by Ben Bova
I burrowed into that beanbag as deeply as I could, scooping out pebbles with both hands, digging like a terrified gopher on speed. I would’ve dug all the way back to Earth if I could have.
Fuchs and the ambusher were still duking it out, with a spare laser blast now and then hitting Achernar as it swung slowly around the ‘roid. The ship looked like a shambles, big gouges torn through its hull, chunks torn off and spinning lazily alongside its main structure.
They hadn’t destroyed the radio, though. In my helmet earphones I could hear Judge Meyers’s voice, harsh with static:
“Sam, if this is another scheme of yours ...”
Sam tried to explain to her what was happening, but I don’t think he got through. She kept asking what was going on and then, after a while, her voice cut off altogether.
Sam said to me, “Either she’s sore at me and she’s leaving the Belt, or she’s worried about me and she’s coming here to see what’s happening.”
I hoped for the latter, of course. Our suits had air regenerators, I knew, but they weren’t reliable for more than twenty-four hours, at best. From the looks of poor old Achernar, we were going to need rescuing and damned soon, too.
We still couldn’t really see Fuchs’s ship; it was either too far away in that dark emptiness or he was jinking around too much for us to get a visual fix on him. I saw flashes of light that might have been puffs from maneuvering thrusters, or they might have been hits from the other guy’s laser. The ambusher’s craft was close enough for us to make out, most of the time. He was viffing and slewing this way and that, bobbing and weaving like a prizefighter trying to avoid his opponent’s punches.
But then the stiletto flared into sudden brilliance, a flash so bright it hurt my eyes. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw the afterimage burning against my closed lids.
“Got a propellant tank,” Sam said, matter-of-factly. “Fuchs’ll close in for the kill now.”
I opened my eyes again. The stiletto was deeply gashed along its rear half, tumbling and spinning out of control. Gradually it pulled itself onto an even keel, then turned slowly and began to head away from the asteroid. I could see hot plasma streaming from one thruster nozzle; the other was dark and cold.
“He’s letting him get away,” Sam said, sounding surprised. “Fuchs is letting him limp back to Ceres or wherever he came from.”
“Maybe Fuchs is too badly damaged himself to chase him down,” I said.
“Maybe.” Sam didn’t sound at all sure of that.
We waited for another hour, huddled inside our suits in the beanbag of an asteroid. Finally Sam said, “Let’s get back to the ship and see what’s left of her.”
There wasn’t much. The hull had been punctured in half a dozen places. Propulsion was gone. Life support shot. Communications marginal.
We clumped to the cockpit. It was in tatters; the main window was shot out, a long ugly scar from a laser burn right across the control panel. The pilot’s chair was ripped, too. It was tough to sit in the bulky space suits, and we were in zero gravity to boot. Sam just hovered a few centimeters above his chair. I realized that my stomach had calmed down. I had adjusted to zero-gee. After what we had just been through, zero-gee seemed downright comfortable.
“We’ll have to live in the suits,” Sam told me.
“How long can we last?”
“There are four extra air regenerators in stores,” Sam said. “If they’re not damaged we can hold out for another forty-eight, maybe sixty hours.”
“Time enough for somebody to come and get us,” I said hopefully.
I could see his freckled face bobbing up and down inside his helmet. “Yep ... provided anybody’s heard our distress call.”
The emergency radio beacon seemed to be functioning. I kept telling myself we’d be all right. Sam seemed to feel that way; he was positively cheerful.
“You really think we’ll be okay?” I asked him. “You’re not just trying to keep my hopes up?”
“We’ll be fine, Gar,” he answered. “We’ll probably smell pretty ripe by the time we can get out of these suits, but except for that I don’t see anything to worry about.”
Then he added, “Except...”
“Except?” I yelped. “Except what?”
He grinned wickedly. “Except that I’ll miss the wedding.” He made an exaggerated sigh. “Too bad.”
