The Sam Gunn Omnibus

Piker’s Peek

I know Sam Gunn’s supposed to be some sort of folk hero, a space-age Robin Hood or something, but let me tell you, he’s nothing more than a cheating, womanizing, loudmouthed little scoundrel. And those are his good points!

Take the business about Hell Crater, for example.

I was perfectly happy running Rockledge Industries’s space operations despite the fact that Sam Gunn was always causing us trouble. True, we had euchred him out of that orbital honeymoon hotel he had started, but we knew how to make a profit out of it and Sam didn’t. And we paid him a decent price for it; not as much as he had expected, but more than he deserved, certainly.

Of course, we had withheld the space-sickness cure that our Rockledge research labs had come up with. Without it, people coming to enjoy a romantic tryst in weightlessness spent their honeymoons upchucking. With it, Rockledge could buy out Sam on the cheap when he was on the verge of bankruptcy and make a first-class orbital tourist facility out of his vomit palace.

Well, perhaps we did take slightly unfair advantage of Sam, but that’s the way the world turns. Business is business. Sentiment has no part in it. Still, Sam took it personally, and he took it hard. My spies in his operation—which he called S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, no less—told me had vowed vengeance.

“I’ll get that silver-plated SOB,” was one of his milder remarks, I was told. He snarled that choice little bon mot after he had Rockledge’s check in his bank account, I might add.

Frankly, I thought Sam was finished. I thought we had heard the last of him. How wrong I was!

Imagine my surprise when, some months later, my phone told me that Sam Gunn wanted to have a meeting with me. Surprise quickly turned to suspicion when I played back Sam’s call.

“Pierre, you old silver fox,” Sam said, grinning malevolently, “I know we’ve had our differences in the past….”

He had a nerve, addressing me by my first name. For people of Sam’s ilk I expected to be called Mr. D’Argent. But Sam never paid any attention to the finer points of politesse.

On and on he went. If there’s one thing that Sam can do, it’s talk. His tongue must be made of triple-laminated heat shield cermet. I sat back in my desk chair and studied his sly, shifty-eyed face while he chattered nonstop. Sam looks like a grown-up Huckleberry Finn, although he hasn’t grown up all that much. He claims he’s one hundred sixty-five centimeters tall, which is an obvious lie. If he’s one sixty-five, Napoleon must have been two meters and then some.

Sam’s face is round, topped with a thatch of wiry rust-red hair. His snub nose is sprinkled with freckles, and his eyes seem never to be the same color twice. Hazel eyes, he says. The eyes of a born con artist, I say. For the life of me I can’t understand what women see in him, but Sam is never without a beautiful woman hanging on him. Or two. Or three.

I was just considering fast-forwarding his message when at last he got to the point.

“Pierre, I have an idea that’ll knock your jockstrap out from under you. But it’s going to take a big chunk of capital to put it into operation. So I figured, with Rockledge’s money and my brains we could make an indecent profit. Wanna talk about it?”

And that was it. His message was over. The phone screen froze on Sam’s grinning image and a string of callback numbers.

I didn’t call him back. Not at first. Let him stew in his own juices for a while, I thought, and I waited for an onslaught of messages from Sam. As a matter of fact, I was looking forward to seeing the detestable little snot get down on his knees and beg me to listen to him.

But Sam didn’t beg. He didn’t even try to call me again. I waited for days, going about my business as normal, without hearing a peep from Sam. I began to wonder what he’d wanted. Why did he call? He said he needed a large amount of capital to finance his latest scheme. What was he up to? Had he gone to someone else to raise the money? To BLM Aerospace, perhaps?

In those days, incidentally, my office was on Earth. In beautiful Montreal, actually. Rockledge Industries was a truly diversified and multinational corporation, with fingers in literally thousands of operations all over the Earth and, of course, in orbital space. We were even beginning to build O’Neill type habitats at the L-4 and L-5 libration points along the Moon’s orbit. We were so fully committed financially that I didn’t know where I’d come up with funding for whatever harebrained scheme Sam had in mind, even if I were foolish enough to invest Rockledge money in it.

So it was something of a surprise when, one fine crisp winter morning as I took my usual walking commute from my condominium home to my office through the glassteel tube that connects the two towers at their twentieth floors, I saw Sam walking along with me.

Outside the tube!

My eyes must have popped wide. Sam was out there in the mid-February cold, apparently walking on air. He just plodded along, step by step, with nothing visible between him and the city streets, twenty storeys below. He paid no attention to me, nor to the other men and women in the tube who stopped to gape in amazement at him.

The temperature out there was below zero and I could see from the clouds scudding overhead and the way that the bare tree branches were swaying far below that a considerable wind was blowing. Sam was wearing nothing heavier than a suit jacket as he leaned into the wind and trudged along, his shifty eyes squeezed almost shut, but a crooked grin on his freckled, snub-nosed face, doggedly slogging toward the Rockledge corporate office tower.

I found myself slowing down to keep pace with him, slack-jawed. A crowd of other commuters was gathering, watching Sam with equal astonishment. A woman tapped at the curving glassteel wall to get his attention. Sam paid her no heed.

An older man rapped hard on the glassteel with his walking stick, looking annoyed.

“Get down from there, you damned fool!” he shouted.

Sam abruptly stopped his forward motion and turned to stare at us: For an instant he seemed frozen in midair. Then he looked down. His eyes went wide as he realized there was nothing below him but thin air. He dropped as if an invisible trapdoor had opened beneath him, plummeting downward like a dead weight.

I banged my nose painfully against the transparent wall of the tube, trying to follow his figure as it hurtled down toward the streets. I heard a dozen other thumps and grunts as others in the crowd did the same. Sam dropped like a stone and disappeared from our view.

My God! I thought. He’s committed suicide! For a moment I felt horrified, but then (I must confess) I said to myself, That’s the last I’ll see of the exasperating little bastard.

I was, of course, quite wrong.

I raced to my office, sprinting past several assistants who tried to catch my attention. I had to call the police, turn on the local news, find out what had happened to Sam.

Imagine my stupefied shock, then, when I saw Sam sitting behind my desk, grinning from ear to ear like a poorly carved Jack-o’-lantern.

“You!” I gasped, out of breath from surprise, astonishment and exertion. “I saw you—”

“You saw a hologram, Pierre old buddy-pal. Looked realistic, didn’t it?”

I sank into the bottle-green leather armchair in front of my desk. “Hologram?”

“The old geezer with the cane was stooging for me. Caught your attention, didn’t it?”

Astonishment quickly gave way to pique. Sam had tricked me, and wormed his way into my private office in the bargain.

“Get out from behind my desk,” I snapped.

“Certainly, oh gracious captain of industry,” said Sam. He got up from my swivel chair, pretended to dust off its seat, and bowed as I came around the desk. He scampered around the other end of the desk and took the leather armchair. It was too big for him: his feet dangled several centimeters off the floor and he looked like a child in a man’s chair.

I scowled at him as I sat down. Sam grinned back at me. For several moments neither of us said anything, something of a record for silence on Sam’s part.

“All right,” I said at last, “you’ve finagled your way into my office. Now what’s this latest castle in the sky of yours all about?”

“For a corporate bigshot, you’re damned perceptive, Pierre. But the castle I want to build isn’t in the sky. It’s on the Moon. Hell Crater, to be exact.”

