“Don’t look so gloomy, Carlos, old buddy,” Sam said. “You’ve got to understand the big picture.”
“The big picture?”
“Sure. There’s money to be made in space. Lots of money.”
“I understand that,” said my father.
“Yeah, but you gotta understand the rest of it.” And Sam looked squarely at Ric as he said, “The money is made in space. But it gets spent here on Earth.”
My father brushed thoughtfully at his mustache with a fingertip. “I see.”
“So let’s spread it around and do some good.”
Ric almost smiled. “But I think you will get more of the money than anyone else, won’t you?”
Sam gave him a rueful look. “Yeah, that’s right. And I’ll spend it faster than anybody else, too.”
So Ric and I returned to Ecuador. General Quintana reluctantly stepped aside and allowed elections. Democracy returned to Ecuador, although Ric claimed it arrived in our native land for the first time. Quintana retired gracefully, thanks to a huge bribe that Sam and my father provided. My father actually was voted back into the presidency, in an election that was mostly fair and open.
Spence and Bonnie Jo eventually were divorced, but that happened years later. By that time I had married Ric and he was a rising young politician who would one day be president of Ecuador himself. The country was slowly growing richer, thanks to its investment in space industries. Sam’s orbital hotel was only the first step in the constantly growing commerce in space.
I never saw Sam again. Not face-to-face. Naturally, we all saw him in the news broadcasts time and again. Just as he said, he spent every penny of the money he made on OrbHotel and went broke.
But that is another story. And, gracias a dios, it is a story that does not involve me.
Habitat New Chicago
“Sure, I knew Sam—briefly,” Russell Christopher said as he and Jade stood on the edge of the playground. “This ball field wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Sam.”
Jade was at Solar News’s virtual reality center. Like Christopher, she was wearing a full-sensor VR helmet and gloves. While she was still in the low lunar gravity of Selene, she could see and feel everything that Christopher saw and felt, standing at the playground in the New Chicago habitat, a quarter-million miles from the Moon.
“You said something about Sam being a grandfather?” Jade asked. Then she had to wait for an annoying three seconds for Christopher’s reply to reach her.
He was a good-looking man, Jade thought: tall and lean, with an earnest, honest-looking face and clear light blue eyes. He reminded Jade of Spence.
“Grandfathered,” Christopher replied at last. “I said Sam was grandfathered, not a grandfather.”
“What do you mean?”
Again the interminable three-second delay.
“It’s kind of complicated,” said Christopher.
I’ll never get the story out of him like this, Jade thought. It’ll take a week, with this time lag.
“Look,” she said, “why don’t you just tell me the whole story in your own words. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” Christopher answered, after another three seconds.
Grandfather Sam
It looked extremely rocky for the New Chicago cubs that day. Okay, so I stole the line from “Casey at the Bat.” But it really was the bottom of the ninth, and the New White Sox were ahead of us, 14-13, there were two out, and little Sam Gunn was coming up to bat.
To everybody except Hornsby and me it was just a pickup game being played on the last unzoned open space in New Chicago. Nobody was playing for anything except fun. Except him and me. And Sam, although I didn’t know it then.
We had acquired quite a crowd, considering this was just a sandlot game. Not even sandlot. There wasn’t a real infield, nothing but grass and a few odd pieces to mark the bases. Sam’s expensive suede jacket was second base, for instance. My old cap was home plate. You didn’t need a cap to play baseball in New Chicago, or sunglasses, either. Sunlight comes into the habitat through long windows; it’s not a big glaring ball in the sky, except once in a while when a window happens to be facing directly sunward.
New Chicago was—is—an O’Neill-type space habitat. You know, a big cylinder built along the Moon’s orbit at the L-5 point, just hanging there like an oversized length of pipe. About the length of Manhattan island and a couple of kilometers in diameter, New Chicago spins along its central axis a lazy once per minute; that’s enough to produce an artificial gravity inside that’s almost exactly the same as Earth’s.
Newcomers get a little disconcerted the first time they come out into the open and look up. Instead of sky, there’s more of New Chicago up there. The landscaped ground just curves up along the inside of the cylinder, all the way around. With binoculars you can see people standing upside-down up there, staring at you through their binoculars because you look upside-down to them.
New Chicago is really a lovely place, or it was until the real-estate tycoons got their hooks into it. It was nowhere as big as sprawling Old Chicago had been before the greenhouse floods, of course. It was beautifully landscaped on the inside with hills and woods and small, livable villages scattered here and there with plenty of open green space in between.
It was that green space that had attracted Sam and me and the other applicant—Elrod Hornsby, a lawyer representing a big construction firm from Selene City—to this morning’s meeting of the Zoning Board. To developers like Sam and Hornsby, open green space was an open invitation to making money. Convert the green space into something profitable, like an extra condo complex or an amusement center. Why not? New Chicago was originally spec’d to hold fifty thousand families, with plenty of living space for everybody.
But the builders, developers, lawyers, politicians, they all saw that the habitat could actually hold a lot more people. Millions, if they had the same average living space that people once had in Old Chicago. Tens of millions, if they were packed in the way they were in Delhi or Mexico City or Port Nairobi.
Go on, pack ’em in! That’s what the developers wanted. They made their money by overbuilding in the space habitats and then moving back Earthside, to some quiet little gated community on a mountaintop where nobody but megamillionaires were allowed in, while the communities they wrecked sank into slums rife with crime and disease.
What do they care?
Like I said, Sam and Hornsby both had their eyes on this open green field. I did too, but for a very different reason.
So there I was, standing on first base, puffing hard from running out a dribbler of a ground ball to shortstop. A real ballplayer would have pegged me out by twenty feet, but the teenager playing short for the White Sox had a scattergun for an arm; when he threw the ball, the crowd behind first base hit the ground. I think maybe even the people watching from overhead through their binoculars might have ducked. That’s how I got to first.
Now, Sam wasn’t much of a hitter. So far, he’d produced a couple of pop flies to the infield, struck out once (but got to first when he dropped his bat on the catcher’s foot and the poor kid, howling and hopping in pain, dropped the ball) and had a pair of bunt singles. Hadn’t hit the ball farther than forty feet, except for the pop-ups, which went pretty high, but not very far.
Oh yeah, and Sam had walked a couple of times. After all, he was a small target up there at the plate.
Board member Pete Nostrum was grinning like a clown from the pitcher’s mound. It wasn’t a mound, really, just a scuffed-up part of the grass field. See, Hornsby and the whole Zoning Board were on the White Sox side of the game, while Sam and I were on the Cubs. Both sides filled in their teams with some of the kids who’d been playing when the Zoning Board meeting adjourned to this open field.