Short fiction complete, p.272
Short Fiction Complete, page 272
“Would you believe,” Sam said to me, “that they sent me the only six techs in all of Asia that can’t speak English? They expect me to talk to them in Sanskrit or whatever.”
“That must be frustrating,” I said.
“Not all that bad.” I detected a grin in his voice. “I can call them anything that pops into my head, and they don’t take offense . . . as long as I stick to English.”
Then he whirled back toward them and unleashed a blast of heavily accented Japanese that galvanized the technicians into frenzied action. I understood a little of what he said, and I have no intention of repeating it.
It took the better part of two hours, but Sam finally got the electrical sparking stopped. He had to do the toughest part of the job by himself; the technicians either could not or would not go within fifty meters of the crackling blue fireworks. I had to hang there like a lanky sausage, with nothing to do but watch Sam work while I worried about how much radiation I was absorbing.
When the sparking finally stopped, however, the six technicians began dismantling the magnetron with the intense purposiveness of a team of ants tearing into a jelly doughnut that someone had carelessly dropped.
“C’mon,” Sam said, pulling himself along the guide rail toward me, “let’s go back inside, Zorro.”
“Zoilo,” I corrected.
“Yeah, sure.”
As we headed for the tube hatch I tried to make some conversation. “How much time do you spend outside like this?”
“Too damned much,” Sam snapped.
“I mean, the radiation levels—”
“That’s why I wear a lead jockstrap, pal.”
I thought he was joking. Years later I found out that he wasn’t.
I followed him back to the access tube and down to the office/habitat area. The worried trio I had met earlier was nowhere in sight, although where they could hide in the narrow confines of the office/habitat area was beyond me.
We stopped in front of the space suit lockers and began to work our way out of our suits. Once Sam lifted off his helmet, I took a good look at him. I had seen videos and stills of him, naturally. I knew that round, snub-nosed face with its bristling rust-red hair almost as well as I knew my own. Yet seeing him live and close up was different: he looked more animated, livelier. And his eyes seemed to twinkle with the awareness that he knew things I didn’t.
Sam’s space suit looked grimy, hard-used. Its torso and helmet were covered with corporate logos and mission patches, everything from Vacuum Cleaners Inc. to an ancient, faded Space Station Freedom. Several emblems puzzled me: one that said Keep the baby, Faith, and another that looked like the gaudily striped flattened sphere of the planet Jupiter with four little stars beside it and the word Roemer beneath.
“C’mon,” Sam said. “Lemme show you where you’ll be sleeping tonight.”
“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” I asked.
He gave me an exaggerated frown. “I know why you’re here. C.C. wants to pin my balls to her office wall, right?”
It was clear that he understood exactly why I had come; no cover story was necessary with Sam. So I nodded, then realized that Sam was at eye level with me, despite the fact that I was almost a foot taller than he. I had unconsciously slipped my feet into the floor loops, to anchor myself down. Sam, on the other hand, floated free and bobbed weightlessly beside me.
“Why is it,” he asked the empty air, “that when a little guy makes some money, everybody in the goddamned government wants to investigate him?”
“Mr. Gunn,” I started to explain, “you have had an extremely—”
“Call me Sam,” he snapped.
“Very well. You may call me Zoilo.”
“I already do, Zorro.”
“Zoilo.”
“I still can’t figure out why the double-dipped ISC is worried about my good luck on the commodities market.”
“Ms. Chatsworth is concerned that more than good luck may be involved,” I replied.
He grinned at me, a gap-toothed grin of pure boyish glee.
“She thinks I’m cheating?”
He said it with such wide-eyed innocence that I was left speechless.
Sam laughed and said, “C’mon, let’s get some shut-eye. The next OTV won’t be here until tomorrow afternoon.”
He floated down the corridor, propelling himself with deft touches of his fingers against the metal walls. I pulled my stockinged feet out of the floor loops and clambered hand over hand after him, using the grips that studded the walls.
