by Ben Bova
By the time the Moralists’ lawyers came to the conclusion that Sam was bluffing, we were moving fast enough and far enough so that Dabney decided it would not be worthwhile trying to recover my asteroid. The Rememberer sailed out to the Asteroid Belt, half a dozen propulsion engineers were fired by the Moralists (and immediately hired by S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited) and Sam and I spent more than a year together.
“AND THAT IS how I became famous.” Elverda Apacheta smiled slightly, as if someone had paid her a compliment she did not deserve. “Even though I am a sculptress, I am known to the public for that one painting. Like Michelangelo and the Sistine ceiling.”
Jade asked, “And Sam? You say he spent more than a year with you on your asteroid?”
Now the sculptress laughed, a rich throaty sound. “Yes, I know it sounds strange to imagine Sam staying in one place for two days on end, let alone three hundred and eighty. But he did. He stayed with me that long.”
“That’s ... unusual.”
“You must realize that half the solar system’s lawyers were looking for Sam. It was a good time for him to be unavailable. Besides, he wanted to see the Asteroid Belt for himself. You may recall that he made and lost several fortunes out there.”
“Yes, I know,” said Jade.
Elverda Apacheta nodded slowly, remembering. “It was a stormy time, cooped up in my little workshop. We both had other demons driving us: Sam wanted to be the first entrepreneur to set up operations in the Asteroid Belt....”
“And he was,” Jade murmured.
“Yes, he was. And I had my own work. My art.”
“Which is admired and adored everywhere.”
“Perhaps so,” admitted the sculptress, “but still I receive requests to produce the Virgin of the Andes. No matter what I do, that painting will haunt me forever.”
“The Rememberer is the most popular work of art off-Earth. Every year thousands of people make the pilgrimage. Your people will never be forgotten.”
“Perhaps more tourists would go to see it if it were in a lower orbit,” the sculptress mused. “Sam worked it out so that it swung through the Asteroid Belt, returned to Earth’s vicinity, and was captured into a high orbit, about twelve thousand kilometers up. He was afraid of bringing it closer; he said his calculations were not so exact and he feared bringing it so close that it would hit the Earth.”
“Still, it’s regarded as a holy shrine and one of the greatest works of art anywhere,” Jade said.
“But it’s rather difficult for people to get to.” Elverda Apacheta’s smooth brow knitted slightly in an anxious little frown. “I have asked the IAA to bring it closer, down to where the tourist hotels orbit, but they have not acted on my request as yet.”
“You know how slow bureaucracies are,” said-Jade.
The sculptress sighed. “I only hope I live long enough for them to make their decision.”
“Did the Moralists try to recapture your asteroid?”
“Oh no. That was the beauty of Sam’s scheme. By pushing The Rememberer into such a high-velocity orbit, he made it too expensive for the Moralists to go chasing after us. They screamed and sued, but finally they settled on another one of the Aten group. More than one, I believe.”
“And Sam left you while you were still coasting out in the Belt?”
She smiled sadly. “Yes. We quarreled a lot, of course. It was not entirely a honeymoon trip. Finally, he detached his ship to investigate some of the smaller asteroids that we had discovered. He said he wanted to register a priority in their discovery. ‘It’s the only way I’ll ever get my name in the history books,’ he told me. That was the last I saw of him.”
“No further contact at all?”
“Oh, we called each other. We spent hours talking. But he never came back to me.” Elverda Apacheta looked away from Jade, toward the view of Earth in the lounge’s lone window. “In a way I was almost glad of it. Sam was very intense, and so was I. We were not meant to stay together for very long.”
Jade said nothing. For long moments the only sound in the lounge was the faint whisper of air coming through the ventilating ducts.
“The last time I spoke with him,” Elverda Apacheta said, “he had a premonition of death.”
Jade felt her entire body tense. “Really?”
“Oh, it was nothing dark and brooding. That was not Sam’s nature. He merely asked me someday to do a statue of him exactly as I remembered him, without using a photograph or anything else for a model. Strictly from memory. He said he would like to have that as his monument once he is gone.”
