I was losing weight worrying over this problem. And I started to have bad dreams, nightmares in which C.C. Chatsworth was fiendishly slicing me into thin sections on those volleyball wires, cackling insanely while my blood floated all around me in zero-gravity bubbles.
Sam, strangely enough, was very solicitous, fussing over me like a distraught uncle.
“You gotta eat better, Zorro,” he told me as I picked at my dinner.
We were back at the Earthview. Sam had just returned from another quick trip to Sunsat Seventeen. The magnetrons were still giving trouble. Sam grumbled about the Asian consortium’s insistence that seventy-five percent of the satellite’s hardware had to be manufactured in Asia.
“And not the Pacific Rim countries, where they know how to build major hardware,” he groused. “Not Japan or even China.”
Despite my growing despair, I went for his bait. “Then where is the hardware being built?” I asked.
Sam frowned from across the circular dining table. “Upper Clucksville, from the looks of it. Afghanistan, Tzadikistan, Dumbbellistan—guys who had trouble making oxcarts are now building klystrons and power busses and I’m stuck with a contract that says I’ve gotta make it all work right or it comes outta my profits!”
“Why did you ever agree to such a contract?” I wondered out loud.
“Outta the goodness of my heart,” said Sam, placing a hand on his chest. “Why else?”
A bell rang in my mind.
Sam was gone the next morning, back to the same Sunsat Seventeen. I went up to my roomy office and immediately got to work. Ignoring the pretty view of the plaza’s greenery and the Olympic-sized swimming pool where young tourists were doing quintuple flips in lunar slow-motion from the thirty-meter diving platform, I booted up my computer and started checking out the hunch that had popped into my mind the night before.
In the back of my mind it occurred to me that Sam had generously given me this office next to his own so that he could keep an eye on me. He probably had the desktop computer bugged, too, so he could see what I was looking into. So I used my trusty old palm-sized machine instead. It was slower, because it had to access files stored back on Earth and that meant a second-and-a-half lag. But using Sam’s computer would have been foolish, I thought.
Yes! I was right. Every time Sam made a successful buy on the futures market he was in orbit, not on the Moon. Almost. He made a few buys from his office here in Selene City as well, but they were sometimes winners, more often losers. When he called in his buys from orbit they were winners, every time except once, and that once happened when a factory ship broke down months after Sam’s purchase of its cargo of industrial steel; the cargo was almost a year late in reaching the market. Everyone lost money on that one.
His sell orders came from Selene, from orbit, from wherever he happened to be. But his successful buys, the ones that were making him rich, always came from orbit.
I was so excited by this discovery that it wasn’t until late that afternoon that the reaction hit me. So what? So Sam makes his buy decisions while he’s working in orbit, instead of when he’s on the Moon. What does that prove?
It didn’t prove anything, I realized. It certainly reinforced the idea that Sam was cheating the system, somehow. But how he was doing it remained a mystery.
I felt terribly let down. As if I had spent every bit of my energy trying to break down a solidly locked door, only to find that the room beyond that door was totally empty.
I sat at the desk Sam had loaned me, staring out at the scantily clad tourists performing athletic feats that were impossible on Earth, feeling completely drained and exhausted. In my mind’s eye I saw C.C. roasting me over the coals of bureaucratic wrath. And Sam grinning at me like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern, knowing that he had outsmarted me.
I should have been angry with Sam. Furious. The little trickster was ruining my career, my life. Yet I just couldn’t work up the rage. Sam had been kind to me. I knew it had all been in his own self-interest, but the little wise guy had actually behaved as if we were real friends.
Nevertheless, I had to get to the bottom of this. Sam was cheating and it was my job to nail him. Or I would be nailed myself.
I hauled myself up from the desk chair and headed for Selene’s spaceport, checking my palm computer for the departure time of the next OTV heading for Sunsat Seventeen.
I’m going to catch him in the act, I told myself. He’s not going to outsmart me any longer.
When I finally arrived at the sunsat, he was outside again, working with the same team of technicians while the same trio of engineers gave me worried frowns and mumbles as I pulled on the same slightly-too-small space suit.
“Sam told us we should stay inside,” said one of the women engineers.
“He said it’s going to be real hairy topside,” the other one added.
The bald, bearded man said, “He said he had to test the escape pod again.”
“Again?” The word caught my attention.
The man nodded solemnly while the two women checked out my backpack.
“How often does he check out the escape pod?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Every time he comes here, just about.”
One of the women said, from behind me, “Sam’s worried that this sunsat might be unsafe.”
My mind was clicking fast. I couldn’t imagine any disaster that could make this sixty-square kilometer slab of metal so unsafe that they would have to abandon it. The so-called escape pod was a modified OTV; it could fly all the way back to the Moon, if necessary.
And Sam took out the escape pod almost every time he came to this sunsat.
Click. Click. Click. Those facts meshed together. They added up to something—but I didn’t know the full answer. Not yet.
“Tell Sam that I’m coming out to the escape pod,” I commanded. “Tell him not to leave until I get to him.”
I flew up the access tube as fast as I could and pulled myself hand-over-hand along the guard rail that led out to the escape pod. All the while, I was thinking that the pod ought to be stationed close to the habitat module, not out at the end of the structure.
I got there almost in time. Just as I reached the docking module, the pod detached and floated away into the emptiness.
“Sam!” I yelled into my helmet microphone. “Come back here! I’m going with you.”
“Sorry, Zorro, no can do,” Sam’s voice chirped cheerfully in my earphones. “Go on back inside and have a cup of coffee. I’ll only be out for a couple hours or so. Gotta check the emergency systems.”
The pod was drifting slowly away; he hadn’t fired its main engine yet.
“Sam, you’re full of bullshit and we both know it!”
“Such harsh language,” he replied. “That’s not like you, Zorro.”
I had to do something. I couldn’t just hover there and watch him get away with it. I don’t remember thinking over my options. I simply acted without rational thought.
I unclipped my tether and jumped off the satellite, trying to reach the slowly drifting escape pod.
Just as I did, I heard Sam warning, “Counting down to main engine ignition: ten, nine, eight…”
I desperately needed to reach the pod before its rocket engine lit up. Reaching awkwardly behind me, I tried to find the bleed valve for my air tank. If I could squirt a little air out, it would act as a rocket thrust and zip me out to the pod before Sam could light up its main engine.
My gloved fingers found the valve while I mentally tried to picture how it worked. I pushed down on the knob, then turned it just a hair.
Too much. I was snapped into a crazy spin, my arms and legs flailing wildly, pulled away from my body by centrifugal force. The escape pod, the sunsat, the stars whirled madly around me.