“What about retrieving the Nerf balls before they reenter the atmosphere?” I asked. “I’d think that Rockledge would want to get their hands on them, see why they failed.”
“Yeah,” Sam said. “I want a separate contract from Rockledge to retrieve their Nerf balls and …”
“Keep reading,” Bonnie Jo said. “It’s in the pile there.”
She had done it all. VCI would be the exclusive contractor for garbage removal not only for the government, but for Rockledge as well. With that kind of a lead, we’d be so far ahead of any possible competitors that nobody would even bother to try to get into the business against us.
I signed all the contracts. With a great show of reluctance, Sam signed the secrecy agreement. Then I signed mine.
“You’re marvelous,” I said to Bonnie Jo, handing her back all the documents. “To do all this …”
“I’m just protecting my daddy’s investment,” she said coolly. There was no smile on her face. She was totally serious. “And my own.”
I couldn’t look into those gray-green eyes of hers. I turned away.
Somebody knocked at the door. Just a soft little tap, kind of weak, timid.
“Now what?” Sam snapped. “Come on in,” he yelled, exasperated. “Might as well bring the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with you.”
The door opened about halfway and Albert Clement slipped in, thin and gray as ever, back in his usual charcoal three-piece undertaker’s suit.
“I’m sorry if I’m intruding,” he said, softly, apologetically.
Sam’s frown melted. “You’re not intruding.”
Clement sort of hovered near the door, as if he didn’t dare come any further into the room.
“I wanted to make certain that you were all right,” he said.
“You came all this way?” Sam asked. His voice had gone tiny, almost hollow.
Clement made a little shrug. “I had a few weeks’ annual leave coming to me.”
“So you came out to Guam.”
“I wanted to … that was a very courageous thing you did, son. I’m proud of you.”
I thought I saw tears in the corners of Sam’s eyes. “Thanks, Dad. I—” He swallowed hard. “I’m glad you came to see me.”
“Dad?” Jade was startled. “That withered old man was Sam’s father?”
“He sure was,” Johansen replied. “He and Sam’s mother had divorced when Sam was just a baby, from what Sam told me later on. Sam was raised by his stepfather, took his name. Didn’t even know who his real father was until just before he started up VCI.”
Jade felt her own heart constricting in her chest. Who is my father? My mother? Where are they? Why did they abandon me?
“Hey, are you okay?” Johansen had a hand on her shoulder.
“What? Oh, yes. I’m fine … just… fine.”
“You looked like you were a million miles away,” he said.
“I’m all right. Sorry.”
He leaned back away from her, but his eyes still looked worried.
“So it was his father who fed him the inside information from the Department of Commerce,” Jade said, trying to recover her composure.
“Right. That’s how Sam learned that the program had a small business set-aside,” Johansen explained. “Which was public knowledge, by the way. Clement didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But he certainly didn’t want anyone to know about their relationship, either, did he?”
Johansen nodded. “I guess not. You know, I never saw Sam so—I guess subdued is the right word. He and Clement spent a solid week together. Once the hospital people let us get up and walk around, they even went deep-sea fishing together.”
“I’ll have to check him out,” Jade said, mostly to herself.
“Clement died a few years later. He retired from the Commerce Department and applied for residency in the first of the L-4 habitats, the old Island One. Thought the low gravity would help his heart condition, but he died in his sleep before the habitat was finished building. Sam gave him a nice funeral. Quiet and tasteful. Not what you’d expect from Sam at all.”
“And his mother? Is she still alive?”
Johansen shook his head. “He would never talk about his mother. Not a word. Maybe he discussed her with Clement, but I just don’t know.”
Jade sat back in her chair, silent for a long moment while the candlelight flickered across her face. She had not seen her adopted mother, not even spoken with her by videophone, in more than ten years. The link between them was completely broken.
“So that’s how Sam made his first fortune. With Vacuum Cleaners, Incorporated,” she said at last.
“VCI,” Johansen corrected. “Yeah, he made a fortune all right. Then he squandered it all on that bridge-ship deal a couple years later. By then he was completely out of VCI, though. I stayed on as president until Rockledge eventually bought us out.”
“Rockledge?”
“Right. The big corporations always win in the end. Oh, I got a nice hunk of change out of it. Very nice. Set me up for life. Allowed me to buy a slice of this habitat and become a major shareholder.”
“Did Sam ever marry Bonnie Jo?”
Johansen grimaced.
That got decided while we were still on Guam—Johansen replied.
Bonnie Jo hung around, just like Clement did. Sam seemed to spend more time with his father than with her, so I wound up walking the hospital grounds with her, taking her out to dinner, that kind of stuff.
Finally, one night over dinner, she told me she and Clement would be leaving the next day.
I said something profound, like, “Oh.”
“When will you and Sam be allowed to leave the hospital?” she asked. We were in the best restaurant in the capital city, Agana. It was sort of a dump; the big tourist boom hadn’t started yet in Guam. That didn’t happen until a few years later, when Sam opened up the orbital hotel and built the launch complex there.
Anyway, I shrugged for an answer. I hadn’t even bothered to ask the medics about when we’d be let go. The week had been very restful, after all the pressures we had been through. And as long as Bonnie Jo was there I really didn’t care when they sent us packing.
“Well,” she said, “Albert and I go out on the morning flight tomorrow.” There was a kind of strange expression on her face, as if she was searching for something and not finding it.
“I guess you’ll marry Sam once we get back to the States,” I said.
She moved her eyes away from mine and didn’t answer. I felt as low as one of those worms that lives on the bottom of the ocean.
“Well… congratulations,” I said.
In a voice so low I could barely hear her, Bonnie Jo said, “I don’t want to marry Sam.”
I felt my jaw muscles tighten. “But you still want to protect your father’s investment, don’t you? And your own.”
Her eyes locked onto mine. “I could do that by marrying the president of VCI, couldn’t I?”
I know how it feels to have your space suit ripped open. All the air whooshed out of me.
“Spence, you big handsome lunk, you’re my investment,” she said. “Didn’t you know that?”
“Me?”
“Yes, you.”
I nearly knocked the table over kissing her. I never felt so happy in all my life.
“Which number wife was she?” Jade was surprised at the acid in her voice.
Johansen pushed his chair slightly back from the restaurant table. “Number four,” he said, somewhat reluctantly.
“And it didn’t work out?”
“Wasn’t her fault,” he said. “Not really. I spent more time in orbit than at home. She met this kid who was an assistant vice president at her father’s bank. They had a lot more in common….”