by Ben Bova
And, if you know anything about Sam, you know that of course there was a woman involved. A beautiful, statuesque, golden-haired Bishop of the New Lunar Church, no less.
I didn’t know anything about Sam except the usual stuff that the general public knew: Sam Gunn was a freewheeling space entrepreneur, a little stubby loudmouthed redheaded guy who always found himself battling the big boys of huge interplanetary corporations and labyrinthine government bureaucracies. Sam was widely known as a womanizer, a wiseass, a stubby Tasmanian Devil with a mind as sharp as a laser beam and a heart as big as a spiral galaxy.
He had disappeared years earlier out on some wild-ass trek to the Kuiper Belt. Everybody thought he had died out in that frozen darkness beyond Pluto. There was rejoicing in the paneled chambers of corporate and government power, tears shed among Sam’s legion of friends.
And then after his long absence he showed up again, spinning a wild tale about having fallen into a black hole. He was heading back to Earth, coming in from the cold, claiming that friendly aliens on the other side of the black hole had showed him how to get back to our space-time, back to home. Sam’s enemies nodded knowingly: of course the aliens would want to get rid of him, they said to each other.
And they sent just about every lawyer on Earth after Sam. He owed megabucks to dozens of creditors, including some pretty shady characters. He was so deeply in debt that there was no place on Earth he could land his spacecraft without having umpteen dozen eager lawyers slam him with liens and lawsuits.
Which is why Sam landed not on Earth, but on the Moon. At Selene, which was now an independent nation and apparently the only human community in the solar system that didn’t have Sam at the head of its “most wanted” list.
He came straight to the underground halls of Selene University. To my office!
Imagine my surprise when Sam Gunn showed up at my doorway, all one hundred sixty-some centimeters of him.
And asked me to invent a matter transmitter for him.
“A matter transmitter?” I must have sputtered, I was so shocked. “But that’s nonsense. It’s kiddie fantasy. It’s nothing but—”
“It’s physics,” Sam said. “And you’re a physicist. Right?”
He had me there.
I am Daniel C. Townes IV, PhD. I am a particle physicist. I was on the short list last year for the Nobel Prize in physics. But that was before I met Sam Gunn.
Sam had popped into my office unannounced, sneaking past the department secretary during her lunch break. (Which, I must confess, often takes a couple of hours.) He just waltzed through my open doorway, walked up to my desk, stuck out his hand and introduced himself. Then he told me he needed a matter transmitter. Right away.
I sagged back in my desk chair while Sam perched himself on the only bare corner of my desk, grinning like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern. His face was round, with a snub nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Wiry reddish hair; I think they call that color auburn. His eyes were light, twinkling.
“Physics is one thing,” I said, trying to regain my dignity. “A matter transmitter is something else.”
“Come on,” Sam said, wheedling, “you guys have transmitted photons, haven’t you? You yourself just published a paper about transmitting atomic particles from one end of your lab to the other.”
He had read the literature. That impressed me.
You have to understand that I was naive enough to think that I might be the youngest person ever to receive the physics Nobel. I had to be careful, though. More than one young genius had been cut down by the knives that whirl through academia’s hallowed halls in the dark of night.
Sam aged me, though.
I think he had roosted on my desk because that made him taller than I was, as long as I remained sitting in my swivel chair. I have to confess, though, that there wasn’t any place else he could have sat. My office was littered with reports, journals, books, even popular magazines. The visitor’s chair was piled high with memos that the secretary had printed out
from the department’s unending file of meaningless trivia. There might be no paper on the Moon, but we sure do pile up the monofilament plastic sheets that we use in its place.
“So how about it, Dan-o?” Sam asked. “Can you make me a matter transmitter? It’s worth a considerable fortune and I’ll cut you in on it, fifty-fifty.”
“What makes you think—”
“You’re the expert on entanglement, aren’t you?”
I was impressed even more. Entanglement is not a subject your average businessman either knows or cares about.
