by Ben Bova
“Nope,” Sam said. “Everything worked out just the way I thought it would. Ol’ Francis X. was an altar boy, y’know. Went to Notre Dame and almost became a priest, before he found out how much he enjoyed making money.”
“You knew that all along?”
“I was counting on it,” Sam answered cheerfully.
We were at my door. I realized I was very weary, drained physically and emotionally. Sam looked as chipper as a sparrow, despite the hour.
“Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve,” he said.
I tapped my wristwatch. “You mean today; it’s well past midnight.”
“Right. I gotta get a high-g boost direct to Rome set up for Billy Boy if he’s gonna say Christmas Eve mass in St. Peter’s. Even then it’s gonna be awful close. See ya!”
He hustled down the corridor to his own suite, whistling shrilly off-key. And that’s the last I saw of Sam until Christmas.
POPE WILLIAM WAS overjoyed, of course. He invited me to breakfast that morning, just before his high-boost shuttle was set to take off. Even Cardinal Hagerty managed to smile, although it looked as if the effort might shatter his stony face. Josella was nowhere in sight, though.
“My prayers have been answered,” the Pope told me.
“The Lord certainly moves in mysterious ways,” I said.
“Indeed She does,” said the Pope, with a mischievous wink.
More mysterious than either of us realized at the time. Sam set up a direct high-g flight to Rome for the papal visitors, so that Pope William could get back in time for his Christmas Eve mass in St. Peter’s. But all of a sudden an intense solar flare erupted and raised radiation levels in cis-lunar space so high that all flights between the Earth and the Moon had to be canceled. All work on the lunar surface stopped and everybody had to stay underground for forty-eight hours. It was as if God was forcing all of Selene’s residents and visitors to observe the Christmas holiday.
Which is how William I became the first Pope to celebrate a public mass on the Moon. On Christmas Eve, in Selene’s main plaza. The whole population turned out, even Sam.
“I figure about five percent of this crowd is Roman Catholic,” Sam said, looking over the throng. We were seated up on the stage of the theater shell, behind the makeshift altar. Several thousand people jammed the theater’s tiers of seats and spilled out onto the grass of the plaza’s greenway.
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “For one hour, we’re all united.”
Sam grinned. The Pope didn’t have his best ceremonial robes with him; he offered the mass in a plain white outfit. “They’re doing The Nutcracker this evening,” Sam whispered to me. “Wanna see it?”
Low-gravity ballet. Once I had dreams of becoming a dancer on the Moon. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
“Good,” said Sam.
We watched the elaborate ritual of the mass, and the thousands of transfixed men and women and children standing out on the plaza, their eyes on the Pope. I spotted a slim, dark-skinned young man in a trim mustache and beard who looked awfully familiar.
“Y’know,” Sam whispered, “maybe I’ve been wrong about this all along.”
I nodded.
“I mean,” he went on, “if a guy really wants to make a fortune, he ought to start a religion.”
I turned and stared at him. “You wouldn’t!”
“Maybe that’s what I ought to do.”
“Oh Sam, you devil! Start a religion? You?”
“Who knows.”
I tried to glare at him but couldn’t.
“And another thing,” he whispered. “If we ever do get married, you’ll have to live here on the Moon with me. I’m not going back to Earth; it’s too dangerous down there.”
My heart skipped a couple of beats. That was the first time Sam had ever admitted there was any kind of chance he’d marry me. He shrugged good-naturedly. “Merry Christmas, Jill.” “Merry Christmas,” I replied, thinking that it might turn out to be a very interesting new year indeed.
Torch Ship Hermes
“SO DID YOU AND SAM EVER GET MARRIED?” JADE ASKED.
Sitting in one of the comfortable armchairs in the torch ship’s lounge, Jill Meyers smiled enigmatically. “Not yet. I got the little SOB to within an eyelash of saying ‘I do’ a couple of times, but both times he scampered out on me before we could make it official.”
“And now ... ?”
“Why do you think I’ve hired this ship? I’ll get him this time. I want to see the look on his face when he sees me—with a minister at my side.”
