The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Two Years Before the Mast

They’re already making wisecracks about this voyage—Sam’s voice continued. Since we break Earth orbit tomorrow we’re officially launching the expedition on April First. Some of the media jerkoffs are already calling us The Ship of Fools.

I had nothing to do with selecting the launch date. The goddamned International Astronautical Authority picked the date, with their usual infinite wisdom. Had to wait two weeks here in orbit because their tracking facilities were completely tied up on the latest Mars expedition. Six scientists and three astronauts going to spend ninety days on the Martian surface—some big-time expedition!

Anyway, the two-week delay gave those nervous nellies down in the banks a chance to send up their so-called experts for another check of all the ship’s systems. Everything’s fine, all systems go, they couldn’t find anything wrong. Even though we’ll be out for at least two years, they had to admit that the ship and the crew I picked are fully up to the mission.

Wish I could say the same about my partners.

I had to form a limited partnership to get this venture going. Seven limited partners. Very limited. Three men and four women who were willing to put up ten million bucks apiece for the privilege of being the first human beings to ride out to the Asteroid Belt. Without their backing the banks wouldn’t have even looked at my deal. I needed their seed money, but now I’m gonna have to put up with them for two years or more.

What the hell! I’m the captain. If any of them gives me a hard time I’ll make the sucker walk the plank.

Jade stopped the disk.

“I don’t have my notes with me,” she said to the empty room. “I want to refresh my memory of who those partners were—besides you.”

Darling did not answer, but the picture on the screen above her changed to show a group of eight people, four women and four men, all dressed in snappy flight suits. Sam was front and center, the shortest of the men and shorter than two of the women. His round, freckled face gave him the look of an aging leprechaun. Wiry red hair cropped close. Sly grin. The beginnings of wrinkles in the corners of his eyes.

“Which one is you?” Jade called out.

A long moment, then a circle appeared around the face of the man standing farthest to the left.

“My god, you were beautiful!” she blurted.

Rick Darling, at that age, was little less than an Adonis. Handsome face, tanned, full-lipped, framed by dark wavy hair. Broad shoulders, muscular build that showed even through the flight suit. Not a single piece of jewelry on him.

“Yes, I was, wasn’t I?” Darling’s voice, even through the speakers, sounded unutterably wistful.

She leaned forward and touched the disk player’s control button once again.

The computer can fill in the date—Sam’s voice said. He sounded edgy, almost out of breath.

Well, we’re off, on schedule. High-energy boost. We’ll pass the Mars expedition in a couple of weeks. Too bad we won’t get close enough to wave to ’em. Good friend of mine from back in my astronaut days is commanding the flight. She’s the first woman to command a Mars mission. Hope that makes her happier than I ever could.

Everything’s okay here, all systems in the green. My partners are having a ball. Literally, some of them. I introduced two of the women to zerogee fun and games last night. They liked it so much that I almost had to call for help. Almost.

Women are blabbermouths! Now the two that I didn’t take down to the hub are sore at me. And one of the men, that Darling character, is starting to make hints.

I hired one of the crewmen to help keep the passengers amused. Erik Klein. He’s a blond, tanned, beach boy type. Not too bright, but muscular enough to keep the women happy. The other two—my real crew—I’ve got to keep separated from the partners. These seven dwarf-brained numbskulls think they’re here for fun and games. I thought they’d entertain each other, pretty much. With Erik and me helping out a little, now and then.

Two years of this. Two years of this?

I had to give them a lecture. Imagine it! Me, laying down the rules to somebody else.

But they’re going to wreck this mission before we get halfway to where we’re going. Hell, they could even wreck the damned ship and kill us all.

Trouble is, they think they’re here to be entertained. I guess that’s the impression they got, somehow, from the way I described the trip to them, way back when.

Seven partners. Seven movers and shakers from the media, high society, the arts and sciences. Hell, even the astronomer is acting like a freshmen away from home for the first time in his life.

And they’re bothering the crew. I don’t mind if they screw themselves into catatonia, among themselves. But the crew’s gotta run this ship. They’ve got to be in top physical and mental condition when we start prospecting among the asteroids.

It all seemed so simple, back on Earth. Get seven prominent scatterbrains to put up the seed money for an expedition to the asteroids. Use their credentials to impress the banks enough to put up the real backing. Go out to the asteroids, find a nice chunk of nickel/iron, smelt and refine it on the way back to Earth, then sell it for enough to give everybody a nice profit.

It’s the sweetest deal I’ve ever put together, especially since the seven dwarfs will be getting their shares from the net profit we make, while I’ll be drawing my own off the top, from the gross.

But, lord! are those seven airheads a shipload of trouble. I may have to shove one of them out an airlock, just to impress the others that I mean business.

Imagine it! Me trying to enforce discipline on them.

I hate this job.

Listen, this log is going to have to be confidential. I’m going to give the computer a security code word so nobody can break into it and hear what I’ve got to say.

Let’s see … computer, this is a command. Code this log under, uh, umm—code word “supercalifragelistic-expialidotious.”

[Computer]: Code word accepted.

Okay, good. I hadn’t intended to get so paranoid, but I’m stuck here for the next twenty-three months with nobody I can trust. I’ve got to talk to somebody or I’ll go nuts. So I’ll talk to you, computer.

[Computer]: I contain artificial intelligence programs that can provide limited responses to your inputs.

When I want you to answer me, I’ll tell you! Otherwise, keep your voice synthesizer quiet. Understood?

[Computer]: Understood.

Part of the reason for locking up this log is that I’m going to start naming names and I don’t want anybody else to know what those names are. Christ knows I’ve done enough screwing around in my time, but I’ve always believed a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell. Well, maybe I’m not a gentleman and I certainly ain’t talking about just kissing, but I’ve never gone around embarrassing anybody I was lucky enough to go to bed with.

