The Sam Gunn Omnibus

The Prudent Jurist

You might have known—said Steve Wright—that the very first person to be hauled in to trial by the spanking-new Interplanetary Tribunal would be Sam Gunn. And on trial for his life, at that.

Things might not have been too bad, even so, if it weren’t for Sam’s old nemesis, the Beryllium Blonde. She wanted Sam’s hide tacked onto her office wall. Sam, of course, wanted her body. Anyplace.

And then there was the Toad, as well.

Sam’s voice had been the loudest one in the whole solar system against letting lawyers get established off-Earth.

“When it comes to interplanetary jurisprudence,” he often said—at the top of his leathery lungs—”what we need is less juris and more prudence!”

But it was inevitable that the Interplanetary Astronautical Authority would set up a court to enforce its rulings and carry Earth-style legalities out to the edge of the frontier. After all, the Asteroid Belt was being mined by little guys like Sam and big corporations like Rockledge Industries.

And major consortiums like Diversified Universities & Laboratories, Ltd. (which Sam called DULL) were already pushing the exploration of Jupiter and its many moons.

When the scientists announced the discovery of life on the Jovian moon Europa, of course, the environmentalists and theologians and even the Right To Lifers demanded that laws—and lawyers—be established in space to protect it.

And Sam wound up on trial. Not just for murder. Genocide.

Me, I was the closest thing to a lawyer in Sam’s then-current company, Asteroidal Resources, Inc. Sam had started up and dissolved more corporations than Jupiter has moons, usually making a quick fortune on some audacious scheme and then blowing it on something even wilder. Asteroidal Resources, Inc. was devoted to mining heavy metals from the Asteroid Belt, out beyond Mars, and smelting them down to refined alloys as his factory ships sailed back to the Earth-Moon system.

The company was based on solid economics, provided needed resources to the Earth-Moon system’s manufacturers, and was turning a tidy—if not spectacular—profit. For Sam, this was decidedly unusual. Even respectable.

Sam ran a tight company. His ships were highly automated, with bare-bones skeleton crews. There were only six of us in ARI’s headquarters in Ceres, the largest of the asteroids. None of us was a real lawyer; Sam wouldn’t allow any of them into his firm. My paralegal certificate was as far as Sam was willing to go. He snarled with contempt when other companies began bringing their lawyers into the belt.

And when I said that the office was in Ceres, that’s exactly what I mean. Even though it’s the biggest chunk of rock in the belt, Ceres is only a little over nine hundred kilometers across; barely big enough to be round, instead of an irregular lump, like the other asteroids. No air, hardly any gravity. Mining outfits like Sam’s and big-bad Rockledge and others had honeycombed the rock to set up their local headquarters inside it.

My official title was Director, Human Resources. That meant that I was the guy who handled personnel problems, payroll, insurance, health claims, and lawsuits. Sam always had three or four lawsuits pending; he constantly skirted the fringes of legality—which was why he didn’t want lawyers in space, of course. He had enough trouble with the Earthbound variety.

The Beryllium Blonde, by the way, was a corporate lawyer, one of the best, with a mind as sharp and vindictive as her body was lithe and curvaceous. A deadly combination, as far as Sam was concerned.

The entire Human Resources Department in ARI consisted of me and a computer. I had very sophisticated programs to work with, you know, but there was no other human in Human Resources.

Still, I thought things were humming along smoothly enough in our underground offices until the day Sam came streaking back home on a high-g burn, raced straight from the landing pad to my office without even taking off his flight suit, and announced: “Orville, you’re gonna be my legal counsel at the trial. Start boning up on interplanetary law.”

My actual name is Steven. Steven Achernar Wright. But for some reason Sam called me Orville. Sometimes Wilbur, but mostly Orville.

“Legal counsel?” I echoed, bounding out of my chair so quickly that I sailed completely over my desk in the low gravity. “Trial? For what? What’re you charged with?”

He shook his head. “Murder, I think. Maybe worse.”

And he scooted into his office. All I really saw of the little guy was a sawed-off blur of motion topped with rusty-red hair. Huckleberry Finn at Mach 5.

I learned about the charges against Sam almost immediately. My phone screen chimed and the impressive black and silver seal of the International Astronautical Authority appeared on its screen, followed an eye-blink later by a very legal-looking summons and an arrest warrant.

The charges were attempted murder, grand larceny, violation of sixteen—count ’em, sixteen—different IAA environmental regulations and assault and battery with willful intent to cause grievous bodily harm.

Oh yes, and the aforementioned charge of genocide.

All that happened before lunch.

I tapped into the best legal programs on the sys and, after half a day’s reading, arranged to surrender Sam to the IAA authorities at Selene City, on the Moon. He yowled and complained every centimeter of the way. Even when we landed on the Moon Sam screeched loud enough to set up echoes through Selene City’s underground corridors, right up to the headquarters of the IAA.

The IAA chief administrator cheerfully released Sam on his own recognizance. He and Sam were old virtual billiards buddies, and besides Sam couldn’t get away; his name, photo, fingerprints, retinal patterns, and neutron scattering index were posted at every rocket port on the Moon. Sam was stuck on the Moon, at least until his trial.

Maybe longer. The World Government’s penal colony was at Farside, where convicts couldn’t even see Earth in their sky and spent their time trying to scrounge helium-three from the regolith, competing with nanomachines that did the job for practically nothing for the big corporations like Masterson and Wankle.

The trial started promptly enough. I begged for more time to prepare a defense, interview witnesses, check the prosecution’s published statement of the facts of the case (“And scatter a few bribes around,” Sam suggested). No go. The IAA refused any and all requests for a delay in the proceedings. Even their cheerful chief administrator gave me a doleful look and said, “No can do. The trial starts tomorrow, as scheduled.”

That worried me. Nobody wanted to appear on Sam’s behalf; there were no witnesses to the alleged crimes that weren’t already lined up to testify for the prosecution. I couldn’t even dig up any character witnesses.

“Testify to Sam’s character?” asked one of his oldest friends. “You want them to throw the key away on the little SOB? Or maybe you expect me to commit perjury?”

That was the kindest response I got.

What worried me even more was the fact that several hundred “neutral observers” had booked passage to the Moon to attend the trial; half of them were environmentalists who thirsted for Sam’s blood; the other half were various enemies the little guy had made over his many years of blithely going his own way and telling anybody who didn’t like it to stuff his head someplace where the sun doesn’t shine.

The media sensed blood—and Sam’s blood, at that. He had been great material for them for a long time: the little guy who always thumbed his nose at authority and got away with it. But now Sam had gone too far, and the kindest thing being said about him in the media was that he was “the accused mass-murderer of an entire alien species, the man who wiped out the harmless green lichenoids of Europa.”

If all this bothered Sam he gave no indication of it. “The media,” he groused. “They love you when you win and they’ll use you for toilet paper when you don’t.”

I studied his round, impish, Jack-o’-lantern face for a sign of concern. Or remorse. Or even anger at being haled into court on such serious charges. Nothing. He just grinned his usual toothy grin and whistled while he worked, maddeningly off-key.

Sam was more worried about the impending collapse of Asteroidal Resources, Inc. than his impending trial. The IAA had frozen all his assets and embargoed all his vehicles. The two factory ships on their way in from the belt were ordered to enter lunar orbit when they arrived at the Earth-Moon system and to stay there; their cargoes were impounded by the IAA, pending the outcome of the trial.

“They want to break me,” Sam grumbled. “Whether I win the trial or lose, they want to make sure I’m flat busted by the time it’s over.”

And then the Toad showed up, closely followed by Beryllium Blonde.

We were sitting at the defendant’s table in the courtroom, a very modernistic chamber with severe, angular banc and witness stand of lunar stone, utterly bare smoothed stone walls and long benches of lunar aluminum for the spectators. The tables and chairs for the defendant and prosecution were also burnished aluminum, cold and hard. No decorations of any kind; the courtroom was functional, efficient, and gave me the feeling of inhuman relentlessness.

“Kangaroo court,” Sam muttered as we took our chairs.

The crowd filed in, murmuring and whispering, and filled the rows behind us. Various clerks appeared. No media reporters or photographers were allowed in the courtroom but there had been plenty of them out in the corridor, asking simple questions like, “Why did you wipe out those harmless little green lichenoids, Sam?”

Sam grinned at the them and replied, “Who says I did?”

“The IAA, DULL, just about everybody in the solar system,” came their shouted response.

Sam shrugged good-naturedly. “Nobody’s heard my side of it yet.”

“You mean you didn’t kill them?”

“You claim you’re innocent?”

“You’re denying the charges against you?”

For once in his life, Sam refused to be baited. All he said was, “That’s what this trial is for; to find out who did what to whom. And why.”

They were so stunned at Sam’s refusal to say anything more that they stopped pestering him and allowed us to go into the courtroom. I was sort of stunned, too. I was used to Sam’s nonstop blather on any and every subject under the Sun. Sphinx-like silence was something new, from him.

The courtroom was settling down to a buzzing hum of whispered conversations when the three black-robed judges trooped in to take their seats at the banc. No jury. Sam’s fate would be decided by the three of them.

As everybody rose to their feet, Sam looked at the three judges and groaned. “Buddha on ice-skates, it’s the Toad.”

His name was J. Everest Weatherwax, and he was so famous that even I recognized him. Multi-trillionaire, captain of industry, statesman, public servant, philanthropist, Weatherwax was a legend in his own time. He had helped to found DULL and funded unstintingly the universities that joined the consortium. He was on the board of directors of so many corporations nobody knew the exact number. He was also one the board of governors of the IAA. His power was truly interplanetary in reach, but he had never been known to use that power except for other people’s good.

Yet Sam clearly loathed him.

“The Toad?” I whispered to Sam as we sat down and the chief judge—a comely gray-haired woman with steely eyes—began to read the charges against Sam.

“He’s a snake,” Sam hissed under his breath. “An octopus. He controls people. He owns them.”

“Mr. Weatherwax?” I was stunned. I had never heard a harsh word said against him before. His good deeds and public unselfishness were known throughout the solar system.

“Just look at him,” Sam whispered back, his voice dripping disgust.

I had to admit that Weatherwax did look rather toad-like, sitting up there, looming over us. He was very old, of course, well past the century mark. His face was fleshy, flabby, his skin was gray and splotchy, his shoulders slumped bonelessly beneath his black robe. His eyes bulged and kept blinking slowly; his mouth was a wide almost lipless slash that hung slightly open.

