The Sam Gunn Omnibus (67 page)

Darling. The art critic. The guy
who’d been stuffing himself ever since we had left Earth orbit.

The file I had on Darling claimed
that he had inherited a modest fortune from his mother, a real estate broker in
Florida. It would’ve been a larger fortune if his father hadn’t kept frittering
money away on half-baked schemes like opening a fundamentalist Christian theme
park in Beirut. The old man died, eventually: gunned down by a crazed ecologist
on the Ross Ice Shelf where he was trying to build a hotel and penguin-hunting
lodge.

Darling claimed his ten million
investment in the
Argo
expedition came from
his inheritance. Said it was all the money he had in the world.

I
called a lady in
Anaheim that I knew, Kay Taranto. She specialized in tracking down deadbeats
for the Disney financial empire. I asked her to find out if any money from
Rockledge had suddenly appeared in Darling’s chubby hands. Told her to check
Liechtenstein. Kay was as persistent and dogged as a heat-seeking missile. If
there was anything to find out about Darling, she was the one to do it.

Meanwhile, I told Will to go
through the entire ship millimeter by millimeter to see if there were any other
nasty little surprises planted here or there.

“Don’t sleep, don’t eat, don’t even
waste time breathing,” I told him. “From now on you’re my bug inspector. Look
everywhere.”

He gave me a sly grin. “Even under
the beds?”

“And in them, if you have to,” I said.
“For every bug you find I’ll give you a bonus—say, a week’s salary?”

“How about a month’s?”

I
nodded an okay.
It’d be worth it, easy.

I
DON’T KNOW
whose idea it was to have a
continuous banquet until all the food that was about to spoil was eaten up.
Probably Darling’s. Kind of thing his perverted brain would think up.

For the past three days and nights
the seven of them have been stuffing themselves like ancient Romans during
Saturnalia. Ship of Bulemics. They must know that everything they upchuck is
going into the reprocessor, but it looks like they just don’t care. Not right
now.

Of course, they’re drinking all the
wine on board, too. My only joy is that they’re going to be so sick when they
get to the end of the food that they’ll just lay in their sacks for a
long
time and let me get on with the real job of this mission.

I’m staying up here at the command
center for the duration of their orgy. I’ve got some old synthesized Dixieland
playing on the intercom so

I
can’t hear their laughing and shouting from down in
the dining room. Or their puking. I’ve ordered the crew to stay out of the
passengers’ area.

“Let
‘
em
bust their guts,” I told my men. “We’ve got work to do.”

When you read that there’s millions
of asteroids out in the Belt you get the mental picture of a kind of forest of
chunks of rock and metal, you know, clustered so thick that you can’t sail a
ship through without getting dinged.

No such luck.

Sure, there’s millions of asteroids
in the Belt. Some as big as mountains; a few of
‘
em
are a couple of hundred kilometers wide. But most of
‘
em are the size of pebbles, even grains of sand. And they’ve
got a tremendously wide volume of space to wander around in, out there between
the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. You could put all the planets and moons of the
solar system in that region and it’d still be almost entirely empty space.

The first thing I’m looking for is
a nice little nickel-iron asteroid, maybe a couple hundred meters across.
Nothing spectacular; a piece as small as a Little League baseball field will do
fine. She’ll contain more high-grade iron ore than the whole Earth’s steel
industry uses in ten years. Maybe fifty to seventy-five tons of platinum, an
impurity that’d set a man up for life. To say nothing of the gold and silver
that’s sprinkled around in her.

Such an asteroid is worth trillions
of dollars. Maybe hundreds of trillions.

Then there’s the carbonaceous-type
rocky asteroids. They contain something more valuable than gold, a lot more
valuable. They contain water.

There’s a new frontier being built
in cislunar space, the region between low Earth orbit and the Moon’s surface.
We’ve got zero-gee factories in orbit and mining operations on the Moon. We’ve
got big condominium habitats being built in the L-4 and L-5 libration points.
More than fifty thousand people live and work in space now.

They get most of their raw materials
from the Moon. Lunar ores give our frontier workers aluminum and titanium, even
some iron, although it’s lowgrade stuff and expensive as hell to mine and
smelt. There’s plenty of silicon on the Moon; they
’
ve
got a thriving electronics industry growing there.

But the people on the space
frontier have got to import their heavy metals from Earth. And their water.
They buy high-grade steels from outfits like Rockledge International, and pay
enormous prices for lifting the tonnage up from Earth. Same thing for water,
except the corporate bastards charge even more for that than they do for steel
or even platinum.

Which is why Rockledge and the
other corporate giants don’t want to see me succeed on this venture. If I come
coasting back to the Earth-Moon system with several thousand tons of high-grade
steel and enough water to start building swimming pools in Moonbase—and
undercutting the corporations’ Earth-based prices—I’ll have broken the
stranglehold those fat-cat bastards have on the space settlements.

They don’t like that. Which is why
they’re out to stop me. I’ve got to be on the lookout for their next attempt.
They can’t launch anything to intercept us or attack us outright; the IAA would
know that they’d done it and there’d be criminal charges filed against them.