I didn’t have to say another word, not for the better part of the next hour. Sam spun out his grandiose plan to build what he called a resort facility at Hell Crater: hotels, restaurants, gambling casinos, legalized prostitution (which Sam called “sexual therapy”), electronic games and virtual reality simulations based on the completely realistic holographic system he had used to stun me and the other commuters.

Hell Crater, it turns out, was named after a nineteenth-century Jesuit astronomer, Maximilian J. Hell; an Austrian, I believe. Sam loved the idea of turning the thirty-kilometer-wide crater into a lunar Sin City, a couple of hundred kilometers south of Alphonsus, where the lunar nation of Selene stood.

“We can string up a cable car transportation system from Selene to Hell,” Sam enthused, “and show the tourists some terrific scenery on the way: Mare Nubium, the Straight Wall, Mt. Yeager—lots to see.”

He finally took a breath.

I countered, “Sam, you can’t expect me to recommend to Rockledge’s senior management that we invest in a den of vice. Prostitution? Gambling? Impossible.”

“It’s all completely legal,” he pointed out. “The nation of Selene doesn’t have jurisdiction, and even if they did we wouldn’t be breaking any of their laws. This isn’t the Vatican, for cryin’ out loud.”

“Rockledge’s board of directors—”

“Would go to Hell as fast as they could,” Sam said, grinning. Then he admitted, “As long as they could go incognito.”

“It’s impossible, Sam. Forget about it.”

He shrugged. “I’ll have to go elsewhere, then.”

I wasn’t frightened by that. “And just who do you think would be foolish enough to finance your crazy scheme?”

“I dunno. Maybe the D’Argent Trust.”

I laughed in his face. “My wife controls the Trust. If you think for one nanosecond that she’d invest in a glorified whorehouse—”

“She might,” Sam said, “in exchange for some information about the activities of certain Rockledge employees.”

I felt my brows knit. “Which Rockledge employees?”

“A certain knockout blonde named Marlowe.”

“She’s in the comptroller’s office.”

“But she spends a lot of time with the head of the space operations department.”

“That’s not true! And besides, it’s strictly business!”

Sam chuckled. “Pierre, your face is as red as a Chinese pomegranate.”

“You’re the one who had an affair with that woman!” I remembered. “You and she—”

“It was a lot of fun,” Sam said, with a sly smile. “Until I found out she was working for you and trying to slick me out of my share of the orbital hotel. She was screwing me, all right.”

“Industrial espionage,” I said, with as much dignity as I could manage.

“Yeah, sure.” He sighed. “Well, I’ve got my memories. And some damned good pictures of her.”

“I don’t care what you have. My relationship with Ms. Marlowe has always been strictly professional. I mean, business.”

“You think your wife would believe that?”

“You’re making totally unfounded accusations,” I snapped. “Ms. Marlowe and I—”

“Make a beautiful couple. Wanna see the pictures?”

“They’re fakes! They’ve got to be! I never—”

“You never,” Sam said. “But would Mrs. D’Argent believe you? One look at your blonde bosom buddy and you’re in deep sheep dip, Pierre, mon vieux.”

“It’s a filthy lie!” I screamed. I hollered. I lost my cool. I ranted and threatened to have Sam assassinated or at least take him to court. He simply sat there and grinned that maddening gap-toothed grin of his at me while I fussed and fizzed and finally gave in to him.

That’s how Rockledge Industries and S. Gunn Enterprises, Unlimited, went into partnership.

I squeezed the funding from various Rockledge projects and kept it as quiet as I could. Half a billion dollars might seem like small change to a hundred-billion-dollar corporation such as Rockledge, but still, one should be careful. For nearly two years I didn’t see Sam at all (much to my relief), except for monthly progress reports that he sent through my private laser link from the Rockledge office in Selene. I lived in fear that I’d be discovered, and in dread of the next annual meeting of the board of directors.

The corporate comptroller assigned Ms. Marlowe, of all people, to the Hell Crater project. I spoke to her only by phone or e-link. I was very careful not to have any face-to-face meetings with her, which Sam could turn into more material for his blackmail.

I must confess that Sam ran the project efficiently and energetically. Major construction projects always run into snags, but the Hell Crater complex was built smoothly and swiftly.

“We’ll be ready to open by the time your next annual board meeting convenes,” Sam told me, by laser link from the Moon.

I confessed, “I can’t understand how you managed to get it built so quickly.”

He grinned that lopsided pumpkin grin of his. “I paid off the right people, Pierre.”

“I know the wages you’ve paid are above industry standards, but I still don’t see how you’ve done so well.”

There’s a lag of almost three seconds in conversations from the Moon; it takes that long for a signal to get there and back again. I sat at my desk watching Sam’s self-satisfied smirk, waiting for his response.

“It’s not the wages,” Sam said at last. “It’s the bribes.”

“Bribes!” I yelped.

Again the wait. Then, “Oh come on, now, Mr. Straight Arrow. You don’t think that Rockledge people have paid off a building inspector here and there, or bought protection from the local union goons? You’re not that naive, are you, Pierre, mon infant?”

Bribes. All I could think of was the corporate CEO and the board of directors. Bad enough to be building a Sin City, but spending Rockledge money on bribery! I began to wonder if they’d give me a golden parachute when they pushed me out the window.

“Don’t be so uptight about it,” Sam advised me. “Your CEO’s a sporting type, from what I hear. He’s gonna love the idea, wait and see.”

I decided not to wait. Better to make a clean breast of it before it was too late. So the next time the CEO came to Montreal I asked for a private meeting with him, away from the office. We met in a dinner-theater restaurant. The food was mediocre and the musical revue they were playing featured more nudity than talent. But the CEO seemed to enjoy himself, while I wondered if the other patrons thought we might be a gay couple, sitting off in a shadowy corner at a table for two.

He looked every inch the successful modern business executive: handsome, lean and youthful (thanks to his unabashed patronage of rejuvenation clinics). I felt almost shabby next to him; my hair had turned silver before I was thirty.

I had to wait until the intermission before I could get his undivided attention. To my surprise, when I told him that I had invested in a resort facility on the Moon, he smiled at me. “I was wondering when you’d bring up the subject. Hell Crater, isn’t it?”

I expressed a modicum of astonishment at his knowledge of the project.

“You don’t stay at the top of the heap, D’Argent, unless you have excellent information conduits. One of the comptroller’s people has been keeping me informed about the Hell Crater project.”

It was Ms. Marlowe, I realized. She was climbing up the corporate ladder in her own inimitable style.

“There’s something about the project that you don’t know yet,” I said, dreading the confession I was about to make. “About the firm that’s actually building the complex—”

“It’s Sam Gunn,” he replied easily.

“You know?”

“As I said, I have my sources of information.”

Sweat broke out on my upper lip. “I didn’t mention it until now because—”

“I understand completely. You’ve been very clever about this entire operation. If it flops, it’s Sam Gunn’s failure.”

“And if it succeeds?”

“We’ll squeeze him out, of course.”

I felt immensely relieved. “That’s exactly what I had planned to do all along,” I said, stretching the truth a little.

“We’re making money on the orbital hotel,” said the CEO. “A resort facility on the Moon makes sense. Especially if it’s beyond the legal strictures of terrestrial moralists.”

He had no qualms about the den of vice Sam was building!

“Besides,” the CEO added, “it will be a great place to meet agreeable young women.”

Just at that moment the three-piece orchestra blared a fanfare and the entire cast of the revue came capering out onto the stage once again, without a stitch of clothing in sight.

