by Ben Bova
It didn’t prove anything, I realized. It certainly reinforced the idea that Sam was cheating the system, somehow. But how he was doing it remained a mystery.
I felt terribly let down. As if I had spent every bit of my energy trying to break down a solidly locked door, only to find that the room beyond that door was totally empty.
I sat at the desk Sam had loaned me, staring out at the scantily clad tourists performing athletic feats that were impossible on Earth, feeling completely drained and exhausted. In my mind’s eye I saw C.C. roasting me over the coals of bureaucratic wrath. And Sam grinning at me like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern, knowing that he had outsmarted me.
I should have been angry with Sam. Furious. The little trickster was ruining my career, my life. Yet I just couldn’t work up the rage. Sam had been kind to me. I knew it had all been in his own self-interest, but the little wise guy had actually behaved as if we were real friends.
Nevertheless, I had to get to the bottom of this. Sam was cheating and it was my job to nail him. Or I would be nailed myself.
I hauled myself up from the desk chair and headed for Selene’s spaceport, checking my palm computer for the departure time of the next OTV heading for Sunsat Seventeen.
I’m going to catch him in the act, I told myself. He’s not going to outsmart me any longer.
When I finally arrived at the sunsat, he was outside again, working with the same team of technicians while the same trio of engineers gave me worried frowns and mumbles as I pulled on the same slightly-too-small space suit.
“Sam told us we should stay inside,” said one of the women engineers.
“He said it’s going to be real hairy topside,” the other one added.
The bald, bearded man said, “He said he had to test the escape pod again.”
“Again?” The word caught my attention.
The man nodded solemnly while the two women checked out my backpack.
“How often does he check out the escape pod?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Every time he comes here, just about.”
One of the women said, from behind me, “Sam’s worried that this sunsat might be unsafe.”
My mind was clicking fast. I couldn’t imagine any disaster that could make this sixty-square kilometer slab of metal so unsafe that they would have to abandon it. The so-called escape pod was a modified OTV; it could fly all the way back to the Moon, if necessary.
And Sam took out the escape pod almost every time he came to this sunsat.
Click. Click. Click. Those facts meshed together. They added up to something—but I didn’t know the full answer. Not yet.
“Tell Sam that I’m coming out to the escape pod,” I commanded. “Tell him not to leave until I get to him.”
I flew up the access tube as fast as I could and pulled myself hand-over-hand along the guard rail that led out to the escape pod. All the while, I was thinking that the pod ought to be stationed close to the habitat module, not out at the end of the structure.
I got there almost in time. Just as I reached the docking module, the pod detached and floated away into the emptiness.
“Sam!” I yelled into my helmet microphone. “Come back here! I’m going with you.”
“Sorry, Zorro, no can do,” Sam’s voice chirped cheerfully in my earphones. “Go on back inside and have a cup of coffee. I’ll only be out for a couple hours or so. Gotta check the emergency systems.”
The pod was drifting slowly away; he hadn’t fired its main engine yet.
“Sam, you’re full of bullshit and we both know it!”
“Such harsh language,” he replied. “That’s not like you, Zorro.”
I had to do something. I couldn’t just hover there and watch him get away with it. I don’t remember thinking over my options. I simply acted without rational thought.
I unclipped my tether and jumped off the satellite, trying to reach the slowly drifting escape pod.
Just as I did, I heard Sam warning, “Counting down to main engine ignition: ten, nine, eight...”
I desperately needed to reach the pod before its rocket engine lit up. Reaching awkwardly behind me, I tried to find the bleed valve for my air tank. If I could squirt a little air out, it would act as a rocket thrust and zip me out to the pod before Sam could light up its main engine.
My gloved fingers found the valve while I mentally tried to picture how it worked. I pushed down on the knob, then turned it just a hair.
Too much. I was snapped into a crazy spin, my arms and legs flailing wildly, pulled away from my body by centrifugal force. The escape pod, the sunsat, the stars whirled madly around me.
