The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Solar News Offices, Selene City

“But none of them will see me!” Jade blurted. “Not one of them!”

“Out of six survivors of the mission, not one will talk to you?” Jim Gradowsky demanded.

“Not one,” Jade replied glumly.

Jumbo Jim leveled a stern finger at her. “You mean you haven’t gotten to any of them, that’s what you’re really saying.”

“I’ve tried, Jim, I’ve really tried.”

Gradowsky leaned both his heavy forearms on his desktop, nearly flattening a chocolate bar that lay there half unwrapped. Jade, sitting tensely on the cubbyhole office’s shabby couch, unconsciously leaned back away from his ponderous form.

“They’re all on Earth, aren’t they?” he asked, his voice slightly softer.

Jade defended herself. “But I’ve been hounding them, Jim. I could interview them by videophone, but not one of them will even answer my calls! The best I’ve gotten is a return call from one of their lawyers telling me to stop annoying them.”

“Orlando claims that some private detective agency ran a check on you.”

“To see if I’m really a Solar News reporter?”

Gradowsky knitted his brows slightly. “More than that, looks like. They wanted a complete dossier on you: age, date and place of birth, previous employment, the whole nine yards.”

“Who was the agency working for?”

“One of the people you’re trying to interview.”

“Which one?”

“The Margaux woman; the recluse who lives in Maine.”

“Why would she … ?”

“Who the hell knows? That’s why you’ve got to get to these people, Jade. They’re trying to hide something. I can feel it in my bones. There’s something big they’re hiding down there!”

“But I can’t go to Earth, Jim. You know that. Raki knows it, too.”

Gradowsky fixed her with an unhappy frown. “How many time have I told you, kid? A reporter has to go to where the story is. You’ve got to camp on their doorsteps. You’ve got to force them to see you.”

“On Earth?”

He shrugged so hard that his wrinkled short-sleeved shirt almost pulled free of his pants.

“On Earth,” Jade repeated.

“Raki’s under pressure to get this show finished, one way or the other. What you’ve got so far is fine, but if you could get an interview with one of the survivors of that asteroid jaunt—just one of them—both of you would look like angels to the board of directors.”

“I’d have to wear an exoskeleton,” Jade said. “Get a powered wheelchair. A heart-booster pump.”

Gradowsky’s fleshy face broke into a grin. “That’s the stuff! They couldn’t turn you down if you showed up like that! They’d have to talk to you. Hell, you might drop dead right on their doorsteps!”

“Yes,” Jade muttered. “I might.”

“So? What’s keeping you?”

“There’s one survivor living off-Earth,” she said.

“Yeah, you told me. On a bridge ship. That’s too far away, kid. It’d cost a fortune to send you there, all the way out to Mars. And we can’t wait for the ship to loop back here.”

“The ship goes past Mars and on to the Belt.”

“I know.”

“The sculptress lives on an asteroid out there. The woman who worked with Sam when he got into the advertising business.”

Gradowsky shook his head. “We can’t let you spend two years tootling around on a bridge ship.”

“I could hire a high-boost shuttle. They run back and forth to the bridge ships all the time.”

With an exaggerated show of patience, Gradowsky said, “Jade, honey, there are six survivors of Sam’s first expedition to the asteroids. Five of them live on Earth. Any other reporter would be there now, chasing them down.”

“I can’t go to Earth!”

“Then you’re off the assignment,” Gradowsky said flatly. “I can’t help it, but those are the orders from Orlando. Either you get the job done or they’ll give the assignment to another reporter.”

“Is that what Raki said?”

“It’s out of his hands, kid. There’s a dozen staff reporters down there salivating for the chance to get in on this. You’ve opened a big can of worms, Jade. Now they’re all hot to grab the story away from you.”

Jade felt cold anger clutching at her heart. “So either I go to Earth or I’m off the Sam Gunn bio?”

“That’s the choice you have, yeah.” Gradowsky tried to look tough, but instead he simply looked upset.

Without another word Jade got up from the chair and made her way from Gradowsky’s office to Monica’s. There was nowhere else for her to run.

Before Jade could say anything Monica handed her palmcomp to her. “There was a call for you. From Earth. Maine, USA.”

“Jean Margaux lives in Maine,” Jade said, suddenly breathless with expectation. She sat in Monica’s spare chair and tapped the proper keys on the board.

A man’s long, hound-sad face appeared on the wall screen. He was sitting behind a huge desk of polished wood, bookcases neatly lined with leather volumes at his back. He wore a suit jacket of somber black and an actual necktie, striped crimson and deep blue.

