The Sam Gunn Omnibus (109 page)

He glowered at me as the meeting
broke up and the board members filed out of the conference room.

“I’ll get you for this,” he growled
at me.

“No you won’t. You’re going to
resign from the corporation; you and Ms. Marlowe, both.”

His eyes went wide. “You ... that’s
blackmail!”

“A little trick I learned from Sam
Gunn,” I gloated.

That was how I became Chief
Executive Officer of Rockledge Industries. I owe it all to Sam. I almost felt
sorry for the contemptible runt, leaving him to his fate with the Godfather.

Until, that is, I saw a video drama
featuring a craggy-faced, raspy-voiced actor named Gus Popov.

An actor! The whole business of the
Mafia had been an act, a ploy, a swindle by that little sonofabitch to bilk me
out of the twenty billion Sam needed to build the Hell Crater complex. I wanted
to kill him. I wanted to—

I
hesitated in mid-fury.
I had actually come out of this deal rather well. I was now CEO of Rockledge
Industries and all the problems with Hell Crater had been pinned on my
predecessor. Sam had actually done me a favor: unknowingly, I was sure, but I was
far better off now than I’d been a year earlier.

I
never found out
who Ms. Chang really was: probably another actor; maybe one of Hell’s Belles,
for all I knew. A pity. She was certainly beautiful. As for Sam’s whereabouts,
who knew? The solar system’s a big place, with plenty of room for a scoundrel
like Sam to hide. I had the feeling, though, that he had never left Hell
Crater. Why should he? He owned the place!

I
started thinking
about how Rockledge might take it away from him. After all, he had squeezed
Rockledge out of Hell Crater; there must be a way for us to squeeze him back.

It was about six months after I had
moved into the old CEOs office when I got a call from—guess who?

“Hi, Pierre, you double-dealing
SOB,” Sam said cheerfully. “Hell Crater’s a big moneymaker. Thanks for
financing it.”

I
was so furious I couldn’t
do anything but splutter at Sam’s image on my wall screen.

“Calm down, calm down!” Sam said, grinning like an evil elf. “How’d you
like to get your money back? I’ve got this deal cooking for a transit system
out to the Asteroid Belt....”

JADE TERMINATED THE D’ARGENT
NARRATIVE AND CALLED
back her unfinished message
to Jim Gradowsky.

“Jim,”
she said, “I just listened to D’Argent’s story. Its good material. He’s so
obviously biased against Sam that he makes Sam look almost like an angel. Let’s
go with it.”

Spence
called from the bed, “You getting hungry, Jade? It’s almost dinner hour.”

She
smiled at her husband. “Just let me finish this and then we can dress for
dinner.”

“I’ve
got to take a shower,” Spence said.

“Me
too. You go first while I finish this message to Jim.”

Spence
gave her a wolfish grin. “I’ll wait. Then we can shower together.”

“In
that teeny little stall?”

“We’ll
have to stay very close to each other.”

Jade smiled back at him. “Okay. Give me a minute.”

Turning back to the wall screen, she went on, “Jim, I got this story out
of the blue. A guy named Hashimoto sent it to me at the office and Monica
forwarded it to me. Apparently he saw the bio and figured he’d put in what he
knows about Sam. It’s a good story. I think we should include it in the
follow-on.”

“NOBODY CAN CONSISTENTLY MAKE MONEY
IN THE
com
modities
market,” she said, puffing hard. “The little bastard is cheating, some’ow.”

“How?” I asked.

Wiping a rivulet of sweat from her
brow, she answered, “That’s what I want you to find out.”

We were dangling on the sidelines
of the volleyball court. The game is rather different in zero gravity. The net
is circular, held in the middle of the court by hair-thin monofilament wires.
Hit one of those wires and it will slice you like a loaf of salami in a
delicatessen. The court itself is spherical, the curving walls hard and
unpadded glassteel. The ball can take strange bounces off those walls. So can
the players.

There were hardly any spectators
watching from the other side of the glassteel. This was a private game,
something of a grudge match, as a matter of fact.

Carole C. Chatsworth was a big,
blonde, blowsy Cockney who looked and sounded as if she belonged in some cheap
burlesque show. Actually, she was a brilliant, hard-driving, absolutely
ruthless bureaucrat who had worked her way to the top of the Interplanetary
Security Commission’s enforcement division.

And she was a cutthroat volleyball
player, the kind who would slam you off the wall or push you into the wire if
you got in her way.

She was also my boss, and she was
convinced that Sam Gunn was illegally reaping a fortune on the commodities
futures market.

“No one can be as lucky as that
little sod,” she told me, her eyes following the flying, sweating players.” ‘E’s
rigging the market some’ow.”

When C.C. gets an idea in her head,
forget about trying to argue her out of it. The only two questions she’ll put
up with are: What do you want me to do? and, How soon?

She had allowed herself to bloat up
enormously in zero-gee. The rumor was that she’d originally come up to this
orbiting hotel when Sam Gunn owned it and Sam had bedded her. Or maybe the
other way around. After all, it was supposed to be a “honeymoon hotel” in those
days. Sam’s motto for the place was, “If you like waterbeds, you’ll love
zero-gee.”

C.C. never went back Earthside. She
moved the ISC headquarters to the hotel, and actually got the Commission to buy
half the orbital habitat to provide room for her staff’s offices and living
quarters. She was ready to bed down with Sam for life. But Sam pulled one of
his disappearing acts on her, leaving her humiliated, furious, and certain that
his only interest in her had been to get her to buy out his share of the hotel
and run off to the Asteroid Belt with her money.