I could still hear Sam counting,”... three, two ..
A noiseless flash of light made me blink even while my head was whacking from side to side inside my helmet. I thought I heard Sam’s voice yelling something, but then everything went blurry. I thought I was unconscious or maybe dead, but my head was still thumping painfully and every part of my body was screaming with pain and I was getting terribly dizzy.
Finally I did black out. My last thought was that this was a thoroughly idiotic way to die, spinning like a rag doll while Sam rocketed off to do whatever it was he did to cheat the commodities market.
When I came to, the first thing I saw was Sam’s round, freckled face staring down at me. He was smiling, sort of, even though the expression on his face was far from pleased.
“You just cost me a couple hundred million bucks, Zorro,” he said. Softly.
I blinked. My head was throbbing, thundering with pain. My back and shoulders and arms and legs—all of me ached agonizingly.
But what cut through the haze of hurt was the sight of Sam. He was in his beat-up old space suit, helmet off. Something new had been added to his collection of patches and insignias. He had painted a slashing red zigzag across the suit’s chest. A letter zee. The mark of Zorro.
“Wh ...” My throat was dry and raw. It took a real effort to work up enough saliva to swallow. “What happened?” I asked weakly.
Sam tried to frown at me but his face just wasn’t cut out for it.
“Just as I lit up the pod’s engine you went pin-wheeling past me like a bowling ball with legs.”
We were in the escape pod, I realized. A padded bulkhead curved above me, and beyond Sam’s back I could see the control panel and the small circular viewport above it. I was lying on one of the acceleration couches.
“You rescued me,” I said.
Sam hunched his shoulders. “It was either that or watch you zip all the way out to Mars. I figured you’d run out of air in about ten minutes, the way you were squirting it out of your backpack.”
I tried to sit up, but my head pounded like a thunder-burst and I got woozy.
“Take it easy, babe,” Sam said. “Just lay there and relax. We’re on our way back to the sunsat, but it’ll take an hour or so.”
“An hour ... ?”
“I had to burn a helluva lot of propellant to catch you, Zorro. And then burn off that velocity and head back. Lotta delta-vee, pal. So we’re on a minimum energy trajectory, headin’ back to the ol’ corral.” Those last few words he pronounced with a fake western twang.
“You saved my life,” I said, realizing that it was true. I felt an enormous sense of gratitude welling up inside me.
Sam brushed it off with a wave of his hand. “It was either that or have C.C. come after me for murder.”
“She couldn’t—”
“Couldn’t she? Once she figured out that you knew how I was getting a jump on the market, she’d automatically assume I killed you to keep you quiet.”
I blinked with shock. “But I didn’t—”
“Pretty smart cookie, Zorro, ol’ pal.” Sam was smiling, but it seemed a little on the bitter side. “That’s why I painted your zee on my chest. You got me, fair and square.”
There are times when a man should keep his big mouth shut and accept praise, whether he deserves it or not. This was certainly
one of those times. Unfortunately, my brain was too addled from the beating I had just undergone to pay attention to my own advice.
“What do you mean, I got you?” I asked, befuddled. “What does the zee on your chest have to do with it?”
Sam’s grin turned more impish. He touched one end of the zee and said, “A factory ship.” Then, sliding his finger along the zigzag red line, he added, “The Baade Orbital Telescope,” the finger slid across the other leg of the zee, “the reflector I hung out at the Mars L-5 position,” finally the finger came to rest at the other end of the zee, “and the ISC’s main receiving telescope in Earth orbit.”
Then he pointed to the patch on his chest, just above the zee, the one that said Roemer. “He figured out the speed of light.”
I got it! Like a flash of lightning, I suddenly understood what Sam had been doing all along.
Everybody knew approximately when a factory ship was due to send its message back toward Earth, telling what kind of an ore load it was going to be carrying home. The messages are sent by tight laser beam to the ISC’s receiving facility in Earth orbit. Once the satellite gets the word, it broadcasts the news to all the market centers in the Earth-Moon system.
