We showered, which in zero-gee is an intricate, intimate procedure. Sam washed me thoroughly, lovingly, using the washcloth to tenderly push the soapy water that clung to my skin over every inch of my body.
“The perfect woman,” he muttered. “A dirty mind in a clean body.”
Finally we dried off, dressed and headed out to Sam’s ship. But first he maneuvered the little scooter along the length of my asteroid.
“Doesn’t seem to be much more done than the last time I was here,” he said, almost accusingly.
I was glad we were in the space suits and he could not see me blush. I remained silent.
As we moved away from The Rememberer, Sam told me, “The lawyers aren’t having much luck with the arbitration board.” In the earphones of my helmet his voice sounded suddenly tired, almost defeated.
“I didn’t think they would.”
“The board’s gonna hand down its decision in two weeks. If they decide against you, there’s no appeal.”
“And they will decide against me, won’t they?”
He tried to make his voice brighter. “Well, the lawyers are doing their damnedest. But if trickery and deceit won’t work, maybe I can bribe a couple of board members.”
“Don’t you dare! You’ll go to jail.”
He laughed.
As we came up to Sam’s transport ship, I saw its name stenciled in huge letters beneath the insect-eye canopy of the command module: Klaus Heiss.
“Important economist,” Sam answered my question. “Back fifty years or so. The first man to suggest free enterprise in space.”
“I thought that writers had suggested that long before space flight even began,” I said as we approached the ship’s airlock.
Sam’s voice sounded mildly impatient in my earphones. “Writers are one thing. Heiss went out and raised money, got things started. For real.”
Klaus Heiss was fitted out more handsomely than Adam Smith, even though it seemed no larger. The dining lounge was more luxurious, and apparently the crew ate elsewhere. There were four of us for dinner: Sam and myself, and the two “nutcases,” as he had called them.
Morton McGuire and T. Kagashima did not seem insane to me. Perhaps naive. Certainly enthusiastic.
“It’s the greatest idea since the invention of writing!” McGuire blurted as we sat around the dining lounge table.
He was speaking about their idea of painting the ionosphere with advertisements.
McGuire was a huge mass of flesh, bulging in every direction, straining the metal snaps of his bilious green coveralls. He looked like a balloon that had been overfilled to the point of bursting. He proudly told me that he was known as “Mountain McGuire,” from his days as a college football player. He had gone from college into advertising, gaining poundage every passing day. Living on Earth, he could not be classified as an agravitic endomorph. He was simply fat. Extremely so.
“I’m just a growing boy,” he said happily as he jammed fistfuls of food into his mouth.
The other one, Kagashima, was almost as lean as I myself. Quiet too, although his oriental eyes frequently flashed with suppressed mirth. No one seemed to know what Kagashima’s first name was. When I asked what the “T” stood for he merely smiled enigmatically and said, “Just call me Kagashima; it will be easier for you.” He spoke English very welclass="underline" no great surprise since he was born and raised in Denver, USA.
Kagashima was an electronics wizard. McGuire an advertising executive. Between them they had cooked up the idea of using electron guns to create glowing pictures in the ionosphere.
“Just imagine it,” McGuire beamed, his chubby hands held up as if framing a camera shot. “It’s twilight. The first stars are coming out. You look up and—POW!—there’s a huge red and white sign covering the sky from horizon to horizon: Drink Coke!”
I wanted to vomit.
But Sam encouraged him. “Like skywriting, when planes used to spell out words with smoke.”
“Real skywriting!” McGuire enthused.
Kagashima smiled and nodded.
“Is it legal,” I asked, “to write advertising slogans across the sky?”
McGuire snapped a ferocious look at me. “There’s no laws against it! The lawyers can’t take the damned sky away from us, for god’s sake! The sky belongs to everyone.”
I glanced at Sam. “The lawyers seem to be taking my asteroid away from me.”
His smile was odd, like the smile a hunter would have on his face as he saw his prey coming into range of his gun.
“Possession is nine-tenths of the law,” Sam muttered.
“Who possesses the sky?” Kagashima asked, with that oriental ambiguity that passes for wisdom.
“We do!” snapped McGuire.
Sam merely smiled like a cat eying a fat canary.
At Sam’s insistence I spent the night hours aboard his ship. His quarters were much more luxurious than mine, and since practically all space operations kept Greenwich Mean Time, there was no problem of differing clocks.
His cabin was much more than an alcove off the command module. It was small, but a real compartment, with a zipper hammock for sleeping and a completely enclosed shower stall that jetted water from all directions. We used the shower, but not the hammock. We finally fell asleep locked weightlessly in each other’s embrace and woke up when we gently bumped into the compartment’s bulkhead, many hours later.
“We’ve got to talk,” Sam said as we were dressing.
I smiled at him. “That means you talk and I listen, no?”
“No. Well, maybe I do most of the talking. But you’ve got to make some decisions, kiddo.”
“Decisions? About what?”
“About your asteroid. And the next few years of your life.”
He did not say that I had to make a decision about us. I barely noticed that fact at the time. I should have paid more attention.
Glancing at the digital clock set into the bulkhead next to his hammock, Sam told me, “In about half an hour I’m going to be conversing with the Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney, spiritual leader of the Moralist Sect. Their chief, their head honcho, sitteth at the right hand of You-Know-Who. The Boss.”
“The head of the Moralists?”
“Right.”
“He’s calling you? About my asteroid?”
Sam’s grin was full of teeth. “Nope. About his worms. We’re carrying another load of ’em out to his Eden on this trip.”
“Why would the head of the Moralists call you about worms?”
“Seems that the worms have become afflicted by a rare and strange disease,” Sam said, the grin turning delightfully evil, “and the hauling contract the Moralists signed with me now contains a clause that says I’m not responsible for their health.”
I was hanging in midair, literally and mentally. “What’s that got to do with me?”
Drifting over so close that our noses were practically touching, Sam asked in a whisper, “Would you be willing to paint the world’s first advertisement on the ionosphere? An advertisement for the Moralists?”
“Never!”
“Even if it means that they’ll let you keep the asteroid?”
Ah, the emotions that surged through my heart! I felt anger, and hope, and disgust, even fear. But mostly anger.
“Sam, that’s despicable! It’s a desecration! To turn the sky into an advertising poster…”
Sam was grinning, but he was serious about this. “Now don’t climb up on a high horse, kid….”
“And do it for the Moralists?” My temper was boiling over now. “The people who want to take my asteroid away from me and destroy the memory of my own people? You want me to help them?”
“Okay, okay! Don’t pop your cork over it.” Sam said, taking me gently by the wrist. “I’m just asking you to think about it. You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to.”