“God help any fly that comes near him,” Sam muttered. “Zap! with his tongue.”

Weatherwax’s money had founded DULL. He had saved the ongoing Martian exploration company when that nonprofit gaggle of scientists had run out of funding. He had made his money originally in biotechnology, almost a century ago, then diversified into agro-business and medicine before getting into space exploration and scientific research in a major way. He had received the Nobel Peace Prize for settling the war between India and China. Rumor had it that if he would only convert to Catholicism, the Pope would make him a saint.

As soon as the chief judge finished reading the charges, Sam shot to his feet.

“I protest,” he said. “One of the judges is prejudiced against me.”

“Mr. Gunn,” said the chief judge, glaring at Sam, “you are represented by legal counsel. If you have any protests to make, they must be made by him.”

Sam turned to me and made a nudging move with both hands.

I got to my feet slowly, thinking as fast as I could. “Your honor, my client feels that the panel might be less than unbiased, since one of the judges is a founder of the organization that has brought these charges against the defendant.”

Weatherwax just smiled down at us, drooling ever so slightly from the corner of his toadish mouth.

The chief judge closed her eyes briefly, then replied to me, “Justice Weatherwax has been duly appointed by the International Astronautical Authority to serve on this panel. His credentials as a jurist are impeccable.”

“Since when is he a judge?” Sam stage-whispered at me.

“The defense was not aware that Mr. Weatherwax had received an appointment to the bench, your honor,” I said as diplomatically as I could.

“Justice. Weatherwax received his appointment last week,” she answered frostily, “on the basis of his long and distinguished record of service in international disputes.”

“I see,” I said meekly. “Thank you, your honor.” There was nothing else I could do.

“Settling international disputes,” Sam grumbled. “Like the China-India War. Once he stopped selling bio-weapons to both sides they had to stop fighting.”

“However,” the chief judge said, turning to Weatherwax, “if the justice would prefer to withdraw in the face of the defendant’s concern …”

Weatherwax stirred and seemed to come to life like a large mound of protoplasm touched by a spark of electricity.

“I assure you, Justice Ostero, that I can judge this case with perfect equanimity.” His voice was a deep groan, like the rumble of a distant bullfrog.

The chief justice nodded once, curtly. “So be it,” she said. “Let’s get on with these proceedings.”

It was exactly at the point that the Beryllium Blonde entered the courtroom.

It was as if the entire courtroom stopped breathing; like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, everything and everybody seemed to stop in their tracks, just to look at her.

Lunar cities were pretty austere in those days; the big, racy casinos over at Hell Crater hadn’t even been started yet. Selene City was the largest of the Moon’s communities, but even so it wasn’t much more than a few kilometers of rock-walled tunnels. Even the so-called Grand Plaza was just a big open space with a dome sealing it in. Okay, so most of the ground inside the plaza was green with grass and shrubs. After two days, who cared? You could rent wings and go flying on your own muscle power, but there wasn’t much in the way of scenery.

The Beryllium Blonde was scenery. She stepped into the courtroom and lit up the place, like her golden hair was casting reflections off the bare stone walls. The panel of three judges—two women and the Toad—just stared at her as she walked demurely down the courtroom’s central aisle and stopped at the railing that separated the lawyers and their clients from the spectators.

We were all spectators, of course. She was absolutely gorgeous: tall and shapely beyond the dreams of a teenaged cartoonist. A face that could launch a thousand rockets—among other things.

She looked so sweet, with those wide blue eyes and that perfect face. Her glittery silver suit was actually quite modest, with a high buttoned Chinese collar and trousers that looped beneath her delicate little feet. Of course, the suit was form-fitting: it clung to her as if it’d been sprayed onto her body, and there wasn’t a man in the courtroom who didn’t envy the fabric.

Even Sam could do nothing more than stare at her, dumbfounded. It wasn’t until much later that I learned why he called her the Beryllium Blonde: beryllium, a steel-gray metal, quite brittle at room temperature, with a very high melting point; used mostly as a hardening agent.

How true.

“Am I interrupting?” she asked, in a breathy innocent voice.

The chief judge had to swallow visibly before she found her voice. “No, we were just getting started. What can I do for you?” This from the woman who was known, back in Australia, as the Scourge of Queensland.

“I am here to help represent the prosecution, on a pro bono basis.”

All four of the prosecution’s expensive lawyers shot to their feet and welcomed her to their midst.

Sam just moaned.

“It goes back a long way,” Sam told me after the preliminaries had ended and the court had adjourned for lunch. We had scooted back to the hotel suite we were renting, the two of us desperately trying to hold the company together despite the trial and embargo and everything else.

“She tried to screw me out of my zero-gee hotel, way back when,” he said.

I wondered how literally Sam meant his words. He had the solar system’s worst reputation as an insensitive womanizing chauvinist boor. Yet somehow Sam never lacked for female companionship. I’ve seen ardent feminists succumb to Sam’s charm. Once in a while.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” Sam said, sighing mightily at his memories. “Of course, we spent a pretty intense time together before the doo-doo hit the fan.” He sighed again. “All she was after was the rights to my hotel.”

“While you were truly and deeply in love,” I wisecracked.

Sam looked shocked. “I think I was,” he said, sounding hurt. “At least, while it lasted.”

“So she has a personal bias against you. Maybe I can get her thrown off the case—”

“Don’t you dare!” Sam shrieked, nearly jumping over the coffee table.

“But—”

He gave me his Huck Finn grin. “If I’ve got to be raped, pillaged and burnt at the stake,” he said happily, “I couldn’t think of anybody I’d prefer to have holding the matches.”

Had Sam given up?

I don’t know about Sam, but after the first two days of testimony I was ready to give up.

Fourteen witnesses—a baker’s dozen plus one—all solemnly testified that Sam had deliberately, with malice aforethought and all that stuff, wiped out the harmless lichenoid colony that dwelled under Europa’s ice mantle. And had even bashed one of the DULL scientists on the head with an oxygen tank when the man had tried to stop him.

The spectators on the other side of the courtroom rail sobbed and sighed through the testimony, hissed at Sam and groaned piteously when the last of the witnesses showed a series of computer graphics picturing the little green lichenoids before Sam and the empty cavity under the ice where the lichenoids had been but were no longer—because of Sam.

“What need have we of further witnesses?” bellowed a heavyset woman from the back of the courtroom.

I turned and saw that she was on her feet, brandishing an old-fashioned rope already knotted into a hangman’s noose.

The chief judge frowned at her, rather mildly, and asked her to sit down.

For the first time since his profession of impartiality Weatherwax spoke up. “We want to give the accused a fair trial,” he rumbled, again sounding rather like a bullfrog. “Then we’ll hang him.”

He made a crooked smile to show that he was only joking. Maybe.

The chief judge smiled, too. “Although we haven’t yet decided how a sentence of capital punishment would be carried out,” she said, looking straight-faced at Sam, “I’m sure it won’t be by hanging. In this low-gravity environment that might constitute cruel and unusual punishment.”

“Thanks a lot,” Sam muttered.

Then the chief judge turned to me. “Cross-examination?”

The scientist who had shown the computer graphics was still sitting in the witness chair, to one side of the judges’ banc. I didn’t have any questions for him. In fact, I wanted him and his cute little pictures off the witness stand as quickly as possible.

But just as I started to shake my head I heard Sam, beside me, speak up.

“I have a few questions for this witness, your honors.”

The three judges looked as startled as I felt.

“Mr. Gunn,” said the chief judge, with a grim little smile, “I told you before that you are represented by counsel and should avail yourself of his expertise.”

Sam glanced at me. We both knew my expertise consisted of a gaggle of computer programs and not much else.

“There are aspects of this case that my, uh… counsel hasn’t had time to study. I was on the scene and I know the details better than he possibly could.”

The three judges conferred briefly, whispering and nodding. At last the chief judge said, “Very well, Mr. Gunn, you may proceed.” Then she smiled coldly and added, “There is an old tradition in the legal profession that a man who represents himself in court has a fool for a client.”

Sam got to his feet, grinning that naughty-little-boy grin of his. “And a fool for a lawyer, too, I guess.”

All three judges nodded in unison.

“Anyway,” Sam said, jamming his hands into the pockets of his baby-blue coveralls, “there are a couple of things I think the court should know in deeper detail.”

I glanced over at the Beryllium Blonde while Sam sauntered up to the witness box. She was sitting back, smiling and relaxed, as if she was enjoying the show. Her four colleagues were watching her, not Sam.

The witness was one of the DULL scientists who’d been on Europa, Dr. Clyde Erskine. He was a youngish fellow, with thinning sandy hair and the beginnings of a pot belly.

Sam gave him his best disarming smile. “Dr. Erskine. Are you a biologist?”

“Uh … no, I’m not.”

“A geologist?”

“No.” Rather sullenly, I thought.

“What is your professional specialty, then?” Sam asked, as amiably as he might ask a bartender for a drink on the house.

Erskine replied warily. “I’m a professor of communications at the University of Texas. In Austin.”

“Not a. biologist?”

“No, I am not a biologist.”

“Not a geologist or a botanist or zoologist or even a chemist, are you?”

“I am a doctor of communications,” Erskine said testily.

“Communications? Like, communicating with alien life forms? SETI, stuff like that?”

“No,” Erskine said. “Communications between humans. My specialty is mass media.”

Sam put on a look of shocked surprise. “Mass media? You mean you’re a public relations flack?” “I am a doctor of communications!”

“But what you were doing on Europa was generating PR material for DULL, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” he admitted. “That was my job.”

Sam nodded and took a few steps away from the witness, as if he were trying to digest Erskine’s admission.

Turning back to the witness chair, Sam asked, “We’ve heard fourteen witnesses so far. Were any of them biologists?”

Erskine frowned in thought for a moment. “No, I don’t believe any of them were.”

“Were any of them scientists of any stripe?”

“Most of them were communications specialists,” Erskine answered.

“PR flacks, like yourself.”

“I am not a flack!” Erskine snapped.

“Yeah, sure,” said Sam. He hesitated a moment, then asked, “How many people were on Europa?”

“Uh … let me see,” Erskine muttered, screwing up his eyes to peer at the stone ceiling. “Must have been upwards of three dozen. . . No, more like forty, forty-five.”

“How many of ’em were scientists?” Sam asked.

“We all were!”

“I mean biologists, geologists—not PR flacks.”

