The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Sam’s War

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 situation as well 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.

My father’s strong voice cut through the babble of argument. “To hell with the legalities!”

That stunned them all into silence.

“When a nation’s vital interests are being usurped by foreigners, when a nation’s legal rights are being trampled under the heels of imperialists, when a nation’s wealth is being stolen from its people and their chosen leaders—then that nation must fight back with any and every means at its disposal.”

The Indonesian paled. “You are speaking of war.”

“Exactly so!”

“War?” echoed the Ugandan, dropping the finger sandwich he had been nibbling.

“We have no other course,” my father insisted.

“But… war?” squeaked the slim and timid representative from the Maldives. “Against the United States? Europe? Japan?”

My father smiled grimly. “No. Not against any nation. We must make war against the corporations that are operating in space.”

The Brazilian ran a fingertip across his pencil-thin moustache. “It should be possible to destroy a few satellites with ASATs.” He was showing that he knew not only the political and military situation, but the technical jargon as well.

“Fire off a single antisatellite weapon and the U.N. Peacekeepers will swoop down on you like avenging angels,” warned the delegate from Gabon.

“The same U.N. that refuses to consider our request for justice,” my father grumbled.

The Colombian representative smiled knowingly. “There are many ways to make war,” he said. “Space facilities are extremely fragile. A few well-placed bombs, they can be very small, actually. A few very public assassinations. It can all be blamed on the Muslims or the ecologists.”

“Or the feminists,” snapped the Indonesian, himself a Muslim and a devoted ecologist. Everyone else in the room laughed.

“Exactly so,” said my father. “We pick one corporation and bend it to our will. Then the others will follow.”

Thus we went to war against Sam Gunn.

My father was no fool. Making war—even the limited kind of terrorist’s war—against one of the giant multinational corporations would have been dangerous, even suicidal. After all, a corporation such as Rockledge International had an operating budget larger than the Gross National Product of most of the Twelve Nations. Their corporate security forces outgunned most of our armies.

But Sam Gunn’s corporation, VCI, was small and vulnerable. It looked like a good place to start.

So our meeting ended with unanimous agreement. The Twelve Equatorial Nations issued the Declaration of Quito, proclaiming that the space over the Equator was our sovereign territory, and we intended to defend it against foreign invaders just as we would defend the sacred soil of our homelands.

The Declaration was received with nearly hysterical fervor all through Latin America. In Ecuador, even the revolutionaries and the news media reluctantly praised my father for his boldness. North of the Rio Grande, however, it was ignored by the media, the government, and the people. Europe and Japan received it with similar iciness.

My far-seeing father had expected nothing more. A week after the meeting of the Twelve he told me over dinner, “The gringos choose to ignore us. Like ostriches, they believe that if they pay us no attention we will go away.”

“What will be your next move, Papa?” I asked.

He smiled a fatherly smile at me. “Not my move, Juanita, my beautiful one. The next move will be yours.”

I was stunned. Flattered. And a bit frightened.

My father had chosen me for the crucial task of infiltrating VCI. I had been educated at UCLA and held a degree in computer programming, despite my father’s grumbling that a daughter should study more feminine subjects, such as nutrition (by which he meant cooking). I also had a burning fervor to help my people. Now I received a rapid course in espionage and sabotage from no less than the director of our secret police himself.

“You must be very careful,” my father told me, once my training was concluded.

“I will be, Papa,” I said. I had joined him for breakfast on the veranda of the summer palace, up in the foothills where the air was clean and deliciously cool.

He looked deep into my eyes, and his own eyes misted over. “To send my only child to war is not an easy thing, you know.” He was being slightly inaccurate. I was his only legitimate child, and it was obvious that he had been planning to use me this way for some time.

“Yet,” he went on, “I must think and act as El Presidente, rather than as a loving father.”

“I understand, Papa.”

“You will be a heroine for your people. A new Mata Hari.”

The original Mata Hari had been a slut and so poor at espionage that she was caught and executed. I realized that my father did not know that. He was a politician, not a student of history.

Turning his head to look out over the balcony to the terraced hillsides where the peons were hard at work on the coca fields, he murmured, “There is much money to be made in space.”

There was much money being made from the coca, I knew. But since the cocaine trade was still illegal the money that came from it could not be put into the national treasury. My father had to keep it for himself and his family, despite his heartfelt desire to help the destitute peons who were forced to labor from sunrise to sunset.

The rebels in the hills claimed that my father was corrupt. They were radical ecologists, I was told, who wanted to stop the lumbering and mining and coca cultivation that provided our poor nation’s pitiful income. My father saw our seizure of the equatorial orbit as a means of making more money for our country, money that he desperately needed to buy off the rebels—and the next election.

He dabbed at his eyes with his damask napkin, then rose from the breakfast table. I got up too. The servants began clearing the dishes away as we walked side by side from the veranda into the big old house, heading for the door and the limousine waiting for me.

“Be a good soldier, my child,” he said to me once we had reached the front door. The butler was waiting there with my packed travel bag. “Be brave. Be fearless.”

“I will do my best, Papa.”

“I know you will.” He gripped me in a full embrace, unashamed of the tears that streamed from his eyes or the fact that he was so much shorter than I that I had to bend almost double to allow him to kiss my cheeks.

My own eyes were misty, as well. Finally he let go of me and I went quickly down the steps to the waiting limousine. While the butler put my bag into the trunk, I turned back to my father, came to attention, and snapped a military salute to him. He returned my salute, then turned away, unable to watch me step into the limo and start the long ride to the airport.

Thus I went to war.

I had been surprised, at first, that Sam Gunn’s company had hired me on nothing more than the strength of the faked university credentials of the fictitious person that my father’s secret police had created for me. Of course, I knew enough computer programming to pass—I hoped. And of even more course, it would never do for the VCI people to know that I was the daughter of the man who had issued the Declaration of Quito. Even if they ignored our Declaration, I reasoned, they could not possibly be ignorant of it.

VCI was a surprisingly small operation. I reported to their headquarters in Orlando, a modest office building quite near the vast Disney World complex. There were only a couple of dozen employees there, including the company’s president, a lanky silver-haired former astronaut named Spencer Johansen.

“Call me Spence,” he said when I met him, my first day at VCI. I had just sat down at my own desk in my own office—actually nothing more than a cubbyhole formed by movable plastic partitions that were only shoulder high.

Johansen strolled in, smiling affably, and sat casually on the corner of my bare desk. He offered his hand and I took it in a firm grip.

You must understand that, by any reasonable standard, I was quite an attractive young lady. My hair is the honey blonde of my Castilian ancestry. My figure is generous. I have been told that my eyes are as deep and sparkling as a starry midnight sky. (The young lieutenant who told me that was quickly transferred to a remote post high in the Andes to fight the rebels.) I am rather tall for a woman in my country, although many North American women are as tall as I, and even taller. Nonetheless, I was not that much shorter than Spence, whom I judged to be at least one hundred and ninety centimeters in height.

“Welcome aboard,” he said. His smile was dazzling.

“Thank you,” I answered in English. “I am happy to be here.” I had worked hard to perfect the Los Angelino accent that my fictitious persona called for.

His eyes were as blue as a Scandinavian summer sky. Despite his smile, however, I got the impression that he was probing me, searching for my true motives.

“We had planned to start you off on some of the more routine stuff, but we’ve got a bit of an emergency cooking and we’re kinda shorthanded—as usual.”

Before I could reply he went on, “Can you handle a VR-17 simulator? Reprogram it?”

I nodded cautiously, wondering if this was a true emergency or some kind of a test.

“Okay,” Spence said. “Come on down to the simulations center.” He headed for the opening in the partitions that was the doorway to my cubicle. There was no door to it.

I followed him, stride for stride, as he hurried along the corridor. He was wearing a soft blue open-necked, short-sleeved shirt and denim jeans. I wore a simple modest blouse of salmon pink and comfortable russet slacks. He glanced at me and grinned. “You play tennis?”

“A little.” I had won every tournament I had ever entered; the daughter of El Presidente had to win, but I thought it would be best to be modest with him.

“Thought so.”

“Oh?”

“You’re not puffing,” he said. “Not many of these desk-jockeys can keep up with me.”

“I am curious,” I said as we entered the simulations center. It was nothing more than a large windowless room, empty except for the big mainframe computer standing in its center and the desks with terminals atop them set up in a ring around the mainframe. The four corners of the room were bare but for a single cheap plastic chair in each corner.

A man was sitting in one of those chairs, with a virtual realty helmet covering his face and data gloves on both his hands, which twitched in the empty air, manipulating controls that existed only in the VR programming.

“Curious about what?” Spence asked as he showed me to one of the computer terminals.

I slid into the little wheeled chair. “You are the president of this company, right?”

“Yep.”

“But I had the impression that the company belonged to someone named Sam Gunn.”

Before Spence could answer, the man in the VR helmet began swearing horribly at the top of his voice. He called down the wrath of God on everyone connected with the machinery he was supposed to be operating, on the person or persons who had programmed the VR simulation, on Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein and all the mathematicians in the world. All the while his hands gesticulated wildly, as if he were desperately trying to ward off a host of devils.

Strangely, Spence grinned at the interruption. Then he turned back to me and said, loud enough to be heard over the continuing tirade of abuse, “I’m the president of VCI, but Sam Gunn is the founder and owns more stock than anybody else. He doesn’t like to sell shares to anyone who isn’t an employee.”

“I can become a stockholder?”

“We have a very generous stock option plan,” Spence replied, almost yelling to be heard over the continuing screaming. “Didn’t you watch your employee orientation video?”

In truth, I had not. It had never occurred to me that employees might become partial owners of the company. A very clever gringo, this Sam Gunn. He undoubtedly keeps the majority of shares in his own hands and doles out a pittance to his employees, thereby gaining their loyalty.

As if he could read my thoughts, Spence said, “Sam’s a minority stockholder now. My wife and I own more shares than anybody else except Sam, but no individual owns more than a few percent.”

Wife? Spence was married. For some reason I felt a pang of disappointment.

“Sam Gunn must be an unusual man,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the rantings from the corner of the room. But the instant I started to speak, the ravings stopped, and my voice shrilled stupidly. I felt my face flame red. Spence’s grin widened but he said nothing.

“I would like to meet him some day,” I said, more softly, as I turned to the computer terminal.

“You can meet him right now,” said Spence. “That’s him in the VR rig.”

My mouth must have dropped open. I spun the little chair around to see Spence looking off toward the corner. The man there was pulling off his VR helmet, still muttering obscenities.

I stared at Sam Gunn as he got up from the chair and tugged the data gloves off. He was short, much shorter than I. His torso was stocky, solid, although I could see that his belly bulged the faded blue coveralls he wore. His face was round, with a little snub of a nose and a sprinkling of freckles. Hair the color of rusted wire, cut very short, and sprinkled with gray—which he insisted (I soon learned) was due to exposure to cosmic radiation in space, not from age. From this distance, halfway across the room, I could not tell the color of his eyes. But I could easily see that he was angry, blazing furious, in fact.

“Goddammit, Spence,” he said, stamping toward us, “if we don’t get this simulation fixed and fixed damned soon somebody’s gonna lose his ass out there.”

Spence put a fatherly hand on my shoulder. “Here’s the gal who’s going to fix it. Just started with us this morning.” My shoulder tingled from his touch.

Sam gave me a stern look. “This kid?”

“Juanita O’Rourke,” Spence introduced me. It was my alias, of course.

Sam stared at me. He was about the same height standing as I was sitting. I saw that his eyes were a bluish-green hazel color, flecked with golden highlights.

“From Los Angeles,” Spence added. “Computer programming degree from—”

“I don’t care where you’re from or where you went to school,” said Sam Gunn. “I love you.”

I had heard that he was a womanizer of the worst sort. Some of his escapades had been included in the dossier my father’s secret police had given me to study. The dossier hinted at much more. Strangely, my father never mentioned the danger that Sam Gunn might pose to me. Perhaps he did not know of it. After all, his attention was focused on affairs of state, not affairs of the bedroom.

I got to my feet and put on a modest smile. Partly it was because I towered nearly thirty centimeters over Sam Gunn. The feeling gave me joy.

“You give your heart quickly,” I said, adding to myself silently, And very often.

His round, freckled face turned into an elf’s delighted countenance. “Will you have dinner with me tonight?”

I hesitated just long enough to let him think I seriously considered his invitation. “Not tonight,” I said. “I just arrived here and there’s so much to do….”