To say that the personnel quarters aboard Sunsat Seventeen were spartan would be an understatement. They consisted of a row of lockers, nothing more. A mesh sleeping cocoon was fastened to one side, a fold-down sink on the other. There was an electrical outlet and a data port for connecting a computer. The locker was barely tall enough for me to squeeze into it; I had to keep my chin pressed down on my chest.
The next morning I groaned as I unfolded myself out in the corridor. Sam, on the other hand, was chipper and as bright as a new-minted penny.
“Whatsamatter, Zorro,” he asked, almost solicitously, “you in pain or something?”
Stretching in an effort to ease the crick in my neck, I explained that the privacy booths were too cramped for comfort.
“Gee,” Sam said, bouncing lightly off the floor to rise to eye level with me, “I always thought they were really spacious.”
Over breakfast in the minuscule galley I asked, “Why are you here, Sam, instead of in your office in Selene City? Surely you can hire engineers to supervise the work here.”
He gave me a sour look as he spooned up oatmeal. “Yeah, sure. I can hire the entire graduating class of MIT if I want to.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because every engineer I hire costs me money, and money is something I don’t have much of, that’s why.”
“But the High Asia Sunsat Combine must be paying at least minimum rates for your maintenance contract.”
He chewed thoughtfully for a moment; the oatmeal was that lumpy. Then he swallowed and said, “Nobody would sign a contract with S. Gunn Enterprises unless our bid was considerably tinder standard rates. Your sweetheart Ms. Chatsworth has seen to that.”
“But that’s illegal. It’s restraint of . . .” My voice trailed off as I realized the import of what he was telling me.
“C.C. and her connections in the government saw to it that I got screwed out of my old corporation. She’s got a vendetta going against me. The only work I can find is these crappy maintenance contracts, and even then I’ve got to do it at a helluva lot less than standard pay.”
I heard myself ask weakly, “Well, how many contracts do you have?”
“Six, right now. Three sunsats, a couple of orbiting astronomical telescopes, and the laundry facility at the new retirement center in Selene City.”
“Laundry?”
He laughed bitterly. “Great job for a pioneer, isn’t it? Washing old folks’ dirty sheets.”
Sam had truly been a pioneering entrepreneur, I knew. The zero-gee hotel, the first asteroid mining expedition, even the early work of cleaning debris out of the low-orbit region around Earth—he had been the trailblazer. Now he was reduced to maintenance contracts, and hiring fourth-rate technicians because he couldn’t afford better.
Yet . . . somehow he was getting rich in the commodities futures market.
“Well,” I said, “at least maintenance contracts provide a steady income.”
“Oh yeah, sure.” A frown puckered his brows. “They’re usually safe and easy, all right. But this bunch of clowns trying to operate Sunsat Seventeen are making this particular job a pain in the butt.”
“The magnetrons?”
“The everything!” Sam exclaimed. “The hardware’s crappy. The technicians don’t know what they’re doing. And I’m supposed to make it all come out peachy keen.”
“In the meantime, though,” I pointed out, “you’re piling up quite a fortune in the commodities market.”
He toyed with the oatmeal remaining in his bowl. “Am I?” he asked softly.
“According to our records, you certainly are.”
Sam sighed mightily, like a man weary of being dragged down by lesser mortals. “I’ve been pretty lucky, I guess. In the market, I mean.”
From the gleam in Sam’s eye, I knew he was enjoying the fact that C.C. was annoyed enough to send me to investigate him. He certainly did not appear to be worried about my presence. Not in the slightest.
After breakfast I retired to my locker and plugged in my pocket computer, scrunching myself up close to its tiny microphone so that my lips almost touched it. I didn’t want Sam to hear me.
All that morning and right through lunch I searched through Sam’s records. Not that I hadn’t before, but now I was looking specifically into his transactions in the commodities market. There was a pattern to be found; there always is, in any crooked scheme. Find the pattern and you find the crook.
