by Ben Bova
Except for one green-topped card table, sharply lit by halogen lamps, in the middle of the vast floor. Popov sat there, still in his tux, Ms. Chang at his side and a half-dozen more gorillas on their feet behind him. One empty chair waited across the table from Popov. An unopened pack of cards rested on the table, with two piles of chips, one in front of Popov, the other at the empty chair that was waiting for Sam.
“You’re late, Sam,” said Popov as we stepped into the pool of glaringly bright light.
“I had to stop on the way and pick up my partner,” Sam said carelessly, gesturing toward me. Just like the lying little sneak, blaming me.
Sam plopped in the empty chair and noisily cracked his knuckles. I shuddered. Popov smiled in such a sinister way that it made me shudder even more. Ms. Chang smiled too, but much more alluringly.
“We each have a hundred thousand dollars worth of chips,” Popov said, his grating voice sounding ominous. “We play until one of us goes broke. Okay by you?”
“Okay by me,” said Sam.
I stood behind Sam. There was no other chair for me to sit in. Popov called the first round: five-card draw poker.
I have never seen such cheating in my entire life! As I stood behind Sam, I saw treys turn into aces before my astounded eyes; cards changed their suits, going from spades to hearts or whatever Sam needed. It was all I could do to keep my eyes from popping out of my skull.
Popov must have been cheating too. He had to be, or else Sam would have blown him out of the water in the first ten minutes. He’d win a hand, and Sam would fiddle with one of his shirt studs and take the next pot. I realized that both men were loaded with every electronic and optical sensor known to humankind.
Sam began to pull ahead. The pile of chips in front of him grew while Popov’s diminished. Ms. Chang played hostess, getting up from time to time to bring drinks to the two players. The goons behind Popov never moved; they stood there like menacing statues.
After a while I realized that whenever Ms. Chang refreshed Sam’s drink Popov started winning. Sam didn’t seem to mind: soon enough he’d pull ahead again with full houses and straight flushes, no matter which cards he was dealt.
“Let’s take a kidney break,” Popov said at last. His chips were down to a perilously low level.
“Okay by me,” said Sam cheerfully from behind a small mountain of chips. He got up and headed for one of the restrooms; Popov went in the opposite direction, convoyed by his gorillas, leaving Ms. Chang alone.
I was getting frantic. If Sam won, I’d be ruined—and Popov would take it out on me. I glanced at my wristwatch. It was almost two AM I hadn’t counted on Sam’s cheating. I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. Of course the despicable little scoundrel would cheat!
I followed Sam into the restroom. “Sam, you’re cheating,” I accused.
“No kidding,” he answered lightly. “What do you think the Godfather is doing, playing tiddlywinks?”
“I can’t allow cheating. It’s wrong, Sam.”
“Tell Popov. Those goons standing behind him are reading my cards with infrared sensors for him.”
“The cards are marked?”
“Does Santa Claus live at the North Pole?”
“But—”
“I’ve been using nanomachines kind of creatively, myself,” Sam admitted. “It’s one helluva game.”
A duel of double-dealing, swindling con artists. I had the terrible feeling that in a competition like this against Sam, the Mafia was like a gang of schoolyard bullies trying to beat up on Superman.
Sam started back to the table with me following glumly behind him. Sam’s got to lose, I kept repeating to myself. Everything depends on Popov beating him.
For the next couple of hours the game seesawed back and forth while I stood there sweating. Gradually, Popov’s pile of chips was growing, Sam’s shrinking. Both men were still cheating with every device known to modern technology.
One of Popov’s goons moved Ms. Chang’s chair to Sam’s side of the table, and she sat demurely beside him. I still had to stand. Sam covered his cards so carefully that I could no longer see them. Ahah! I thought. He doesn’t trust his inamorata.
For the next hour Popov won steadily. Sam fiddled with his shirt studs, scratched behind his ears, adjusted his cufflinks, all to no avail. He even took off one of his shoes and shook it as if it were filled with pebbles. It did no good. The chips were flowing across the table to Popov’s pile, hand after hand. Sam looked grimmer and grimmer; he pulled his bow tie loose and ran his hands through his bristly hair. Popov just smiled wider and wider. Even the thugs standing behind his chair began to relax and nudge each other knowingly.