“His statue on the Moon.”
The sculptress nodded. “Yes. I did it in glass. Lunar glass. Have you seen it?”
“It’s beautiful!”
Elverda Apacheta laughed. “It does not look like Sam at all. He was not a tall, dauntless explorer with a jutting jaw and steely eyes. But it’s the way he wanted to be, and in a strange sort of way, inside that funny little body of his, that is the way he really was. So that is the way I made his statue.”
And she laughed. But the tears in her eyes were not from joy.
Jade found her own vision blurring. For the first time since she had found out the truth about her birth, she realized that Sam Gunn, her own father, would have loved her if he had only known she existed.
Titan
STANDING IN AN ARMORED PRESSURE SUIT ON THE SHORE OF the methane sea, Jade aimed her rented camcorder at the huge fat crescent of Saturn peeking through a rare break in the clouds that filled the hazy orange sky. The planet was striped like a faded beach ball, its colors pale, almost delicate tones of yellow and pink with whitish splotches here and there. The ring system looked like a scimitar-thin line crossing its bulging middle, though the rings cast a wide solid shadow on Saturn’s oblate disk.
“Dear Spence,” Jade said into her helmet microphone. “As you can see, I’ve made it to Titan. And I truly do wish you were here. It’s eerie, strange and beautiful and kind of scary.”
The clouds scudded across the face of Saturn, blotting it from view. The sky darkened, and the perpetual gloom of Titan deepened. Jade turned slightly and focused the camera on the methane sea. It looked thick, almost oily. Near the horizon a geyser pushed slowly skyward, a slow-motion fountain of utterly cold liquid nitrogen.
“It only took two months to get here from Ceres on the high-boost ship. It was expensive, but the university runs a regularly scheduled service to the campus here. Titan’s become the hub for studies of the outer solar system, although there are actually more people living and working in the Jupiter system. Which is natural, I suppose, since they discovered those giant whale things living in the Jovian ocean.”
Waves were lapping sluggishly against the ice rocks on which Jade stood. The whole methane sea seemed to be heaving itself slowly, reluctantly toward her.
“Tidal shift,” whispered a small voice in her helmet earphones. “Please return to base.” She was being monitored by the Titan base’s automated safety cameras, of course.
“The tide’s starting to come in,” Jade said. “Time for me to get back to the base,” she swung the camera around, “up on those cliffs. I don’t know how much of it you can see in this murk, but it’s pretty comfortable—for a short visit. Like a college dormitory, I guess.”
She started walking toward the powered stairs that climbed up to the cliff top.
“I do wish you were here, Spence. Or I was there. I miss you. This will be the last interview for the Sam Gunn biography. I’ll be coming back to Selene after this. It’ll take six months, even at constant boost, but I’m looking forward to getting back home. Please video me back as soon as you can.”
Two months of enforced inactivity aboard the plasma torch ship that had brought her to Titan had given Jade plenty of time to think about Spence Johansen.
She wanted to end her video message with “I love you,” but found that she could not. I’m not sure of myself, she realized. I’m not sure of him. There’ll b
e time enough for that when I get back, she told herself. Then she added ruefully, if Spence hasn’t married again by then.
SOLOMON GOODMAN LOOKED very young to be a famous professor and Noble laureate. He’s not much more than thirty, she told herself.
Unlike most of the other people she had interviewed, Professor Goodman had no qualms about talking to her. He had immediately acceded to her request for an interview even before Jade had reached Ceres, and had personally set her up with a reservation aboard the plasma torch ship that had brought her out to Titan.
Now she sat in his office. What looked like a large picture window was actually a smart screen, she realized. A beautifully clear image of Saturn showed on it, obviously taken from a satellite camera above Titan’s perpetual cloud cover. Jade could see the mysterious spokes in Saturn’s rings and the streaks of pale colors banding the planet’s oblate body.