Erskine’s face was getting red. “Communications is a valid scientific field—”

“Sure it is,” Sam cut him off. “How many biologists among the forty-five men and women stationed on Europa?”

Erskine frowned in thought for a moment, then mumbled, “I’m not quite certain….”

“Ten?” Sam prompted.

“No.”

“More than ten?”

“Uh … no.”

“Five?”

Silence.

“More or less?” Sam insisted.

“I think there were three biologists,” Erskine muttered, his voice so low that I could hardly hear him.

“Yet none of them have testified at this trial,” Sam said, a hint of wonder in his voice. “Why is that, do you think?” “I don’t know,” Erskine replied sullenly. “I guess none of them was available.”

“Not available.” Sam seemed to mull that over for a moment. “Then who prepared all the slides and graphs you and your cohorts have shown at this trial?”

Erskine glanced up at the judges, then answered, “The communications department of the University of Texas.”

“At Austin.”

“Yes.”

“Not the handful of scientists who were on Europa and are now mysteriously not available?”

“The scientists gave us the input for the computer graphics.”

“Oh? They were available to help you prepare your presentations but they’re not available for this trial? Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

Sam turned away from the witness. I thought he was coming back to our table, but suddenly Sam wheeled back to face Erskine again. “Do you have any samples of the Europa lichenoids?”

“Samples? Me? No.”

“Do any of the biologists have samples of them? Actual physical samples?”

“No,” Erskine said, brows knitting. “They were living under more than seven kilometers of ice. We were—”

“Thank you, Dr. Erskine,” Sam snapped. Looking up at the judges he said grandly, “No further questions.”

Erskine looked slightly confused, then started to get to his feet.

“Redirect, please,” said the Beryllium Blonde.

All three judges smiled down at her. I smiled too as she walked from behind the prosecution’s table toward the witness box. Just watching her move was a pleasure. Even Sam gawked at her. Beads of perspiration broke out on his upper lip as he sat down beside me.

“Dr. Erskine,” the Blonde asked sweetly, “which scientists helped you to prepare the graphics you showed us?”

Erskine blinked at her as if he were looking at a mirage that was too good to be true. “They were prepared by Dr. Heinrich Fossbinder, of the University of Zurich.”

“Dr. Fossbinder is a biologist?”

“Dr. Fossbinder is a Nobel laureate in biology. He was head of the biology team at Europa.”

“All three of ’em,” Sam stage-whispered loud enough to draw a warning frown from the judges.

The Blonde proceeded, undeterred. “But if you have no samples of the Europa life-forms, how were these computer images produced?”

Erskine nodded, as if to compliment her on asking an astute question. “As I said, the lichenoids were living beneath some seven kilometers of ice. We very carefully sank a fiber-optic line down to within a few dozen meters of their level and took the photographs you saw through that fiberoptic link.”

With an encouraging smile that dazzled the entire courtroom, the Blonde asked, “Was your team drilling a larger bore hole, in an effort to extract samples of the life-forms?”

“Yes we were.”

“And what happened?”

Erskine shot an angry look at Sam. “He ruined it! He came in with his ore-crushing machinery and chewed up so much of the ice that the entire mantle collapsed. Our bore hole was shattered and the lichenoids were exposed to vacuum.”

“What effect did that have on the native life-forms of Europa?” she asked in a near-whisper.

“It killed them all!” Erskine answered hotly. “Wiped them out!” He pointed a trembling finger at Sam. “He killed a whole world’s biosphere!”

The courtroom erupted in angry shouts. I thought the audience was going to lynch Sam then and there.

The Beryllium Blonde smiled at the raging spectators and said, barely loud enough to be heard over their yelling, “The prosecution rests.”

The chief judge banged her gavel and recessed for the day, but hardly any of the audience paid her any attention. They wanted Sam’s blood. A cordon of security guards formed around us, looking worried. But as we headed for the door, I saw that Sam was unperturbed by any of the riotous goings-on; his eyes were locked on the Blonde. It was as if no one else existed for him.

The outlook wasn’t brilliant that evening. The prosecution had presented what looked like an airtight case. I had no witnesses except Sam, and in our discussions of the case he hadn’t once refuted the prosecution’s testimony.

“You really wiped out the colony of lichenoids?” I asked him repeatedly.

His only answer was a shrug and an enigmatic, “They’re not there, are they?”

“And you actually banged that scientist on the head with an oxy bottle?”

He grinned at the memory of it. “I sure did,” he admitted, impishly.

We were having dinner in our hotel suite. Sam couldn’t show his face in a restaurant, that’s how much public opinion had turned against him. We had needed six security guards just to walk us from the courtroom to the hotel.

“But he wasn’t a scientist,” Sam added, heaping broiled scungilli on his plate. Selene’s aquaculture produced the best shellfish off-Earth, and the hotel’s chef was a Neapolitan master artist.

“He was a science writer for DULL,” Sam went on. “Most of the so-called scientists on Europa were public-relations flacks and administrators.”

“Like Erskine?”

He nodded. “They weren’t doing research. They were busy pumping out media hype about their great green discovery.”

“That’s neither here nor there, Sam,” I said, picking at my own clams posilipo.

“Isn’t it?” He made a know-it-all smile.

“Sam, are you keeping something from me?” I asked.

“Me?”

“If you’ve got some information that will help win this case, some facts, witnesses—anything! We need it now, Sam. I’m supposed to open your defense tomorrow morning and I don’t have a thing to go on.”

“Except my testimony,” he said.

That’s what I was afraid of.

Yet the next morning I put Sam on the witness chair and asked him one single question: “Mr. Gunn, can you tell us in your own words what took place on Europa during the time you were there?”

“Soitinly!” Sam said, grinning.

The judges were not amused. Neither was the Beryllium Blonde, sitting at the prosecution’s table, watching Sam intently, her blue eyes focused on him like twin lasers.

The whole thing started—Sam said—with the Porno Twins. Cindy and Mindy.

You gotta understand that working those mining ships out there in the Asteroid Belt is hard, lonely work. Sure, there are women among the crews, but there’s always eight or nine more guys than gals on those factory ships, and the guys get—well, the polite word for it is horny.

(The chief judge huffed at that but didn’t interrupt. The Toad snorted. The Beryllium Blonde smiled.)

The Porno Twins supplied a needed service for the miners. Virtual sex, on demand. Oh sure, there were VR services from Earth-Moon, but the time lag meant that you couldn’t do real-time simulations: you had to buy a VR program that was prepackaged. It might have a few variables, but you more or less got a regular routine, take it or leave it.

The Porno Twins had come out to the belt and established themselves in a spacecraft that could swing around the area and maneuver close enough to the factory ships to do real-time simulations. You know, positive feedback and all that. You could talk with ’em, and they’d respond to you. It was great!

Well, anyway, the guys told me it was great. Some of the women used them, too, but that’s their business. I never did. Virtual reality is terrific and all that, but I prefer the real thing. I want to feel some warmth instead of grappling with an electronic fantasy.

I saw the twins’ advertisements, of course. They were really attractive: two very good-looking dolls who were identical down to their belly buttons, except that one was right-handed and the other was a lefty. Mindy and Cindy. Geniuses at what they did. They were natural redheads, but with VR they could be any color or shade you wanted.

It was the idea of their being twins that made them so popular. Every guy’s got a fantasy about that and they were happy to fulfill your wildest dreams, anything you asked for. And it was all perfectly safe, of course: they were usually a million kilometers away, feeding your fantasy at the speed of light with a real-time virtual reality link.

I had thought about dropping in on them for a real visit, you know, in the flesh. Me and every other guy in the belt. But they stayed buttoned up inside their own spacecraft; no visitors. None of us knew what kind of defenses they might have on their craft, but I guess we all realized that their best defense was the threat of leaving the belt.

So nobody molested them. If anybody gave even a hint that he might try to sneak out to their ship, his fellow miners dissuaded him—as they say—forcefully. Nobody wanted the Twins to leave us alone out in the dark and cold between Mars and Jupiter.

It was sheer coincidence that I happened to be the closest ship to theirs when their life-support system malfunctioned. I guess I’m lucky that way, if you can call it lucky when lightning strikes you.

I was trying to repair the mining boat Clementine when I heard their distress call. Most mining boats have minimal crews; Clementine was the first to be designed to run with no crew at all. Except it didn’t work right.

Mining boats attach themselves to an asteroid and grind up the rock or metal, sort it by chemical composition, and store it in their holds until they make rendezvous with a factory boat and unload the ores. Clementine was chewing up its target asteroid all right, but there was a glitch in the mass spectrometer and the idiot computer running the boat couldn’t figure out which stream of ore should go into which hold, so it stopped all operations halfway into the program and just clung to the asteroid like a scared spider, doing absolutely nothing except costing me money.

So I jetted out to Clementine from Ceres in my personal torch ship, leaving the company’s important business in the capable and well-trained hands of my crackerjack staff. I figured they could run things for maybe four-five days before driving me into bankruptcy.

So I’m in a battered old hard suit hanging weightless with my head stuck in the computer bay and my feet dangling up near the navigation sensors when the radio bleeps.

“This is SEX069,” said a sultry female voice. “We have an emergency situation. Our life support system has suffered a malfunction. Our computer indicates we have only eleven point four days until the air recycling scrubbers fail completely. We need help immediately.”

I didn’t have to look up the IAA registry to find out who SEX069 was. That was the Porno Twins’ spacecraft! I pulled my head out of the computer bay, cracking my helmet on the edge of the hatch hard enough to make me see stars, and jack-knifed myself into an upright position by the set of navigation sensors. Not easy to do in a hard suit, by the way.

Being designed to operate uncrewed, Clementine didn’t have an observation port or even cameras outside its dumb hull. But it had a radio, so I squirted off a message to the Twins as fast as my gloved fingers could hit the keypad.

“This is Sam Gunn,” I said, in my deepest, manliest voice. “Received your distress call and am on my way to you.” Then I couldn’t resist adding, “Have no fear, Sam is here!”

I got out of Clementine fast as I could and into my personal torch ship, Joker. While I was taking off my hard suit I had the Twins squirt me their location and their computer’s diagnostic readings.

Their craft was several million kilometers away, coasting in a Sun-centered orbit not far from the asteroid Vesta.

Now, Joker’s built for my comfort—and for speed. Her fusion-MHD drive could accelerate at a full g continuously, as long as she had reaction mass to fire out her nozzles. Any other rock jockey in the belt would have had to coast along for weeks on end to reach the Twins. I could zip out to Vesta in a matter of hours, accelerating like a bat out of sheol.

