The Sam Gunn Omnibus (65 page)

Erik’s
a good kid. Not a deep thinker, but he smiles pretty and the passengers seem to
like him, especially the female passengers. On the official manifest he’s my
logistics specialist. Not much of a technician, but he does his job okay.

I
think of them as
passengers now, rather than partners. In this phase of the flight we’re running
sorta like a cruise liner. There won’t be any real work to do until we get past
the orbit of Mars and start actively prospecting for an asteroid to mine. In
the meantime it’s six meals a day and all the entertainment I can dream up for
my magnificent seven.

They’re not as much trouble right
now as I thought they’d be. Darling’s happy as a mugger in an old lady’s home.
He’s always in the galley or the dining salon, stuffing himself on all the
gourmet food I stored aboard. He’s gaining weight fast; his clothes look like they’re
gonna start popping seams any minute.

Sheena has calmed down a lot. Maybe
what I told her about being a celebrity when she comes back to Earth has
helped. But I think it’s Lowell Hubble who’s made the real difference. He’s the
oldest man on board, lean gray-haired fatherly type. Neat little mustache that’s
still almost dark. Dresses in rumpled slacks and baggy cardigan sweaters. Even
smokes a pipe. Sheena’s taken up with him and they both seem delighted about
it. He’s even teaching her astronomy.

Is Hubble the Rockledge agent? I’ve
been wondering about that. He’s an astronomer, for chrissake. They don’t make much
money. There’s no Dunn & Bradstreet report on him, although he comes from a
pretty wealthy family. But was the ten million he ponied up his own money, or
Rockledge’s?

I
asked Grace
Harcourt to snoop around for me and see what she could find out.

“Me? Spy for you?” She laughed out
loud.

I
had invited her
up to the command center, what would be called the bridge on a ship at sea, I guess.
I like Grace. She’s tough and feisty; has to be, to make it as an entertainment
industry gossip columnist. There’s a lot of competition in that business. And a
lot of lawsuits.

I
had met her years
ago, when I was a NASA astronaut-in-training and she was still a local TV news
reporter in Houston. We had gotten along really well right from the start, but
my so-called career took me to Florida and she aimed for Hollywood. And hit it
big.

Grace is tiny, a good two inches
shorter than me. But she’s smart, sharp. Not bad looking, either. A little more
on her hips than there ought to be, but otherwise she’s got a nicely curved
figure that looks good in frilly blouses and pleated skirts. She also has a
pleasant, heart-shaped face that knows how to smile.

But now she was laughing. “I’m a
gossip columnist, Sam,” she said, “not a secret agent.”

“Snooping is snooping,” I told her.
“Just keep your pretty eyes and ears open for me, will you?”

She gave me a funny look. “How do
you know I’m not working for Rockledge?”

That made me grin. “You’re a gossip
columnist, right? You never kept a secret in your life.”

She laughed and admitted I was
right. I’ve got no worries about Grace. She records her column every day and we
transmit it to Earth. She bases her stuff on the same reports from her spies
and finks that she’d be getting if she was at home in Beverly Hills. She also
throws in a couple tidbits about our voyage now and then and shows her viewers
some of the ship. No other daily column has ever been recorded from deep space
before.

Then I had the run-in with Marjorie
Dupray. She had been my zerogee companion, along with Sheena, that first night.
A very successful fashion designer, Marj had started out as a model and she’s
kept that lean, long-legged, model’s figure. But she’s got a mean look to her,
if you ask me. Maybe it’s that buzz cut of hers, with her hair dyed like a neon
flamingo. Or the biker’s leathers she likes to wear. She doesn’t give off much
of a female aura.

Why would a fashion designer agree
to come on this voyage? And put up ten mil, to boot? I decided to question her,
subtly, so she wouldn’t know I was suspicious.

I
invited her up to
the command center one evening when I had the watch alone. She seemed moderately
bored as I showed her the navigational computer and the Christmas Tree lights
of the life support systems monitor board. But she perked up a bit when we got
to the comm console.

“How long does it take a message to
get back to Earth now?” she asked.

“Nearly half an hour,” I said. “And
longer every day. We are going where no man has gone before, you know.”

“And no woman.”

I m
ade a little bow
to acknowledge her feminist point of view, which surprised me. Then I asked:

“Are you getting any work done? Is
our voyage into deep space inspiring you to create new clothing designs?”

She shook her head. It was a finely
sculptured head, with a haughty nose and strong chin, high cheekbones that
threw shifting shadows across her face. Marj is damned near a foot taller than
me. I have nothing against tall women; in fact, I consider them a challenge.
But that butch haircut of hers bothered me. And now the color was burnt orange.

But
I was after information, not challenges.

“Don’t
you have contracts to fulfill? I thought this voyage was going to be a working
session for you. How can you afford to take two years of
f
?”

She
gave me a pitying look. “I don’t have to push it, Sam. When I get back from
this trip I’ll be the first and only designer to have been in deep space. I’ll
be able to throw rags together and the fashion industry will gobble them up and
call them works of inspired genius.”

“Oh.”
Maybe she was telling the truth. The fashion industry has always seemed kind of
weird to me. “I thought maybe you were independently wealthy. Or you had
another source of income.”

“I
have a few investments here and there,” she said, with a slight smile.

“Like
in Liechtenstein?” I blurted.

Her
sculptured face turned cold as ice. “Is that what this is all about, Sam? You
think I’m spying on you?”

