by Ben Bova
“In the meantime, though,” I pointed out, “you’re piling up quite a fortune in the commodities market.”
He toyed with the oatmeal remaining in his bowl. “Am I?” he asked softly.
“According to our records, you certainly are.”
Sam sighed mightily, like a man weary of being dragged down by lesser mortals. “I’ve been pretty lucky, I guess. In the market, I mean.”
From the gleam in Sam’s eye, I knew he was enjoying the fact that C.C. was annoyed enough to send me to investigate him. He certainly did not appear to be worried about my presence. Not in the slightest.
After breakfast I retired to my locker and plugged in my pocket computer, scrunching myself up close to its tiny microphone so that my lips almost touched it. I didn’t want Sam to hear me.
All that morning and right through lunch I searched through Sam’s records. Not that I hadn’t before, but now I was looking specifically into his transactions in the commodities market. There was a pattern to be found; there always is, in any crooked scheme. Find the pattern and you find the crook.
It quickly became clear that Sam was buying and selling almost exclusively in the metals market: meteoric iron and precious metals, mostly. He speculated on the cargoes bound inward from the Asteroid Belt on the factory ships, guessing which ships would return laden with profitable cargoes and which would not. He was right ninety-three percent of the time, an impossible score for pure luck.
The commodities futures market was a crapshoot, and like all gambles, the odds were stacked against the gambler. Yet Sam was beating those odds a staggering ninety-three percent of the time. Impossible, unless he was cheating somehow.
You see, there were a huge number of variables in each mission out to the asteroids, too many for anyone to guess right ninety-three percent of the time. Or even fifty-three percent of the time, for that matter.
There were thousands of independent miners out there in the Asteroid Belt hunting down usable asteroids, chunks of metals and minerals that could be mined profitably. The factory ships went out on Hohmann transfer orbits, using the minimum amount of energy, spending the least amount of money to reach a destination in the belt.
Picking the right destination was crucial. No sense spending a year in space to arrive at a spot where no miners and no ore were waiting for you. Rendezvous points and times were selected beforehand, but a thousand unforeseen factors could ruin your plans. Usually the small mining teams auctioned off their ores to the highest bidder. But often enough they decided not to wait for you because somebody else showed up with ready credits for the ores.
All these factors were heavily influenced by timing and distance. The Asteroid Belt is mostly empty space, even though there are millions of asteroids floating out there between Mars and Jupiter. Think of mega-trillions of cubic kilometers of nothingness, with a few grains of dust drifting through the void: that’s what the so-called “belt” is like.
It takes propulsion energy—which means money—to maneuver in space, to move the millions of kilometers between usable asteroids. The miners were mostly small-time independent operators who were always short on funds; they were always willing to take immediate credits instead of waiting for your particular factory ship to reach the rendezvous point you were aiming for.
There were more pending lawsuits over broken contracts for ore deliveries than there were divorce cases on Earth. The miners evaded the law, by and large, because it cost a corporation more to catch and fine them than the fines could possibly return. Besides, fining a miner was a study in frustration anyway. Most of them simply declared bankruptcy and started up again under a new name.
All this made the commodities market an arena fraught with uncertainties. How do you know which factory ship will come back with a rich cargo of metals or minerals? How can you guess what such cargoes will be worth on the market, when it takes a year or more for the factory ship to make the return journey to Earth?
The answer is, you wait as long as you possibly can before you invest your money (or, more accurately, make your bet). The safest thing to do is to wait until a factory ship has actually taken on a specific cargo of metals, check with the price of such metals on the futures market, and only then sink your money into that particular ship.
So investors waited eagerly for communications from the various factory ships. It takes more than half an hour for a message to travel from the belt to the Earth-Moon system. There’s no way around that time lag. Even moving at the speed of light as they do, electronic or optical laser messages average about thirty minutes to cover the distance between the belt and the Earth-Moon region.