“Spare us the profanity, Mr. Gunn,” said the Toad.

“And kindly stick to the facts of the case,” the chief judge added, frowning. “We don’t need a sales pitch for your personal yacht.”

Sam shrugged and glanced at me. I realized that if he was trying to drum up interest in Joker, he must be feeling pretty desperate, financially.

The point is—Sam blithely continued—that Joker was the only craft in the belt that had a chance in … in the solar system, of helping the Twins. Nobody else could get to them in eleven days or less.

But as I sat in the bridge, in my form-accommodating, reclinable swiveling command chair, which has built-in massage and heat units (the chief judge glowered at Sam), and looked into the details of the Twins’ diagnostics, I realized they were in even deeper trouble than I had thought. The graphs on the screens showed that not only had their recycler failed, they were also losing air; must’ve been punctured by a centimeter-sized asteroid, punched right through their armor and sprung a leak in their main air tank. Maybe it knocked out their recycling system, too.

Their real problem was with their automated maintenance equipment. How could their system allow the air recycling equipment to go down? And their damned outside robot was supposed to fix punctures as soon as they happened. Theirs didn’t. It was just sitting on the outer skin of the hull, frozen into immobility. Maybe an asteroid had dinged it, too. Their diagnostics didn’t show why the robot wasn’t working.

They needed air, or at least oxygen. And they needed it in a hurry. Even if I got to them in a day or so and fixed the leak and repaired their recycling system they wouldn’t have enough air to survive.

I spent the next few hours chewing on their problem. Or really, getting the best computers I could reach to chew on it. Joker has some really sophisticated programs in its access (the chief judge scowled again) but I also contacted my headquarters on Ceres and even requested time on the IAA system. I had to come up with a solution that would work. And fast.

By the time I had showered, put on a fresh set of coveralls, and taken a bite of food, the various analyses started showing up on the multiple display screens in Jokers very comfortable yet efficiently laid-out bridge. (“Mr. Gunn!” all three judges yelped.)

Okay, so here’s the situation. The Twins’ air is leaking out through the puncture. I can fix the puncture in ten minutes, while their dumb robot sits on its transistors and does nothing, but they’ll still run out of air in a couple of days. I can give them oxygen from Jokers water tanks—electrolyze the water, that’s simple enough. But then I won’t have enough reaction mass to get away and we’ll both be in trouble.

Now, I’ve got to admit, the thought of being marooned off Vesta with the Porno Twins had a certain appeal to it. But when I thought it over, I figured that although being with them could be great fun, dying with them wasn’t what I wanted to do.

Besides, they flatly refused to even consider letting me inside their leaking craft.

“Oh, no, Mr. Gunn!” they said, in unison. “We could never allow you to board our .ship.”

Cindy and Mindy were on my main display screen, two lovely redheads with sculpted cheekbones and emerald-green eyes and lips just trembling with emotion.

“That wouldn’t be right,” said Cindy. Or maybe it was Mindy.

“We’ve never let anyone into our ship,” said the other one.

“If we let you, then all the other miners would want to visit us, too.”

“In person!”

“In the flesh.”

“But this would be a mission of mercy,” I pleaded.

They blushed and lowered their eyes. Beautiful long silky lashes, I noticed.

“Mr. Gunn,” said Mindy. Or maybe Cindy. “How would you feel if we allowed one of your miners to board our vessel?”

“You’d want the same privilege, wouldn’t you?” the other one asked.

“I sure would,” I admitted, feeling deflated and erect at the same time.

“For your information,” said Cindy (Mindy?), “we’ve received calls from seventeen other mining ships, responding to our distress message.”

“They’re all on their way to us.”

“And they all will want to come aboard once they reach us.”

“Which we won’t allow, of course.”

“Of course,” I said, downcast. “How soon can they reach you?”

“Not for several weeks, at least.”

“We’ve informed them all that there’s no sense in their coming to us, since they can’t reach us in time.”

“But they’ve all replied that they’ll come anyway.”

I wondered who the hell was doing any mining. The Twins could cause a financial collapse of the metals and minerals market at this rate.

“Mr. Gunn,” said the chief judge sharply, “will you please stick to the facts pertaining to this case? We have no prurient interest in your sexual fantasies.”

“Or your financial problems,” added the Toad.

“But you’ve gotta understand the situation,” Sam insisted. “Unless you can see how the distances and timing were, you won’t be able to grasp the reasons for my actions.”

The chief judge heaved a long, impatient sigh. “Get on with it, Mr. Gunn,” she groused.

Okay, okay. Where was I… oh, yeah.

I didn’t believe the computer analyses when I first saw them. But each system came up with the same set of alternatives and the only one that had any chance of helping the Twins was the one I took.

It looked crazy to me, at first. But the computers had taken into account Jokers high-thrust capability; that was they key to their solution.

All I had to do was zip out to Jupiter at three g’s acceleration, grab some oxygen from one of the_kice-covered Galilean moons, refuel Jokers fusion generator by scooping hydrogen and helium isotopes from Jupiter’s upper atmosphere, and then roar back to the belt at another three g’s and deliver the oxygen to the Twins.

Simple.

Also impossible.

So that’s what I did.

“May i interrupt?” asked the Beryllium Blonde, rising to her feet behind the prosecution’s table.

All three judges looked happy to accommodate her. Or maybe they were just getting tired of listening to Sam. His voice had a kind of nervous edge to it; after a while it was like listening to a mosquito whining in your ear.

“Mr. Gunn,” she said, smiling ingenuously at Sam, in the witness box, “you told this court that you consulted several computer analyses before deciding on your course of action?”

“That’s right,” Sam replied, grinning goofily at her. He seemed overjoyed that she was talking to him.

“And did each of these computer analyses specifically direct you to the Jovian moon Europa?”

Sam shifted a little on the chair. “No, they didn’t. They all showed that Ganymede would be my best bet.”

“Then why did you go to Europa?”

“I was coming to that when you interrupted me.”

“Isn’t it true, Mr. Gunn, that your entire so-called ‘mission of mercy’ was actually a clever plot to break the embargo on commercial exploitation of the Jupiter system?”

That’s where Sam should have said a simple and emphatic no! and let it go at that. But not Sam.

Apparently some things were more important to Sam even than women. He lost his goofy expression and stared straight into her china-blue eyes.

“The IAA’s embargo on the commercial development of the Jupiter system is a shuck,” Sam said evenly.

A general gasp arose. Even the judges—especially the judges—seemed shocked. For the first time since the trial had begun, the Toad looked angry.

Undeterred, Sam went on, “Why embargo commercial enterprises from the entire Jupiter system? What’s the sense of it? Even if you want to protect those little green things on Europa, just putting Europa off-limits would be good enough. Why close off the whole system?”

“Why indeed,” the Blonde countered, “now that you’ve killed off those poor little green creatures.”

“Would you rather let two human women die?” Sam demanded.

“Two prostitutes?”

“Look who’s talking.”

The chief judge whacked her gavel so hard its head flew off, nearly beaning the clerk sitting at the foot of the banc.

But before the judge could say anything, Sam exclaimed, “One of the issues at stake here is the moral question of human life versus animal rights.”

A rail-thin, bald and bleary-eyed man shot to his feet from the middle of the spectators. “Animals have legal rights! A dog or a cat has just as much right to life and dignity as a human being!”

“Yeah,” Sam retorted, “unless the human being’s life is in danger. If I’m a fireman rushing into a burning building, who am I gonna grab first, a human baby or a puppy dog?”

“Stop this!” the chief judge bellowed, slapping the top of the banc with the flat of her hand. “I will have order in this courtroom or I’ll clear the chamber!”

The gaunt animal-rights man sat down, muttering to himself.

“And you, Mr. Gunn,” said the chief judge, scowling down at Sam, “will not turn this trial into a circus. Stick to the facts of the case!”

“One of the ‘facts’ of this case,” Sam replied evenly, “is the accusation that I wiped out an entire alien life-form. Even if that’s true—and I’m not admitting it is—I did what I did to save the lives of two human woman.”

He turned back to the Blonde. “And they’re not prostitutes; they’re producers of virtual reality simulations. Which is more than I can say for some of the broads in this courtroom!”

“Your honors!” the Blonde cried, her hands flying to her face. But I was close enough to see that her cheeks weren’t blushing and there was pure murder in those deep blue eyes.

The chief judge threw her hands in the air. “Mr. Gunn, if you cannot or will not restrict your testimony to the facts of this case, we will hold you in contempt of court.”

For just an instant the expression on Sam’s face told me that he was considering a term in the penal colony as better than certain bankruptcy. But the moment passed.

“Okay,” he said, putting on his most contrite little-boy face. “I’ll stick to the facts—if I’m not interrupted.”

The Blonde huffed and stamped back to the prosecution table.

As i said, the computer analyses showed that I had to zoom out to the Jupiter system at three g’s, grab some oxygen from Ganymede, restock my fusion fuel and reaction mass by scooping Jupiter’s atmosphere, and then race back to the Twins—again at three g’s. Three point oh two, to be exact.

It was trickier than walking a tightrope over Niagara Falls on your hands, blindfolded; more convoluted than a team of Chinese acrobats auditioning for the Beijing Follies; as dangerous as—

(“Mr. Gunn, please!” wailed the chief judge.)

Well, anyway, it was going to be a female dog and a half. Riding for several days at a time in three g’s is no fun; you can’t really move when every part of your body weighs three times normal. A hiccup can give you a hernia. If you’re not extremely careful you could end up with your scrotum hanging down to your ankles. I always wear a lead jockstrap, of course, but even so …

(I thought the judges were about to have apoplexy, but Sam kept going without even taking a breath, so by the time they were ready to yell at him he was already miles away, subject-wise.)

I cranked my reclining command chair all the way down so it could work as an acceleration couch. I couldn’t take the chance of trying to raise my head and chew solid food and swallow while under three gee’s, so while the acceleration was building up I set up an intravenous feeding system for myself from Jokers medical systems. The ship has the best medical equipment this side of Lunar University, by the way. That was pretty easy. The tough part was sticking the needle into my own arm and inserting the intravenous feed.

(Half the courtroom groaned at the thought.)

And then there was the waste elimination tubing, but I won’t go into that.

(More groans and a couple of gargling, retching sounds.)

