The Sam Gunn Omnibus (69 page)

This morning we got an order from
the International Astronautical Authority—bless ‘em—that forbids us from mining
any more asteroids until further notice.

A moratorium on asteroid mining!
Only temporary, they say. But “temporary” to those lard-bottomed bureaucrats
could mean years! I could be old and senile before they lift the moratorium.

Those fatheaded drones claim that
we’ve perturbed the orbit of Aphrodite so much that there’s a chance it might
strike the Earth. There’s not much left of Aphrodite, but she’s still big
enough to cause damage

wherever
she lands. The media are already talking about the “killer asteroid” and
running stories about how an asteroid hit wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million
years ago.

Absolute bullshit!

What’s happened is that Rockledge
and the other big boys are putting pressure on the IAA to stop me—uh, us, that
is. Now that they know we can undercut their price for water, they’re using
Aphrodite as an excuse. If the asteroid’s orbit poses a threat, the IAA can
send a team out with enough rocket thrusters to nudge it away from the Earth,
for chrissakes. I’ll pay the friggin
’
cost of the mission, if I have to. Take it off as a business expense; lower my
goddamned taxes.

But what the
I
AA’s done is put a moratorium on all
operations that might change an asteroid’s natural orbit. Hell, we’re the only
operation out here in the Belt. They’re trying to stop us.

Well, fuck them!

I
ordered Lonz to
ignore the message. I’m not even going to acknowledge receiving it. We’re going
ahead and mining that big chunk of nickel-iron, and then we’ll head back home
with enough high-grade metal to make all the off-Earth settlements drool. They’ll
want to do business with us, and there’s nothing the friggin’ IAA can do to
stop them from buying what I’m selling.

Then
we’ll let the lawyers
fight it out. I’ll have all the space settlements on my side, and the media
will love a story that pits us little guys against the big, bad corporate monsters.

Moratorium, my ass!

YESTERDAY WE NAMED
the asteroid Pittsburgh. I called
the partners together again and told them, not asked them, what the name would
be. I was born in Pittsburgh, and back in its heyday it was a big steel-making
town. So will this asteroid be. Our sensors show she’s practically solid metal.

This morning I sent my claim in to
the IAA. I haven’t acknowledged their moratorium order, and I haven’t told the
partners about it. Filing a claim for the asteroid doesn’t violate their moratorium,
of course, but it’ll sure make them suspicious. What the hell! There’s nothing
they can do about it. It’d take them a year to get a ship out here to try to
stop us.

You’re not allowed to claim
possession of an astronomical body, but once you’ve informed the IAA that you’ve
established a working facility someplace you’ve got the right to use its
natural resources there without anybody else coming in to compete with you. The
facility can be scientific, industrial, or a permanent habitat. It could even
be commercial, like a tourist hotel. That’s how the various settlements on the
Moon were established; no nation owns them, but once a group lays claim to a
territory, the IAA prevents any other group from muscling in on the same
territory.

With a chunk of metal like
Pittsburgh the LAA ought to give S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, exclusive
rights to mine its resources— moratorium or no fucking moratorium. The asteroid’s
too small to allow another company to start whittling away at it. At least,
that’s the legal position that the IAA agreed to before the
Argo
left Earth orbit. Now we’ll have to see if they stick to it.

In the meantime, there’s work to
do.

PITTSBURGH’S
A BEAUTY!
We’re hovering about five hundred meters from her.
At this distance she’s huge, immense, like a black pitted mountain hanging over
our heads. I’ve spent most of the day taking the partners out for EVAs. To say
they were impressed would be the understatement of the decade.

Imagine an enormous lump of
coal-black metal, its surface roughened and pitted, its ridges and crater rims
gleaming where the Sun strikes them. It’s so big it dwarfs you when you go
outside, makes you feel like it’s going to crush you, almost.

I
brought the
partners out in twos. Each time a pair of them floated free of the airlock and
looked up through their bubble helmets I heard the same sound out of them: a
gasp—surprise, awe, fear, grandeur, all that and more.

Hubble asked for permission to chip
some samples for himself, to study in the little lab he’s set up in his
quarters. Bo Williams started reciting poetry, right there in his space suit.
Even Jean Margaux, the Ice Queen, was audibly impressed.

Everybody except Darling came out
to look.

“There’s our fortune,” I told each
one of them over the suit-to-suit comm link. “Considering the mass of this
beauty and the prices on today’s metals market, you’re looking at ten billion
dollars, on the hoof. At least.”

That made them happy. Which was a
good thing, because we’re getting down to the last of the preserved food. In a
day or two we’re going to have to start eating the recycled stuff.

The IAA is still sending their moratorium
to us, every hour on the hour. I’ve instructed the crew to ignore it and not to
tell the partners about it. I’ve ordered them not to acknowledge any incoming messages
from anybody. Then I sent out a message to my own office in Florida that we
were experiencing some kind of communications difficulty, and all the incoming
transmissions were so garbled we couldn’t make them out.

Lonz gave me a funny look when I sent
that out. A guilty look.

“Nobody’s gonna hold you
responsible,” I told him. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Right, boss,” he said. But he
still looked uneasy. And he’s never called me boss before.

I
SPENT
M0ST of the night watching the videos of Darling’s
movements during the time I was taking the other partners outside to see
Pittsburgh close-up.