Spence cleared his throat and said, “You want this simulation checked out, don’t you?”

All Sam’s anger and frustration had disappeared as quickly as a dry leaf is blown away by a gust of wind. “Okay, Esmeralda—”

“Juanita,” I corrected.

Sam shook his head. “To me you’re Esmeralda, the beautiful gypsy girl that Quasimodo loves.”

“I am not a gypsy.”

“But you’re beautiful,” he said.

“And you will be Quasimodo?”

Sam dropped into a crouch and twisted his head up at a bizarre angle. “I’ll be whoever you want me to be, Esmeralda.”

He made me laugh.

“The simulation,” Spence reminded him.

“Oh. Yeah. That.”

Fortunately, the problem was simple enough for me to solve, although it took several days’ intense work. VCI’s major business was removing old commsats that had ceased to function from the geosynchronous orbit so that new commsats could be placed there. There were only a finite number of slots available in GEO, and they were strictly allocated by the International Telecommunications Authority. VCI crews flew from space stations in low Earth orbit (LEO) to GEO and removed the dead commsats to make room for new ones.

It was a small part of the satellite communications industry, but a key factor. VCI also had contracts to sweep debris out of the lower orbits where the space stations flew. I learned that the company’s name originally stood for Vacuum Cleaners, Incorporated. Sam’s company cleaned up the vacuum of orbital space.

More recently, Sam had begun sending people up to GEO to repair malfunctioning commsats. It was cheaper to fix them than to replace them—in theory, at least. In practice, the costs of sending astronauts to GEO even for a few hours was almost as much as replacing a malfunctioning satellite.

The virtual reality simulation that Sam was frustrated over was one in which an operator could remain aboard the space station in LEO and remotely direct an unmanned spacecraft to repair a malfunctioning satellite in GEO.

“Bring the dead back to life,” as Sam put it.

“It would be much safer for our people if they could stay in the space station rather than fly up to GEO,” Spence explained to me. “GEO’s in the middle of the outer Van Allen Belt. Astronauts can’t stay there very long because of the radiation.”

“I see,” I said.

“We could save a bundle of money if we could do this job remotely,” said Sam eagerly. “Just the drop in our insurance costs could pay for the whole program.”

Spence added, “In the long run we could operate right here from the ground. No need to send people to one of the space stations, even.”

“That’d save even more money,” Sam agreed happily.

“But the simulation keeps glitching,” said Spence.

“And until we get it right in the simulator we can’t try it in the real world.”

Thus the burden of their hopes was placed on my young shoulders. I thought it strange that something so vital would be entrusted to a totally new and untried employee. Was this a trap of some sort? Or a test? Soon enough I learned that it was typical of the way Sam Gunn ran his company. He kept his staff as small as he possibly could, hiring only when there was no other way to get a necessary job done. And make no mistake about it, Sam Gunn ran VCI. Despite his lofty title, Spence took orders from Sam. Most of the time.

The problem with the simulation was not terribly difficult. If Sam had not been so impatient his own staff personnel or a consultant would eventually have found it. But what Sam wanted was instant results, which meant that I spent virtually twenty-four hours a day working on the problem. Except for the hour or so each day I spent fending off Sam’s invitations to dinner, to lunch, to a suite in the zero-gravity honeymoon hotel he wanted to build in orbit.

Within a few days I had the program running so smoothly that Sam was willing to try a test in orbit. And I realized that I could sabotage his operation quite easily. In fact, I planted a bug in the program that I could activate whenever I chose to.

I discussed my accomplishment with my father on the direct phone link from our consulate in Orlando. I drove to the consulate in the dark of night, well past midnight, to make certain that no one from VCI would see me.

I had feared that I would wake my father from his justly-earned sleep. As it turned out, he was in bed, but not asleep. At first he did not activate the phone’s video, which puzzled me. When he finally did, I realized that he was not alone in his bed. He tried to hide her, but I could see that a tousle-haired young trollop lay beside him, bundled under the sheets. She peeked out from behind my father’s back, showing a bare shoulder, a pair of flashing dark eyes, and piles of raven black hair.

My father was delighted with the progress I had made in little more than a week.

“I can sabotage their mission to repair satellites,” I reported to him, trying to ignore his companion. She could not have been much older than I. “And they will never even know that sabotage has occurred.”

“Good!” He beamed at me. “Excellent! But do not attack them just yet. Let them run a successful mission or two. Wait until the strategic moment to strike.”

“I understand, Papa.”

“You are doing well, my child.”

I looked past him to the young woman sharing his bed. My mother had been dead for many years and my father was still a man of vigor. Yet I felt angry. I did not tell him that Sam Gunn was attracted to me.

“And you are well, Papa?” My question sounded acidly cynical to my own ears.

Yet my beloved father obviously did not feel my anger. “I am in good health,” he reported smilingly. “Although the rebels have surrounded the army base at Zamora.”

“What?” I felt a double pang of alarm. The lieutenant who had been infatuated with me was at the Zamora base.

“Not to worry, my daughter. We are reinforcing the base by helicopter and will soon drive the scum back to their caves in the mountains.”

Yet I did worry. The rebels seemed to get bolder, stronger, each year. I went back to work, angry with my father yet frightened for him. We needed to wrest control of the equatorial orbit from the gringo corporations, quickly. I began to look for more ways to sabotage VCI. I even let Sam take me out to dinner several times, although each evening ended at the front door of my apartment building with nothing more romantic than a handshake. Sam was not exactly a perfect gentleman: he was a persistent as a goat in mating season. I fended him off, however. My arms were longer than his.

“Esmeralda,” he complained one evening, “you’re turning my love life into the petrified forest.”

We were at the entrance to my apartment building. I thought of it as my castle, its walls and electronic door locks my defense against Sam’s assaults.

“I agreed to have dinner with you,” I said, “nothing more.”

He sighed heavily. “I guess I’m paying you too much.”

“Paying me …”

With an almost wicked grin he said, “If you were broke and hungry you’d appreciate me more, I betcha.”

“What an evil thing to say!”

“Well, look at this apartment building,” he went on. “It’s a frigging luxury palace! I’m just paying you too much money. You’re living too well—”

I had to cut off his line of thought before he realized that my salary could never pay the rent on my apartment. Before he began to ask himself how a poor computer programmer from Los Angeles could afford the clothes and the sports car I had.

“So you want women to be starving and poor,” I snapped at him. “Or perhaps you prefer them barefoot and pregnant?”

He shrugged good-naturedly. “Barefoot is okay.”

I did not have to pretend to be angry. I could feel the blood heating my cheeks. “Sam, the days of male domination over women were finished long ago,” I told him. “Don’t you understand that?”

“I’m not interested in domination. All I want is a little cooperation.”

“You are a hopeless chauvinist, Sam.”

He broke into an impish grin. “Not quite hopeless, Esmeralda. I still have some hope.”

It was impossible to dislike Sam, even though I tried. But at least I stopped him from asking himself how I could afford my lifestyle on the salary he was paying me.

Yet it was Spence that I felt drawn to. He was quietly competent, always even-tempered, extremely capable. I knew he was married, but somehow I felt that his marriage was not all that happy for him. Perhaps it was because I wanted to believe so. Perhaps it was because he was a kind, fatherly, caring, truly gentle man.

And then I met Spence’s wife. Her name was Bonnie Jo. Apparently she had once been engaged to marry Sam Gunn but somehow had married Spence instead. The story I gathered from my fellow workers was that her father had provided the money for Sam to start VCI. Spence had mentioned that he and his wife were both stockholders, which made me wonder if her father was still a financial backer of the company.

But it was not her finances that stunned me. It was her beauty. Bonnie Jo’s hair was the color of lustrous gold, her eyes a rich, deep, mysterious grayish green. She was almost as tall as I, her figure slim and athletic, her clothes always impeccably stylish. Compared to her, I felt fat and stupid. Her voice was low, melodious; not the piercing high-pitched shrill of so many gringo women. But her eyes were hard, calculating; her beauty was cold, like an exquisite statue or a fashionably draped mannequin.

It quickly became clear to me that she no longer loved Spence, if she ever had. She was cool to him, sometimes cruelly so, as when she bought herself a sapphire ring for her own birthday and loudly announced that Spence could not have afforded it on the salary Sam gave him.

For his part, Spence buried himself in his work, driving himself deeper and deeper into the technical side of VCI, leaving the administration to Bonnie Jo and the office staff. This brought us together every day. I realized that I was falling in love with this handsome, kind, suffering older man. I also realized that he saw me as nothing more than another employee, young enough almost to be his daughter.

Spence traveled to Space Station Alpha to personally test the program for remotely repairing satellites in GEO. I remained in Orlando, at VCI’s mission control center. It was a tiny room, big enough only for three monitoring stations. Windowless, it would have been unbearably stuffy if the air conditioning had not been turned up so high that it became unbearably frigid. The front wall was one huge display screen, which could be broken into smaller displays if we desired.

I sat at the right-hand monitor, almost shivering despite the sweater I wore, ready to give whatever assistance I could to the man who was actually controlling Spence’s mission. We both wore earphones clamped over our heads, with pin-sized mikes at our lips. However, the mission controller was supposed to do all the talking; I was told to remain silent. Sam took the third seat, on the left, but it was empty most of the time because Sam hardly sat still for two seconds at a time. He was constantly bouncing out of his chair, pacing behind us, muttering to himself.

“This has gotta work, guys,” he mumbled. “The whole future of the company’s riding on this mission.”

I thought he was being overly dramatic. Only later did I come to realize that he was not.

The big display screen before us showed a telescope view from Alpha of our Orbital Transfer Vehicle as it approached the satellite that needed repair. The OTV was an ugly contraption: clusters of spherical tanks and ungainly metal struts. At its front a pair of mechanical arms poked out stiffly. Ridiculously small rocket nozzles studded the vehicle fore and aft and around its middle; they reminded me of the bulbous eyes of a mutant iguana.

I could feel Sam’s breath on my neck as Spence’s voice said, “Shifting to onboard camera view.”

“Roger, onboard view,” said the mission controller, sitting at my elbow.

The screen abruptly showed a close-up view of the malfunctioning satellite. It seemed huge as it hung serenely against the black backdrop of space.

“Starting rendezvous sequence,” Spence’s voice said. Calmly, quietly, as unruffled as a man tying his shoelaces.

Sam was just the opposite. “Keep your eyes glued on the readouts,” he snapped. “And your finger on the abort button. The last thing we want is a collision out there.”

He was speaking to the mission controller, I knew, but his words applied to me as well. I had inserted a subroutine into the automatic rendezvous program that would fire an extra burst of thrust at the critical moment. Not only would the OTV be destroyed, but the communications satellite, too. VCI would be sued by the commsat’s insurer, at the very least. All I had to do was touch one keypad on the board in front of me. Despite the frigid air-conditioning I began to perspire.

But I kept my hands in my lap. Calmly, methodically, Spence achieved the rendezvous and then directed the OTV’s machinery to remove the malfunctioning power conditioner from the commsat and insert the new one. I watched the screen, fascinated, almost hypnotized, as the robot arms did their delicate work, directed by Spence’s fingers from more than thirty thousand kilometers’ distance.

At last the mission controller said into his microphone, “I copy power conditioning checkout in the green. Move off for communications test.”

“Moving off for comm test.” The mission plan called for the OTV to back away from the commsat while its owners in Tokyo tested the new power conditioner to make certain it properly fed electrical power to the satellite’s forty transponders.

The display screen showed the commsat dwindling away. And then the great glowing blue curve of the Earth swung into view, speckled with dazzling white clouds. I felt my breath gush from me. It was overwhelming.

I heard Spence chuckle in my earphone. “I’ll bet that’s Juanita.”

“Yes,” I replied without thinking. I glanced at the mission controller. Instead of frowning at my breaking the mission protocol, he was grinning at me.

“Never seen the view from orbit before, huh?” Spence asked.

“Only photographs in magazines or videos,” I said.

“Welcome to the club,” said Spence. “It still gets me, every time.”

“Let’s get back to work, shall we?” Sam said. But his voice was strangely subdued.

The word came from Tokyo that the power conditioner functioned perfectly. A seventy-million-dollar commsat had been saved by replacing one faulty component.

Now it was Sam who gushed out a heartfelt sigh. “Good work, guys. C’mon, I’m gonna buy you all the best dinner in town.”

I wanted to stay at my monitoring station and talk with Spence. But I could not. The mission controller cut the link to him even before I could say adios.

