by Ben Bova
Of course, we had withheld the space-sickness cure that our Rockledge research labs had come up with. Without it, people coming to enjoy a romantic tryst in weightlessness spent their honeymoons upchucking. With it, Rockledge could buy out Sam on the cheap when he was on the verge of bankruptcy and make a first-class orbital tourist facility out of his vomit palace.
Well, perhaps we did take slightly unfair advantage of Sam, but that’s the way the world turns. Business is business. Sentiment has no part in it. Still, Sam took it personally, and he took it hard. My spies in his operation—which he called S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, no less— told me had vowed vengeance.
“I’ll get that silver-plated SOB,” was one of his milder remarks, I was told. He snarled that choice little bon mot after he had Rockledge’s check in his bank account, I might add.
Frankly, I thought Sam was finished. I thought we had heard the last of him. How wrong I was!
Imagine my surprise when, some months later, my phone told me that Sam Gunn wanted to have a meeting with me. Surprise quickly turned to suspicion when I played back Sam’s call.
“Pierre, you old silver fox,” Sam said, grinning malevolently, “I know we’ve had our differences in the past....”
He had a nerve, addressing me by my first name. For people of Sam’s ilk I expected to be called Mr. D’Argent. But Sam never paid any attention to the finer points of politesse.
On and on he went. If there’s one thing that Sam can do, it’s talk. His tongue must be made of triple-laminated heat shield cermet. I sat back in my desk chair and studied his sly, shifty-eyed face while he chattered nonstop. Sam looks like a grown-up Huckleberry Finn, although he hasn’t grown up all that much. He claims he’s one hundred sixty-five centimeters tall, which is an obvious lie. If he’s one sixty-five, Napoleon must have been two meters and then some.
Sam’s face is round, topped with a thatch of wiry rust-red hair. His snub nose is sprinkled with freckles, and his eyes seem never to be the same color twice. Hazel eyes, he says. The eyes of a born con artist, I say. For the life of me I can’t understand what women see in him, but Sam is never without a beautiful woman hanging on him. Or two. Or three.
I was just considering fast-forwarding his message when at last he got to the point.
“Pierre, I have an idea that’ll knock your jockstrap out from under you. But it’s going to take a big chunk of capital to put it into operation. So I figured, with Rockledge’s money and my brains we could make an indecent profit. Wanna talk about it?”
And that was it. His message was over. The phone screen froze on Sam’s grinning image and a string of callback numbers.
I didn’t call him back. Not at first. Let him stew in his own juices for a while, I thought, and I waited for an onslaught of messages from Sam. As a matter of fact, I was looking forward to seeing the detestable little snot get down on his knees and beg me to listen to him.
But Sam didn’t beg. He didn’t even try to call me again. I waited for days, going about my business as normal, without hearing a peep from Sam. I began to wonder what he’d wanted. Why did he call? He said he needed a large amount of capital to finance his latest scheme. What was he up to? Had he gone to someone else to raise the money? To BLM Aerospace, perhaps?
In those days, incidentally, my office was on Earth. In beautiful Montreal, actually. Rockledge Industries was a truly diversified and multinational corporation, with fingers in literally thousands of operations all over the Earth and, of course, in orbital space. We were even beginning to build O’Neill type habitats at the L-4 and L-5 libration points along the Moon’s orbit. We were so fully committed financially that I didn’t know where I’d come up with funding for whatever harebrained scheme Sam had in mind, even if I were foolish enough to invest Rockledge money in it.
So it was something of a surprise when, one fine crisp winter morning as I took my usual walking commute from my condominium home to my office through the glassteel tube that connects the two towers at their twentieth floors, I saw Sam walking along with me.
Outside the tube!
My eyes must have popped wide. Sam was out there in the mid-February cold, apparently walking on air. He just plodded along, step by step, with nothing visible between him and the city streets, twenty storeys below. He paid no attention to me, nor to the other men and women in the tube who stopped to gape in amazement at him.