I welded the computer keyboard to the end of my command chair’s right armrest even though the computer was fully equipped with voice recognition circuitry. Didn’t want to take any chances on the system—as ultra-sophisticated as it is—failing to recognize my voice because I was strangling in three gee’s.

By the time Jokers acceleration passed two gee’s I was flat on my back in the couch, all the necessary tubes in place, display screens showing me the ongoing analyses of this crazy mission. I had to get everything right, down to the last detail, or end up burning myself to a crisp in Jupiter’s atmosphere or nose-diving into Ganymede and making a new crater in the ice.

“You keep saying Ganymede,” the Toad demanded. “How did you end up at Europa?”

“I’m coming to that, oh saintly one,” Sam replied.

I had to drag Clementine along with me, because I was going to need the ores she’d managed to store in her holds before her super-duper computer fritzed. Those chunks of metal were going to be my heat shield when I skimmed Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. I just hoped there was enough of ’em to make a workable heat shield.

The way the numbers worked out, I would accelerate almost all the way to the Jupiter system, then flip around and start decelerating. I’d still be doing better than two gee’s when I hit Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Even though the gases are pretty thin at that high altitude, I needed a heat shield if I didn’t want Joker to get barbecued, with me inside her.

So even though I was flat on my back and not able to move much more than my fingers and toes, I had plenty of work to do. I couldn’t trust Clementine’s smartass computer to handle the heat shield job; her computer was too glottle-stop sophisticated for such a menial job. I had to manually direct the manipulators to pull chunks of ore from her holds and place them up ahead of Joker by a few meters, all the time lying on the flat of my back, spending most of my energy just trying to breath.

Believe me, breathing in three gee’s is not fun, even when you’re on a padded couch. The g force is running from your breastbone to your spine, so every time you try to expand your lungs to take in some air, you’ve got to push your ribs against three times their normal weight. It’s like having an asthma attack that never goes away. I was exhausted before the first day was over.

It would’ve been better if I could’ve just pumped some sedatives through the IV in my arm and slept my way to Jupiter. But I had to build up the heat shield or I’d be fricasseed when I hit Jupiter’s atmosphere. I tapped into the best reentry programs on Earth as I put together those chunks of metal. They had to be close enough to one another so that the shock waves from the heated gases would cancel one another out before they got through the spaces between chunks and heated up Joker.

“You did this while on the way to Jupiter?” asked the other woman judge. “While accelerating at three gravities?”

Sam put his right hand over his heart. “I did indeed,” he said.

The woman shook her head, whether in admiration or disbelief I couldn’t figure out.

“A question, please?” asked the Beryllium Blonde from her seat at the prosecution table.

For the first time, the chief judge looked just a trifle annoyed. “There will be ample time for cross-examination, counselor.”

“I merely wanted to ask if Mr. Gunn was aware of the embargo on unauthorized flights into the Jovian system imposed by the Interplanetary Astronautical Authority.”

Aware of it?—Sam replied—I sure was. I sent out a message to the research station on Europa to tell ’em I was entering the Jupiter system on a mission of mercy. I set my comm unit to continue sending the message until it was acknowledged. They ignored it for a day and a half, and then finally sent a shi—an excrement-load of legalese garbage that took my computer twenty minutes to translate into understandable English.

(“And what was the message from Europa?” the chief judge asked.)

Boiled down to, “Keep out! We don’t care who you are or why you’re heading this way; just turn around and go back to where you came from.”

I got on the horn and tried to explain to them that I was trying to save the lives of two women and I wouldn’t disturb them on Europa, but they just kept beaming their legal kaka. Either they didn’t believe me or they didn’t give a hoot about human lives.

Well, I couldn’t turn around even if I’d wanted to. My flight profile depended on using Jupiter’s atmosphere to aerobrake Joker, swing around the planet, and make a slowed approach to Ganymede. So I programmed my comm unit to keep repeating my message to Europa. It was really pretty: we’re both hollering at each other and paying no attention to what the other guy’s hollering back. Like two drivers in Boston yelling at each other over a fender-bender.

But while I’m roaring down toward Jupiter I start wondering: why does DULL need the whole Jupiter system roped off, when all they’re supposed to be studying is Europa? I mean, they looked at Jupiter’s other Galilean moons and didn’t find diddly-poo. And if there’s any life on Jupiter it’s buried so deep inside those clouds that we haven’t been able to find it.

Why embargo the whole Jupiter system when all they’re supposed to be studying is Europa?

The question nagged at me like a toothache. Even while I was putting my makeshift heat shield together, I kept wondering about it in the back of my mind. I kept mulling it over, using the question to keep me from thinking about how much my chest hurt and wondering about how many breaths I had left before my ribs collapsed.

Once the heat shield was in place—or as good as a ramshackle collection of rocks can be—I could devote my full attention to the question. Mine, and the computer’s.

One thing I’ve learned over the years of being in business: when you’re trying to scope out another company’s moves, follow the money trail. So I started sniffing out the financial details of Diversified Universities & Laboratories, Ltd. It wasn’t all that easy; DULL is a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization; it isn’t publicly owned and its finances are not on public record.

But even scientists like to see their names in the media, and corporate bigwigs like it even more. So I started scrolling through the media stories about the discovery of life-forms on Europa and DULL’s organization of a research station on the Jovian moon.

I learned two very interesting things.

The cost of setting up the research operation on Europa was funded by Wankle Enterprises, Incorporated, of New York, London and Shanghai.

It was Wankle’s lawyers—including a certain gorgeous blonde—who talked the IAA into placing the whole Jupiter system, planet, moons, all of it, under embargo. No commercial development allowed. No unauthorized missions permitted.

Make that three things that I learned: The IAA’s embargo order has some fine print in it. DULL is allowed to permit “limited resource extraction” from the Jupiter system as a means of funding its ongoing research activities on Europa. And guess who got permission from DULL to start “limited resource extraction” from Jupiter and its moons? Wankle Enterprises, Inc.

Who else?

The spectators stirred and muttered. The judges were staring at Sam with real interest now, as if he’d suddenly turned into a different species of witness. All five of the prosecution attorneys—including the Beryllium Blonde—were on their feet, making objections.

“Irrelevant and immaterial,” said the first attorney.

“Rumor and hearsay,” said number two.

“Wankle Enterprises is not on trial here,” said number three, “Sam Gunn is.”

“He’s trying to smear Diversified Universities and Laboratories, Limited,” number four bleated.

The Blonde said, “I object, your honors.”

The chief judge raised an eyebrow half a millimeter. “On what grounds, counselor?”

“Mr. Gunn’s statements are irrelevant, immaterial, based on rumor and hearsay, an attempt to shift the focus of this trial away from himself and onto Wankle Enterprises, and a despicable attempt to smear the good name of an organization dedicated to the finest and noblest scientific research.”

The chief judge nodded, then glanced briefly at her colleagues on either side of her. They both nodded, much more vigorously.

“Very well,” she said. “Objection sustained. Mr. Gunn’s last statement will be stricken from the record.”

Sam shrugged philosophically. “None of those three facts can stay on the record?”

“None.”

“I found out something else, too,” Sam said to the judges. “A fourth fact about DULL.”

“Unless it is strictly and necessarily relevant to this case,” said the chief judge sternly, “it will not be allowed as testimony.”

Sam thought it over for a moment, an enigmatic smile on his Jack-o’-lantern face. Then, with a shake of his head that seemed to indicate disappointment but not defeat, Sam returned to his testimony.

Okay, I’ll save the fourth fact for a while and then we’ll see if it’s relevant or not.

Where was I—oh, yeah, I’m dropping into Jupiter’s gas clouds at a little under three g’s, the insides of my chest feeling like somebody’s been sandpapering them for the past few days.

I put in a call to. the Twins, telling them to hang in there, I’d be back with all the oxygen they needed in less than a week. I didn’t tell them how awful I felt, but they must have seen it in my face.

It took about eleven minutes for my comm signal to reach them, and another eleven for their answer to get back to me. So I gave them a brave “Don’t give up the ship” spiel and then went about my business checking out my heat shield—and DULL’s finances.

Cindy and Mindy both appeared on my comm screen, wearing less than Samoan nudists at the springtime fertility rites. If my eyeballs hadn’t weighed a little more than three times normal they would’ve popped right out of their sockets.

“We truly appreciate what you’re doing for us, Sam,” they said in unison, as if they’d rehearsed it. “And we want you to know that we’ll be especially appreciative when you come back to us.”

“Extremely appreciative,” breathed Cindy. Mindy?

“Extraordinarily appreciative,” the other one added, batting her long lashes at me.

I was ready to jump off my couch and fly to them like Superman. Except that the damned gee-load kept me pinned flat. All of me.

Everything would’ve worked out fine—or at least okay—if my swing through Jupiter’s upper atmosphere had gone as planned. But it didn’t.

Ever see an egg dropped from the top of a ninety-storey tower hit the pavement? That’s what Joker was doing, just about: dropping into Jupiter’s atmosphere like a kamikaze bullet. I had to use the planet’s atmosphere to slow down my ship while at the same time I scooped enough Jovian hydrogen and helium isotopes to fill my propellant tanks. With that makeshift heat shield of rocks flying formation in front of Joker all the while.

Things started going wrong right away. The heat shield heated up too much and too soon. Jokers skin temperature started rising really fast. One by one my outside cameras started to conk out; their circuitry was being fricasseed by white-hot shock-heated gases. Felt like I was melting, too, inside the ship despite the bridge’s absolutely first-rate climate control system.

The damned heat shield started breaking up, which was something my hotshot computer programs didn’t foresee. I should’ve thought of it myself, I guess. Stands to reason. Each individual rock in that jury-rigged wall in front of me was blazing like a meteor, ablating away, melting like the Wicked Witch of the West when you throw water on her.

(The chief judge frowned, puzzled, at Sam’s reference but Weatherwax gave a toad-like smile and even nodded.)

I would’ve peeled down to my skivvies if I’d been able to, but I was still plastered into my reclined command chair like a prisoner chained to a torture rack. Must’ve lost twenty pounds sweating. Came as close to praying as I ever did, right there, zooming through Jupiter’s upper atmosphere.

The camera on Jokers ass end was still working, and while I sweated and almost prayed I watched Jupiter’s swirling clouds whizzing by, far, far below me. Beautiful, really, all those bands of colors and the way they curled and eddied along their edges, kinda like the way—

(“Spare us the travelogue,” said the Toad, his bulging eyes blinking with displeasure. The chief judge added, “Yes, Mr. Gunn. Get on with it.”)