Despite the CEO’s smiling approval of the Hell Crater resort, I was understandably edgy when the board meeting came around. Twenty-two men and women sat around the long polished table in our Amsterdam office: most of them gray-haired and grumpy-looking. I doubted they would look so favorably on our being a partner in a lunar Sin City.

The youthful-looking CEO was also the board chairman. He sat at the head of the long conference table, impeccable in a form-fitted dark blue suit and butter-yellow turtleneck shirt. I envied him. I wanted his job. I wanted his power. But I feared that once the board of directors found out about Hell Crater I could kiss my ambitions goodbye.

Like a dozen other division chiefs, I sat along the side wall of the rectangular conference room, squarely between the comptroller himself and the head of human resources, widely known as Sally the Sob Sister. Sally was a “three-fer” in our corporate diversity program: she was female, black Hispanic, and handicapped (as far as the government was concerned) by her obesity. She was munching something, as usual, slyly reaching down into the capacious tote bag she had deposited at her feet. On the comptroller’s other side sat Ms. Marlowe, golden blonde, radiantly beautiful, her china-blue eyes fastened on the CEO’s chiseled features.

The meeting went along well enough; only a few points of disagreement and the usual grumbles from directors who felt that a nine percent increase in the corporation’s net income wasn’t good enough to suit them.

They droned on all morning. We broke for lunch and adjourned to the next room, where a sumptuous buffet table had been laid out. Sally the Sob Sister made a virtual Mt. Everest on her plate and gobbled it all down fast enough to come back for more. I couldn’t eat a thing, although I took a few leafs of salad and pretended to nibble on them, standing in a corner by the windows that looked out on the canal that runs through the heart of Amsterdam.

“I say, Pierre, I want to ask you about something.”

I turned to see one of the women directors, Mrs. Haverstraw. She was British, an elegant lady with snow-white hair beautifully coiffed and a long, horse-like face complete with huge projecting teeth. She could barely keep her lips closed over them. She wore a light blue skirted suit, touched off with massive sapphires at her wrists, throat, and earlobes.

“Mrs. Haverstraw,” I said, in my best fawning manner. “And how is Mr. Haverstraw?”

“He’s dead. Kicked off last month. Skydiving accident.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“I’m not. He always was a pompous twit. Rich as Croesus, though, I’m happy to say.”

“I’m so glad.”

“Yes, rather. I wanted to ask you, though, about this invitation to go to the Moon.”

I felt the blood drain out of my face.

“Does Rockledge have a tourist center on the Moon now?” Mrs. Haverstraw asked. “And if we do, why hasn’t the board been informed of it?”

I swallowed hard and asked her, in a very small voice, “Um, may I see the invitation, please?”

“I haven’t it with me. It came electronically, just this morning, as I was leaving for this meeting.” She smiled toothily. “I remember the first line of it, though. It said, ‘Go to Hell.’ ”

I wanted to throw up.

If Mrs. Haverstraw had received an invitation to visit Hell Crater, then every member of the board must have as well. So that was Sam’s plan all along. He conned me into this scheme to destroy me, to humiliate me in front of the board of directors, to get me fired, ruined, disgraced. I could hear his mocking laughter in my mind.

“I say, Mr. D’Argent, are you quite all right?”

I focused on Mrs. Haverstraw, who was staring at me quizzically.

“I’m … I’m a little surprised, that’s all,” I said, thinking faster than I ever had before in my life. “We had … planned to announce the, eh, tourist facility at the meeting today. Under new business.”

“Oh, goodie,” said Mrs. Haverstraw, suddenly almost girlish in her enthusiasm. “I love surprises.”

I went back into the conference room, my mind spinning. The meeting resumed, dragging along. Next to me, the comptroller sat staring blankly into space, stupefied into quiescence by the boring proceedings. On my other side, Sally continued to sneak food into her mouth. Crumbs littered the carpeting around her. Ms. Marlowe breathed deeply and continued to focus on the CEO.

At last, the CEO looked around the long conference table and smiled handsomely. “That completes our agenda, ladies and gentlemen. Except for one item of new business.”

Mrs. Haverstraw looked my way.

I got to my feet, brushed a few of Sally’s errant crumbs from my trousers, and cleared my throat uneasily. If the board didn’t like the idea of Rockledge’s building a Sin City on the Moon, my career was finished. Clever of the CEO to make me the messenger.

Half a dozen of the directors had already pushed their chairs back from the table, ready to leave. They glared and grumbled.

“As you know,” I began, trying to put the best face on the situation, “the space operations division has always been at the frontier of innovation and …” I struggled for a word “… and, uh, progress.”

Several gray heads nodded, although I saw a few impatient stares as well.

“Today I’d like to announce that we have nearly completed a tourist facility on the Moon, at Hell Crater.”

That stirred them. The CEO kept his expression neutral, although I thought he snuck a quick glance in Ms. Marlowe’s direction.

I took a deep breath and began to explain what we were building at Hell Crater, all the while thinking of how Sam would have done it. I’m no spellbinder, but I managed to spin out a vision of a tourist facility that would rival anything on Earth, while skirting the matter of gambling and prostitution.

“And on the Moon,” I went on, “with its one-sixth gravity, there’s no problem of people becoming space sick, yet they still weigh only one-sixth of what they do on Earth.”

“What about our space sickness cure?”

“We’ll still sell it to people going into orbit. That’s a firm market. And tourists heading for the Moon will be in weightlessness for a day or so. They’ll buy our pills too.”

“But will people go all the way to the Moon for a vacation?”

“Of course they will,” I enthused, crossing my fingers behind my back. “And they’ll book their passages aboard Rockledge spacecraft.”

“This is a family resort?” one of the younger men asked. “Not for adults?”

“There will be plenty of entertainment for adults as well as families,” I said.

They grilled me for the better part of an hour. By the end of it, the board was satisfied that the Hell Crater project would be a moneymaker. I even began to believe it myself.

“That explains the invitation I received this morning,” said the oldest member of the board, a crooked smile snaking across his withered face. “I was going to ask you about it, after the meeting.”

“ ‘Go to Hell,’ ” quoted a balding director seated halfway down the long table. “Catches your attention, doesn’t it?”

Everyone laughed, rather guardedly, I thought.

Swallowing hard again, I apologized weakly. “Publicity people sometimes lack a sense of decorum.”

“Well, I’m ready to go,” said the younger director who had asked about adult entertainment; “How about the rest of you?”

Thus the entire Rockledge board of directors decided to attend the grand opening of the Hell Crater resort.

You’ve got to understand that up until this moment none of the directors knew that Rockledge was in partnership with Sam Gunn. I wanted to keep it that way as I met with the CEO after the board meeting, in the privacy of his airport-sized office.

“Although we’re a full partner with, um, the builders of the facility,” I said, “I thought it best to keep Rockledge’s name out of the limelight on this. After all, we’re not really in the resort business.”

He pursed his sculpted lips. “Perhaps we should be, Pierre. There’s a lot of money in entertainment.”

It was the first time he’d ever called me by my first name! I didn’t even realize that he knew my first name !

I managed to hide my elation and warn, “There is also a lot of risk in the entertainment business, sir. I believe we should enter this area very carefully.”

“Good thinking,” he said. Then, with a sly smile spreading across his sculptured features he added, “I believe the comptroller should have a representative go to Hell with the board and a few chosen members of senior management.”

“Yes,” I agreed immediately. “Of course.”