As soon as a favorable message is received, investors start bidding up the price of that ship’s cargo.
But some investors, the ones with more guts than brains, put their money into a ship’s cargo before the good word comes from the Asteroid Belt. They bet that the news will be good before the news is received. Most of those investors quickly go broke.
Sam Gunn invested that way. And he was not going broke. Far from it. He was getting rich.
There was no way for him to do that legally. Of that, C.C. Chatsworth was convinced. So was I. But I had to find out how he was cheating the system. Or face the wrath of C.C. She was determined to put somebody’s testicles on her office wall. If she couldn’t get Sam’s, she’d take mine.
The OTV duly arrived and carried Sam and me back to Selene. The city was almost entirely underground, as all lunar cities were in those days. Even the imposing grand plaza, as long as six football fields with a dome of seventy-five meters’ height, was totally enclosed, except for the huge curved glassteel windows at its far end.
The plaza was grassed and landscaped and dotted with flowering shrubbery, however, so it looked very Earthlike even though the light lunar gravity allowed tourists to soar like birds on big, colorful plastic wings they rented.
The ISC was paying for a minimum-sized studio apartment at the government-rented set of rooms on Level One, barely large enough for a bed, mini-kitchen and phone-booth-sized bathroom. I had to hunch over to squeeze into the shower.
Sam, on the other hand, ensconced me in a spacious office next to his own, in the imposing headquarters tower of Moonbase Inc., where he had rented space for his own S. Gunn Enterprises. I was surprised that his offices were so spacious, until I realized that he slept in his own office and saved himself the cost of an apartment. It was strictly against the building’s regulations, of course, but somehow Sam managed to get away with it.
I spent days digging into the personnel files of each and every individual who might be tipping Sam off about ore shipments from the Asteroid Belt. Using the ISC’s powers of subpoena I investigated their personal financial records. I could find nothing that hinted at bribery or collusion.
Besides, how could anyone tip Sam before the rest of the market? The news from the factory ships traveled at the speed of light from the Asteroid Belt to the Earth-Moon system. There was no way around that.
Evenings I spent with Sam. He wined and dined me as if I were a long-lost brother or a wealthy potential customer. He even found dates for me, lovely young women who seemed more interested in Sam than in me. But nevertheless, Sam saw to it that I was not lonely at Selene. I knew he was trying to bribe me, or at least make me feel that he was a fine person and incapable of chicanery. Yet I began to realize how lonely, how empty, my life had been up to that point. Being with Sam was fun!
On the other hand, each day I received a phone call from C.C., her quivering, jowled face grimacing at me angrily.” ‘Ave you nailed ‘im yet?” she would demand. Each day she grew angrier, her fleshy face redder. It got so bad that I stopped taking all incoming calls. But she called anyway and left messages of rage that escalated daily.
I became so desperate that I asked him point-blank, “How do you do it, Sam?”
“Do what?”
“Cheat the market.”
We were in Selene’s finest restaurant, Earthview, waiting for our
evening’s companions to show up. The restaurant was deep underground, rather than in the plaza. On the Moon, where the airless surface is bathed in deadly radiation and peppered by meteoric infall, the deeper below-ground you are, the more your prestige. Earthview was on Selene’s bottom level, where the executives kept their own plush quarters.
The restaurant was several storeys high, however. The volume had originally been an actual cave; now it was occupied by tiers of dining tables covered with the finest napery and silverware made from asteroidal metal. No two tables were on the same level. Each one stood on a pedestal atop an impossibly slim column of shining stainless steel while curving ramps twined between them. On Earth the human waiters and bussers would have been exhausted after an hour’s work. Here in the low gravity of the Moon they could work four-hour shifts with comparative ease. Still, one tipped generously at Earthview.
“Cheat the market?” Sam put on such a look of hurt innocence that I had to laugh.
“Come on, Sam,” I said. “You know that you’re cheating and I know that you know.”
