Anyway, Sam was so jubilant that he arranged to come up to Freedom in person to take the satellite back to Earth. Under his instructions I had not brought the grapefruit inside the station; instead I stored it in one of the racks built into the station’s exterior framework. Sam was bringing up a special sealed vacuum container to bring the satellite back to the ground without letting it get contaminated by air.
Sam was coming up on one of the regular shuttle resupply flights. Since there wasn’t any room for more personnel aboard the station he would only stay long enough to take the Vanguard satellite and bring it back to Earth with him.
That was the plan, anyway.
Well, the news that a private company had recaptured the old satellite hit the media like a Washington scandal. Sam was suddenly hot news, proclaiming the right of salvage in space while all sorts of lawyers from government agencies and university campuses argued that the satellite by rights belonged to the government. The idea of selling it to the Smithsonian or some other museum seemed to outrage them.
I saw Sam on the evening TV news the night before he came up to the station. Instead of playing the little guy being picked on by the big bullies, Sam went on the attack:
“That grapefruit’s been floating around up there as dead as a doornail since before I was born,” he said to the blonde who was interviewing him. “My people located it, my people went out and grabbed it. Not the government. Not some college professor who never even heard of the Vanguard 1958b until last week. My people. VCI. Part of S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited.”
The interviewer objected, “But you used government facilities …”
“We are leasing government facilities, lady. We pay for their use.”
“But that satellite was paid for by the American taxpayer.”
“It was nothing but useless junk. It went unclaimed for decades. The law of salvage says whoever gets it, owns it.”
“But the law of salvage is from maritime law. No one has extended the law of salvage into space.”
“They have now!” Sam grinned wickedly into the camera.
It didn’t help, of course, when some Japanese billionaire offered thirty million yen for the satellite.
Next thing you know, the shuttle resupply flight has no less than five guests aboard. They had to bump an astronomer who was coming up to start a series of observations and a medical doctor who was scheduled to replace the medic who’d been serving aboard the station for ninety days.
Five guests: Sam; Ed Zane from the space agency; Albert Clement from the Department of Commerce; Pierre D’Argent of Rock-by-damn-ledge.
And Bonnie Jo Murtchison.
Sam was coming up to claim the satellite, of course. Zane and Clement were there at the request of the White House to investigate this matter of space salvage before Sam could peddle the satellite to anyone—especially the Japs. I wasn’t quite sure what the hell D’Argent was doing there, but I knew he’d be up to no good. And Bonnie Jo?
“I’m here to protect my investment.” She smiled when I asked her why she’d come.
“How did you get them to allow you … ?”
We were alone in the shuttle’s mid-deck compartment, where she and Sam and the other visitors would be sleeping until the shuttle undocked from the station and returned to Earth—with the satellite, although who would have ownership of the little grapefruit remained to be seen.
Bonnie Jo was wearing a light blue agency-issue flight suit that hugged her curves so well it looked like it was tailor-made for her. She showed no signs of space adaptation syndrome, no hint that she was ill at ease in zero-gee. Looked to me as if she enjoyed being weightless.
“How did I talk them into letting me come up here with Sam? Simple. I am now VCI’s legal counsel.”
She sure was beautiful. She had cropped her hair real short, almost a crew cut. Still she looked terrific. I heard myself ask her, as if from a great distance away, “You’re a lawyer, too?”
“I have a law degree from the University of Utah. Didn’t I tell you?” The whole situation seemed to amuse her.
When a government employee gets an order from the White House, even if it’s from some third assistant to a janitor, he jumps as high as is necessary. In the case of Zane and Clement, they had been told to settle this matter about the Vanguard satellite, and they had jumped right up to space station Freedom. Clement looked mildly upset at being in zero gravity. I think what bothered him more than anything else was that he had to wear coveralls instead of his usual chalky gray three-piece suit. Darned if he didn’t find a gray flight suit, though.
Zane was really sick. The minute the shuttle went into weightlessness, Sam gleefully told me, Zane had started upchucking. The station doctor took him in tow and stuck a wad of antinausea slow release medication pads on his neck. Still, it would take a day or more before he was well enough to convene the hearing he’d been sent to conduct.
Although the visitors were supposed to stay aboard the shuttle, Sam showed up in the station’s command module and even wheedled permission to wriggle into a space suit and go EVA to inspect our hardware. It was working just the way we had designed it, deflecting the bits of junk and debris that floated close enough to the station to feel the influence of our magnetic bumper.
“I must confess that I didn’t think it would work so well.”
I turned from my console in the command module and saw Pierre D’Argent standing behind me. “Standing” is the wrong word, almost, because you don’t really stand straight in zero-gee; your body bends into a sort of question-mark kind of semi-crouch, as if you were floating in very salty water. Unless you consciously force them down, your arms tend to drift up to chest height and hang there.
It made me uneasy to have D’Argent hanging (literally) around me. My console instruments showed that the bumper system was working within its nominal limits. I could patch the station’s radar display onto my screen to see what was coming toward us, if anything. Otherwise there were only graphs to display and gauges to read. Our equipment was mounted outside and I didn’t have a window. The magnetic field itself was invisible, of course.
“The debris actually gains an electrical charge while it orbits the Earth,” he murmured, stroking his gray mustache as he spoke.
I said nothing.
“I wouldn’t have thought the charge would be strong enough to be useful,” he went on, almost as if he was talking to himself. “But then your magnetic field is very powerful, isn’t it, so you can work with relatively low charge values.”
I nodded.
“We’re going to have to retrieve our Nerf balls,” he said with a sad little sigh. “The corporation will have to pay the expense of sending a team up to physically retrieve them and bring them back to Earth for study. We won’t be launching any more of them until we find out where we went wrong with these.”
“The basic idea is wrong,” I said. “You should have gone magnetic in the first place.”
“Yes,” D’Argent agreed. “Yes, I see that now.”
When I told Sam about our little conversation he got agitated.
“That sneaky sonofabitch is gonna try to steal it out from under us!”
“He can’t do that,” I said.
“And rain makes applesauce.”
It all came to a head two days later, when Zane finally got well enough to convene his meeting.
It took place in the shuttle’s mid-deck compartment, the six of us crammed in among the zippered sleeping bags and rows of equipment trays. Bonnie Jo anchored herself next to the only window, the little round one set into the hatch. D’Argent managed to get beside her, which made me kind of sore. I plastered my back against the airlock hatch at the rear of the compartment; that gave me enough traction to keep from floating around.