So the entire board of directors, their spouses or significant others, and a select few employees (including Ms. Marlowe) packed into a Rockledge rocket vehicle that took us to the Moon. The CEO ordained a high-thrust flight, so we were in zero gravity for only twenty hours, enough to prove the efficacy of the corporation’s space sickness pills.

Despite her nervousness at flying into space, my wife thoroughly enjoyed our first day at Hell Crater. Sam was nowhere in sight, of course, one of the few times he displayed enough common sense to remain behind the scene. Not a mention of his name anywhere in the complex.

The complex was built inside a huge dome of lunar concrete that was covered with rubble from the Moon’s dusty surface soil for protection against radiation and the day/night temperature swings. From outside it looked like a large perfectly symmetrical hill. Inside, the dome was studded with amusement arcades; fine restaurants and fast-food cafeterias; Dante’s Inferno Casino; an office where you could rent wings and fly on your own muscle power through the dome; The Imaginarium, which featured the very latest in virtual reality simulations (including sex fantasies); and a garishly lit “entertainment center” blatantly named Hell’s Belles.

There were lights and raucous music everywhere, and plenty of smiling attendants in colorful uniforms to guide us and answer our questions. The Rockledge contingent were the only guests in the complex, a total of about fifty of us. The resort wasn’t open to the general public yet, so we had the run of the place, no waiting in lines, no being told, “I’m sorry, we’re fully booked.” And no news media to snoop on us.

Burrowed belowground there was a five-star hotel, a medical complex that specialized in cosmetic and rejuvenation therapies, a tastefully decorated mall of boutique shoppes, and living quarters for the surprisingly large staff.

We wandered from one spectacular site to another, goggle-eyed. I was shocked to see that my wife was passionate about gambling; I couldn’t tear her away from the slot machines. We were each given a thousand credits on the house, and she was running it up into a respectable fortune. I realized that Sam was letting her win; it would simply be added to Rock-ledge’s payments to S. Gunn Enterprises, sooner or later. It was just as well that she was so fascinated with the slots, I told myself. Let her stay in the casino; then she won’t get curious about Hell’s Belles or the sex simulations at the virtual reality center.

Even the CEO seemed to enjoy himself immensely. I’d never before seen him smile so broadly, nor heard him laugh out loud.

“This place is going to be a great success,” he said to me, actually clapping me on the back as we stood at the blackjack table. “Congratulations, Pierre.”

His wife was nowhere in sight, even though she herself was a member of the board of directors. Ms. Marlowe was standing close to the CEO, in a spectacularly low cut sequined gown.

Then he leaned closer and whispered in my ear, “Now to pry it away from Sam Gunn.”

The hotel suite my wife and I shared was sumptuous, to say the least. But as I lay in the darkness of our bedroom that first night, an uneasiness began to assail me. I wasn’t worried about booting Sam out of Hell; the little sneak would do the same to me if he could. No, what worried me was the splendor of it all. This is all too good, I thought. Sam must have spent huge amounts of money to build this complex, far more than the Rockledge funding I had funneled to him.

We were scheduled for an excursion to Selene the next morning, although about half the board members said they wanted to remain in Hell; lunar scenery and a tour of the oldest human settlement on the Moon didn’t interest them as much as the attractions of the resort complex. A few of the younger men wanted to try their hands at flying like birds (and then, once their wives were gone, enjoying either virtual or actual sex). I told the CEO I wasn’t going to Selene either because I had to stay and confer with Sam. He nodded understanding and gave me a knowing wink. My wife was less sympathetic. She absolutely refused to go outside the complex’s dome without me.

“But I have business to conduct, darling,” I told her.

She arched an eyebrow at me. “At that virtual reality place, no doubt. I understand you can program sexual fantasies there.”

I was aghast that she could think that of me. “Heavens no!” I said. “I have to meet with Sam Gunn.”

“Sam Gunn? That reprehensible little brat? I’d rather you visited Hell’s Belles.”

I assured her that I was meeting with Sam, and she finally decided to believe me. “I believe I’ll take a look at the cosmetic clinics down on the lower level. They have some lovely shops down there, too,” she said.

I knew she intended to spend every credit she’d made at the slot machines the night before, and then some. Ah well, I thought. Peace at any price. Then I remembered an old bit of wisdom from Monte Carlo: money won by a gambler is merely loaned.

Sam’s private office was rather modest, compared to the ego palaces of men like my CEO. It was part of a small suite nestled into the office complex between Dante’s Inferno and The Imaginarium. His private office held a small desk and a couple of chairs, nothing more, although the walls were smart screens. When I walked in, one wall displayed a view of Mare Nubium: empty, desolate, yet strangely beautiful, especially with a nearly full Earth hanging in the black sky.

Sam was leaning back in his swivel chair and grinning like the proverbial Cheshire Cat. The wall behind his desk was a collage of photos of Sam with the movers and shakers of the world, as well as Sam with various scantily clad women, each one a knockout.

“So how do you like the place, Oh Silver-Haired Partner of Mine?”

I felt a frown knit my face. Sam was being altogether too familiar, just like the irreverent rogue. I said nothing as I sat in front of his desk, but my frown turned to surprise. The chair was much lower than I had expected; even in the soft lunar gravity I thumped onto its seat. Sam was actually sitting higher than I was.

“It’s a trick Josef Stalin used,” he told me before I could say a word. “Put your chair on a platform and saw the legs down on your visitors’ chairs.”

“I should have expected as much,” I growled, “from you.”

“Don’t be touchy, Silver One. Isn’t the complex terrific? Your boss seemed to have a great time. I see he brought la Marlowe with him.”

“It’s terrific all right,” I growled. “Too terrific.”

Sam’s pie plate of a face took on a look of hurt innocence. “Whaddaya mean?”

“Sam, you couldn’t possibly have built all this and staffed it so handsomely on the funding Rockledge has provided you.”

He steepled his fingers in front of his face for a moment, then nodded. “No fooling you, eh?”

“What’s going on?”

“Well, I knew the half-bill you ponied up wouldn’t cover everything I wanted to do, so I took in another partner.”

“Another partner? You can’t do that! The terms of our agreement—”

“Not really a partner, not legally,” Sam interjected, looking like a mischievous imp. “I used your funding as leverage for a loan that really paid for building the complex. And staffing it.”

“A loan? Who in his right” mind would loan you a penny, unless you held the threat of blackmail over him?”

“There are people,” Sam said slowly, “who specialize in high-risk loans.”

“People? Who?”

“They also have a lot of experience in running gambling casinos and, uh, other entertaining diversions.”

“Experience in—” Suddenly it hit me. “Oh my God! The Mafia! You’re in with the Mafia!”

Sam tut-tutted. “They haven’t called themselves that in half a century. And they’re international now, not just Sicilian: there’s Russians, Japanese, Colombians; they’ve gone global, just like all the other major industries.”

“The Mafia,” I groaned. “You’re in league with—”

“Call them the Syndicate. That’s the name they prefer.”

“They’re the bloody Mafia!” I snapped.

“Be polite to them,” Sam warned. “Call them the Syndicate when you talk to them.”

“Me? Talk to the likes of them? Never!”

Sam shook his head sadly. “Never say never, pal.” And he pointed with a stubby finger past my shoulder.

Turning, I saw a slinky, sultry, sallow-cheeked young woman with lustrous long black hair and smoldering dark almond-shaped eyes set in high cheekbones. How long she had been standing in the doorway of Sam’s office I had no way of knowing. I distinctly remembered having closed the door when I came into the office. She must have opened it without making a sound.

