An older man rapped hard on the glassteel with his walking stick, looking annoyed.
“Get down from there, you damned fool!” he shouted.
Sam abruptly stopped his forward motion and turned to stare at us: For an instant he seemed frozen in midair. Then he looked down. His eyes went wide as he realized there was nothing below him but thin air. He dropped as if an invisible trapdoor had opened beneath him, plummeting downward like a dead weight.
I banged my nose painfully against the transparent wall of the tube, trying to follow his figure as it hurtled down toward the streets. I heard a dozen other thumps and grunts as others in the crowd did the same. Sam dropped like a stone and disappeared from our view.
My God! I thought. He’s committed suicide! For a moment I felt horrified, but then (I must confess) I said to myself, That’s the last I’ll see of the exasperating little bastard.
I was, of course, quite wrong.
I raced to my office, sprinting past several assistants who tried to catch my attention. I had to call the police, turn on the local news, find out what had happened to Sam.
Imagine my stupefied shock, then, when I saw Sam sitting behind my desk, grinning from ear to ear like a poorly carved Jack-o’-lantern.
“You!” I gasped, out of breath from surprise, astonishment and exertion. “I saw you—”
“You saw a hologram, Pierre old buddy-pal. Looked realistic, didn’t it?”
I sank into the bottle-green leather armchair in front of my desk. “Hologram?”
“The old geezer with the cane was stooging for me. Caught your attention, didn’t it?”
Astonishment quickly gave way to pique. Sam had tricked me, and wormed his way into my private office in the bargain.
“Get out from behind my desk,” I snapped.
“Certainly, oh gracious captain of industry,” said Sam. He got up from my swivel chair, pretended to dust off its seat, and bowed as I came around the desk. He scampered around the other end of the desk and took the leather armchair. It was too big for him: his feet dangled several centimeters off the floor and he looked like a child in a man’s chair.
I scowled at him as I sat down. Sam grinned back at me. For several moments neither of us said anything, something of a record for silence on Sam’s part.
“All right,” I said at last, “you’ve finagled your way into my office. Now what’s this latest castle in the sky of yours all about?”
“For a corporate bigshot, you’re damned perceptive, Pierre. But the castle I want to build isn’t in the sky. It’s on the Moon. Hell Crater, to be exact.”
I didn’t have to say another word, not for the better part of the next hour. Sam spun out his grandiose plan to build what he called a resort facility at Hell Crater: hotels, restaurants, gambling casinos, legalized prostitution (which Sam called “sexual therapy”), electronic games and virtual reality simulations based on the completely realistic holographic system he had used to stun me and the other commuters.
Hell Crater, it turns out, was named after a nineteenth-century Jesuit astronomer, Maximilian J. Hell; an Austrian, I believe. Sam loved the idea of turning the thirty-kilometer-wide crater into a lunar Sin City, a couple of hundred kilometers south of Alphonsus, where the lunar nation of Selene stood.
“We can string up a cable car transportation system from Selene to Hell,” Sam enthused, “and show the tourists some terrific scenery on the way: Mare Nubium, the Straight Wall, Mt. Yeager—lots to see.”
He finally took a breath.
I countered, “Sam, you can’t expect me to recommend to Rockledge’s senior management that we invest in a den of vice. Prostitution? Gambling? Impossible.”
“It’s all completely legal,” he pointed out. “The nation of Selene doesn’t have jurisdiction, and even if they did we wouldn’t be breaking any of their laws. This isn’t the Vatican, for cryin’ out loud.”
“Rockledge’s board of directors—”
“Would go to Hell as fast as they could,” Sam said, grinning. Then he admitted, “As long as they could go incognito.”
“It’s impossible, Sam. Forget about it.”
He shrugged. “I’ll have to go elsewhere, then.”
I wasn’t frightened by that. “And just who do you think would be foolish enough to finance your crazy scheme?”
“I dunno. Maybe the D’Argent Trust.”
I laughed in his face. “My wife controls the Trust. If you think for one nanosecond that she’d invest in a glorified whorehouse—”
“She might,” Sam said, “in exchange for some information about the activities of certain Rockledge employees.”
I felt my brows knit. “Which Rockledge employees?”
“A certain knockout blonde named Marlowe.”
“She’s in the comptroller’s office.”
“But she spends a lot of time with the head of the space operations department.”
“That’s not true! And besides, it’s strictly business!”
Sam chuckled. “Pierre, your face is as red as a Chinese pomegranate.”
“You’re the one who had an affair with that woman!” I remembered. “You and she—”
“It was a lot of fun,” Sam said, with a sly smile. “Until I found out she was working for you and trying to slick me out of my share of the orbital hotel. She was screwing me, all right.”
“Industrial espionage,” I said, with as much dignity as I could manage.
“Yeah, sure.” He sighed. “Well, I’ve got my memories. And some damned good pictures of her.”
“I don’t care what you have. My relationship with Ms. Marlowe has always been strictly professional. I mean, business.”
“You think your wife would believe that?”
“You’re making totally unfounded accusations,” I snapped. “Ms. Marlowe and I—”
“Make a beautiful couple. Wanna see the pictures?”
“They’re fakes! They’ve got to be! I never—”
“You never,” Sam said. “But would Mrs. D’Argent believe you? One look at your blonde bosom buddy and you’re in deep sheep dip, Pierre, mon vieux.”
“It’s a filthy lie!” I screamed. I hollered. I lost my cool. I ranted and threatened to have Sam assassinated or at least take him to court. He simply sat there and grinned that maddening gap-toothed grin of his at me while I fussed and fizzed and finally gave in to him.
That’s how Rockledge Industries and S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, went into partnership.
I squeezed the funding from various Rockledge projects and kept it as quiet as I could. Half a billion dollars might seem like small change to a hundred-billion-dollar corporation such as Rockledge, but still, one should be careful. For nearly two years I didn’t see Sam at all (much to my relief), except for monthly progress reports that he sent through my private laser link from the Rockledge office in Selene. I lived in fear that I’d be discovered, and in dread of the next annual meeting of the board of directors.
The corporate comptroller assigned Ms. Marlowe, of all people, to the Hell Crater project. I spoke to her only by phone or e-link. I was very careful not to have any face-to-face meetings with her, which Sam could turn into more material for his blackmail.
I must confess that Sam ran the project efficiently and energetically. Major construction projects always run into snags, but the Hell Crater complex was built smoothly and swiftly.
“We’ll be ready to open by the time your next annual board meeting convenes,” Sam told me, by laser link from the Moon.
I confessed, “I can’t understand how you managed to get it built so quickly.”
He grinned that lopsided pumpkin grin of his. “I paid off the right people, Pierre.”