At last Sam looked across the table at Popov and his massive pile of chips and said, “Okay, Godfather. Let’s put an end to this. High card takes it all.”
Popov looked at Sam for a long, silent moment. “One trick for the whole pot?”
Sam nodded slowly. I saw sweat trickling down his cheek.
Popov nodded back and called for a fresh pack of cards. “High card wins it all,” he said as one of the goons unwrapped the new deck.
Sam shuffled the cards. Popov cut the deck, then pushed it across the green-topped table to Sam.
“Draw,” he said.
Sam pushed the deck back toward him. “You go first, Godfather.”
Popov looked from Sam to Ms. Chang to me and then back at Sam again. He reached out one hand and took the top card from the deck.
An eight of clubs.
No one spoke. No one even breathed. My mind was spinning. My legs went weak. An eight! Sam can top an eight easily. I’m ruined!
Sam shook his head slightly, then pulled the next card.
Four of diamonds.
“Oh, Sam,” breathed Ms. Chang.
“Shit,” said Sam.
The goons behind Popov chuckled. Popov himself allowed a satisfied smile to creep across his craggy face.
“Well, that’s it, Mr. D’Argent,” he said to me, playing his role to the end. “You owe me forty billion dollars.”
With a relieved smile I replied, “No, I don’t. Sam owes you, not me.”
“You’re my partner!” Sam yelped. “You’ve got to—”
“As of midnight Rockledge Industries dissolved its partnership with S. Gunn Enterprises,” I announced. “You’re on your own, Sam.”
He shot out of his chair. “You can’t break our partnership unilaterally!”
“I can and I did,” I told him, perhaps a trifle smugly. “You should have read our agreement more carefully, Sam. The contract clearly states in clause thirty-seven, subparagraph sixteen, that either party can dissolve the partnership on moral grounds.”
“Moral grounds!” Sam yipped. “What moral grounds?”
I drew myself up to my full height. “Rockledge Industries will not be party to an operation that promotes gambling and prostitution, even though it might be legal in the locality in which it is situated.”
“But you knew about it from the git-go!”
I shook my head. “That makes no difference. The partnership is dissolved. Rockledge has no further responsibilities to you, Mr. Gunn.”
He stood there gaping at me, his collar open and bow tie hanging loosely down the wrinkled, sweaty front of his shirt.
“You can’t do this to me!” Sam whined.
“It’s done,” I said. Then I turned on my heel and headed for the casino’s exit, grinning happily. This was going to cost Rockledge twenty billion, I knew, but it’d be worth it to get rid of Sam Gunn—and my CEO, in the bargain.
From behind me I heard Popov’s voice: “Sam, you owe me forty bill.”
I quickened my pace and practically ran out of the casino, thinking, This is the end of Sam Gunn.
By the time I got my hotel suite I was almost feeling sorry for Sam. But then I told myself that he’d brought this on himself. It’s not my fault. He’s the one who went to the Mafia, or the Syndicate, or whatever they called th
emselves. Sam should have known better. Play with fire and you get burned.
I took a dose of tranquilizers and crawled into bed beside my sleeping wife, knocking over the ice bucket and what was left of the champagne in the process. They fell to the luxurious carpet in dreamy lunar slow motion. She barely stirred. I thought I’d have bad dreams but actually I slept quite soundly. Perhaps knowing that I’d never again be troubled by Sam Gunn helped.
The next morning as my wife and I waited in our hotel-furnished dressing gowns for room service to deliver our breakfast, Ms. Chang phoned. She was pale and had dark circles beneath her eyes; she looked much less slinky and sultry than the night before, for which I was thankful, since my wife was in the room.
“I just want you to know, Mr. D’Argent, that the little problem we discussed earlier about your return flight to Earth has been resolved. There will be no difficulties about it, none at all.”
I felt a wave of relief surge through me. Despite my better instincts, though, I asked, “And what about Mr. Gunn?”
Her face became somber. “Don’t ask about Sam, Mr. D’Argent. It’s too gruesome to talk about.”
And she broke off the connection.
So we rode back to Earth in comfort and safety.
