by Allen Steele
“C’mon, guys.” Taking one hand from the gun, Smith impatiently waved his men toward her. “Drag her out of the way.”
“You heard what she said.” Before anyone could stop him, Baynes took a seat on the crate beside Bacquart. “The lady says no…and so do I.”
Smith’s men halted in midstep. Pulling a defenseless woman away from the crate was one thing; doing the same to two people was another. Baynes felt the crate’s aluminum lid bend slightly beneath him; he tried not to put his full weight upon it as he curled his right arm within her left elbow. Now they were inseparable, or at least not without the combined efforts of all three Wellstown men. And Smith would have to put down his gun if he wanted to help his partners.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Smith was no longer sure of himself. He pointed the gun at Baynes. “Get off that thing! I mean it!”
“Sorry, no.” Baynes’s mouth was dry, his heart hammering against his chest. “You’ll just have to shoot us both. That’s all there is to it.”
“Smith…” McGrath let out his breath. “Give it up.”
“Like hell!” Smith’s voice rose, becoming higher in desperation. “If they don’t get off that thing, I’m gonna…”
“You know what’ll happen if you kill ’em. The boss is the second-in-command at Arsia, and the doc is a VIP from France. If they wind up dead…” He paused meaningfully, giving them a moment to think about it. “You and your guys will become wanted men. Even the movement will disown you. No one will rest until you’re caught…and you’ll get the airlock when they do.”
“Then you’re gonna help us.” Smith’s gun turned toward McGrath. “You’re part of this, too, y’know.”
“Nope. I didn’t sign up for this.” McGrath pointed toward the second rover. “Now go on…get out of here. The vase won’t do you any good now.”
Smith didn’t say or do anything for several moments, and neither did his two accomplices. Baynes waited for whatever was going to happen next, still half-expecting the next breath he took to be his last.
Smith muttered an obscenity. He relaxed his grip on the gun and let his arm fall to his side, then he looked at the other two men. “All right,” he said quietly, “let’s go.”
Without another word, the three of them turned and walked back to the rover. Baynes waited until they climbed in and drove away, heading back up the valley the way they’d come, before he dared let out his breath.
“That was…that was close,” he said softly.
“Yeah, well…they just hadn’t thought things through.” McGrath said nothing for a second. “I guess you’re going to have to report this to Jenkins.”
Baynes considered the situation as he stood up from the crate. His knees felt stiff, as if he’d been sitting there for hours. He still didn’t trust Link McGrath, or even particularly like him, but the fact remained that he owned him one.
“I don’t think anyone has to know what happened here,” he said at last. “No harm, no foul…so long as you stay out of trouble, I mean.”
“If by ‘trouble’ you mean the movement…” McGrath shook his head. “Sorry, boss, I can’t make that promise. I agree with the motives, not the methods.”
“Yeah, okay…whatever.” Baynes was too relieved to argue with him. So far as he was concerned, he was just happy to still be alive and to still have the vase in his possession.
He turned to Bacquart. She’d stood up from the crate and had opened it, peering inside to make sure that the vase was undamaged. “I have to tell you, that was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“If you say so.” She didn’t look up from the vase.
“One hell of a bluff, doc,” McGrath added. “I am impressed.”
She closed the crate, locked it again. “I wasn’t bluffing.”
Baynes was about to object, then he remembered what she’d said to him in Jenkins’ office about how she considered the vase, with its place in history, to be more precious than mere human life. No, she hadn’t been bluffing. She’d meant every word.
“I believe you.” He reached down to wrap a hand around one of the crate handles. “Okay, then…let’s get this thing home.”
I’m fascinated by eccentrics, particularly those who go to great lengths to be left alone. Although I’m not maniacally reclusive, in this era where privacy has allegedly come to an end, I’ve discovered there’s something to be said for what the late, great Warren Zevon called “splendid isolation.” So my phone number is unlisted, my mail comes to a post office box, I don’t blog or tweet, and my arm had to be bent before I surrendered to the inevitable and started a Facebook page.
