by Ben Bova
“What’s fer yew?” she asked. She looked like she was into weight lifting. The gray sweatshirt she was wearing had the sleeves cut off; plenty of muscle in her arms. The expression on her squarish face was no-nonsense, unsmiling.
“West Tennessee,” said Sam. “Right?”
The bartender looked surprised. “Huntsville, ’Bama.”
“Heart of the Tennessee Valley,” Sam said. “I come from the bluegrass country, myself.”
Which was a complete lie. Sam was born in either Nevada or Pennsylvania, according to which of his dossiers you read. Or maybe Luzon, in the Philippines.
Well, in less than six minutes, Sam had the bartender laughing and trading redneck jokes with him. Her name was Belinda. I just sat beside him and watched the master at work. He could charm the devil out of hell, Sam could.
Sam ordered Tennessee corn mash for both of us. While he chatted up the bartender, though, I noticed that the place was emptying out. The three guys at the bar got up and left first, one by one. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the guys in the booths heading for the door. No big rush, but within a few minutes they had all walked out. On tiptoes.
I said nothing, but soon enough Sam realized we were alone.
“What happened?” he asked Belinda. “We chased everybody out?”
She shook her head. “Rock Rats worry about strangers. They prob’ly think you’re maybe a tax assessor or a safety inspector from the IAA.”
Sam laughed. “Me? From the IAA? Hell, no. I’m Sam Gunn. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”
“No! Sam Gunn? You couldn’t be!”
“That’s me,” Sam said, with his Huckleberry Finn grin.
“You were the first guy out here in the belt,” said Belinda, real admiration glowing in her eyes.
“Yep. Captured a nickel/iron asteroid and towed her back to Earth’s orbit.”
“Pittsburgh. I heard about it. Took you a couple of years, didn’t it?”
Sam nodded. He was enjoying the adulation.
“That was a long time ago,” Belinda said. “I thought you’d be a lot older.”
“I am.”
She laughed, a hearty roar that made the glasses on the back bar rattle. “Rejuve therapy, right?”
“Why not?”
Just then, a red-haired mountain strode into the bar. One of the biggest men I’ve ever seen. He didn’t look fat, either: just big, with a shaggy mane of brick-red hair and a shaggier beard to match.
He walked right up to us.
“You’re Sam Gunn.” It wasn’t a question.
“Right,” said Sam. Swiveling toward me, he added, “And this young fellow here is Garret G. Garrison III.”
“The third, huh?” the redhead huffed at me. “What happened to the first two?”
“Hung for stealin’ horses,” I lied, putting on my thickest Wild West accent.
Belinda laughed at that. The redhead simply huffed.
“You’re George Ambrose, right?” Sam asked.
“Big George, that’s me.”
“The mayor of this fair community,” Sam added.
“They elected me th’ fookin’ chief,” Big George said, almost belligerently. “Now, whattaya want to see me about?”
“About Lars Fuchs.”
George’s eyes went cold and narrow. Belinda backed away from us and went down the bar, suddenly busy with the glassware.
“What about Lars Fuchs?” George asked.
“I want to meet him. I’ve got a business proposition for him.”
George folded his beefy arms across his massive chest. “Fuchs is an exile. Hasn’t been anywhere near Ceres for dog’s years. Hell, this fookin’ habitat wasn’t even finished when we tossed ’im out. We were still livin’ down inside th’ rock.”
Sam rested his elbows on the bar and smiled disarmingly at Big George. “Well, I’ve got a business proposition for Fuchs and I need to talk to him.”
“What kind of a business proposition?”
With a perfectly straight face Sam answered, “I’m thinking of starting a tourist service here in the belt. You know, visit Ceres, see a mining operation at work on one of the asteroids, go out in a suit and chip some gold or diamonds to bring back home. That kind of thing.”
George said nothing, but I could see the wheels turning behind that wild red mane of his.