It quickly became clear that Sam was buying and selling almost exclusively in the metals market: meteoric iron and precious metals, mostly. He speculated on the cargoes bound inward from the asteroid belt on the factory ships, guessing which ships would return laden with profitable cargoes and which would not. Fie was right ninety-three percent of the time, an impossible score for pure luck.
The commodities futures market was a crapshoot, and like all gambles, the odds were stacked against the gambler. Yet Sam was beating those odds a staggering ninety-three percent of the time. Impossible, unless he was cheating somehow.
You see, there were a huge number of variables in each mission out to the asteroids, too many for anyone to guess right ninety-three percent of the time. Or even fifty-three percent of the time, for that matter.
There were thousands of independent miners out there in the asteroid belt, hunting down usable asteroids, chunks of metals and minerals that could be mined profitably. The factory ships went out on Hohmann transfer orbits, using the minimum amount of energy, spending the least amount of money to reach a destination in the belt.
Picking the right destination was crucial. No sense spending a year in space to arrive at a spot where no miners and no ore were waiting for you. Rendezvous points and times were selected beforehand, but a thousand unforeseen factors could ruin your plans. Usually the small mining teams auctioned off their ores to the highest bidder. But often enough they decided not to wait for you because somebody else showed up with ready credits for the ores.
All these factors were heavily influenced by timing and distance. The asteroid belt is mostly empty space, even though millions of asteroids are floating out there between Mars and Jupiter. Think of megatrillions of cubic kilometers of nothingness, with a few grains of dust drifting through the void: That’s what the so-called “belt” is like.
It takes propulsion energy—which means money—to maneuver in space, to move the millions of kilometers between usable asteroids. The miners were mostly small-time independent operators who were always short on funds; they were always willing to take immediate credits instead of waiting for your particular factory ship to reach the rendezvous point you were aiming for.
There were more pending lawsuits over broken contracts for ore deliveries than there were divorce cases on Earth. The miners evaded the law, by and large, because it cost a corporation more to catch and fine them than the fines could possibly return. Besides, fining a miner was a study in frustration anyway. Most of them simply declared bankruptcy and started up again under a new name.
All this made the commodities market an arena fraught with uncertainty. Flow do you know which factory ship will come back with a rich cargo of metals or minerals? How can you guess what such cargoes will be worth on the market, when it takes a year or more for the factory ship to make the return journey to Earth?
The answer is, you wait as long as you possibly can before you invest your money (or, more accurately, make your bet). The safest thing to do is to wait until a factory ship has actually taken on a specific cargo of metals, check with the price of such metals on the futures market, and only then sink your money into that particular ship.
So investors waited eagerly for communications from the various factory ships. It takes more than half an hour for a message to travel from the belt to the Earth/Moon system. There’s no way around that time lag. Even moving at the speed of light as they do, electronic or optical laser messages average about thirty minutes to cover the distance between the belt and the Earth/Moon region.
As soon as a favorable message is received, investors start bidding up the price of that ship’s cargo.
But some investors, the ones with more guts than brains, put their money into a ship’s cargo before the good word comes from the asteroid belt. They bet that the news will be good before the news is received. Most of those investors quickly go broke.
Sam Gunn invested that way. And he was not going broke. Far from it. Fie was getting rich.
There was no way for him to do that legally. Of that, C.C. Chatsworth was convinced. So was I. But I had to find out how he was cheating the system. Or face the wrath of C.C. She was determined to put somebody’s testicles on her office wall. If she couldn’t get Sam’s, she’d take mine.
The OTV duly arrived and carried Sam and me back to Selene. The city was almost entirely underground, as all lunar cities were in those days. Even the imposing grand plaza, as long as six football fields with a dome of seventy-five meters height, was totally enclosed, except for the huge, curved glassteel windows at its far end.
