I could still hear Sam counting,”… three, two ..
A noiseless flash of light made me blink even while my head was whacking from side to side inside my helmet. I thought I heard Sam’s voice yelling something, but then everything went blurry. I thought I was unconscious or maybe dead, but my head was still thumping painfully and every part of my body was screaming with pain and I was getting terribly dizzy.
Finally I did black out. My last thought was that this was a thoroughly idiotic way to die, spinning like a rag doll while Sam rocketed off to do whatever it was he did to cheat the commodities market.
When I came to, the first thing I saw was Sam’s round, freckled face staring down at me. He was smiling, sort of, even though the expression on his face was far from pleased.
“You just cost me a couple hundred million bucks, Zorro,” he said. Softly.
I blinked. My head was throbbing, thundering with pain. My back and shoulders and arms and legs—all of me ached agonizingly.
But what cut through the haze of hurt was the sight of Sam. He was in his beat-up old space suit, helmet off. Something new had been added to his collection of patches and insignias. He had painted a slashing red zigzag across the suit’s chest. A letter zee. The mark of Zorro.
“Wh …” My throat was dry and raw. It took a real effort to work up enough saliva to swallow. “What happened?” I asked weakly.
Sam tried to frown at me but his face just wasn’t cut out for it.
“Just as I lit up the pod’s engine you went pin-wheeling past me like a bowling ball with legs.”
We were in the escape pod, I realized. A padded bulkhead curved above me, and beyond Sam’s back I could see the control panel and the small circular viewport above it. I was lying on one of the acceleration couches.
“You rescued me,” I said.
Sam hunched his shoulders. “It was either that or watch you zip all the way out to Mars. I figured you’d run out of air in about ten minutes, the way you were squirting it out of your backpack.”
I tried to sit up, but my head pounded like a thunder-burst and I got woozy.
“Take it easy, babe,” Sam said. “Just lay there and relax. We’re on our way back to the sunsat, but it’ll take an hour or so.”
“An hour … ?”
“I had to burn a helluva lot of propellant to catch you, Zorro. And then burn off that velocity and head back. Lotta delta-vee, pal. So we’re on a minimum energy trajectory, headin’ back to the ol’ corral.” Those last few words he pronounced with a fake western twang.
“You saved my life,” I said, realizing that it was true. I felt an enormous sense of gratitude welling up inside me.
Sam brushed it off with a wave of his hand. “It was either that or have C.C. come after me for murder.”
“She couldn’t—”
“Couldn’t she? Once she figured out that you knew how I was getting a jump on the market, she’d automatically assume I killed you to keep you quiet.”
I blinked with shock. “But I didn’t—”
“Pretty smart cookie, Zorro, ol’ pal.” Sam was smiling, but it seemed a little on the bitter side. “That’s why I painted your zee on my chest. You got me, fair and square.”
There are times when a man should keep his big mouth shut and accept praise, whether he deserves it or not. This was certainly one of those times. Unfortunately, my brain was too addled from the beating I had just undergone to pay attention to my own advice.
“What do you mean, I got you?” I asked, befuddled. “What does the zee on your chest have to do with it?”
Sam’s grin turned more impish. He touched one end of the zee and said, “A factory ship.” Then, sliding his finger along the zigzag red line, he added, “The Baade Orbital Telescope,” the finger slid across the other leg of the zee, “the reflector I hung out at the Mars L-5 position,” finally the finger came to rest at the other end of the zee, “and the ISC’s main receiving telescope in Earth orbit.”
Then he pointed to the patch on his chest, just above the zee, the one that said Roemer. “He figured out the speed of light.”
I got it! Like a flash of lightning, I suddenly understood what Sam had been doing all along.
Everybody knew approximately when a factory ship was due to send its message back toward Earth, telling what kind of an ore load it was going to be carrying home. The messages are sent by tight laser beam to the ISC’s receiving facility in Earth orbit. Once the satellite gets the word, it broadcasts the news to all the market centers in the Earth-Moon system.
Sam intercepted the signal. It was that simple. He positioned one of the orbiting astronomical telescopes his company maintained to intercept the laser signal, bounce it to a reflector he had prepositioned along the orbit of Mars, and then finally send it Earthward. The signal was received at the Earth satellite station ten or twenty minutes later than it normally would have been and nobody was the wiser because nobody bothered to check the exact moment that the factory ship sent its signal.
Meanwhile, Sam used that ten or twenty minutes to buy metals futures before anyone else knew what the factory ship was carrying.
It was so simple! Once you understood what he was doing it seemed absolutely obvious.
And totally illegal.
“Sam,” I said, still somewhat breathless with the astonishment of discovery, “you could go to jail for twenty years.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose so.”
A dead silence fell between us. Sam got up from the couch and floated weightlessly to the control panel. I cranked the couch up to a sitting position, grateful that my head only felt as if it was being split open by a band-saw.
“You’ve been cheating the market, Sam.”
He glanced back at me, over his shoulder, an elfin grin on his round face. “I don’t think there’s anything in the ISC rules about intercepting laser signals. I checked those rules pretty thoroughly, you know.”
“Insider knowledge,” I said firmly, “is a crime.”
“What insider knowledge?” he asked, trying to look innocent. “I just happened to learn about the factory ships’ cargos before anybody else did.”
“By rigging their communications.”
“Nothing illegal about that.”
“Yes there is.”
“Prove it!”
“C.C. will prove it,” I said. “She’ll haul you up before the interplanetary tribunal and they’ll send you to the penal colony on Farside.”
“Maybe,” Sam said. I could see from the way his brow furrowed that he was actually worried.
Well, Sam knew me better than I knew myself, of course. He had already decided to stop tinkering with the market; C.C. and her minions (including me) were getting too close for comfort.
“I only did it to put together enough money to buy a couple of factory ships and go out to the Asteroid Belt again,” he told me.
“You mean this whole scheme was just your way of raising capital?” I was incredulous.
“What else?” he asked, wide-eyed. “None of the sheep-dip banks would lend me a dime. C.C blackballed me. The big-shot investors stick with the big-time operators, like Rockledge and Pogorny. Nobody’d loan me enough money to build an outhouse, let alone a few factory ships.”
I thought it over for a few moments. “So… if I didn’t turn you in, you’d stop this market rigging on your own?”
“Yep,” he answered immediately. “Honest injun. Cross my heart. Scout’s honor.” And he held up one hand in a three-fingered Boy Scout salute.
The man had saved my life. I had done something foolishly stupid and he had saved me from certain death. I owed him that.
Besides, the thought of Sam in jail, or toiling away at the Farside penal colony… I couldn’t bear that.