“It could mean an influx of money for your people,” Sam went on, in his best snake-oil spiel. “A hotel here in orbit around Ceres, rich tourists flooding in. Lots of money.”
George unbent his arms, but he still remained standing. “What’s all this got to do with Fuchs?”
“Shiploads full of rich tourists might make a tempting target for a pirate.”
“Bullshit.”
“You don’t think he’d attack tour ships?”
“Lars wouldn’t do that. He’s not a fookin’ pirate. Not in that sense, anyway.”
“I’d rather hear that from him,” Sam said. “In fact, I’ve got to have his personal assurance before my backers will invest in the scheme.”
George stared at Sam for a long moment, deep suspicion written clearly on his face. “Nobody knows where Lars is,” he said at last. “You might as well go back home. Nobody here’s gonna give you any help.”
We left the bar with Big George glowering at our backs so hard, I could feel the heat. Following the maps on the wall screens in the passageways, we found the adjoining rooms that I had booked for us.
“Now what?” I asked Sam as I unpacked my travel bag.
“Now we wait.”
Sam had simply tossed his bag on the bed of his room and barged through the connecting door into mine. We had packed for only a three-day stay at Ceres, although we had more gear stowed in Achernar. Something had to happen pretty quick, I thought.
“Wait for what?” I asked.
“Developments.”
I put my carefully folded clothes in a drawer, hung my extra pair of wrinkle-proof slacks in the closet, and set up my toiletries in the lavatory. Sam made himself comfortable in the room’s only chair, a recliner designed to look like an astronaut’s couch. He cranked it down so far, I thought he was going to take a nap.
Sitting on the bed, I told him, “Sam, I’ve got to call Judge Myers.”
“Go right ahead,” he said.
“What should I tell her?”
“Tell her we’ll be back in time for the wedding.”
I doubted that.
Two days passed without a word from anyone. Sam even tried to date Belinda, he was getting so desperate, but she wouldn’t have anything to do with him.
“They all know Fuchs,” Sam said to me. “They like him and they’re protecting him.”
It was common knowledge that Humphries had sworn to kill Fuchs, but Amanda had married Humphries on the condition that he left Fuchs alone. Everybody in Ceres, from Belinda the barmaid to the last Rock Rat, thought that we were working for Humphries, trying to find Fuchs and murder him. Or at least locate him, so one of Humphries’s hired killers could knock him off. Fuchs was out there in the belt somewhere, cruising through that dark emptiness like some Flying Dutchman, alone, taking a strangely measured kind of vengeance on unmanned Humphries ships.
I had other fish to fry, though. I wanted to find out what was on the chip that Amanda had given Sam. Her message to her ex-husband. What did she want to tell him? Fuchs was a thorn in Humphries’s side; maybe only a small thorn, but he drew blood, nonetheless. Humphries would pay a fortune for that message, and I intended to sell it to him.
But I had to get it away from Sam first.
Judge Myers was not happy with my equivocating reports to her. Definitely not happy.
There’s no way to have a conversation in real time between Ceres and Earth; the distance makes it impossible. It takes
nearly half an hour for a message to cross one-way, even when the two bodies are at their closest. So I sent reports to Judge Myers and—usually within an hour—I’d get a response from her.
After my first report, she had a wry grin on her face when she called back. “Garrison, I know it’s about as easy to keep Sam in line as nailing tapioca to a wall in zero G. But all the plans for the wedding are set, it’s going to be the biggest social event of the year. You’ve got to make sure that he’s here. I’m depending on you, Garrison.”
A day later, her smile had disappeared. “The wedding’s only a week from now, Garrison,” she said after my second call to her. “I want that little scoundrel at the altar!”
Third call, the next day: “I don’t care what he’s doing! Get him back here! Now!”
That’s when Sam came up with his bright idea.
“Pack up your duds, Gar,” he announced brightly. “We’re going to take a little spin around the belt.”
