The Sam Gunn Omnibus (112 page)

“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.

In truth, I was getting to like
Sam. He was enjoying this fencing, I saw. He liked to talk; he even seemed to
enjoy listening to me talk. I found myself telling him about my boyhood in Cuba
and my longing to explore the buried cities of Mars.

“Archeology, hey?” he mused. “Lots
of good-looking women students. Lonely outposts far from civilization.” He
nodded happily. “Could be a good life, Zorro.”

Sam was especially enjoying the
fact that I was living on an ISC expense account, running up a huge dent in
C.C.’s budget. That’s why he insisted that we dine at the Earthview. There was
no more expensive restaurant in the solar system.

After that fruitless (although
thoroughly enjoyable) dinner, I decided to
cherchez les femmes.
Sam was wooing half a dozen women simultaneously, and avoiding several others—including
a judge of the World Court, a former United States Senator, Jill Meyers.

I
found that
although several of Sam’s “dates” loathed most of the other women he was
pursuing, none of them had a harsh word to say about Sam himself.

“I know he plays around,” said a
lean, lanky young redhead from Colorado who was working at Selene as a tour
guide. She shrugged it off. “I guess that’s part of what makes him so
interesting—you never know what he’s going to do next.”

An older, wiser Chinese women who
operated excavating equipment up on the surface told me, “Sam is like
lightning: he never hits the same place twice.” Then she smiled sagely and
added, “Unless you put out something that attracts him.”

The typical reaction was that of a
grinning, curly-haired Dutch blonde, “At least he’s not a bore! Sam’s always a
lot of fun, even if he does exasperate you sometimes.”

I
would not get any
useful information from his lovers. They had no useful information to give me.

It was frustrating, to say the
least. Somehow Sam knew what the factory ships were bringing back toward Earth
before the information was received on Earth. But that was impossible. The
ships broadcast their information in the clear; no coded messages were allowed.
The messages were received by the
I
SC’s
own communications satellite and immediately relayed to every receiving antenna
in the Earth-Moon system at the same time. All right, when the Moon was in the
right part of its orbit, receivers on the Moon might catch the incoming messages
a second and a half sooner than receivers on Earth. So what? That made no real
difference. The Moon lagged a second and a half behind when it was on the other
side of its orbit. I repeat, So what?

Yet, just to make certain, I ran a
correlation of Sam’s right “guesses” with the position of the Moon in its
orbit. Nothing. It made no difference whether the Moon was a second and a half
ahead or behind.

Sam was enjoying my frustration. We
became buddies, of a sort. He pulled me away from my desk time and again to
show me around Selene, take me for walks up on the surface, even escort me to
the gambling casino at Hell Crater and treat me to a pile of chips—which I promptly
lost. Dice, roulette, baccarat, even the slot machines; it made no difference,
I lost at them all, much to Sam’s glee.

I
began to clutch
at straws. Somehow, I knew—I
knew
—Sam was getting the incoming
messages from the factory ships before the rest of the Earth-Moon system. He
could make his buying decisions based on advance knowledge; of that I was
certain. That meant that he was receiving those messages sooner than everyone
else. In turn, that meant that the speed of light was not the same for Sam as
it was for everyone else.

I
was challenging
Einstein; that’s how crazy Sam was making me.

He had somehow rigged the speed
with which those messages traveled from the Asteroid Belt to Earth. But that
was impossible! The speed of light is the one immutable factor in all of
Einstein’s relativity. It can’t be changed. It travels at one speed in vacuum
and one speed only. Sam couldn’t slow it down or speed it up.

Or—if he could—why would he be
wasting his time playing the commodities market? He could be opening up the
path to interstellar travel!

In desperation I asked my computer
to search for any correlations it could discern in all of Sam’s market
transactions. Anything at all.

The list that scrolled across my
screen was even more frustrating than my other failed ideas. There were plenty
of correlations, but none of them made any sense. For example, Sam’s buys of metals
futures seemed to follow some astrological pattern: the computer actually
worked out a pattern in which Sam’s investments correlated with the
astrological signs for the days in which he made his buys.

Sam sold his futures, of course.
That’s how he made money. He bought when the price was low, before most other
investors dared to risk their money. Then he waited until the price for that
particular cargo rose, and sold it off at a handsome profit. While his buys had
that weird astrological correlation, his sales did not; they were strictly
related to the market price for the metals.

I
was losing weight
worrying over this problem. And I started to have bad dreams, nightmares in
which C.C. Chatsworth was fiendishly slicing me into thin sections on those
volleyball wires, cackling insanely while my blood floated all around me in
zero-gravity bubbles.

Sam, strangely enough, was very
solicitous, fussing over me like a distraught uncle.

“You gotta eat better, Zorro,” he
told me as I picked at my dinner.

We were back at the Earthview. Sam
had just returned from another quick trip to Sunsat Seventeen. The magnetrons
were still giving trouble. Sam grumbled about the Asian consortium’s insistence
that seventy-five percent of the satellite’s hardware had to be manufactured in
Asia.