He blinked his eyes several times. They were green now. I could have sworn they’d been blue. But Sam was wearing a trim leisure suit of forest green, and his eyes almost matched his attire. Contact lenses? I wondered.
“How could I possibly cheat the market?” he asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said.
Sam broke into a boyish grin. “Look, Zorro old pal, your ISC auditors have been plowing through my company’s files for more than a week now. They’ve even snooped into my personal accounts. What have they found?”
“Nothing,” I admitted.
“You know why?” he asked, with a devilish cock of one eyebrow.
“Why?”
“Because there’s nothing to find. I’m as pure as the driven snow. Clean as a whistle. Spotless. Unblemished. Unsullied. Right up there .with the Virgin Mary—well, maybe not that unsullied. But you’ll have to find another chest to carve your zee into.”
I had given up long ago on getting him to pronounce my name correctly. To him I was Zorro and there was no use wasting energy trying to change him.
In truth, I was getting to like Sam. He was enjoying this fencing, I saw. He liked to talk; he even seemed to enjoy listening to me talk. I found myself telling him about my boyhood in Cuba and my longing to explore the buried cities of Mars.
“Archeology, hey?” he mused. “Lots of good-looking women students. Lonely outposts far from civilization.” He nodded happily. “Could be a good life, Zorro.”
Sam was especially enjoying the fact that I was living on an ISC expense account, running up a huge dent in C.C.’s budget. That’s why he insisted that we dine at the Earthview. There was no more expensive restaurant in the solar system.
After that fruitless (although thoroughly enjoyable) dinner, I decided to cherchez les femmes. Sam was wooing half a dozen women simultaneously, and avoiding several others—including a judge of the World Court, a former United States Senator, Jill Meyers.
I found that although several of Sam’s “dates” loathed most of the other women he was pursuing, none of them had a harsh word to say about Sam himself.
“I know he plays around,” said a lean, lanky young redhead from Colorado who was working at Selene as a tour guide. She shrugged it off. “I guess that’s part of what makes him so interesting—you never know what he’s going to do next.”
An older, wiser Chinese women who operated excavating equipment up on the surface told me, “Sam is like lightning: he never hits the same place twice.” Then she smiled sagely and added, “Unless you put out something that attracts him.”
The typical reaction was that of a grinning, curly-haired Dutch blonde, “At least he’s not a bore! Sam’s always a lot of fun, even if he does exasperate you sometimes.”
I would not get any useful information from his lovers. They had no useful information to give me.
It was frustrating, to say the least. Somehow Sam knew what the factory ships were bringing back toward Earth before the information was received on Earth. But that was impossible. The ships broadcast their information in the clear; no coded messages were allowed. The messages were received by the ISC’s own communications satellite and immediately relayed to every receiving antenna in the Earth-Moon system at the same time. All right, when the Moon was in the right part of its orbit, receivers on the Moon might catch the incoming messages a second and a half sooner than receivers on Earth. So what? That made no real difference. The Moon lagged a second and a half behind when it was on the other side of its orbit. I repeat, So what?
Yet, just to make certain, I ran a correlation of Sam’s right “guesses” with the position of the Moon in its orbit. Nothing. It made no difference whether the Moon was a second and a half ahead or behind.
Sam was enjoying my frustration. We became buddies, of a sort. He pulled me away from my desk time and again to show me around Selene, take me for walks up on the surface, even escort me to the gambling casino at Hell Crater and treat me to a pile of chips—which I promptly lost. Dice, roulette, baccarat, even the slot machines; it made no difference, I lost at them all, much to Sam’s glee.
I began to clutch at straws. Somehow, I knew—I knew—Sam was getting the incoming messages from the factory ships before the rest of the Earth-Moon system. He could make his buying decisions based on advance knowledge; of that I was certain. That meant that he was receiving those messages sooner than everyone else. In turn, that meant that the speed of light was not the same for Sam as it was for everyone else.