Still…I think you can take being a hermit just a little too far.
ALIVE AND WELL, A LONG WAY FROM ANYWHERE
When Jerry Stone died, exactly three minutes and thirty-six seconds went by before anyone on Earth knew he was gone. That was the time it took for the med bracelet on his left wrist to register his final heartbeat and relay that information to the Stone House’s main computer, which in return transmitted an automatic signal across the 40,362,000 miles that currently lay between asteroid 2010 TK7 and Earth.
JSTONE LIFE FACTORS TERMINAL. That was the text of the message, as terse and coldly factual as only a computer could express it. I was asleep when someone minding the graveyard shift at a deep-space communications center in Texas called to tell me the news. I’m embarrassed to admit that the first thing to enter my mind wasn’t that Jerry Stone, my boss for the last forty-two years, was dead, but rather the fact that there’s a two-hour time difference between Houston and Reno, and that the kid who called from Texas hadn’t taken a moment to consider whether an old guy like me might still be in bed at 5 AM.
How rude of Jerry to pass away at such an inconvenient hour.
I got up and made coffee, then went to my desk to read the report sent me via encrypted mail. It wasn’t until I saw that terse message from the Stone House, followed by the flatlined biofeedback from Jerry’s bracelet, that the truth sank in. I don’t know how long I stared at the desk screen, only that my coffee was cold when I picked it up again.
Jeremiah Edward Stone, age 72, was dead. The founder and CEO of ConSpace, once the largest private space corporation, was no longer among the living. Not that anyone would have noticed. It had been more than four decades since Jerry Stone had rubbed elbows with the rest of the human race. Since December 23, 2063, his only companions had been the packs of fogzes he’d raised. Indeed, I was one of few people who’d spoken to him in many years.
Now he was gone, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. Sadness, relief…I was tasting a bit of both, and something else as well: anger. A mystery had surrounded Jerry Stone for all those years. He’d never revealed its answer to anyone. I’d always hoped that he’d tell me, but he never did, and now it appeared that he never would.
“Jerry.” I closed my eyes, let out my breath, and sank back in my chair. “Jerry, Jerry, Jerry…sometimes you really piss me off.”
Then I straightened up, activated the desk’s keyboard, and did what I’d always done for him. I wrote a press release.
Everyone in the world—no, scratch that; everyone in the solar system—knew Jerry Stone. Or at least they thought they did. That’s the price of fame. Your face and voice are familiar to all, but the realities of your everyday existence—what you have for breakfast, your favorite colors, the little things you like or dislike—are trivialities very few people know and which probably wouldn’t interest them even if they did. The greater your celebrity, the more you become a caricature of yourself, until you vanish as a person and simply become a media image.
These are the public facts about Jerry Stone. Born in 2027 to a middle-class family in Decatur, Georgia, he began building his fortune at age 12, when he started using part of his weekly allowance to invest in penny stocks. From his bedroom, Jerry played the stock market the way other kids played computer games; he was a child prodigy when it came to the venture cap
ital investment, and could have taught a Wall Street trader a few tricks. He was making more money than his parents by the time he turned 16, and was already a millionaire when he graduated high school.
For someone like him, college wasn’t necessary. He went anyway, if only because it was a great way to meet girls. In three years he’d graduated from the Yale business school with a Skull and Bones ring on his finger and more women than he could handle. At 21, he was one of the world’s youngest billionaires.
