“What happens to Cuban-American relations when he finds out?”
Jones’s smile had evaporated. “Which brings us back to the vital question: are you going to try to blow the whistle?”
I didn’t like the sound of that try to.
“No, she’s not,” Sam said. “Ramona’s a good American citizen and this is a matter of international relations now.”
The gall of the man! He had elevated his scam into an integral part of the State Department’s efforts to end the generations-old split between Cuba and the U.S. I wondered who in Washington had been crazy enough to hang our foreign policy on Sam Gunn’s trickery and deceit. Probably the same kind of deskbound lunkheads who had once dickered with the Mafia to assassinate Castro with a poisoned cigar.
“I want to hear what you have to say, Ms. Perkins,” Jones said, her voice low but hard as steel.
What could I say? What did I want to say? I really didn’t know.
But I heard my own voice tell them, “Sam promised to close down Space Adventure Tours in two more months. I think that would be a good idea.”
Sam nodded slowly. “Sure. By that time I oughtta be able to raise enough capital to buy a Clippership and take tourists into orbit for real.”
Jones looked from me to Sam and back again.
Sam added, “Of course, it would help if the State Department ponied up some funding for me.”
She snapped her attention to Sam. “Now wait a minute ..
“Not a lot,” Sam said. “Ten or twenty million, that’s all.”
Jones’s mouth dropped open. Then she yelped, “That’s extortion!”
Sam placed both hands on his flowered shirt in a gesture of aggrieved innocence. “Extortion? Me?”
“AND THAT’S JUST about the whole story, Uncle Griff,” Ramona said to me.
I leaned back in my desk chair and stared at her. “That business with the president of Cuba happened two months ago. What kept you down there in Panama until now?”
She blushed. Even beneath her deep suntan I could see her cheeks reddening.
“Uh … well, I wanted to stay on Sam’s tail and make certain he closed up his operation when he promised he would.”
Sam hadn’t closed Space Adventure Tours, I knew. He had suspended operations in Panama and returned to the agency. Gone back on duty. He was scheduled for a classified Air Force mission, of all things. I had talked myself blue in the face, trying to get the astronaut office in Houston to replace him with somebody else, but they kept insisting Sam was the best man they had for the mission. Lord knows who he bribed, and with what.
“You didn’t have to stay in Panama all that time,” I pointed out to my niece. “You could have kept tabs on him from here in Washington.”
She blushed even more deeply. “Well, Uncle Griff, to tell the truth … it was sort of like a, you know, kind of like a honeymoon.”
I snorted. Couldn’t help it. The thought of my own little niece shacked up with …
“You were living with him?” I bellowed.
She just smiled at me. “Yes,” she said, dreamily.
I was furious. “You let Sam Gunn—”
“Not Sam!” Ramona said quickly. Then she grinned at me. “You thought I was living with Sam?” She laughed at me.
Before I could ask, she told me, “Hector! We fell in love, Uncle Griff! We’re going to get married.”
That was different. Sort of. “Oh. Congratulations, I suppose. When?”
“Next year,” my niece answered. “When Sam starts real flights into orbit, Hector and I are going to spend our official honeymoon in space!”
I wanted to puke.
So that’s why we had to fire Sam Gunn. Government regulations specifically state that you can’t be running a business of your own while you’re on the federal payroll. Besides, the little SOB made a shambles of everything he touched.
It wasn’t easy, though. Actually firing somebody from a government job is never easy, and Sam played every delaying trick in the book. Just to see if he could give me apoplexy, I’m sure.
The little conniving sneak was even working out an arrangement to rent a section of a new space station and turn it into an orbiting honeymoon hotel before I finally got all the paperwork I needed to fire his butt out of the agency.
And he didn’t leave quietly. Not Sam. Know what his final masterstroke was? He left me a prepaid ticket to ride his goddamned Clipper-ship into orbit and spend a full week in his orbiting hotel.
He knew damned well I’d never give him the satisfaction! Probably the little bastard thought I was too old to enjoy sex. Or maybe he expected me to bust a blood vessel while I’m making love in weightlessness.
But I fooled him. Good and proper. I grew a beard. I got hair implants. The little wiseass never recognized me.
When they opened this retirement center here at Copernicus I was one of the first residents. I thought maybe Sam would come here, sooner or later, if and when he finally retired.
That’s what I’m waiting for. I know he’s not dead. Sooner or later he’s going to show up again, and sooner or later he’ll end up here in this low-gravity old folks’ home. Retired, with nothing to do. Then I can drive him nuts, for a change.
That’s something worth living for!
The Show Must Go On!
“Pretty shaky,” Gradowsky muttered, after listening to Griffith’s narration. “Even with his sworn testament the lawyers aren’t going to like this.”
Jade slumped in the battered old couch, feeling exhausted from her weeks of travel and tension.
“You don’t mean that we can’t use any of it, do you?”
“That’s not my decision, kid,” said Gradowsky from behind his desk. “We’ll have to let the lawyers listen to what you’ve got.”
She nodded glumly, too tired to argue. Besides, it would do no good to fight Gradowsky on this. His hands were tied. She began to get an inkling of how Sam Gunn had felt about being hemmed in by office procedures and red tape.
“So where do you go from here?” Gradowsky asked her.
Jade pulled herself up straighter in the chair, startled by the question. “You mean we’re going on with the project?”
“Sure. Until the lawyers pull the plug on us. Why not? I think what you’re getting is great stuff. I just worry about people suing us, that’s all.”
Jade’s weariness seemed to wash away like water-paint under a fire hose.
“Well,” she said, “several of the people I talked to said there’s a man at space station Alpha who—”
“Alpha? That’s in Earth orbit.” “Right.”
“We don’t have the budget to send you out there,” Gradowsky said.
“We don’t?”
“Hell, kiddo, you’ve just about used up the whole expense budget I gave you just traipsing around the different lunar settlements. Do you have any idea of what it costs to fly back Earthside?”
“I wouldn’t be going all the way to Earth,” Jade answered. “Just to the space station.”
“Yeah, I know.” Gradowsky seemed embarrassed with the recollection that Jade could not go to Earth even if she wanted to.
“I’ve covered just about everybody I could find here on the Moon,” she said. “But there are plenty of people elsewhere: on Alpha, in the Lagrange habitats, even out in the Belt.”
Gradowsky puffed his cheeks and blew out a heavy sigh. “The Asteroid Belt. Christ!”
Jade knew she had to do something, and quickly, or the Sam Gunn project was finished.
“When I first started this job,” she said to her boss, “you told me that a good reporter goes where the story is, regardless of how far or how difficult it might be.”
He grinned sheepishly at her. “Yeah, I know. But I forgot to tell you the other half of it—as long as the big brass okays the expenses.”