The Sam Gunn Omnibus (113 page)

“Sam!”
I yelled into my helmet microphone. “Come back here! I’m going with you.”

“Sorry,
Zorro, no can do,” Sam’s voice chirped cheerfully in my earphones. “Go on back
inside and have a cup of coffee. I’ll only be out for a couple hours or so.
Gotta check the emergency systems.”

The
pod was drifting slowly away; he hadn’t fired its main engine yet.

“Sam,
you’re full of bullshit and we both know it!”

“Such
harsh language,” he replied. “That’s not like you, Zorro.”

I
had to do something. I couldn’t just hover there and
watch him get away with it. I don’t remember thinking over my options. I simply
acted without rational thought.

I
unclipped my tether and jumped off the satellite,
trying to reach the slowly drifting escape pod.

Just
as I did, I heard Sam warning, “Counting down to main engine ignition: ten,
nine, eight...”

I
desperately needed to reach the pod before its
rocket engine lit up. Reaching awkwardly behind me, I tried to find the bleed
valve for my air tank. If I could squirt a little air out, it would act as a
rocket thrust and zip me out to the pod before Sam could light up its main
engine.

My
gloved fingers found the valve while I mentally tried to picture how it worked.
I pushed down on the knob, then turned it just a hair.

Too
much. I was snapped into a crazy spin, my arms and legs flailing wildly, pulled
away from my body by centrifugal force. The escape pod, the sunsat, the stars
whirled madly around me.

I
could still hear
Sam counting,”... three, two ..

A noiseless flash of light made me
blink even while my head was whacking from side to side inside my helmet. I thought
I heard Sam’s voice yelling something, but then everything went blurry. I thought
I was unconscious or maybe dead, but my head was still thumping painfully and every
part of my body was screaming with pain and I was getting terribly dizzy.

Finally I did black out. My last
thought was that this was a thoroughly idiotic way to die, spinning like a rag
doll while Sam rocketed off to do whatever it was he did to cheat the
commodities market.

When I came to, the first thing I saw
was Sam’s round, freckled face staring down at me. He was smiling, sort of,
even though the expression on his face was far from pleased.

“You just cost me a couple hundred
million bucks, Zorro,” he said. Softly.

I
blinked. My head
was throbbing, thundering with pain. My back and shoulders and arms and
legs—all of me ached agonizingly.

But what cut through the haze of
hurt was the sight of Sam. He was in his beat-up old space suit, helmet off. Something
new had been added to his collection of patches and insignias. He had painted a
slashing red zigzag across the suit’s chest. A letter zee. The mark of Zorro.

“Wh ...” My throat was dry and raw.
It took a real effort to work up enough saliva to swallow. “What happened?” I asked
weakly.

Sam tried to frown at me but his
face just wasn’t cut out for it.

“Just as I lit up the pod’s engine
you went pin-wheeling past me like a bowling ball with legs.”

We were in the escape pod, I realized.
A padded bulkhead curved above me, and beyond Sam’s back I could see the
control panel and the small circular viewport above it. I was lying on one of
the acceleration couches.

“You rescued me,” I said.

Sam hunched his shoulders. “It was
either that or watch you zip all the way out to Mars. I figured you’d run out
of air in about ten minutes, the way you were squirting it out of your
backpack.”

I
tried to sit up,
but my head pounded like a thunder-burst and I got woozy.

“Take it easy, babe,” Sam said. “Just
lay there and relax. We’re on our way back to the sunsat, but it’ll take an
hour or so.”

“An hour ... ?”

“I had to burn a helluva lot of
propellant to catch you, Zorro. And then burn off that velocity and head back.
Lotta delta-vee, pal. So we’re on a minimum energy trajectory, headin’ back to
the ol’ corral.” Those last few words he pronounced with a fake western twang.

“You saved my life,” I said,
realizing that it was true. I felt an enormous sense of gratitude welling up
inside me.

Sam brushed it off with a wave of
his hand. “It was either that or have C.C. come after me for murder.”

“She couldn’t—”

“Couldn’t she? Once she f
i
gured out that you knew how I was getting a
jump on the market, she’d automatically assume I killed you to keep you quiet.”

I
blinked with
shock. “But I didn’t—”

“Pretty smart cookie, Zorro, ol’
pal.” Sam was smiling, but it seemed a little on the bitter side. “That’s why I
painted your zee on my chest. You got me, fair and square.”

There are times when a man should
keep his big mouth shut and accept praise, whether he deserves it or not. This
was certainly one of those times. Unfortunately, my brain was too addled from
the beating I had just undergone to pay attention to my own advice.

“What do you mean, I got you?” I asked,
befuddled. “What does the zee on your chest have to do with it?”

Sam’s grin turned more impish. He
touched one end of the zee and said, “A factory ship.” Then, sliding his finger
along the zigzag red line, he added, “The Baade Orbital Telescope,” the finger
slid across the other leg of the zee, “the reflector I hung out at the Mars L-5
position,” finally the finger came to rest at the other end of the zee, “and
the ISC’s main receiving telescope in Earth orbit.”

Then he pointed to the patch on his
chest, just above the zee, the one that said
Roemer.
“He
figured out the speed of light.”

I
got it! Like a
flash of lightning, I suddenly understood what Sam had been doing all along.