By then, humankind had established itself as a spacefaring civilization. Solar power satellites were in geosynchronous orbit above Earth. Industrial bases had been built on the Moon, mining its regolith for helium-3 and rare-earth minerals. Multi-national companies had established colonies on Mars. The first efforts to mine main-belt asteroids had begun. Even distant Jupiter was on its way to being exploited for its vast reserves of He3. The solar system was the new place to make serious money, and Jerry was among the many major investors who’d bankrolled companies like Skycorp and Uchu-Hiko. But Jerry wasn’t just another entrepreneur looking to score big bucks from space development. In an interview for Fortune, he said that he’d been fascinated by space since childhood, when he’d seen images of the first expedition to reach Mars; indeed, he pointed out that the first stock he’d ever bought was for a small company which manufactured solenoids for orbital satellites. Jerry put money into everything from cars to chickens, but space was always his primary interest; a percentage of the profits he made from the other stuff was sunk into the space industry, and as always he had an uncanny ability to predict which companies were worth the investment.
Sometimes his prescience was scary. No one else foresaw that the major space companies would go bankrupt after the Descartes Station lunar colony declared independence and formed what would eventually become the Pax Astra. Even as the lunar revolution was heating up, Jerry secretly met with other major space investors and laid out the facts as he saw them: if the revolution was successful, it would eventually grow to include the Mars settlements, and anyone who tried to compete with them was doomed because the lunar and Martian colonies would hold all the cards. So the smart thing to do would be to wait until companies like Skycorp were about to fold, as it inevitably would, then sell their stock for whatever it was worth, take the money, and start a new corporation which would do business with the Pax Astra.
The other investors paid attention to Jerry. Most of them, at least. Those who didn’t found themselves holding worthless stock when his predictions turned out to be correct. The investors who knew better than to argue with a 25-year-old wunderkind became the Board of Directors of ConSpace, the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the old establishment. Naturally, they elected Jeremiah Edward Stone as its President and CEO. They had no choice; Jerry was also the majority shareholder.
A number of financial sages, from New York to Hong Kong, said that ConSpace was a gamble. Certainly it was, but it wasn’t a crap-shoot; Jerry knew what he was doing. Once the Mars colonies joined Descartes Station to form the Pax Astra, they discovered that they still needed to do business with Earth if the Pax was going to survive. And since ConSpace had already established itself as the main interplanetary transport company, the Pax had no choice but to contract with ConSpace.
As CEO, Jerry deferred an annual salary in exchange for a percentage from the cost-per-pound surcharge for every payload that went to or from Earth. A number of people thought he was crazy, but he knew exactly what he was doing. By the time he turned 35, Jerry Stone was one of the wealthiest men alive. No one except he and his accountants knew the extent of his assets, but it was estimated to be as much as $100 billion.
Jerry was hardly a recluse in those days. Far from it. He was almost always in the news. One day he was escorting a famous supermodel down the red carpet of a Hollywood premiere. A few days later, he’d be sighted on the aft deck of his ninety-foot yacht, warming himself beneath the Mediterranean sun while another beautiful woman rubbed oil on his back. A week later, he was on the Moon, joining a hiking party to walk the length of the Straight Wall. And then it was back to Earth, to cut the ribbon of another children’s hospital.
Jerry Stone was a man all men aspired to be: billionaire, philanthropist, adventurer, lover, hero. I’m not sure, though, that he truly enjoyed his life. When I saw pictures of him—at the cotillion, at the European race track, at the president’s inaugural ball—it always seemed to me that his smile was just a little too wide, his eyes gleaming just a little too brightly, as if he was consciously forcing himself to be happy, and not quite succeeding.
There were also peculiar aspects of his personality. The fact that he always wore the same outfit—black long-sleeve shirt, black trousers, black socks, black shoes—was obvious, of course, but accepted as a minor eccentricity; indeed, quite a number of guys emulated his style. And it was well-known that Jerry was a strict vegetarian who was revolted by the very sight of meat.
Yet only those close to him knew about his oddest tendencies. He showered at least twice a day, three times if he wasn’t too busy, and washed his hands constantly. One of the women who went to bed with Jerry told me that he insisted upon turning off all the lights before anyone took off their clothes, and that sex was brief, mechanical, and unsatisfying. After a while, he stopped dating women entirely. And once Jerry had enough money that he could set the rules of engagement, his business partners soon found that they almost never had personal meetings with him. Jerry preferred to speak with them via video hookup, even when he was in the same building as the persons who’d made appointments to see him.