Curiosity is a funny thing. It not only kills cats, it makes physicists forget Newton’s Third Law, the one about action and reaction.
I heard myself ask him, “Did you really survive going through a black hole?”
Grinning even wider, Sam nodded. “Yep. Twice.”
“What’s it like? What did you experience? How did it feel?”
Sam shrugged. “Nothing to it, really. I didn’t see or feel anything all that unusual.”
“That’s impossible.”
Sam just sat there on the corner of my desk, grinning knowingly.
“Unless,” I mused, “the laws of physics change under the intense gravitational field...”
“Or I’m telling you a big, fat lie,” Sam said.
“A lie?” That stunned me. “You wouldn’t—”
“Look,” Sam said, bending closer toward me, “I need a matter transmitter. You whip one up for me and I’ll give you all the data in my ship’s computer.”
I could feel my eyes go wide. “Your ship? The one that went through the black hole?”
“Twice,” said Sam.
Thus began my partnership with Sam Gunn.
INGRID MACTAVISH WAS something else. A missionary from the New Morality back Earthside, she had come to Selene to be installed as a Bishop in the New Lunar Church. She was nearly two meters tall, with bright golden hair that glowed and cascaded down past her shoulders, and eyes the color of perfect sapphires. A Junoesque goddess. A Valkyrie in a virginal white pants suit that fit her snugly enough to send my blood pressure soaring.
I’ll never forget my first encounter with her. She just stormed into my office and, without preamble, demanded, “Is it true?”
It’s hard to keep a secret in a community as small and intense as Selene. Rumors fly along those underground corridors faster than kids on jetblades. Sam wanted me to keep my work on the matter transmitter absolutely, utterly, cosmically top-secret. But the word leaked out, of course, after only a couple of weeks. I was surprised that nobody blabbed about it before then.
That’s what brought Bishop MacTavish into my office, all one hundred and eighty-two centimeters of her.
“Is it true?” she repeated.
She was practically radiating righteous wrath, those sapphire eyes blazing at me.
I swallowed as I got politely to my feet from my desk chair. I’m accustomed to being the tallest person in any crowd. I’m just a tad over two meters; I’d been a fairly successful basketball player back at Cal-Tech, but here on the Moon even Sam could jump so high in the light gravity that my height wasn’t all that much of an advantage.
Bishop MacTavish was not accustomed to looking up at anyone, I saw.
“Is what true?” I asked mildly. A soft answer turneth away wrath, I reasoned.
I think it was my height that softened her attitude. “That you’re working on a device to transmit people through space instantaneously,” she replied, her voice lower, gentler.
“No, that is not true,” I replied. Honestly.
She sank down into the chair in front of my desk, which I had cleaned off since Sam’s first visit. There were hardly more than three or four slim reports resting on it.
Bishop MacTavish looked startled for a moment; then she slipped the reports out from beneath her curvaceous rump and let them fall to the floor in the languid low gravity of the Moon.
“Thank God,” she murmure
d. “That’s one blasphemy we won’t have to deal with.”
“Blasphemy?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.
She blinked those gorgeous eyes at me. “A matter transmitter, if it could be made successfully, could also be used as a matter duplicator, couldn’t it?”
It took me a moment to understand what she was saying; I was rather hypnotized by her eyes.
“Couldn’t it?” she repeated.
“Duplicator? Yes, I suppose it might be feasible....”
“And every time you use it you’d be murdering a human being.” “What?” That truly stunned me. “What are you talking about?”
“When someone goes into your transporter his body is broken down into individual atoms, isn’t it? The pattern is sent to the receiver, where the body is reconstituted out of other atoms. The original person has been destroyed. Just because a copy comes out of the receiver—”
“No, no, no!” I interrupted. “That’s fantasy from the kiddie shows. Entanglement doesn’t work that way. Nothing gets destroyed.”
“It doesn’t?”