For some reason, Sam insisted that Bonnie Jo join us. So he bundled the four of us into his leased Mercedes and drove us to a Moroccan restaurant on the strip just outside Disney World.

“You’re gonna love this place,” Sam assured us as our turbanned host guided us to a table by the dance floor, a big round engraved brass table, barely a few centimeters off the floor. There were no chairs, only pillows scattered around the table.

“Relax, kick your shoes off,” Sam said as he flopped onto one of the big pillows. “The belly dancers start in a few minutes.”

The restaurant was small, almost intimate. Although smoking in restaurants had been outlawed for decades, the management filtered a thin gray haze (nontoxic, the menu assured us) through the air-conditioning system. For “atmosphere,” the menu said. The food was surprisingly good, roasted goat and couscous and a tangy sauce that reminded me of the best Mexican dishes. But it was clear that Sam had come to see the dancers. And that he had seen them many times before. They all seemed to recognize him and to spend most of their performances close enough to our table for me to smell the heavy perfumes they used.

Our mission controller’s name was Gene Redding. He was well into his forties, balding, portly and very competent at his job. As he sat on the pillows gazing up at the dancers gyrating within arm’s reach, his face turned redder and redder and his bald pate began to glisten with perspiration. His glasses kept fogging, and he constantly removed them to wipe them clear, squinting at the dancers all the while. From the silly grin on his face it was obvious that he was enjoying the entertainment.

Conversation was impossible while the dancers were on. The reedy music and thumping percussion were too loud, and the men were too engrossed. I saw that Bonnie Jo was just as interested in the dancers as the men were. I must admit that they were fascinating: erotic without being vulgar. God knows what fantasies they stirred in the men’s minds.

It was on the drive back to the office that the argument began.

“We turned the corner today,” Sam said happily as he drove along Interstate 4. “Now the money’s gonna start pouring in.”

“And you’ll pour it all out again, won’t you, Sam?” said Bonnie Jo.

She was sitting in the back seat, with me. Gene was up front with Sam.

“I’m gonna invest it in the company’s growth,” Sam said lightly.

“You’re going to sink it into your idiotic orbital hotel scheme.” It sounded to me as if Bonnie Jo was speaking through gritted teeth.

“Idiotic?” Sam snapped. “Whattaya mean, idiotic? People are gonna pay good money for vacations in zero-gee. It’s gonna be the honeymoon capital of the world!”

“Sam, if just for once you’d think with your brain instead of your testicles, you’d see what a damned fool scheme this is!”

“Yeah, sure. They laughed at Edison, too.”

“We can’t piss away our profits on your harebrained schemes, Sam!”

“As long as I’m the biggest stockholder I can.”

I noticed that we were going faster as the argument got hotter. Sam was using neither the highway’s electronic guidance system nor the car’s cruise control; his rising blood pressure made his foot lean harder on the car’s accelerator.

Bonnie Jo said, “Not if I can get a bloc to outvote you at the annual meeting.”

“You tried that before and it didn’t get you very far, did it?”

“Spence will vote on my side this time,” she said.

The other cars were blurring past us, streaks of headlights on one side, streaks of red tail lights on the other. I felt like a crew member in a relativistic starship.

“The hell he will,” Sam yelled back. “Spence is solidly behind me on this. So’s your father.”

“My father has already given me his proxy.”

Sam was silent for several moments. We sped past a huge double trailer rig like a bullet passing a tortoise.

“So what,” he said at last. “Most of the employees’ll vote my way. And that includes Spence.”

“We’ll see,” said Bonnie Jo.

“We sure as hell will.”

So there were internal strains within VCI’s top management. My discovery of this pleased me very much, mainly, I must confess, because I realized that Spence and Bonnie Jo were truly unhappy with one another. I began to think that I might use their differences to destroy VCI—and their marriage.

But Sam had other ideas. So did my father. And also, so did the rebels.

The following Friday afternoon Sam popped into my cubbyhole of an office, whistling off-key and grinning at the same time. It made him look rather like a lopsided Jack-o’-lantern.

“Got any plans for this weekend?” he asked me as he pulled up the only other chair in my cubicle, turned it backwards, and straddled it.

I certainly did. I was planning to spend the weekend at my desk, studying every scrap of data I could call up on my computer about VCI’s finances. I already knew enough about the technical operations of the company. Sam’s argument with Bonnie Jo had opened my eyes to the possibilities of ruining the corporation by financial manipulations.

“I will be working all weekend,” I said.

“You sure will,” said Sam, crossing his arms over the back of the little plastic chair and leaning his chin on them.

His mischievous grin told me that he had something unusual in mind. I merely stared at him, saying nothing, knowing that he was bursting to tell me whatever it was.

Sure enough, Sam could not remain silent for more than two heartbeats. “Ever been in orbit?” he asked. Quickly he added, “Literally, I mean. In space.”

I blinked with surprise. “No. Never.”

His grin widened. “Okay, then. Pack an overnight bag. You’re going up tomorrow morning. I’ll have you back here in time to be at your desk first thing Monday morning.”

“You’re taking me into space?”

“Space Station Alpha,” he said. “You’ll love it.”

“With you?”

He tried to put on a serious expression. “Strictly business, Esmeralda. Strictly business. You’ll have a private compartment in the one-g section.”

“But why?”

“Company policy. Everybody who works for VCI gets a chance to go into orbit.”

“This is the first time anyone’s told me about it,” I said.

His grin returned. “Well… it’s a new company policy. I just made it, as a matter of fact.”

I realized his intention. “So you merely want to get me into space with you.”

“It’ll be business, I swear,” Sam said, trying to look innocent.

“What business?” I asked. All my instincts were ringing alarm bells within me.

“I need a woman’s opinion about my plans for the orbital hotel. Can’t ask Bonnie Jo, she’s dead-set against the idea.”

I must have frowned, because he swiftly added, “I’m talking about the way the compartments are done up, the facilities and the decorations and all that. The food service. I need a woman’s point of view, honest.”

He almost sounded reasonable.

But his grin would not fade away. “Of course, if the mood strikes you and you start to feel romantic I could show you the zero-gee section of the station and we could accomplish feats that could never be done on Earth.”

“No!” I snapped. “Never!”

“Aw, come on,” Sam pleaded like a little boy. “I’ll behave myself, honest. I really do need your opinion. It’s business, really it is.”

My mind was racing furiously. The more I knew about Sam’s operations the easier it would be to trip him up, I reasoned. However, I knew that no matter how much he protested, his lecherous male mind still entertained the hope that he could seduce me, still harbored fantasies of making love with me in zero gravity. I had to admit to myself that I harbored a similar fantasy—except that it was Spence I fantasized about, not Sam.

“Listen,” Sam said, interrupting my train of thought. “I know you think I’m a male chauvinist and all that. Okay, maybe I am. But I’m not a rapist. If anything happens between us it’ll be because you want it to happen as much as I do.”

“I should be perfectly safe, then.”

He laughed. “See? You’ve got nothing to fear.”

Still I hesitated. His reputation worried me. Apparently he could be irresistibly charming when he wanted to be.

He heaved a great, disappointed sigh, threw his hands up over his head and said, “All right, all right. You want a chaperone to go with us? You got it. I’ll ask Spence to come along, too. How’s that?”

I had to exert every iota of self-control I possessed to keep myself from leaping out from behind my desk and shouting Yes! Yes! Very deliberately, I turned my gaze away from Sam’s eager eyes and studied the blank wall behind him, pretending to think mightily.

At last I said, “A chaperone is proper. But it should be a woman. A duena.”

Sam sighed again, this time from exasperation. “Look, I can’t shuttle people up and back to a space station just to keep your Hispanic proprieties. D’you know how much it costs?”

“But you are taking me,” I said.

“I need your mother-loving feminine opinion about the hotel accommodations, dammit! And Spence has useful work to do for the company at Alpha. That’s it!”

“Very well,” I said with as much reluctance as I could feign. “Spence is a married gentleman. He is not as good as a proper duena, but I suppose he can be trusted to act as our chaperone.”

Sam jumped to his feet, bowed deeply, and pranced out of my cubicle. Only when I was certain that he could not see me did I allow myself to smile.

Less than a quarter-hour later a young man appeared at my open doorway. He looked like a Latino: somber dark eyes, thick curly black hair, skin the color of smoked parchment. He was handsome, in a smoldering, sullen way. Sensuous lips.

“Ms. O’Rourke?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I’m supposed to give you an orientation tour. For your ride up to Alpha.” His tone was little short of insolent.

“Right now? I’m busy….”

He shrugged disdainfully. “Whenever you’re ready, princess. Sam told me to hang around until you’ve got an hour of free time.”

Princess? I seethed inwardly, but maintained a calm exterior. I would not give this sneering youth the satisfaction of seeing that he could anger me.

“I won’t be ready until sometime after six,” I said.

Again he shrugged. “Then I’ll hafta hang around until after six.”

“Where will I find you?”

A spark of something glinted in his eyes. Perhaps it was anger. “I’ll be in the simulations lab, back down the main corridor, past—”

“I know where the simulations lab is,” I said.

“Okay. See you whenever you get there.” He turned and started to leave.

“Wait!” I called. “What is your name?”

“Ricardo Queveda,” he answered over his shoulder. “Extension 434.”

It was close to seven-thirty before I finished my day’s work and made my way to the simulations lab. Although quitting time at VCI was nominally six, there were still plenty of people in the corridors and offices. Many of Sam’s employees worked long hours. Most of them, in fact..

But the simulations lab seemed deserted. The computer in its center was dark and silent. The overhead lights were dimmed. I stood in the doorway frowning with uncertainty. He had said he would be here. How dare he leave without informing me?

“You ready for your orientation spin?”

The voice behind me startled me. I turned and saw that it was Queveda. He held a frosted can of cola in one hand.

“Dinner,” he said, hoisting the can before my face. “Want some?”

“No thank you. Let’s get this over with.”

“Okay. It’s pretty simple,” he said as he ushered me inside the lab. The ceiling lights brightened automatically. “IAA safety regulations require anyone flying into orbit for the first time to have an orientation simulation and lecture. The lecture is recorded and you can see it on one of the display screens here or take a copy home with you and view it at your leisure. Which do you prefer?”

“I’ll see it here,” I said.

He nodded. “Sure. There’s another half-hour I’ll have to hang around twiddling my thumbs.”

His attitude angered me. “Really!” I snapped. “If it’s your job to do this, why are you so nasty about it?”

He stared straight into my eyes. “My job, senorita, is maintaining these goddamned computers. What I’m doing now is extra.”

“Maintaining the computers? But I’ve never seen you here.”

“You haven’t noticed,” he replied sullenly. “I’ve been here. I’ve seen you plenty of times. But you just look right past the hired help, like some goddamned princess or something.”

“That’s no reason to be angry with me.”

“That’s not why I’m pissed off.”

“And there’s no need for such vulgar language!”

“Dispense Usted perdon, princesa,” he said, with a horrible accent.

“Where are you from?” I demanded.

“Los Angeles,” he said as he guided me to one of the monitoring desks that ringed the computer.

“And what makes you so angry?”

He snorted. “The thought that a refined lady like you would willingly ride into a tryst in space with an Anglo.”

“A tryst? Is that what you think I’m doing?”

“What else?”

I wanted to slap his sullen, accusing face. But I decided that I would not dignify his anger with any response whatsoever.

“Let’s get this orientation over with,” I said, barely controlling my temper. “Then we can both go home.”

I watched the recorded lecture. Then he silently led me to one of the simulation areas and helped me don the VR helmet and gloves. I “rode” in virtual reality aboard a Delta Clipper from Cape Canaveral to Space Station Alpha. The simulation did not provide the physical sensations of acceleration or zero gravity: it was strictly a safety review, showing the interior layout of the Clipper’s passenger cabin, the escape hatches, and the emergency oxygen system.

At last it was finished and I pulled the helmet off. Queveda was standing beside me; he took the helmet from my hands.

“I am not engaging in a tryst with Sam Gunn,” I heard myself mutter as I wormed off the VR gloves.

He gave me a smoldering look. “I’m glad to hear it, even if it’s not true.”

“I do not tell lies!”

For the first time, he smiled at me. It was only half a smile, really, but it made him look much better. “I’m sure you’re telling the truth. But you don’t know Sam.”