Sam intercepted the signal. It was that simple. He positioned one of the orbiting astronomical telescopes his company maintained to intercept the
laser signal, bounce it to a reflector he had prepositioned along the orbit of Mars, and then finally send it Earthward. The signal was received at the Earth satellite station ten or twenty minutes later than it normally would have been and nobody was the wiser because nobody bothered to check the exact moment that the factory ship sent its signal.
Meanwhile, Sam used that ten or twenty minutes to buy metals futures before anyone else knew what the factory ship was carrying.
It was so simple! Once you understood what he was doing it seemed absolutely obvious.
And totally illegal.
“Sam,” I said, still somewhat breathless with the astonishment of discovery, “you could go to jail for twenty years.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose so.”
A dead silence fell between us. Sam got up from the couch and floated weightlessly to the control panel. I cranked the couch up to a sitting position, grateful that my head only felt as if it was being split open by a band-saw.
“You’ve been cheating the market, Sam.”
He glanced back at me, over his shoulder, an elfin grin on his round face. “I don’t think there’s anything in the ISC rules about intercepting laser signals. I checked those rules pretty thoroughly, you know.”
“Insider knowledge,” I said firmly, “is a crime.”
“What insider knowledge?” he asked, trying to look innocent. “I just happened to learn about the factory ships’ cargos before anybody else did.”
“By rigging their communications.”
“Nothing illegal about that.”
“Yes there is.”
“Prove it!”
“C.C. will prove it,” I said. “She’ll haul you up before the interplanetary tribunal and they’ll send you to the penal colony on Farside.”
“Maybe,” Sam said. I could see from the way his brow furrowed that he was actually worried.
Well, Sam knew me better than I knew myself, of course. He had already decided to stop tinkering with the market; C.C. and her minions (including me) were getting too close for comfort.
“I only did it to put together enough money to buy a couple of factory ships and go out to the Asteroid Belt again,” he told me.
“You mean this whole scheme was just your way of raising capital?” I was incredulous.
“What else?” he asked, wide-eyed. “None of the sheep-dip banks would
lend me a dime. C.C blackballed me. The big-shot investors stick with the big-time operators, like Rockledge and Pogorny. Nobody’d loan me enough money to build an outhouse, let alone a few factory ships.”
I thought it over for a few moments. “So... if I didn’t turn you in, you’d stop this market rigging on your own?”
“Yep,” he answered immediately. “Honest injun. Cross my heart. Scout’s honor.” And he held up one hand in a three-fingered Boy Scout salute.
The man had saved my life. I had done something foolishly stupid and he had saved me from certain death. I owed him that.
Besides, the thought of Sam in jail, or toiling away at the Farside penal colony... I couldn’t bear that.
But then the image of C.C. rose in my mind, like a volcano of blubber about to erupt and spew over me. The best I could hope for was to admit I hadn’t been able to find Sam’s scam and let her demote me to third-rank sewer inspector or something even worse. If she ever got a hint that I had discovered Sam’s trick and let him go—I’d be breaking rocks on Farside myself.
There was only one honorable thing for me to do. After getting Sam’s solemn pledge that he would never, never tamper with the market again, I returned alone to Selene City and called in my resignation from the ISC.
C.C. called me back in ten seconds. I was in my spartan studio apartment, packing for my return to Earth, when the wall screen lit up. There she was, Mt. Vesuvius in the flesh, steaming and glowering at me.
“ ‘E got to you, did ‘e?” she said, without preamble.
“No,” I replied, trying to shield myself as much as I could behind my garment bag. “On the contrary, I think I scared him enough so that he’ll stay out of the market from now on.”
“Oh, really?” she said, dripping sarcasm.
“Really,” I said, with as much dignity as a man can muster while he’s holding a half-dozen pairs of under-drawers in his hands.
