“That finishes it,” Raki was saying, his lips turned down into an unaccustomed frown. “The Sam Gunn bio stops right here and now.”
“There’s a fifth survivor of the expedition,” Jade heard herself say. “And he isn’t part of this threatened lawsuit.”
Gradowsky immediately replied, “Yeah, but he’s all the way to hell out by Mars on a bridge ship.”
“They’re hiding something,” Jade snapped. “Something so important to them that Jean Margaux died to keep it secret.”
It took a couple of seconds for Raki to answer from Earth, “It was an accident, Jade.”
“Was it? Are we sure of that?”
Neither man replied.
Jade hunched forward in her chair. “The only other survivor of that expedition is on the bridge ship Golden Gate. The sculptress who made Sam’s statue is living out in the Belt. And the professor who was with Sam when he died is outfitting a deep-space mission at Titan. I could get to all three of them!”
“And not get back for two years,” Gradowsky grumbled.
“Okay, so what?” Jade felt eagerness trembling through her. “Raki, you can put the Sam Gunn bio on hold, can t you? Let those lawyers think we’ve dropped the project. Meantime I’ll get out to the Golden Gate and see what they’re trying to hide. And then go on to the other two. I can do it! I know I can!”
Gradowsky was staring at her. Raki had a faraway look in his eyes.
“We’d have to pay you salary for two years while you’re doing nothing,” Raki said.
“I’m getting minimum,” Jade shot back. “You won’t be losing much. Or just pay my travel costs while I’m going back and forth; put me on salary only for the time I’m actually working.”
“H’mm.”
“We could slip her aboard a high-boost shuttle,” Gradowsky said. “Trade her fare for advertising time. Get her out to the Golden Gate in a few weeks, maybe for free. Or at a reduced fare, at least.”
Raki fingered his handsome mustache. Jade felt her heart stop while he pondered.
Finally he said, “Very well. Travel expenses only unless you’re actually working. Jim, see what you can do about getting her to that bridge ship quickly. And not a word about this to anybody!”
“We won’t let their lawyers know what we’re doing,” Gradowsky said, grinning. “Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried about their damned lawyers,” Raki answered. “I don’t want the CEO to know what I’ve just agreed to!”
Bridge Ship Golden Gate
“Yes, I was one of the investors in that mad expedition,” said Rick Darling. “It was probably the most foolish thing I’ve ever done, in a long life of foolishness.”
Jade could not quite fathom the expression on Darling’s face. He was immensely fat, the kind of obesity that can only be achieved in a low gravity environment. He looked like a layered mountain, rolls upon rolls of fat bulging beneath his flamingo-pink robe.
In the shadowy half-light of his private quarters, his face looked like a gibbous moon, bloated cheeks and tiers of chins. He was smiling, but his eyes were so deeply set in folds of fat that Jade could not tell if his smile was pleased or pained.
“Sam Gunn.” Darling sighed heavily and took a sip from the gem-encrusted goblet engulfed in his fat, bejeweled hand. “I thought I’d never hear his name spoken in polite society again. The little bastard.”
Jade felt ill at ease, despite the fact that Darling’s quarters were at a comfortable lunar gravity. But of all the people she had interviewed over the months of her travels, of all the people that Sam Gunn had worked with, lived with, loved and hated with, Rick Darling gave her a strong sense of foreboding.
His private quarters were little short of sybaritic, from the pile of sumptuous pillows on which Darling reclined like an overweight maharajah to the splendid tapestries lining the walls and the richly carved genuine wood low tables scattered across the room. The tables were the only furniture she could see. Like her host, Jade sat on a mound of pillows, softly yielding yet comfortably supportive. The scenes embroidered on the pillows were wildly erotic. The tapestries flaunted every form of perversion she had ever heard of and several that were totally new to her.
Darling himself wore more rings and bracelets and heavy necklaces of gold and glittering jewels than she had ever seen on one person, male or female. She felt distinctly shabby in her jade green slacks and vest, adorned by nothing more than a faux pearl necklace and matching earrings.
The very air of this latter-day Arabian Nights chamber was sickly sweet with perfume. Or was it more than perfume? It would be simple enough for this smiling pile of flesh to put a narcotic in the air-circulation system. Or an aphrodisiac.
The thought alarmed her.
Sitting up straight, a current of apprehension tingling through her body, she asked in as businesslike a voice as she could summon up:
“You didn’t like Sam Gunn?”
“No one liked him, dear lady,” replied Rick Darling. His voice was a clear sweet tenor, almost angelic. “Sam was not a likable person, believe me.”
“Yet you knowingly invested in his venture. Nobody forced you to go out and spend two years of your life in that spacecraft with him.”
Darling’s smile revealed that he even had diamonds set into his teeth. For the first time she noticed the earrings half hidden beneath his glistening tightly curled hair. The man looked like a jewelry display case.
“No one forced me to go, true enough.” He sighed again, like a mountain heaving. “But there were circumstances, my dear. Circumstances often force us to do things we really would rather not do.”
“Really?”
“Certainly.” Darling reached for the splendid gold pitcher on the low table at his side. He raised the pitcher and his eyebrows, which were flecked with sparkling chips of diamond.
“No thanks, I’m fine,” said Jade. And I intend to stay that way, she added silently. She had taken one sip of what Darling had claimed to be the finest wine produced off-Earth. She had no intention of taking more.
“Circumstances,” Darling went on, as he filled his own cup, “dictate our actions. For example, you yourself are not comfortable here. You are not comfortable with me, are you?”
Jade blinked several times before admitting, “No, I guess I’m not.”
Darling nodded, sending ripples through his many chins. “You fought and batded to get to me. You argued and bribed your way past the ship’s security people. You literally camped at my door until I finally agreed to see you. Now that you are here, you frown with disapproval at my decor, my lifestyle, myself. Yet you remain, because of circumstances.”
She forced a smile. “I thought I was interviewing you.”
He smiled back, glittering diamonds at her. “I live the way I live. I am rich enough to afford whatever it takes to make me happy. And, to a considerable extent, whoever.”
“You got rich because of Sam Gunn.”
“Yes, that’s true. Damn him.” “Why?” She leaned forward, eager for the answer. “I’ve tried to interview all of the other surviving members of that expedition and none of them would even speak to me. What happened? What did Sam do?”
Darling heaved another titanic sigh. “I have his disks, you know.”
“What?”
“I suppose you could call them the ship’s log. After all, he was the captain of the vessel.”
“You have Sam’s log of the mission?”
“Yes.”