The Sam Gunn Omnibus

The Mark of Zorro

“Nobody can consistently make money in the commodities market,” she said, puffing hard. “The little bastard is cheating, some’ow.”

“How?” I asked.

Wiping a rivulet of sweat from her brow, she answered, “That’s what I want you to find out.”

We were dangling on the sidelines of the volleyball court. The game is rather different in zero gravity. The net is circular, held in the middle of the court by hair-thin monofilament wires. Hit one of those wires and it will slice you like a loaf of salami in a delicatessen. The court itself is spherical, the curving walls hard and unpadded glassteel. The ball can take strange bounces off those walls. So can the players.

There were hardly any spectators watching from the other side of the glassteel. This was a private game, something of a grudge match, as a matter of fact.

Carole C. Chatsworth was a big, blonde, blowsy Cockney who looked and sounded as if she belonged in some cheap burlesque show. Actually, she was a brilliant, hard-driving, absolutely ruthless bureaucrat who had worked her way to the top of the Interplanetary Security Commission’s enforcement division.

And she was a cutthroat volleyball player, the kind who would slam you off the wall or push you into the wire if you got in her way.

She was also my boss, and she was convinced that Sam Gunn was illegally reaping a fortune on the commodities futures market.

“No one can be as lucky as that little sod,” she told me, her eyes following the flying, sweating players. “ ‘E’s rigging the market some’ow.”

When C.C. gets an idea in her head, forget about trying to argue her out of it. The only two questions she’ll put up with are: What do you want me to do? and, How soon?

She had allowed herself to bloat up enormously in zero-gee. The rumor was that she’d originally come up to this orbiting hotel when Sam Gunn owned it and Sam had bedded her. Or maybe the other way around. After all, it was supposed to be a “honeymoon hotel” in those days. Sam’s motto for the place was, “If you like waterbeds, you’ll love zero-gee.”

C.C. never went back Earthside. She moved the ISC headquarters to the hotel, and actually got the Commission to buy half the orbital habitat to provide room for her staff’s offices and living quarters. She was ready to bed down with Sam for life. But Sam pulled one of his disappearing acts on her, leaving her humiliated, furious, and certain that his only interest in her had been to get her to buy out his share of the hotel and run off to the Asteroid Belt with her money.

Maybe hell hath no fury like a woman jilted, but C.C. assuaged her anguish with food. She grew larger and larger, gobbling everything in sight, especially chocolate. Whenever a friend, or a fellow bureaucrat or even a physician commented on her size, she laughed bitterly and said, “But I weigh exactly the same as when I first came up ’ere: zero!”

Now she looked like a lumpy dirigible in a soggy, stained sweat suit as she waited for her next turn in the volleyball competition.

“I thought we’d fixed the little bastard’s wagon when ’e tried to sue the Pope,” she muttered, watching the volleyball action with narrowed, piggy eyes. “But some’ow ’e’s making ’imself rich in the futures market. ’E’s cheating. I know ’e is.”

I did not demur. It would have done no good, especially to my career.

“You’re going to Selene City with the team that’s auditing Sam’s books,” she told me. “Officially, you’re one of the auditors. That’ll be your cover.”

My real job, she told me very firmly, was “to find out how that little cheating, womanizing, swindling scumbag of a deviant ’umper is rigging the commodities market.”

So off I went to the Moon to find Sam Gunn.

I suppose I should introduce myself. My name is Zoilo Hashimoto, the only son of a Japanese-American construction engineer and a Cuban baseball player whose career was cut short by her pregnancy with me. Dad was killed before I was born in the great tsunami that wiped out the hotel complex he was building on Tarawa. Mom returned to baseball as an umpire after her second marriage broke up, which was after my four sisters were born. She was known as a strict enforcer of the rules on the field. Believe me, she was just as strict at home.

Somewhere in my genetic heritage there must have been a basketball player, for despite the diminutive size of both my parents I am nearly two meters tall—six feet, five inches in old-fashioned English units.

I have been told I am handsome, with deep brown eyes and high cheek bones that make me look decidedly oriental. Yet I have never been very successful with women. Perhaps I am too shy, too uncertain of myself. I once tried to grow a beard, but it looked terrible, and the unwritten dress code of the ISC demands clean-shaven men. The unwritten rules are always the important ones, of course.