“And not the Pacific Rim countries,
where they know how to build major hardware,” he groused. “Not Japan or even
China.”

Despite my growing despair, I went
for his bait. “Then where is the hardware being built?” I asked.

Sam frowned from across the
circular dining table. “Upper Clucksville, from the looks of it. Afghanistan,
Tzadikistan, Dumbbellistan— guys who had trouble making oxcarts are now
building klystrons and power busses and I’m stuck with a contract that says I’ve
gotta make it all work right or it comes outta
my
profits!”

“Why did you ever agree to such a
contract?” I wondered out loud.

“Outta the goodness of my heart,”
said Sam, placing a hand on his chest. “Why else?”

A bell rang in my mind.

Sam was gone the next morning, back
to the same Sunsat Seventeen. I went up to my roomy office and immediately got
to work. Ignoring the pretty view of the plaza’s greenery and the Olympic-sized
swimming pool where young tourists were doing quintuple flips in lunar
slow-motion from the thirty-meter diving platform, I booted up my computer and
started checking out the hunch that had popped into my mind the night before.

In the back of my mind it occurred
to me that Sam had generously given me this office next to his own so that he
could keep an eye on me. He probably had the desktop computer bugged, too, so
he could see what I was looking into. So I used my trusty old palm-sized machine
instead. It was slower, because it had to access files stored back on Earth and
that meant a second-and-a-half lag. But using Sam’s computer would have been
foolish, I thought.

Yes! I was right. Every time Sam made
a successful buy on the futures market he was in orbit, not on the Moon.
Almost. He made a few buys from his office here in Selene City as well, but
they were sometimes winners, more often losers. When he called in his buys from
orbit they were winners, every time except once, and that once happened when a
factory ship broke down months after Sam’s purchase of its cargo of industrial
steel; the cargo was almost a year late in reaching the market. Everyone lost money
on that one.

His sell orders came from Selene,
from orbit, from wherever he happened to be. But his successful buys, the ones
that were making him rich,
always
came from orbit.

I
was so excited by
this discovery that it wasn’t until late that afternoon that the reaction hit me.
So what? So Sam makes his buy decisions while he
’
s
working in orbit, instead of when he’s on the Moon. What does that prove?

It didn’t prove anything, I realized.
It certainly reinforced the idea that Sam was cheating the system, somehow. But
how he was doing it remained a mystery.

I
felt terribly let
down. As if I had spent every bit of my energy trying to break down a solidly
locked door, only to find that the room beyond that door was totally empty.

I
sat at the desk
Sam had loaned me, staring out at the scantily clad tourists performing
athletic feats that were impossible on Earth, feeling completely drained and
exhausted. In my mind’s eye I saw C.C. roasting me over the coals of
bureaucratic wrath. And Sam grinning at me like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern,
knowing that he had outsmarted me.

I
should have been
angry with Sam. Furious. The little trickster was ruining my career, my life.
Yet I just couldn’t work up the rage. Sam had been kind to me. I knew it had
all been in his own self-interest, but the little wise guy had actually behaved
as if we were real friends.

Nevertheless, I had to get to the
bottom of this. Sam was cheating and it was my job to nail him. Or I would be
nailed myself.

I
hauled myself up
from the desk chair and headed for Selene’s spaceport, checking my palm
computer for the departure time of the next OTV heading for Sunsat Seventeen.

I’m going to catch him in the act,
I told myself. He’s not going to outsmart me any longer.

When I finally arrived at the
sunsat, he was outside again, working with the same team of technicians while
the same trio of engineers gave me worried frowns and mumbles as I pulled on
the same slightly-too-small space suit.

“Sam told us we should stay inside,”
said one of the women engineers.

“He said it’s going to be real
hairy topside,” the other one added.

The bald, bearded man said, “He
said he had to test the escape pod again.”

“Again?” The word caught my
attention.

The man nodded solemnly while the
two women checked out my backpack.

“How often does he check out the
escape pod?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Every time he comes
here, just about.”

One of the women said, from behind
me, “Sam’s worried that this sunsat might be unsafe.”

My mind was clicking fast. I couldn’t
imagine any disaster that could make this sixty-square kilometer slab of metal
so unsafe that they would have to abandon it. The so-called escape pod was a modified
OTV; it could fly all the way back to the Moon, if necessary.

And
Sam took out the escape pod almost every time he came to this sunsat.

Click.
Click. Click. Those facts meshed together. They added up to something—but I didn’t
know the full answer. Not yet.

“Tell
Sam that I’m coming out to the escape pod,” I commanded. “Tell him not to leave
until I get to him.”

I
flew up the access tube as fast as I could and
pulled myself hand-over-hand along the guard rail that led out to the escape
pod. All the while, I was thinking that the pod ought to be stationed close to
the habitat module, not out at the end of the structure.

I
got there almost in time. Just as I reached the
docking module, the pod detached and floated away into the emptiness.