by Ben Bova
Somewhere in my genetic heritage there must have been a basketball player, for despite the diminutive size of both my parents I am nearly two meters tall—six feet, five inches in old-fashioned English units.
I have been told I am handsome, with deep brown eyes and high cheek bones that make me look decidedly oriental. Yet I have never been very successful with women. Perhaps I am too shy, too uncertain of myself. I once tried to grow a beard, but it looked terrible, and the unwritten dress code of the ISC demands clean-shaven men. The unwritten rules are always the important ones, of course.
I had started my career in law enforcement, figuring that I could safely retire after twenty years of police work with enough of a pension to follow my one true passion: archeology. I longed to help search for the ancient cities that were being unearthed on Mars (pardon the unintentional pun). I was never a street officer; the robots had taken over such dangerous duties by the time I graduated college with my degree in criminology. Instead, I specialized in tracking down financial crooks. I worked with computers and electronic ferrets rather than guns and stun wands.
But enough about me. Let me tell you how I met Sam Gunn.
I DUTIFULLY WENT to the Moon, to Sam’s corporate headquarters at Selene City, foolishly expecting Sam to be there, especially with a team of ISC auditors combing through his records. But Sam wasn’t, of course.
He was out at a new solar power satellite that was just going online to provide fifteen gigawatts of electrical power to the growing industrial cities of central Asia.
Years earlier Sam had been one of the first to go out to the asteroids to mine their metals and minerals. He had amassed a considerable fortune and a fleet of ore-processing factory ships. But then disaster struck and he lost it all. In desperation he had tried to sue the Pope, and although he got what he wanted without going to trial, he quickly lost it all. C.C. Chatsworth had been a major force in seeing to it that Sam was broken and humiliated.
But now he was getting rich again. In the commodities market, of all places.
Sam’s present company was in business to service and maintain several solar power satellites and other facilities in Earth orbit and on the Moon. And he was out at the newest of the sunsats, rather than in his offices in Selene City.
I was reluctant to go the satellite to meet him. Those huge sunsats ride in geosynchronous orbit, nearly thirty-six thousand kilometers above the equator, on the fringes of the outer Van Allen Belt. There’s a lot of ionizing radiation out there, and I didn’t like the idea of living in it, even inside a shielded space suit.
But that’s where Sam was and that’s where I had to go. Or face the sizeable wrath of the sizeable C.C. Chatsworth.
So I rode an OTV (orbital transfer vehicle, to landlubbers) from Selene to Sunsat Seventeen. An OTV is the most utilitarian of utility vehicles, nothing more than a collection of tankage, cargo containers, crew pod and engines.
I sat crammed behind the two pilots during the whole nine-hour trip, staring out the curving port of the crew pod, watching the graceful blue and white sphere of Earth grow and grow until it was a massive, dazzling presence of overwhelming beauty, deep blue oceans and resplendent white clouds, wrinkled old mountains with bony fingers of snow clutching their crests. Even the sprawling cities looked almost pretty from this vantage point.
Then the sunsat swung into view, blocking out everything else, huge and square and so close that my heart clutched in my chest; I thought we were going to plunge right into it.
It was ten kilometers long and six klicks across, a huge flat expanse of solar cells that drank in sunlight and converted it silently to electricity. Off at one end were the magnetrons that transformed the electricity into microwave energy, and the big steerable antennas that beamed the microwaves to receiving antenna farms on Earth.
I had expected the sunsat to glitter and gleam, like a jewel or a huge light in the sky. Instead it was dark and silent, greedily soaking up sunlight, not reflecting it.
Except down at the end where the magnetrons were. They were sparking and flashing spectacularly, blue electrical snakes writhing all across them, shooting off brilliant lightning flashes into the dead black emptiness of space. It was all in eerie silence, naturally, but in my mind I could imagine the crackling and hissing of gigawatts of electricity straining to get loose.
“Nothing to be alarmed about,” said the OTV pilot over his shoulder to me, shoehorned in behind him. The man’s voice was decidedly quavering. “Besides, we’ll be docking several klicks away from that mess.”
He docked us at the port on the shaded underside of the sunsat, where the so-called living quarters were. There were only three people there, two Asian women and a frowning, bearded, bald, portly European man. They all looked nervous, worried. Much to my consternation, the OTV pulled away and headed back for the Moon as soon as it detached its cargo pods. Its crew never waited to find out if I wanted to return with them.
I was informed by the worried-looking trio that Sam was “up topside,” working with the technicians who were trying to fix the “transient” that was afflicting the magnetrons.
They pulled a space suit out of a locker and before I realized what was happening they were stuffing me into it. The suit was brand new and stiff; it smelled of freshly cured plastic and cleaning oils, like a new car. Believe it or not, in those days it was difficult to find a suit that would fit someone as tall as I. This one barely did; my fingers were cramped in the gloves, and my toes crunched uncomfortably into the boots. I felt as if I had to stoop to keep the suit from popping open on me.
Once I was suited up they hustled me to the access tube that led up and out to the sunlit side of the satellite.
