The Sam Gunn Omnibus (47 page)

With Jill’s help I raised enough
capital to start a shoestring operation in lunar mining. It was touch-and-go
for a while, but the boom in space manufacturing that I had prophesied actually
did come about and I got filthy rich.

Of course, I more or less had to marry
Jill. I owed her that, she had been so helpful. Why she wanted to marry me was
a mystery to me, but she was damned determined to do it.

Of course, I was just as damned
determined not to get married. So I— but that’s another story.

JIM GRADOWSKY GUFFAWED AND LEANED BACK IN HIS
swivel
chair so far that Jade feared he would topple over.

“That’s terrific, kid! Great story.”
Wiping his eyes, he smiled at Jade as he asked, “What’s next?”

Jade
had dreaded this moment. “I don’t really know,” she replied. “I’ve run out of
people to interview.”

Gradowsky’s happy face turned to
gloom. “Come on, Jade, there must be half a zillion people who’ve known Sam
over all those years.”

“They’re all back on Earth,” she
said, her voice low.

“Oh. And you can’t go to Earth, is
that it?”

“That’s it, Jim.”

He took in a deep breath and
reached into his desk drawer for a cookie. “You’ll have to do it by videophone,
then.”

Nodding, grateful that her boss
understood, she said, “There’s this one woman I’ve got a lead on, in Ecuador.
She’s the daughter of their former president and the wife of their current
president.”

“Go get her!”

“It won’t be easy,” Jade said. “She
says she’s busy with their space tower project and—”

Gradowsky puffed out an exasperated
sigh. “Jade, honey, if it was easy
anybody
could do it. You get to
her. One way or another.”

Jade nodded. “I’ll try.”

“We all try, kid. You’ve got to succeed.”

(Recorded
at Mt. Esperanza, Ecuador)

“I HAVE NO TIME TO SPEAK TO YOU ABOUT SAM GUNN. T
hat
phase of my life
ended long ago. Believe me, directing the construction of the first space
elevator on the Earth keeps me quite busy, thank you.”

Even in the small screen in Jade’s
office the space elevator was impressive: a massive tower that rose from the mountaintop
and disappeared into the clouds high above.

Juanita Rivera y Queveda looked
impressive, too. Her face was round, the skin golden brown, her hair thick and
midnight dark. Jade couldn’t see much of her outfit, but it seemed to be more
like a general’s braid-heavy uniform than the simple coveralls of an engineer.

“Look at it!” she said, gesturing
toward the elevator off in the hazy distance. “Even in its half-finished
condition, is it not magnificent? A tower to the heavens, an elevator that
rises from this mountaintop all the way up to the geosynchronous orbit, nearly
forty thousand kilometers high! Ah, these are wonderful times to be alive.”

Jade started to ask a question,
then realized it would take nearly three seconds before the woman’s answer
could cover the round-trip distance between Earth and the Moon.

“As you undoubtedly know,” the
Ecuadorian went on, “my husband is the former president of Ecuador, as was my
father. But I have never been involved in politics, except for that brief time
when Sam Gunn intruded into my life. In fact the first time I heard of the idea
of a space elevator, it was Sam who told me about it. He called it a ‘skyhook.’
I thought it was foolishness then, but now I know better.

“What
can I tell you that you do not already know? Sam was a whirlwind, a force of
nature. He was constantly in motion, always tumbling and jumbling everything
and everyone around him. It was like living in a perpetual hurricane, being
near Sam.

“I understand that he died out in
deep space somewhere. Too bad. I am not interested in him, whether he is dead
or alive. My interest is in this space elevator, which you in the media call
the Skyhook Project. When it is finished, people will be able to ride from our
site in my native Ecuador all the way up to the geostationary orbit for
pennies! Merely the price of electricity to operate the elevator, plus a modest
profit for our company.

“Yes, it is costing billions to
build the elevator, but we have had no trouble in finding investors.

“Of course, if Sam were here among
us he would be one of our biggest investors, certainly. But what chaos he would
cause! We are much better off without him.

“Oh, I suppose I really do hope he
is not dead. I miss him, to tell the truth. But I’m glad he is not here! This
project is too important to have him involved in it.”

The woman stopped speaking. Her
eyes seemed to focus dreamily on something in the past.

Jade took the opportunity. “Couldn’t
you tell me just a little about Sam? Your impression of him? How he affected
your life?”

Juanita Rivera y Queverda smiled, a
little sadly, Jade thought.

“Very well,” she said softly. “I will take a brief break and have a
cafe con leche
while I will speak
of the time I worked for Sam Gunn. And the revolution. But only one cup! Then I
must get back to my work.”

I
KNOW IT IS INCREDIBLE TO
BELIEVE THAT SAM GUNN, of
all people, saved
civilization-as-we-know-it. But the chauvinistic little gringo did. Although he
never got the credit for it.

Yet he was lucky, at that. After
all, I was supposed to murder him.

Not that I am a professional
assassin, you understand. The daughter of
El Presidente
is no common thug. I followed a higher calling: national honor, patriotism,
love of my people and my father. Especially, love of my father.