So we lived inside the suits for the next day and a half. It wasn’t all that bad, except we couldn’t eat any solid food. Water and fruit juices, that was all we could get through the feeder tube. I started to feel like a Hindu ascetic on a hunger strike.
We tried the comm system, but it was intermittent at best. The emergency beacon was faithfully sending out our distress call, of course, with our position. It could be heard all the way back to Ceres, I was sure. Somebody would come for us. Nothing to worry about. We’ll get out of this okay. Someday we’ll look back on this and laugh. Or maybe shudder. Good thing we had to stay in the suits; otherwise I would have gnawed all my fingernails down to the wrist.
And then the earphones in my helmet suddenly blurted to life.
“Sam! Do you read me? We can see your craft!” It was Judge Meyers. I was so overjoyed that I would have married her myself.
Her ship was close enough so that our suit radios could pick up her transmission.
“We’ll be there in less than an hour, Sam,” she said.
“Great!” he called back. “But hold your nose when we start peeling out of these suits.”
Judge Meyers laughed and she and Sam chatted away like a pair of teenagers. But then Sam looked up at me and winked.
“Jill, I’m sorry this has messed up the wedding,” he said, making his voice husky, sad. “I know you were looking forward to—”
“You haven’t messed up a thing, Sam,” she replied brightly. “After we’ve picked you up—and cleaned you up—we’re going back to The Rememberer and have the ceremony as planned.”
Sam’s forehead wrinkled. “But haven’t your guests gone back home? What about the boys’ choir? And the caterers?”
She laughed. “The guests are all still here. As for the entertainment and the caterers, so I’ll have to pay them for a few extra days. Hang the expense, Sam. This is our wedding we’re talking about! Money is no object.”
Sam groaned.
In a matter of hours we were aboard Judge Meyers’s ship, Parthia, showered, shaved, clothed and fed, heading to The Rememberer and Sam’s wedding. Sam was like Jekyll and Hyde: while he and I were alone together he was morose and mumbling, like a guy about to face a firing squad in the morning. When Judge Myers joined us for dinner, though, Sam was chipper and charming, telling jokes and spinning tall tales about old exploits. It was quite a performance; if Sam ever goes into acting he’ll win awards, I’m sure.
After dinner Sam and Judge Meyers strolled off together to her quarters. I went back to the compartment they had given me, locked the door, and took out the chip.
It was easier this time, since I remembered the keys to the encryption. In less than an hour I had Amanda’s hauntingly beautiful face on the display of my compartment’s computer. I wormed a plug into my ear, taking no chances that somebody might eavesdrop on me.
The video was focused tightly on her face. For I don’t know how long I just gazed at her, hardly breathing. Then I shook myself out of the trance and touched the key that would run her message.
“Lars,” she said softly, almost whispering, as if she were afraid somebody would overhear her, “I’m going to have a baby.”
Holy mother in heaven! It’s a good thing we didn’t deliver this message to Fuchs. He would’ve probably cut us into little pieces and roasted them on a spit.
Amanda Cunningham Humphries went on, “Martin wants another son, he already has a five-year-old boy by a previous wife.”
She hesitated, looked over her shoulder. Then, in an even lower voice, “I want you to know, Lars, that it will be your son that I bear, not his. I’
ve
had myself implanted with one of the embryos we froze at Selene, back before all these troubles started.”
I felt my jaw drop down to my knees.
“I love you, Lars,” Amanda said. “I’ve always loved you. I married Martin because he promised he’d stop trying to kill you if I did. I’ll have a son, and Martin will think it’s his, but it will be your son, Lars. Yours and mine. I want you to know that, dearest. Your son.”
Humphries would pay a billion for that, I figured.
And he’d have the baby Amanda was carrying aborted. Maybe he’d kill her, too.
“So what are you going to do about it, Gar?”
I whirled around in my chair. Sam was standing in the doorway.
“I thought I locked—”
“You did. I unlocked it.” He stepped into my compartment and carefully slid the door shut again. “So, Gar, what are you going to do?”
I popped the chip out of the computer and handed it to Sam.
