in love?”
He made a little nod. In our weightlessness, the action made him drift slightly away from me. I caught him in my arms, though, and pulled us back together.
“I love you, Sam,” I whispered, as though it were a secret. “I love you.”
He gave a long sigh. I thought it was contentment, happiness even.
“Listen,” he said, “you’ve got to come over to the ship. Those two nutcases who want to paint the ionosphere are on their way to the Moralists’ habitat.”
“What does that have to do with ...”
“You gotta meet them,” he insisted. Untangling from me, he began to round up his clothes, floating like weightless ghosts in the shadows. “You know what those Moralist hypocrites are going to call their habitat, once it’s finished? Eden! How’s that for chutzpah?”
He had to explain the Yiddish word to me. Eden. The Moralists wanted to create their own paradise in space. Well, maybe they would, although I doubted that it would be paradise for anyone who deviated in the slightest from their stern views of right and wrong.
We showered, which in zero-gee is an intricate, intimate procedure. Sam washed me thoroughly, lovingly, using the washcloth to tenderly push the soapy water that clung to my skin over every inch of my body.
“The perfect woman,” he muttered. “A dirty mind in a clean body.”
Finally we dried off, dressed and headed out to Sam’s ship. But first he maneuvered the little scooter along the length of my asteroid.
“Doesn’t seem to be much more done than the last time I was here,” he said, almost accusingly.
I was glad we were in the space suits and he could not see me blush. I remained silent.
As we moved away from The Rememberer, Sam told me, “The lawyers aren’t having much luck with the arbitration board.” In the earphones of my helmet his voice sounded suddenly tired, almost defeated.
“I didn’t think they would.”
“The board’s gonna hand down its decision in two weeks. If they decide against you, there’s no appeal.”
“And they will decide against me, won’t they?”
He tried to make his voice brighter. “Well, the lawyers are doing their damnedest. But if trickery and deceit won’t work, maybe I can bribe a couple of board members.”
“Don’t you dare! You’ll go to jail.”
He laughed.
As we came up to Sam’s transport ship, I saw its name stenciled in huge letters beneath the insect-eye canopy of the command module: Klaus Heiss.
“Important economist,” Sam answered my question. “Back fifty years or so. The first man to suggest free enterprise in space.”
“I thought that writers had suggested that long before space flight even began,” I said as we approached the ship’s airlock.
Sam’s voice sounded mildly impatient in my earphones. “Writers are one thing. Heiss went out and raised money, got things started. For real.”
KLAUS HEISS WAS fitted out more handsomely than Adam Smith, even though it seemed no larger. The dining lounge was more luxurious, and apparently the crew ate elsewhere. There were four of us for dinner: Sam and myself, and the two “nutcases,” as he had called them.
Morton McGuire and T. Kagashima did not seem insane to me. Perhaps naive. Certainly enthusiastic.
“It’s the greatest idea since the invention of writing!” McGuire blurted as we sat around the dining lounge table.
He was speaking about their idea of painting the ionosphere with advertisements.
McGuire was a huge mass of flesh, bulging in every direction, straining the metal snaps of his bilious green coveralls. He looked like a balloon that had been overfilled to the point of bursting. He proudly told me that he was known as “Mountain McGuire,” from his days as a college football player. He had gone from college into advertising, gaining poundage every passing day. Living on Earth, he could not be classified as an agravitic endomorph. He was simply fat. Extremely so.
“I’m just a growing boy,” he said happily as he jammed fistfuls of food into his mouth.
The other one, Kagashima, was almost as lean as I myself. Quiet too, although his oriental eyes frequently flashed with suppressed mirth. No one seemed to know what Kagashima’s first name was. When I asked what the “T” stood for he merely smiled enigmatically and said, “Just call me Kagashima; it will be easier for you.” He spoke English very well: no great surprise since he was born and raised in Denver, USA.
Kagashima was an electronics wizard. McGuire an advertising executive. Between them they had cooked up the idea of using electron guns to create glowing pictures in the ionosphere.
“Just imagine it,” McGuire beamed, his chubby hands held up as if framing a camera shot. “It’s twilight. The first stars are coming out. You look up and—POW!—there’s a huge red and white sign covering the sky from horizon to horizon: Drink Coke!”
I wanted to vomit.
But Sam encouraged him. “Like skywriting, when planes used to spell out words with smoke.”
“Real skywriting!” McGuire enthused.
Kagashima smiled and nodded.
“Is it legal,” I asked, “to write advertising slogans across the sky?”
McGuire snapped a ferocious look at me. “There’s no laws against it! The lawyers can’t take the damned sky away from us, for god’s sake! The sky belongs to everyone.”
I glanced at Sam. “The lawyers seem to be taking my asteroid away from me.”
His smile was odd, like the smile a hunter would have on his face as he saw his prey coming into range of his gun.
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” Sam muttered.
“Who possesses the sky?” Kagashima asked, with that oriental ambiguity that passes for wisdom.
“We do!” snapped McGuire.