Ecuador was, and still is, a
democracy. My beloved father was, but sadly is no longer, its
Presidente.
Above all else, you must realize that Ecuador was, and always had been, among
the poorest nations of the Earth.

Ah, but we owned something of
inestimable value. Or at least, we owned a part of it. Or at the very least, we
claimed ownership of a part of it.

The Equator. It runs across our
noble country. Our nation’s very name is equatorial. An imaginary line, you
say. Not entirely imaginary. For above the Equator, some thirty-five thousand
kilometers above it, lies the only region of space where satellites may be
placed in stationary orbits. The space people call it the
geostationary
orbit,
or GEO.

A satellite in GEO rotates around
the Earth in precisely the same twenty-three hours, fifty-six minutes and few
odd seconds that the Earth itself takes to turn one revolution. Thus a
satellite in GEO will appear to hover over one spot above the Equator.
Communications satellites are placed in GEO so that antennas on the ground can
lock onto them easily. They do not wander around the sky, as satellites at
lower or higher altitudes do.

It was my father’s genius to
understand the value of the Equator. It was also his sad destiny to have Sam
Gunn as his nemesis.

“The gringos and the Europeans get
rich with their satellites,” my father told the other eleven delegations to the
meeting.

“And the Japanese, too,” said the
representative from Zaire.

“Exactly so.”

As host to this meeting of the
Twelve Equatorial Nations, my father stood at the head of the long polished
conference table and gave the opening speech. He was a majestic figure in the
captain-general’s uniform of sky-blue that he had chosen to wear. With the
lifts in his gleaming boots he looked almost tall. The uniform tunic’s
shoulders were broad and sturdy, the medals gleaming on its breast looked
impressive even though they were decorations he had awarded himself. He had
long been darkening his hair, but now it was thinning noticeably. He had
brought in specialists from North America, from Europe and even China; there
was nothing they could do except recommend an operation to replace his
disappearing hair. My father was brave in many ways, but the thought of
personal pain made him hesitate.

So he stood before the other
delegates with a receding hairline. I thought his high forehead made him look more
handsome, more intellectual. Yet he longed for the full leonine mane of his
younger days.

My father had spent the better part
of two years working, pleading, cajoling to bring these Twelve together. They
had come reluctantly, grudgingly, I thought. But they had come. There was much
to gain if we could capture the geostationary orbit for ourselves.

I
served my father
as his personal secretary, so I sat against the wall to one side of his
imposing figure, together with the other secretaries and aides and bodyguards.
The delegates were of all hues and sizes: the massive Ugandan so dark his skin
seemed almost to shine; the Brazilian dapper and dainty in his white silk suit;
the silver-haired representative from Kiribati dressed in the colorful robes of
his Pacific atolls. One could say that these Twelve truly represented the
entire human race in all its variety, except for the fact that they were all male.
I was the only woman present. Not even one of the other aides was a woman.

Although Ecuador was a poor nation,
my father had spared no expense for this conference. The table was sumptuously
set with decanters of wine and stronger spirits, trays of Caspian caviar and
Argentine beef. The people may be poor, my father often said, but the
Presidente
must
rise above their shortcomings. After all, what are taxes for? The miserable
revolutionaries in the mountains vowed to put an end to my father’s displays of
wealth, and the sour-faced journalists in the cities coined slogans against
him, but the people accepted their
Presidente
as they always have accepted the forces of nature over which they have no
control.

My father thundered on, his
powerful voice making the wines vibrate in their crystal decanters. “The
corporations of the northern hemisphere use
our
territory and give us nothing for it. Imperialism! That’s what it is, nothing
but naked imperialism!”

The representatives applauded his
words. They were stirred, I could see. They all agreed with my father, each and
every one of them. The rich and powerful corporations had taken something that
we wanted for ourselves.

But the Indonesian, slim and dark,
with the big soulful eyes of a frightened child, waited until the applause
ended and then asked softly, “But what can we do about it? We have tried
appeals to the United Nations and they have done nothing for us.”

“We have a legal right to the
equatorial orbit,” insisted the Kenyan, preaching to the choir. “Our
territorial rights are being violated.”

The Brazilian shook his head. “Territorial
rights end at the edge of the atmosphere.” The Brazilians had their own space
operations running, although they claimed they were not making any profits from
it. Rumor had it that key members of their government were siphoning the money
into their own pockets.

“They most certainly do not!” my
father snapped. “Territorial rights extend to infinity.”

Two-thirds of the men around the
table were lawyers and they immediately fell to arguing. I knew the legal
situat
i
on as we
l
l as any of them. Historically, a nation’s territorial rights
extended from its boundaries out to infinity. But such legal rights became a
shambles once satellites began orbiting the Earth.

The Russians started it all back in
1957 with their original Sputnik, which sailed over virtually every nation on
Earth without obtaining prior permission from any of them. No one could shoot
down that first satellite, so it established the de facto precedent. But now
things were different; antisatellite weapons existed. True, the big nations refused
to sell them to their smaller neighbors. But such weapons were built by
corporations, and there were ways to get what one wanted from the
corporations—for money.