Everybody knew approximately when a
factory ship was due to send its message back toward Earth, telling what kind
of an ore load it was going to be carrying home. The messages are sent by tight
laser beam to the ISC’s receiving facility in Earth orbit. Once the satellite
gets the word, it broadcasts the news to all the market centers in the
Earth-Moon system.

Sam intercepted the signal. It was
that simple. He positioned one of the orbiting astronomical telescopes his
company maintained to intercept the

laser
signal, bounce it to a reflector he had prepositioned along the orbit of Mars,
and then finally send it Earthward. The signal was received at the Earth
satellite station ten or twenty minutes later than it normally would have been
and nobody was the wiser because nobody bothered to check the exact moment that
the factory ship sent its signal.

Meanwhile, Sam used that ten or
twenty minutes to buy metals futures before anyone else knew what the factory
ship was carrying.

It was so simple! Once you
understood what he was doing it seemed absolutely obvious.

And totally illegal.

“Sam,” I said, still somewhat
breathless with the astonishment of discovery, “you could go to jail for twenty
years.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

A dead silence fell between us. Sam
got up from the couch and floated weightlessly to the control panel. I cranked
the couch up to a sitting position, grateful that my head only felt as if it
was being split open by a band-saw.

“You’ve been cheating the market,
Sam.”

He glanced back at me, over his
shoulder, an elfin grin on his round face. “I don’t think there’s anything in
the ISC rules about intercepting laser signals. I checked those rules pretty
thoroughly, you know.”

“Insider knowledge,” I said firmly,
“is a crime.”

“What insider knowledge?” he asked,
trying to look innocent. “I just happened to learn about the factory ships’
cargos before anybody else did.”

“By rigging their communications.”

“Nothing illegal about that.”

“Yes there is.”

“Prove it!”

“C.C. will prove it,” I said. “She’ll
haul you up before the interplanetary tribunal and they’ll send you to the
penal colony on Farside.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. I could see from
the way his brow furrowed that he was actually worried.

Well, Sam knew me better than I knew
myself, of course. He had already decided to stop tinkering with the market;
C.C. and her minions (including me) were getting too close for comfort.

“I only did it to put together
enough money to buy a couple of factory ships and go out to the Asteroid Belt
again,” he told me.

“You mean this whole scheme was
just your way of raising capital?” I was incredulous.

“What else?” he asked, wide-eyed. “None
of the sheep-dip banks would

lend
me a dime. C.C blackballed me. The big-shot investors stick with the big-time
operators, like Rockledge and Pogorny. Nobody’d loan me enough money to build
an outhouse, let alone a few factory ships.”

I
thought it over
for a few moments. “So... if I didn’t turn you in, you’d stop this market
rigging on your own?”

“Yep,” he answered immediately. “Honest
injun. Cross my heart. Scout’s honor.” And he held up one hand in a
three-fingered Boy Scout salute.

The man
had
saved my life. I had done something foolishly stupid and he had saved me from
certain death. I owed him that.

Besides, the thought of Sam in
jail, or toiling away at the Farside penal colony... I couldn’t bear that.

But then the image of C.C. rose in
my mind, like a volcano of blubber about to erupt and spew over me. The best I could
hope for was to admit I hadn’t been able to find Sam’s scam and let her demote
me to third-rank sewer inspector or something even worse. If she ever got a
hint that I
had
discovered Sam’s trick
and let him go—I’d be breaking rocks on Farside myself.

There was only one honorable thing
for me to do. After getting Sam’s solemn pledge that he would never,
never
tamper with the market again, I returned alone to Selene City and called in my
resignation from the ISC.

C.C. called me back in ten seconds.
I was in my spartan studio apartment, packing for my return to Earth, when the
wall screen lit up. There she was, Mt. Vesuvius in the flesh, steaming and
glowering at me.

“ ‘E got to you, did ‘e?” she said,
without preamble.

“No,” I replied, trying to shield myself
as much as I could behind my garment bag. “On the contrary, I think I scared
him enough so that he’ll stay out of the market from now on.”

“Oh, really?” she said, dripping
sarcasm.

“Really,” I said, with as much
dignity as a man can muster while he’s holding a half-dozen pairs of under-drawers
in his hands.

“Then it might interest you to know
that one Samuel Gunn as just bought an entire factory ship’s cargo of ‘eavy metals,
ten minutes before the news of the ship’s successful rendezvous with nine
different ore miners reached the bloody market.”

Sam had broken his promise! I was
stunned. Not angry, just sad that he really couldn’t be trusted.

“Well,” I said, “you’ll have to
send someone else to snoop out how he does it. I failed, and I’ve quit. I’m out
of the game.”

“You’ll be out more than that, you
bleedin’ traitor!” For the next several minutes C.C. described at the top of
her voice how she was going to blackball me and see to it that I never worked
anywhere on Earth again. “Or on the Moon, for that matter!” she added, with
extra venom.

I
was ruined and I knew
it. But actually, what made me feel even worse was the knowledge that Sam had
gone back on his word. He’d continue to fiddle with the market until C.C.
finally caught him. He couldn’t get away with it forever; if I figured his
scheme out (even with Sam’s help) someone else could, too. Sam was heading for
jail, sooner or later. The thought depressed me terribly.