I started to reply, but to my surprise I found that I had to swallow hard before I could get any words out. “I couldn’t do that to her,” I said.
Sam looked square into my eyes. “You certain of that?”
I almost laughed. “What’s a few hundred million bucks? I don’t need that kind of money.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes, dammit, I’m certain!” I snapped. It wasn’t easy to toss away all that money, and Sam was starting to irritate me.
“Okay,” he said, breaking into that lopsided smile of his. “I believe you.”
Sam got to his feet, his right fist closed around the chip.
“What will you do with it?” I asked.
“Pop it out an airlock. A few days in hard UV should degrade it so badly that even if somebody found it in all this emptiness they’d never be able to read it.”
I got up from my desk chair. “I’ll go with you,” I said.
So the two of us marched down to the nearest airlock and got rid of the chip. I had a slight pang when I realized how much money we had just tossed out into space, but then I realized I had saved Amanda’s life, most likely, and certainly the life of her baby. Hers and Fuchs’s.
“Fuchs will never know,” Sam said. “I feel kind of sorry for him.”
“I feel sorry for her,” I said.
“Yeah. Me too.”
As we walked down the passageway back toward my compartment, curiosity got the better of me.
“Sam,” I asked, “what if you weren’t sure that I’d keep her message to myself? What if you thought I’d sneak off to Humphries and tell him what was on that chip?”
He glanced up at me. “I’ve never killed a man,” he said quietly, “but I’d sure stuff you into a lifeboat and set you adrift. With no radio.”
I blinked at him. He was dead serious.
“I wouldn’t last long,” I said.
“Probably not. Your ship would drift through the Belt for a long time, though. Eons. You’d be a real Flying Dutchman.”
“I’m glad you trust me.”
“I’m glad I can trust you, Gar.” He gave me a funny look, then added, “You’re in love with her, too, aren’t you?”
It took me a few moments to reply, “Who wouldn’t be?”
So we flew to The Rememberer with Judge Meyers and all the wedding guests and the minister and boys’ choir, the caterers and all the food and drink for a huge celebration. Six different news nets were waiting for us: the wedding was going to be a major story.
Sam snuck away, of course. He didn’t marry Jill Meyers after all. That’s why she’s on this ship, the Hermes, to meet him all the way out in the Kuiper Belt at that black hole he supposedly discovered.
She still wants to marry Sam. Don’t ask me why. All I know is that she’ll have to be pretty damned clever to get him to hold still for it.
Disappearing Act
It was nearly midnight when the maitre d’ finished his tale.
“So Lars Fuchs never knew that Amanda’s baby was his own son?” Jade asked, her voice slightly hollow with thoughts of her own birth, her own parents.
“Neither did Martin Humphries,” the maitre d’ replied somberly.
Spence asked, “Fuchs died on that Venus expedition, didn’t he?”
“Yes,” said Jade. “And Amanda died in childbirth, according to the nets. But Humphries is still alive.”
“He hasn’t been seen in public in years,” the maitre d’ pointed out. “The rumor is that he had some sort of mental breakdown.”
“Still, I don’t know if we can use your story. I’ll have to check with our legal department.”
The maitre d’ nodded. “I understand. Frankly, I wouldn’t want Martin Humphries’s people coming after me.”
“Then why’d you tell us?” Spence asked.
The portly man shrugged. “It seemed like the thing to do. For Sam, I guess. To set the record straight. He wasn’t the bastard everybody thinks he was.”
Jade smiled at him, but then she said, “I can’t pay you for the story unless our lawyers say we can use it.”
The maitre d’ smiled back. “That’s okay. I’m doing well enough here. When we get back to Selene I’ll have enough to open my own business.”
“Oh?”
“Selling Martian artifacts.”
“You can’t do that! It’s forbidden by the IAA!”
The maitre d’ s smile widened, showed teeth. “I’ve hired a squad of students who spend their summers with the Mars exploration teams. They make cups and bowls and stuff out of native Martian rock. Voila! Martian artifacts.”
Spence gaped at him. “That… that’s fraud.”
“No, it clearly states on every bill of sale that the artifact was made on Mars. I give no guarantee of age, or of—”
The ship’s captain came bustling into the salon, looking tense, upset. He hurried straight to the table where Jade, Spence and the maitre d’ were sitting.
Spence got to his feet.
To Jade, the captain said, “We just received a message.” “Oh?”
“From Sam Gunn.”
“From Sam?” all three of them asked in unison.
“The little scoundrel is flying back to Earth! He’s popped out of that black hole and he’s heading Earthward at a full g acceleration!”
“That’s impossible!” Spence snapped.
Instead of replying the captain aimed a palm-sized remote at the smart wall.
Sam Gunn’s round, freckled face appeared on the screen. “To whom it may concern,” he said cheerfully. “I’m back from the mini-black hole and on my way toward Earth. See ya there!”
The image winked off.
“That’s all?” Spence demanded.
“We tracked the source of the message. It’s a torch ship heading inbound at one full g.”
“Where’d he get a torch ship?”
“Sacre dieu,” said Jade. “Every lawyer in the solar system’s going to be waiting for Sam when he gets to Earth.”
“Including the Beryllium Blonde,” Spence muttered.
“Have you told Senator Meyers?”
The captain nodded. “Before anyone else.”
“She must be furious,” said the maitre d’.
A puzzled, disbelieving expression on his face, the captain replied, “She laughed! She laughed out loud. I thought she’d snapped.”
“Not Jill Meyers,” Jade said.
“She’s given orders to turn around and get back to Earth,” the captain said. “As fast as we can.”
Torch ship Hermes orbited the Moon exactly once, just long enough for Jade and Spence to be picked up by a shuttle from Selene. Then the ship—with Jill Meyers and her entourage still aboard—returned to Earth.
But Sam Gunn was nowhere to be found. His ship had arrived in Earth orbit, but when customs inspectors boarded it the ship was empty. They impounded it, sealed it, and told the authorities—and the news media—that Sam Gunn had disappeared.
That started a feeding frenzy in the media. Jumbo Jim Gradowsky conferred with Solar News’s corporate bigwigs and released Jade’s hurriedly edited follow-on series about Sam. It was a smash hit, top of the audience ratings. Solar rereleased Jade’s original biography, then packaged the two shows together and scored still another smashing success.
Yet there was no sign of Sam Gunn. He had disappeared. There were rumors that he was in Selene, but no one admitted to seeing him. Then, after weeks of such rumors, the news flashed through Selene that Sam Gunn had been working with a professor at the university. And he’d been arrested by Selene’s security police.
Jade looked up the professor, Daniel C. Townes IV. A physicist. She called him several times, but always got his answering machine.
Then he walked into her office, tall, lanky, looking slightly bemused.