I almost wanted to tell him that I loved Spence, not Sam. But that would have been foolish. Apparently the rumors flew thick and fast through the whole company. Already it was taken for granted that Sam and I would make out in zero-gee. Besides, telling him how I felt about Spence would have made him angry all over again.

So I tried to shift the conversation as we walked along the corridor to the building’s front entrance. The halls were mostly deserted now. Even Sam’s most dedicated employees eventually went home to their families and friends.

“I am from Los Angeles, too, you know,” I said.

“Really? What part?”

Quickly I realized I had put my foot into a quagmire. “Oh, I went to UCLA,” I said. “I lived just off the campus.”

“Westwood, huh?”

Actually I had lived in a leased condominium in Pacific Palisades, with a magnificent view of the beach and the sunsets over the ocean.

“When I said Los Angeles,” he told me as we reached the front door, “I meant the city. The barrio. Downtown.”

“Oh.” I had heard about the squalor and crime in the downtown area, but had never visited such a slum.

We stepped out into the soft warm breeze of a balmy Florida evening.

“You were born there?” I asked as we walked toward our cars.

It was dark in the parking lot. Suddenly I was glad of his companionship.

“No,” he answered. “My parents came to Los Angeles when I was an infant.”

“And where were you born?” I asked.

“In Quito.”

I felt stunned. Quito!

“That’s the capital of Ecuador,” he explained, misunderstanding my silence. “My father was a university professor there but he was driven out by the dictator”

“Dictator?” I snapped. “Ecuador is a democracy.”

“Democracy hell! It’s a dictatorship, run by a little clique of fascist bastards.”

I felt myself shaking from head to toe. My throat went dry with suppressed anger.

“Someday I’ll go back to Ecuador,” Ricardo Queveda said. “Someday there’s going to be a reckoning. The people won’t stand for this corrupt regime much longer. Revolution is on the way, you’ll see.”

In the shadows of the parking lot I could not make out the expression on his face or the fire in his eyes. But I could hear it in his voice, his passionate, fervent voice, filled with hatred for my father. And if he knew who I really was, he would hate me, too.

I slept hardly at all that night, worrying about my father and the rebels and the seething hatred I had heard in young Ricardo Queveda’s voice. When I did manage to close my eyes I was racked by terrifying nightmares in which I was struggling to climb the sheer face of a high cliff with Sam up above me and Spence below. I saw the rope connecting me to Sam begin to fray. I tried to shout but no sound would come from my throat. I tried to scream but I was helpless. The rope snapped and I plunged down into the abyss, past Spence who reached out to save me, but in vain.

I woke screaming, bathed in perspiration, tangled in my bed-sheets. And I realized that in the last moment of my nightmare the man who reached toward me was not Spence after all. It was Ricardo.

Dawn was breaking. Time to get up anyway.

I was applying the final dab of mascara when the apartment’s intercom chimed. I called out to it and Sam’s voice rasped, “Arise Esmeralda. Your knight in shining armor is here to whisk you away to the promised land.”

I had seldom heard such a mixture of metaphors.

We drove to the Cape in Spence’s reconditioned antique Mustang, gleaming silver, with me crammed into the tiny rear seat and the top down. My careful hairdo was blown to tatters once we hit the highway but I did not care; it was glorious to race in the early morning sunlight.

Despite my VR orientation, I gulped as we strapped ourselves into the contoured chairs of the Delta Clipper. It was a big, conical-shaped craft, sitting in the middle of a concrete blast pad. It reminded me of the ancient round pyramids of Michoacan, in Mexico: massive, tall and enduring. But this “pyramid” was made of lightweight alloys and plastics, not stone. And it was intended to fly into space.

After all my fears, the actual takeoff was almost mild. The roar of the rocket engines was muffled by the cabin’s acoustical insulation. The vibration was less than my orientation simulation had led me to believe. Before I fully realized we were off the ground the ship had settled down into a smooth, surging acceleration.

And then the engines shut off and we were coasting in zero gravity. My stomach felt as if it were dropping away to infinity and crawling up my throat, both at the same time. The medicinal patch Sam had given me must have helped, though, because in a few moments my feeling of nausea eased. It did not disappear entirely, but it sank to a level where I could turn to Spence, sitting beside me, and make a weak grin.

“You’re doing fine,” he said, treating me to that dazzling smile of his. I did not even mind that the loose end of his shoulder belt was floating in the air, bobbing up and down like a flat gray snake.

Sam, of course, unclipped his harness as soon as the engines cut off and floated up to the padded ceiling.

“This is the life!” he announced to the ten other passengers. Then he tucked his knees up under his chin and did a few zero-gee spins and tumbles.

The other passengers were mostly experienced engineers and technicians riding up to Alpha for a stint of work on the space station. One of them, however, must have been new to zero-gee. I could hear him retching into one of the bags that had been thoughtfully placed in our seat-backs. The sound of it made me gag.

“Ignore it,” Spence advised me, placing a cool, calm hand on my arm. With his other hand he pointed at the acrobatic Sam. “And ignore him, too. He does this every trip, just to see who he can get to throw up.”

Once we docked with Alpha and got down to the main wheel of the station, everyone felt much better. Except Sam. I believe he truly preferred zero-gee to normal gravity.

Alpha station was a set of three nested wheels, each at a different distance from the center to simulate a different level of gravity. The outermost wheel was at one g, normal Earthly gravity. The second was at one-third gee, roughly the same as Mars. The innermost was at the Moon’s level of one-sixth gee. The hub of the station was, of course, effectively zero gravity, although some of the more sensitive scientific and industrial experiments were housed in “free flyers” that floated independendy of the space station’s huge, rotating structure.

Much of the main wheel was unoccupied, I saw. Long stretches of the sloping corridor stood bare and empty as Sam and I walked through them. Nothing but bare structural ribs and dim overhead lights. Not even any windows.

“Plenty room for hotel facilities here,” Sam kept muttering.

Spence had disappeared into the area on the second wheel that VCI had leased from Alpha’s owner, Rockledge Industries. He had come up to work on the satellite repair facility we had established there, not merely to chaperone me.

“But Sam,” I asked as we strolled through the dismally empty corridor, “why would anyone pay the price of a ticket to orbit just to be cooped up in cramped compartments in a space station? It’s like being in a small ocean liner, down in steerage class, below the water line.”

He smiled as if I had stepped into his web. “Two reasons, Esmeralda. One—the view. You can’t imagine what it’s like to see the Earth from up here until you’ve done it for yourself.”

“I’ve seen photos and videos. They’re breathtaking, yes, but—”

“But not the real experience,” Sam interrupted. “And then there’s the second reason.” He broke into a lecherous leer. “Making love in zero gravity. It’s fantastic, lemme tell you.”

I did not respond to that obvious ploy.

“Better yet, lemme show you.”

“I think not,” I said coolly. But I wondered what it would be like to make love in zero gravity. Not with Sam, of course. With Spence.

Sam’s expression turned instantly to wounded innocence. “I mean, lemme show you the zero-gee section of the station.” “Oh.”

“Did you think I was propositioning you?”

“Of course.”

“How could you? This is a business trip,” he protested. “I even brought you a chaperone. My intentions are honorable, cross my heart.” Which he did, and then raised his right hand in a Boy Scout’s salute.

I trusted Sam as far as I could throw the cathedral of Quito, but I followed him down the long passageway to the hub of the space station. It was a strange, eerie journey. The passageway was nothing more than a long tube studded with ladder-like rungs. With each step we descended the feeling of gravity lessened until it felt as if we were floating, rather than climbing. Sam showed me how to let go of the rungs altogether, except for the faintest touch against them now and then to propel myself up the tube. Soon we were swimming, hardly touching the rungs at all, hurtling faster and faster along the long metal tube.

I realized why the standard uniform for the space station was one-piece coveralls that zippered at the cuffs of the trousers and sleeves. Anything else would have been undignified, perhaps even dangerous.

The tube was only dimly lit, but I could see up ahead a brighter glow coming from an open hatch at the end. We were whipping along by now, streaking past the rungs like a pair of dolphins.

And then we shot into a huge, empty space: a vast hollow sphere with padded walls. Sam zoomed straight across the center and dove headfirst into the curving wall. It gave and he bounced back toward me. I felt as if I had been dropped out of an airplane. I was falling and there was no way I could control myself.

Then Sam grabbed me as we passed each other. His hands gripped my flailing arms and I was surprised at how strong he was. We spun around each other, two astronomical bodies suddenly caught in a mutual orbit. I was breathless, unable to decide whether I should scream or laugh. Slowly we drifted to the wall and nudged against it. Sam flattened his back against the padding, gaining enough traction to bring us both to a stop.

“Fun, huh?”

It took me several moments to catch my breath. Once I did, I realized that Sam was holding me in his arms and his lips were almost touching mine.

I pushed away, gently, and floated toward the middle of the huge enclosure. “Fun, yes,” I admitted.

We spent nearly an hour playing games like a pair of school children let loose for recess. We looped and dived and bounced off the padded walls. We played tag and blindman’s bluff, although I was certain that Sam cheated and peeked whenever he felt like it.

Finally we hovered in the middle of the empty sphere, sweating, panting, an arm’s length from one another.

“Well,” Sam said, running a hand over his sweaty brow, “whattaya think? Worth the price of a ticket to orbit?”

“Yes! Well worth it. I believe people will gladly pay to come here for vacations.”

“And honeymoons,” Sam added, with his impish grin. “You haven’t even tried the best part of it yet.”

I laughed lightly. There was no sense getting angry at him. “I think I can imagine it well enough.”

“Ah, but the experience, that’s the thing.”

I looked into his devilish hazel eyes and, for the first time, felt sad for Sam Gunn. “Sam,” I said as gently as I could, “you must remember that Esmeralda loves the young poet, not Quasimodo.”

His eyes widened with surprise for a moment. Then his grin returned. “Hell, you don’t have to follow the script exactly, do you?”

He was truly incorrigible.

“It must be time for dinner,” I said. “We should get back to the galley, shouldn’t we?”

So we started up the tube and, as the gravity built up, found ourselves clambering down the rungs of the ladder like a pair of firefighters descending to the street.

“You mean you’re in love with somebody else?” Sam’s voice echoed along the metal walls of the tube.

He was below me. I could see his face turned up toward me, like a round ragamuffin doll with scruffy red hair. I pondered his question for a few moments.

“I think I am,” I answered.

“Somebody younger? Somebody your own age?”

“What difference does it make?”

He fell silent for several moments. At last he said softly, “Well, he better treat you right. If he gives you any trouble you tell me about it, understand?”

I was so surprised at that I nearly missed my step on the next rung. Sam Gunn being fatherly? I found it hard to believe, yet that was what he seemed to be saying.

Spence was already in the galley when we got there.

Sam showed me how to work the food dispensers as he explained, “This glop is barely fit for human consumption. I think Rockledge has some kind of experiment going about how lousy the food has to be before people stop eating it and let themselves starve.”

I accepted a prepared tray from the machine and went to the table where Spence was sitting. There were only ten tables in the galley, and most of them were empty.

“Experienced workers bring their own food up with them and microwave it,” Sam kept rattling on. “Of course, when I open the hotel I’ll have a cordon bleu chef up here and the best by-damn food service you ever saw. Cocktail lounge, too, with real waitresses in cute little outfits. None of those idiot robots like they have down at the Cape….”

He chattered and babbled straight through our meager dinner. In truth, the food was not very appetizing. The soy burger was too cool and the iced tea too warm. I am sure it was nutritious, but it was also bland and dull.

Spence could barely get a word in, the way Sam was nattering. I was content to let him do the talking. Suddenly I felt extremely tired, worn out. It had been a demanding day, with the flight from the Cape and Sam’s zero-gee acrobatics. I had barely slept the night before and had arisen with the dawn.

I yawned in Sam’s face. And immediately felt terribly embarrassed. “Sorry,” I apologized. “But I am very tired.”

“Or bored,” Sam said, without a trace of resentment.

“Tired,” I repeated. “Fatigued. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Too much excitement,” Sam said.

Spence said nothing.

“I must get some sleep,” I said, pushing my chair back.

“Can you find your room all right?” Spence asked.

“I think so.”

“I’ll walk you to your door,” he said, getting to his feet.

Sam remained seated, but he glanced first at me and then at Spence. “I’ve got a few things to attend to,” he said, “soon as I finish this glorious Rockledge repast.”

So Spence walked with me along the sloping corridor toward the area where the sleeping compartments were.

“Sam works very long hours, even up here,” I said.