It bothered me that he refused to
go EVA like the rest of them. So I activated the ship’s internal monitoring
system, the cameras that are set unobtrusively into the overhead panels of
every section of the ship. I suppose I could have been watching everything that
everybody does since the moment we left Earth orbit. Maybe that would’ve told me
who the Rockledge fink is. Certainly it would have been as good as watching
porno flicks.

But there are seven of them and
only one of me. I’d have to spend seven times the hours I actually have in the
hopes of catching somebody performing an act of sabotage—or doing something in
bed I haven’t done myself, and better.

Anyway, I discovered Darling’s
secret. Trouble is, it’s got nothing to do with Rockledge or possible sabotage.
The sneaky lard-ass has been hoarding food! While the rest of the partners were
up in the command center or suiting up at the main airlock, he was tiptoeing
down to the food lockers and hauling armfuls of goodies back to his own suite.
He’s got packaged food stored in his bureau drawers, canned food stuffed under
his bed, whole cases of food hidden in his closets.

God knows how long he’s been
stealing the stuff. His personal wine cooler is filled with frozen food, which
the bastard must have been stealing since before the freezers went on the
fritz.

Did he know the freezers were going
to commit hara-kiri?

THE WORK ON
Pittsburgh is going slower than I had
planned. The metal’s so good that it’s tougher than we had expected. So it
takes longer for the laser torches to cut through it. Once we’ve got a slice
carved off, the smelting and refining equipment works fine. We’re building up a
nice payload of high-quality steel for the Lagrange habitats and the
steelhungry factories in Earth orbit.

To say nothing of the lovely ingots
of twenty-four carat gold and pure silver that we’re cooking out of the ore.
And the sheets of platinum!

Argo
is starting to look
like a little toy doughnut sitting alongside a cluster of shiny steel grapes.
See, in zero gravity, when we melt down a slab of ore it forms itself into a
very neat sphere of molten metal. Like a teeny little sun, glowing outside the
ship. After we remove the impurities (the gold and silver and platinum, that
is) we inject gas into the sphere to hollow it out while it’s solidifying. A
hollow sphere is easier for our customers to work with than a solid ball of
steel. The gas comes right from the asteroid itself, of course; a byproduct of
our mining operation.

All this is done remotely, without
any people outside. Lonz and Will control the operation from the command
center. They only go EVA if something goes wrong, some piece of equipment
breaks down. Even then, the little maintenance robots can take care of the
routine repairs. They’ve only had to go EVA twice in all the weeks we’ve been
working on Pittsburgh.

We’ll have to leave the asteroid
soon if we want to get back to Earth on a reasonable schedule. The partners are
grumbling about the recycled food—Darling’s bitching the loudest, the lying
thief. He’s feasting on the real food he’s cached in his suite while the rest
of us are nibbling on shitburgers. All the other partners are marveling that he’s
gaining weight while the rest of us are slimming down.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore.
This evening when I came into the dining lounge there was fat-ass Darling in
his homemade toga, holding a green briquette of recycled crap in one hand with
his chubby pinky up in the air.

“I will
never
come out on a fly-by-night operation like this again,” he was saying.

Jean Margaux sniffed at the red
briquette she had in front of her. They were odorless, but her face looked as
if she was getting a whiff of a pigsty on a blazing afternoon in August. Marj
Dupray and Bo Williams were off at a table by themselves, whispering to each
other with their heads nearly touching over their table.

“I’m sorry you don’t like the food,”
I said to Darling. I could feel the tightness in my face.

“It
’
s
inedible,” he complained.

“Then
you’ll just have to go back to your suite and gorge yourself on the food you’ve
got hidden there,” I said.

His
fleshy face turned absolute white.

Jean
looked amused. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a candy bar hidden under your bed,”
she said to Darling.

“I
resent your implication,” the fat bastard said to me.

“Resent
it all you like,” I shot back. “After you’ve taken us to your suite and opened
up your wine cooler.”

He
heaved himself to his dainty little feet. “I won’t stay here and be insulted.”

Jean
looked kind of curious now. Bo and Marj had stopped their tete-a-tete and were
staring at us.

With
as much dignity as a small dirigible, Darling headed for the hatch.

I
called after him, “Come on, Rick, invite us to your
suite. Share the food you’ve hoarded, you puffed-up sonofabitch.”

He
spun around to face me, making the fringes of his toga flap and swirl. “You
retract that statement or, so help me, when we get back to Earth I’ll sue you
for every penny you’ve got!”

“Sure,
I’ll retract it. After you’ve invited us to your suite.”

“That’s
an invasion of my privacy!” he said.

Jean
drew herself up to her full height. “Richard, dear, are you actually hiding
food from us?”

Bo
Williams got off his chair, too. “Yeah—what’s the story, Rick? How come you’re
getting fatter while we’re all getting thinner?”

Darling’s
eyes swung from one of them to the other. Even Marjorie was on her feet now,
scowling at him.

“Can’t
you see what he’s doing?” Darling spluttered and pointed a fat finger at me. “He’s
trying to make a scapegoat out of me! He’s trying to get you all to hate me and
forget that
he’s
the one who’s gotten us
into this mess!”

“There’s
an easy way to prove you’re innocent,” Williams said. “Invite us in to your
suite.”