Goodman sat slouched in a pseudo-leather couch, his long legs stretched out, almost touching Jade’s booted feet. She pictured him as a skinny, gangling student even though he was now getting pudgy, potbellied. His hair was still quite dark and thickly curled; his slightly puffy face could look quite pleasant when he smiled.
A robot had brought a tray of tea things and deposited them on the low table between the couch and the padded chair on which Jade was sitting.
“One of the perks of university life,” Goodman said, almost defensively. “Real old English tea in the afternoon. I got into the habit when I was at Oxford. Really gives you a lift for the later part of the day.”
Jade let him pour a cup of steaming tea for her, then added a bit of milk herself. The tea service was real china, brought in all the way from Earth. The Nobel prize brought its privileges, she thought.
“So what do you want to know about Sam?” Goodman asked, smiling at her. Jade noticed that he had large hands; they dwarfed the delicate cup and saucer he was holding.
“Well,” Jade said, turning on the recorder in her belt, “you were the last person to see him alive, weren’t you?”
His smile faded. He put the cup and saucer down on the tray in front of him.
Looking up at Jade with an almost guilty expression on his face, Goodman said, “I guess you could say that I killed Sam Gunn.”
Einstein
GOODMAN LEANED EVEN DEEPER INTO THE COUCH, HEAD tilted back, eyes focused on something, someplace far beyond the ceiling of his office.
You can’t pace the floor in zero gravity—he said, almost to himself. So Sam was flitting around the cramped circular control center of our ship like a crazed chipmunk, darting along madly, propelling himself by grabbing at handgrips, console knobs, viewport edges, anything that could give him a moment’s purchase as he whirled by.
I was sweating over my instruments, but every nine seconds Sam whizzed past me like a demented monkey, jabbering, “It’s gotta be there. It’s gotta be there!”
“There’s something out there,” I yelled over my shoulder, annoyed with him. Angry at myself, really. It was my calculations that had put us into this fix.
The instruments were showing a definite gravitational flux, damned close to what I had calculated when I was still back on campus. But out here, well past the orbit of Pluto—farther than anybody had gone before—what I needed to see was a planet, a fat little world orbiting out in that darkness more than seven billion miles from Earth.
Planet X. The tenth planet. Not a cometary body, an icy dirtball like so many of the objects out there in the Kuiper Belt. A planet, a real solid body with a gravitational flux considerably stronger than Earth’s.
I mean, they can argue about whether Pluto or those other icy bodies should be considered planets. But from the gravitational flux I’d detected, this one had to be a real, sizeable planet. Bigger than Earth, most likely.
Astronomers had been searching for Planet X since before Percival Lowell’s time, but I had worked out exactly where it should be, me and the CalTech/MIT/Osaka linked computers. And Sam Gunn had furnished the money and the ship to go out and find it.
Only, it wasn’t there.
“It’s gotta be there.” Sam orbited past me again.”Gotta be.”
The first time I met Sam, I thought he was nuts. Chunky little guy. Hair like a nest of rusted wire. Darting, probing eyes. Kind of shifty. The eyes of a politician, maybe, or a confidence man.
“Fly out there?” I had asked him. “Why not just rent time on an orbital telescope, or use the lunar observa—”
“To claim it, egghead!” Sam had snapped. “A whole planet. I want it.”
He couldn’t have been that dumb, I thought. He’d amassed several fortunes, and lost all but the latest one. To fly out beyond Pluto would cost every penny he had, and more.
“You can’t claim a planet,” I explained patiently. “International agreements from back in ...”
“Puke on international agreements!” he shouted. “I’m not a national government. I’m S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. And a whole planet’s gotta be worth a fortune.”
Sam had a reputation for shady schemes, but I couldn’t for the life of me see how he planned to profit from claiming Planet X. Nor any reason for me to leave my home and job at the university to go out to the end of the solar system with him.