Once I was safely back in my office in Montreal, I phoned my CEO to tell him that I’d dissolved Rockledge’s partnership with Sam.
“Dissolved it? You mean he owns the Hell Crater complex without us?”
“Yes,” I said, trying to hide my elation. “And we’re paying Sam’s company—or what’s left of it—twenty billion dollars to get out of the deal.”
“Twenty billion?” I’d never seen the CEO turn purple before.
It all went exactly as I planned it. The CEO wanted to fire me, of course, but I used the corporation’s intricate dismissal procedures to delay that process until Rockledge’s next quarterly board meeting. Once the board members—including Mrs. CEO—heard that we had incurred a debt of twenty billion, ostensibly to S. Gunn Enterprises, they scowled mightily at the CEO. He tried to pin the fiasco on me, of course, but I pointed out that despite my warnings he had enthusiastically supported the idea of Rockledge getting into the euphemistically named entertainment industry.
“Once I learned that entertainment, in this case,” I said sternly, “meant gambling and prostitution—and the Mafia—I wanted to pull out of the deal immediately. But I was overruled by the CEO.”
The board members gasped at the mention of the Mafia. They grumbled among themselves. They groused at the CEO. By the end of the meeting, just as I had planned, they voted to remove the CEO as board chairman. They wanted to fire him altogether, but he narrowly averted that fate, by a single vote: his wife’s.
He glowered at me as the meeting broke up and the board members filed out of the conference room.
“I’ll get you for this,” he growled at me.
“No you won’t. You’re going to resign from the corporation; you and Ms. Marlowe, both.”
His eyes went wide. “You ... that’s blackmail!”
“A little trick I learned from Sam Gunn,” I gloated.
That was how I became Chief Executive Officer of Rockledge Industries. I owe it all to Sam. I almost felt sorry for the contemptible runt, leaving him to his fate with the Godfather.
Until, that is, I saw a video drama featuring a craggy-faced, raspy-voiced actor named Gus Popov.
An actor! The whole business of the Mafia had been an act, a ploy, a swindle by that little sonofabitch to bilk me out of the twenty billion Sam needed to build the Hell Crater complex. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to—
I hesitated in mid-fury. I had actually come out of this deal rather well. I was now CEO of Rockledge Industries and all the problems with Hell Crater had been pinned on my predecessor. Sam had actually done me a favor: unknowingly, I was sure, but I was far better off now than I’d been a year earlier.
I never found out who Ms. Chang really was: probably another actor; maybe one of Hell’s Belles, for all I knew. A pity. She was certainly beautiful. As for Sam’s whereabouts, who knew? The solar system’s a big place, with plenty of room for a scoundrel like Sam to hide. I had the feeling, though, that he had never left Hell Crater. Why should he? He owned the place!
I started thinking about how Rockledge might take it away from him. After all, he had squeezed Rockledge out of Hell Crater; there must be a way for us to squeeze him back.
It was about six months after I had moved into the old CEOs office when I got a call from—guess who?
“Hi, Pierre, you double-dealing SOB,” Sam said cheerfully. “Hell Crater’s a big moneymaker. Thanks for financing it.”
I was so furious I couldn’t do anything but splutter at Sam’s image on my wall screen.
“Calm down, calm down!” Sam said, grinning like an evil elf. “How’d you like to get your money back? I’ve got this deal cooking for a transit system out to the Asteroid Belt....”
Zoilo Hashimoto
JADE TERMINATED THE D’ARGENT NARRATIVE AND CALLED back her unfinished message to Jim Gradowsky.
“Jim,” she said, “I just listened to D’Argent’s story. Its good material. He’s so obviously biased against Sam that he makes Sam look almost like an angel. Let’s go with it.”
Spence called from the bed, “You getting hungry, Jade? It’s almost dinner hour.”
She smiled at her husband. “Just let me finish this and then we can dress for dinner.”
“I’ve got to take a shower,” Spence said.
“Me too. You go first while I finish this message to Jim.”
Spence gave her a wolfish grin. “I’ll wait. Then we can shower together.”
“In that teeny little stall?”
“We’ll have to stay very close to each other.”