The plaza was grassed and landscaped and dotted with flowering shrubbery, however, so it looked very Earthlike even though the light lunar gravity allowed tourists to soar like birds on big, colorful plastic wings they rented.
The ISC was paying for a minimum-sized studio apartment at the government-rented set of rooms on Level One, barely large enough for a bed, minikitchen and phone booth-sized bathroom. I had to hunch over to squeeze into the shower.
Sam, on the other hand, ensconced me in a spacious office next to his own, in the imposing headquarters tower of Moonbase Inc., where he had rented space for his own S. Gunn Enterprises. I was surprised that his offices were so spacious, until I realized that he slept in his own office and saved himself the cost of an apartment. It was strictly against the building’s regulations, of course, but somehow Sam managed to get away with it.
I spent days digging into the personnel files of each and every individual who might be tipping Sam off about ore shipments from the asteroid belt. Using the ISC’s powers of subpoena, I investigated their personal financial records. I could find nothing that hinted at bribery or collusion.
Besides, how could anyone tip Sam before the rest of the market? The news from the factory ships traveled at the speed of light from the asteroid belt to the Earth/Moon system. There was no way around that.
Evenings I spent with Sam. He wined and dined me as if I were a long-lost brother or a wealthy potential customer. Fie even found dates for me, lovely young women who seemed more interested in Sam than in me. But nevertheless, Sam saw to it that I was not lonely at Selene. I knew he was trying to bribe me, or at least make me feel that he was a fine person and incapable of chicanery. Yet I began to realize how lonely, how empty, my life had been up to that point. Being with Sam was fun!
On the other hand, each day I received a phone call from C.C., her quivering, jowled face grimacing at me angrily. “ ’Ave you nailed ’im yet?” she would demand. Each day she grew angrier, her fleshy face redder. It got so bad that I stopped taking all incoming calls. But she called anyway and left messages of rage that escalated daily.
I became so desperate that I asked him point blank, “Flow do you do it, Sam?”
“Do what?”
“Cheat the market.”
We were in Selene’s finest restaurant, Moonglow, waiting for our evening’s companions to show up. The restaurant was deep underground, rather than in the plaza. On the Moon, where the airless surface is bathed in deadly radiation and peppered by meteoric infall, the deeper below ground you are, the more your prestige. Moonglow was on Selene’s bottom level, where the executives kept their own plush quarters.
The restaurant was several stories high, however. The volume had originally been an actual cave; now it was occupied by tiers of dining tables covered with the finest napery and silverware made from asteroidal metal. No two tables were on the same level. Each one stood on a pedestal atop an impossibly slim column of shining stainless steel while curving ramps twined between them. On Earth, the human waiters and bussers would have been exhausted after an hour’s work. Here in the low gravity of the Moon, they could work four-hour shifts with comparative ease. Still, one tipped generously at Moonglow.
“Cheat the market?” Sam put on such a look of hurt innocence that I had to laugh.
“Come on, Sam,” I said. “You know that you’re cheating and I know that you know.”
He blinked his eyes several times. They were green now. I could have sworn they’d been blue. But Sam was wearing a trim leisure suit of forest green, and his eyes almost matched his attire. Contact lenses? I wondered.
“How could I possibly cheat the market?” he asked.
“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said.
Sam broke into a boyish grin. “Look, Zorro old pal, your ISC auditors have been plowing through my company’s files for more than a week now. They’ve even snooped into my personal accounts. What have they found?”
“Nothing,” I admitted.
“You know why?” he asked, with a devilish cock of one eyebrow.
“Why?”
“Because there’s nothing to find. I’m as pure as the driven snow. Clean as a whistle. Spotless. Unblemished. Unsullied. Right up there with the Virgin Mary—well, maybe not that unsullied. But you’ll have to find another chest to carve your zee into.
I had given up long ago on getting him to pronounce my name correctly. To him I was Zorro, and there was no use wasting energy trying to change him.