Despite herself Jade laughed.
“You know, there’s somebody else on this ship you should talk to,” Meyers said. “He was working with Sam when Sam got accused of genocide.”
“Genocide!”
“You haven’t heard about that one? Well, I guess they did hush it up afterward. But still—”
“He’s on this ship? I’ve got to interview him!”
Meyers nodded. “I’ll introduce you to him. His name’s Steve Wright.”
Steven Achernar Wright
WITHOUT HESITATION, JILL MEYERS PHONED STEVE WRIGHT and invited him to the ship’s lounge for a drink. He turned out to be a pleasant enough fellow, somewhere near fifty, Jade judged. He had a shy, almost boyish manner, and unruly sandy hair that tended to flop over his forehead at the slightest excuse.
Once Jade started asking questions about Sam Gunn, his shyness turned to a reluctant, almost hostile series of monosyllabic grunts.
Until Jill Meyers told him, “Jade produced the video biography about Sam.”
A new light dawned in Wright’s eyes. “I haven’t seen it, but I heard it treated Sam pretty well.”
A little more conversation and a couple of drinks from the robot-tended bar, and Wright began to relax and talk nonstop.
“Look, I was the closest thing to a lawyer that Sam ever had. I mean, he hated lawyers. Probably that’s because he was always getting himself into legal troubles, you know, operating out at the edge of the law the way he always did.
“I don’t know if he really fell into that black hole or not. And I guess I don’t really care. Maybe he found real aliens out there and maybe not. We’ll see if he brings any back with him.”
Jade made a sympathetic smile, then asked, “Why are you running all the way out to the Kuiper Belt to meet Sam?”
“Why? Because I feel responsible for the little guy, that’s why. He went tootling off to find Planet X with that university geek and left behind, like, a ton and three-quarters of lawsuits.”
“But he’s been away so long the statute of limitations on all the suits has run out,” Jill Myers pointed out.
“Maybe not. That Beryllium Blonde that he’s tangled with has come up with the idea that since Sam claims he was in a space-time warp, time hasn’t passed for him the way it has for the rest of us and therefore the statutes of limitations should be considered suspended for all the time Sam was allegedly in the warp!”
“What?” Meyers snapped. “That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? She’s claiming that if time hasn’t elapsed for him then it shouldn’t elapse for the lawsuits. And the courts are taking it very seriously.” “No!”
“So I’m going out there to warn the little bugger that his legal troubles aren’t over. Not by a long shot.”
“The Beryllium Blonde?” asked Jade. “Is her name Jennifer something?” “Marlow,” Wright said. “You don’t know about her?” “A little,” said Jade.
“Or about the Toad, either? Cheez, what kind of a producer are you? Didn’t you do any research before you came aboard this torch ship?
The Prudent Jurist
YOU MIGHT HAVE KNOWN-SAID STEVE WRIGHT-THAT THE very first person to be hauled in to trial by the spanking-new Interplanetary Tribunal would be Sam Gunn. And on trial for his life, at that.
Things might not have been too bad, even so, if it weren’t for Sam’s old nemesis, the Beryllium Blonde. She wanted Sam’s hide tacked onto her off
ice wall. Sam, of course, wanted her body. Anyplace.
And then there was the Toad, as well.
Sam’s voice had been the loudest one in the whole solar system against letting lawyers get established off-Earth.
“When it comes to interplanetary jurisprudence,” he often said—at the top of his leathery lungs—”what we need is less juris and more prudence!”
But it was inevitable that the Interplanetary Astronautical Authority would set up a court to enforce its rulings and carry Earth-style legalities out to the edge of the frontier. After all, the Asteroid Belt was being mined by little guys like Sam and big corporations like Rockledge Industries.
And major consortiums like Diversified Universities & Laboratories, Ltd. (which Sam called DULL) were already pushing the exploration of Jupiter and its many moons.
When the scientists announced the discovery of life on the Jovian moon Europa, of course, the environmentalists and theologians and even the Right To Lifers demanded that laws—and lawyers—be established in space to protect it.