I was challenging Einstein; that’s how crazy Sam was making me.
He had somehow rigged the speed with which those messages traveled from the Asteroid Belt to Earth. But that was impossible! The speed of light is the one immutable factor in all of Einstein’s relativity. It can’t be changed. It travels at one speed in vacuum and one speed only. Sam couldn’t slow it down or speed it up.
Or—if he could—why would he be wasting his time playing the commodities market? He could be opening up the path to interstellar travel!
In desperation I asked my computer to search for any correlations it could discern in all of Sam’s market transactions. Anything at all.
The list that scrolled across my screen was even more frustrating than my other failed ideas. There were plenty of correlations, but none of them made any sense. For example, Sam’s buys of metals futures seemed to follow some astrological pattern: the computer actually worked out a pattern in which Sam’s investments correlated with the astrological signs for the days in which he made his buys.
Sam sold his futures, of course. That’s how he made money. He bought when the price was low, before most other investors dared to risk their money. Then he waited until the price for that particular cargo rose, and sold it off at a handsome profit. While his buys had that weird astrological correlation, his sales did not; they were strictly related to the market price for the metals.
I was losing weight worrying over this problem. And I started to have bad dreams, nightmares in which C.C. Chatsworth was fiendishly slicing me into thin sections on those volleyball wires, cackling insanely while my blood floated all around me in zero-gravity bubbles.
Sam, strangely enough, was very solicitous, fussing over me like a distraught uncle.
“You gotta eat better, Zorro,” he told me as I picked at my dinner.
We were back at the Earthview. Sam had just returned from another quick trip to Sunsat Seventeen. The magnetrons were still giving trouble. Sam grumbled about the Asian consortium’s insistence that seventy-five percent of the satellite’s hardware had to be manufactured in Asia.
“And not the Pacific Rim countries, where they know how to build major hardware,” he groused. “Not Japan or even China.”
Despite my growing despair, I went for his bait. “Then where is the hardware being built?” I asked.
Sam frowned from across the circular dining table. “Upper Clucksv
ille, from the looks of it. Afghanistan, Tzadikistan, Dumbbellistan— guys who had trouble making oxcarts are now building klystrons and power busses and I’m stuck with a contract that says I’ve gotta make it all work right or it comes outta my profits!”
“Why did you ever agree to such a contract?” I wondered out loud.
“Outta the goodness of my heart,” said Sam, placing a hand on his chest. “Why else?”
A bell rang in my mind.
Sam was gone the next morning, back to the same Sunsat Seventeen. I went up to my roomy office and immediately got to work. Ignoring the pretty view of the plaza’s greenery and the Olympic-sized swimming pool where young tourists were doing quintuple flips in lunar slow-motion from the thirty-meter diving platform, I booted up my computer and started checking out the hunch that had popped into my mind the night before.
In the back of my mind it occurred to me that Sam had generously given me this office next to his own so that he could keep an eye on me. He probably had the desktop computer bugged, too, so he could see what I was looking into. So I used my trusty old palm-sized machine instead. It was slower, because it had to access files stored back on Earth and that meant a second-and-a-half lag. But using Sam’s computer would have been foolish, I thought.
Yes! I was right. Every time Sam made a successful buy on the futures market he was in orbit, not on the Moon. Almost. He made a few buys from his office here in Selene City as well, but they were sometimes winners, more often losers. When he called in his buys from orbit they were winners, every time except once, and that once happened when a factory ship broke down months after Sam’s purchase of its cargo of industrial steel; the cargo was almost a year late in reaching the market. Everyone lost money on that one.
His sell orders came from Selene, from orbit, from wherever he happened to be. But his successful buys, the ones that were making him rich, always came from orbit.
I was so excited by this discovery that it wasn’t until late that afternoon that the reaction hit me. So what? So Sam makes his buy decisions while he’s working in orbit, instead of when he’s on the Moon. What does that prove?