But I can’t talk things out without naming names. It just won’t work. Am I making any sense?

[Pause]

Hey, computer, am I making any sense?

[Computer]: Your statements are internally consistent.

Great. How do I call up your psychotherapy program?

[Computer]: Ask for Guidance Counselor.

Jeez, just like in high school. Okay, gimme the Guidance Counselor.

[Computer, same voice]: How may I help you?

Just listen and then tell me what I should do after I finish, okay?

[Computer]: If that’s what you really want.

Oh brother!

[Computer]: Is that part of your problem, your brother? I have your biographical dossier in my files, but there is no mention of a brother.

No, no, no! I haven’t started yet!

[Computer]: I see.

I’m starting now. Got it?

[Computer]: Go on.

Let’s see … I think it was Nelson Algren who said that three rules for a happy life are: One, never play cards with any man named ‘Doc.’ Two: never eat at any place called ‘Mom’s.’ And three: never, never go to bed with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.

[Computer]: Um-hmm.

I went to bed with Sheena Chang last night. Big mistake.

[Computer]: Sheena Chang, video actress. Proclaimed one of the ten most beautiful women in the world by 21st-century Fox/United Artists/MGM/Fujitsu Corporation. Latest starring role: Tondaleo, the sultry Eurasian prostitute with a heart of gold, in Invasion of the Barbarians from Outer Space. Age: twenty-seven. Height…

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s her. Sultry Eurasian, all right. I was really surprised when her agent told me she had agreed to come on this voyage. I had only called her on a lark; thought it’d be fun to be on a slow boat to China with her.

[Computer]: To China? Navigational data shows we are heading …

Just a figure of speech, dammit! Stop interrupting!

Anyway, I never thought she’d give up two years in the middle of her career to come sailing out to the Asteroid Belt with me. But she did. Last night I found out why.

She was all hot breath and sizzle until I got her clothes off her and put her in my bed. We had made it before, in the threesome with Marj Dupray down in the zero-gee section. Sheena had been a wild woman then; Marj wasn’t so bad herself, for a skinny fashion designer. They were both tanked up on champagne and whatnot. After all, that was our first night out.

[Computer]: I see.

Well, anyway, last night Sheena and I have a private little supper in my quarters. She’s wearing a low-cut dress so slinky she must have sprayed it on. One thing leads to another and finally we’re both in the buff and on the bed.

I say to her, “I was really knocked out when you agreed to come on this trip.

That’s all it took. The floodgates opened.

[Computer]: Floodgates?

She started crying! At first I thought she had drunk too much wine with dinner, but then I remembered that she had downed a tub of champagne that first night without batting an eye. She just blubbered away and babbled for hours, right there in the bed. Naked. One of the ten most beautiful women in the world.

[Computer]: Why was she crying?

That’s what I asked her. And she told me. And told me. And told me! Her career is going down the tubes; her last three videos lost money; her implants are slumping; her husband is suing her for divorce; her boyfriend’s left her for a younger starlet; her agent’s making bad deals for her; her cat died…. Jeez, she just went on and on about how her life was ruined and she was going to kill herself.

[Computer]: Perhaps she should speak to me. I may be able to help her.

Yeah, maybe. Anyway, it turns out that her publicity agent convinced her that taking this voyage would be just the thing to give her career a boost. When she comes back she’ll be the first actress to have flown to the Asteroid Belt. They’ll make a docudrama out of it. They’ll get Michael J. Fox III to play my role. Ta-da, ta-dum, ta-dee—so off she goes on the good ship Argo.

[Computer]: Ta-da, ta-dum, ta-dee?

Ignore it. Two days out, Sheena starts thinking that maybe she made a mistake. Two weeks out she’s certain of it. Her publicity guy and her agent have connived behind her back to get her out of the way so that the new starlet her boyfriend’s shacked up with can take her place. Her career is ruined. Her body’s falling apart and she can’t sue the plastic surgeons because the publicity would ruin her even more. She’ll be out of the limelight for two whole years. By the time she gets back everybody’ll have forgotten who the hell she is, and she’ll be an old woman by then anyway, past thirty.

[Computer]: According to her dossier she will be only twenty-nine when this mission ends.

So she lied about her age! Anyway, Sheena doesn’t want to make love, she wants to kill herself. It took me all goddamned night to calm her down, cheer her up, and convince her that when we get back from the asteroids she’ll be rich enough to buy 21st-century, et al.

[Computer]: According to the prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission—

I know, I know! So I exaggerated a little. She needed cheering up.

By the time I got her to stop talking about killing herself, it was damned near morning. I had to get dressed and go to the bridge for the first-shift systems review. She wriggled back into that slinky dress of hers, still sniffling a little. Then she dropped the bombshell.

[Computer]: Should I activate the damage-control program?

No, stupid. But gimme the logistics program.

[Computer]: Logistics.

Sheena Chang is not to receive any drugs, medications or pharmaceuticals of any kind. Understand? In fact, all requests for medication, stimulants or relaxers from any of the partners is to be reported to me immediately. Understood?

[Computer]: Understood.

Okay. Get the guidance counselor back.

[Computer]: Guidance counselor.

The bombshell Sheena handed me was metaphorical. You understand what metaphorical means?

[Computer]: I have a thorough command of twenty languages, including English.

Wonderful. She told me that one of the partners is an agent for Rockledge International, the multinational megacorporation, the soulless bloodsucking vampires of the corporate world, the gutless sneaking bastards who’d steal your cojones and sell them to the highest bidder if you gave them the chance. I’ve tangled with them before; they’re always trying to grab everything for themselves, the two-bit sonsofbitches.

[Computer]: You disapprove of them.

Only as much as I disapprove of cannibalism, genocide, and selling your mother to a Cairo brothel.

[Computer]: I see.