I had been in space suits before; they saw that on my dossier, so they felt no qualms about sending me outside alone with only the barest briefing on how to attach the suit’s tether to one of the guard rails that ran the length of the satellite, between the rows of solar panels.
They told me which radio frequencies were which, and left me at the hatch of the access tube. I nodded to them from inside my helmet, went through the hatch, and started to pull myself weightlessly along the rungs set into the curving inner wall of the tube.
I am one of those fortunate few who have never been bothered by weightlessness. Practically everyone gets queasy at first, a fact that ruined Sam’s original plan for his honeymoon hotel. Yes, there are patches and pills you can take. Biofeedback training, too. Still, most people want to barf when they first experience zero-gee. Not me. I found it exhilarating, right from the first moment.
So I swam weightlessly the length of the access tube and opened the hatch at its other end. Stepping out onto the broad, flat surface of the sunsat was something like stepping from a cool darkened room into the full brilliance of a blazing Arizona summer afternoon.
My suit creaked and groaned from the sudden heat load of the Sun’s unfiltered fury. I heard the fans whir up and the pumps gurgle. But none of that mattered. The scenery was too breathtaking to care about anything else.
I was standing on a wide, flat expanse of dark, glassy solar panels. Actually, I was standing in an aisle between rows of panels. The sunsat was a world of its own, a world that stretched for kilometers in every direction, row upon row of panels so dark they looked almost like emptiness, like the void of space itself. Between the rows, however, metal strips of aisles glinted in the brilliant sunlight.
I could not see the Earth; it was on the satellite’s other, shaded side. For all I could see, I was alone in the universe on this giant raft of solar panels, just me and the distant stars and the blazing Sun with its pulsing, glowing corona and a halo of zodiacal light extending on either side of it.
For the first time in my life I felt a dizzying surge of vertigo. It took me several moments to catch my breath. Then I remembered what I was here for, and tapped the keypad at my wrist to turn on the suit-to-suit radio frequency.
“... never seen such a collection of misbegotten, h
am-handed, under-brained, overpaid jerkoffs in my whole life! Don’t you guys know anything? Where’d you get your degrees, Genghis Dumb University?”
Those were the first words I heard Sam Gunn speak.
I attached my tether to the guard rail and started slowly toward the end of the sunsat where six space-suited figures were hovering off to one side of the sparking, sputtering magnetrons like a half-dozen toy balloons tethered to various guard rails. In their midst was one stumpy little figure, bobbing up and down like a Mexican jumping bean on amphetamines, literally at the end of his tether.
“Eleven billion dollars to build this pile of junk,” Sam was yelling, “and all of it’s going down the toilet because nobody here knows how to shut down a stupid, frigging power bus!”
“Ah ... Mr Gunn?” I said into my helmet microphone.
He paid no attention. He kept up his tirade, describing in considerable detail the physical, mental and moral shortcomings of the technicians surrounding him, their families, their friends, their entire gene pool, even their herds of goats and sheep.
“Mr. Gunn!” I bellowed.
“... never been smart enough to wipe your own—WHAT?” he snarled, turning in my direction.
“I am Zoilo Hashimoto, from—”
“Leapin’ lizards, Sandy!” Sam exclaimed. “It’s Zorro, come to right wrongs and carve a zee into my chest!”
“Zoilo,” I corrected. I might as well have saved my breath.
“That’s what we need around here. The masked avenger. The mark of Zorro. You can start by transplanting some brains into these zombies.”
The six space-suited technicians simply hung on their tethers, silent as corpses, unmoving and apparently unmoved by Sam’s insults.
“Would you believe,” Sam said to me, “that they sent me the only six techs in all of Asia that can’t speak English? They expect me to talk to them in Sanskrit or whatever.”
“That must be frustrating,” I said.
“Not all that bad.” I detected a grin in his voice. “I can call them anything that pops into my head and they don’t take offense.... as long as I stick to English.”
Then he whirled back toward them and unleashed a blast of heavily accented Japanese that galvanized the technicians into frenzied action. I understood a little of what he said and I have no intention of repeating it.
It took the better part of two hours, but Sam finally got the electrical sparking stopped. He had to do the toughest part of the job by himself; the technicians either could not or would not go within fifty meters of the crackling blue fireworks. I had to hang there like a lanky sausage, with nothing to do but watch Sam work while I worried about how much radiation I was absorbing.
When the sparking finally stopped, however, the six technicians began dismantling the magnetron with the intense purposiveness of a team of ants tearing into a jelly doughnut that someone had carelessly dropped.
“C’mon,” Sam said, pulling himself along the guide rail toward me, “let’s go back inside, Zorro.”
“Zoilo,” I corrected.
“Yeah, sure.”
As we headed for the tube hatch I tried to make some conversation. “How much time do you spend outside like this?”
“Too damned much,” Sam snapped.
“I mean, the radiation levels out here are—”
“That’s why I wear a lead jockstrap, pal.”
I thought he was joking. Years later I found out that he wasn’t.
I followed him back to the access tube and down to the office/habitat area. The worried trio I had met earlier was nowhere in sight, although where they could hide in the narrow confines of the office/habitat area was beyond me.