Sam got to his feet. “Pierre, mon confrere, may I introduce Ilyana Campanella Chang. Ilyana, Pierre D’Argent, head of space operations for—”

“For Rockledge Industries, I know,” she said in a smoky voice. Ms. Chang was wearing a skintight black dress that showed a tantalizing amount of bosom and shimmered as she walked to the chair next to mine. “Walked” is only an approximation of the way she moved. She reminded me of a jungle beast, a sleek black leopard or maybe a slithering boa constrictor. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. She sat down and crossed her long, beautiful legs.

Sam was staring at her, too. He had always been partial to sultry brunettes. And bubbly blondes. And tempestuous redheads. Sam was an equal-opportunity chaser, making no discrimination against anyone female who was even mildly attractive. Ms. Chang was much more than mild. Much.

“Ilyana is the Syndicate’s local representative,” Sam said, in a voice choked with testosterone. Or perhaps it was fear.

She smiled silkily at me. “What you call the Mafia. As Sam told you, we have become a global enterprise. My own family heritage is part Russian, part Italian, and part Chinese.”

“The Ma—” I cut the word short. “I mean, the Syndicate. You?”

“Does that surprise you?” she asked.

I glanced at Sam. He was still walleyed, obviously enraptured by this vision of dangerous loveliness.

“Frankly, it does,” I replied. “I wouldn’t think that a young woman such as yourself would be involved in criminal activities.”

Her smile widened enough to show teeth. “I was born to it. I’m a Family person, on both sides of my family.”

“I’ll be damned,” I muttered.

“Well, you are in Hell,” Sam said, regaining some of his composure.

“And you will remain here,” said Ilyana, with a hint of steel in her voice, “until our business is brought to a satisfactory conclusion.”

“Our business? What business?”

“Our global operation is expanding,” said Ms. Chang. “We’re going interplanetary.”

I understood her immediately. “You want to get your hooks into this facility, here on the Moon.”

She smiled approvingly at me. “Mr. Gunn, here—our darling Sam—has borrowed a rather large sum of money from the Syndicate. It is time to repay.”

I drew myself up straighten “That’s got nothing to do with me.”

“I’m afraid it does,” she said.

Before I could reply, Sam jumped in. “I told you, I used your money as collateral on a bigger loan. None of the regular banks would handle it, so the Syndicate loaned me enough to get this complex built.”

“And staffed,” said Ilyana. “Those are mostly our people out there, dealing at the gaming tables, working in the restaurants and shops and, uh … therapy centers.”

“She means Hell’s Belles,” Sam explained.

“I knew I shouldn’t have let you talk me into this!” I shouted.

“Too late, old pal. Now it’s time to pay the piper.”

I started to answer, but hesitated. All right, Sam had snookered me into this, true enough. But the complex was built. Everything was working fine. It could become a major tourist attraction and a big moneymaker for Rockledge. I reasoned that if I bailed Sam out on this stupid loan, it would be only on the condition that he relinquish all his interest in the resort. Rockledge would have the complex free and clear, which was exactly what the CEO and I wanted.

“How much money are we talking about?” I asked.

“Fifteen billion,” Sam said.

Before I could faint, Ilyana said, “Eighteen billion. You forgot this afternoon’s interest.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right.”

“Eighteen billion?” I screeched.

“Tomorrow morning it will be twenty point six,” Ilyana said sweetly. “The interest mounts rather steeply.”

“How steeply?”

“Forty percent,” Sam answered.

“Compounded semi-daily,” Ilyana added.

“That’s usury!”

Her smile turned pitying. “Rockledge owns a credit service that charges almost as much.”

“It’s still usury,” I insisted.

“Nevertheless,” she said, “that is what is owed. Sam doesn’t have the wherewithal to pay it, so you must.”

“Me? When elephants fly! Why don’t you just kill the little sonofabitch and be done with it?”

Ilyana made a little pout. “What good would killing Sam do? We want the money you owe us, not a corpse.”

“Besides,” Sam chimed in, “Ilyana and I are thinking about getting married, settling down. Right, hon?”

She blew him a kiss. The little rat! He’s romancing this Mafia princess to save his own skin while he’s putting my neck on the guillotine!

Ilyana turned back to me. “I’m afraid you must pay, Mr. D’Argent. You are Sam’s partner, after all, and responsible for his debts. Surely a giant corporation such as Rockledge can afford a few billions.”

“Over my dead—” Again I stopped myself short. Maybe she didn’t want to kill Sam, but I didn’t know how she felt about murder in general.

“Mr. D’Argent,” Ilyana said, almost pleadingly, “don’t make this difficult for us and for yourself. You must pay. Otherwise your board of directors will never return to Earth. Alive, that is.”

“You … you’re threatening the entire board?”

“And their spouses, I’m afraid,” Ilyana said, nearly managing to look sad.

“My wife …”

“Your spaceship will have a terrible accident when it leaves the Moon. There will be no survivors.”

“And no witnesses,” Sam added, almost cheerfully.

I glowered at him. “You’ll be a witness.”

“Ah, but I’m going to be married into the Family,” Sam said. “Right, Ilyana, my precious angel?”

She blew him another kiss.

Then she got up from her chair like a beautiful python gliding up a tree and said, “You two gentlemen will want to talk this over, I know. Sam, darling, please call me when you’ve decided what you’re going to do.”

Sam nodded vigorously. Ilyana went to the door while we both watched her, half hypnotized by her graceful beauty.

She opened the door, then turned back toward us. “Oh, by the way, the chairman of our board is staying at the hotel here and would like to meet you both this evening.”

“The chairman of your board?” I echoed.

“Yes. In bygone years he’d be called the capo di tutti capi. Or perhaps the Godfather.”

She smiled sweetly and left the office, closing the door behind her without making a sound.

For several moments Sam and I were absolutely silent. At last I said, “She must be marvelous in bed.”

“How would I know?” Sam replied, spreading his hands in a gesture of innocence. “For all I know, she’s still a virgin.”

“You mean you haven’t—”

“Not one finger. If I even tried to, a dozen goons would drag me off to her Godfather, who would hang me by my cojones and use my head for batting practice.”

I groaned. “Sam, Sam … how did I ever let you talk me into this?”

“That’s not important now. The problem now is, how are we going to get out of this?”

He had a point.

I couldn’t go to my CEO and ask for twenty billion dollars. The half-billion I had funneled to Sam had been a major strain. And I couldn’t face their Godfather without having the twenty billion to hand over to him. As I sat there sweating, Sam drummed his fingers on his desk.

“I’m pretty sure they won’t kill you,” he said at last.

“Pretty sure?”

“What good would it do them?”

“It certainly wouldn’t do me much good,” I groused. “Nor my wife. Nor the board of directors.”

“Let me think about this,” Sam said, scratching at his red thatch of hair. “There’s gotta be a way out.”

I thought of the line from Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus: “Why this is hell, nor am I out of it.”

My wife and I were scheduled to have dinner with the CEO, his wife, and several key board members at Hell Crater’s finest restaurant, The Fallen Angel. Ordinarily an invitation like this would have been a step toward promotion, perhaps even an opportunity to join the board. I should have been overjoyed and eager with anticipation. Instead, as I put on my tuxedo that evening and struggled with the shirt studs, what I felt was anxiety bordering on dread.