So there’s Sheena sniffling and squeezing her boobs into her dress, and she tells me I’ve been so nice and kind and patient that she’s going to warn me that one of the partners is secretly working for Rockledge.

“Which one?” I asked her.

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Then how do you know that one of them is on Rockledge’s payroll?”

She finally gets her bosom adjusted—believe me, it took all my powers of concentration not to go over to her and give her a hand. Anyway, she says:

“A couple of nights ago, it was kind of late and we were in the lounge having a nightcap or two….”

“We? Who?”

She shrugged. I was still in the buff and immediately came to attention. Sheena paid no attention and I thought she’d probably seen bigger. But not better.

I asked her again, “Who was in the lounge with you?”

“Oh, golly, we had been drinking for a while. And Rick had handed out some really weird candy; he’s got a whole trunkful of shit, you know….”

“I know.” I was starting to get exasperated with her birdbrain act. “So Darling was there. Who else?”

“Oh, Marjorie, and Dr. Hubble. Grace Harcourt, she was sitting with me. I don’t remember if Bo Williams was there or not. And I’m sure Jean Margaux wasn’t. She wouldn’t be, the snob.”

“So who said what? What’d you hear?”

“It was just a snatch of conversation, a man’s voice, I’m pretty sure. Somebody said something about money piling up at a bank in Liechtenstein….”

“Liechtenstein?”

“That’s right. He’s getting a monthly stipend from Rockledge International and it’s gathering compound interest all the time we’re away on this trip!”

She looked pleased that she remembered that much. But that was all she could remember. Or so she said. Somebody was on Rockledge’s payroll, in secret. And it was probably a man.

[Computer]: Why does that bother you so?

Why? Why? Because Rockledge’ll try to steal the profits of this mission out from under me, that’s why! It’s just like those sleazy bastards—let the little guy do all the work and then they come in and snatch the money. Rape and pillage, that’s the way they work.

[Computer]: I assume those are metaphors again.

Listen, you stupid hunk of germanium, I want you to get me a Dunn & Bradstreet on each one of my partners. One of them’s a—

[Computer]: You will have to call up the financial program.

Okay! Gimme the financial program!

[Computer]: Financial.

I want a complete rundown on each one of my partners.

[Computer]: Displaying.

No, no, no! Not the data already in your memory! That’s months old, for chrissakes. I want the up-to-the-minute stuff. And check the banks in Liechtenstein.

[Computer]: That will take several hours. Transmission time to Earth is currently—

Just do it! Fast as you can. Do it.

Jeez, I feel like a kid in a confessional booth. It’s been three months since my last entry in this log. A pretty quiet three months.

Things have gone along okay, really smoother than I expected. One of the plasma thrusters crapped out last week, but Will Bassinio and I went EVA and replaced it with a spare. Will’s my electronics specialist; a real whiz at chips and circuits and stuff like that. Lonz—Alonzo Ali, my first mate—monitored us from the command center while Erik did what he does best: charmed the passengers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And no woman.”

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

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

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

But I was after information, not challenges.

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

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

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

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

“Like in Liechtenstein?” I blurted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Well it wasn’t me.”

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

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

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

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

I assured her that I did.

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

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

Jeez, I’m getting paranoid!

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

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

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

Those mother-humping, slime-sucking, illegitimate sons of snakes from Rockledge! Now I know what they’re up to, and why they’ve got an agent on board!

We passed the point of no return two days ago.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Excuse me,” I said to Jean. Her high-society airs sort of made me act like a butler in a bad video.

I stepped past her to ask Erik, “Is something wrong?”

“I think so,” he said, furrowing his brow even deeper.

“What is it?” I asked softly.

“I’m not really sure,” said Erik.

Jean was watching us intently. I restrained my urge to grab Erik by the throat and pull his tongue out of his head.

“What seems to be the trouble?” I asked, as diffidently as possible. No roughneck, I.

“Funny smell.”

“Ah. A strange odor. And where might this odd scent be coming from?”

“The food freezers.”

All this polite badinage had lulled me into a sense of unreality.

“The food freezers? Plural?”

“Yeah.”

“The food freezers,” I repeated, smiling and turning toward the blue-blooded Ms. Margaux. Then it hit me. “The food freezers!”

I lunged past Erik to the command console. The goddamned Christmas Tree was as green as Clancy’s Bar on St. Patrick’s Day.

“No malfunctions indicated,” Lonz said, in that deep rich basso of his. He’s from Kenya, and any time he gets tired of space he can take up a career in the opera.

My heart rate went back to normal, almost, but I decided to go down to the freezers and check them out anyway. Jean asked if she could accompany me. There was a strange light in her eyes, something that told me she anticipated a lesson in arctic survival.

I nodded and headed for the hatch.

“Isn’t Erik coming, too?” Jean asked.

Oh-ho, I thought. She wants the cram course in arctic survival.

“Yeah, right. Come on Erik. Show me where you smelled this funny odor.”

The logistics section is almost exactly on the opposite side of the wheel from the command center. We could have gone down one of the connecting tubes and through the hub, but I decided with Jean along it’d be better if we just walked around the wheel and stayed at a full one gee.

It’s always a little strange, walking along inside the wheel. Your feet and your inner ear tell you that you’re strutting along on a flat surface, while your eyes see that the floor is curving up in front of you, right out of sight. Anyway, we walked down the central corridor, past the lounge, the galley and dining salon, the passengers’ living quarters, and the gym before we got to the logistics section. The workshops and maintenance facilities are all on the other half of the wheel. Our factory and processing smelter are down near the hub, of course, in microgravity.

Erik opens the big door to the first of the walk-in food freezers. It smells like a camel caravan had died in there several days ago. The second one smelled worse. By the time we got to the third one I guess our noses were suffering from sensory overload: it only smelled as bad as rancid milk poured over horse manure.