The temperature out there was below zero and I could see from the clouds scudding overhead and the way that the bare tree branches were swaying far below that a considerable wind was blowing. Sam was wearing nothing heavier than a suit jacket as he leaned into the wind and trudged along, his shifty eyes squeezed almost shut, but a crooked grin on his freckled, snub-nosed face, doggedly slogging toward the Rockledge corporate office tower.
I found myself slowing down to keep pace with him, slack-jawed. A crowd of other commuters was gathering, watching Sam with equal astonishment. A woman tapped at the curving glassteel wall to get his attention. Sam paid her no heed.
An older man rapped hard on the glassteel with his walking stick, looking annoyed.
“Get down from there, you damned fool!” he shouted.
Sam abruptly stopped his forward motion and turned to stare at us: For an instant he seemed frozen in midair. Then he looked down. His eyes went wide as he realized there was nothing below him but thin air. He dropped as if an invisible trapdoor had opened beneath him, plummeting downward like a dead weight.
I banged my nose painfully against the transparent wall of the tube, trying to follow his figure as it hurtled down toward the streets. I heard a dozen other thumps and grunts as others in the crowd did the same. Sam dropped like a stone and disappeared from our view.
My God! I thought. He’s committed suicide! For a moment I felt horrified, but then (I must confess) I said to myself, That’s the last I’ll see of the exasperating little bastard.
I was, of course, quite wrong.
I raced to my office, sprinting past several assistants who tried to catch my attention. I had to call the police, turn on the local news, find out what had happened to Sam.
Imagine my stupefied shock, then, when I saw Sam sitting behind my desk, grinning from ear to ear like a poorly carved Jack-o’-lantern.
“You!” I gasped, out of breath from surprise, astonishment and exertion. “I saw you—”
“You saw a hologram, Pierre old buddy-pal. Looked realistic, didn’t it?”
I sank into the bottle-green leather armchair in front of my desk. “Hologram?”
“The old geezer with the cane was stooging for me. Caught your attention, didn’t it?”
Astonishment quickly gave way to pique. Sam had tricked me, and wormed his way into my private office in the bargain.
“Get out from behind my desk,” I snapped.
“Certainly, oh gracious captain of industry,” said Sam. He got up from my swivel chair, pretended to dust off its seat, and bowed as I came around the desk. He scampered around the other end of the desk and took the leather armchair. It was too big for him: his feet dangled several centimeters off the floor and he looked like a child in a man’s chair.
I scowled at him as I sat down. Sam grinned back at me. For several moments neither of us said anything, something of a record for silence on Sam’s part.
“All right,” I said at last, “you’ve finagled your way into my office. Now what’s this latest castle in the sky of yours all about?”
“For a corporate bigshot, you’re damned perceptive, Pierre. But the castle I want to build isn’t in the sky. It’s on the Moon. Hell Crater, to be exact.”
I didn’t have to say another word, not for the better part of the next hour. Sam spun out his grandiose plan to build what he called a resort facility at Hell Crater: hotels, restaurants, gambling casinos, legalized prostitution (which Sam called “sexual therapy”), electronic games and virtual reality simulations based on the completely realistic holographic system he had used to stun me and the other com
muters.
Hell Crater, it turns out, was named after a nineteenth-century Jesuit astronomer, Maximilian J. Hell; an Austrian, I believe. Sam loved the idea of turning the thirty-kilometer-wide crater into a lunar Sin City, a couple of hundred kilometers south of Alphonsus, where the lunar nation of Selene stood.
“We can string up a cable car transportation system from Selene to Hell,” Sam enthused, “and show the tourists some terrific scenery on the way: Mare Nubium, the Straight Wall, Mt. Yeager—lots to see.”
He finally took a breath.
I countered, “Sam, you can’t expect me to recommend to Rockledge’s senior management that we invest in a den of vice. Prostitution? Gambling? Impossible.”
“It’s all completely legal,” he pointed out. “The nation of Selene doesn’t have jurisdiction, and even if they did we wouldn’t be breaking any of their laws. This isn’t the Vatican, for cryin’ out loud.”