Sam merely smiled like a cat eying a fat canary.
AT SAM’S INSISTENCE I spent the night hours aboard his ship. His quarters were much more luxurious than mine, and since practically all
space operations kept Greenwich Mean Time, there was no problem of differing clocks.
His cabin was much more than an alcove off the command module. It was small, but a real compartment, with a zipper hammock for sleeping and a completely enclosed shower stall that jetted water from all directions. We used the shower, but not the hammock. We finally fell asleep locked weightlessly in each other’s embrace and woke up when we gently bumped into the compartment’s bulkhead, many hours later.
“We’ve got to talk,” Sam said as we were dressing.
I smiled at him. “That means you talk and I listen, no?”
“No. Well, maybe I do most of the talking. But you’ve got to make some decisions, kiddo.”
“Decisions? About what?”
“About your asteroid. And the next few years of your life.”
He did not say that I had to make a decision about us. I barely noticed that fact at the time. I should have paid more attention.
Glancing at the digital clock set into the bulkhead next to his hammock, Sam told me, “In about half an hour I’m going to be conversing with the Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney, spiritual leader of the Moralist Sect. Their chief, their head honcho, sitteth at the right hand of You-Know-Who. The Boss.”
“The head of the Moralists?”
“Right.”
“He’s calling you? About my asteroid?”
Sam’s grin was full of teeth. “Nope. A
bout his worms. We’re carrying another load of ‘em out to his Eden on this trip.”
“Why would the head of the Moralists call you about worms?”
“Seems that the worms have become afflicted by a rare and strange disease,” Sam said, the grin turning delightfully evil, “and the hauling contract the Moralists signed with me now contains a clause that says I’m not responsible for their health.”
I was hanging in midair, literally and mentally. “What’s that got to do with me?”
Drifting over so close that our noses were practically touching, Sam asked in a whisper, “Would you be willing to paint the world’s first advertisement on the ionosphere? An advertisement for the Moralists?”
“Never!”
“Even if it means that they’ll let you keep the asteroid?”
Ah, the emotions that surged through my heart! I felt anger, and hope, and disgust, even fear. But mostly anger.
“Sam, that’s despicable! It’s a desecration! To turn the sky into an advertising poster...”
Sam was grinning, but he was serious about this. “Now don’t climb up on a high horse, kid....”
“And do it for the Moralists?” My temper was boiling over now. “The people who want to take my asteroid away from me and destroy the memory of my own people? You want me to help them?”
“Okay, okay! Don’t pop your cork over it.” Sam said, taking me gently by the wrist. “I’m just asking you to think about it. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”
Completely bewildered, I allowed Sam to lead me up to the ship’s command module. The same two husband-and-wife engineers were there at their consoles, just as blond and even more bloated than they had been the last time I had seen them, it seemed to me. They greeted me with smiles of recognition.
Sam asked them to leave and they wafted out through the main hatch like a pair of hot-air balloons. On their way to the galley, no doubt.
We drifted over to the comm console. No one needs chairs in zero gravity. We simply hung there, my arms floating up to about chest height, as they would in a swimming pool, while Sam worked the console to make contact with the Moralist Sect headquarters back on Earth.
It took more than a half hour for Sam to get Rev. Dabney on his screen. A small army of neatly scrubbed, earnest, glittering-eyed young men and women appeared, one after the other, and tried to deal with Sam. Instead, Sam dealt with them.
“Okay, if you want the worms to die, it’s your seventy million dollars, not mine,” said Sam to the young lawyer.
To the lawyer’s superior, Sam spoke sweetly, “Your boss signed the contract. All I’m doing is informing you of the problem, as specified in clause 22.1, section C.”
To his boss, “All right! I’ll dump the whole load right here in the middle of nowhere and cut my losses. Is that what you want?”
To Rev. Dabney’s astonished assistant administrator, “The lawsuit will tie you up for years, wiseass! You’ll never finish your Eden! The creditors will take it over and make a Disney World out of it!”
To the special assistant to the High Pastor of the Moralist Sect, “This has gone beyond lawyers. It’s even beyond the biologists’ abilities! The damned worms are dying! They’re withering away! What we need is a miracle!”
That, finally, brought the Right Rev. Virtue T. Dabney to the screen.
I instantly disliked the man. His face was largely hidden behind a dark beard and mustache. I suppose he thought it made him look like an Old Testament patriarch. To me he looked like a conquistador; all he needed was a shining steel breastplate and helmet. He seemed to me perfectly capable of burning my people at the stake.
“Mr. Gunn,” he said, smiling amiably. “How may I help you?”
Sam said lightly, “I’ve got another ten tons of worms for you, as per contract, but they’re dying. I don’t think any of ‘em are gonna survive long enough to make it to your habitat.”
It took more than a minute for the messages to get back and forth from Earth to the Klaus Heiss. Dabney spent the time with hands folded and head bowed prayerfully. Sam hung onto the handgrips of the comm console to keep himself from bobbing around weightlessly. I stayed out of range of the video and fidgeted with seething, smoldering nervous fury.