He refused to take it. “I read her message the first night on our way to the Belt,” Sam said, sitting on the edge of my bed. “I figured you’d try to get it off me, one way or another.”
“So you gave it to me.”
Sam nodded gravely. “So now you know what her message is. The question is, what are you going to do about it?”
I offered him the chip again. “Take it, Sam. I don’t want it.”
“It’s worth a lot of money, Gar.”
“I don’t want it!” I repeated, a little stronger.
Sam reached out and took the chip from me. Then, “But you know what she’s doing. You could tell Humphries about it. He’d pay a lot to know.”
I started to reply, but to my surprise I found that I had to swallow hard before I could get any words out. “I couldn’t do that to her,” I said.
Sam looked square into my eyes. “You certain of that?”
I almost laughed. “What’s a few hundred million bucks? I don’t need that kind of money.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes, dammit, I’m certain!” I snapped. It wasn’t easy to toss away all that money, and Sam was starting to irritate me.
“Okay,” he said, breaking into that lopsided smile of his. “I believe you.”
Sam got to his feet, his right fist closed around the chip.
“What will you do with it?” I asked.
“Pop it out an airlock. A few days in hard UV should degrade it so
badly that even if somebody found it in all this emptiness they’d never be able to read it.”
I got up from my desk chair. “I’ll go with you,” I said.
So the two of us marched down to the nearest airlock and got rid of the chip. I had a slight pang when I realized how much money we had just tossed out into space, but then I realized I had saved Amanda’s life, most likely, and certainly the life of her baby. Hers and Fuchs’s.
“Fuchs will never know,” Sam said. “I feel kind of sorry for him.”
“I feel sorry for her,” I said.
“Yeah. Me too.”
As we walked down the passageway back toward my compartment, curiosity got the better of me.
“Sam,” I asked, “what if you weren’t sure that I’d keep her message to myself? What if you thought I’d sneak off to Humphries and tell him what was on that chip?”
He glanced up at me. “I’ve never killed a man,” he said quietly, “but I’d sure stuff you into a lifeboat and set you adrift. With no radio.”
I blinked at him. He was dead serious.
“I wouldn’t last long,” I said.
“Probably not. Your ship would drift through the Belt for a long time, though. Eons. You’d be a real Flying Dutchman.”
“I’m glad you trust me.”
“I’m glad I can trust you, Gar.” He gave me a funny look, then added, “You’re in love with her, too, aren’t you?”
It took me a few moments to reply, “Who wouldn’t be?”
SO WE FLEW to The Rememberer with Judge Meyers and all the wedding guests and the minister and boys’ choir, the caterers and all the food and drink for a huge celebration. Six different news nets were waiting for us: the wedding was going to be a major story.
Sam snuck away, of course. He didn’t marry Jill Meyers after all. That’s why she’s on this ship, the Hermes, to meet him all the way out in the Kuiper Belt at that black hole he supposedly discovered.
She still wants to marry Sam. Don’t ask me why. All I know is that she’ll have to be pretty damned clever to get him to hold still for it.
Disappearing Act
IT WAS NEARLY MIDNIGHT WHEN THE MAITRE D’ FINISHED his tale.
“So Lars Fuchs never knew that Amanda’s baby was his own son?” Jade asked, her voice slightly hollow with thoughts of her own birth, her own parents.
“Neither did Martin Humphries,” the maitre d’ replied somberly.
Spence asked, “Fuchs died on that Venus expedition, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Jade. “And Amanda died in childbirth, according to the nets. But Humphries is still alive.”
“He hasn’t been seen in public in years,” the maitre d’ pointed out. “The rumor is that he had some sort of mental breakdown.”
“Still, I don’t know if we can use your story. I’ll have to check with our legal department.”
The maitre d’ nodded. “I understand. Frankly, I wouldn’t want Martin Humphries’s people coming after me.”
“Then why’d you tell us?” Spence asked.
The portly man shrugged. “It seemed like the thing to do. For Sam, I guess. To set the record straight. He wasn’t the bastard everybody thinks he was.”