I explained to my wife that I had to have cocktails with Sam Gunn and a few of his associates before dinner. She frowned with distaste, but accepted the situation.

“Business before pleasure,” she said grandly. Then added, “So long as it’s not monkey business with that little womanizer.”

Sam’s reputation was known everywhere, even among corporate wives. Especially among corporate wives.

The Godfather’s suite was only a few doors down the corridor from our own. I gave my wife a peck on the cheek while she was deciding which of the necklaces laid out on the dressing table before her would be best to wear with the gown she had bought earlier that afternoon. She barely nodded as I took my leave of her. Good thing, too, because Ms. Chang opened the door to her Godfather’s suite when I pressed the buzzer. She was wearing an ankle-length sheath of glittering metallic black, its skirt slit up to her shapely hip. If my wife had seen her, real hell would have broken loose over my head.

Ms. Chang gestured me into the suite’s thickly carpeted sitting room. Four rather lumpy-looking men in dark suits looked me over as if they had X-ray eyes. No one spoke a word. I stood uneasily by the door for a moment. Then in came Sam from the adjoining room, with the Godfather at his side, both of them in tuxedos.

He didn’t look Sicilian. I mean, he wasn’t a heavy, swarthy, sour-faced man. Not at all. Don Guido Alexandreivich Popov was as slim as a saber blade. His thickly luxuriant hair was a light sandy blond; his eyes a piercing light gray. He wasn’t much taller than Sam, and several centimeters shorter than I. Yet he radiated power, a self-assurance that comes from having enormous resources at your command.

Ms. Chang performed the introductions. Popov’s handshake was firm without being blatantly muscular. His eyes searched mine as he smiled and said, “So where’s my twenty bill?”

I must have blanched, because he laughed and added, “I don’t expect it this evening. Relax. Have a drink.” His voice was slightly scratchy, rough, as if his vocal cords had been damaged.

As he directed me toward the bar, Ms. Chang said, “Actually, it’s twenty point six billion. As of the opening of business tomorrow morning.”

Popov shrugged. “Twenty, twenty point six, let’s not quibble.”

One of the dark-suited thugs slipped behind the bar and poured him what appeared to be a tumbler of spring water. Sam asked for a pinot grigio and Ms. Chang ordered vodka, neat. I needed a whisky, badly, but I decided that I should keep my head clear.

“I’ll have the same as Mr. Popov,” I said to the man behind the bar.

He glanced at Popov, who smiled and tapped me on the shoulder. “I’m used to drinking grappa,” he said. “Are you?”

“Grappa?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“It’s the Italian version of acetylene,” Sam piped up. “You can use it to burn through bank safes.”

Popov laughed, a grating, painful sound. “Maybe you’d prefer something else, Mr. D’Argent.”

I settled for sparkling water.

Popov gestured me to a chair by the window. He took the one opposite me while Sam and Ms. Chang nestled in the love seat between us.

He took a sip of his drink. “I need it for my throat. Soothes the vocal cords.”

Or burns them out, I thought. But I kept my thoughts to myself. Sam sat by Ms. Chang’s side, grinning like a schoolboy on a date with the prom queen. The musclemen in their dark suits stayed back by the bar, silent as ponderous wraiths. An uncomfortable silence enveloped the room.

“So,” Popov said at last, “how are we going to resolve this situation?”

“I don’t see how you can expect Rockledge Corporation to pay a debt that Sam’s run up,” I said, as firmly as I could.

“He’s your partner,” said Popov. “You’re legally responsible.”

“We never approved the loan he took from you.”

“Makes no difference.”

“It does, legally.”

“I guess it’s a little unusual for you,” Popov granted, “but it happens all the time in my business.”

“It’s not that unusual in the legitimate world,” Sam said. “It’s the ‘deep pockets’ ploy. Go after the guy with the deepest pocket of money.”

Popov nodded and beamed at Sam like a prospective Godfather-in-law.

“But Rockledge didn’t incur this debt.”

Popov shrugged.

“It would ruin my career if I so much as asked my CEO to pay it.”

He shrugged more elaborately.

“I can’t do it,” I said.

“That’s too bad,” Popov replied. “I had hoped to avoid making a mess.”

“You can’t murder the entire board of directors!” I said. “You’d never get away with it. And what good would it do you, anyway?”

Popov sighed patiently, then ticked off on his fingers, “One: We’ll get away with it. We make a business out of getting away with things like this. Rockets blow up sometimes. It’ll be a tragic accident. Two: Rockledge will have to find a new CEO and a whole new board of directors. Guess who owns enough Rockledge stock to take control, once the old board is out of the way?”

I felt stunned. “You? You wouldn’t! You couldn’t!”

“He would and he could,” Sam said. “Trust me on that.”

“I wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw a … a… a herd of buffalos!”

“Now, now,” Popov said placatingly, “let’s not get emotional here. We’re talking business.”

“You’re talking murder.”

“But it’s business, not personal. I’ve got nothing against you, personally. This is strictly business.”

Sam’s face suddenly lit up. “But suppose that, instead of business, we made it a sporting proposition.”

“What do you mean, Sam?” Ms. Chang asked, shifting slightly on the love seat to rub against Sam like a purring cat. It was enough to raise my already high blood pressure an extra few points.

“Uncle Guido,” Sam asked, “have you ever played cards for a twenty-billion-dollar stake?”

“Twenty point six,” Ms. Chang murmured.

Popov stared at Sam as if he didn’t understand what the little devil was talking about. Then a slow smile of recognition crept across his craggy face.

“Double or nothing?” he asked.

Sam grinned. “Why not? What’ve we got to lose?”

Before I could object, the two men shook hands on it.

Popov got to his feet, and the rest of us did, too. “I understand you have a dinner engagement, Mr. D’Argent.”

“Yes, I do, but—”

“Enjoy your dinner.” He turned to Sam. “What do you say to meeting me in Dante’s Inferno at midnight, Sam?”

“Okay by me.”

“Double or nothing,” Popov reminded us.

“Okay by me,” Sam repeated.

Of course it was okay by him! He’d be playing with Rockledge’s money!

Dinner that evening was the longest, dreariest, most nerve-racking meal I’ve ever had. I couldn’t eat a bite, but nobody seemed to notice or care. My wife and Mrs. CEO were seated next to one another and chattered away happily. The CEO himself sat at my other side and made broad hints about how I was about to take a big step up the corporate ladder. Even his wife allowed that if I made it to the board of directors I could sit beside her. I thought to myself that getting higher in the corporation merely gave me more leg room when I hanged myself.

I couldn’t let the board of directors get on that rocket that Popov was going to blow up. It would be easy enough to keep my wife and myself off it; I could always claim that I had some details about the resort to take care of. But how I could keep the CEO and the rest of the board off the rocket without telling them of the fix that Sam had gotten me into? It would be bad enough to confess that I’d put the corporation into this mess, but to admit that it was Sam Gunn who’d led me by the nose into it—that would be unbearable.

And there was Sam, the miserable little rat, with the exquisite Ms. Chang at an intimate candlelit table for two, far on the other side of the restaurant. They seemed totally absorbed in each other.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I told myself. Excusing myself from the table while the dessert course was being served, I made a beeline for the men’s room. It was positively opulent, but I had no time to admire the faux marble paneling and asteroidal gold plumbing fixtures. Locking myself into a booth, I slipped my phone off my wrist and called Popov.

He was apparently still in his suite, and still in his tuxedo. In the wrist phones minuscule screen I couldn’t see if anyone else was in the room with him.

