The six space-suited technicians simply hung on their tethers, silent as corpses, unmoving and apparently unmoved by Sam’s insults.
“Would you believe,” Sam said to me, “that they sent me the only six techs in all of Asia that can’t speak English? They expect me to talk to them in Sanskrit or whatever.”
“That must be frustrating,” I said.
“Not all that bad.” I detected a grin in his voice. “I can call them anything that pops into my head and they don’t take offense…. as long as I stick to English.”
Then he whirled back toward them and unleashed a blast of heavily accented Japanese that galvanized the technicians into frenzied action. I understood a little of what he said and I have no intention of repeating it.
It took the better part of two hours, but Sam finally got the electrical sparking stopped. He had to do the toughest part of the job by himself; the technicians either could not or would not go within fifty meters of the crackling blue fireworks. I had to hang there like a lanky sausage, with nothing to do but watch Sam work while I worried about how much radiation I was absorbing.
When the sparking finally stopped, however, the six technicians began dismantling the magnetron with the intense purposiveness of a team of ants tearing into a jelly doughnut that someone had carelessly dropped.
“C’mon,” Sam said, pulling himself along the guide rail toward me, “let’s go back inside, Zorro.”
“Zoilo,” I corrected.
“Yeah, sure.”
As we headed for the tube hatch I tried to make some conversation. “How much time do you spend outside like this?”
“Too damned much,” Sam snapped.
“I mean, the radiation levels out here are—”
“That’s why I wear a lead jockstrap, pal.”
I thought he was joking. Years later I found out that he wasn’t.
I followed him back to the access tube and down to the office/habitat area. The worried trio I had met earlier was nowhere in sight, although where they could hide in the narrow confines of the office/habitat area was beyond me.
We stopped in front of the space suit lockers and began to work our way out of our suits. Once Sam lifted off his helmet I took a good look at him. I had seen videos and stills of him, naturally. I knew that round, snub-nosed face with its bristling rust-red hair almost as well as I knew my own. Yet seeing him live and close-up was different: he looked more animated, livelier. And his eyes seemed to twinkle with the awareness that he knew things I didn’t.
Sam’s space suit looked grimy, hard-used. Its torso and helmet were covered with corporate logos and mission patches, everything from Vacuum Cleaners Inc. to an ancient, faded Space Station Freedom. Several emblems puzzled me: one that said Keep the baby, Faith, and another that looked like the gaudily striped flattened sphere of the planet Jupiter with four little stars beside it and the word Roemer beneath.
“C’mon,” Sam said. “Lemme show you where you’ll be sleeping tonight.”
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” I asked.
He gave me an exaggerated frown. “I know why you’re here. C.C. wants to pin my balls to her office wall, right?”
It was clear that he understood exactly why I had come; no cover story was necessary with Sam. So I nodded, then realized that Sam was at eye level with me, despite the fact that I was almost a foot taller than he. I had unconsciously slipped my feet into the floor loops, to anchor myself down. Sam, on the other hand, floated free and bobbed weightlessly beside me.
“Why is it,” he asked the empty air, “that when a little guy makes some money, everybody in the goddamned government wants to investigate him?”
“Mr. Gunn,” I started to explain, “you have had an extremely—”
“Call me Sam,” he snapped.
“Very well. You may call me Zoilo.”
“I already do, Zorro.”
“Zoilo.”
“I still can’t figure out why the double-dipped ISC is worried about my good luck on the commodities market.”
“Ms. Chatsworth is concerned that more than good luck may be involved,” I replied.
He grinned at me, a gap-toothed grin of pure boyish glee.
“She thinks I’m cheating?”
He said it with such wide-eyed innocence that I was left speechless.
Sam laughed and said, “C’mon, let’s get some shut-eye. The next OTV won’t be here until tomorrow afternoon.”
He floated down the corridor, propelling himself with deft touches of his fingers against the metal walls. I pulled my stockinged feet out of the floor loops and clambered hand-over-hand after him, using the grips that studded the walls.
To say that the personnel quarters aboard Sunsat Seventeen were spartan would be an understatement. They consisted of a row of lockers, nothing more. A mesh sleeping cocoon was fastened to one side, a fold-down sink on the other. There was an electrical outlet and a data port for connecting a computer. The locker was barely tall enough for me to squeeze into it; I had to keep my chin pressed down on my chest.
The next morning I groaned as I unfolded myself out in the corridor. Sam, on the other hand, was chipper and as bright as a new-minted penny.
“Whatsamatter, Zorro,” he asked, almost solicitously, “you in pain or something?”
Stretching in an effort to ease the crick in my neck, I explained that the privacy booths were too cramped for comfort.
“Gee,” Sam said, bouncing lightly off the floor to rise to eye level with me, “I always thought they were really spacious.”
Over breakfast in the minuscule galley I asked, “Why are you here, Sam, instead of in your office in Selene City? Surely you can hire engineers to supervise the work here.”
He gave me a sour look as he spooned up oatmeal. “Yeah, sure. I can hire the entire graduating class of MIT if I want to.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because every engineer I hire costs me money, and money is something I don’t have much of, that’s why.”
“But the High Asia Sunsat Combine must be paying at least minimum rates for your maintenance contract.”
He chewed thoughtfully for a moment; the oatmeal was that lumpy. Then he swallowed and said, “Nobody would sign a contract with S. Gunn Enterprises unless our bid was considerable under standard rates. Your sweetheart Ms. Chatsworth has seen to that.”
“But that’s illegal. It’s restraint of…” My voice trailed off as I realized the import of what he was telling me.
“C.C. and her connections in the government saw to it that I got screwed out of my old corporation. She’s got a vendetta going against me. The only work I can find is these crappy maintenance contracts, and even then I’ve got to do it at a helluva lot less than standard pay.”
I heard myself ask weakly, “Well, how many contracts do you have?”
“Six, right now. Three sunsats, a couple of orbiting astronomical telescopes, and the laundry facility at the new retirement center in Selene City.”
“Laundry?”
He laughed bitterly. “Great job for a pioneer, isn’t it? Washing old folks’ dirty sheets.”
Sam had truly been a pioneering entrepreneur, I knew. The zero-gee hotel, the first asteroid mining expedition, even the early work of cleaning debris out of the low-orbit region around Earth—he had been the trailblazer. Now he was reduced to maintenance contracts, and hiring fourth-rate technicians because he couldn’t afford better.
Yet… somehow he was getting rich on the commodities futures market.
“Well,” I said, “at least maintenance contracts provide a steady income.”
“Oh yeah, sure.” A frown puckered his brows. “They’re usually safe and easy, all right. But this bunch of clowns trying to operate Sunsat Seventeen are making this particular job a pain in the butt.”