What was my motivation? Not to accept some legal document, certainly. Sam’s sudden presence made it painfully clear to me that I had been terribly alone for such a long time. I had not minded the loneliness at all—not until he punctuated it as he did. My first reaction had been anger, of course. But how could I remain angry with a man who was so obviously taken with my so-called beauty?
My asteroid was in shadow as we sailed toward his ship, so we could not see the figures I had already carved upon it. It bulked over us, blotting out the Sun, like some huge black pitted mountain, looming dark and somehow menacing. Sam kept up a steady chatter on the suit-to-suit radio. He was asking me questions about what I was doing and how my work was going, but somehow he did all the talking.
His ship was called Adam Smith, a name that meant nothing to me. It looked like an ordinary transfer vehicle, squat and ungainly, with spidery legs sticking out and bulbous glassy projections that housed the command and living modules. But as we approached it I saw that Sam’s ship was large. Very large. I had never seen one so big.
“The only one like it in the solar system, so far,” he acknowledged cheerfully. “I’m having three more built. Gonna corner the cargo business.”
He rattled on, casually informing me that he was the major owner of the orbital tourist facility, the Earth View Hotel.
“Every room has a view of Earth. It’s gorgeous.”
“Yes, I imagine it is.”
“Great place for a honeymoon,” Sam proclaimed. “Or even just a weekend. You haven’t lived until you’ve made love in zero-gee.”
I went silent and remained so the rest of the short journey to his ship. I had no intention of responding to sexual overtures, no matter how subtle. Or blatant.
Dinner was rather pleasant. Five of us crowded into the narrow wardroom that doubled as the mess. Cooking in zero gravity is no great trick, but presenting the food in a way that is appetizing to the eye without running the risk of its floating off the plate at the first touch of a fork—that calls for art. Sam managed the trick by using plates with clear plastic covers that hinged back neatly. Veal piccata with spaghetti, no less. The wine, of course, was served in squeeze bulbs.
There were three crew persons on Adam Smith. The only woman, the communications engineer, was married to the propulsion engineer. She was a heavyset blonde of about thirty who had allowed herself to gain much too much weight. Michelangelo would have loved her, with her thick torso and powerful limbs, but by present standards she was no great beauty. But then her husband, equally fair-haired, was also of ponderous dimensions.
It is a proven fact that people who spend a great deal of time in low gravity either allow themselves to become tremendously fat, or thin down to little more than skin and bones, as I had. The physiologists have scientific terms for this: I am an agravitic ectomorph, so I am told. The two oversized engineers were agravitic endomorphs. Sam, of course, was neither. He was Sam—irrepressibly unique.
I found myself instinctively disliking both of the bloated engineers until I thought of the globulous little Venus figures that prehistoric peoples had carved out of hand-sized round rocks. Then they did not seem so bad.
The third crewman was the payload specialist, a lanky dark taciturn biologist. Young and rather handsome, in a smoldering sullen way. Although he was slim, he had some meat on his bones. I found that this was his first space mission, and he was determined to make it his last.
“What is your cargo?” I asked.
Before the biologist could reply, Sam answered, “Worms.”
I nearly dropped my fork. Suddenly the spaghetti I had laboriously wound around it seemed to be squirming, alive.
“Worms?” I echoed.
Nodding brightly, Sam said, “You know the Moralist Sect that’s building an O’Neill habitat?”
I shook my head, realizing I had been badly out of touch with the rest of the human race for three years.
“Religious group,” Sam explained. “They decided Earth is too sinful for them, so they’re building their own paradise, a self-contained, self-sufficient artificial world in a Sun-circling orbit, just like your asteroid.”
“And they want worms?” I asked.
“For the soil,” said the biologist.
Before I could ask another question Sam said, “They’re bringing in megatons of soil from the Moon, mostly for radiation shielding. Don’t want to be conceiving two-head Moralists, y’know. So they figured that as long as they’ve got so much dirt they might as well use it for farming, too.”
“But lunar soil is sterile,” the biologist said.
“Right. It’s got plenty of nutrients in it, all those chemicals that crops need. But no earthworms, no beetles, none of the bugs and slugs and other slimy little things that make the soil alive”
“And they need that?”
“Yep. Sure do, if they’re gonna farm that lunar soil. Otherwise they’ve gotta go to hydroponics, and that’s against their religion.”
I turned from Sam to the biologist. He nodded to confirm what Sam had said. The two engineers were ignoring our conversation, busily shoveling food into their mouths.
“Not many cargo haulers capable of taking ten tons of worms and their friends halfway around the Earth’s orbit,” Sam said proudly. “I got the contract from the Moralists with hardly any competition at all. Damned profitable, too, as long as the worms stay healthy.”
“They are,” the biologist assured him.
“This is the first of six flights for them,” said Sam, returning his attention to his veal and pasta. “All worms.”
I felt myself smiling. “Do you always make deliveries in person?”
“Oh no.” Twirling the spaghetti on his fork beneath the plastic cover of his dish. “I just figured that since this is the first flight, I ought to come along and see it through. I’m a qualified astronaut, you know.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah. Besides, it lets me get away from the hotel and the office. My buddy Omar can run the hotel while I’m gone. Hell, he runs it while I’m there!”
“Then what do you do?”
He grinned at me. “I look for new business opportunities. I seek out new worlds, new civilizations. I boldly go where no man has gone before.”
The biologist muttered from behind a forkful of veal, “He chases women.” From his dead-serious face I could not tell if he was making a joke or not.
“And you deliver ten tons of worms,” I said.
“Right. And the mail.”
“Ah. My letter.”
Sam smiled broadly. “It’s in my cabin, up by the bridge.”
I refused to smile back at him. If he thought he was going to get me into his cabin, and his zero-gee hammock, he was terribly mistaken. So I told myself. I had only taken a couple of sips of the wine; after three years of living like a hermit, I was careful not to make a fool of myself. I wanted to be invulnerable, untouchable.
Actually, Sam was an almost perfect gentleman. After dinner we coasted from the wardroom along a low-ceilinged corridor that opened into the command module. I had to bend over slightly to get through the corridor, but Sam sailed along blithely, talking every millimeter of the way about worms, Moralists and their artificial heaven, habitats expanding throughout the inner solar system and how he was going to make billions from hauling specialized cargos.
His cabin was nothing more than a tiny booth with a sleeping hammock fastened to one wall, actually just an alcove built into the command module. Through the windows of the bridge I could see my asteroid, hovering out there with the Sun starting to rise above it. Sam ducked into his cubbyhole without making any suggestive remarks at all, and came out a moment later with a heavy, stiff, expensive-looking white envelope.