“Then it might interest you to know that one Samuel Gunn as just bought an entire factory ship’s cargo of ‘eavy metals, ten minutes before the news of the ship’s successful rendezvous with nine different ore miners reached the bloody market.”
Sam had broken his promise! I was stunned. Not angry, just sad that he really couldn’t be trusted.
“Well,” I said, “you’ll have to send someone else to snoop out how he does it. I failed, and I’ve quit. I’m out of the game.”
“You’ll be out more than that, you bleedin’ traitor!” For the next several minutes C.C. described at the top of her voice how she was going to blackball me and see to it that I never worked anywhere on Earth again. “Or on the Moon, for that matter!” she added, with extra venom.
I was ruined and I knew it. But actually, what made me feel even worse was the knowledge that Sam had gone back on his word. He’d continue to fiddle with the market until C.C. finally caught him. He couldn’t get away with it forever; if I figured his scheme out (even with Sam’s help) someone else could, too. Sam was heading for jail, sooner or later. The thought depressed me terribly.
That was before Sam’s final message reached me.
I was heading glumly out to the rocket port for the ride back to Earth and my lonely, dusty, empty apartment in Florida’s sprawling Tampa-Orlando-Jacksonville industrial belt. No job and no prospects. No friends, either. Just about everyone I knew worked at the ISC. They would all shun me, fearful of C.C.’s wrath.
There were two messages waiting for me at the port’s check-in counter. The clerk there—a lissome young woman whom Sam had introduced me to scarcely a week earlier—showed me to a booth where I could take my messages in privacy.
The first was from someone I had never seen before. He was white-haired, with a trim beard and the tanned, leathery look of a man who had spent a good deal of his life outdoors. Yet he wore the rumpled tweeds of an academic.
“Mr. Hashimoto, this is rather a strange situation,” he said into the camera. He was recording the message, not knowing where I was or when I would hear his words. “I am Hickory J. Gillett, dean of the University of New Mexico Archeology Department. We have just received a bequest of two hundred million dollars from an anonymous donor who wants us to create an endowed chair of archeology. His only require
ment is that you accept the position as our first Professor of Martian Archeology.”
I nearly fainted. Professor of Martian Archeology. Endowed chair. It was my dream come true.
Hardly conscious of what I was doing, I touched the keypad for my second message.
Sam Gunn’s impish face grinned at me from the screen. “So I pulled off one final stunt,” he said. “See you on Mars, Prof. Save one of the female students for me.”
And he slashed one pointed finger through the air in the zigzag of a letter zee.
The Maitre D’
“IT’S A PLEASURE HAVING SOMEONE SO FAMOUS ON BOARD with us,” said the maitre d’ as he showed Jade and Spence to their table in Hermes s small but luxuriously decorated dining salon.
“Me?” Jade felt surprised. “I’m not famous. Not like Senator Meyers.”
The maitre d’ smiled patiently. He was a portly man, his hair receding from his forehead but still dark, as was his trim mustache and pointed Vandyke. Aside from the cooks, he was the only human working in the dining salon. The waiters were all utilitarian robots, their flat tops exactly the same height as the tables. They rolled noiselessly across the carpeting on tiny trunions.
“You are the producer of the Sam Gunn biography, aren’t you?” he asked in a deferential, sibilant near-whisper.
“Yes, that’s true,” Jade replied as she sat on the chair he was holding for her.
“I knew Sam,” the maitre d’ said. “And Senator Meyers, too, although she doesn’t recognize me. I looked somewhat different back in those days.”
Jade recognized a come-on. “You’ll have to tell me about it,” she said guardedly.
Glancing about at the salon’s six tables, all of them filled with passengers, the maitre d’ said, “Perhaps after dinner? You could linger over a cognac and after these other guests have left I could tell you about it.”
Jade glanced at Spence, who was scowling suspiciously.
“All right,” she said. “After dinner.”
The maitre d’ bowed politely and left their table.
“You trust him?” Spence asked, almost in a growl.