Something happened to him. Exactly what, we’ll probably never know. One thing about having money and power: no one can tell you what to do, even when it’s for your own good. In fact, it’s hard to find anyone honest enough to tell you that you need help…and Jerry was known to have a quick temper, particularly when it came to criticism. A psychiatrist told me that, based on the available evidence, he believed Jerry had developed a social phobia that manifested itself in a number of obsessive compulsive disorders. But since Jerry refused to see anyone, voluntary psychiatric examination was unlikely.
At any rate, his public appearances became increasingly infrequent, until he was rarely seen anymore. He lived either on his yacht, which no longer went anywhere but instead became permanently anchored in the San Diego harbor just off Coronado, or in his chalet in the Swiss Alps, which he’d reach by suborbital shuttle from a private spaceport in southern California. Models and movie stars were no longer his consorts, and drop-in visits to four-star restaurants became a thing of the past. ConSpace rolled right along, making money like no other company in the 21st Century, but its founder and CEO became a recluse only occasionally seen on some vice-president’s wall screen.
Someone like Jerry doesn’t withdraw from the public eye without questions being asked, and it wasn’t long before his behavior became the subject of media speculation. The talking heads spent countless hours wondering what was going on; their theories ran from him having some hideous disease, perhaps a form of skin cancer that had permanently disfigured him, to the bizarre notion that he was dead, a victim of an accident that had taken his life, and that ConSpace was covering up his demise by carrying on the pretense that he was still alive. Photographers staked out his yacht, his chalet, even the spaceport, but all their long lenses ever caught was a distant figure, wearing a black overcoat and a slouch hat, who disappeared almost as quickly as he was spotted.
One of those blurred snapshots had appeared on a gossip site the morning I received a request to meet with ConSpace’s executive vice-president. I had just sat down at my desk in the company’s public relations department when I opened the red-flagged email. I stared at the brief message for a minute or so, wondering what I had done that would cause me to be summoned to Alberto Diaz’s office. Was it a press release I had written? Coming back late from my lunch breaks? Was I about to be laid off only eight months after going to work for ConSpace?
I had no idea. The email told me to come at once, so I put on the tie I kept in my desk drawer, left my cube without telling anyone where I was going, and took the elevator up to the top floor.
I thought I was about to be fired. I wasn’t, but had I known what was about to happen, I would have quit right then and there.
Diaz’s assistant was apparently expecting me. A perfect smile and a lilted request to wait just a moment, then she levitated through the oak door behind her. I had just enough time to admire the Chinese silk tapestries before she reappeared. Mr. Diaz would see me now, and would I like coffee?
You’re usually not offered coffee just before you’re fired, so I relaxed a little as she ushered me into Diaz’s office. My entire department could have been relocated to that one room; the carpet alone was probably worth more than my salary. Alberto Diaz was seated behind an antique chestnut desk in front of floor-to-ceiling windows; Houston skyscrapers formed a backdrop behind him. He stood up as I walked in. A brief handshake, then I took a seat in a leather armchair across the desk from him.
I’d never met Alberto Diaz before. When I’d been interviewed for my job, the person who eventually hired me was the PR department’s senior manager. This was my first visit to the executive suite. So I sat nervously and sipped the coffee Diaz’s secretary brought me while her boss studied his desk screen. There was a cryptic smile on his face as his eyes moved back and forth, and every now and then he made a satisfied grunt. Alberto Diaz was in his mid-sixties, overweight, and losing his hair. Something about him bespoke a lifelong bully who’d learned how to imitate a gentleman.
“Lauderdale,” he said at last, still not looking at me even as he said my name. “Paul Lauderdale…very, very interesting.” He nodded to the screen. “Undergraduate degree in journalism, University of Missouri. Postgrad studies at Columbia University, no degree. Three years at the Times, then you left journalism and went to work as a press secretary for Representative Joanna Robeson of New York…”