There were no relay stations around Earth’s orbit in those days. My call had to fight past the Sun’s coronal interference. Sam’s image, when he came onto my comm screen, was shimmering and flecked with pinpoint bursts of light, like an old hologram.
As soon as he said hello I unloaded my tale of woe in a single burst of unrelieved fury and fear.
“They’re taking possession of the asteroid!” I finished. “I told you they couldn’t be trusted!”
For once in his life Sam was silent and thoughtful. I watched his expression change from mild curiosity to shocked surprise and then to a jaw-clenched anger as my words reached him.
At last he said, “Don’t go off the deep end. Give me a few hours to look into this. I’ll call you back.”
It took almost forty-eight hours. I was frantic, my emotions swinging like a pendulum between the desire to hide myself or run away altogether and the growing urge to take one of the high-powered lasers I used for rock carving and slice the propulsion team into bite-sized chunks of bloody dead meat.
I tried to reach Sam a thousand times during those maddening horrible hours of waiting. Always I got one of the crew members from his ship, or a staff person from his headquarters at the Earth View Hotel. Always they gave me the same message: “Sam’s looking into the problem for you. He said he’ll call you as soon as he gets everything straightened out.”
When he finally did call me, I was exhausted and ready for a straitjacket.
“It doesn’t look good,” said his wavering, tight-lipped image. Without waiting for me to respond, Sam outlined the situation.
The Right Reverend Virtue T. Dabney (his T stood for Truthful, it turned out!) had screwed us both. The Moralists never withdrew their claim from the IAA’s arbitration board, and the board had decided in their favor, as Dabney had expected. The Moralists had the right to take my asteroid and use it as construction material.
Worse still, Sam’s cargo of worms had arrived at Eden in fine, slimy, wriggling earthwormy health. And even worse than that, Sam had signed the contract to produce the ionospheric advertisements for the Moralist Sect. The deal was set, as legal and legitimate as an act of the world congress.
“If I don’t go through with the ads,” Sam said, strangely morose, “the bastards can sue me for everything I’ve got. They’ll wind up owning my hotel, my ships, even the clothes on my back.”
“Isn’t there anything we can do?” I pleaded to his image on my screen.
For long minutes he gave no response, as my words struggled across nearly three hundred million kilometers to reach him. I hung weightless before the screen, suspended in the middle of my shabby little compartment while outside I could feel the thumps and clangs of the propulsion team attaching their obscene rocket thrusters and nuclear engines to my asteroid. I felt like a woman surrounded by rapists, helpless and alone.
I stared so hard at Sam’s image in my screen that my eyes began to water. And then I realized that I was crying.
At last, after a lifetime of agony, Sam’s face broke into a sly grin. “Y’know, I saw a cartoon once, when I was a kid. It was in a girlie magazine.”
I wanted to scream at him. What does this have to do with my problem? But he went on calmly, smiling crookedly at his reminiscence, knowing that any objections from me could not reach him for a quarter of an hour.
“It showed these two guys chained to the wall of a dungeon, ten feet off the floor. Chained hand and foot. Beards on them down to their kneecaps. Totally hopeless situation. And one of the guys—” Sam actually laughed! “—one of the guys has this big stupid grin on his face and he’s saying, ‘Now here’s my plan.’ ”
I felt my lungs filling themselves with air, getting ready to shriek at his nonsense.
“Now, before you blow your top,” Sam warned, “let me tell you two things: First, we’re both in this together. Second—well… here’s my plan.”
He kept on speaking for the next hour and a half. I never got the chance to object or even get a word in.
That is how I came to paint the first picture in Earth’s ionosphere.
Sam had expected me all along to draw the advertisements for him. He never planned to use another artist. “Why should some stranger make all that money?” was his attitude.
While the propulsion engineers fitted out my asteroid with their nuclear rocket systems and supply ships from the Moon towed huge spherical tanks of gaseous propellants, Sam relayed the Rev. Dabney’s rough sketches of what the ionospheric advertisements should look like.
They were all photographs of Dabney himself, wrapped in pure white robes with heavenly clouds of gold behind him and just the hint of a halo adorning his saintly head.
I would have trashed them immediately if I had not been aware of Sam’s plan.
The timing had to be perfect. The first ad was scheduled to be placed over the midwestern section of the United States, where it could be seen from roughly Ohio to Iowa. If everything went the way Mountain McGuire and T. Kagashima claimed it would, the picture would drift slowly westward as the day/night terminator crawled across the Earth’s surface.
Sam himself came to visit me on the day that the first ad was to be produced. He was in the latest and largest of his cargo carriers, the Laissez Faire, which he jokingly referred to as “The Lazy Fairy.”
My asteroid was already on its way to Eden. The propulsion engineers had connected the last of their propellant tanks, turned on their systems, and left me alone to glide slowly, under the low but steady thrust of the nuclear rockets, to a rendezvous with Eden. They would return in a few days to make final course corrections and take me off the asteroid forever.
Sam looked absolutely impish when he stepped into my compartment. His grin was almost diabolic. My place was an even bigger mess than usual, what with the sketches for the advertisements floating here and there and all my other sketches and computer wafers hanging weightlessly in midair.
“How can you ever find anything in here?” Sam asked, glancing around.
I had remained at my drawing board, behind it actually. It formed something of a defensive shield for me. I did not want to fling myself into Sam’s arms, no matter how much I really did want to do it. I couldn’t let him think that I was willing to be his lover again in return for the help he was giving me. I couldn’t let myself think that, especially because it was very close to being true.
He gave no indication of expecting such a reward. He merely eyed me mischievously and asked, “You really want to go through with this?”
I did not hesitate an instant. “Yes!”
He took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m game if you are. The lawyers have checked everything out. Let’s do it.”
I slid out from behind my drawing board and went to the computer. Sam came up beside me and activated my communications console. For the next half-hour we were all business, me checking my drawing and Sam connecting with McGuire and Kagashima.
“I’m glad they attached the rockets and that other junk to the end of the asteroid you haven’t carved yet,” Sam muttered as we worked. “Would’ve been a crime if they had messed up the work you’ve already done.”
I nodded curtly, not trusting myself to look into his eyes. He was close enough to brush against my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of his body next to me, even while I sweated with cold apprehension.
Working together as a team linked across hundreds of millions of kilometers, Sam, McGuire, Kagashima and I painted the first picture high in the ionosphere of Earth. From my computer my design went forth to a set of electron guns on board the same orbiting station that housed Sam’s hotel. In the comm screen I saw the picture forming across the flat midsection of North America.