Well, okay. So I finally pull out of Jupiter’s atmosphere with my propellant tanks full and Jokers skin still intact—barely. But the aerobraking hadn’t followed the computer’s predicted flight path as closely as I’d thought it would. Wasn’t off by much, but as I checked out my velocity and position I saw pretty damned quickly that I wasn’t going to be able to reach Ganymede.

Joker had slowed to less than one g, all right, and other than the failed cameras and a few strained seams in the skin the ship was okay. I could sit up and even walk around the bridge, if I wanted to. I even disconnected all the tubing that was hooked into me. Felt great to be free and able to take a leak on my own again.

But Ganymede was out of reach.

Now the whole reason for this crazy excursion was to grab oxygen to replenish the Porno Twins’ evaporating supply. I checked through the computer and saw that the only ice-bearing body I could reasonably get to was—you guessed it—good ol’ Europa.

“Mr. Gunn,” the Toad interrupted, his voice a melancholy croak, “do you honestly expect this court to believe that after all your derring-do, Europa was the only possible body that you could reach?”

Sam gave him his most innocent look. “I’m under oath, right? How can I lie to you?”

The chief judge opened her mouth as if she were going to zing Sam, then she seemed to think better of it and said nothing.

“Besides,” Sam added impishly, “you can check Jokers computer logs, if you haven’t already done that.”

The Beryllium Blonde called from the prosecution table, “A point of information, please?”

All three judges smiled and nodded.

Without rising, the Blonde, asked, “There are twenty-seven moons in the Jupiter system, are there not?”

“Twenty-nine,” Sam snapped, “including the two little sheepdog rocks that keep Jupiter’s ring in place.”

“Aren’t most of these moons composed of ices that contain a goodly amount of oxygen?”

“Yes they are,” Sam replied before anyone else could, as politely as if he were speaking to a stranger.

“Then why couldn’t you have obtained the oxygen you claim you needed from one of those other satellites?”

“Because, oh fairest of the sadly mush-brained profession of hired truth-twisters, my poor battered little ship couldn’t reach any of those other moons.”

“Truly?”

Sam put his right hand over his heart. “Absolutely. Joker was like a dart thrown at a dartboard. I had aimed for a bull’s-eye, but the aerobraking flight had jiggled my aim and now I was headed for Europa. Scout’s honor. It wasn’t my idea. Blame Isaac Newton, or maybe Einstein.”

The Blonde said nothing more, but it was perfectly clear from the expression on her gorgeous face that she didn’t believe a word Sam was saying. I looked up at the judges—it took an effort to turn my eyes away from the Blonde—and saw that none of the three of them believed Sam either. Mentally I added the possibility of perjury charges to the list Sam already faced.

It wasn’t my idea to hit Europa—Sam insisted—but there wasn’t much else I could do. Sure, I had my tanks full of propellant for the fusion torch, but I was gonna need that hydrogen and helium for the high-g burn back to Vesta and the Twins. I couldn’t afford to spend any of it jinking around the Jupiter system. I was pointed at Europa when I came out of Jupiter’s atmosphere. Act of God, you could call it.

(I couldn’t fail to notice the grin that crept across Sam’s face as he spoke. Neither could the judges. Either he was not telling it exactly the way it had happened or he was downright pleased that this “act of God” had pointed him squarely at Europa.)

I called the DULLards on Europa again and gave them a complete rundown of the situation. Recorded my message and had the comm system keep replaying it to ’em. They didn’t respond. Not a peep.

I had nothing to do for several hours except feel good that I didn’t have all those damned tubes poking into me. But even though I could get up and walk around my luxuriously appointed bridge and take solid food from my highly automated and well-stocked galley, my brain kept nibbling at a question that’d been nagging at me since before I hit Jupiter.

Why did DULL insist on keeping the whole Jupiter system off-limits to outside developers?

And why did the IAA agree to let them do that?

All of a sudden my comm system erupted with noise from Europa. They started screaming at me that I wasn’t allowed in the Jupiter system, I can’t land on Europa, I’d better haul ass out of there, yaddida, yaddida, and so on. Threatened me with lawsuits and public flogging and whatnot.

I told them I was on a mission of mercy and two human lives depended on my grabbing some of their ice. Three lives, come to think of it. My butt was on the line, too.

But even if they heard me they didn’t listen. They just kept screaming that I wasn’t allowed to land on Europa or be anywhere in the Jupiter system. Different faces appeared on my comm screen every fifteen seconds, seemed like, all of them getting more and more frantic as I came hurtling closer to Europa’s ice-covered surface.

“I hear what you’re saying,” I told them. “I’m not going to disturb your little green lichenoids. I just need to grab some ice and, believe me, I’ll be out of your way as fast as a jackrabbit in mating season.”

I might as well have been talking to myself. In fact, I think I was. They paid no attention to what I was saying.

A really nasty-looking lug come on my comm screen. “This is Captain Majerkurth. I’m in charge of security here on Europa. If you try to land here I will personally break your balls.”

“Security?” I blurted. “What do you need security for? And what army are you a captain in?”

“I am a captain in the security department of Wankle Enterprises, on loan to Diversified Universities and Laboratories, Limited,” he replied evenly—an even snarl, that is.

“Well, if I were you, mon capitain,” I said, “I’d start getting my people under shelter. My spacecraft is accompanied by about a hundred or so rocks that’re going to hit Europa like a meteor shower.”

That was the remains of my heat shield, of course. Most of the rocks had ablated down to pebble size, but at the velocity we were traveling they could still do some damage. Europa’s icy surface was going to get peppered and there wasn’t anything I could do about it except warn them to get under shelter.

Well, to make a long story short (the judges all sighed at that) I landed on Europa nice and smooth, a real gentle touchdown. With Clementine still dragging along beside me, of course. The meteor shower I promised Captain Majerkurth didn’t harm anything, near as I can tell: just a few hundred new little craterlets in Europa’s surface of ice.

So I’ve got Clementine chewing up ice and storing it in her holds. Bypassed her dumbass mass spectrometer, otherwise her computer would’ve stopped everything because it couldn’t figure out what elements were going into which bins. Didn’t matter. It was all ice, which added up to hydrogen for Jokers fusion torch and oxygen for the Twins.

I expected Majerkurth to show up, and sure enough, I hadn’t been sitting on Europa for more than an hour before this flimsy little hopper pops up over my horizon, heading my way on a ballistic trajectory. For half a second I thought the hardass had fired a missile at me, but my computer analyzed the radar data in picoseconds and announced that it was a personnel hopper, not a missile, and it was gonna land beside Joker.

I buttoned up Joker good and tight. I had no intention of letting Majerkurth come aboard. But the space-suited figure that climbed down from the hopper wasn’t the security captain.

“Mr. Gunn, this is Anitra O’Toole. Permission to come aboard?”

I stared at the image in my display screen. You can’t tell much about a person when she’s zipped into a space suit, but Anitra O’Toole looked small—maybe my own height or even a little less—and her voice was kind of… well, she sounded almost scared.

“Are you one of Majerkurth’s security people?” I asked.

“Security? Goodness no! If Captain Majerkurth knew I was here he’d…” She hesitated, then pleaded, “Please let me come aboard, Mr. Gunn. Please!”

What could I do? I could never refuse a woman asking for help, and she seemed to need my help pretty desperately. It was like the time I—

(“Please stick to the facts of this case!” the chief judge demanded.)

Yeah, okay. So I let her in. Anitra O’Toole turned out to be young, kinda pretty in a cheerleader way, and very worried. Oh, and she was one of the three biologists among the DULL team on Europa.

And she was scared, too. She wouldn’t say why, at first, or why she wanted to come aboard Joker. She just fidgeted and blathered about her husband waiting for her back on Earth and how she was afraid that her marriage was coming apart because they’d been separated so long and her career might be going down the tubes as well.

I only had a few hours to be on Europa, but while my brain-dead Clementine was ingesting ice I tried to be as hospitable as possible. I sat Anitra down in my quarters, just off the bridge, and programmed the galley to produce a gourmet dinner of roast squab, sweet potatoes, string beans—

(“Mr. Gunn!” growled the Toad.)

All right, all right. I popped a bottle of champagne for her. Joker has the best wine cellar in space, bar none.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t try to seduce married women, even when they tell me their marriage is in trouble. Especially then, as a matter of fact. Too complicated; too many chances for lawsuits or grievous bodily harm.

I was more interested in her saying that her career might be going down the tubes. One of three biologists on Europa, working on a newly discovered form of extraterrestrial life, and her career was in trouble?

“Why?” I asked her.

Anitra had these big violet eyes and the kind of golden blonde hair that most women get out of a bottle. Sitting there beside me in a one-piece zipsuit, she looked young and unhappy and vulnerable, like a runaway waif. I stayed an arm’s length away; it wasn’t easy, but I kept thinking about the Twins as much as I could.

“The adaptation isn’t working,” Anitra said, miserable. “All this planning and genetic engineering and they still won’t reproduce.”

“What won’t reproduce?” I asked.

She sipped at the champagne. I refilled her glass.

“Could you take me back to Earth?” she blurted.

I started to say no, which was the truth. But long, long ago I had learned that the truth doesn’t always get the job done.

“I’m heading back to the belt. My company headquarters is in Ceres,” I said. “I could arrange transportation from there.”

She clutched at my wrist, nearly spilling my champagne. “Would you?”

“Why do you want to leave Europa so badly?”

Those violet eyes looked away from me. “My husband,” she said vaguely.

“Won’t DULL set you up with transportation? They have regular resupply flights, don’t they? You could hook a ride back Earthside with them.”

“No,” she said, barely a whisper. “I’ve got to go now, while I’ve got.the chance. And the nerve.”

“But your work here on the lichenoids …”

“That’s the whole point!” she burst. “It isn’t working and everybody’s going to find out and I’m going to be ruined professionally and nobody will want me, not even Brandon.”

I figured Brandon was her husband.

(“Is there a point to all this?” asked the chief judge, frowning.)

The point is this. Anitra O’Toole told me that the lichenoids DULL was studying are not native to Europa. They were engineered in a biology lab in Zurich and planted on Europa by the DULL team.

The courtroom erupted. As if a bomb had gone off. Half the spectators jumped to their feet, shouting. The Beryllium Blonde and her four cohorts were screaming objections. The chief judge was banging the stump of her gavel on the banc, demanding order.