We stopped in front of the space suit lockers and began to work our way out of our suits. Once Sam lifted off his helmet I took a good look at him. I had seen videos and stills of him, naturally. I knew that round, snub-nosed face with its bristling rust-red hair almost as well as I knew my own. Yet seeing him live and close-up was different: he looked more
animated, livelier. And his eyes seemed to twinkle with the awareness that he knew things I didn’t.
Sam’s space suit looked grimy, hard-used. Its torso and helmet were covered with corporate logos and mission patches, everything from Vacuum Cleaners Inc. to an ancient, faded Space Station Freedom. Several emblems puzzled me: one that said Keep the baby, Faith, and another that looked like the gaudily striped flattened sphere of the planet Jupiter with four little stars beside it and the word Roemer beneath.
“C’mon,” Sam said. “Lemme show you where you’ll be sleeping tonight.”
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” I asked.
He gave me an exaggerated frown. “I know why you’re here. C.C. wants to pin my balls to her office wall, right?”
It was clear that he understood exactly why I had come; no cover story was necessary with Sam. So I nodded, then realized that Sam was at eye level with me, despite the fact that I was almost a foot taller than he. I had unconsciously slipped my feet into the floor loops, to anchor myself down. Sam, on the other hand, floated free and bobbed weightlessly beside me.
“Why is it,” he asked the empty air, “that when a little guy makes some money, everybody in the goddamned government wants to investigate him?”
“Mr. Gunn,” I started to explain, “you have had an extremely—”
“Call me Sam,” he snapped.
“Very well. You may call me Zoilo.”
“I already do, Zorro.”
“Zoilo.”
“I still can’t figure out why the double-dipped ISC is worried about my good luck on the commodities market.”
“Ms. Chatsworth is concerned that more than good luck may be involved,” I replied.
He grinned at me, a gap-toothed grin of pure boyish glee.
“She thinks I’m cheating?”
He said it with such wide-eyed innocence that I was left speechless.
Sam laughed and said, “C’mon, let’s get some shut-eye. The next OTV won’t be here until tomorrow afternoon.”
He floated down the corridor, propelling himself with deft touches of his fingers against the metal walls. I pulled my stockinged feet out of the floor loops and clambered hand-over-hand after him, using the grips that studded the walls.
To say that the personnel quarters aboard Sunsat Seventeen were spartan would be an understatement. They consisted of a row of lockers, nothing more. A mesh sleeping cocoon was fastened to one side, a fold-down sink on the other. There was an electrical outlet and a data port for connecting a computer. The locker was barely tall enough for me to squeeze into it; I had to keep my chin pressed down on my chest.
The next morning I groaned as I unfolded myself out in the corridor. Sam, on the other hand, was chipper and as bright as a new-minted penny.
“Whatsamatter, Zorro,” he asked, almost solicitously, “you in pain or something?”
Stretching in an effort to ease the crick in my neck, I explained that the privacy booths were too cramped for comfort.
“Gee,” Sam said, bouncing lightly off the floor to rise to eye level with me, “I always thought they were really spacious.”
Over breakfast in the minuscule galley I asked, “Why are you here, Sam, instead of in your office in Selene City? Surely you can hire engineers to supervise the work here.”
He gave me a sour look as he spooned up oatmeal. “Yeah, sure. I can hire the entire graduating class of MIT if I want to.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because every engineer I hire costs me money, and money is something I don’t have much of, that’s why.”
“But the High Asia Sunsat Combine must be paying at least minimum rates for your maintenance contract.”
He chewed thoughtfully for a moment; the oatmeal was that lumpy. Then he swallowed and said, “Nobody would sign a contract with S. Gunn Enterprises unless our bid was considerable under standard rates. Your sweetheart Ms. Chatsworth has seen to tha
t.”
“But that’s illegal. It’s restraint of...” My voice trailed off as I realized the import of what he was telling me.
“C.C. and her connections in the government saw to it that I got screwed out of my old corporation. She’s got a vendetta going against me. The only work I can find is these crappy maintenance contracts, and even then I’ve got to do it at a helluva lot less than standard pay.”
I heard myself ask weakly, “Well, how many contracts do you have?”
“Six, right now. Three sunsats, a couple of orbiting astronomical telescopes, and the laundry facility at the new retirement center in Selene City.”
“Laundry?”
He laughed bitterly. “Great job for a pioneer, isn’t it? Washing old folks’ dirty sheets.”
Sam had truly been a pioneering entrepreneur, I knew. The zero-gee hotel, the first asteroid mining expedition, even the early work of cleaning debris out of the low-orbit region around Earth—he had been the trailblazer. Now he was reduced to maintenance contracts, and hiring fourth-rate technicians because he couldn’t afford better.
Yet... somehow he was getting rich on the commodities futures market.
“Well,” I said, “at least maintenance contracts provide a steady income.”
“Oh yeah, sure.” A frown puckered his brows. “They’re usually safe and easy, all right. But this bunch of clowns trying to operate Sunsat Seventeen are making this particular job a pain in the butt.”
“The magnetrons?”
“The everything!” Sam exclaimed. “The hardware’s crappy. The technicians don’t know what they’re doing. And I’m supposed to make it all come out peachy-keen.”