No, Rockledge and any
partners-in-crime they may have are working from within. They’ve got an agent
on board my ship and they’ve got a plan for wrecking this expedition. This
sabotage of the food freezers is just their first shot. Will hasn’t found any more
time bombs yet, but that doesn’t mean the ship’s clean. Not by a long shot. They
could hide a ton of surprises aboard the
Argo
;
I just hope Will digs ‘em up before they go off.

I
know it sounds
paranoid, but even paranoids have enemies.

KAY TARANTO FlNALLY
answered me today. We’re so far
beyond the orbit of Mars by now that messages take nearly an hour to travel
from Earth, even at the speed of light. So two-way conversations are out of the
question.

I
took her call in
my personal quarters, just off the command center. The transmission was
scrambled, of course, and it took a little coaxing of the computer before I got
a clear picture on my screen. Kay had never been a great beauty: she’s got a
lean, scruffy, lantern-jawed look to her. The only time I’ve ever seen her
smile was when she nailed a victim who was trying to escape Disney’s clutches.
Now her face in my screen was
un
smiling, dead serious.

“No joy, Sam,” she said. “Far as I can
tell, Darling is virginally pure, money-wise. No large sums deposited in any of
his accounts. No deposits at all in the past four years. He’s been living off
the income from several nice chunks of blue-chip stocks. No accounts in
Liechtenstein that I could find. No Rockledge stock in his portfolio, either.
He just about cleaned out his piggy bank to raise the ten mill for your wacky
venture. And that’s all there is to it.”

Then she let a faint glimmer of a
smile break her iron-hard facade. “That’ll be seventy-five thou pal. And dinner’s
on you when you get back.”

Thanks a friggin’ lot, I said
silently to her image on the screen.
Por nada.

OKAY,
SO
WE
found a carbonaceous chondrite first.

From everything the astrogeologists
had told me, metallic asteroids are much more plentiful than the carbonaceous
stones. But it’s just happened that our sensors picked up a carbonaceous rock,
bang!
right off the bat. I fired two automated probes at it as soon as we got close
enough. This morning Lonz initiated the course change we need to match orbit
with the rock and rendezvous with it. We’ll catch up to it in ten days.

The passengers—partners—have
finally recovered from their food orgy. For a week or so they were pretty hung
over, and pretty shamefaced. It’s a pity I didn’t think to make a video of
their antics. I could blackmail them for the rest of their lives if I had it
all on disk.

Anyway, I called a meeting in the
lounge. They all looked pretty dreary, worn out, like they were recuperating
from some tropical disease. All except Darling, who seemed pink and healthy.
And a lot heavier
than
he
was before. He’s ditched his normal clothing and he’s now wearing some kind of
robe that looks like he stitched it together himself. It took me a couple of minutes
of staring at it before I recognized what it was: two tablecloths from the
dining lounge, with some designs hand-painted on them.

Shades of the Emperor Nero! Was he
wearing eye makeup, too?

“We’ve located a carbonaceous asteroid,”
I announced, turning away from Darling. “We’ll make rendezvous with it in ten
days.”

Hubble’s ears perked up. “I’d like
to see the data, if I may.” His voice was still hoarse from all the Roman
feather-throating he’d gone through. You’d think that his being an older man, a
scientist and all that, he would’ve set a better example for the other
bubbleheads. But no, he’d been just as wild as the rest of them.

I
noticed, though,
that Sheena was no longer sitting next to him. His father image had apparently
gone down the toilet along with everything else.

“Sure,” I said to him. “Come on up
to the command center afterward. Right now, though, I thought it’d be a good
idea if we came up with a proper name for the rock.”

“You can’t claim it, can you?” Grace
asked.

Bo Williams shook his bald head. “No
one can claim any natural object in space. That’s international law.”

“You can use
it,
though,” Hubble said. “There’s no law against mining
or otherwise utilizing an astronomical body, even if you can’t claim ownership.”

“First come, first served,” said
Rick Darling. With a smirk.

“You’re
all well-versed on interplanetary law,” I said, making myself smile at them. “But
I still think we ought to give this rock a name. It’s going to make us rich;
the least we can do is name it.”

“What
will we get from it?” Sheena asked.

“Water,”
responded five or six voices simultaneously, including mine.

“Is
that all?”

“Tons
of water,” I said. “Water sells for about one million U.S. dollars per ton at
Lagrange One. Considering the size of this asteroid and its possible water
content, we ought to clear a hundred million, easy.”

“That
would pay back our investment!” Marj Dupray piped.

“With
a profit,” added Jean Margaux, the first time I had seen her say something
spontaneous.

“There’ll
be other valuables on a carbonaceous chondrite, as well,” Hubble said, taking
out his pipe for the first time. “Carbon, of course. A fair amount of nitrogen,
I would suppose. It could be quite profitable.”

Not
bothering to explain to them the difference between gross income and net
profit, I said, “So let’s pick a name for the rock and register it with the
IAA.”

They
fell silent.

“I
was sort of thinking we might name it Gunn One,” I suggested modestly.

They
booed and hooted. Each and every one of them.

“Aphrodite,”
said Sheena, once the razzing had quieted down.

Everybody
turned to stare at her. Aphrodite?

She
blinked those gorgeous eyes of hers; they were emerald green this morning. “I remember
some painting by some old Italian of the birth of Venus, coming out of the sea.
You know, like she’s the gift of the sea.”