But what caught my eye was the look on the splotchy face of the Toad.

Weatherwax was staring at Sam as if he would have gladly strangled him if he’d had the chance.

It took a while and a lot of whacking of the stump of her gavel, but once order was restored to the courtroom, the chief judge fixed Sam with a beady eye and asked, “Are you maintaining, Mr. Gunn, that there never were indigenous life-forms on Europa?”

Sitting in the witness chair with his hands folded childlike on his lap, Sam replied courteously, “Yes, ma’am, that’s exactly what I’m saying. The whole story was a subterfuge, engineered by the people who run DULL”

“This is outrageous!” Weatherwax roared. Everyone in the courtroom realized that he was the man who ran DULL.

The chief judge was a little more professional. She turned to the prosecution’s lawyers, who were still standing and fuming.

“Cross-examination?”

The Beryllium Blonde stalked out from behind the table like a battle cruiser maneuvering into range for a lethal broadside.

She stood before Sam for a long, silent moment while the entire court held its breath. He stared up at her; maybe he was trying to look defiant. To me, he looked like a kid facing the school principal.

“Mr. Gunn,” she started, utterly serious, no smile, her eyes cold and calculating, “the allegation you have just made is extremely serious. What evidence do you have to support it?”

“The testimony of Dr. Anitra O’Toole, of Johns Hopkins University’s biology department.”

“And where is Dr. O’Toole? Why isn’t she here at this trial?”

Sam took a breath. “As far as I know, she is still on Europa. They won’t let her leave.”

“Won’t let her leave?” the Blonde registered disbelief raised to the nth power.

“She’s being held prisoner, more or less,” Sam said. “That’s why Wankle put a security team on Europa: to see that the scientists don’t talk and can’t get away.”

“Really, Mr. Gunn! And why isn’t her husband demanding her return to Earth?”

“Because, as far as he knows, she’s on Europa voluntarily, placing her career before their marriage. Besides, my sources tell me the guy’s shacked up with a certain blonde lawyer.”

Her eyes went wide and she smacked Sam right in the mouth. Hauled off and whacked him with the flat of her hand. The crack echoed off the courtrooms stone walls.

A couple of spectators cheered. The judges were so stunned none of them moved.

Sam ran a thumb across his jaw. I could see the white imprint of her fingers on his skin.

With a crooked grin, Sam went on, “He’s here in Selene City. I could have him subpoenaed to appear here, if you like.”

The Blonde visibly pulled herself together, regained her self-control by sheer force of will. She put on a contrite expression and looked up at the judges.

“I apologize for my behavior, your honors,” she said, in a hushed little-girl voice. “It was inexcusable of me to allow the witness’s slanderous statement to affect me so violently.”

“Apology accepted,” said the Toad. The chief judge’s brows knit, but she said nothing.

So the Blonde got away with slugging Sam and even made it look as if it was his own fault. Neat work, I thought.

She turned back to Sam. “Do you have any evidence of your allegation about the lichenoids, Mr. Gunn?”

“I have Dr. O’Toole’s statement on video. I activated Jokers internal camera system once I allowed her on board my ship.”

“Video evidence can be edited, doctored, manufactured out of computer graphics—”

“Like the slides of the Europa lichenoids we saw earlier,” Sam countered.

“You are defaming scientists whose reputations are beyond reproach!” the Blonde exclaimed.

“Nobody’s reputation is beyond reproach,” Sam said hotly. “You oughtta know that.”

Turning to the judges, he went on without taking a breath, “Your honors, none of these scientists were trying to hoodwink the public. They were drawn into a plot by the people who run Wankle Enterprises, a plot to stake out a monopoly on the resources of the whole Jupiter system!”

The chief judge answered sternly, “How can you make such an allegation, Mr. Gunn, without proof?” But I noticed she was eying the Toad as she spoke.

“Look, this is the way it worked,” Sam said, ignoring her question. “DULL’s operation on Europa is funded by Wankle Enterprises, right? Wankle’s people went to DULL more than five years ago and suggested an experiment: they wanted DULL’s scientists to engineer terrestrial lichen to survive in the conditions of Europa, living in the watery slush at the bottom of Europa’s mantle of ice. The idea was to see how life-forms would behave under extraterrestrial conditions.”

“Which is a valid scientific project,” the Blonde said.

“Yeah, that’s what they told the scientists. So the biologists engineer the critters and they send a team out to Europa to see if they can actually survive there.”

The chief judge interrupted. “You are contending, Mr. Gunn, that there were no native life-forms on Europa?”

“No native life-forms on or in or any way connected with Europa. If they’d found native life forms they wouldn’t have had to engineer this experiment, would they?”

“But DULL announced the discovery of native life-forms.”

“Right!” Sam exulted. “That’s when our slimy friend here sprung his trap. They announced that the scientists had discovered native life-forms on Europa, instead of telling the media that the lichenoids had been engineered in a bio lab in Zurich.”

“That is utterly ridiculous,” said the Blonde. I noticed that the Toad was slumping more than usual in his chair.

“The hell it is,” Sam snapped. “The poor suckers on Europa were caught in a mousetrap. They were stuck on Europa, dependant on DULL and Wankle for transportation home. Dependant on them for air to breathe! They couldn’t get to the media; they were surrounded by three dozen DULL public-relations flacks and a Wankle security team. Even if they could blow the whistle, it’d look as if they were in on the fraud from the beginning. One way or another their careers would be finished. DULL would never let them sweep the floor of a laboratory again, let alone practice scientific research.”

“Monstrous,” muttered the chief judge. Whether she meant Sam’s allegations were monstrous or DULL’s actions, I couldn’t figure out.

“Meanwhile, DULL’s communications experts are putting the pressure on the scientists to go along with the deception. After all, once the lichenoids adapt to the conditions under the ice on Europa they’ll really be extraterrestrial organisms, right? The scientists could announce their true origins in the scientific journals in a year or two or three. Who’s going to notice, by then, except other scientists?”

The Blonde stamped her lovely foot for attention. “But why go through this subterfuge? It’s all so pointless and ridiculous. Why would reputable scientists, why would the directors and governors of DULL, go through such an elaborate and foolish subterfuge? Mr. Gunn’s wild theory falls apart on the question of motivation, your honors.”

“Not so, oh temptress of the heavenly spheres,” Sam replied. “Motivation is exactly where my theory is strongest.”

He paused dramatically. Two of the judges leaned forward to hear his next words. Weatherwax looked as if he wanted to be someplace else. Anyplace else.

“Once DULL’s public-relations program announced that native organisms had been found on Europa, what did the IAA do?” Before anyone could reply, Sam went on, “They roped off the whole Jupiter system—the whole damned system! Jupiter itself and all its moons, sealed off, embargoed. No commercial development allowed. Forbidden territory. No go there, bwana, IAA make big taboo.”

“Mr. Gunn, please!” said the third judge.

“No commercial development allowed in the entire Jupiter system,” Sam repeated. “Except for the company that was funding the Europa research station. They were allowed ‘limited resource extraction’ to repay for their funding the Europa team. Right?”

The chief judge murmured, “Right.”

“Who was funding the Europa station? Wankle Enterprises. Who was allowed to develop ‘limited resource extraction’—which means scooping Jupiter’s clouds and mining its moons? Wankle Enterprises. Who has a monopoly on the thousands of trillions of dollars worth of resources in the Jupiter system? Wankle Enterprises. Surprise!”

“Limited resource extraction,” snapped the Blonde, “means just that. Limited.”

“Yeah, sure. What does ‘limited’ mean? How much? There’s no definition. A billion dollars? A trillion? And what happens if the environmentalists or some other corporation or the Dalai Lama complains that Wankle’s taking too much out of the Jupiter system? Wankle simply announces that the lichenoids on Europa weren’t native life-forms after all. Ta-daaa! The scientists get a black eye and Wankle has established operations running all over the Jupiter system. That gives them the edge on any competition, thanks to the monopoly the IAA mistakenly granted them.”

Weatherwax stirred himself. “We’ve listened long enough to these paranoid ramblings,” he rumbled. “I haven’t heard a single iota of evidence to support Mr. Gunn’s ravings.”

“Call Dr. O’Toole back from Europa,” Sam said. “Or watch the video I made of her in my quarters aboard Joker. Call Professor Fossbinder in from Zurich. Call Brandon O’Toole, for Pete’s sake; he’s right here in Selene City. He knows that his wife was engineering lichen before she shipped out to Europa. He’ll tell you all about it, if he isn’t besotted by our Beryllium Blonde here.”

And he quickly raised his fists into a boxer’s defensive posture.

The Blonde just stood there, her lovely mouth hanging open, her eyes wide and darting from Sam to the Toad and back again.

Weatherwax heaved an enormous sigh, then croaked, “I move that we adjourn this hearing for half an hour while we discuss this new … allegation, in chambers.”

The chief judge nodded, tight-lipped. We all rose and the judges swept out; the courtroom was so quiet I could hear their black robes rustling. The audience filed out, muttering, whispering; but Sam and I sat tensely at the defendants’ table, he drumming his fingers on the tabletop incessantly, his head turned toward the prosecution’s table and the Blonde. She was staring straight ahead, sitting rigid as an I-beam—a gorgeously curved I-beam. Her four cohorts sat flanking her, whispering among themselves.

After about ten minutes, a clerk came out and told us that we were wanted in the judges’ chambers. I felt surprised, but Sam grinned as if he had expected it. The clerk went over and conferred briefly with the prosecution lawyers. They all got up and filed out of the courtroom, looking defeated. Even the Blonde seemed down, tired, lost. I felt an urge to go over and try to comfort her, but Sam grabbed me by the collar of my tunic and pointed me toward the slightly open door to the judges’ chambers.

Weatherwax was sitting alone on an imitation leather couch big enough for four; the other two judges were nowhere in sight. He had taken off his judicial robe, revealing a rumpled pale green business suit that made him look more amphibious than ever.

“What do you want, Gunn?” he growled as we sat on upholstered armchairs, facing him.

“I want my ships released and my business reopened,” Sam said immediately.

Weatherwax slowly blinked his bulging eyes. “Once this case is dismissed, that will be automatic.”

Dismissed? I was startled. Was it all over?

“And,” Sam went on, “I want full disclosure about the lichenoids. I want the scientists cleared of any attempt to hoodwink the public.”

Again the Toad blinked. “We can always blame the PR people; say they got the story slightly askew.”