“Rockledge’s board of directors—”
“Would go to Hell as fast as they could,” Sam said, grinning. Then he admitted, “As long as they could go incognito.”
“It’s impossible, Sam. Forget about it.”
He shrugged. “I’ll have to go elsewhere, then.”
I wasn’t frightened by that. “And just who do you think would be foolish enough to finance your crazy scheme?”
“I dunno. Maybe the D’Argent Trust.”
I laughed in his face. “My wife controls the Trust. If you think for one nanosecond that she’d invest in a glorified whorehouse—”
“She might,” Sam said, “in exchange for some information about the activities of certain Rockledge employees.”
I felt my brows knit. “Which Rockledge employees?”
“A certain knockout blonde named Marlowe.”
“She’s in the comptroller’s office.”
“But she spends a lot of time with the head of the space operations department.”
“That’s not true! And besides, it’s strictly business!”
Sam chuckled. “Pierre, your face is as red as a Chinese pomegranate.”
“You’re the one who had an affair with that woman!” I remembered. “You and she—”
“It was a lot of fun,” Sam said, with a sly smile. “Until I found out she was working for you and trying to slick me out of my share of the orbital hotel. She was screwing me, all right.”
“Industrial espionage,” I said, with as much dignity as I could manage.
“Yeah, sure.” He sighed. “Well, I’ve got my memories. And some damned good pictures of her.”
“I don’t care what you have. My relationship with Ms. Marlowe has always been strictly professional. I mean, business.”
“You think your wife would believe that?”
“You’re making totally unfounded accusations,” I snapped. “Ms. Marlowe and I—”
“Make a beautiful couple. Wanna see the pictures?”
“They’re fakes! They’ve got to be! I never—”
“You never,” Sam said. “But would Mrs. D’Argent believe you? One look at your blonde bosom buddy and you’re in deep sheep dip, Pierre, mon vieux.”
“It’s a filthy lie!” I screamed. I hollered. I lost my cool. I ranted and threatened to have Sam assassinated or at least take him to court. He simply sat there and grinned that maddening gap-toothed grin of his at me while I fussed and fizzed and finally gave in to him.
That’s how Rockledge Industries and S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, went into partnership.
I squeezed the funding from various Rockledge projects and kept it as quiet as I could. Half a billion dollars might seem like small change to a hundred-billion-dollar corporation such as Rockledge, but still, one should be careful. For nearly two years I didn’t see Sam at all (much to my relief), except for monthly progress reports that he sent through my private laser link from the Rockledge office in Selene. I lived in fear that I’d be discovered, and in dread of the next annual meeting of the board of directors.
The corporate comptroller assigned Ms. Marlowe, of all people, to the Hell Crater project. I spoke to her only by phone or e-link. I was very careful not to have any face-to-face meetings with her, which Sam could turn into more material for his blackmail.
I must confess that Sam ran the project efficiently and energetically. Major construction projects always run into snags, but the Hell Crater complex was built smoothly and swiftly.
“We’ll be ready to open by the time your next annual board meeting convenes,” Sam told me, by laser link from the Moon.
I confessed, “I can’t understand how you managed to get it built so quickly.”
He grinned that lopsided pumpkin grin of his. “I paid off the right people, Pierre.”
“I know the wages you’ve paid are above industry standards, but I still don’t see how you’ve done so well.”
There’s a lag of almost three seconds in conversations from the Moon; it takes that long for a signal to get there and back again. I sat at my desk watching Sam’s self-satisfied smirk, waiting for his response.
“It’s not the wages,” Sam said at last. “It’s the bribes.”
“Bribes!” I yelped.
Again the wait. Then, “Oh come on, now, Mr. Straight Arrow. You don’t think that Rockledge people have paid off a building inspector here and there, or bought protection from the local union goons? You’re not that naive, are you, Pierre, mon infant?”
Bribes. All I could think of was the corporate CEO and the board of directors. Bad enough to be building a Sin City, but spending Rockledge money on bribery! I began to wonder if they’d give me a golden parachute when they pushed me out the window.