I had started my career in law enforcement, figuring that I could safely retire after twenty years of police work with enough of a pension to follow my one true passion: archeology. I longed to help search for the ancient cities that were being unearthed on Mars (pardon the unintentional pun). I was never a street officer; the robots had taken over such dangerous duties by the time I graduated college with my degree in criminology. Instead, I specialized in tracking down financial crooks. I worked with computers and electronic ferrets rather than guns and stun wands.

But enough about me. Let me tell you how I met Sam Gunn.

I dutifully went to the Moon, to Sam’s corporate headquarters at Selene City, foolishly expecting Sam to be there, especially with a team of ISC auditors combing through his records. But Sam wasn’t, of course.

He was out at a new solar power satellite that was just going online to provide fifteen gigawatts of electrical power to the growing industrial cities of central Asia.

Years earlier Sam had been one of the first to go out to the asteroids to mine their metals and minerals. He had amassed a considerable fortune and a fleet of ore-processing factory ships. But then disaster struck and he lost it all. In desperation he had tried to sue the Pope, and although he got what he wanted without going to trial, he quickly lost it all. C.C. Chatsworth had been a major force in seeing to it that Sam was broken and humiliated.

But now he was getting rich again. In the commodities market, of all places.

Sam’s present company was in business to service and maintain several solar power satellites and other facilities in Earth orbit and on the Moon. And he was out at the newest of the sunsats, rather than in his offices in Selene City.

I was reluctant to go the satellite to meet him. Those huge sunsats ride in geosynchronous orbit, nearly thirty-six thousand kilometers above the equator, on the fringes of the outer Van Allen Belt. There’s a lot of ionizing radiation out there, and I didn’t like the idea of living in it, even inside a shielded space suit.

But that’s where Sam was and that’s where I had to go. Or face the sizeable wrath of the sizeable C.C. Chatsworth.

So I rode an OTV (orbital transfer vehicle, to landlubbers) from Selene to Sunsat Seventeen. An OTV is the most utilitarian of utility vehicles, nothing more than a collection of tankage, cargo containers, crew pod and engines.

I sat crammed behind the two pilots during the whole nine-hour trip, staring out the curving port of the crew pod, watching the graceful blue and white sphere of Earth grow and grow until it was a massive, dazzling presence of overwhelming beauty, deep blue oceans and resplendent white clouds, wrinkled old mountains with bony fingers of snow clutching their crests. Even the sprawling cities looked almost pretty from this vantage point.

Then the sunsat swung into view, blocking out everything else, huge and square and so close that my heart clutched in my chest; I thought we were going to plunge right into it.

It was ten kilometers long and six klicks across, a huge flat expanse of solar cells that drank in sunlight and converted it silently to electricity. Off at one end were the magnetrons that transformed the electricity into microwave energy, and the big steerable antennas that beamed the microwaves to receiving antenna farms on Earth.

I had expected the sunsat to glitter and gleam, like a jewel or a huge light in the sky. Instead it was dark and silent, greedily soaking up sunlight, not reflecting it.

Except down at the end where the magnetrons were. They were sparking and flashing spectacularly, blue electrical snakes writhing all across them, shooting off brilliant lightning flashes into the dead black emptiness of space. It was all in eerie silence, naturally, but in my mind I could imagine the crackling and hissing of gigawatts of electricity straining to get loose.

“Nothing to be alarmed about,” said the OTV pilot over his shoulder to me, shoehorned in behind him. The man’s voice was decidedly quavering. “Besides, we’ll be docking several klicks away from that mess.”

He docked us at the port on the shaded underside of the sunsat, where the so-called living quarters were. There were only three people there, two Asian women and a frowning, bearded, bald, portly European man. They all looked nervous, worried. Much to my consternation, the OTV pulled away and headed back for the Moon as soon as it detached its cargo pods. Its crew never waited to find out if I wanted to return with them.

I was informed by the worried-looking trio that Sam was “up topside,” working with the technicians who were trying to fix the “transient” that was afflicting the magnetrons.