I shook my head. “It’s rather complicated, but essentially the process matches the pattern of the thing to be transported and reproduces that pattern at the other end of the transmission. The original is not destroyed; it isn’t harmed in any way.”
She cocked a suspicious brow at me.
“It takes a lot of energy, though,” I went on. “I doubt that it will ever be practical.”
“But such a machine would be creating living human beings, wouldn’t it? Only God can create people. A matter duplicator would be an outright blasphemy, clearly.”
“Maybe so,” I muttered. But then I came back to my senses. “Uh ... although, that is, well, I thought that people create people. You know... uh, sexually.”
“Of course.” She smiled and lowered her lashes self-consciously. “That’s doing God’s work.”
“It is?”
She nodded, then took a deep breath. I nearly started hyperventilating.
“But if you’re not working on a matter transmitter,” she said, breaking into a happy smile as she started to get up from the chair, “then there’s no cause for alarm.”
The trouble with being a scientist is that it tends to make you honest. Oh, sure, there’ve been cheats and outright frauds in science. But the field has a way of winnowing them out, sooner or later. Honesty is the bedrock of scientific research. Besides, I didn’t want her to leave my office.
So I confessed, “I am working on a matter transmitter, I’m afraid.”
She looked shocked. “But you said you weren’t.”
“I’m not working on a device to transport people. That would be too dangerous. My device is intended merely to transmit documents and other lightweight, nonorganic materials.”
She thumped back into the chair. “And you’re doing this for Sam Gunn?” “Yes, that’s true.”
She took an even deeper breath. “That little devil. Blasphemy means nothing to him.”
“But the transmitter won’t be used for people.”
“You think not?” she said sharply. “Once Sam Gunn has a matter transmitter in his hands he’ll use it for whatever evil purposes he wants.”
“But the risks—”
“Risks? Do you think for one microsecond that Sam Gunn cares about risks? To his body or his soul?”
“I... suppose not,” I replied weakly.
“This has got to be stopped,” she muttered.
I finally came to my senses. “Why? Who wants to stop this work? Who are you, anyway?”
“Oh!” She looked suddenly embarrassed. “I never introduced myself, did I?”
I tried to smile at her. “Other than the fact that you’re worried about blasphemy and you’re the most incredibly beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, I know nothing at all about you.”
Which wasn’t entirely true. I knew that she believed the act of procreation was doing God’s work.
“I am Bishop Ingrid MacTavish,” she said, extending her hand across my desk, “of the New Lunar Church.”
“You must be a newcomer to Selene,” I said as I took her hand in mine. Her grip was firm, warm. “I’d have noticed you before this.”
“I arrived yesterday,” she said. Neither one of us had released our hands. “Actually, I’m an ethicist.”
“Ethicist?”
“Yes,” she said. “There are certain ethical inconsistencies between accepted moral practice on Earth and here in Selene.”
That puzzled me, but only for a moment. “Oh, you mean nanotechnology.”
“Which is banned on Earth.”
“And common practice here on the Moon. We couldn’t survive without nanomachines.”
“That’s one of the reasons why I decided to set up my ministry here on the Moon.”
Interesting, I thought. “And the other reason?”
She hesitated, then answered, “I’ve been hired temporarily by a consortium of law firms to find Sam Gunn and serve him with papers for a large number of major lawsuits.”
At that moment, with impeccable timing, Sam bounced into my office.
“Hey, Dan-o, I’ve been thinking—”
Ingrid jumped to her feet, stumbling clumsily because she was unaccustomed to the light lunar gravity.
Sam rushed over to help her and she lurched right into his arms. With her height, and Sam’s lack of same, Sam’s face got buried in Ingrid’s commodious bosom momentarily while I stood behind my desk, too stunned to do anything more than gape at the sight.
Sam jerked away from her, his face flame-red. The little guy was actually embarrassed! Ingrid’s face was red, too, with anger. She swung a haymaker at Sam. He ducked; she staggered off-balance. I came around my desk like a shot and grabbed Ingrid by her shoulders, steadying her.