Jean kept her oh-so-proper attitude, but her face looked like she had stopped breathing. Erik was giving me a sort of hangdog grin, like he expected me to blame him for the catastrophe.

I kept my cool. I did not puke or even gag. I just raised my clenched fists over my head and uttered a heartfelt, “Son of a BITCH!”

Jean couldn’t control her ladylike instincts any further; she yanked a facial tissue from a pocket in her blouse, pressed it to her face, and fled back toward her quarters.

I left Erik there and zipped back to the lounge to call the passengers together to ask for volunteers to help with the cleanup.

It’s a very nice lounge, if I say so myself. Plush chairs, deep carpeting, big video screens that can serve as windows to the splendors of the universe outside. At the moment they were showing a video of some tropical beach: gentle waves lapping in, palm trees swaying against a clean blue sky, no people in sight. Must have been a clip from some travel agency’s come-on. There hasn’t been a beach that clean and empty of tourists since the first commercial flights of the hypersonic airliners.

“Wait just a moment, Sam,” said Lowell Hubble, our pipe-smoking astronomer. No tobacco, of course, that stuff had been outlawed way back in ’08 or ’09. Whatever he had in the blackened, long-stemmed pipe he always held clamped in his teeth was smokeless and sweet-smelling. I think it was a bubblegum derivative.

“Are you telling us,” he said from around the pipe, “that our food supply is ruined?”

“Most of the frozen food, yes,” I admitted. “Looks that way. I need some help checking out the situation.”

“We’ll starve!” Rick Darling yelped.

“You’ll starve last,” quipped Grace Harcourt. Good old Grace: she could be tough or tender, and she knew when to be which.

Darling stuck out his lower lip at her. The others were staring at me apprehensively. They had been sitting in the recliner chairs scattered about the room; now they were hunching forward tensely on the front two inches of each chair. I was standing in front of the bar, trying to look cool and competent.

“Nobody’s going to starve,” I told them. “It’s only the frozen food that’s affected and I think we can save a good deal of it, if we move quickly enough.”

“Isn’t all the food frozen?” asked Bo Williams, our Pulitzer Prize author, the man who had already signed a megabuck contract to write the book about this voyage. Bo looked more like a professional wrestler than an author: shaved bullet head, no neck, heavy shoulders and torso, bulging gut.

“Most of it. But we have a backup supply of packaged food. And the reprocessors, of course.”

“Canned food.” Darling shuddered.

“Some of it’s canned. Most of it’s been preserved by irradiation. Food’s been stored for half a century and more that way.”

“Radiation?” Sheena Chang’s big eyes went wider than usual. She was wearing violet contacts to go with the color of her outfit, a Frederick’s of Hollywood version of a flight suit, real tight, with lots of zippers.

“It’s all right,” Hubble said, leaning over from his chair to pat her hand reassuringly. “Nothing to worry about.”

“What was that about reprocessors?” Grace asked.

This was not a subject I wanted to discuss in any detail. “We can recycle the food, to a certain extent.”

“Recycle?” For once I was not happy that Grace was a newshound.

“It’s been done on space stations and long-duration missions.” I tried to pass the whole thing off. “The Mars expedition has a recycling system.”

“The food we eat will be recycled?” Damn Grace and her goddamned tenacity!

“Right,” I snapped. “Now, I need …”

Rick Darling was catching on. “You mean our garbage will be recycled into fresh food?”

“Not just our garbage, sweetheart,” Grace told him.

Jean Margaux, she who gave the impression she did not do that sort of thing, stared at me as if I had insulted her entire family tree.

Marjorie Dupray said grimly, “I’ll starve first.”

Marj wouldn’t have far to go before she starved. She was all skin and bones already. As usual, she was wearing the crummiest clothes of the group: a shapeless sweater of dingy gray and baggy oversized slacks decorated with fake machine oil stains. But I knew that underneath that camouflage was a body as sleek and responsive as a racing yacht.

“Nobody needs to starve,” I said, getting irritated with the bunch of them. Maybe this was the Ship of Fools, after all.

“Sure,” Darling groused. “We can spend the next year and a half eating recycled…”

“Don’t say it!” Jean snapped. “I can’t bear even to think of it.”

“Let’s see how much of the frozen food we can rescue,” I urged. “Who’s gonna help us clean up the freezers?”

Not a hand was raised. None of my partners would volunteer to help.

“That’s the crew’s responsibility; not ours,” said the always gracious Jean Margaux.

The others agreed.

It was grisly work.

We had to go in there and see what was spoiled beyond recovery, what could be saved if we cooked it immediately, and what was still reasonably okay. At the same time I wanted to figure out how all three freezers could fail without any warning lights showing up on the command console.

Erik and I did the dirty work with the food. Will checked out the freezers’ electrical systems. He wore an oxygen mask with a little supply bottle on the belt of his flight suit. Sensitive kid.

“Where I grew up in South Philadelphia used to smell like this,” he grumbled through the clear plastic mask as he entered the first of the freezers. “I never thought I’d get a whiff of home out here in space.”

“Don’t get homesick on me,” I told him. “Just find out what went wrong.”

About half of the food had turned to green slime, really putrid. The stench didn’t seem to affect Erik at all; he just cleaned away with the same obtuse smile on his chiselled features as ever.

“Doesn’t the smell bother you?” I asked him.

“What smell?”

“For chrissakes, you’re the one who reported it in the first place!”

“Oh that. Yeah, it is rather annoying, isn’t it?”

I just shook my head and Erik went back to work in blond, blue-eyed innocence.

So we shoveled several tons of spoiled food into the reprocessor, which chugged and burped and buzzed for hours on end, turning out neat little bricks of stuff, some colored reddish gray, others colored greenish gray. They were supposed to be synthetic meat and synthetic vegetables. I nibbled on one each, then wished we had brought a cargo bay filled with Worcester sauce, ketchup, soy sauce, and Texas three-alarm salsa.