They pulled a space suit out of a locker and before I realized what was happening they were stuffing me into it. The suit was brand new and stiff; it smelled of freshly cured plastic and cleaning oils, like a new car. Believe it or not, in those days it was difficult to find a suit that would fit someone as tall as I. This one barely did; my fingers were cramped in the gloves, and my toes crunched uncomfortably into the boots. I felt as if I had to stoop to keep the suit from popping open on me.

Once I was suited up they hustled me to the access tube that led up and out to the sunlit side of the satellite.

I had been in space suits before; they saw that on my dossier, so they felt no qualms about sending me outside alone with only the barest briefing on how to attach the suit’s tether to one of the guard rails that ran the length of the satellite, between the rows of solar panels.

They told me which radio frequencies were which, and left me at the hatch of the access tube. I nodded to them from inside my helmet, went through the hatch, and started to pull myself weightlessly along the rungs set into the curving inner wall of the tube.

I am one of those fortunate few who have never been bothered by weightlessness. Practically everyone gets queasy at first, a fact that ruined Sam’s original plan for his honeymoon hotel. Yes, there are patches and pills you can take. Biofeedback training, too. Still, most people want to barf when they first experience zero-gee. Not me. I found it exhilarating, right from the first moment.

So I swam weightlessly the length of the access tube and opened the hatch at its other end. Stepping out onto the broad, flat surface of the sunsat was something like stepping from a cool darkened room into the full brilliance of a blazing Arizona summer afternoon.

My suit creaked and groaned from the sudden heat load of the Sun’s unfiltered fury. I heard the fans whir up and the pumps gurgle. But none of that mattered. The scenery was too breathtaking to care about anything else.

I was standing on a wide, flat expanse of dark, glassy solar panels. Actually, I was standing in an aisle between rows of panels. The sunsat was a world of its own, a world that stretched for kilometers in every direction, row upon row of panels so dark they looked almost like emptiness, like the void of space itself. Between the rows, however, metal strips of aisles glinted in the brilliant sunlight.

I could not see the Earth; it was on the satellite’s other, shaded side. For all I could see, I was alone in the universe on this giant raft of solar panels, just me and the distant stars and the blazing Sun with its pulsing, glowing corona and a halo of zodiacal light extending on either side of it.

For the first time in my life I felt a dizzying surge of vertigo. It took me several moments to catch my breath. Then I remembered what I was here for, and tapped the keypad at my wrist to turn on the suit-to-suit radio frequency.

“… never seen such a collection of misbegotten, ham-handed, under-brained, overpaid jerkoffs in my whole life! Don’t you guys know anything? Where’d you get your degrees, Genghis Dumb University?”

Those were the first words I heard Sam Gunn speak.

I attached my tether to the guard rail and started slowly toward the end of the sunsat where six space-suited figures were hovering off to one side of the sparking, sputtering magnetrons like a half-dozen toy balloons tethered to various guard rails. In their midst was one stumpy little figure, bobbing up and down like a Mexican jumping bean on amphetamines, literally at the end of his tether.

“Eleven billion dollars to build this pile of junk,” Sam was yelling, “and all of it’s going down the toilet because nobody here knows how to shut down a stupid, frigging power bus!”

“Ah … Mr Gunn?” I said into my helmet microphone.

He paid no attention. He kept up his tirade, describing in considerable detail the physical, mental and moral shortcomings of the technicians surrounding him, their families, their friends, their entire gene pool, even their herds of goats and sheep.

“Mr. Gunn!” I bellowed.

“… never been smart enough to wipe your own—WHAT?” he snarled, turning in my direction.

“I am Zoilo Hashimoto, from—”

“Leapin’ lizards, Sandy!” Sam exclaimed. “It’s Zorro, come to right wrongs and carve a zee into my chest!”

“Zoilo,” I corrected. I might as well have saved my breath.

“That’s what we need around here. The masked avenger. The mark of Zorro. You can start by transplanting some brains into these zombies.”

The six space-suited technicians simply hung on their tethers, silent as corpses, unmoving and apparently unmoved by Sam’s insults.