“The worms are dying, you say? What seems to be the matter? Your first shipment made it to Eden with no trouble at all, I believe.”
“Right. But something’s gone wrong with this load. Maybe we got bad worms to start with. Maybe there’s a fault in the cargo containers’ radiation shielding. The worms are dying.” Sam reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a blackened, twisted, dried out string of what must have once been an earthworm. “They’re all going like this.”
I watched intently for all the long seconds it took the transmission to reach Dabney’s screen. When it did, his eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open.
“All of them? But how can this be?”
Sam shrugged elaborately. “Beats the hell out of me. My biologist is stymied, too. Maybe it’s a sign from God that he doesn’t want you to leave the Earth. I dunno.”
Dabney’s bearded face, when that line of Sam’s finally hit him, went into even greater shock.
“I cannot believe the Lord would smite his faithful so. This is the work of evil.”
“So what do we do about it?” Sam asked cheerfully. “My contract guarantees full payment for delivery. I’m not responsible for the condition of the cargo after your people inspected my cargo bay and okayed the shipment.”
Sam blanked out the screen and turned to me. “Have you made up your mind, kiddo?”
“Made up my mind?”
“About the ads in the ionosphere.”
“What do his dying worms have to do with me? Or with painting an advertisement on the ionosphere?”
“You’ll see!” he promised. “Will you do it?”
“No! Never!”
“Even if it means saving your asteroid?”
I was too angry even to consider it. I turned my back to Sam and gritted my teeth with fury.
Sam sighed deeply, but when I whirled around to face him once more, he was grinning at me in that lopsided cunning way of his. Before I could say anything, he flicked on the screen again. Dabney’s expression was crafty now. His eyes were narrowed, his lips pressed tight.
“What do you suggest as a solution to this problem, Mr. Gunn?”
“Damned if I know,” said Sam. “Seems to me you need a miracle, Reverend.”
He took special delight in Dabney’s wince when that “damned” reached him.
“A miracle, you say,” replied the Moralist leader. “And how do you think we might arrange a miracle?”
Sam chuckled. “Well—I don’t know much about the way religions work, but I’ve heard that if somebody is willing to make a sacrifice, give up something that he really wants or even needs, then God rewards him. Something about casting bread upon the waters, I think.”
I began to realize that there was nothing at all wrong with the Moralists’ worms. Sam was merely holding them hostage. For me. He was risking lawsuits that could cost him everything he owned. For me.
Dabney’s expression became even more squint-eyed than before. “You wouldn’t be Jewish by any chance, would you, Mr. Gunn?”
Sam’s grin widened to show lots of teeth. “You wouldn’t be antiSemitic, would you, Reverend?”
Their negotiation went on for the better part of three hours, with those agonizing long pauses in between each and every statement they made. After an hour of jockeying back and forth, Dabney finally suggested that he—and his sect—might give up their claim to an asteroid that they wanted to use for building material.
“That might be just the sacrifice that will save the worms,” Sam allowed.
More offers and counteroffers, more tiptoeing and verbal sparring. It was all very polite. And vicious. Dabney knew that there was nothing
wrong with the worms. He also knew that Sam could open his cargo ba
y to vacuum for the rest of the trip to Eden, and the Moralists would receive ten tons of very dead and desiccated garbage.
Finally, “If my people make this enormous sacrifice, if we give up our claim to this asteroid that we so desperately need, what will you be willing to do for me ... er, us, in return?”
Sam rubbed his chin. “There’s hundreds of asteroids in the Aten group, and more in the Apollos. They all cut across Earth’s orbit. You can pick out a different one. It’s no great sacrifice to give up this one little bitty piece of rock that you’re claiming.”
Dabney was looking down, as if at his desktop. Perhaps an aide was showing him lists of the asteroids available to help build his Eden.
“We picked that particular asteroid because its orbit brings it the closest to Eden and therefore it is the easiest—and least expensive—for us to capture and use.”
He held up a hand before Sam could reply, an indication of very fast reflexes on his part. “However, in the interests of charity and self-sacrifice, I am willing to give up that particular asteroid. I know that some Latin American woman has been carving figures on it. If I—that is, if we allow her to remain and give up our claim to the rock, what will you do for the Moralist Sect in return?”
Now Sam’s smile returned like a cat slinking in through a door open merely the barest crack. I realized that he had known all along that Dabney would not give in unless he got something more out of the deal than merely the delivery of the worms he had already paid for. He wanted icing on his cake.
“Well now,” Sam said slowly, “how about an advertisement for the Moralist Sect that glows in the sky and can be seen from New England to the Mississippi valley?”
No! I screamed silently. Sam couldn’t help them do that! It would be sacrilegious.
But when the transmission finally reached Dabney, his shrewd eyes grew even craftier. “What are you talking about, Mr. Gunn?”
Sam described the concept of painting the ionosphere with electron guns. Dabney’s eyes grew wider and greedier with each word.