Spence Johansen sat on the king-sized bed, studiously reading a manual on Hermes’s fusion propulsion system. A former astronaut, Spence had buddied up with several of the ship’s officers and was learning all he could about the massive torch ship.
Jade was telling Gradowsky about her newfound friendship with Jill Meyers when she noticed the yellow light at the bottom of the wall screen blinking. She cut her report short and called out to the screen, “Show incoming message, please.”
To her surprise, Jumbo Jim’s face filled the screen, grinning lopsidedly. “Hi, Jade. Hope everything’s okay with you on your honeymoon trip.” Before Jade could reply that she was working (not that Gradowsky would have received her reply for an hour or more), Jumbo Jim added, “Hey, Monica sends love and kisses. Says she misses you.”
Jade realized that Gradowsky didn’t send a call across the solar system just for social chitchat.
Sure enough, her boss’s face grew serious. “Uh, Jade, you know that Rockledge’s lawyers have been threatening to sue us for libel or something, ’cause of the series. Well, Raki got our own lawyers to threaten ’em right back, infringing freedom of the press or something like that.
“So yesterday we get a long message from Pierre D’Argent, you know, Rockledge Industries’s CEO. He’s waving an olive branch. Says he’ll drop the suit if we’ll run his story in a follow-on series. Says he can show the world what a rotten no-good crook Sam was.”
Jade felt her cheeks flaming with anger.
“Well, anyway, here’s D’Argent’s story. I’ve listened to it and it’s damned interesting, even if he hates Sam’s guts. I think we could go with it. And it would make the lawyers on both sides very happy.
“Lemme know what you think.”
Controlling her anger, Jade glanced at Spence, his nose still buried in the propulsion manual. She leaned back in the compartment’s padded little desk chair and waited for D’Argent’s story to begin.
Piker’s Peek
I know Sam Gunn’s supposed to be some sort of folk hero, a space-age Robin Hood or something, but let me tell you, he’s nothing more than a cheating, womanizing, loudmouthed little scoundrel. And those are his good points!
Take the business about Hell Crater, for example.
I was perfectly happy running Rockledge Industries’s space operations despite the fact that Sam Gunn was always causing us trouble. True, we had euchred him out of that orbital honeymoon hotel he had started, but we knew how to make a profit out of it and Sam didn’t. And we paid him a decent price for it; not as much as he had expected, but more than he deserved, certainly.
Of course, we had withheld the space-sickness cure that our Rockledge research labs had come up with. Without it, people coming to enjoy a romantic tryst in weightlessness spent their honeymoons upchucking. With it, Rockledge could buy out Sam on the cheap when he was on the verge of bankruptcy and make a first-class orbital tourist facility out of his vomit palace.
Well, perhaps we did take slightly unfair advantage of Sam, but that’s the way the world turns. Business is business. Sentiment has no part in it. Still, Sam took it personally, and he took it hard. My spies in his operation—which he called S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, no less—told me had vowed vengeance.
“I’ll get that silver-plated SOB,” was one of his milder remarks, I was told. He snarled that choice little bon mot after he had Rockledge’s check in his bank account, I might add.
Frankly, I thought Sam was finished. I thought we had heard the last of him. How wrong I was!
Imagine my surprise when, some months later, my phone told me that Sam Gunn wanted to have a meeting with me. Surprise quickly turned to suspicion when I played back Sam’s call.
“Pierre, you old silver fox,” Sam said, grinning malevolently, “I know we’ve had our differences in the past….”
He had a nerve, addressing me by my first name. For people of Sam’s ilk I expected to be called Mr. D’Argent. But Sam never paid any attention to the finer points of politesse.
On and on he went. If there’s one thing that Sam can do, it’s talk. His tongue must be made of triple-laminated heat shield cermet. I sat back in my desk chair and studied his sly, shifty-eyed face while he chattered nonstop. Sam looks like a grown-up Huckleberry Finn, although he hasn’t grown up all that much. He claims he’s one hundred sixty-five centimeters tall, which is an obvious lie. If he’s one sixty-five, Napoleon must have been two meters and then some.
Sam’s face is round, topped with a thatch of wiry rust-red hair. His snub nose is sprinkled with freckles, and his eyes seem never to be the same color twice. Hazel eyes, he says. The eyes of a born con artist, I say. For the life of me I can’t understand what women see in him, but Sam is never without a beautiful woman hanging on him. Or two. Or three.
I was just considering fast-forwarding his message when at last he got to the point.
“Pierre, I have an idea that’ll knock your jockstrap out from under you. But it’s going to take a big chunk of capital to put it into operation. So I figured, with Rockledge’s money and my brains we could make an indecent profit. Wanna talk about it?”
And that was it. His message was over. The phone screen froze on Sam’s grinning image and a string of callback numbers.
I didn’t call him back. Not at first. Let him stew in his own juices for a while, I thought, and I waited for an onslaught of messages from Sam. As a matter of fact, I was looking forward to seeing the detestable little snot get down on his knees and beg me to listen to him.
But Sam didn’t beg. He didn’t even try to call me again. I waited for days, going about my business as normal, without hearing a peep from Sam. I began to wonder what he’d wanted. Why did he call? He said he needed a large amount of capital to finance his latest scheme. What was he up to? Had he gone to someone else to raise the money? To BLM Aerospace, perhaps?
In those days, incidentally, my office was on Earth. In beautiful Montreal, actually. Rockledge Industries was a truly diversified and multinational corporation, with fingers in literally thousands of operations all over the Earth and, of course, in orbital space. We were even beginning to build O’Neill type habitats at the L-4 and L-5 libration points along the Moon’s orbit. We were so fully committed financially that I didn’t know where I’d come up with funding for whatever harebrained scheme Sam had in mind, even if I were foolish enough to invest Rockledge money in it.
So it was something of a surprise when, one fine crisp winter morning as I took my usual walking commute from my condominium home to my office through the glassteel tube that connects the two towers at their twentieth floors, I saw Sam walking along with me.
Outside the tube!
My eyes must have popped wide. Sam was out there in the mid-February cold, apparently walking on air. He just plodded along, step by step, with nothing visible between him and the city streets, twenty storeys below. He paid no attention to me, nor to the other men and women in the tube who stopped to gape in amazement at him.
The temperature out there was below zero and I could see from the clouds scudding overhead and the way that the bare tree branches were swaying far below that a considerable wind was blowing. Sam was wearing nothing heavier than a suit jacket as he leaned into the wind and trudged along, his shifty eyes squeezed almost shut, but a crooked grin on his freckled, snub-nosed face, doggedly slogging toward the Rockledge corporate office tower.
I found myself slowing down to keep pace with him, slack-jawed. A crowd of other commuters was gathering, watching Sam with equal astonishment. A woman tapped at the curving glassteel wall to get his attention. Sam paid her no heed.