I was so furious I couldn’t do anything but splutter at Sam’s image on my wall screen.
“Calm down, calm down!” Sam said, grinning like an evil elf. “How’d you like to get your money back? I’ve got this deal cooking for a transit system out to the Asteroid Belt….”
Zoilo Hashimoto
Jade terminated the D’Argent narrative and called back her unfinished message to Jim Gradowsky.
“Jim,” she said, “I just listened to D’Argent’s story. Its good material. He’s so obviously biased against Sam that he makes Sam look almost like an angel. Let’s go with it.”
Spence called from the bed, “You getting hungry, Jade? It’s almost dinner hour.”
She smiled at her husband. “Just let me finish this and then we can dress for dinner.”
“I’ve got to take a shower,” Spence said.
“Me too. You go first while I finish this message to Jim.”
Spence gave her a wolfish grin. “I’ll wait. Then we can shower together.”
“In that teeny little stall?”
“We’ll have to stay very close to each other.”
Jade smiled back at him. “Okay. Give me a minute.”
Turning back to the wall screen, she went on, “Jim, I got this story out of the blue. A guy named Hashimoto sent it to me at the office and Monica forwarded it to me. Apparently he saw the bio and figured he’d put in what he knows about Sam. It’s a good story. I think we should include it in the follow-on.”
The Mark of Zorro
“Nobody can consistently make money in the commodities market,” she said, puffing hard. “The little bastard is cheating, some’ow.”
“How?” I asked.
Wiping a rivulet of sweat from her brow, she answered, “That’s what I want you to find out.”
We were dangling on the sidelines of the volleyball court. The game is rather different in zero gravity. The net is circular, held in the middle of the court by hair-thin monofilament wires. Hit one of those wires and it will slice you like a loaf of salami in a delicatessen. The court itself is spherical, the curving walls hard and unpadded glassteel. The ball can take strange bounces off those walls. So can the players.
There were hardly any spectators watching from the other side of the glassteel. This was a private game, something of a grudge match, as a matter of fact.
Carole C. Chatsworth was a big, blonde, blowsy Cockney who looked and sounded as if she belonged in some cheap burlesque show. Actually, she was a brilliant, hard-driving, absolutely ruthless bureaucrat who had worked her way to the top of the Interplanetary Security Commission’s enforcement division.
And she was a cutthroat volleyball player, the kind who would slam you off the wall or push you into the wire if you got in her way.
She was also my boss, and she was convinced that Sam Gunn was illegally reaping a fortune on the commodities futures market.
“No one can be as lucky as that little sod,” she told me, her eyes following the flying, sweating players. “ ‘E’s rigging the market some’ow.”
When C.C. gets an idea in her head, forget about trying to argue her out of it. The only two questions she’ll put up with are: What do you want me to do? and, How soon?
She had allowed herself to bloat up enormously in zero-gee. The rumor was that she’d originally come up to this orbiting hotel when Sam Gunn owned it and Sam had bedded her. Or maybe the other way around. After all, it was supposed to be a “honeymoon hotel” in those days. Sam’s motto for the place was, “If you like waterbeds, you’ll love zero-gee.”
C.C. never went back Earthside. She moved the ISC headquarters to the hotel, and actually got the Commission to buy half the orbital habitat to provide room for her staff’s offices and living quarters. She was ready to bed down with Sam for life. But Sam pulled one of his disappearing acts on her, leaving her humiliated, furious, and certain that his only interest in her had been to get her to buy out his share of the hotel and run off to the Asteroid Belt with her money.
Maybe hell hath no fury like a woman jilted, but C.C. assuaged her anguish with food. She grew larger and larger, gobbling everything in sight, especially chocolate. Whenever a friend, or a fellow bureaucrat or even a physician commented on her size, she laughed bitterly and said, “But I weigh exactly the same as when I first came up ’ere: zero!”
Now she looked like a lumpy dirigible in a soggy, stained sweat suit as she waited for her next turn in the volleyball competition.
“I thought we’d fixed the little bastard’s wagon when ’e tried to sue the Pope,” she muttered, watching the volleyball action with narrowed, piggy eyes. “But some’ow ’e’s making ’imself rich in the futures market. ’E’s cheating. I know ’e is.”
I did not demur. It would have done no good, especially to my career.
“You’re going to Selene City with the team that’s auditing Sam’s books,” she told me. “Officially, you’re one of the auditors. That’ll be your cover.”
My real job, she told me very firmly, was “to find out how that little cheating, womanizing, swindling scumbag of a deviant ’umper is rigging the commodities market.”
So off I went to the Moon to find Sam Gunn.
I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Zoilo Hashimoto, the only son of a Japanese-American construction engineer and a Cuban baseball player whose career was cut short by her pregnancy with me. Dad was killed before I was born in the great tsunami that wiped out the hotel complex he was building on Tarawa. Mom returned to baseball as an umpire after her second marriage broke up, which was after my four sisters were born. She was known as a strict enforcer of the rules on the field. Believe me, she was just as strict at home.
Somewhere in my genetic heritage there must have been a basketball player, for despite the diminutive size of both my parents I am nearly two meters tall—six feet, five inches in old-fashioned English units.
I have been told I am handsome, with deep brown eyes and high cheek bones that make me look decidedly oriental. Yet I have never been very successful with women. Perhaps I am too shy, too uncertain of myself. I once tried to grow a beard, but it looked terrible, and the unwritten dress code of the ISC demands clean-shaven men. The unwritten rules are always the important ones, of course.
I had started my career in law enforcement, figuring that I could safely retire after twenty years of police work with enough of a pension to follow my one true passion: archeology. I longed to help search for the ancient cities that were being unearthed on Mars (pardon the unintentional pun). I was never a street officer; the robots had taken over such dangerous duties by the time I graduated college with my degree in criminology. Instead, I specialized in tracking down financial crooks. I worked with computers and electronic ferrets rather than guns and stun wands.
But enough about me. Let me tell you how I met Sam Gunn.
I dutifully went to the Moon, to Sam’s corporate headquarters at Selene City, foolishly expecting Sam to be there, especially with a team of ISC auditors combing through his records. But Sam wasn’t, of course.
He was out at a new solar power satellite that was just going online to provide fifteen gigawatts of electrical power to the growing industrial cities of central Asia.
Years earlier Sam had been one of the first to go out to the asteroids to mine their metals and minerals. He had amassed a considerable fortune and a fleet of ore-processing factory ships. But then disaster struck and he lost it all. In desperation he had tried to sue the Pope, and although he got what he wanted without going to trial, he quickly lost it all. C.C. Chatsworth had been a major force in seeing to it that Sam was broken and humiliated.