Sam backed away from us, stuttering, “I didn’t mean to ... that is, it was an accident…I was only trying ...” Then he seemed to see Ingrid for the first time, really see her in all her statuesque beauty. His eyes turned into saucers.
“Who ... who are you?” Sam asked, his voice hollow with awe.
Ingrid pulled free of me, but I noticed that she placed one hand lightly on my desktop. “I’m your worst nightmare,” she hissed.
“No nightmare,” Sam said. “A dream.”
She wormed a hand into the hip pocket of her snug-fitting trousers and pulled out a wafer-thin data chip. “Sam Gunn, I hereby serve you legal notification of—”
Sam immediately clasped his hands behind his back. “You’re not serving me with anything, lady. You’ve got no jurisdiction here in Selene. You have to go through the international court and even then you can only serve me if I’m on Earth, in a nation that’s got an extradition treaty with the North American Alliance. Which Selene hasn’t.”
Ingrid smiled thinly at him. “Well, you know your law, I must admit.”
Sam made a little bow, his hands still locked behind his back. “How’d you get in here, anyway? Selene doesn’t allow Earthside lawyers to come here. Legal issues with Earth are handled electronically.”
“Which is why you’re hiding here in Selene,” Ingrid replied.
With a Huck Finn grin, Sam acknowledged, “Until I can recoup my fortune and deal with all those malicious lawsuits.”
“Malicious?” Ingrid laughed. “You owe Masterson Aerospace seven hundred million for the spacecraft you leased. Forty-three million—and counting—to Rockledge Industries for expenses on the orbital hotel that you haven’t paid for in more than two years. Nine million—”
“Okay, okay,” Sam conceded. “But how can I settle with them when they’ve got all my assets frozen?”
“That’s your problem,” said Ingrid.
“Why don’t we discuss it over dinner?” Sam suggested, his grin turning sly.
“Dinner? With you? Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Scared?”
She hesitated, then glanced at me. I caught her meaning. She didn’t want to be alone
with Sam.
“Sam,” I said, “we have a lot to talk about. I’ve got a working model just about finished, but to build a real machine I’m going to need some major funding and—”
Sam’s no dummy. He caught on immediately. “Okay, okay. You come to dinner, too.”
Turning back toward Ingrid, he asked, “Is that all right with you? Now you’ll have a chaperone.”
Ingrid smiled brightly. “That’s perfectly fine with me, Mr. Gunn.”
THE EARTHVIEW IS the oldest and, to my mind, still the best restaurant in Selene. On Earth, the higher you are in a building the more prestigious and expensive; that’s why penthouses cost more than basement apartments—on Earth. On the Moon, though, the surface is dangerous: big temperature swings between sunlight and shadow, ionizing radiation constantly sleeting in from the Sun and stars, micrometeoroids peppering the ground and sandpapering everything exposed to them.
So in Selene, prestige and cost increase as you go down, away from the surface. The Earthview took in four full levels: its main entrance was on the third level below the Grand Plaza, and an actual human maitre d’ guided you to tables set along the winding descending rampway that led all the way down to the seventh level.
The place got its name from the oversized screens that studded the walls, showing camera views of the surface with the Earth hanging big and blue and majestic in the dark lunar sky. I never got tired of gazing at Earth and its ever-changing pattern of dazzling white clouds shifting across those glittering blue oceans.
Sam had reserved the best table in the place, down at the very lowest level. While we waited for Ingrid to arrive, Sam and I had a drink: lunar “rocket fuel” with carbonated water for me and plain South Pole water for Sam. He pumped me for everything I knew about her.
“I didn’t realize she’s working for lawyers at first,” I said. “She told me she’s an ethicist, and a Bishop in the New Lunar Church.”
“A Bishop? That’s enough to give a man religion, almost,” Sam mused.
“I never heard of the New Lunar Church before. Must be something new.”
“Fundamentalist,” Sam said knowingly. “Connected to the New Morality back Earthside.”