“Don’t be so uptight about it,” Sam advised me. “Your CEO’s a sporting type, from what I hear. He’s gonna love the idea, wait and see.”
I decided not to wait. Better to make a clean breast of it before it was too late. So the next time the CEO came to Montreal I asked for a private meeting with him, away from the office. We met in a dinner-theater restaurant. The food was mediocre and the musical revue they were playing featured more nudity than talent. But the CEO seemed to enjoy himself, while I wondered if the other patrons thought we might be a gay couple, sitting off in a shadowy corner at a table for two.
He looked every inch the successful modern business executive: handsome, lean and youthful (thanks to his unabashed patronage of rejuvenation clinics). I felt almost shabby next to him; my hair had turned silver before I was thirty.
I had to wait until the intermission before I could get his undivided attention. To my surprise, when I told him that I had invested in a resort facility on the Moon, he smiled at me. “I was wondering when you’d bring up the subject. Hell Crater, isn’t it?”
I expressed a modicum of astonishment at his knowledge of the project.
“You don’t stay at the top of the heap, D’Argent, unless you have excellent information conduits. One of the comptroller’s people has been keeping me informed about the Hell Crater project.”
It was Ms. Marlowe, I realized. She was climbing up the corporate ladder in her own inimitable style.
“There’s something about the project that you don’t know yet,” I said, dreading the confession I was about to make. “About the firm that’s actually building the complex—”
“It’s Sam Gunn,” he replied easily.
“You know?”
“As I said, I have my sources of information.”
Sweat broke out on my upper lip. “I didn’t mention it until now because—”
“I understand completely. You’ve been very clever about this entire operation. If it flops, it’s Sam Gunn’s failure.”
“And if it succeeds?”
“We’ll squeeze him out, of course.”
I felt immensely relieved. “That’s exactly what I had planned to do all along,” I said, stretching the truth a little.
“We’re making money on the orbital hotel,” said the CEO. “A resort facility on the
Moon makes sense. Especially if it’s beyond the legal strictures of terrestrial moralists.”
He had no qualms about the den of vice Sam was building!
“Besides,” the CEO added, “it will be a great place to meet agreeable young women.”
Just at that moment the three-piece orchestra blared a fanfare and the entire cast of the revue came capering out onto the stage once again, without a stitch of clothing in sight.
Despite the CEO’s smiling approval of the Hell Crater resort, I was understandably edgy when the board meeting came around. Twenty-two men and women sat around the long polished table in our Amsterdam office: most of them gray-haired and grumpy-looking. I doubted they would look so favorably on our being a partner in a lunar Sin City.
The youthful-looking CEO was also the board chairman. He sat at the head of the long conference table, impeccable in a form-fitted dark blue suit and butter-yellow turtleneck shirt. I envied him. I wanted his job. I wanted his power. But I feared that once the board of directors found out about Hell Crater I could kiss my ambitions goodbye.
Like a dozen other division chiefs, I sat along the side wall of the rectangular conference room, squarely between the comptroller himself and the head of human resources, widely known as Sally the Sob Sister. Sally was a “three-fer” in our corporate diversity program: she was female, black Hispanic, and handicapped (as far as the government was concerned) by her obesity. She was munching something, as usual, slyly reaching down into the capacious tote bag she had deposited at her feet. On the comptroller’s other side sat Ms. Marlowe, golden blonde, radiantly beautiful, her china-blue eyes fastened on the CEO’s chiseled features.
The meeting went along well enough; only a few points of disagreement and the usual grumbles from directors who felt that a nine percent increase in the corporation’s net income wasn’t good enough to suit them.
They droned on all morning. We broke for lunch and adjourned to the next room, where a sumptuous buffet table had been laid out. Sally the Sob Sister made a virtual Mt. Everest on her plate and gobbled it all down fast enough to come back for more. I couldn’t eat a thing, although I took a few leafs of salad and pretended to nibble on them, standing in a corner by the windows that looked out on the canal that runs through the heart of Amsterdam.