I didn’t reckon on Sam’s persuasiveness. He didn’t have a silver tongue. Far from it. His language was more often crude, even obscene, rather than eloquent. But he was a nonstop needier, wheedler, pleader, seducer. In the language of my forefathers, he was a nudge. His tongue didn’t have to be silver; it was heavy-duty, long-wearing, blister-proof, diamond-coated solid muscle.
So I found myself ducking through the hatch of the special ship he had commissioned. Only the two of us as crew; I was to do the navigating, while Sam did everything else, including the cooking. Before I could ask myself why I was doing this, I was being flattened into the acceleration couch as we roared out into the wild black yonder.
But Planet X wasn’t there.
Sam slowed down, puffing, until he was dangling right behind me, his feet half a meter off the floor. My softboots were locked in the foot restraints and still he barely came up to my height. He was wheezing, and I realized there was a lot of gray in his reddish hair. His face looked tired, old, eyes baggy and sad.
“Of all the eggheads in all the universities in all the solar system,” he groaned, “you’ve ...”
Suddenly I realized what the instruments were telling me. I shouted, “It’s a black hole!”
“And I’m the tooth fairy.”
“No, really! It’s not a planet at all. It’s a black hole. Look!”
Sam snarled, “How in hell can I see something that’s invisible by definition?”
With trembling fingers I pointed to the gravitational flux meters and the high-energy detectors. We even went over to the optical telescope and bumped our heads together like Laurel and Hardy, trying to squint through the eyepiece together.
Nothing to see. Except a faint violet glow, the last visible remains of the thin interplanetary gas that was being sucked into the black hole on a one-way trip to oblivion.
It really was a black hole! The final grave of a star that had collapsed, God knows how many eons ago. A black hole! Practically in our backyard! And I had discovered it! Visions of the Nobel Prize made me giddy.
Sam sprang straight to the communications console and started tapping frantically at its keyboard, muttering about how he could rent time to astronomers to study the only black hole close enough to Earth to see firsthand.
“It’s worth a freakin’ fortune,” he chortled, his fingers racing along the keys like a concert pianist trying to do Chopin’s Minute Waltz in thirty seconds. “A dozen fortunes!”
He filed his claim and even gave the black hole a name: Einstein. I grinned and nodded agreement with his choice.
It took nearly eleven hours for Sam’s message to get to Earth, and another eleven for their reply to reach us. I spent the time studying Einstein while Sam pro
claimed to the universe how he was going to build an orbiting hotel just outside Einstein’s event horizon and invent a new pastime for the danger nuts.
“Space surfing! A jetpack on your back and good old Einstein in front of you. See how close you can skim to the event horizon without getting sucked in! It’ll make billions!”
“Until somebody gets stretched into a bloody string of spaghetti,” I said. “That grav field out there is powerful, Sam, and I think it fluctuates....”
“All the better,” said Sam, clapping his hands like a kid in front of a Christmas tree. “Let a couple of the risk freaks kill themselves and all the others will come boiling out here like lemmings on migration.”
I shook my head in wonder.
When the comm signal finally chimed I was still trying to dope out the basic parameters of our black hole. Yes, I was thinking of Einstein as ours; that’s what being near Sam does to you.
His round little face went pugnacious the instant he saw the woman on the screen. I felt an entirely different reaction. She was beautiful, with thick platinum blonde hair and the kind of eyes that promised paradise.
But her voice was as cold as a robot’s. “Mr. Gunn, we meet again. Your claim has been noted and filed with the Interplanetary Astronautical Authority. In the meantime, I represent the creditors from your most recent bankruptcy. To date ...”
She droned on while Sam’s face went from angry red to ashy grey. This far from Earth, all messages were one-way. You can’t hold a conversation with an eleven-hour wait between each transmission. The blonde went into infinite detail about how much money Sam owed, and to whom. Even though I was only half listening, I learned that our ship was not paid for, and my own university was suing Sam for taking my instrumentation without authorization!
Finally she smiled slightly and delivered the knockout. “Now Mr. Gunn—aside from all the above unpleasantness, it may interest you to realize that your claim to this alleged black hole is without merit or substance.”