Spence chuckled. “He’s working on a couple of Rockledge people. Of the female variety.”

“Oh?”

“The little guy’s always got something going. Although I’ve got to admit,” Spence added, “that he gets a lot of dope about what Rockledge is doing from his—uh, contacts.”

“A sort of masculine Mata Hari?” I asked.

Spence laughed outright.

As we neared the door to my compartment I heard myself asking Spence, “Why don’t they have windows in the compartments? It makes them feel so small and confined.”

Even as I spoke the words I wondered if I wanted to delay the moment I must say good-night to Spence, or if there was another reason.

“The station’s spinning, you know,” he replied, completely serious. “If you had a window in your compartment you’d see the stars looping around, and then the Earth would slide past, and maybe the Moon, if it was in the right position. Could make you pretty queasy, everything spinning by like that.”

“But Sam said the view was magnificent.”

“Oh, it is! Believe me. But that’s the view from outside, or down at the observation blister in the hub.”

“I see.”

“Sam plans to put a video screen in each of his hotel rooms. It’ll look like a window that gives you a steady view of the Earth or whatever else you’d like to see.”

So after all his talk about seeing “the real thing,” Sam was prepared to show his hotel guests little more than video images of the Earth from space. That was just like the gringo capitalist exploiter, I told myself.

Yet I heard myself asking Spence, “Is the view truly magnificent?”

“Sam didn’t show you?”

“No.”

His face lit up. “Want to see it now? You’re not too tired, are you? It’ll only take—”

“I’m not too tired,” I said eagerly. “I would like very much to see this fabulous view.”

All the way along the long tube leading to the station’s hub a voice in my mind reprimanded me. You know why you asked him about the windows, it scolded. You wanted Spence to take you to the zero-gee section.

We floated into the big padded gym. Spence propelled himself to a particular piece of the padding and peeled it back, revealing a small hatch. He opened it and beckoned me to him. I pushed off the curving wall and swam to him, my heart racing so hard I feared it would break my ribs.

Spence helped me wriggle through the narrow hatch, then followed me into a small, cramped dome. There was barely room enough for the two of us. He swung the hatch shut and we were in total darkness.

“Hang on a minute….” he mumbled.

I heard a click and then the whir of an electric motor. The dome seemed to split apart, opening like a clamshell. And beyond it—

The Earth. A huge brilliant blue curving mass moving slowly, with ponderous grace, below us. The breath gushed out of me.

Spence put his arm around my shoulders and whispered, “Lord, I love the beauty of thy house, and the place where thy glory dwells.”

It was—there are no words to do it justice. We huddled together in the transparent observation blister and feasted our eyes on the world swinging past, immense and glorious beyond description. Deep blue seas and swirling purest white clouds, the land brown and green with wrinkles of mountains and glittering lakes scattered here and there. Even the dark night side was spectacular with the lights of cities and highways outlining the continents.

“No matter how many time you’ve seen it,” Spence said, “it still takes your breath away. I could watch it for hours.”

“It’s incredible,” I said.

“We’ll have to build more observation blisters for the hotel guests. Stud the whole zero-section with them.”

The panorama was ever-changing, one spectacular scene blending imperceptibly into another. We saw the sun come up over the curving horizon, shooting dazzling streamers of red and orange through the thin layer of the atmosphere. I recognized the isthmus of Panama and the curving bird’s head of the Yucatan.

“Where is Ecuador?” I asked.

“Too far south for us to see on this swing. Why do you want to see Ecuador?”

In my excitement I had forgotten that I was supposed to be from Los Angeles.

“Ricardo Quevedai,” I temporized quickly. “He told me was born in Ecuador.”

By the time we were watching our second sunrise, nearly two hours later, I had melted into Spence’s arms. I turned my face up to his, wanting him to kiss me.

He understood. He felt the same passion that I did.

But he said, very gently, “I’m a married man, Juanita.”

“Do you love Bonnie Jo?”

“I used to. Now…” He shook his head. In the light from the glowing Earth I could see how troubled and pained he was.

“I love you, Spence,” I told him.

He smiled sadly. “Maybe you think you do, but it isn’t a smart move. I wouldn’t be very good for you, kid.”

“I know my own heart,” I insisted.

“Don’t make it any tougher than it has to be, Juanita. I’m old enough to be your father and I’m married. Not happily, true enough, but that’s my fault as much as Bonnie Jo’s.”

“I could make you happy.”

“You shouldn’t be getting yourself involved with old married men. Pay some attention to guys your own age, like Ric.”

“Queveda? That… that would-be revolutionary?”

He looked totally surprised. “Revolutionary? What are you talking about?”

“Nothing,” I snapped. “Nothing at all.”

The mood was shattered, the spell broken. I had confessed my love to Spence and he had treated me like a lovesick child.

“We’d better leave,” I said coldly.

“Yeah,” Spence said. “We could both use some sleep.”

But I did not sleep. Not at all. I seethed with anger all night. Spence had not only rejected me, he had belittled me. He did not see me as a desirable woman; he thought of me as a child to be lectured, to be palmed off on some young puppy dog whose only passion is to avenge his miserable family’s supposed honor.

What a fool I had been! I did not love Spence. I hated him! I spent the whole night telling myself so.

When we boarded the Clipper for the return flight to Florida, Sam was not with us.

“Where is he?” I asked Spence.

“He left a message. Went off to visit a buddy of his in the old Mac Dac Shack.”

“The what?”

“One of the smaller stations. It’s a medical center now.”

“Sam needs medical attention?”

Spence broke into a grin. “Maybe after last night, he does, after all.”

I did not find that funny.

Sam did not appear at the office until three days later, and when he did finally show up he was grinning like a cat who had feasted on canaries.

He breezed into the mission control center while I was monitoring our latest repair mission. Ricardo Queveda sat in the left-hand chair, busily removing a set of computer boards that had to be replaced with upgrades.

“I’ve got everything lined up for the hotel,” Sam announced loudly, plopping himself into the chair on my right.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Yep. Finally got Rockledge to agree to a reasonable leasing fee. Got my buddy Omar set to handle the logistics up in orbit. Contractors, a personnel outfit to hire the staff—everything’s in place.”

He smiled contentedly and leaned back in the little swivel chair. “All I need is the money.”

I had to smile at him. “That would seem to me to be a major consideration.”

“Nah.” Sam waved an arm in the air. “I’ll get the board to approve it at the next stockholder’s meeting. That’s only six weeks away.”

He popped to his feet and strode confidently out of the center, whistling in his usual off-key fashion.

“Gringo imperialist,” muttered Ricardo Queveda.

“You accept his paychecks,” I taunted.

He gave me a dark look. “So do you.”

“I don’t call him names.”

“No. But you don’t need his money, do you? You live in a fine condo and drive a fancy sports car. Your clothing costs more than your salary.”

“You’ve been spying on me?”

He laughed bitterly. “No need for spying. You are as obvious as an elephant in a china shop.”

“So my family has money,” I said. “What of it?”

“You don’t come from Los Angeles and you don’t need this job, that’s what of it. Why are you here?”

I could not answer. My brain froze in the laser beams of his dark eyes.

“Is it because you are Sam’s mistress?”

“No!”

He smiled tightly. “But you are in love with Spence, aren’t you?”

“No I am not!”

“It’s obvious,” Ricardo said.

“I hate him!”

“Yes,” he said. “Anyone can see that.”

The annual stockholders’ meeting took place six weeks later. In that time I had become quite expert at running the mission control board. During my first weeks on the job I merely sat alongside Gene Redding and watched how he handled the job. Within two weeks he was allowing me to take over when he took a break. Within a month we were sharing the duty on long, ten and even twelve-hour shifts.

Sam needed more mission controllers because the volume of work was increasing rapidly. As he had predicted, the money was beginning to pour in to VCI. The ability to repair malfunctioning commsats and to replenish the fuel they used for their attitude-control thrusters suddenly made VCI a major force in the communications satellite industry. Instead of replacing aging commsats the corporations could get VCI to refurbish them, at a fraction of the replacement cost.

Spence worked closely with us, handling most of the remotely controlled missions himself, operating the unmanned OTVs that now ran regular repair-and-refurbishment missions to GEO.

Sam practically danced with joy. “I’ll be able to declare a dividend for the stockholders,” he told us, “and still have a wad of moolah to get the hotel started.”

Bonnie Jo frowned at him. “We could give the stockholders a bigger dividend if you’d forget about your orbital sex palace.”

Sam laughed. “Are you kidding? My hotel’s gonna be the biggest moneymaker you’ve ever seen in space. I’ve even got an advertising motto for it: ‘If you like water beds, you’re gonna love zero-gee!’ ”

Bonnie Jo huffed.

Spence spent more time in the simulator than at home with Bonnie Jo. Sam was frugal when it came to hiring more staff; he might take on a very junior computer programmer from Los Angeles, but astronauts and mission controllers carried much higher price tags, and he refrained from hiring them. We worked extremely long hours, and Sam himself “flew” many of the remote missions; Spence did the rest of them—more than Sam did, by actual count.

It seemed to me that Spence was glad of the excuse to spend so much time away from his wife. Anyone could sense that their marriage was ripping apart. It made me sad to see him so unhappy, and I had to remind myself often that he had treated me like a schoolgirl and I hated him. For her part, Bonnie Jo seemed perfectly content to have Spence spend most of his time on the remote missions. She herself began to fly back to Salt Lake City every weekend.

Naturally, with my duties as the second mission controller and his as principal operator of the remote satellite repairs, we were together quite a bit.

Well, not together in the physical sense, precisely. Spence was in another room, some twenty meters down the hall from my mission control desk. But somehow, when I was not on duty I often found myself walking down that hallway to watch him at work. He sat in an astronaut’s contoured couch, his hands covered with metallic gloves that trailed hair-thin fiber-optic cables, the top half of his handsome face covered by the stereo screens that showed him what the OTV’s cameras were seeing.

I told myself that I was studying his moves, learning how to sabotage the repair missions. When the time came I would strike without mercy. When I was not hanging by the doorway to the remote manipulator lab, studying him like a avenging angel, I was at my mission control console, actually speaking with Spence, connected electronically to him, closer to him than anyone else in the world. Including his wife. I wanted to be close to him; that made it easier to find a way to sabotage his work, his company, his life.

“You planning to attend the stockholders’ meeting?” Spence asked me during a lull in one of the missions.

I was startled that he asked a personal question. “Say again?” I asked, in the professional jargon of a mission controller.

Spence chuckled. “It’s okay, Juanita. The OTV’s still in coast mode. It’ll be another hour before we have to get to work. Loosen up.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course.”

“You bought some stock, didn’t you?”

“A few shares,” I said. In actuality I was spending my entire salary on shares of VCI. If there had been a way to buy up all the existing shares I would have done it, using my father’s treasury to deliver the company into his hands.

As fate would have it, the annual stockholders’ meeting took place on the same day that my father gave his famous speech at the United Nations.

He told me about the speech the night before the meeting. As usual, I had driven to the consulate late at night and called him on the videophone. At least he had the good sense to receive my calls in his office, when he knew I was going to contact him.

My father was glowing with pride. His smile was brilliant, the shoulders of his suit wider than ever. He had even faced the necessity of replacing his thinning hair. Although his new mane of curly brown hair looked as if it had been stolen from a teenaged rock star, it was so wild and thick, it obviously made him feel younger and more vigorous.

“With Brazil in the chair at the Security Council and the Committee of the Twelve Equatorial Nations lining up support among the small nations in the General Assembly, I have high hopes for our cause.”

“And your speech?” I asked him. “What will you say?”

His smile became even wider, even more radiant. “You must watch me on television, little one. I want you to be just as surprised as the rest of the world will be.”

He would tell me no more. I of course reported in full to him about VCI’s continuing success in repairing and refurbishing satellites remotely. And of the growing strains in the company’s management.

“You still have the capability of destroying their spacecraft?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I replied, thinking of how much damage I could do to Spence.

“Good,” said my father. “The time is fast approaching when we will strike.”

“Will it be necessary—”

But his attention was suddenly pulled away from me. I heard an aide shouting breathlessly at him, “The rebels have ambushed General Quintana’s brigade!”

“Ambushed?” my father snapped, his eyes no longer looking at me. “Where? When?”

“In the mountains of Azuay, south of Cuenca. The general has been captured and his troops are fleeing for their lives!”

My father’s face went gray, then red with fury. He turned back to me. “Excuse me, daughter. I have urgent business to attend to.”