Jade smiled back at him. “Okay. Give me a minute.”
Turning back to the wall screen, she went on, “Jim, I got this story out of the blue. A guy named Hashimoto sent it to me at the office and Monica forwarded it to me. Apparently he saw the bio and figured he’d put in what he knows about Sam. It’s a good story. I think we should include it in the follow-on.”
The Mark of Zorro
“NOBODY CAN CONSISTENTLY MAKE MONEY IN THE commodities market,” she said, puffing hard. “The little bastard is cheating, some’ow.”
“How?” I asked.
Wiping a rivulet of sweat from her brow, she answered, “That’s what I want you to find out.”
We were dangling on the sidelines of the volleyball court. The game is rather different in zero gravity. The net is circular, held in the middle of the court by hair-thin monofilament wires. Hit one of those wires and it will slice you like a loaf of salami in a delicatessen. The court itself is spherical, the curving walls hard and unpadded glassteel. The ball can take strange bounces off those walls. So can the players.
There were hardly any spectators watching from the other side of the glassteel. This was a private game, something of a grudge match, as a matter of fact.
Carole C. Chatsworth was a big, blonde, blowsy Cockney who looked and sounded as if she belonged in some cheap burlesque show. Actually, she was a brilliant, hard-driving, absolutely ruthless bureaucrat who had worked her way to the top of the Interplanetary Security Commission’s enforcement division.
And she was a cutthroat volleyball player, the kind who would slam you off the wall or push you into the wire if you got in her way.
She was also my boss, and she was convinced that Sam Gunn was illegally reaping a fortune on the commodities futures market.
“No one can be as lucky as that little sod,” she told me, her eyes following the flying, sweating players.” ‘E’s rigging the market some’ow.”
When C.C. gets an idea in her head, forget about trying to argue her out of it. The only two questions she’ll put up with are: What do you want me to do? and, How soon?
She had allowed herself to bloat up enormously in zero-gee. The rumor was that she
’d originally come up to this orbiting hotel when Sam Gunn owned it and Sam had bedded her. Or maybe the other way around. After all, it was supposed to be a “honeymoon hotel” in those days. Sam’s motto for the place was, “If you like waterbeds, you’ll love zero-gee.”
C.C. never went back Earthside. She moved the ISC headquarters to the hotel, and actually got the Commission to buy half the orbital habitat to provide room for her staff’s offices and living quarters. She was ready to bed down with Sam for life. But Sam pulled one of his disappearing acts on her, leaving her humiliated, furious, and certain that his only interest in her had been to get her to buy out his share of the hotel and run off to the Asteroid Belt with her money.
Maybe hell hath no fury like a woman jilted, but C.C. assuaged her anguish with food. She grew larger and larger, gobbling everything in sight, especially chocolate. Whenever a friend, or a fellow bureaucrat or even a physician commented on her size, she laughed bitterly and said, “But I weigh exactly the same as when I first came up ‘ere: zero!”
Now she looked like a lumpy dirigible in a soggy, stained sweat suit as she waited for her next turn in the volleyball competition.
“I thought we’d fixed the little bastard’s wagon when ‘e tried to sue the Pope,” she muttered, watching the volleyball action with narrowed, piggy eyes. “But some’ow ‘e’s making ‘imself rich in the futures market. ‘E’s cheating. I know ‘e is.”
I did not demur. It would have done no good, especially to my career.
“You’re going to Selene City with the team that’s auditing Sam’s books,” she told me. “Officially, you’re one of the auditors. That’ll be your cover.”
My real job, she told me very firmly, was “to find out how that little cheating, womanizing, swindling scumbag of a deviant ‘umper is rigging the commodities market.”
So off I went to the Moon to find Sam Gunn.
I SUPPOSE I should introduce myself. My name is Zoilo Hashimoto, the only son of a Japanese-American construction engineer and a Cuban baseball player whose career was cut short by her pregnancy with me. Dad was killed before I was born in the great tsunami that wiped out the hotel complex he was building on Tarawa. Mom returned to baseball as an umpire after her second marriage broke up, which was after my four sisters were born. She was known as a strict enforcer of the rules on the field. Believe me, she was just as strict at home.