And Sam wound up on trial. Not just for murder. Genocide.
Me, I was the closest thing to a lawyer in Sam’s then-current company, Asteroidal Resources, Inc. Sam had started up and dissolved more corporations than Jupiter has moons, usually making a quick fortune on some audacious scheme and then blowing it on something even wilder. Asteroidal Resources, Inc. was devoted to mining heavy metals from the Asteroid Belt, out beyond Mars, and smelting them down to refined alloys as his factory ships sailed back to the Earth-Moon system.
The company was based on solid economics, provided needed resources to the Earth-Moon system’s manufacturers, and was turning a tidy—if not spectacular—profit. For Sam, this was decidedly unusual. Even respectable.
Sam ran a tight company. His ships were highly automated, with bare-bones skeleton crews. There were only six of us in ARI’s headquarters in Ceres, the largest of the asteroids. None of us was a real lawyer; Sam wouldn’t allow any of them into his firm. My paralegal certificate was as far as Sam was willing to go. He snarled with contempt when other companies began bringing their lawyers into the belt.
And when I said that the office was in Ceres, that’s exactly what I mean. Even though it’s the biggest chunk of rock in the belt, Ceres is only a little over nine hundred kilometers across; barely big enough to be round, instead of an irregular lump, like the other asteroids. No air, hardly any gravity. Mining outfits like Sam’s and big-bad Rockledge and others had honeycombed the rock to set up their local headquarters inside it.
My official title was Director, Human Resources. That meant that I was the guy who handled personnel problems, payroll, insurance, health claims, and lawsuits. Sam always had three or four lawsuits pending; he constantly skirted the fringes of legality—which was why he didn’t want lawyers in space, of course. He had enough trouble with the Earthbound variety.
The Beryllium Blonde, by the way, was a corporate lawyer, one of the best, with a mind as sharp and vindictive as her body was lithe and curvaceous. A deadly combination, as far as Sam was concerned.
The entire Human Resources Department in ARI consisted of me and a computer. I had very sophisticated programs to work with, you know, but there was no other human in Human Resources.
Still, I thought things were humming along smoothly enough in our underground offices until the day Sam came streaking back home on a high-g burn, raced straight from the landing pad to my office without even taking off his flight suit, and announced: “Orville, you’re gonna be my legal counsel at the trial. Start boning up on interplanetary law.”
My actual name is Steven. Steven Achernar Wright. But for some reason Sam called me Orville. Sometimes Wilbur, but mostly Orville.
“Legal counsel?” I echoed, bounding out of my chair so quickly that I sailed completely over my desk in the low gravity. “Trial? For what? What’re you charged with?”
He shook his head. “Murder, I think. Maybe worse.”
And he scooted into his office. All I really saw of the little guy was a sawed-off blur of motion topped with rusty-red hair. Huckleberry Finn at Mach 5.
I learned about the charges against Sam almost immediately. My phone screen chimed and the impressive black and silver seal of the International Astronautical Authority appeared on its screen, followed an eye-blink later by a very legal-looking summons and an arrest warrant.
The charges were attempted murder, grand larceny, violation of sixteen—count ‘em, sixteen—different IAA environmental regulations and assault and battery with willful intent to cause grievous bodily harm.
Oh yes, and the aforementioned charge of genocide.
All that happened before lunch.
I TAPPED INTO the best legal programs on the sys and, after half a day’s reading, arranged to surrender Sam to the IAA authorities at Selene City, on the Moon. He yowled and complained every centimeter of the way. Even when we landed on the Moon Sam screeched loud enough to set up echoes through Selene City’s underground corridors, right up to the headquarters of the IAA.
The IAA chief administrator cheerfully released Sam on his own recognizance. He and Sam were old virtual billiards buddies, and besides Sam couldn’t get away; his name, photo, fingerprints, retinal patterns, and neutron scattering index were posted at every rocket port on the Moon. Sam was stuck on the Moon, at least until his trial.