I was too surprised to ask questions. In less than an hour, we were back in Achernar and heading out from Ceres. Sam had already filed a flight plan with the IAA controllers. As far as they were concerned, Sam was going to visit three specific asteroids, which might be used as tourist stops if and when he started his operation in the belt. Of course, I knew that once we cleared Ceres, there was no one and nothing that could hold him to that plan.
“What are we doing?” I asked, sitting in the right-hand seat of the cockpit. “Where are we going?”
“To meet Fuchs,” said Sam.
“You’ve made contact with him?”
“Nope,” Sam replied, grinning as if he knew something nobody else knew. “But I’m willing to bet somebody has. Maybe Big George. Fuchs saved his life once; did you know that?”
“But how—?”
“It’s simple,” Sam answered before I could finish the question. “We let it be known that we want to see Fuchs. Everybody says they don’t know where he is. We go out into the belt, away from everything, including snoops who might rat out Fuchs to Martin Humphries. Somebody from Chrysalis calls Fuchs and tells him about us. Fuchs intercepts our ship to see what I want. I give him Amanda’s message chip. QED.”
It made a certain amount of sense. But I had my doubts.
“What if Fuchs just blasts us?”
“Not his style. He’s only attacked unmanned ships.”
“He wiped out an HSS base on Vesta, didn’t he? Killed dozens.”
“That was during the war between him and Humphries. Ancient history. He hasn’t attacked a crewed ship since he’s been exiled.”
“But suppose—”
The communications console pinged.
“Hah!” Sam gloated. “There he is now.”
But the image that took form on the comm screen wasn’t Lars Fuchs’s face. It was Jill Myers.
She was beaming a smile that could’ve lit up Selene City for a month. “Sam, I’ve got a marvelous idea. I know you’re wrapped up in some kind of mysterious mission out there in the belt, and the wedding’s only a few days off, so . . .”
She hesitated, like somebody about to spring a big surprise. “So instead of you coming back Earthside for the wedding, I’m bringing the wedding out to you! All the guests and everything. In fact, I’m on the torch ship Statendaam right now! We break Earth orbit in about an hour. I’ll see you in five days, Sam, and we can be married just as we planned!”
To say Sam was surprised would be like saying Napoleon was disturbed by Waterloo. Or McKenzie was inconvenienced when his spacecraft crashed into the Lunar Apennines. Or—well, you get the idea.
Sam looked stunned, as if he’d been pole-axed between the eyes. He just slumped in the pilot’s chair, dazed, his eyes unfocused for several minutes.
“She can’t come out here,” he muttered at last.
“She’s already on her way,” I said.
“But she’ll ruin everything. If she comes barging out here, Fuchs’ll never come within a lightyear and a half of us.”
“How’re you going to stop her?”
Sam thought about that for all of a half second. “I can’t stop her. But I don’t have to make it easy for her to find me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Run silent, run deep.” With deft finger, Sam turned off the ship’s tracking beacon and telemetry transmitter.
“Sam! The controllers at Ceres will think we’ve been destroyed!”
He grinned wickedly. “Let ’em. If they don’t know where we are, they can’t point Jill at us.”
“But Fuchs won’t know where we are.”
“Oh, yes, he will,” Sam insisted. “Somebody at Ceres has already given him our flight plan. Big George, probably.”
“Sam,” I said patiently, “you filed that flight plan with the IAA. They’ll tell Judge Myers. She’ll come out looking for you.”
“Yeah, but she’ll be several days behind. By that time the IAA controllers’ll tell her we’ve disappeared. She’ll go home and weep for me.”
“Or start searching for your remains.”
He shot me an annoyed glance. “Anyway, we’ll meet with Fuchs before she gets here, most likely.”
“You hope.”
His grin wobbled a little.
I thought the most likely scenario was that Fuchs would ignore us and Judge Myers would search for us, hoping that Sam’s disappearance didn’t mean he was dead. Once she found us, I figured, she’d kill Sam herself.