Maybe hell hath no fury like a
woman jilted, but C.C. assuaged her anguish with food. She grew larger and
larger, gobbling everything in sight, especially chocolate. Whenever a friend,
or a fellow bureaucrat or even a physician commented on her size, she laughed
bitterly and said, “But I weigh exactly the same as when I first came up ‘ere:
zero!”

Now she looked like a lumpy
dirigible in a soggy, stained sweat suit as she waited for her next turn in the
volleyball competition.

“I thought we’d fixed the little
bastard’s wagon when ‘e tried to sue the Pope,” she muttered, watching the
volleyball action with narrowed, piggy eyes. “But some’ow ‘e’s making ‘imself
rich in the futures market. ‘E’s cheating. I know ‘e is.”

I
did not demur. It
would have done no good, especially to my career.

“You’re going to Selene City with
the team that’s auditing Sam’s books,” she told me. “Officially, you’re one of
the auditors. That’ll be your cover.”

My real job, she told me
very
firmly, was “to find out how that little cheating, womanizing, swindling
scumbag of a deviant ‘umper is rigging the commodities market.”

So off I went to the Moon to find
Sam Gunn.

I
SUPPOSE I
should introduce myself. My name is
Zoilo Hashimoto, the only son of a Japanese-American construction engineer and
a Cuban baseball player whose career was cut short by her pregnancy with me.
Dad was killed before I was born in the great tsunami that wiped out the hotel
complex he was building on Tarawa. Mom returned to baseball as an umpire after
her second marriage broke up, which was after my four sisters were born. She
was known as a strict enforcer of the rules on the field. Believe me, she was
just as strict at home.

Somewhere in my genetic heritage
there must have been a basketball player, for despite the diminutive size of
both my parents I am nearly two meters tall—six feet, five inches in
old-fashioned English units.

I have been told I am handsome,
with deep brown eyes and high cheek bones that make me look decidedly oriental.
Yet I have never been very successful with women. Perhaps I am too shy, too
uncertain of myself. I once tried to grow a beard, but it looked terrible, and
the unwritten dress code of the ISC demands clean-shaven men. The unwritten
rules are always the important ones, of course.

I
had started my
career in law enforcement, figuring that I could safely retire after twenty
years of police work with enough of a pension to follow my one true passion:
archeology. I longed to help search for the ancient cities that were being
unearthed on Mars (pardon the unintentional pun). I was never a street officer;
the robots had taken over such dangerous duties by the time I graduated college
with my degree in criminology. Instead, I specialized in tracking down
financial crooks. I worked with computers and electronic ferrets rather than
guns and stun wands.

But enough about me. Let me tell
you how I met Sam Gunn.

I
DUTIFULLY WENT to the Moon, to Sam’s corporate
headquarters at Selene City, foolishly expecting Sam to be there, especially
with a team of ISC auditors combing through his records. But Sam wasn’t, of
course.

He was out at a new solar power
satellite that was just going online to provide fifteen gigawatts of electrical
power to the growing industrial cities of central Asia.

Years earlier Sam had been one of
the first to go out to the asteroids to mine their metals and minerals. He had
amassed a considerable fortune and a fleet of ore-processing factory ships. But
then disaster struck and he lost it all. In desperation he had tried to sue the
Pope, and although he got what he wanted without going to trial, he quickly
lost it all. C.C. Chatsworth had been a major force in seeing to it that Sam
was broken and humiliated.

But now he was getting rich again.
In the commodities market, of all places.

Sam’s present company was in
business to service and maintain several solar power satellites and other
facilities in Earth orbit and on the Moon. And he was out at the newest of the sunsats,
rather than in his offices in Selene City.

I
was reluctant to
go the satellite to meet him. Those huge sunsats ride in geosynchronous orbit,
nearly thirty-six thousand kilometers above the equator, on the fringes of the
outer Van Allen Belt. There’s a lot of ionizing radiation out there, and I didn’t
like the idea of living in it, even inside a shielded space suit.

But that’s where Sam was and that’s
where I had to go. Or face the sizeable wrath of the sizeable C.C. Chatsworth.

So I rode an OTV (orbital transfer
vehicle, to landlubbers) from Selene to Sunsat Seventeen. An OTV is the most
utilitarian of utility vehicles, nothing more than a collection of tankage,
cargo containers, crew pod and engines.

I
sat crammed
behind the two pilots during the whole nine-hour trip, staring out the curving
port of the crew pod, watching the graceful blue and white sphere of Earth grow
and grow until it was a massive, dazzling presence of overwhelming beauty, deep
blue oceans and resplendent white clouds, wrinkled old mountains with bony
fingers of snow clutching their crests. Even the sprawling cities looked almost
pretty from this vantage point.

Then the sunsat swung into view,
blocking out everything else, huge and square and so close that my heart
clutched in my chest; I thought we were going to plunge right into it.

It was ten kilometers long and six
klicks across, a huge flat expanse of solar cells that drank in sunlight and
converted it silently to electricity. Off at one end were the magnetrons that transformed
the electricity into microwave energy, and the big steerable antennas that
beamed the microwaves to receiving antenna farms on Earth.

I
had expected the
sunsat to glitter and gleam, like a jewel or a huge light in the sky. Instead
it was dark and silent, greedily soaking up sunlight, not reflecting it.