Will Bassinio just showed me what went wrong with the freezers.

He looked really worn out when he reported to me this morning in the command center. Eyes red from lack of sleep, a black ring around his nose and mouth from the oxygen mask he’d been wearing for nearly twelve hours straight. He didn’t smell so good, either. The rotting food had impregnated his coveralls.

“You been at it all night?” I asked him.

He nodded wearily. “Whoever did the job on the freezers was pretty fuckin’ smart.”

Will pulled three tiny chips from the chest pocket of his smelly, stained coveralls. They were so small I couldn’t make out what they were.

“Timers,” he explained before I could ask. “Somebody spliced ’em into the control unit of each freezer. Really neat job; took me all fuckin’ night to find ’em. Interrupted the current flow and shut the freezers down, while at the same time sending an okay reading to the monitors up here on the bridge. Pretty fuckin’ ingenious.”

“Can you fix the freezers before all the food thaws out?” I asked.

Will gave me a sad shake of his head. “Whoever did this job knew what he was doing. I’d have to rebuild the whole control unit in each freezer. Take two-three weeks, maybe more.”

“We don’t have spares?”

“We were supposed to. They’re listed in the logistics computer but the bin where they ought to be stored is dead-empty.”

I felt my blood seething. Sabotage.

“Were they put into the control units before we launched, or during the flight?” I asked.

Will gave me a shrug. “Can’t tell.”

“There aren’t any locks on the freezer doors,” I muttered.

“Never saw anybody goin’ in there,” he muttered back. “Except that Darling guy, once. He said he was looking for a key lime pie.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How about a month’s?”

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

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

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

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

I’m staying up here at the command center for the duration of their orgy. I’ve got some old synthesized Dixieland playing on the intercom so I can’t hear their laughing and shouting from down in the dining room. Or their puking. I’ve ordered the crew to stay out of the passengers’ area.

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

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

No such luck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Okay, so we found a carbonaceous chondrite first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that all?”

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

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

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

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

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

They fell silent.

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

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

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

Everybody turned to stare at her. Aphrodite?

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

“But what’s that got to do with …”

“And that’s Venus. There’s already a planet named Venus.”

“I know,” Sheena said. “That’s why I thought we could use her Greek name, Aphrodite.”

I had never realized she knew anything at all about anything at all. But she knew about the goddess of love’s different names. I went behind the bar to the computer terminal and checked on the names already registered for asteroids. There was a Juno and a Hera, a Helena and even a Cleopatra. But no Aphrodite.

“Aphrodite looks good,” I said.

“I still fail to see what it has to do with a lump of rock floating around in space,” Jean complained.

But we voted her down and sent a message to the IAA headquarters in Geneva: a new asteroid has been discovered and its name is Aphrodite.

A hundred and twenty-seven tons of water. Boy, do I feel good about that! A hundred and twenty-seven million bucks safely stowed in our inflatable tanks!

We’ve been working hard for a solid month, chewing up Aphrodite and baking the volatiles out of her rocks. The grinding equipment worked fine; so did the ovens. No sabotage there, thank God.

There isn’t much of old Aphrodite left. Sheena got kind of upset when she realized we were tearing up the rock and grinding it and baking the pieces. We left a small chunk so the name’s still valid, although we’ve perturbed its orbit so much that Hubble claims she’ll fall in toward the Sun and cross the orbit of Mars and maybe even Earth’s orbit.

Thirty-one thousand, seven hundred and fifty gallons of water, according to the volume of tankage we’ve filled. That masses out to one hundred and twenty-seven tons. Plus an almost equal amount of ammonia and methane. We’ve got an even dozen of our inflatable storage tanks hanging outside the ship’s hub. I’ve already made a contract with Moonbase Corporation to buy the whole kit and kaboodle at ten percent below Rockledge’s price. They’ll process the ammonia and methane for the nitrogen and carbon, then mix the leftover hydrogen with oxygen from lunar ores to make still more water.

We’re gonna drown Rockledge!

My partners have been happy and pretty well-behaved this past month. The news media back home have been interviewing them almost constantly; they’re all becoming famous. This isn’t the Ship of Fools anymore. The media’s describing us now as “the grandest entrepreneurial venture in history.”

I love the publicity, because the more attention the media pays us the harder it’ll be for Rockledge or one of those other big corporate monsters to attack us.

And Lonz has found a bee-yoo-tiful nickel-iron asteroid hanging out there just two weeks from where we are. Laser measurements show she’s a little over a hundred meters by thirty by twenty or so. Enough high-grade iron ore in her to give us a corner on the steel market for all the Lagrange construction jobs!

We’re gonna be rich!

I need the guidance counselor.

[Computer]: How may I help you?

I’ve got a problem.

[Computer]: Yes?

About a woman. Two women, really.

[Computer]: Go on.

It’s Grace Harcourt and Sheena Chang. They’re snarling and spitting at each other like a pair of cats.

[Computer]: Why do you think they’re behaving that way?

It’s over me, stupid! Why else?

[Computer]: Tell me what happened.

We’re cruising toward this nickel-iron asteroid, going to make rendezvous in a few days. So I call the partners together in the lounge again to decide on a name for the rock.

And Sheena pipes up, “I don’t think it’s right for us to be destroying these asteroids.”

That surprised me. But coming from her, I tried to explain things gently.

“Look, Sheena,” I said. “The whole reason we’re out here, the reason you and everybody else joined this expedition, is to get the natural resources that these asteroids contain and bring them back home, where people need them.”

“You smashed up Aphrodite until there’s practically nothing left of her, and now she’s going to crash into Mars or the Earth or maybe even fall into the Sun and burn to death!”

“Sheena, it’s just a hunk of rock.”

“It’s part of nature. It’s part of the natural environment. We shouldn’t be tampering with the environment. That’s wrong.”