Jade smiled at him, but then she said, “I can’t pay you for the story unless our lawyers say we can use it.”
The maitre d’ smiled back. “That’s okay. I’m doing well enough here. When we get back to Selene I’ll have enough to open my own business.”
“Oh?”
“Selling Martian artifacts.”
“You can’t do that! It’s forbidden by the IAA!”
The maitre d’ s smile widened, showed teeth. “I’ve hired a squad of students who spend their summers with the Mars exploration teams. They make cups and bowls and stuff out of native Martian rock. Voila! Martian artifacts.”
Spence gaped at him. “That... that’s fraud.”
“No, it clearly states on every bill of sale that the artifact was made on Mars. I give no guarantee of age, or of—”
The ship’s captain came bustling into the salon, looking tense, upset. He hurried straight to the table where Jade, Spence and the maitre d’ were sitting.
Spence got to his feet.
To Jade, the captain said, “We just received a message.” “Oh?”
“From Sam Gunn.”
“From Sam?” all three of them asked in unison.
“The little scoundrel is flying back to Earth! He’s popped out of that black hole and he’s heading Earthward at a full g acceleration!”
“That’s impossible!” Spence snapped.
Instead of replying the captain aimed a palm-sized remote at the smart wall.
Sam Gunn’s round, freckled face appeared on the screen. “To whom it may concern,” he said cheerfully. “I’m back from the mini-black hole and on my way toward Earth. See ya there!”
The image winked off.
“That’s all?” Spence demanded.
“We tracked the source of the message. It’s a torch ship heading inbound at one full g.”
“Where’d he get a torch ship?”
“Sacre dieu,” said Jade. “Every lawyer in the solar system’s going to be waiting for Sam when he gets to Earth.”
“Including the Beryllium Blonde,” Spence muttered.
“Have you told Senator Meyers?”
The captain nodded. “Before anyone else.”
“She must be furious,” said the maitre d’.
A puzzled, disbelieving expressio
n on his face, the captain replied, “She laughed! She laughed out loud. I thought she’d snapped.”
“Not Jill Meyers,” Jade said.
“She’s given orders to turn around and get back to Earth,” the captain said. “As fast as we can.”
TORCH SHIP HERMES orbited the Moon exactly once, just long enough for Jade and Spence to be picked up by a shuttle from Selene. Then the ship—with Jill Meyers and her entourage still aboard— returned to Earth.
But Sam Gunn was nowhere to be found. His ship had arrived in Earth orbit, but when customs inspectors boarded it the ship was empty. They impounded it, sealed it, and told the authorities—and the news media— that Sam Gunn had disappeared.
That started a feeding frenzy in the media. Jumbo Jim Gradowsky conferred with Solar News’s corporate bigwigs and released Jade’s hurriedly edited follow-on series about Sam. It was a smash hit, top of the audience ratings. Solar rereleased Jade’s original biography, then packaged the two shows together and scored still another smashing success.
Yet there was no sign of Sam Gunn. He had disappeared. There were rumors that he was in Selene, but no one admitted to seeing him. Then, after weeks of such rumors, the news flashed through Selene that Sam Gunn had been working with a professor at the university. And he’d been arrested by Selene’s security police.
Jade looked up the professor, Daniel C. Townes IV. A physicist. She called him several times, but always got his answering machine.
Then he walked into her office, tall, lanky, looking slightly bemused.
“I understand you’re looking for me,” he said, folding his long-legged figure into the little plastic chair in front of Jade’s desk.
She almost leaped across the desk. “Do you know where Sam Gunn is?”
He frowned slightly. “I know where one of them is,” said Townes.
Takes Two to Tangle
ONE SAM GUNN IS BAD ENOUGH-SAID PROFESSOR TOWNES.
But now there’s at least two of them, maybe more, and it’s all my fault.
Well, mostly my fault. Sam had something to do with it, of course. More than a little, as you might suspect if you know anything about Sam.