Popov smiled when he recognized my face. “Mr. D’Argent.”

“I have a proposition for you, sir,” I said, without preamble.

“A proposition?”

I took a deep breath and plunged in. Popov listened in silence. Finally, when I was finished, he nodded solemnly.

“I’m wary of Sam Gunn, also,” he said, in his harsh, painful rasp. “I don’t believe his intentions toward my niece are entirely honorable.”

“He’s about as honorable as Jack the Ripper,” I said.

Popov pursed his lips. “This will break my Ilyana’s heart.”

“Better now than later, when Sam betrays her.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said slowly.

It took several more minutes, but at last he agreed to my proposition. Then I placed a quick call to Rockledge’s legal department, back at corporate headquarters on Earth. The chief counsel didn’t like being disturbed during her dinner hour, but once she heard what I wanted her to do she willingly agreed to do it.

“We’re partnered to S. Gunn Enterprises?” she yelped. “You’d damned will better get out of that deal!”

By the time I got back to the dinner table, everyone was having coffee and liqueurs. It was past eleven PM when my wife and I finally got back to our hotel suite. The phone’s message light was blinking, and before I could get to it my wife called out to the phone to play the message.

Sam’s impish face came up on the screen, looking dead serious for a change. “Pierre, monjouer aux cartes, can you come up to my office right away? It’s important. Any time before eleven-thirty. Please.” And his face took on such an expression of distress that my wife looked troubled.

“The poor man looks as if his heart is going to break,” she said.

More likely his gall bladder, I thought, but I kept it to myself. Has he found out about my deal with Popov? I wondered.

“I’m not going to Sam’s office,” I grumbled. “Not at this time of night.”

“But he said it’s important.” My wife has her faults, and one of them is a soft heart. Show her a picture of a puppy or a kitten and she’ll buy whatever’s being pushed. Sam was playing the puppy, of course. I realized that he must know more about me and my wife than I had ever suspected.

Grumbling, I went through the motions of phoning him back; no answer. Not even a video mail system where I could leave a message.

“You’d better go to his office,” my wife said. “And quickly, it’s nearly eleven-thirty.”

I got as far as the elevator at the end of the corridor. Sam was waiting for me there, his woebegone look replaced by an expression of impish glee.

“I didn’t think you’d want to miss the big card game,” he said, waving his hand in front of the elevator’s heat-sensitive call button. He didn’t know a thing about my Popov deal; he was grinning like a kid playing hooky from school.

“My wife—”

“I’ve sent her a bottle of champagne with a note apologizing for taking you away from her,” Sam said cheerfully. “She’ll be asleep in twenty minutes, half an hour at most.”

Before I could say another word the elevator doors slid open. Two of Popov’s grim-faced thugs were already in it.

“Come to escort me to the game?” Sam said to them. “How thoughtful the Godfather is!”

I had no option except to go with Sam up to the main floor, with all its .garish lights and arcades, and into Dante’s Inferno.

The casino was strangely empty. Popov’s people had closed the gaming center to the general public—meaning Rockledge personnel. Sam and I, followed by the two silent, stone-faced goons, threaded our way through tables for roulette, craps, blackjack, all covered by gray plastic sheets. The slot machines and video games were dark and still. Most of the overhead lights were off: the casino was draped in shadows, mysterious and somehow threatening.

Except for one green-topped card table, sharply lit by halogen lamps, in the middle of the vast floor. Popov sat there, still in his tux, Ms. Chang at his side and a half-dozen more gorillas on their feet behind him. One empty chair waited across the table from Popov. An unopened pack of cards rested on the table, with two piles of chips, one in front of Popov, the other at the empty chair that was waiting for Sam.

“You’re late, Sam,” said Popov as we stepped into the pool of glaringly bright light.

“I had to stop on the way and pick up my partner,” Sam said carelessly, gesturing toward me. Just like the lying little sneak, blaming me.

Sam plopped in the empty chair and noisily cracked his knuckles. I shuddered. Popov smiled in such a sinister way that it made me shudder even more. Ms. Chang smiled too, but much more alluringly.

“We each have a hundred thousand dollars worth of chips,” Popov said, his grating voice sounding ominous. “We play until one of us goes broke. Okay by you?”

“Okay by me,” said Sam.

I stood behind Sam. There was no other chair for me to sit in. Popov called the first round: five-card draw poker.

I have never seen such cheating in my entire life! As I stood behind Sam, I saw treys turn into aces before my astounded eyes; cards changed their suits, going from spades to hearts or whatever Sam needed. It was all I could do to keep my eyes from popping out of my skull.

Popov must have been cheating too. He had to be, or else Sam would have blown him out of the water in the first ten minutes. He’d win a hand, and Sam would fiddle with one of his shirt studs and take the next pot. I realized that both men were loaded with every electronic and optical sensor known to humankind.

Sam began to pull ahead. The pile of chips in front of him grew while Popov’s diminished. Ms. Chang played hostess, getting up from time to time to bring drinks to the two players. The goons behind Popov never moved; they stood there like menacing statues.

After a while I realized that whenever Ms. Chang refreshed Sam’s drink Popov started winning. Sam didn’t seem to mind: soon enough he’d pull ahead again with full houses and straight flushes, no matter which cards he was dealt.

“Let’s take a kidney break,” Popov said at last. His chips were down to a perilously low level.

“Okay by me,” said Sam cheerfully from behind a small mountain of chips. He got up and headed for one of the restrooms; Popov went in the opposite direction, convoyed by his gorillas, leaving Ms. Chang alone.

I was getting frantic. If Sam won, I’d be ruined—and Popov would take it out on me. I glanced at my wristwatch. It was almost two AM I hadn’t counted on Sam’s cheating. I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. Of course the despicable little scoundrel would cheat!

I followed Sam into the restroom. “Sam, you’re cheating,” I accused.

“No kidding,” he answered lightly. “What do you think the Godfather is doing, playing tiddlywinks?”

“I can’t allow cheating. It’s wrong, Sam.”

“Tell Popov. Those goons standing behind him are reading my cards with infrared sensors for him.”

“The cards are marked?”

“Does Santa Claus live at the North Pole?”

“But—”

“I’ve been using nanomachines kind of creatively, myself,” Sam admitted. “It’s one helluva game.”

A duel of double-dealing, swindling con artists. I had the terrible feeling that in a competition like this against Sam, the Mafia was like a gang of schoolyard bullies trying to beat up on Superman.

Sam started back to the table with me following glumly behind him. Sam’s got to lose, I kept repeating to myself. Everything depends on Popov beating him.

For the next couple of hours the game seesawed back and forth while I stood there sweating. Gradually, Popov’s pile of chips was growing, Sam’s shrinking. Both men were still cheating with every device known to modern technology.

One of Popov’s goons moved Ms. Chang’s chair to Sam’s side of the table, and she sat demurely beside him. I still had to stand. Sam covered his cards so carefully that I could no longer see them. Ahah! I thought. He doesn’t trust his inamorata.

For the next hour Popov won steadily. Sam fiddled with his shirt studs, scratched behind his ears, adjusted his cufflinks, all to no avail. He even took off one of his shoes and shook it as if it were filled with pebbles. It did no good. The chips were flowing across the table to Popov’s pile, hand after hand. Sam looked grimmer and grimmer; he pulled his bow tie loose and ran his hands through his bristly hair. Popov just smiled wider and wider. Even the thugs standing behind his chair began to relax and nudge each other knowingly.