“Go with God,” I mumbled, feeling silly at using such an archaic phrase. But it was all I could think to say.

The rebels were very clever. They must have known that my father was scheduled to fly to New York to deliver his speech to the United Nations. Now he either had to cancel his speech and admit to the world that his nation was in the throes of a serious internal conflict, or go to New York and leave his army leaderless for several days.

I could not sleep that night. When I arrived at the stockholders’ meeting my eyes were red and puffy, my spirits low. How can I help my father? I kept asking myself. What can I do? He had sent me here to help him triumph over Sam Gunn and these other gringos. But he was being threatened at home and I was thousands of kilometers away from him. I felt miserable and stupid and helpless.

Spence noticed my misery.

More than a hundred people were filing into the room in the big hotel where the stockholders’ meeting was being held. Employees and their spouses, all ages, all colors. Blacks and Hispanics and Asians, women and men, Sam had brought together every variety of the human species in his company. He hired for competence; VCI was truly a company without prejudice of any kind. Except that it helped if you were female and young and attractive. That was Sam’s one obvious weakness.

Out of that throng Spence noticed me. He made his way through the crowd that was milling around the coffee and doughnuts and came to my side.

“What’s the matter, Juanita?”

I looked up into his clear blue eyes and saw that he too was sad-faced.

“Family problems,” I muttered. “Back home.”

He nodded grimly. “Me too.” “Oh?”

Before he could say more, Sam’s voice cut through the hubbub of conversations. “Okay, let’s get this show on the road. Where’s our noble president? Hey, Spence, you silver-haired devil, come on up here and preside, for god’s sake, will ya?”

Spence lifted my chin a centimeter and gave me a forced grin. “Time to go to work,” he said. Then he turned and almost sprinted up to the front of the room and jumped up onto the makeshift dais.

Sam, Bonnie Jo, and two other men flanked Spence at the long table set up on the dais. The board of directors, I realized. Each of them had a microphone and a name card in front of them. I was fairly certain that the older of the two strangers—Eli G. Murtchison—was Bonnie Jo’s father.

There were two mammoth television sets on either side of the dais as well. I wondered if the hotel kept them there all the time, or if they had been brought in for some specific reason.

The rest of us took the folding plastic chairs that the hotel had set along the floor of the meeting room. They were hard and uncomfortable: a stimulus to keep the meeting short, I thought. The meeting began with formalities. Spence asked that the minutes of the last meeting be accepted. Bonnie Jo read her treasurer’s report so fast that I could not understand a word of it.

Then Sam, as chairman of the board, began his review of the year’s business and plans for the coming year.

I could feel the tension in the air. Even as Sam spoke glowingly to the stockholders about VCI’s new capabilities in remote satellite repair, even while they loudly applauded his announcement of a dividend, the room seemed to crackle with electricity.

And all the while I wondered where my father was, what he was doing, what decisions he was making.

A stockholder—Gene Redding, of all people—rose to ask a question. “Uh, Sam, uh, why isn’t our dividend bigger, if we’re, uh, making such good profits now?”

I turned in my chair to see Gene better. He was standing: portly, bald, looking slightly flustered. I had never before seen him in a suit and tie; he had always worn jeans and sports shirts at the office. But his suit was rumpled and his tie hung loosely from his unbuttoned shirt. It seemed to me that he felt guilty about asking his question. He was on Bonnie Jo’s side, I realized.

Sam said tightly, “We have always plowed our profits back into the company, to assure our growth. This year the profits have been big enough to allow a dividend. But we are still plowing some of the profits back into growth.”

Gene got red in the face, but he found the strength to ask, “Back into the growth of VCI’s existing projects, or, uh, some other program?”

Sam shot a glance along the head table toward Bonnie Jo. Then he grinned at Gene. “You can sit down, Gene. This is gonna take some time, I can see that.”

Bonnie Jo said, “Sam wants to put our profits—your profits—into building an orbital tourist hotel.”

“A honeymoon hotel,” Sam corrected.

A few chuckles arose from the stockholders.

“And we don’t have to build it,” Sam added. “We can lease space aboard Alpha from Rockledge International.”

“Didn’t you try that once before, when Global Technology first built Space Station Alpha?” asked another stockholder, a woman I did not recognize.

“And it didn’t work out?” asked another.

“You went broke on that deal, didn’t you?” still another asked. I realized that Bonnie Jo had recruited her troops carefully.

“Yeah, yeah,” Sam answered impatiently. “That was years ago. Rockledge has taken over Alpha now and they’re looking for customers to lease space.”

“Under what terms?” Bonnie Jo asked.

“It’s a bargain,” said Sam enthusiastically. “A steal!”

I looked at Spence, sitting between Sam and Bonnie Jo. His face was a mask, his usual smile gone, his features frozen as if he wished to betray not even the slightest sign of emotion or partisan bias.

Gene Redding rose to his feet once again. I could see that his hands were trembling, he was so nervous.

“I…” he cleared his throat, “I want to make a, uh, a motion.”

Spence said grimly, “Go ahead.”

“I move … that the board of directors …” he seemed to be reciting a memorized speech, “refuse to allocate, uh, any monies … for any programs … not directly associated with VCI’s existing lines of business.” Gene said the last words in a rush, then immediately sat down.

“Second!” cried Bonnie Jo.

Spence stared at the back wall of the meeting room as he said automatically, “Movement made and seconded. Discussion?”

I had expected Sam to jump up on the table and do a war dance. Or at least to rant and scream and argue until we all dropped from exhaustion. Instead, he glanced at his wristwatch and said:

“Let’s postpone the discussion for a bit. There’s a speech coming up at the UN that we should all take a look at.”

Spence agreed to Sam’s suggestion so quickly that I knew the two of them had talked it over beforehand. Bonnie Jo looked surprised, nettled, but her father laid a hand on her arm and she refrained from objecting.

The UN speech was by my father, of course, although no one in the room knew that I was the daughter of Ecuador’s presidente. I felt a surge of pride when his handsome face appeared on the giant TV screens. If only his new hair had matched his face better! He wore a civilian’s business suit of dark blue, with the red sash of his office slanting across his chest. He looked bigger than normal, his chest broader and deeper. I realized he must have been wearing a bulletproof vest. Was he worried that the rebels would try to assassinate him? Or merely wary of New York?

My father’s speech was marvelous, although I had to listen to the English translation instead of hearing his dramatic, flowery Spanish. Still, it was dramatic enough. My father explained the legal origins of our claim to the equatorial orbit, the injustice of the rich corporations who refused to share their wealth with the orbit’s rightful owners, and the complicity of the United Nations for allowing this terrible situation to persist.

I sat in my hard little folding chair and basked in the glow of my father’s unassailable logic and undeterrable drive.

“Is there no one to help us?” he asked rhetorically, raising his hands in supplication. “Cannot all the apparatus of international law come to the aid of the Twelve nations who have seen their territory invaded and usurped? Will no one support the Declaration of Quito?”

Suddenly his face hardened. His hands balled into fists. “Very well, then! The Twelve Equatorial Nations will defend their sacred territory by themselves, if necessary. I serve notice, on behalf of the Twelve Equatorial Nations, that the equatorial orbit belongs to us, and to no other nation, corporation, or entity. We are preparing to send an international team of astronauts to establish permanent residence in the equatorial orbit. Once there, they will dismantle or otherwise destroy the satellites that the invaders have placed in our territory.”

The audience in the UN chamber gasped. So did we, in the hotel’s meeting room. I felt a thrill of hot blood race through me.

“We will defend our territory against the aggressors who have invaded it,” my father declared. “If this means war, then so be it. To do anything less would be to bow to the forces of imperialism!”

The people around me stared at one another, stunned into silence.

All except Sam, who yelled, “Jesus H. Christ on a motorcycle!”

As the TV picture winked off, one of the stockholders shouted, “What the hell are we going to do about that?”

All sense of order in our meeting room dissolved. Everyone seemed to talk at once. Spence rapped his knuckles on the table but no one paid any attention to him. The argument about Sam’s orbital hotel was forgotten. My father had turned our meeting into chaos.

Until Sam jumped up on the table and waved his arms excitedly. “Shut the hell up and listen to me!” he bellowed.

The room silenced. All eyes turned to the pudgy rust-haired elf standing on the head table.

“We’re gonna get there before they do,” Sam told us. “We’re gonna put a person up there in GEO before they can and we’re gonna claim the orbit for ourselves. They wanna play legal games, .we can play ’em too. Faster and better!”

Spence objected, “Sam, nobody can stay in GEO for long. It’s in the middle of the outer Van Allen belt, for gosh sakes.”

“Pull a couple of OTVs together, fill the extra propellant tanks with water. That’ll provide enough shielding for a week or so.”

“How do you know? We’ve got to do some calculations, check with the experts—”

“No time for that,” Sam snapped. “We’re in a race, a land rush, we gotta go now. Do the calculations afterward. Right now the vital thing is to get somebody parked up there in GEO before those greedy sonsofbitches get there!”

“But who would be nuts enough to—”

“I’ll do it,” Sam said, as if he had made up his mind even before Spence asked the question. “Let’s get busy!”

That broke up our meeting, of course. Spence officially called for an adjournment until a time to be decided. Everyone raced for their cars and drove pell-mell back to the office. Except for Sam and Spence, who jumped into Spence’s convertible Mustang and headed off toward Cape Canaveral.

Despite my feelings of patriotism and love of my father, I felt thrilled. It was tremendously exciting to dash into the mission control center and begin preparations for launching Sam to GEO. Spence went with him as far as Space Station Alpha. Together they hopped up to the station where our OTVs were garaged on the next available Delta Clipper, scarcely thirty-six hours after my father’s speech.

Even Bonnie Jo caught the wave of enthusiasm. She came into the control center as Sam and Spence were preparing the two OTVs for Sam’s mission. It was night; I was running the board, giving Gene a rest after he had put in twelve hours straight. Bonnie Jo slid into the chair beside me and asked me to connect her with Sam up at Alpha.

“We’ve been monitoring the Brazilian launch facility,” she said, once Sam’s round, freckled face appeared on the screen. “They’re counting down a manned launch. They claim it’s just a scientific research team going up to the Novo Brasil space station. But get this Sam: the Brazilians are also counting down an unmanned launch.”

“With what payload?”

“An old storm cellar that the U.S. government auctioned off five years ago.”

“A what?”

“A shielded habitat module, like the ones the scientists used on their first Mars missions to protect themselves from solar flare radiation,” Bonnie Jo said.

Sam looked tired and grim. “They ain’t going to Mars.”

“According to the flight plan they filed, they’re merely going to the Brazilian space station.”

“My ass. They’re heading for GEO.”

“Can you get there first?” Bonnie Jo asked.

He nodded. “Got the second OTV’s tanks filled with water. Rockledge bastards charged us two arms and a leg for it, but the tanks are filled. Spence is out on EVA now, rigging an extra propulsion unit to the tanker.”

“Where did you get an extra propulsion unit?”

“Cannibalized from a third OTV.”

Bonnie Jo tried not to, but she frowned. “That’s three OTVs used for this mission. We only have two left for our regular work.”

“There won’t be any regular work if we don’t get to GEO and establish our claim.”

Her frown melted into a tight little smile. “I think I can help you there.”

“How?”

“The Brazilians haven’t filed an official flight plan with the LAA safety board.”

The International Astronautical Administration had legal authority over all flights in space.

“Hell, neither have we,” said Sam.

“Yes, but you didn’t have that fatheaded Ecuadorian spouting off about sending a team to occupy GEO.”

Fatheaded Ecuadorian! I almost slapped her. But I held on to my soaring temper. There was much to be learned from her, and I was a spy, after all.

Sam was muttering, “I don’t see what—”

With a smug, self-satisfied smile, Bonnie Jo explained, “I just asked my uncle, the Senator from Utah, to request that our space agency people ask the IAA if they’ve inspected the Brazilian spacecraft to see if it’s properly fitted out for long-term exposure to high radiation levels.”

Sam grinned back at her. “You’re setting the lawyers on them!”

“The safety experts,” corrected Bonnie Jo.

“Son of a bitch. That’s great!”

Bonnie Jo’s smile shrank. “But you’d better get your butt off the space station and on your way to GEO before the IAA figures out what you’re up to.”

“We’ll be ready to go in two shakes of a sperm cell’s tail,” Sam replied happily.