Sam gave a short, barking laugh. “Blame the media, right.”

“Is that all?” Weatherwax asked, his brows rising.

Sam shrugged. “I’m not out to punish anybody. Live and let live has always been my motto.”

“I see.”

“Of course,” Sam went on, grinning impishly, “once you admit publicly that the lichenoids on Europa are a genetic experiment and not native life-forms, then the embargo on commercial development in the Jupiter system ends. Right?”

This time Weatherwax kept his froggy eyes closed for several moments before he conceded, “Right.”

Sam jumped to. his feet. “Good! That oughtta do it.”

The Toad remained seated. There was no attempt on the part of either of them to shake hands. Sam scuttled toward the door and I got up and went after him.

But Sam stopped at the door and turned back to the Toad. “Oh, yeah, one other thing. Now that we’ve come to this agreement, there’s no further need for you to keep the scientists bottled up on Europa. Let Dr. O’Toole come back here.”

Weatherwax tried to glare at Sam but it was pathetically weak.

“And tell your sexy lawyer underling to take her claws off O’Toole’s husband,” Sam added, with real iron in his voice. “Give those two kids a chance to patch up their marriage.”

Without even waiting for a response from the Toad, he yanked the door open and stepped outside. With me right behind him.

By dinnertime that evening the media were running stories about how Wankle’s chief public-relations consultant, Dr. Clyde Erskine of the University of Texas at Austin, had made a slight misinterpretation about the lichenoids on Europa. Sam whooped gleefully as we watched the report in our hotel suite.

He switched to the business news, which was also about the Europa “misinterpretation,” but which included the fact that the IAA had decided to lift the embargo on commercial development of the Jupiter system.

Sam howled and yelped and danced across our dinner table.

“Weatherwax moved fast,” I said, still sitting on the hard-backed chair while Sam did a soft-shoe around our dinner plates.

We had already been notified by the IAA that Sam’s ore carriers were no longer embargoed and Asteroidal Resources, Inc. was back in business.

Sam deftly jumped down to the floor and sat on the edge of the table, facing me.

“He’s got the power to move fast, Orville. The Toad has a reputation for good-deed-doing, but he’s really a power-clutching sonofabitch who’s spent the past ninety years or so worming his way into the top levels of a dozen of the solar system’s biggest corporations.”

“And the IAA,” I added.

“And he founded DULL to serve as a cloak for his plan to grab the whole Jupiter system for himself,” Sam went on, a little more soberly. “This plot of his has been years in the making. Decades.”

“And now it’s unraveled, thanks to you.”

Sam pretended to blush. “I am quietly proud,” he said softly.

I leaned back in my chair. “To think that none of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for the Porno Twins….”

Sam’s face went quizzical. “Oh, it would have happened, one way or the other,” he said, with a puckish grin. “The Twins just provided the opportunity.”

I gaped at him. “You mean you were after Weatherwax all along? From before …” His grin told me more than any words. “Then your testimony was a fabrication?”

“No, no, no,” Sam insisted, jumping to his feet so he could loom over me. That’s hard to do, at his height, so I stayed seated and let him loom. “The Twins’ emergency was real and the only way I could save them was to make that dash out to Jupiter, just like I testified.”

“Really?”

He shrugged. “More or less.”

“You had this all scoped out from the beginning, didn’t you? You knew the whole business and …” I stopped talking, lost in stunned admiration for Sam’s long-range planning. And guts.

He was making like a Jack-o’-lantern again. “Why do you think Weatherwax got himself appointed a judge?”

“So he could make sure you were found guilty,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe, if things worked out the way he wanted them to. But he also wanted to be on the judge’s panel so that if things didn’t work out his way, he could stop the trial and cut a deal with me.”

“Which is what he did.”

“You betcha!”

“But why didn’t you take Dr. O’Toole back with you? You left her on Europa.”

“Had to,” Sam said. “Majerkurth showed up with his team and threatened to blow holes in Joker if I didn’t let her go. I tried to drop an empty oxygen bottle on him, but it missed him and hit one of the PR flacks he had brought along with him.”

I laughed. “So that was the basis of the assault charge.”

“And the attempted murder, too. I would’ve offed Majerkurth if I’d thought it would’ve helped Anitra. As it was, I was outgunned. So I had to let her go—after promising her that I’d fix everything toot sweet.”

“Well, you did that, all right. I’ll bet she’s on her way home to her husband right now.”

“I hope so.”

I reached for my glass of celebratory champagne and took a sip. Then I remembered:

“The Twins! What happened to them?”

That was kinda sad—Sam told me.

I zoomed back to Vesta at three-plus gs with Clementine full of European ice that Jokers electrolysis system was converting into oxygen for them and hydrogen for her own fusion torch.

(I noticed that Sam didn’t slip in a sales pitch for Joker. He was feeling much better now.)

Once I got there, I could’ve patched their leaky air tank and booted up their recycling system and even fixed their stupid maintenance robot—all from the comfort of my bridge in Joker. But I wanted to see them! In the flesh! I was so doggone close to them that I fibbed a little and told them I had to come aboard to make the necessary repairs.

Mindy and Cindy stared at me from my display screen for a long time, not moving, not even blinking. All I could see of them was their beautiful identical faces with their cascading red hair and their bare suggestive shoulders. It was enough to start me perspiring.

“We never let anyone come aboard our ship, Mr. Gunn,” said the one on the left. The one on the right shook her head, as if to reinforce her twin’s statement.

“Call me Sam,” I said. “And if I can’t come aboard, I can’t fix your life-support system.”

Well, we yakked back and forth for hours. They really wanted to stick to their guns, but we all knew that the clock was ticking and they were going to run out of air. Of course, I wouldn’t have let them die. I would’ve done the repairs remotely, from Jokers bridge, if I had to.

But I didn’t let them know that.

“All right,” Mindy said at long last. Maybe it was Cindy. Who could tell. “You can come aboard, Mr.—”

“Sam,” breathed Cindy. I think.

“You can come aboard, but only if you agree to certain conditions.”

The deal was, I could come aboard their ship but I couldn’t have any contact with them. They were going to lock themselves in their compartments and I was forbidden to even tap at their doors.

I was disappointed, but hoped that they’d relent once I’d finished repairing their ship. They offered me virtual reality sex, of course, but I was looking forward to the real thing. The only man in the solar system to make it with the Porno Twins in person! That was a goal worthy of Sam Gunn.

So even though I was bone-weary from being squashed by three-plus gs for several days, and still sore from the tubes that I had to insert into various parts of my anatomy, I was as eager and energetic as a teenager when I finally docked Joker to SEX069. Great stuff, testosterone.

I went straight to their bridge like a good little boy and got their maintenance robot working again. Just a little glitch in its programming; I fixed that and within minutes the dim-witted collection of junk was welding a patch onto the puncture hole in the air tank that the meteoroid had made. There really wasn’t anything much wrong with the ship’s air recycling system, but I took my time starting it up again, thinking all the while about getting together with Cindy and Mindy for a bit of horizontal celebration.

Once I started pumping oxygen from Clementine into their air tanks, I began wondering how I could coax the Twins out of their boudoirs. I checked out their internal communications setup and—voila!—there were the controls for the security cameras that looked into every compartment in the ship.

The first step toward getting them to come out and meet me, I thought, would be to peek into their chambers and see what they were up to.

Wrong! Bad mistake.

They were both in one little compartment, huddled together on the bed, clutching each other like a pair of frightened little kids. And they were old\ Must’ve been in their second century, at least: white hair, pale skin that looked like parchment, skinny and bony and—well, old.

The teeth nearly fell out of my mouth, that’s how far my jaw dropped. Yet, as I stared at them hugging each other like Hansel and Gretel lost in the forest, I began to see how beautiful they really were. Not sexy beautiful, not anymore, but the bone structure of their faces, the straight backs, the long legs. The irresistible Cindy and Mindy that we’d all seen on our comm screens were what they had really looked like a century ago.

I should have felt disappointed, but I just felt kind of sad. And yet, even that passed pretty quickly. Here were two former knockouts who were still really quite beautiful in an elderly way. I know a sculptress who would’ve made a wonderful statue portrait of the two of them.

They were living by themselves, doing their own thing in their own way, bringing joy and comfort to a lot of guys who might have gone berserk without them and their services. And now they were huddled together, terrified that I was gonna break in on them and find out who and what they really were.

So I swallowed hard and tapped the intercom key and said, “I’m finished. Your ship is in fine shape now, although you ought to buy some nitrogen to mix with the oxygen I’ve left for you.”

“Thank you, Sam,” they said in unison. Now that I could see them, I heard the quaver in their voices.

“I’m leaving now. It’s been a pleasure to be able to help you.”

They were enormously grateful. Grateful not only that I had saved their lives, but that I hadn’t intruded on their privacy. Grateful that they could keep up the fantasy of Mindy and Cindy, the sexy Porno Twins.

“Wow,” I said, once Sam finished. “You were downright noble, Sam.”

“Yeah,” he answered softly. “I was, wasn’t I?”

“And that was the last you saw of the Twins?”

“Not exactly.”

I felt my brows rise.

With a self-deprecating shrug, Sam admitted, “They were so super-duper grateful that they insisted on giving me a blank check: I can have a virtual reality session with the two of ’em whenever I want to.”

“So?”

Sam’s grin went from ear to ear. “So I gave in and tried it. I’ve never been a fan of VR sex; I prefer the real thing.”

“So?” I repeated.

His grin got even wider. “So I’m heading back to Ceres tomorrow. I mean, a blank check is just too good to ignore!”

And that’s how Sam Gunn beat the rap on the charge of genocide and opened the Jupiter system for development. He went out to Ganymede and set up a new corporation to scoop helium-three from the clouds of Jupiter and sell it for fuel to fusion power plants all over the solar system.

Then he dumped every penny he had, and a lot he didn’t legally have, into zipping out past Pluto to find Planet X. You know the rest: he found a mini-black hole out there and fell into it and found aliens and all that.

Now he’s on his way back. You know, despite everything, it’s going to be great to see him again. Life was pretty dull without Sam around! Productive, of course, and safe and comfortable. But dull.

Me, I never left Selene City. I’m still running Sam’s old company, Asteroidal Resources, Inc., from our new corporate headquarters here on the Moon.

Of course, Sam wanted me to return to Ceres after the trial, but I happened to run into the Beryllium Blonde in Selene City and she seemed so dejected and lonely—but that’s another story.