At last Sam looked across the table at Popov and his massive pile of chips and said, “Okay, Godfather. Let’s put an end to this. High card takes it all.”

Popov looked at Sam for a long, silent moment. “One trick for the whole pot?”

Sam nodded slowly. I saw sweat trickling down his cheek.

Popov nodded back and called for a fresh pack of cards. “High card wins it all,” he said as one of the goons unwrapped the new deck.

Sam shuffled the cards. Popov cut the deck, then pushed it across the green-topped table to Sam.

“Draw,” he said.

Sam pushed the deck back toward him. “You go first, Godfather.”

Popov looked from Sam to Ms. Chang to me and then back at Sam again. He reached out one hand and took the top card from the deck.

An eight of clubs.

No one spoke. No one even breathed. My mind was spinning. My legs went weak. An eight! Sam can top an eight easily. I’m ruined!

Sam shook his head slightly, then pulled the next card.

Four of diamonds.

“Oh, Sam,” breathed Ms. Chang.

“Shit,” said Sam.

The goons behind Popov chuckled. Popov himself allowed a satisfied smile to creep across his craggy face.

“Well, that’s it, Mr. D’Argent,” he said to me, playing his role to the end. “You owe me forty billion dollars.”

With a relieved smile I replied, “No, I don’t. Sam owes you, not me.”

“You’re my partner!” Sam yelped. “You’ve got to—”

“As of midnight Rockledge Industries dissolved its partnership with S. Gunn Enterprises,” I announced. “You’re on your own, Sam.”

He shot out of his chair. “You can’t break our partnership unilaterally!”

“I can and I did,” I told him, perhaps a trifle smugly. “You should have read our agreement more carefully, Sam. The contract clearly states in clause thirty-seven, subparagraph sixteen, that either party can dissolve the partnership on moral grounds.”

“Moral grounds!” Sam yipped. “What moral grounds?”

I drew myself up to my full height. “Rockledge Industries will not be party to an operation that promotes gambling and prostitution, even though it might be legal in the locality in which it is situated.”

“But you knew about it from the git-go!”

I shook my head. “That makes no difference. The partnership is dissolved. Rockledge has no further responsibilities to you, Mr. Gunn.”

He stood there gaping at me, his collar open and bow tie hanging loosely down the wrinkled, sweaty front of his shirt.

“You can’t do this to me!” Sam whined.

“It’s done,” I said. Then I turned on my heel and headed for the casino’s exit, grinning happily. This was going to cost Rockledge twenty billion, I knew, but it’d be worth it to get rid of Sam Gunn—and my CEO, in the bargain.

From behind me I heard Popov’s voice: “Sam, you owe me forty bill.”

I quickened my pace and practically ran out of the casino, thinking, This is the end of Sam Gunn.

By the time I got my hotel suite I was almost feeling sorry for Sam. But then I told myself that he’d brought this on himself. It’s not my fault. He’s the one who went to the Mafia, or the Syndicate, or whatever they called themselves. Sam should have known better. Play with fire and you get burned.

I took a dose of tranquilizers and crawled into bed beside my sleeping wife, knocking over the ice bucket and what was left of the champagne in the process. They fell to the luxurious carpet in dreamy lunar slow motion. She barely stirred. I thought I’d have bad dreams but actually I slept quite soundly. Perhaps knowing that I’d never again be troubled by Sam Gunn helped.

The next morning as my wife and I waited in our hotel-furnished dressing gowns for room service to deliver our breakfast, Ms. Chang phoned. She was pale and had dark circles beneath her eyes; she looked much less slinky and sultry than the night before, for which I was thankful, since my wife was in the room.

“I just want you to know, Mr. D’Argent, that the little problem we discussed earlier about your return flight to Earth has been resolved. There will be no difficulties about it, none at all.”

I felt a wave of relief surge through me. Despite my better instincts, though, I asked, “And what about Mr. Gunn?”

Her face became somber. “Don’t ask about Sam, Mr. D’Argent. It’s too gruesome to talk about.”

And she broke off the connection.

So we rode back to Earth in comfort and safety.

Once I was safely back in my office in Montreal, I phoned my CEO to tell him that I’d dissolved Rockledge’s partnership with Sam.

“Dissolved it? You mean he owns the Hell Crater complex without us?”

“Yes,” I said, trying to hide my elation. “And we’re paying Sam’s company—or what’s left of it—twenty billion dollars to get out of the deal.”

“Twenty billion?” I’d never seen the CEO turn purple before.

It all went exactly as I planned it. The CEO wanted to fire me, of course, but I used the corporation’s intricate dismissal procedures to delay that process until Rockledge’s next quarterly board meeting. Once the board members—including Mrs. CEO—heard that we had incurred a debt of twenty billion, ostensibly to S. Gunn Enterprises, they scowled mightily at the CEO. He tried to pin the fiasco on me, of course, but I pointed out that despite my warnings he had enthusiastically supported the idea of Rockledge getting into the euphemistically named entertainment industry.

“Once I learned that entertainment, in this case,” I said sternly, “meant gambling and prostitution—and the Mafia—I wanted to pull out of the deal immediately. But I was overruled by the CEO.”

The board members gasped at the mention of the Mafia. They grumbled among themselves. They groused at the CEO. By the end of the meeting, just as I had planned, they voted to remove the CEO as board chairman. They wanted to fire him altogether, but he narrowly averted that fate, by a single vote: his wife’s.

He glowered at me as the meeting broke up and the board members filed out of the conference room.

“I’ll get you for this,” he growled at me.

“No you won’t. You’re going to resign from the corporation; you and Ms. Marlowe, both.”

His eyes went wide. “You … that’s blackmail!”

“A little trick I learned from Sam Gunn,” I gloated.

That was how I became Chief Executive Officer of Rockledge Industries. I owe it all to Sam. I almost felt sorry for the contemptible runt, leaving him to his fate with the Godfather.

Until, that is, I saw a video drama featuring a craggy-faced, raspy-voiced actor named Gus Popov.

An actor! The whole business of the Mafia had been an act, a ploy, a swindle by that little sonofabitch to bilk me out of the twenty billion Sam needed to build the Hell Crater complex. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to—

I hesitated in mid-fury. I had actually come out of this deal rather well. I was now CEO of Rockledge Industries and all the problems with Hell Crater had been pinned on my predecessor. Sam had actually done me a favor: unknowingly, I was sure, but I was far better off now than I’d been a year earlier.

I never found out who Ms. Chang really was: probably another actor; maybe one of Hell’s Belles, for all I knew. A pity. She was certainly beautiful. As for Sam’s whereabouts, who knew? The solar system’s a big place, with plenty of room for a scoundrel like Sam to hide. I had the feeling, though, that he had never left Hell Crater. Why should he? He owned the place!

I started thinking about how Rockledge might take it away from him. After all, he had squeezed Rockledge out of Hell Crater; there must be a way for us to squeeze him back.

It was about six months after I had moved into the old CEOs office when I got a call from—guess who?

“Hi, Pierre, you double-dealing SOB,” Sam said cheerfully. “Hell Crater’s a big moneymaker. Thanks for financing it.”

I was so furious I couldn’t do anything but splutter at Sam’s image on my wall screen.

“Calm down, calm down!” Sam said, grinning like an evil elf. “How’d you like to get your money back? I’ve got this deal cooking for a transit system out to the Asteroid Belt….”