«Indeed.»
«And I didn’t sign any deals with the devil to get there, either,» he added smugly.
«None that you know of,» the angel warned. «A man in your position delegates many decisions to his staff, does he not?»
The man’s face went gray. «Oh my God, you don’t think …»
With a shrug, the angel said, «It doesn’t matter. The deal that I offer guarantees your soul’s salvation, if you meet the terms.»
«How? What do I have to do?»
«You have power, wealth, respect, women, fame.» The angel ticked each point off on his slender, graceful fingers.
«Yes, yes, I know.»
«You must give them up.»
The man lurched forward in the wingchair. «Huh?»
«Give them up.»
«I can’t!»
«You must, if you are to attain the Kingdom of Heaven.»
«But you don’t understand! I just can’t drop everything! The world doesn’t work that way. I can’t just… walk away from all this.»
«That’s the deal,» the angel said. «Give it up. All of it. Or spend eternity in hell.»
«But you can’t expect me to—» He gaped. The angel was no longer in the room with him. For several minutes he stared into empty air. Then, knees shaking, he arose and walked to the closet. It too was empty of strange personages.
He looked down at his hands. They were trembling.
«I must he going crazy,» he muttered to himself. «Too much strain. Too much tension.» But even as he said it, he made his way to the telephone on the bedside table. He hesitated a moment, then grabbed up the phone and punched a number he had memorized months earlier.
«Hello. Chuck? Yes, this is me. Yes, yes, everything went fine tonight. Up to a point.»
He listened to his underling babbling flattery into the phone, wondering how many times he had given his power of attorney to this weakling and to equally venal deputies.
«Listen, Chuck,» he said at last. «I have a job for you. And it’s got to be done right, understand? Okay, here’s the deal—» He winced inwardly at the word. But, taking a deep manly breath, he plunged ahead.
«You know the Democrats are setting up their campaign quarters in that new apartment building—what’s it called, Watergate? Yeah. Okay. Now I think it would serve our purposes very well if we bugged the place before the campaign really starts to warm up …»
There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. But from far, far away, he could hear a heavenly chorus singing.
ISOLATION AREA
Here’s Sam Gunn again, the leather-lunged, sawed-off, skirt-chasing entrepreneur who bends the rules into pretzels in his quest to strike it rich.
«Isolation Area» deals with the period of Sam’s life when he takes that first scary step toward becoming the solar system’s premier big-time space entrepreneur. In a subtler way it is also the story of the friendship between two men, and of the new freedoms that we will find as we begin to live and work—and love—in space.
They faced each other suspiciously, floating weightlessly in emptiness.
The black man was tall, long-limbed, loose, gangling; on Earth he might have made a pro basketball player. His utilitarian coveralls were standard issue, frayed at the cuffs and so worn that whatever color they had been originally had long since faded into a dull gray. They were clean and pressed to a razor sharpness, though. The insignia patch on his left shoulder said Administration. A strictly nonregulation belt of royal blue, studded with rough lumps of meteoric gold and clamped by a heavy gold buckle, cinched his narrow waist and made him look even taller and leaner.
He eyed the reporter warily. She was young, and the slightly greenish cast to her pretty features told him that she had never been in orbit before. Her pale blond hair was shoulder length, he judged, but she had followed the instructions given to groundlings and tied it up in a zero-gee snood. Her coveralls were spanking new white. She filled them nicely enough, although she had more of a figure than he cared for.
Frederick Mohammed Malone was skeptical to the point of being hostile toward this female interloper. The reporter could see the resentment smoldering in the black man’s eyes. Malone’s face was narrow, almost gaunt, with a trim little Vandyke jutting out from his chin. His forehead was high, receding; his hair cropped close to the skull. She guessed Malone’s age at somewhere in the early forties, although she knew that living in zero gravity could make a person look much younger than his or her calendar age.
She tried to restart their stalled conversation. «I understand that you and Sam Gunn were, uh, friends.»
«Why’re you doing a story on Sam?» Malone asked, his voice low and loaded with distrust.
The two of them were in Malone’s «office»: actually an observation blister in the central hub of space station Alpha. Oldest and still biggest of the Earth-orbiting stations, Alpha was built on the old wheels-within-wheels scheme. The outermost rim, where most of the staff lived and worked, spun at a rate that gave it almost a full Earth gravity. Two thirds of the way toward the hub there was a wheel that spun at the Moon’s one-sixth gee. The hub itself, of course, was for all practical purposes at zero gee, weightless.
Malone’s aerie consisted of one wall, on which were located a semicircular sort of desk and communications center, a bank of viewing screens that were all blankly gray at the moment, and an airtight hatch that led to the spokes that radiated out to the various wheels. The rest of the chamber was a transparent plastic bubble, from which Malone could watch the station’s loading dock—and the overwhelming majesty of the huge, curved, incredibly blue and white-flecked Earth as it slid past endlessly, massive, brilliant, ever-changing, ever-beautiful.
To the reporter, though, it seemed as if they were hanging in empty space itself, unprotected by anything at all, and falling, falling, falling toward the ponderous world of their birth. The background rumble of the bearings that bore the massive station’s rotation while the hub remained static sounded to her like the insistent bass growl of a giant grinding wheel that was pressing the breath out of her.
She swallowed bile, felt it burn in her throat, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.
She said to Malone, «I’ve been assigned to do a biography of Mr. Gunn for the Solar Network.»
Despite himself, Malone suddenly grinned. «First time I ever heard him called Mr. Gunn.»
«Oh?» The reporter’s microchip recorder, clipped to her belt, was already on, of course. «What did the people here call him?»
That lean, angular face took on an almost thoughtful look. «Oh… Sam, mostly. ‘That tricky bastard,’ a good many times.» Malone actually laughed. «Plenty times I heard him called a womanizing sonofabitch.»
«What did you call him?»
The suspicion came back into Malone’s eyes. «He was my friend. I called him Sam.»
Silence stretched between them, hanging as weightlessly as their bodies. The reporter turned her head slightly and found herself staring at the vast bulk of Earth. Her mind screamed as if she were falling down an elevator shaft. Her stomach churned queasily. She could not tear her eyes away from the world drifting past, so far below them, so compellingly near. She felt herself being drawn toward it, dropping through the emptiness, spinning down the deep swirling vortex…
Malone’s long-fingered hand squeezed her shoulder hard enough to hurt. She snapped her attention to his dark, unsmiling face as he grasped her other shoulder and held her firmly in his strong hands.
«You were drifting,» he said, almost in a whisper.
«Was I…?»
«It’s all right,» he said. «Gets everybody at first. Don’t be scared. You’re perfectly safe.»