“C’mon, c’mon,” the little man demanded, “the board’s waiting. What’s your plan?”
“I don’t have one!” Raki wailed.
His visitor shook his head. “Just as I thought. No plan.”
“What can I do?” Raki was trembling now. He saw his dream of conquest crumbling. They’ll fire me! I’ll lose everything!
“Not to worry, pal. That’s why I’m here. To help you.” The little man pulled a computer disk from his grubby coverall pocket. It was smaller than the palm of his hand, even though his hand was tiny.
He handed the disk to Raki. It felt warm and solid in his fingers.
“Show ’em that, pal. It’ll knock ’em on their asses.”
Before Raki could think of anything to say, he was standing at the foot of the long, long conference table. The entire board of directors was staring at him from their massive chairs. The old CEO and his henchmen sat up near the head of the table, flanking the chairman of the board, a woman upon whom Raki had lavished every possible attention. She was smiling at him, faintly, but the rest of the board looked grim.
“Well,” snapped the CEO, “what do you have there in your hand, young man?”
Raki took a deep breath. “I hold here in my hand,” he heard his own voice saying, smoothly, without a tremor, “the salvation of Solar News.”
A stir went around the conference table.
Holding up the tiny disk, Raki went on, “This is a documented, dramatized biography of one of the solar system’s most colorful personalities—the late Sam Gunn.”
The board erupted into an uproar.
“Sam Gunn!”
“No!”
“It couldn’t be!”
“How did you manage it?”
One of the truly elderly members of the board, frail and pasty-faced, waved his skeletal hands excitedly. “I have it on very good authority that BBC was planning to do a biography of Sam Gunn. You’ve beaten them to the punch, young man! Bravo.”
The chairman turned a stern eye on her CEO. “How come you didn’t do this yourself?” she demanded of the cowering executive. “Why did Raki have to do this all on his own?” And she gave Raki a wink full of promise.
The entire board of directors got to their feet and applauded. Walter Cronkite appeared, in a white linen double-breasted suit, to join the acclamation. The old CEO faded, ghostlike, until he disappeared altogether.
Raki smiled and made a little bow. When he turned, he saw that Yoni was waiting for him, reclining on a bank of satin pillows beside a tinkling fountain in a moonlit garden scented by warm blossoms.
His strange little visitor stepped out from behind an azalea bush, grinning. “Way to go, pal. Give her everything you’ve got.”
JADE KNEW THAT her ploy had failed. Raki had returned to Orlando two weeks ago, and there was no word from him at all. Nothing.
She went through her assignments perfunctorily, interviewing a development tycoon who wanted to build retirement villages on the Moon, a visiting ecologist from Massachusetts who wanted a moratorium declared on all further lunar developments, an astrobiologist who was trying to raise funds for an expedition to the south lunar pole to search for fossilized bacteria: “I know there’s got to be evidence of life down there someplace; I just know it.”
All the help that Yoni had given her, all the support that Monica gave, had been for nothing. Jade saw herself trapped in a cell of lunar stone, blank and unyielding no matter which way she turned.
Gradowsky warned her. “You’re sleepwalking, kid. Snap out of it and get me stories I can send to Orlando, not this high-school junk you’ve been turning in.”
Another week went by, and Jade began to wonder if she really wanted to stay on as a reporter. Maybe she could go back to running a truck up on the surface. Or ship out to Mars: they needed construction workers there for the new base the scientists were building.
When Gradowsky called her in to his office she knew he was going to fire her.
Jumbo Jim had a strange, uncomfortable expression on his face as he pushed aside a half-eaten hero sandwich and a mug of some foaming liquid while gesturing Jade to the chair in front of his desk.
Swallowing visibly, Gradowsky said, “Well, you did it.”
Jade nodded glumly. Her last assignment had been a real dud: the corporate board of Selene City never gave out any news other than their official media release.
“The word just came in from Orlando. You leave for Alpha tomorrow.”
It took Jade a moment to realize what Jumbo Jim was telling her. She felt her breath catch.
“Raki must have fought all the way up to the board of directors,” Gradowsky was saying. “It must’ve been some battle.”
Instead of elation, instead of excitement, Jade felt numb, smothered, encased in a block of ice. I’ve got to make it work, she told herself. I’ve got to get to every person who knew Sam and make them tell me everything. I owe it to Monica and Yoni. I owe it to Raki.
She looked past Gradowsky’s fleshy, flabby face, still mouthing words she did not hear, and realized that Raki had put his career on the line. And so had she.
Space Station Alpha
They faced each other suspiciously, floating weightlessly in emptiness.
The black man was tall, long-limbed, loose, gangling; on Earth he might have made a pro basketball player. His utilitarian coveralls were standard issue, frayed at the cuffs and so worn that whatever color they had been originally had long since faded into a dull gray. They were clean and pressed to a razor sharpness, though. The insignia patch on his left shoulder said ADMINISTRATION. A strictly nonregulation belt of royal blue, studded with rough lumps of meteoric gold and clamped by a heavy gold buckle, cinched his pencil-thin waist and made him look even taller and leaner.
He eyed the reporter warily. She was young, and the slightly greenish cast to her pretty features told him that she had never been in zero gravity before. Her flame-red hair was shoulder length, he judged, but she had followed the instructions given to groundlings and tied it up in a zero-gee snood. Terrific big emerald eyes, even if they did look kind of scared.
Her coveralls were spanking new white. She filled them nicely enough, a trim, coltish figure that he almost admired. She looked like a forlorn little waif floating weightlessly, obviously fighting down the nausea that was surging through her.
Frederick Mohammed Malone was skeptical to the point of being hostile toward this female interloper. Jade could see the resentment smoldering in the black man’s red-rimmed eyes. Malone’s face was narrow, almost gaunt, with a trim little Vandyke jutting out from his chin. His forehead was high, receding; his hair was cropped close to the skull. His skin was very black. She guessed Malone’s age at somewhere in his early sixties, although she knew that living in zero gravity could make a person look much younger than his or her calendar age.
She tried to restart their stalled conversation. “I understand that you and Sam Gunn were, uh, friends.”
“Why’re you doing a story on Sam?” Malone asked, his voice low and loaded with distrust.
The two of them were in Malone’s “office.” Actually it was an observation blister in the central hub of space station Alpha. Oldest and still biggest of the Earth-orbiting commercial stations, Alpha was built on the old wheels-within-wheels scheme. The outermost rim, where most of the staff lived and worked, spun at a rate that gave it almost a full Earth gravity, out-of-bounds for Jade. Two-thirds of the way toward the hub there was a wheel that spun at the Moon’s one-sixth g. That was where she was quartered for her visit. The hub itself, of course, was for all practical purposes at zero-gee, weightless.