The Sam Gunn Omnibus (111 page)

“Then
why are you here?”

“Because
every engineer I hire costs me money, and money is something I don’t have much
of, that’s why.”

“But
the High Asia Sunsat Combine must be paying at least minimum rates for your maintenance
contract.”

He
chewed thoughtfully for a moment; the oatmeal was that lumpy. Then he swallowed
and said, “Nobody would sign a contract with S. Gunn Enterprises unless our bid
was considerable
under
standard rates. Your
sweetheart Ms. Chatsworth has seen to that.”

“But
that’s illegal. It’s restraint of...” My voice trailed off as I realized the
import of what he was telling me.

“C.C.
and her connections in the government saw to it that I got screwed out of my
old corporation. She’s got a vendetta going against me. The only work I can
find is these crappy maintenance contracts, and even then I’ve got to do it at
a helluva lot less than standard pay.”

I
heard myself ask weakly, “Well, how many contracts
do you have?”

“Six,
right now. Three sunsats, a couple of orbiting astronomical telescopes, and the
laundry facility at the new retirement center in Selene City.”

“Laundry?”

He
laughed bitterly. “Great job for a pioneer, isn’t it? Washing old folks’ dirty
sheets.”

Sam had truly been a pioneering
entrepreneur, I knew. The zero-gee hotel, the first asteroid mining expedition,
even the early work of cleaning debris out of the low-orbit region around
Earth—he had been the trailblazer. Now he was reduced to maintenance contracts,
and hiring fourth-rate technicians because he couldn’t afford better.

Yet... somehow he was getting rich
on the commodities futures market.

“Well,” I said, “at least maintenance
contracts provide a steady income.”

“Oh yeah, sure.” A frown puckered
his brows. “They’re usually safe and easy, all right. But this bunch of clowns
trying to operate Sunsat Seventeen are making this particular job a pain in the
butt.”

“The magnetrons?”

“The everything!” Sam exclaimed. “The
hardware’s crappy. The technicians don’t know what they’re doing. And I’m
supposed to make it all come out peachy-keen.”

“In the meantime, though,” I pointed
out, “you’re piling up quite a fortune in the commodities market.”

He toyed with the oatmeal remaining
in his bowl. “Am
I
?” he asked softly.

“According to our records, you
certainly are.”

Sam sighed mightily, like a man
weary of being dragged down by lesser mortals. “I’ve been pretty lucky, I guess.
In the market, I mean.”

From the gleam in Sam’s eye, I knew
he was enjoying the fact that C.C. was annoyed enough to send me to investigate
him. He certainly did not appear to be worried about my presence. Not in the
slightest.

After breakfast I retired to my
locker and plugged in my pocket computer, scrunching myself up close to its
tiny microphone so that my lips almost touched it. I didn’t want Sam to hear me.

All that morning and right through
lunch I searched through Sam’s records. Not that I hadn’t before, but now I was
looking specifically into his transactions in the commodities market. There was
a pattern to be found; there always is, in any crooked scheme. Find the pattern
and you find the crook.

It quickly became clear that Sam
was buying and selling almost exclusively in the metals market: meteoric iron
and precious metals, mostly. He speculated on the cargoes bound inward from the
Asteroid Belt on the factory ships, guessing which ships would return laden
with profitable cargoes and which would not. He was right ninety-three percent
of the time, an impossible score for pure luck.

The commodities futures market was
a crapshoot, and like all gambles, the odds were stacked against the gambler.
Yet Sam was beating those odds a staggering ninety-three percent of the time.
Impossible, unless he was cheating somehow.

You see, there were a huge number
of variables in each mission out to the asteroids, too many for anyone to guess
right ninety-three percent of the time. Or even fifty-three percent of the
time, for that matter.

There were thousands of independent
miners out there in the Asteroid Belt hunting down usable asteroids, chunks of
metals and minerals that could be mined profitably. The factory ships went out
on Hohmann transfer orbits, using the minimum amount of energy, spending the
least amount of money to reach a destination in the belt.

Picking the right destination was
crucial. No sense spending a year in space to arrive at a spot where no miners
and no ore were waiting for you. Rendezvous points and times were selected
beforehand, but a thousand unforeseen factors could ruin your plans. Usually
the small mining teams auctioned off their ores to the highest bidder. But
often enough they decided not to wait for you because somebody else showed up
with ready credits for the ores.

All these factors were heavily
influenced by timing and distance. The Asteroid Belt is mostly empty space,
even though there are millions of asteroids floating out there between Mars and
Jupiter. Think of mega-trillions of cubic kilometers of nothingness, with a few
grains of dust drifting through the void: that’s what the so-called “belt” is
like.

It takes propulsion energy—which means
money—to maneuver in space, to move the millions of kilometers between usable
asteroids. The miners were mostly small-time independent operators who were
always short on funds; they were always willing to take immediate credits
instead of waiting for your particular factory ship to reach the rendezvous
point you were aiming for.

There were more pending lawsuits
over broken contracts for ore deliveries than there were divorce cases on
Earth. The miners evaded the law, by and large, because it cost a corporation more
to catch and fine them than the fines could possibly return. Besides, fining a
miner was a study in frustration anyway. Most of them simply declared
bankruptcy and started up again under a new name.

