“I would like you to talk with a few of my technical people, Spence. Would you be willing to do that?”
Twice my VCI salary. And that was just for openers. It was obvious he’d be willing to go higher. Maybe a lot higher. I’d been living on Happy Hour hors d’oeuvres and junk food. I was four months behind on the rent for my seedy dump of an apartment—which was sitting empty, because of Bonnie Jo.
But I shook my head. “I’m happy with VCI.” Happy wasn’t exactly the right word, but I couldn’t leave Sam in the lurch. On the other hand, this might be the best way to make a break with Bonnie Jo.
Turning slightly in his chair, D’Argent sort of nodded toward a trio of guys in suits sitting a few tables away from us.
“I’ve taken the liberty of asking a few of my technical people to come here to meet you. Would you be willing to talk with them, Spence? Just for a few minutes.”
Son of a bitch! It was no accident that we bumped into each other. It was a planned ambush.
“I think, with your help, we can adapt the magnetic bumper concept easily enough,” he was saying, silky-smooth. “We’d even pay you a sizable bonus for joining Rockledge: say, a year’s salary.”
They wanted to steal Sam’s idea and squeeze him out of the picture. And they thought I’d help them do it. For money.
I got to my feet. “Mr. D’Argent, Rockledge doesn’t have enough money in its whole damned corporate treasury to buy me away from VCI.”
D’Argent shrugged, very European-like, and made a disappointed sigh. “Very well, although your future would be much more secure with Rockledge than with a con-man such as Mr. Gunn.”
Through gritted teeth I said, “I’ll take my chances with Sam.” And I stalked out of the lounge, leaving him sitting there.
“That was a pretty noble thing to do,” Jade said.
They were more than halfway through their dinners. She had ordered trout from the habitat’s aquaculture tanks. Johansen was eating braised rabbit. Jade had to remind herself that rabbit was bred for meat here in the space habitat, just as it was on Selene. But she had never eaten rabbit at home and she could not bring herself to order it here.
“Nothing noble about it,” he said easily. “It made me feel kind of slimy just to be sitting at the same table with D’Argent. Working with the … gentleman, well, I just couldn’t do it.”
“Even though you were trying to get away from Bonnie Jo.”
He shook his head slightly, as if disappointed with himself. “That was the really tough part. I wanted to get away from her and I wanted to be with her, both at the same time.”
“So what did you do?”
He grinned. “I got away. I went up to space station Freedom.”
Sam had served aboard Freedom when he’d been in the agency—Johansen explained. He was definitely persona non grata there, as far as the bureaucrats in Washington and the Cape were concerned, even though all the working stiffs—the astronauts and mission specialists—they all asked me how he was and when he would be coming up. Especially a couple of the women astronauts.
Living aboard Freedom was sort of like living in a bad hotel, without gravity. The quarters were cramped, there was precious little privacy, the hot water was only lukewarm, and the food was as bland as only a government agency can make it. I spent ten-twelve hours a day inside a space suit, strapped into an MMU—a manned maneuvering unit—assembling our equipment on a special boom outside the station.
The agency insisted that the magnetic field could not be turned on until every experiment being run inside the lab module was completed. Despite all our calculations and simulations (including a week’s worth of dry run on the station mock-up in Huntsville) the agency brass was worried that our magnetic field might screw up some delicate experiment the scientists were doing. It occurred to me that they didn’t seem worried about screwing up the station’s own instrumentation or life-support systems. That would just have threatened the lives of astronauts and mission specialists, not important people like university scientists sitting safe on their campuses.
Anyway, after eleven days of living in that zero-gee tin can I got the go-ahead from mission control to turn on the magnetic field. Maybe the fact that one of the big solar panels got dinged with a stray chunk of junk hurried their decision. The panel damage cut the station’s electrical power by a couple of kilowatts.
Rockledge had already launched two of their Nerf balls, one on a shuttle mission and the other from one of their own little commercial boosters. They were put into orbits opposite in direction to the flow of all the junk floating around, sort of like setting them to swim upstream.
Right away they started having troubles. The first Nerf ball expanded only partway. Instead of knocking debris out of orbit it became a piece of junk itself, useless and beyond anybody’s control. The second one performed okay, although the instrumentation aboard it showed that it was getting sliced up by some of the bigger pieces of junk. Rather than being nudged out of orbit when they hit the sticky balloon, they just rammed right through it and came out the other end. Maybe they got slowed enough to start spiraling in toward reentry. But it wouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks before the Nerf ball was ripped to shreds—and became still yet another piece of orbiting junk.
“They’re part of the problem,” I said to Sam over the station’s videophone link, “instead of being part of the solution.”
Sam’s round face grinned like a Jack-o’-lantern. “So that’s why D’Argent’s looking like a stockbroker on Black Tuesday.”
“He’s got a lot to be worried about,” I said.
Sam cackled happily. Then, lowering his voice, he said, “A friend of mine at the tracking center says the old original Vanguard satellite is going to reenter in a couple weeks.”
“The one they launched in ’58?”
“Yep. It’s only a couple of pounds. They called it the Grapefruit back then.”
I looked over my shoulder at Freedom’s crew members working at their stations. I was in the command module, standing in front of the videophone screen with my stockinged feet anchored in floor loops to keep me from floating around the place weightlessly. The crew—two men and a woman—were paying attention to their jobs, not to me. But still…
“Sam,” I said in a near-whisper, “you want me to try to retrieve it?”
“Do you have any idea of what the Smithsonian will pay for it?” he whispered back. “Or the Japanese?”
I felt like a fighter pilot being asked to take on a risky mission. “Shoot me the orbital data. I’ll see what I can do.”
It took a lot of good-natured wheedling and sweet-talking before Freedom’s commander allowed me to use one of the station’s OMVs. There was a provision for it in our contract, of course, but the station commander had the right to make the decision as to whether VCI might actually use one of the little flitters. She was a strong-willed professional astronaut; I’d known her for years and we’d even dated now and then. She made me promise her the Moon, just about. But at last she agreed.
The orbital maneuvering vehicles were sort of in-between the MMUs that you could strap onto your back and the orbital transfer vehicles that were big enough for a couple of guys to go all the way to GEO. The OMVs were stripped-down little platforms with an unpressurized cockpit, a pair of extensible arms with grippers on their ends, and a rocket motor hanging out the rear end.
I snatched the old Vanguard grapefruit without much trouble, saving it from a fiery death after it had spent more than half a century in space. It was just about the size and shape of a grapefruit, with a metal skin that had been blackened by years of exposure to high-energy radiation. Its solar cells had gone dead decades ago.