If Bonnie Jo was worried about Sam’s safety up there in the Van Allen radiation, she gave no indication of it. I must confess that I felt a twinge of relief that it was Sam who was risking himself, not Spence. But still I smoldered at Bonnie Jo’s insulting words about my father.

And suddenly I realized that I had to tell Papa about her scheme to delay the Brazilian mission. But how? I was stuck here in the mission control center until eight AM.

I could risk a telephone call, I thought. Later, in the dead of night, when there was little chance of anyone else hanging around.

The hours dragged by slowly. At midnight Queveda and another technician were in the center with me, helping Sam and Spence to check out their jury-rigged OTV prior to launch. By one-thirty they were almost ready to start the countdown.

I found myself holding my breath as I watched Sam and Spence go through the final inspection of the OTV, both of them encased in bulky space suits as they floated around the ungainly spacecraft, checking every strut and tank and electrical connection. Their suits had once been white, I suppose, but long use had turned them both dingy gray. Over his years in space Sam had brightened his with decorative patches and pins, but they too were frayed and faded. I could barely read the patch just above his name stencil. It said, The meek shall inherit the Earth. The rest of us are going to the stars.

“Hey Esmeralda,” Sam called to me, “why don’t you come up here with me? It’s gonna be awful lonesome up there all by myself.”

“Pay attention to your inspection,” I told him.

But Sam was undeterred, of course. “We could practice different positions for my zero-gee hotel.”

“Never in a million years,” I said.

He grinned and said, “I’ll wait.”

At last the inspection was finished and we began the final countdown. I cleared my display screen of the TV transmission from Alpha and set up the OTV’s interior readouts. For the next half-hour I concentrated every molecule of my attention on the countdown. A man could be killed by the slightest mistake now.

A part of my mind was saying, so what if Sam is killed? That would stop his mission to GEO and give your father the chance he needs to triumph. But I told myself that my father would not condone murder or even a political assassination. He would triumph and keep his hands clean. And mine. It was one thing to tinker with a computer program so that an unmanned spacecraft would be destroyed. I was not a murderer and neither was my father. Or so I told myself.

“Thirty seconds,” said Ricardo Queveda, sitting on my left.

Sam had become very quiet. Was he nervous? I wondered. I certainly was. My hands were sweaty as I stared at the readouts on my display screen.

“Fifteen seconds.”

Everything seemed right. All systems functioning normally. All the readouts on my screen in the green.

“Separation,” the tech announced.

The launch was not dramatic. I cleared my display screen for a moment and switched to a view from one of the space stations outside cameras and saw Sam’s ungainly conglomeration move away, without so much as a puff of smoke, and dwindle into the star-filled darkness.

I felt inexpressibly sad. He was my enemy, the sworn foe of my people. I should have hated Sam Gunn. Yet, as he flew off into the unknown dangers of living in the radiation belt for who knew how long, I did not feel hatred for him. Admiration, perhaps. Respect for his courage, certainly.

Suddenly I blew him a kiss. To my shock, I found that I actually liked Sam Gunn.

“It’s a good thing he couldn’t see that,” Ricardo growled at me. “He would turn the OTV around and come to carry you off with him.”

I leaned back in my chair, my head throbbing from the tension, glad that this Queveda person was there to remind me of my true responsibilities.

“Sam is a rogue,” I said loftily. “One can admire a rogue without being captivated by him.”

Ricardo snorted his disdain and got up from his chair, leaving me alone in the control center.

I waited until almost dawn before daring to phone my father. The mission was going as planned: Sam was coasting out to GEO, all systems were within nominal parameters, there was nothing for anyone to do. We had not even chatted back and forth since the launch; there was no need to, although I found myself wondering if Sam was so worried about his brash jaunt into the radiation dangers of GEO that he had finally lost the glibness of his tongue.

Somewhere a band of university scientists that Spence had hired as consultants were figuring out how long Sam could remain in GEO safely.

Queveda and the other technicians went home. Other technicians came in and sat on either side of me. After an hour of nothing to do, I told them to take a break, take a nap if they liked. I could monitor the controls by myself. I promised to call them if I needed them.

I phoned my father instead. He was still in New York, where he planned to wait for the success of the Brazilian mission. I woke him, of course, but at least this time he was alone in his bed. Or so it seemed.

“He is already on his way?” My father’s sleepy eyes opened wide once I told him about Sam.

“Yes,” I said. “And the United States is asking the IAA to make a safety investigation of the Brazilian spacecraft.”

He seemed confused by that.

“It will delay the Brazilian mission for days!” I hissed, not daring to raise my voice. “Sam will be in GEO and claim the territory before they even get off the space station.”

My father lapsed into a long string of heartfelt curses so foul that even today I blush at the memory.

He raged at me, “And what have you done about it? Nothing!”

“There is nothing I can do, Papa.”

“Bah! I am surrounded by traitors and incompetents! My own daughter cannot raise a finger to help me.”

“But Papa—”

“Do you realize what this gringo is doing? He is turning our own position against us! He is using my speech as a pretext for taking the equatorial orbit away from us! I will look like a fool! Before the United Nations, before the news media, before the whole world—I will be made to appear like a fool!”

I was shocked and saddened to realize that my father’s concern was not for his people or for the injustice of the situation. His first concern was about his own image.

“But Papa,” I asked tearfully, “what can we do about it?”

“You must act!” he said. “You said you were prepared to sabotage their spacecraft. Now is the time to do it. Strike! Strike now!”

I stared at his image in horror. My father’s face was contorted with fury and hate.

“Kill that gringo bastard!” he snarled at me. “He must never reach the equatorial orbit alive.”

The bug that I had inserted into the mission control program merely allowed me to fire an OTVs thrusters when I chose to. Originally I had thought that I could send an unmanned OTV crashing into a communications satellite; a neat piece of sabotage.

Sam was not planning to park his spacecraft close enough to a commsat for my plan to work, however. He merely wanted to establish himself in GEO long enough to make the territorial claim that my father wanted for the Twelve—and for the UN to recognize that claim.

I could not send him crashing into a satellite, I realized. But what if I used my bug to fire his thrusters as he approached GEO? He would go careening past the orbit, farther out into space. His trajectory would undoubtedly carry him into a wildly looping orbit that would either fling him into deep space forever, or send him hurtling back toward the Earth, to plunge into the atmosphere and burn up like a meteor.

Yes, I told myself, I could kill Sam Gunn with the touch of a finger. I was alone in the mission control center. No one would see me do it. I could then erase the bug in the program and no one would ever know why Sam’s thrusters misfired.

But—murder Sam? Only a few hours earlier I had been telling myself that my father was too good a man to stoop to murder. And now—

“They’re going to assassinate him.”

I whirled in my chair to see Ricardo standing just inside the control center’s doorway. His face was grim, his eyes red and sleepless.

“I thought you had gone home,” I said.

“Didn’t you hear me?” He stalked toward me, angry or frightened or both, I could not tell. “They’re going to kill him! Assassinate him!”

“No … I can’t….” My voice choked in my throat.

“It’s all set up,” Ricardo said, padding to the chair beside me like a hunting cat. “There’s nothing you can do about it.”

“I can’t kill Sam,” I said, nearly breaking into sobs.

“Sam?” Ricardo’s brows knit. “I’m not talking about Sam. It’s your father. The rebels are going to assassinate him in New York.”

“What? How do you know?”

“Because I’m one of them,” he snapped. “I’ve been with them all along. And now I’ve been assigned to kidnap you.”

“Kidnap me?” My voice sounded like a stranger’s to me: pitched high with surprise and fear. Yet inwardly I was not afraid. Shocked numb, perhaps, but not frightened.

Ricardo’s expression was unfathomable, but he seemed to be in torment. “Kidnap you,” he repeated. “Or assassinate you if kidnapping becomes impossible.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

He made a bitter, twisted smile. “This is our moment, princess. Your father is in New York, where we have enough people to get past his security team. You are his only living relative—or the only one he admits to. General Quintana is already storming the main army barracks in the capital.”

“General Quintana? But he’s …” The words choked in my mouth as I realized that Quintana was a traitor.

“He will be our next president,” Ricardo said, then added, “he thinks.”

I could feel my eyes widening.

Still with his twisted smile, Ricardo explained, “Do you think we are fools enough to trust a traitor? Or to put a general in the president’s chair?”

“No, I suppose you are not.”

Ricardo fell silent for a long moment, then he asked, “Will you allow me to kidnap you? It will be merely for long enough to keep you from warning your father.”

“So that you can murder him.”

“I didn’t want them to do that. I thought we could overthrow him without bloodshed, but the others want to make certain that he won’t be able to stop us.”

I said nothing. I was desperately trying to think of something to do, some way to escape Ricardo and warn my father.

“After we finish Sam’s mission I’ll have to take you with me.” His expression changed. He seemed almost shy, embarrassed. “I promise you that you will not be harmed in any way. Unless you try to resist, of course.”

“Of course,” I snapped.

He pointed to my display screen. “It’s almost time for you to activate your bug.”

“You know about that?”

“Of course I know about it,” he said. “I have been watching you very closely since the first day you came here, pretending to be from Los Angeles.”

My heart sank. I had not fooled him for a moment. Yet, somehow, I was forced to admire how clever Ricardo had been, even though he was my enemy. Or rather, my father’s enemy.

“It will be a shame to kill Sam,” he said, with real regret in his voice. “Maybe his trajectory will bring him close enough to one of the space stations so that somebody can rescue him.”

“Not much chance of that,” I said.

He shrugged. Unhappily, I thought. “It must be done. We can’t allow Sam to claim the equatorial orbit.”

“So your glorious rebels want the orbit for themselves,” I taunted.

“Yes! Why not? It is the one chance that a poor nation such as Ecuador has to gain some of the wealth these corporations are making in space.”

“So you will kill Sam as well as my father.”

“No,” he said grimly. “You will kill Sam.”

At that instant Spence’s voice came through the radio receiver, “Preparing for OIB.”

Spence’s voice. Not Sam’s.

Ric looked surprised. I felt a flame of shock race through me. I whirled my chair back to the console and toggled the radio switch.

“Spence! Where are you?”

“Aboard the OTV, Juanita honey. Sam got a brilliant idea at the last minute and we switched places.”

“Where is Sam?”

“He ought to be in New York by now.”

“New York?” we both said in unison.

“Yeah. Anyway, I’m five minutes away from OIB. You copy?”

Orbital insertion burn. The final firing of the OTV’s thrusters to place the spacecraft in the geosynchronous orbit. The time when my bug would make the thrusters fire much longer than they should and fling the craft into a wild orbit that would undoubtedly kill its pilot.

But the pilot was Spence! I had found it troubling to think of killing Sam, but it was Spence inside that OTV! No matter how angry I was with him, no matter how much I told myself I hated him, I could not knowingly, willingly, send him to his death.

“For what it’s worth,” Spence reported cheerfully, “the radiation monitors in this ol’ tin can show everything’s in the green. Radiation’s building up outside, but the shielding’s protecting me just fine. So far.”

I turned from the display screen to Ric. His face looked awful.

“I can’t do it,” I whispered. “I can’t kill him.”

He reached out his hand toward my keyboard, then let it drop to his side. “Neither can I.”

“OIB in three minutes,” Spence’s voice called out. “You copy?”

I looked at the mission timeline clock as I flicked the radio switch again. “We copy OIB in two minutes, fifty-six seconds.”

Ric sank down onto the chair next to me, his head drooping. “Some revolutionary,” he muttered.

“Let me warn my father,” I pleaded. “You don’t want his blood on your hands.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head stubbornly. “I can’t go that far.”

“But Sam will be with him, don’t you understand?”

“Sam? Why would—”

“Sam went to New York! That’s what Spence told us. The only reason for Sam to go to New York is to see my father. Sam will be in the line of fire when your assassins strike. They’ll kill him too!”

Ric looked miserable, but he said in a hoarse croak, “That can’t be helped. There’s nothing I can do.”

“Well, I can,” I said, reaching for the telephone.

“Don’t!”

“What will you do? Kill me?”

He grabbed my arm. I tried to pull free but he was stronger. I struggled but he held me in his powerful arms and pulled me to him and kissed me. Before I realized what I was doing I was kissing him, wildly, passionately, with all the heat of a jungle beast.

At last Ric pulled loose. He stared into my eyes for a long, timeless moment, then said, “Yes. Call your father. Warn him. I can’t be a party to murder. It’s one thing to talk about it, plan for it. But I just can’t go through with it.”