“This message is for Ms. Jane Avril Inconnu. Would you kindly hold your right thumb up to the screen so that the scanner can check it? Otherwise this message will terminate now.”

With a glance at Monica, Jade pressed her right thumb against the palmcomp’s tiny screen. When she lifted it, the image of the gravely unsmiling man froze for a few seconds. Then:

“Thank you, Ms. Inconnu. I have the unpleasant task of informing you that Ms. Jean Margaux was killed yesterday in an automobile accident. As her attorney, I have been empowered by the four other partners in the Argo expedition who live on Earth to inform you that any further attempts to call, interview, photograph, or contact them in any way, by any employee of the Solar News Network, Inc., will be regarded as a breach of privacy and will result in an appropriate suit against said Solar News Network, Inc. Thank you.”

The screen went blank.

Jade felt just as blank, empty, as if her insides had just been pulled out of her, as if she had suddenly stepped out an airlock naked into the numbing vacuum of deep space.

Monica broke the spell. “Well, I’ll be a daughter of a bitch! How do you like that?”

Fifteen minutes later Jade was back in Gradowsky’s office and Raki’s handsome face shone on the display screen built into the office wall.

“Yes, we’ve been notified too,” Raki was saying. He looked annoyed, tight-lipped. Lawyers and threats to sue were taken very seriously in Orlando.

“What the hell are they trying to hide?” Gradowsky asked, his newsman’s nose twitching.

“Whatever it is, we’d better stay clear of the four remaining survivors for the time being. I’ve got the legal staff checking into this, but you know how long it takes them to come up with a recommendation.”

“That’s ’cause you pay them by the hour,” Gradowsky said.

Raki was not amused. “They always give us the most conservative advice. They’ll tell us to avoid the risk of a lawsuit, stay away from the remaining four.”

Jade was listening with only part of her mind. An inner voice was puzzling over the fact that Jean Margaux had detectives investigate her background, and then she was killed in an auto accident. Was it an accident? Or murder? She remembered hearing somewhere that many people on Earth commit suicide by crashing their cars and making it look like an accident. That way they left their heirs the double indemnity money from their insurance.

Jean Margaux was a very wealthy woman. Jade knew that from her own research into the survivors of Sam Gunn’s expedition out to the asteroids. And childless. As far as Jade could learn, she had no heirs.

I’ll have to check out the terms of her will, she told herself. Did one of the other four murder her? Not for money, maybe, but because they were afraid she would eventually talk to me?

“That finishes it,” Raki was saying, his lips turned down into an unaccustomed frown. “The Sam Gunn bio stops right here and now.”

“There’s a fifth survivor of the expedition,” Jade heard herself say. “And he isn’t part of this threatened lawsuit.”

Gradowsky immediately replied, “Yeah, but he’s all the way to hell out by Mars on a bridge ship.”

“They’re hiding something,” Jade snapped. “Something so important to them that Jean Margaux died to keep it secret.”

It took a couple of seconds for Raki to answer from Earth, “It was an accident, Jade.”

“Was it? Are we sure of that?”

Neither man replied.

Jade hunched forward in her chair. “The only other survivor of that expedition is on the bridge ship Golden Gate. The sculptress who made Sam’s statue is living out in the Belt. And the professor who was with Sam when he died is outfitting a deep-space mission at Titan. I could get to all three of them!”

“And not get back for two years,” Gradowsky grumbled.

“Okay, so what?” Jade felt eagerness trembling through her. “Raki, you can put the Sam Gunn bio on hold, can t you? Let those lawyers think we’ve dropped the project. Meantime I’ll get out to the Golden Gate and see what they’re trying to hide. And then go on to the other two. I can do it! I know I can!”

Gradowsky was staring at her. Raki had a faraway look in his eyes.

“We’d have to pay you salary for two years while you’re doing nothing,” Raki said.

“I’m getting minimum,” Jade shot back. “You won’t be losing much. Or just pay my travel costs while I’m going back and forth; put me on salary only for the time I’m actually working.”

“H’mm.”

“We could slip her aboard a high-boost shuttle,” Gradowsky said. “Trade her fare for advertising time. Get her out to the Golden Gate in a few weeks, maybe for free. Or at a reduced fare, at least.”

Raki fingered his handsome mustache. Jade felt her heart stop while he pondered.

Finally he said, “Very well. Travel expenses only unless you’re actually working. Jim, see what you can do about getting her to that bridge ship quickly. And not a word about this to anybody!”

“We won’t let their lawyers know what we’re doing,” Gradowsky said, grinning. “Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried about their damned lawyers,” Raki answered. “I don’t want the CEO to know what I’ve just agreed to!”