Completely bewildered, I allowed Sam to lead me up to the ship’s command module. The same two husband-and-wife engineers were there at their consoles, just as blond and even more bloated than they had been the last time I had seen them, it seemed to me. They greeted me with smiles of recognition.
Sam asked them to leave and they wafted out through the main hatch like a pair of hot-air balloons. On their way to the galley, no doubt.
We drifted over to the comm console. No one needs chairs in zero gravity. We simply hung there, my arms floating up to about chest height, as they would in a swimming pool, while Sam worked the console to make contact with the Moralist Sect headquarters back on Earth.
It took more than a half hour for Sam to get Rev. Dabney on his screen. A small army of neatly scrubbed, earnest, glittering-eyed young men and women appeared, one after the other, and tried to deal with Sam. Instead, Sam dealt with them.
“Okay, if you want the worms to die, it’s your seventy million dollars, not mine,” said Sam to the young lawyer.
To the lawyer’s superior, Sam spoke sweetly, “Your boss signed the contract. All I’m doing is informing you of the problem, as specified in clause 22.1, section C.”
To his boss, “All right! I’ll dump the whole load right here in the middle of nowhere and cut my losses. Is that what you want?”
To Rev. Dabney’s astonished assistant administrator, “The lawsuit will tie you up for years, wiseass! You’ll never finish your Eden! The creditors will take it over and make a Disney World out of it!”
To the special assistant to the High Pastor of the Moralist Sect, “This has gone beyond lawyers. It’s even beyond the biologists’ abilities! The damned worms are dying! They’re withering away! What we need is a miracle!”
That, finally, brought the Right Rev. Virtue T. Dabney to the screen.
I instantly disliked the man. His face was largely hidden behind a dark beard and mustache. I suppose he thought it made him look like an Old Testament patriarch. To me he looked like a conquistador; all he needed was a shining steel breastplate and helmet. He seemed to me perfectly capable of burning my people at the stake.
“Mr. Gunn,” he said, smiling amiably. “How may I help you?”
Sam said lightly, “I’ve got another ten tons of worms for you, as per contract, but they’re dying. I don’t think any of ’em are gonna survive long enough to make it to your habitat.”
It took more than a minute for the messages to get back and forth from Earth to the Klaus Heiss. Dabney spent the time with hands folded and head bowed prayerfully. Sam hung onto the handgrips of the comm console to keep himself from bobbing around weightlessly. I stayed out of range of the video and fidgeted with seething, smoldering nervous fury.
“The worms are dying, you say? What seems to be the matter? Your first shipment made it to Eden with no trouble at all, I believe.”
“Right. But something’s gone wrong with this load. Maybe we got bad worms to start with. Maybe there’s a fault in the cargo containers’ radiation shielding. The worms are dying.” Sam reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a blackened, twisted, dried out string of what must have once been an earthworm. “They’re all going like this.”
I watched intently for all the long seconds it took the transmission to reach Dabney’s screen. When it did, his eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open.
“All of them? But how can this be?”
Sam shrugged elaborately. “Beats the hell out of me. My biologist is stymied, too. Maybe it’s a sign from God that he doesn’t want you to leave the Earth. I dunno.”
Dabney’s bearded face, when that line of Sam’s finally hit him, went into even greater shock.
“I cannot believe the Lord would smite his faithful so. This is the work of evil.”
“So what do we do about it?” Sam asked cheerfully. “My contract guarantees full payment for delivery. I’m not responsible for the condition of the cargo after your people inspected my cargo bay and okayed the shipment.”
Sam blanked out the screen and turned to me. “Have you made up your mind, kiddo?”
“Made up my mind?”
“About the ads in the ionosphere.”
“What do his dying worms have to do with me? Or with painting an advertisement on the ionosphere?”
“You’ll see!” he promised. “Will you do it?”
“No! Never!”
“Even if it means saving your asteroid?”
I was too angry even to consider it. I turned my back to Sam and gritted my teeth with fury.
Sam sighed deeply, but when I whirled around to face him once more, he was grinning at me in that lopsided cunning way of his. Before I could say anything, he flicked on the screen again. Dabney’s expression was crafty now. His eyes were narrowed, his lips pressed tight.
“What do you suggest as a solution to this problem, Mr. Gunn?”
“Damned if I know,” said Sam. “Seems to me you need a miracle, Reverend.”
He took special delight in Dabney’s wince when that “damned” reached him.
“A miracle, you say,” replied the Moralist leader. “And how do you think we might arrange a miracle?”
Sam chuckled. “Well—I don’t know much about the way religions work, but I’ve heard that if somebody is willing to make a sacrifice, give up something that he really wants or even needs, then God rewards him. Something about casting bread upon the waters, I think.”
I began to realize that there was nothing at all wrong with the Moralists’ worms. Sam was merely holding them hostage. For me. He was risking lawsuits that could cost him everything he owned. For me.
Dabney’s expression became even more squint-eyed than before. “You wouldn’t be Jewish by any chance, would you, Mr. Gunn?”
Sam’s grin widened to show lots of teeth. “You wouldn’t be antiSemitic, would you, Reverend?”
Their negotiation went on for the better part of three hours, with those agonizing long pauses in between each and every statement they made. After an hour of jockeying back and forth, Dabney finally suggested that he—and his sect—might give up their claim to an asteroid that they wanted to use for building material.
“That might be just the sacrifice that will save the worms,” Sam allowed.
More offers and counteroffers, more tiptoeing and verbal sparring. It was all very polite. And vicious. Dabney knew that there was nothing wrong with the worms. He also knew that Sam could open his cargo bay to vacuum for the rest of the trip to Eden, and the Moralists would receive ten tons of very dead and desiccated garbage.
Finally, “If my people make this enormous sacrifice, if we give up our claim to this asteroid that we so desperately need, what will you be willing to do for me … er, us, in return?”
Sam rubbed his chin. “There’s hundreds of asteroids in the Aten group, and more in the Apollos. They all cut across Earth’s orbit. You can pick out a different one. It’s no great sacrifice to give up this one little bitty piece of rock that you’re claiming.”
Dabney was looking down, as if at his desktop. Perhaps an aide was showing him lists of the asteroids available to help build his Eden.
“We picked that particular asteroid because its orbit brings it the closest to Eden and therefore it is the easiest—and least expensive—for us to capture and use.”
He held up a hand before Sam could reply, an indication of very fast reflexes on his part. “However, in the interests of charity and self-sacrifice, I am willing to give up that particular asteroid. I know that some Latin American woman has been carving figures on it. If I—that is, if we allow her to remain and give up our claim to the rock, what will you do for the Moralist Sect in return?”