“Oh good Christ!” said Grace, with a huff like a disgusted steam engine. She was sitting on one side of Sheena; Hubble was sitting on the other, sucking on his smokeless pipe.

“There’s nothing alive on these asteroids,” Hubble told her, back to his patient fatherly voice once more. “It doesn’t hurt anyone to mine them.”

“I still think it’s wrong,” Sheena insisted. I saw tears in her eyes.

“How long are we going to put up with this drivel?” Grace snarled.

Sheena went almost rigid in her chair, like somebody had wired it with a couple thousand volts.

Grace said, “I’ve spent most of my working days listening to airheaded actors and actresses attach themselves to causes.’ Sheena, what the hell’s the matter with your brain? We’re talking about a dead chunk of rock. There’s millions of them out here. Get real!”

Sheena just sat there for a minute or so, looking shocked. Jean Margaux was sitting right behind Grace; she had a funny kind of eager grin on her face, like she was waiting to see the gladiators rip each other’s guts open. And Rick Darling was right beside Jean, with a cynical smirk on his bloated puss.

[Computer]: His cat was smirking?

Puss! Face! It’s slang, you dumb pile of germanium.

[Computer]: You are expressing your suppressed hostilities; good.

I’ve never suppressed a goddamned hostility in my whole goddamned life!

[Computer]: Go on.

Where was I—oh, yeah. I was just as surprised at Grace’s outburst as any of the others. Marj and Bo Williams were sitting in the back of the lounge. Bo started to say something but Sheena got there first.

“Listen, Miss High-and-Mighty Columnist,” she said to Grace, “I had to kiss your backside when I was in the acting business, but now I’m going to be independently wealthy, thanks to Sam, and you can go scribble yourself!”

“You plasticized bitch,” Grace shot back, “I’ll bet my backside is the only one in southern California you haven’t kissed.”

“Jealous?”

“Of you? Take away the implants and what’ve you got?”

“A dumpy broad with cellulite on her hips, like you.”

“At least I’ve got a brain in my head!”

“So does a rat!”

They were nose-to-nose now, yelling, starting to get out of their chairs.

I jumped between them. “Hey, hey! Calm down, both of you!”

“Get this airhead out of here, Sam,” Grace said. “There’s nothing going on above her neck anyway.”

Sheena’s eyes were blazing fury. “She’s jealous, jealous, jealous! Look at her, she’s turning green all over!”

Hubble got up and coaxed Sheena back toward her quarters. I held Grace by the shoulders until they left. She was trembling with rage.

“This meeting’s over,” I told the others. “We’ll pick a name for the asteroid later.”

I walked Grace forward, toward the command center, away from the other passengers’ quarters where Sheena and Hubble had gone.

I kept some good cognac in my quarters. Hardly ever touched it myself, but it looked good in its cut crystal decanter and I thought it might help calm Grace down. Me, I prefer beer.

“What the hell happened in there?” I asked Grace.

She sat in the couch, still quivering so much there were almost whitecaps on her cognac. I pulled up the powered recliner chair to face her, with the coffee table between us. My quarters aren’t luxurious, but there’s a little more space to them than the passengers’ suites. Rank hath its privileges, after all.

Grace knocked back half her cognac, then said, “I can’t take any more of her, Sam. She’s driving me nuts.”

“Sheena?”

“Who else? The way she flaunts herself. Makes eyes at all the men.”

“I thought she had settled onto Hubble.”

“She’s after you, Sam. Can’t you see that?”

“Me? I haven’t laid a glove on her since the first month out.”

“And she resents it.”

“That’s crazy.”

Grace put her snifter down on the coffee table. It was plastic, of course, but painted to look like ebony.

“Sam, she’s looking for a father figure. That’s you.”

“That’s Hubble,” I corrected her.

Grace shook her head. “It was Hubble until the food orgy. Then she saw that Lowell was just as human and silly as the rest of us. But, you, mon capitaine, were aloof and noble and doing your duty on the bridge while the rest of us were stuffing ourselves—in more ways than one, I might add.”

“I don’t want to hear about it,” I said.

“You’ve got to listen to me, Sam! You asked me to find out who the Rockledge agent is….”

“Sheena?”

“No, of course not. But if she’s sore at you, if she feels you’ve rejected her, she could become a very willing tool for whoever among us is working for Rockledge.”

That stopped me. “Sheena, helping Rockledge. Hmp. With an enemy like that, who needs friends?”

“This isn’t funny, Sam.”

But it made me laugh anyway.

Suddenly Grace got up from the couch, came around the coffee table, and plopped herself in my lap.

“You big dummy,” she said. “I’m trying to protect you. Can’t you see that?”

Then she said the words that strike terror into the heart of any man.

“Sam—I think I’ve fallen in love with you.”

Well, what could I do? I mean with her sitting in my lap and all? One thing led to another and we wound up in bed. Grace is very tender, very sweet, underneath that facade of the tough Hollywood columnist that she wears most of the time.

But now she wants to hang around my neck. And this ship isn’t big enough for me to hide! Besides, if she’s right about Sheena I ought to be working on her, getting on her good side, so to speak.

[Computer]: In bed, you mean?

That’s her best side, pal.

[Computer]: Is that necessary? It will complicate the interpersonal relationships….

Everything’s already so goddamned complicated that I feel like I’m a pretzel trapped in a spaghetti factory. What should I do?

[Computer]: What do you want to do?

I want to get them both off my back!

[Computer]: And what would be the best way to do that, do you think?

That’s what I’m asking you!

[Computer]: How do you feel about this situation?

Oh Christ! I know this program. Whenever you’re stuck you ask me how I feel. Get lost! Turn off!

[Computer]: Are you certain you want to do this?

End the program, dammit! When I want to jerk off I’ll do it in the bathroom.

