“In his own voice?”
“Yes.”
She could not hide her eagerness. “Can … can I hear them? Copy them?”
He hesitated a long moment, whether from true indecision or merely to dangle her on the hook of her own impatience, Jade could not tell.
Finally Darling said slowly, “You can listen to them, but not copy them. You must agree to the conditions I insist on before I will allow you to hear the disks.”
She tensed. “What conditions?”
He raised a thick, blunt, ringed finger. “Before that, you must also agree to grant me one request after you have heard the disks.”
“One request.”
“You must agree beforehand. Now.”
“Without knowing what the request is?”
He nodded solemnly.
She glanced around at the scenes on the tapestries. Mother of mercy, suppose he wants me to do something like that?
“What are the conditions?”
“You will listen to the disks here in this room. You will strip yourself naked and give all your clothing and your shoulder bag to me before I present you with the disks.”
Jade felt a surge of bile rising in her throat.
“I assure you,” Darling quickly added, “that the nudity is entirely a security precaution. I do not want the disks copied. I must make certain that you do not have a copying device on you.”
She stared hard at him, her thoughts swirling.
“I will leave the room,” Darling said. “A robot will take your clothing and bag to me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I will insist, however, on making certain that you are entirely—unequipped—by making a visual inspection of you via a video intercom.”
Dieu, she thought, he’s a voyeur. And immediately she regretted the three kilos she had gained over the past month. In low gravity the body puffs up anyway; I’ll look pretty bad. Or maybe he likes flab. He’s got plenty of his own.
“Do you agree?” Darling asked, just a hint of anxiousness in his high rich voice.
“To the conditions, yes,” she heard herself say, almost surprised. “But I can’t agree to grant you whatever request you want afterward. After all…”
“I promise you that it will not involve pain or humiliation,” Darling said.
Her heart froze inside her. Sacre coeur, what does he have in mind?
“Wh—what is it?” she asked timidly.
Darling folded his heavy hands over his immense belly. His arms were barely long enough to make it.
“You have worked very hard to get this far. Now you can listen to Sam Gunn’s disks, if you wish to. I will grant your request. If you will grant mine. That is all I intend to tell you.”
The log of the mission that made Sam Gunn a billionaire. In his own voice. It had been an epic, pioneering flight, the first true expedition out beyond the orbit of Mars, the first commercial voyage out to the rich bonanza of the Asteroid Belt.
Rick Darling had never returned to Earth after his voyage with Sam Gunn. He lived in isolated splendor aboard the Golden Gate. Isolated, but not alone. Golden Gate was one of the huge “bridge” spacecraft that plied a long parabolic orbit that looped from the Earth-Moon system out to the Asteroid Belt and back again. Darling was rich enough to set himself up in magnificent style in a private villa aboard the ten-kilometer-long spacecraft. Yet, even in the midst of never less than four thousand human souls, Darling saw almost no one. He preferred to be served by robots.
There were five “bridge” ships sailing the years-long orbit out to the Belt. Way stations on the road to the asteroids. Bridges between the worlds. Their very existence was based on ideas that Sam Gunn had pioneered. Not that anybody gave him credit for it. Or a share of their profits.
But that was a different matter. Jade looked at Darling’s fleshy face, tried to peer into those fat-hidden eyes.
“Well?” he demanded.
She took a deep breath. “All right, I’ll grant your request, whatever it is,” she said, thinking that if it got too nasty she would knee him in the balls and run the hell out of there, naked or not.
Even though the room was far from cold, she shivered as the robot took the last item of her clothing, flowered bikini panties, into its velvet-padded steel claw of a hand. She felt defenseless, exposed, vulnerable.
“The earrings, please,” said the robot with Rick Darling’s voice.
The bastard is watching me. She unscrewed the tiny faux pearls and handed them to the patient robot. One of those earrings was an emergency screamer that would bring the Golden Gate’s security team crashing in if she activated it. She was truly on her own now.
She stood totally naked before the robot, knowing that Darling was inspecting her through its eyes.
“Turn around please.”
She pirouetted slowly, hoping that he would not insist on an internal examination. She heard a brief buzzing sound, barely enough to register on her consciousness.
“Thank you,” Darling’s voice said from the speaker in the robot’s head. “The X-ray scan is finished.”
Planting her fists on her hips, she snapped, “X-rays? What’s next, neutrinos?”
No reply. Instead the robot reached into a slot in its torso and handed her six miniature disks, each of them roughly the size of a walnut. She took them eagerly into her hands.
“There is a laser player built into the table set against the far wall, beneath the video screen,” Darling’s voice instructed. “Unfortunately, Sam chose to make an audio log only. There is no video. I assume that you know what he looked like. If you would like, I can project still pictures of Sam and the various others who made the voyage onto the screen. I also have some video footage of our ship, the Argo. And blueprints, if you want.”
Forgetting her nudity, she answered, “Yes, all the visual images you have. I’d like to see them.”
“I will project them in sync with Sam’s disks, as closely as I can.” Darling’s voice sounded pleased, almost amused.
She hurried across the room and sat cross-legged before the low table. What looked at first like inlays and carvings were actually the controls for a laser player. The legs of the table held its speakers. Spreading the six tiny disks on the table top, she saw that they were clearly numbered.
As she inserted the first one into the slot the screen above her lit up with a view of the Argo. She smiled at the name. Sam certainly didn’t lack for hubris. What was the Yiddish word for it? Chutzpa.
The ship was shaped like a fat tubular wheel, with slender spokes running down to a large hub. She recognized the design instantly: living quarters in the “tire” section, which was spun to give a feeling of gravity; the hub was low-gravity, practically zero-gee at its very center.
Sam’s voice startled her.
“Log of the Argo expedition to the Asteroid Belt. Date: thirty-one March.”
In the recording that Larry Karsh had given her months earlier, Sam’s voice had been sharp, insistent, almost irritating. Now, though, he spoke in a calm baritone, a little on the reedy side perhaps, but a much softer and more relaxed voice than she had anticipated. Everyone said Sam’s eye color changed with his mood: did the timbre of his voice change, too?
“It feels kinda funny being captain of this ship, commander of this expedition, CEO of this operation. I’ve always been under other people’s thumbs, pretty nearly always, at least. I wonder how I’m going to like being the guy in charge?”
Two Years Before the Mast
They’re already making wisecracks about this voyage—Sam’s voice continued. Since we break Earth orbit tomorrow we’re officially launching the expedition on April First. Some of the media jerkoffs are already calling us The Ship of Fools.