It was eerie, out there in the belt. Flatlanders back on Earth think that the asteroid belt is a dangerous region, a-chock with boulders, so crowded that you have to maneuver like a kid in a computer game to avoid getting smashed.
Actually, it’s empty. Dark and cold and four times farther from the sun than the earth is. Most of the asteroids are the size of dust flakes. The valuable ones, maybe a few meters to a kilometer or so across, are so few and far between that you have to hunt for them. You can cruise through the belt blindfolded, and your chances of getting hit even by a pebble-sized ’roid are pretty close to nil.
Of course, a pebble could shatter your ship if it hits you with enough velocity.
So we were running silent, but following the flight plan Sam had registered with the IAA. We got to the first rock Sam had scheduled and loitered around it for half a day. No sign of Fuchs. If he was anywhere nearby, he was running as silently as we were.
“He’s gotta be somewhere around here,” Sam said as we broke orbit and headed for the next asteroid on his list. “He’s gotta be.”
I could tell that Sam was feeling Judge Myers’s eager breath on the back of his neck.
Me, I had a different problem. I wanted to get that message chip away from Sam long enough to send a copy of it to Martin Humphries. With a suitable request for compensation, of course. Fifty million would do nicely, I thought. A hundred mil would be even better.
But how to get the chip out of Sam’s pocket? He kept it on his person all the time; even slept with it.
So it floored me when, as we were eating breakfast in Achernar’s cramped little galley on our third day out, Sam fished the fingernail-sized chip out of his breast pocket and handed it to me.
“Gar,” he said solemnly, “I want you to hide this someplace where nobody can find it, not even me.”
I was staggered. “Why . . . ?”
“Just a precaution,” he said, his face more serious than I’d ever seen it before. “When Fuchs shows up, things might get rough. I don’t want to know where the chip is.”
“But the whole point of this flight is to deliver it to him.”
He nodded warily. “Yeah, Humphries must know we’re looking for Fuchs. He’s got IAA people on his payroll. Hell, half the people in Ceres might be willing to rat on us. Money talks, pal. Humphries might not know why we’re looking for Fuchs, but he knows we’re t
rying to find him.”
“Humphries wants to find Fuchs too,” I said. “And kill him, no matter what he promised his wife.”
“Damned right. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a ship tailing us.”
“I haven’t seen anything on the radar plot.”
“So what? A stealth ship could avoid radar. But not the hair on the back of my neck.”
“You think we’re being followed?”
“I’m sure of it.”
By the seven sinners of Cincinnati, I thought. This is starting to look like a class reunion! We’re jinking around in the belt, looking for Fuchs. Judge Myers is on her way, with a complete wedding party. And now Sam thinks there’s an HSS stealth ship lurking out there somewhere, waiting for us to find Fuchs so they can pounce on him.
But all that paled into insignificance for me as I stared down at the tiny chip Sam had placed in the palm of my hand.
I had it in my grasp! Now the trick was to contact Humphries without letting Sam know of it.
I couldn’t sleep that night. We were approaching the second asteroid on Sam’s itinerary on a dead-reckoning trajectory. No active signals going out from the ship except for the short-range collision avoidance radar. We’d take up a parking orbit around the unnamed rock midmorning tomorrow.
I waited until my eyes were adapted to the darkness of the sleeping compartment, then peeked down over the edge of my bunk to see if Sam was really asleep. He was on his side, face to the bulkhead, his legs pulled up slightly in a sort of fetal position. Breathing deep and regular.
He’s asleep, I told myself. As quietly as a wraith, I slipped out of my bunk and tiptoed in my bare feet to the cockpit, carefully shutting the hatches of the sleeping compartment and the galley, so there’d be no noise to waken Sam.
I’m pretty good at decrypting messages. It’s a useful talent for a con man, and I had spent long hours at computers during my one and only jail stretch to learn the tricks of the trade.
Of course, I could just offer the chip for sale to Humphries without knowing what was on it. He’d pay handsomely for a message that his wife wanted to give to Lars Fuchs.