Well, those sneaking, slithering, slimy bastards at Rockledge have struck again.

This morning we got an order from the International Astronautical Authority—bless ’em—that forbids us from mining any more asteroids until further notice.

A moratorium on asteroid mining! Only temporary, they say. But “temporary” to those lard-bottomed bureaucrats could mean years! I could be old and senile before they lift the moratorium.

Those fatheaded drones claim that we’ve perturbed the orbit of Aphrodite so much that there’s a chance it might strike the Earth. There’s not much left of Aphrodite, but she’s still big enough to cause damage wherever she lands. The media are already talking about the “killer asteroid” and running stories about how an asteroid hit wiped out the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.

Absolute bullshit!

What’s happened is that Rockledge and the other big boys are putting pressure on the IAA to stop me—uh, us, that is. Now that they know we can undercut their price for water, they’re using Aphrodite as an excuse. If the asteroid’s orbit poses a threat, the IAA can send a team out with enough rocket thrusters to nudge it away from the Earth, for chrissakes. I’ll pay the friggin’ cost of the mission, if I have to. Take it off as a business expense; lower my goddamned taxes.

But what the IAA’s done is put a moratorium on all operations that might change an asteroid’s natural orbit. Hell, we’re the only operation out here in the Belt. They’re trying to stop us.

Well, fuck them!

I ordered Lonz to ignore the message. I’m not even going to acknowledge receiving it. We’re going ahead and mining that big chunk of nickel-iron, and then we’ll head back home with enough high-grade metal to make all the off-Earth settlements drool. They’ll want to do business with us, and there’s nothing the friggin’ IAA can do to stop them from buying what I’m selling.

Then we’ll let the lawyers fight it out. I’ll have all the space settlements on my side, and the media will love a story that pits us little guys against the big, bad corporate monsters.

Moratorium, my ass!

Yesterday we named the asteroid Pittsburgh. I called the partners together again and told them, not asked them, what the name would be. I was born in Pittsburgh, and back in its heyday it was a big steel-making town. So will this asteroid be. Our sensors show she’s practically solid metal.

This morning I sent my claim in to the IAA. I haven’t acknowledged their moratorium order, and I haven’t told the partners about it. Filing a claim for the asteroid doesn’t violate their moratorium, of course, but it’ll sure make them suspicious. What the hell! There’s nothing they can do about it. It’d take them a year to get a ship out here to try to stop us.

You’re not allowed to claim possession of an astronomical body, but once you’ve informed the IAA that you’ve established a working facility someplace you’ve got the right to use its natural resources there without anybody else coming in to compete with you. The facility can be scientific, industrial, or a permanent habitat. It could even be commercial, like a tourist hotel. That’s how the various settlements on the Moon were established; no nation owns them, but once a group lays claim to a territory, the IAA prevents any other group from muscling in on the same territory.

With a chunk of metal like Pittsburgh the LAA ought to give S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, exclusive rights to mine its resources—moratorium or no fucking moratorium. The asteroid’s too small to allow another company to start whittling away at it. At least, that’s the legal position that the IAA agreed to before the Argo left Earth orbit. Now we’ll have to see if they stick to it.

In the meantime, there’s work to do.

Pittsburgh’s a beauty! We’re hovering about five hundred meters from her. At this distance she’s huge, immense, like a black pitted mountain hanging over our heads. I’ve spent most of the day taking the partners out for EVAs. To say they were impressed would be the understatement of the decade.

Imagine an enormous lump of coal-black metal, its surface roughened and pitted, its ridges and crater rims gleaming where the Sun strikes them. It’s so big it dwarfs you when you go outside, makes you feel like it’s going to crush you, almost.

I brought the partners out in twos. Each time a pair of them floated free of the airlock and looked up through their bubble helmets I heard the same sound out of them: a gasp—surprise, awe, fear, grandeur, all that and more.

Hubble asked for permission to chip some samples for himself, to study in the little lab he’s set up in his quarters. Bo Williams started reciting poetry, right there in his space suit. Even Jean Margaux, the Ice Queen, was audibly impressed.

Everybody except Darling came out to look.

“There’s our fortune,” I told each one of them over the suit-to-suit comm link. “Considering the mass of this beauty and the prices on today’s metals market, you’re looking at ten billion dollars, on the hoof. At least.”

That made them happy. Which was a good thing, because we’re getting down to the last of the preserved food. In a day or two we’re going to have to start eating the recycled stuff.

The IAA is still sending their moratorium to us, every hour on the hour. I’ve instructed the crew to ignore it and not to tell the partners about it. I’ve ordered them not to acknowledge any incoming messages from anybody. Then I sent out a message to my own office in Florida that we were experiencing some kind of communications difficulty, and all the incoming transmissions were so garbled we couldn’t make them out.

Lonz gave me a funny look when I sent that out. A guilty look.

“Nobody’s gonna hold you responsible,” I told him. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Right, boss,” he said. But he still looked uneasy. And he’s never called me boss before.

I spent most of the night watching the videos of Darling’s movements during the time I was taking the other partners outside to see Pittsburgh close-up.

It bothered me that he refused to go EVA like the rest of them. So I activated the ship’s internal monitoring system, the cameras that are set unobtrusively into the overhead panels of every section of the ship. I suppose I could have been watching everything that everybody does since the moment we left Earth orbit. Maybe that would’ve told me who the Rockledge fink is. Certainly it would have been as good as watching porno flicks.

But there are seven of them and only one of me. I’d have to spend seven times the hours I actually have in the hopes of catching somebody performing an act of sabotage—or doing something in bed I haven’t done myself, and better.

Anyway, I discovered Darling’s secret. Trouble is, it’s got nothing to do with Rockledge or possible sabotage. The sneaky lard-ass has been hoarding food! While the rest of the partners were up in the command center or suiting up at the main airlock, he was tiptoeing down to the food lockers and hauling armfuls of goodies back to his own suite. He’s got packaged food stored in his bureau drawers, canned food stuffed under his bed, whole cases of food hidden in his closets.