Maybe longer. The World Government’s penal colony was at Farside, where convicts couldn’t even see Earth in their sky and spent their time trying to scrounge helium-three from the regolith, competing with nanomachines that did the job for practically nothing for the big corporations like Masterson and Wankle.
THE TRIAL STARTED promptly enough. I begged for more time to prepare a defense, interview witnesses, check the prosecution’s published statement of the facts of the case (“And scatter a few bribes around,” Sam suggested). No go. The IAA refused any and all requests for a delay in the proceedings. Even their cheerful chief administrator gave me a doleful look and said, “No can do. The trial starts tomorrow, as scheduled.”
That worried me. Nobody wanted to appear on Sam’s behalf; there were no witnesses to the alleged crimes that weren’t already lined up to testify for the prosecution. I couldn’t even dig up any character witnesses.
“Testify to Sam’s character?” asked one of his oldest friends. “You want them to throw the key away on the little SOB? Or maybe you expect me to commit perjury?”
That was the kindest response I got.
What worried me even more was the fact that several hundred “neutral observers” had booked passage to the Moon to attend the trial; half of them were environmentalists who thirsted for Sam’s blood; the other half were various enemies the little guy had made over his many years of blithely going his own way and telling anybody who didn’t like it to stuff his head someplace where the sun doesn’t shine.
The media sensed blood—and Sam’s blood, at that. He had been great material for them for a long time: the little guy who always thumbed his nose at authority and got away with it. But now Sam had gone too far, and the kindest thing being said about him in the media was that he was “the accused mass-murderer of an entire alien species, the man who wiped out the harmless green lichenoids of Europa.”
If all this bothered Sam he gave no indication of it. “The media,” he groused. “They love you when you win and they’ll use you for toilet paper when you don’t.”
I studied his round, impish, Jack-o’-lantern face for a sign of concern. Or remorse. Or even anger at being haled into court on such serious charges. Nothing. He just grinned his usual toothy grin and whistled while he worked, maddeningly off-key.
Sam was more worried about the impending collapse of Asteroidal Resources, Inc. than his impending trial. The IAA had frozen all his assets and embargoed all his vehicles. The two factory ships on their way in from the belt were ordered to enter lunar orbit when they arrived at the Earth-Moon system and to stay there; their cargoes we
re impounded by the IAA, pending the outcome of the trial.
“They want to break me,” Sam grumbled. “Whether I win the trial or lose, they want to make sure I’m flat busted by the time it’s over.”
And then the Toad showed up, closely followed by Beryllium Blonde.
WE WERE SITTING at the defendant’s table in the courtroom, a very modernistic chamber with severe, angular banc and witness stand of lunar stone, utterly bare smoothed stone walls and long benches of lunar aluminum for the spectators. The tables and chairs for the defendant and prosecution were also burnished aluminum, cold and hard. No decorations of any kind; the courtroom was functional, efficient, and gave me the feeling of inhuman relentlessness.
“Kangaroo court,” Sam muttered as we took our chairs.
The crowd filed in, murmuring and whispering, and filled the rows behind us. Various clerks appeared. No media reporters or photographers were allowed in the courtroom but there had been plenty of them out in the corridor, asking simple questions like, “Why did you wipe out those harmless little green lichenoids, Sam?”
Sam grinned at the them and replied, “Who says I did?”
“The IAA, DULL, just about everybody in the solar system,” came their shouted response.
Sam shrugged good-naturedly. “Nobody’s heard my side of it yet.”
“You mean you didn’t kill them?”
“You claim you’re innocent?”
“You’re denying the charges against you?”
For once in his life, Sam refused to be baited. All he said was, “That’s what this trial is for; to find out who did what to whom. And why.”
They were so stunned at Sam’s refusal to say anything more that they stopped pestering him and allowed us to go into the courtroom. I was sort of stunned, too. I was used to Sam’s nonstop blather on any and every subject under the Sun. Sphinx-like silence was something new, from him.
The courtroom was settling down to a buzzing hum of whispered conversations when the three black-robed judges trooped in to take their seats at the banc. No jury. Sam’s fate would be decided by the three of them.