I
gave her my innocent-little-boy look. “What makes
you think...”

“Sheena
told me how upset you got. How you think one of us is working for Rockledge
Industries.”

“Well,
yeah, I am upset about that. Wouldn’t you be?”

“Me?
Upset about something Sheena thinks she might have heard while she was guzzling
booze and frying what little brains she’s got on Rick’s junk?” Marj smirked at
me.

“Whoever
made that slip about Liechtenstein must’ve also been high,” I said.

“Well
it wasn’t me.”

“I’m
glad to hear it,” I said. But either my expression or my tone told her I didn’t
altogether believe her profession of innocence.

Marj
patted my cheek with one long, slender-fingered hand. “Sam, dear, there are
times when I would gladly kick you in the balls.”

If
there’s one thing I hate, it’s condescension. “You’d hurt your delicate little
foot, tall lady. I wear a lead jockstrap.”

She
laughed out loud. “I’ll bet you do, at that.”

I
assured her that I did.

Anyway,
that was almost a month ago. Since then nobody’s said or done anything
suspicious, and the cruise is going along without a hitch.

Which worries me. Maybe Grace
really is the Rockledge agent. Maybe she’s kept lots of secrets, especially
about herself. How would I know? Or Marj. Or any one of them.

Jeez, I’m getting paranoid!

Anyway, we pass the point of no
return in another six days. The ship is under a constant acceleration from the
plasma thrusters. It’s a very low acceleration; in the hub of the ship you
still feel like you’re in zero-gee, that’s how low the acceleration is. But
although those little thrusters don’t give you much push, they’re very
fuel-efficient and can run for years at a time (when they don’t crap out) and
keep building up more and more velocity for you.

As an emergency backup, we’re also
carrying three pods of chemical rockets with enough delta-v among ‘em to change
our course, swing past Mars, and head back to the Earth-Moon system. So we can
cut this ride short and go back home if there’s any major trouble—up to the
point of no return. Then, if we have a problem, no matter what the hell it may
be, we’ve still got to coast all the way out to the Asteroid Belt and swing
back to Earth on a trajectory that’ll take us at least eleven months.

So, six days from now we become
hostages to Newton’s laws of motion and momentum. The point of no return. I hate
to admit it, but I’m nervous about it.

THOSE MOTHER-HUMPING, SLIME-SUCKING,
illegitimate sons of
snakes from Rockledge! Now I know what they’re up to, and why they’ve got an
agent on board!

We passed the point of no return
two days ago.

Today the main food freezers
crapped out. All three of ‘em, at the same time. Bang! Gone. Sabotage, pure and
simple. Nineteen months more to go, and all our food is thawing out!

I
wish I was an
Arab, or even a Spaniard. Those people know how to curse!

It makes perfect sense. We die of
starvation. That’s all. Those bastards from Rockledge murder us—all except
their own agent, who waits until we’re all dead, then sends a distress call
back to Earth where Rockledge has a high energy booster all set and ready to
zoom out to rescue their man. Or woman.

Or maybe they let the poor sucker
die too. Dead spies tell no tales. And you don’t have to pay them.

Oh hell, I know that doesn’t make
any sense! I’m starting to babble, I’m so pissed off.

All three food freezers shut down. We
don’t know exactly when because there was no indication on the Christmas Tree
of the main control console. All the goddamned lights stayed clean green while
our food supply started to thaw out.

It was Erik who noticed the
problem. Bright-smiling, genial, slowwitted Erik.

I
was showing off
the command center to Jean Margaux, our high society lady from Boston’s North
Shore. (She pronounces it Nawth Showah.) She’s the one who got jealous the
first night about my zero-gee antics with Sheena and Marj. What the hell, if I’m
naming names I might as well name all of them.

Jean is the tall, stately type.
Handsome face; good bones. Really beautiful chestnut-colored hair, and I think
it’s her natural shade. Not much bosom, but nice long legs and a cute backside.
She likes to wear long slim skirts with slits in them that show off those legs
when she moves.

Cool and aloof, looks down her nose
at you. It’s not as if she gives the impression that her shit don’t stink; she
gives the impression that she doesn’t ever shit. But touch her in the right
place and she dissolves like a pat of butter in a rocket exhaust. She turns
into a real tigress. All it takes is a touch, so help me—and then afterward she’s
the Ice Queen again. Weird.

So I’m showing her the Christmas
Tree, with all its red and green lights, only there wasn’t a single red one
showing. The ship was humming along in perfect condition, if you could believe
the monitor systems. Alonzo Ali was on duty at the command console; Lonz is not
only my first mate, he’s a Phi Beta Kappa astronautical engineer and navigator
from the International Space University.

So Erik comes into the command
center with a puzzled frown on his normally open, wide-eyed face.

“There are no windows,” Jean was
saying. Coming from her, it sounded more like a complaint than a comment.

“Nope,” I said. “With the ship
swinging through a complete revolution every two minutes, you’d get kind of
dizzy looking out a window.”

“But we have windows in the lounge,”
she said. “And in our suites.”

“Those are video screens,” I corrected
as gently as I could. “They show views from the cameras at the ship’s hub,
where they don’t rotate.”

“Oh,” she said, as if I’d stuck a
dead skunk in front of her.

Erik was kind of hanging around
behind her, in my line of vision, not interrupting but sort of jiggling around
nervously, like a kid who has to pee.