All this made the commodities market
an arena fraught with uncertainties. How do you know which factory ship will
come back with a rich cargo of metals or minerals? How can you guess what such
cargoes will be worth on the market, when it takes a year or more for the
factory ship to make the return journey to Earth?

The answer is, you wait as long as
you possibly can before you invest your money (or, more accurately, make your
bet). The safest thing to do is to wait until a factory ship has actually taken
on a specific cargo of metals, check with the price of such metals on the
futures market, and only then sink your money into that particular ship.

So investors waited eagerly for
communications from the various factory ships. It takes more than half an hour
for a message to travel from the belt to the Earth-Moon system. There’s no way
around that time lag. Even moving at the speed of light as they do, electronic
or optical laser messages average about thirty minutes to cover the distance
between the belt and the Earth-Moon region.

As soon as a favorable message is
received, investors start bidding up the price of that ship’s cargo.

But some investors, the ones with more
guts than brains, put their money into a ship’s cargo
before
the good word comes from the Asteroid Belt. They bet that the news will be good
before the news is received. Most of those investors quickly go broke.

Sam Gunn invested that way. And he
was not going broke. Far from it. He was getting rich.

There was no way for him to do that
legally. Of that, C.C. Chatsworth was convinced. So was I. But I had to find
out how he was cheating the system. Or face the wrath of C.C. She was
determined to put
somebody
’
s
testicles
on her office wall. If she couldn’t get Sam’s, she’d take mine.

The OTV duly arrived and carried
Sam and me back to Selene. The city was almost entirely underground, as all
lunar cities were in those days. Even the imposing grand plaza, as long as six
football fields with a dome of seventy-five meters’ height, was totally
enclosed, except for the huge curved glassteel windows at its far end.

The plaza was grassed and
landscaped and dotted with flowering shrubbery, however, so it looked very
Earthlike even though the light lunar gravity allowed tourists to soar like
birds on big, colorful plastic wings they rented.

The ISC was paying for a minimum-sized
studio apartment at the government-rented set of rooms on Level One, barely
large enough for a bed, mini-kitchen and phone-booth-sized bathroom. I had to hunch
over to squeeze into the shower.

Sam, on the other hand, ensconced me
in a spacious office next to his own, in the imposing headquarters tower of
Moonbase Inc., where he had rented space for his own S. Gunn Enterprises. I was
surprised that his offices were so spacious, until I realized that he slept in
his own office and saved himself the cost of an apartment. It was strictly
against the building’s regulations, of course, but somehow Sam managed to get
away with it.

I
spent days
digging into the personnel files of each and every individual who might be
tipping Sam off about ore shipments from the Asteroid Belt. Using the
I
SC’s powers of subpoena I investigated their
personal financial records. I could find nothing that hinted at bribery or
collusion.

Besides, how could anyone tip Sam
before the rest of the market? The news from the factory ships traveled at the
speed of light from the Asteroid Belt to the Earth-Moon system. There was no
way around that.

Evenings I spent with Sam. He wined
and dined me as if I were a long-lost brother or a wealthy potential customer.
He even found dates for me, lovely young women who seemed more interested in
Sam than in me. But nevertheless, Sam saw to it that I was not lonely at
Selene. I knew he was trying to bribe me, or at least make me feel that he was
a fine person and incapable of chicanery. Yet I began to realize how lonely,
how empty, my life had been up to that point. Being with Sam was fun!

On the other hand, each day I received
a phone call from C.C., her quivering, jowled face grimacing at me angrily.” ‘Ave
you nailed ‘im yet?” she would demand. Each day she grew angrier, her fleshy
face redder. It got so bad that I stopped taking all incoming calls. But she
called anyway and left messages of rage that escalated daily.

I
became so
desperate that I asked him point-blank, “How do you do it, Sam?”

“Do what?”

“Cheat the market.”

We were in Selene’s finest
restaurant, Earthview, waiting for our evening’s companions to show up. The
restaurant was deep underground, rather than in the plaza. On the Moon, where
the airless surface is bathed in deadly radiation and peppered by meteoric
infall, the deeper below-ground you are, the more your prestige. Earthview was
on Selene’s bottom level, where the executives kept their own plush quarters.

The restaurant was several storeys
high, however. The volume had originally been an actual cave; now it was
occupied by tiers of dining tables covered with the finest napery and
silverware made from asteroidal metal. No two tables were on the same level.
Each one stood on a pedestal atop an impossibly slim column of shining
stainless steel while curving ramps twined between them. On Earth the human
waiters and bussers would have been exhausted after an hour’s work. Here in the
low gravity of the Moon they could work four-hour shifts with comparative ease.
Still, one tipped generously at Earthview.

“Cheat the market?” Sam put on such
a look of hurt innocence that I had to laugh.

“Come on, Sam,” I said. “You know
that you’re cheating and I know that you know.”

He blinked his eyes several times.
They were green now. I could have sworn they’d been blue. But Sam was wearing a
trim leisure suit of forest green, and his eyes almost matched his attire.
Contact lenses? I wondered.

“How could I possibly cheat the market?”
he asked.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said.

Sam broke into a boyish grin. “Look,
Zorro old pal, your ISC auditors have been plowing through my company’s files
for more than a week now. They’ve even snooped into my personal accounts. What
have they found?”