God knows how long he’s been stealing the stuff. His personal wine cooler is filled with frozen food, which the bastard must have been stealing since before the freezers went on the fritz.

Did he know the freezers were going to commit hara-kiri?

The work on Pittsburgh is going slower than I had planned. The metal’s so good that it’s tougher than we had expected. So it takes longer for the laser torches to cut through it. Once we’ve got a slice carved off, the smelting and refining equipment works fine. We’re building up a nice payload of high-quality steel for the Lagrange habitats and the steelhungry factories in Earth orbit.

To say nothing of the lovely ingots of twenty-four carat gold and pure silver that we’re cooking out of the ore. And the sheets of platinum!

Argo is starting to look like a little toy doughnut sitting alongside a cluster of shiny steel grapes. See, in zero gravity, when we melt down a slab of ore it forms itself into a very neat sphere of molten metal. Like a teeny little sun, glowing outside the ship. After we remove the impurities (the gold and silver and platinum, that is) we inject gas into the sphere to hollow it out while it’s solidifying. A hollow sphere is easier for our customers to work with than a solid ball of steel. The gas comes right from the asteroid itself, of course; a byproduct of our mining operation.

All this is done remotely, without any people outside. Lonz and Will control the operation from the command center. They only go EVA if something goes wrong, some piece of equipment breaks down. Even then, the little maintenance robots can take care of the routine repairs. They’ve only had to go EVA twice in all the weeks we’ve been working on Pittsburgh.

We’ll have to leave the asteroid soon if we want to get back to Earth on a reasonable schedule. The partners are grumbling about the recycled food—Darling’s bitching the loudest, the lying thief. He’s feasting on the real food he’s cached in his suite while the rest of us are nibbling on shitburgers. All the other partners are marveling that he’s gaining weight while the rest of us are slimming down.

Finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. This evening when I came into the dining lounge there was fat-ass Darling in his homemade toga, holding a green briquette of recycled crap in one hand with his chubby pinky up in the air.

“I will never come out on a fly-by-night operation like this again,” he was saying.

Jean Margaux sniffed at the red briquette she had in front of her. They were odorless, but her face looked as if she was getting a whiff of a pigsty on a blazing afternoon in August. Marj Dupray and Bo Williams were off at a table by themselves, whispering to each other with their heads nearly touching over their table.

“I’m sorry you don’t like the food,” I said to Darling. I could feel the tightness in my face.

“It’s inedible,” he complained.

“Then you’ll just have to go back to your suite and gorge yourself on the food you’ve got hidden there,” I said.

His fleshy face turned absolute white.

Jean looked amused. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a candy bar hidden under your bed,” she said to Darling.

“I resent your implication,” the fat bastard said to me.

“Resent it all you like,” I shot back. “After you’ve taken us to your suite and opened up your wine cooler.”

He heaved himself to his dainty little feet. “I won’t stay here and be insulted.”

Jean looked kind of curious now. Bo and Marj had stopped their tete-a-tete and were staring at us.

With as much dignity as a small dirigible, Darling headed for the hatch.

I called after him, “Come on, Rick, invite us to your suite. Share the food you’ve hoarded, you puffed-up sonofabitch.”

He spun around to face me, making the fringes of his toga flap and swirl. “You retract that statement or, so help me, when we get back to Earth I’ll sue you for every penny you’ve got!”

“Sure, I’ll retract it. After you’ve invited us to your suite.”

“That’s an invasion of my privacy!” he said.

Jean drew herself up to her full height. “Richard, dear, are you actually hiding food from us?”

Bo Williams got off his chair, too. “Yeah—what’s the story, Rick? How come you’re getting fatter while we’re all getting thinner?”

Darling’s eyes swung from one of them to the other. Even Marjorie was on her feet now, scowling at him.

“Can’t you see what he’s doing?” Darling spluttered and pointed a fat finger at me. “He’s trying to make a scapegoat out of me! He’s trying to get you all to hate me and forget that he’s the one who’s gotten us into this mess!”

“There’s an easy way to prove you’re innocent,” Williams said. “Invite us in to your suite.”

Bo can look menacing in his sleep, with that burly build of his and the shaved scalp. He’s really a gentle guy, a frustrated poet who makes his living writing documentaries. But he looks like a Turkish assassin.

“I don’t have to prove anything,” Darling answered, edging back toward the hatch. “A man’s innocent until proven guilty. That’s the law.”

What little patience I have snapped right then and there. “I’m the law aboard this vessel,” I said. “And I order you to open up your suite for inspection. Now.”

He hemmed and hawed. He blubbered and spluttered. But with Bo and me pushing him, he backed all the way down the corridor to his suite. Sure enough, there was enough food cached away in there to cater a party.

Which is exactly what we had. I called Grace, Sheena, and Lowell Hubble. Even invited the crew while I went up to the command center and kept an eye on the automated equipment. They ate and drank everything Darling had squirreled away. He just sat on his own bed and cried until there was nothing left but crumbs and empty bottles.

Served him right. But I couldn’t help feeling sort of sorry for the poor jerk when they all left him in his own suite, surrounded by the mess.

I kind of hate to leave Pittsburgh. This asteroid has made me filthy rich. We can’t stay long enough to mine everything she’s got to give us; even if we did the Argo would be toting so much mass that our thrusters would never be able to get us back to Earth.

No, we’ll leave Pittsburgh with our smelting equipment and a beacon on her, to verify our claim. If the IAA works the way they should, nobody else will be able to touch her. In a few years the lawyers ought to have wrangled out this moratorium business, and I’ll be able to send out a fleet of ships to finish carving her up and carting the refined metals back Earthward.

I’ll be a billionaire!