I beat a hasty retreat, happy to be rid of the kid. Although, I’ve got to admit, little T.J. was kind of fun to be with. When he wasn’t crying. And if you held your breath.
True to his naive word, Larry arranged a meeting between D’Argent and me that very afternoon. I was invited to the section of the station where Rockledge had its lab, up in the lunar wheel, alongside my restaurant.
You might have thought we were trying to penetrate a top-secret military base. Between the Lunar Eclipse and the hatch to the Rockledge Laboratory was a corridor no more than ten meters long. Rockledge had packed six uniformed security guards, an X-ray scanner, three video cameras and a set of chemical sniffers into those ten meters. If we didn’t have a regulation against animals they would have probably had a few Dobermans in there, too.
“What’re you guys doing in here?” I asked D’Argent, once they had let me through the security screen and ushered me into the compartment he was using as an office. “You’ve got more security out there than a rock star visiting the Emperor of Japan.”
D’Argent never wore coveralls or fatigues like the rest of us. He was in a spiffy silk suit, pearl gray with pencil-thin darker stripes, just like he wore Earthside. He gave me one of his oily little smiles. “We need all that security, Sam,” he said, “to keep people like you from stealing our ideas”.
I sat at the spindly little chair in front of his desk and gave him a sour look. “The day you have an idea worth stealing, the Moon will turn into green cheese.”
He glared at me. Larry, sitting at the side of D’Argent’s desk, tried to cool things off. “We’re here to discuss a business deal, not exchange insults.”
I looked at him with new respect. Larry wasn’t a kid anymore. He was starting to turn into a businessman. “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. I’m here to offer a trade.”
D’Argent stroked his pencil-thin mustache with a manicured finger. “A trade?”
Nodding, I said, “I’ll license Rockledge to manufacture and market the magnetic bumpers. You let me buy your space sickness cure.”
D’Argent reached for the carafe on his desk. Stalling for time, I thought. He poured himself a glass of water, never offering any to Larry or me. In the soft lunar gravity of the inner wheel, the water poured at a gentler angle than it would on Earth. D’Argent managed to get most of the water into his glass; only a few drops messed up his desk.
He pretended not to notice it. “What makes you think we’ve developed a cure for space sickness?” And he gave Larry a cold eye.
“Senator Meyers told me,” I said calmly. D’Argent looked surprised. “Jill and I are old friends. Didn’t you know?”
“You and Senator Meyers?” I could read the expression on his face. A new factor had entered his calculations.
We went around and around for hours. D’Argent was playing it crafty. He wanted the magnetic bumper business, that was clear to see. And Larry was positively avid to call them Karsh Shields. I pretended that I wanted the space sickness cure to save my hotel, while all the time I was trying to maneuver D’Argent into buying Heaven and taking it off my hands.
But he was smarter than that. He knew that he didn’t have to buy the hotel; it was going to sink of its own weight. In another two weeks I’d be in bankruptcy court.
So he blandly kept insisting, “The space-sickness cure isn’t ready for public use, Sam. It’s still in the experimental stage.”
I could see from the embarrassed red of Larry’s face that it was a gigantic lie.
“Well then,” I suggested, “let me use it on my hotel customers as a field trial. I’ll get them to sign waivers, take you off the hook, legally.”
But D’Argent just made helpless fluttering gestures and talked about the Food and Drug Administration, this law, that regulation, scientific studies, legal red tape, and enough bullcrap to cover Iowa six feet deep.
He was stalling, waiting for my hotel to collapse so he could swoop in, grab Heaven away from me, and get the magnetic bumper business at a bargain.
But while he talked in circles, I started to think. What if I could get my hands on his space-sickness cure and try it out on a few of my customers? What if I steal the damned cure right out from under D’Argent’s snooty nose and then get a tame chemist or two to reproduce whatever combination of drugs they’ve got in their cure? That would put me in a better bargaining position, at least. And it would drive the smooth-talking sonofabitch crazy!
So I decided to steal it.
It was no big deal. D’Argent and his Rockledge security types were too Earthbound in their attitudes. They thought that by guarding the corridor access to the laboratory area they had the lab adequately protected. But there were four emergency airlocks strung along that wheel of the station. Two of them opened onto the restaurant; the other two opened directly into the Rockledge research laboratory.
All I had to do was wait until night, get into a space suit, and go EVA to one of those airlocks. I’d be inside the lab within minutes and the guards out in the corridor would never know it.
Then I had a truly wicked idea. A diversion that would guarantee that the Rockledge security troops would be busy doing something else instead of guarding the access to their lab.
The meeting with D’Argent ran out of steam with neither one of Us making any real effort to meet the other halfway. Halfway? Hell, neither D’Argent nor I budged an inch. Larry looked miserably unhappy when we finally decided to call it quits. He saw his Karsh Shield immortality sliding away from him.
I went straight from D’Argent’s office to the station’s gym. Nothing had changed there, except that T.J. was gone. The place still looked like a perpetual-motion demonstration, kids flapping and yelling everywhere. All except that surly teenaged boy.
I glided over to him.
“Hi!” I said brightly.
He mumbled something.
“You don’t seem to be having a good time,” I said.
“So what?” he said sourly.
I made a shrug. “Seems a shame to be up here and not enjoying it.”
“What’s to enjoy?” he grumbled. “My mother says I have to stay here with all these brats and not get in anybody’s way.”
“Gee, that’s a shame,” I said. “There’s a lot of really neat stuff to see. You want a tour of the place?”
For the first time his face brightened slightly. “You mean, like the command center and all?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“They threw me out of there when I tried to look in, a couple days ago.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I assured him. “I’ll get you in with no trouble.”
Sliding an arm across his skinny shoulders as we headed for the command center, I asked him, “What’s your name, anyway, son?”
“Pete,” he said.
“Stick with me, Pete, and you’ll see stuff that hardly any of the adults ever see.”
So I took him on a tour of the station. I spent the whole damned afternoon with Pete, taking him all over the station. I showed him everything from the command center to my private office. While we were in the command center I booted up the station security program and found that Rockledge didn’t even have intruder alarms or motion sensors inside their lab area. Breaking in through the airlock was going to be easy.
It would have been nifty if I could’ve used Pete as an excuse to waltz through the Rockledge lab, just to get a look at the layout, but it was off-limits, of course. Besides, Pete grandly informed me that he had already seen them. “Just a bunch of little compartments with all kinds of weird glass stuff in them,” he said.
He wasn’t such a bad kid, it turned out. Just neglected by his parents, who had dragged him up here, shown off Daddy’s place of work, and then dumped him with the other brats. Like any reasonable youth, he wanted to be an astronaut. When he learned that I had been one, he started to look up to me, at least a little bit. Well, actually he was a teeny bit taller than I, but you know what I mean.