“OIB in one minute,” Spence’s voice chirped.

“Copy OIB in fifty-nine seconds,” I said as I took up the telephone. My eyes were still on Ric. He smiled at me, the sad smile of a man who has given up everything. For me.

“You are not a killer,” I said to him. “That is nothing to be ashamed of.”

“But the revolution—”

“To hell with the revolution and all politics!” I snapped as I tapped out the number for my father’s hotel room.

“We are sorry,” said a computer-synthesized voice, “but the number you have called is not in service at this time.”

Cold terror gripped my heart.

I called the hotel’s main number. It was busy. For half an hour, while Spence’s OTV settled into its equatorial orbit and he read off all the radiation monitors inside and outside the spacecraft, the hotel’s main switchboard gave nothing but a busy signal.

I was ready to scream when Ric suddenly bolted from the control center and came back a moment later with a hand-sized portable TV. He turned it to the all-news channel.

“… hostage situation,” said a trench-coated reporter standing in front of a soaring hotel tower. It was drizzling in New York but a huge throng had already gathered out on the streets.

“Is the president of Venezuela still in there?” asked an unseen anchor woman.

“It’s the president of Ecuador, Maureen,” said the reporter on the street. “And, yes, as far as we know he’s still in his suite with the gunmen who broke in about an hour ago.”

“Do you know who’s in there with him?”

The reporter, bareheaded in the chilly drizzle, squinted into the camera. “A couple of members of his staff. The gunmen let all the women in the suite go free about half an hour ago. And there is apparently an American businessman in there, too. The hotel security director has identified the American as a Sam Gunn, from Orlando, Florida.”

“How could the rebels get past my father’s security guards?” I wondered out loud.

“Bribes,” said Ric. He spoke the word as if it were a loathsome thing. “Some men will sell their souls for money.”

I told Spence what was happening, of course. He seemed strangely nonchalant.

“Sam’s been in fixes like this before. He always talks his way out of ’em.”

He was trying to keep my spirits up, I thought. “But these men are killers!” I said. “Assassins.”

“If they haven’t shot anybody yet, the chances are they won’t. Unless the New York cops get trigger-happy.”

That was not very encouraging.

“For what it’s worth,” Spence added, “the radiation monitors inside my cabin are still in the green.”

We had not had time to link the radiation monitors to the telemetry system, so there was no readout for them on my console.

“Maybe you could pipe the television news up to me,” he suggested. “I’ve got nothing else to do for a stretch.”

I did that. We watched the tiny television screen until Gene Redding and his assistants showed up at eight AM A murky morning was breaking through the clouds in New York. I thought about hiring a jet plane to fly up there, but realized it would do no good. The hostage crisis dragged on, with the hotel surrounded by police and no one entering or leaving the penthouse suite of my father.

All the employees of VCI were watching the TV scene by now. It seemed as if at least half of them were jammed into the mission control center. Gene Redding had taken over as controller; I had moved to the right-hand chair, a headset still clamped over my ear.

“Want to make a bet Sam talks them out of whatever they came for?” Spence asked me.

I shook my head, then realized that he could not see me. “No,” I said. “Not even Sam could—”

“Wait a minute!” said the news reporter. Like the rest of us, he had been on the scene all night without relief. “Wait a minute! There seems to be some action up there!”

The camera zoomed up to the rooftop balcony of my father’s suite. And there stood Sam, grinning from ear to ear, and my father next to him, also smiling—although he looked drawn and pale, tired to the point of exhaustion. Behind them, three of the rebel gunmen were pulling off their ski masks. They too were laughing.

I rented the fastest jet available at the Orlando airport and flew to New York. With Ric at my side.

By the time we reached my father’s hotel suite the police and the crowds and even the news reporters had long since gone. Sam was perched on the edge of one of the big plush chairs in the sitting room, looking almost like a child playing in a grown-up’s chair. He was still wearing the faded coveralls that he had put on for the space mission.

My father, elegantly relaxed in a silk maroon dressing gown and white silk ascot, lounged at his ease in the huge sofa placed at a right angle to Sam’s chair. The coffee table before them was awash with papers.

My father was smoking a cigarette in a long ivory holder. He was just blowing a cloud of gray smoke up toward the ceiling when Ric and I burst into the room.

“Papa!” I cried.

He leaped to his feet and put the cigarette behind him like a guilty little boy. Sam laughed.

“Papa, are you all right?” I rushed across the room to him. Awkwardly, he balanced the long cigarette holder on the arm of the sofa as I flung my arms around his neck.

“I am unharmed,” he announced calmly. “The rebels have gone back to Quito to form the new government.”

“New government?”

“General Quintana will head the provisional government,” my father explained, “until new elections are held.”

“Quintana?” I blurted. “The traitor?”

Ric’s face clouded over. “The army will run the government and find excuses not to hold elections. It’s an old story.”

“What else could I do?” my father asked sadly.

Still seated in the oversized chair, Sam grinned up at us. “You didn’t do too badly, Carlos old buddy.”

Sam Gunn, on a first-name basis with my father?

Getting to his feet, Sam said to me, “Meet the new co-owner of OrbHotel, Inc.”

One shock after another. It took hours for me to get it all straight in my head. Gradually, as my father and Sam told me slightly conflicting stories, I began to put the picture together.

Sam had barged into my father’s hotel suite just as the rebel assassination team had arrived, guns in hand.

“They had bribed two of my security guards,” my father said grimly. “They just walked in through the front door of the suite, wearing those ridiculous ski masks.”

Sam added, “They were so focused on your father and the other two guys in his security team that I walked in right behind them and they never even noticed. Some assassins. A trio of college kids with guns.”

Once they realized that an American citizen was in the suite the student-assassins became confused. Sam, of course, immediately began bewildering them with a nonstop monologue about how rich they could become if they would merely listen to reason.

“They’re all shareholders in my new corporation,” Sam told us happily. “Sam Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. Neat title, isn’t it?”

“They refrained from assassinating my father in exchange for shares in a nonexistent corporation?” I asked.

“It’ll exist!” Sam insisted. “It’s going to be the holding company for all my other enterprises—VCI, OrbHotel, I got lots of other ideas, too, you know.”

My father’s face turned somber. “They did not settle merely for shares in Sam’s company.”

“Oh? What else?”

“I had to resign as president of Ecuador and name Quintana as head of the interim government.”

“Until elections can be held,” Ric added sarcastically.

“Who is this young man?” my father asked.

“I am Ricorio Esteban Horacio Queveda y Diego, son of Professor Queveda, who fled from your secret police the year you became president.”

“Ah.” My father sagged down onto the sofa and picked up his cigarette holder once again. “Then you want to murder me, too, I suppose.”

“Papa, you’re murdering yourself with those cigarettes!”

“No lectures today, little one,” he said to me. Then he puffed deeply on his cigarette. “I have been through much these past twenty hours.”

“Ric did not condone assassinating you,” I told my father. “He wanted me to warn you.” That was stretching the truth, of course, and I wondered why I said it. Until I took a look at Ric, so serious, so handsome, so brave.

For his part, Ric said, “So you have joined forces with this gringo imperialist.”

“Imperialist?” Sam laughed.

“I have invested my private monies in the orbital hotel project, yes,” my father admitted.

“Drug money,” Ric accused. “Cocaine money squeezed from the sweat of the poor farmers.”

“We’re going to make those farmers a lot richer,” Sam said.

“Yes, of course.” Ric looked as if he could murder them both.

“Listen to me, hothead,” said Sam, jabbing a stubby finger in Ric’s direction. “First of all, I’m no flogging imperialist.”

“Then why have you claimed the equatorial orbit for yourself?”

“So that nobody else could claim it. I don’t give a crap whether the UN recognizes our claim or not, I’m giving all rights to the orbit to the UN itself. That orbit belongs to the people of the world, not any nation or corporation.”

“You’re giving… ?”

“Yeah, sure. Why let the lawyers spend the next twenty years wrangling over the legalities? I claim the orbit, then voluntarily give up the claim to the people of the world, as represented by the United Nations. So there!” And Sam stuck his tongue out at Ric, like a self-satisfied little boy.

Before either of us could reply, Sam went on, “There’s big money to be made in space, kids. VCI’s just the beginning. OrbHotel’s gonna be a winner, and with Carlos bankrolling it, I won’t have to fight with VCI’s stockholders for the start-up cash.”

“And how are you going to make the farmers of Ecuador rich?” Ric asked, still belligerent.

Sam leaned back in the plush chair and clasped his hands behind his head. His grin became enormous.

“By making the government of Ecuador a partner in Sam Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited.”

Ric’s face went red with anger. “That will make Quintana rich, not the people!”

“Only if you let Quintana stay in office,” Sam said smugly.

“A typical gringo trick.”

“Wait a minute. Think it out. Suppose I announce that I’m willing to make a democratically elected government of Ecuador a partner in my corporation? Won’t that help you push Quintana out of power?”

“Yes, of course it would,” I said.

Ric was not so enthusiastic. “It might help,” he said warily. But then he added, “Even so, how can a partnership in your corporation make millions of poor farmers rich?”

“It won’t make them poorer,” replied Sam. “It may put only a few sucres into their pockets, but that’ll make life a little sweeter for them, won’t it?”

Sam had made a bilingual pun! I was impressed, even if Ric was not.

“And we’ll be buying all our foodstuffs for OrbHotel from Ecuadorian producers, naturally,” Sam went on. “And I’ll sell Ecuadorian produce to the other orbital facilities, too. Make a nice profit from it, I betcha. Sure, there’s only a few hundred people living in orbit right now but that’s gonna grow. There’ll be thousands pretty soon, and once the Japanese start building their solar power satellites they’re going to need food for a lot of workers.”

Without seeming to draw a breath Sam went on, “Then there’s the hotel training facility we’re gonna build just outside Quito. We’ll hire Ecuadorians preferentially, of course. Your father drove a hard bargain, believe me, Esmeralda.”

My father smiled wanly.

“And one of these days we could even build a skyhook, an elevator tower up to GEO,” Sam continued. “That’d make Ecuador the world’s center for space transportation. People won’t need rockets; they’ll ride the elevator, starting in Ecuador. It’ll cost peanuts to get into space that way.”

He talked on and on until even Ric was at least halfway convinced that Sam would be good for the people of Ecuador.

It was growing dark before Sam finally said, “Why don’t we find a good restaurant and celebrate our new partnership?”

I looked at Ric. He wavered.

So I said, for both of us, “Very well. Dinner tonight. But tomorrow Ric and I leave for Quito. We have much work to do if Quintana is to be prevented from cementing his hold on the government.”

Sam smiled at us both. “You’ll be going to Quito as representatives of Sam Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited. I don’t want this Quintana character to think you’re revolutionaries and getting you kids getting into trouble.”

“But we are revolutionaries,” Ric insisted.

“I know,” said Sam. “The best kind of revolutionaries. The kind that’re really going to change things.”

“Do you think we can?” I asked.

My father, surprisingly, said, “You must. The future depends on you.”

“Don’t look so gloomy, Carlos, old buddy,” Sam said. “You’ve got to understand the big picture.”

“The big picture?”

“Sure. There’s money to be made in space. Lots of money.”

“I understand that,” said my father.

“Yeah, but you gotta understand the rest of it.” And Sam looked squarely at Ric as he said, “The money is made in space. But it gets spent here on Earth.”

My father brushed thoughtfully at his mustache with a fingertip. “I see.”

“So let’s spread it around and do some good.”

Ric almost smiled. “But I think you will get more of the money than anyone else, won’t you?”

Sam gave him a rueful look. “Yeah, that’s right. And I’ll spend it faster than anybody else, too.”

So Ric and I returned to Ecuador. General Quintana reluctantly stepped aside and allowed elections. Democracy returned to Ecuador, although Ric claimed it arrived in our native land for the first time. Quintana retired gracefully, thanks to a huge bribe that Sam and my father provided. My father actually was voted back into the presidency, in an election that was mostly fair and open.

Spence and Bonnie Jo eventually were divorced, but that happened years later. By that time I had married Ric and he was a rising young politician who would one day be president of Ecuador himself. The country was slowly growing richer, thanks to its investment in space industries. Sam’s orbital hotel was only the first step in the constantly growing commerce in space.

I never saw Sam again. Not face-to-face. Naturally, we all saw him in the news broadcasts time and again. Just as he said, he spent every penny of the money he made on OrbHotel and went broke.

But that is another story. And, gracias a dios, it is a story that does not involve me.