“Would you believe,” Sam said to me, “that they sent me the only six techs in all of Asia that can’t speak English? They expect me to talk to them in Sanskrit or whatever.”

“That must be frustrating,” I said.

“Not all that bad.” I detected a grin in his voice. “I can call them anything that pops into my head and they don’t take offense…. as long as I stick to English.”

Then he whirled back toward them and unleashed a blast of heavily accented Japanese that galvanized the technicians into frenzied action. I understood a little of what he said and I have no intention of repeating it.

It took the better part of two hours, but Sam finally got the electrical sparking stopped. He had to do the toughest part of the job by himself; the technicians either could not or would not go within fifty meters of the crackling blue fireworks. I had to hang there like a lanky sausage, with nothing to do but watch Sam work while I worried about how much radiation I was absorbing.

When the sparking finally stopped, however, the six technicians began dismantling the magnetron with the intense purposiveness of a team of ants tearing into a jelly doughnut that someone had carelessly dropped.

“C’mon,” Sam said, pulling himself along the guide rail toward me, “let’s go back inside, Zorro.”

“Zoilo,” I corrected.

“Yeah, sure.”

As we headed for the tube hatch I tried to make some conversation. “How much time do you spend outside like this?”

“Too damned much,” Sam snapped.

“I mean, the radiation levels out here are—”

“That’s why I wear a lead jockstrap, pal.”

I thought he was joking. Years later I found out that he wasn’t.

I followed him back to the access tube and down to the office/habitat area. The worried trio I had met earlier was nowhere in sight, although where they could hide in the narrow confines of the office/habitat area was beyond me.

We stopped in front of the space suit lockers and began to work our way out of our suits. Once Sam lifted off his helmet I took a good look at him. I had seen videos and stills of him, naturally. I knew that round, snub-nosed face with its bristling rust-red hair almost as well as I knew my own. Yet seeing him live and close-up was different: he looked more animated, livelier. And his eyes seemed to twinkle with the awareness that he knew things I didn’t.

Sam’s space suit looked grimy, hard-used. Its torso and helmet were covered with corporate logos and mission patches, everything from Vacuum Cleaners Inc. to an ancient, faded Space Station Freedom. Several emblems puzzled me: one that said Keep the baby, Faith, and another that looked like the gaudily striped flattened sphere of the planet Jupiter with four little stars beside it and the word Roemer beneath.

“C’mon,” Sam said. “Lemme show you where you’ll be sleeping tonight.”

“Don’t you want to know why I’m here?” I asked.

He gave me an exaggerated frown. “I know why you’re here. C.C. wants to pin my balls to her office wall, right?”

It was clear that he understood exactly why I had come; no cover story was necessary with Sam. So I nodded, then realized that Sam was at eye level with me, despite the fact that I was almost a foot taller than he. I had unconsciously slipped my feet into the floor loops, to anchor myself down. Sam, on the other hand, floated free and bobbed weightlessly beside me.

“Why is it,” he asked the empty air, “that when a little guy makes some money, everybody in the goddamned government wants to investigate him?”

“Mr. Gunn,” I started to explain, “you have had an extremely—”

“Call me Sam,” he snapped.

“Very well. You may call me Zoilo.”

“I already do, Zorro.”

“Zoilo.”

“I still can’t figure out why the double-dipped ISC is worried about my good luck on the commodities market.”

“Ms. Chatsworth is concerned that more than good luck may be involved,” I replied.

He grinned at me, a gap-toothed grin of pure boyish glee.

“She thinks I’m cheating?”

He said it with such wide-eyed innocence that I was left speechless.

Sam laughed and said, “C’mon, let’s get some shut-eye. The next OTV won’t be here until tomorrow afternoon.”

He floated down the corridor, propelling himself with deft touches of his fingers against the metal walls. I pulled my stockinged feet out of the floor loops and clambered hand-over-hand after him, using the grips that studded the walls.

To say that the personnel quarters aboard Sunsat Seventeen were spartan would be an understatement. They consisted of a row of lockers, nothing more. A mesh sleeping cocoon was fastened to one side, a fold-down sink on the other. There was an electrical outlet and a data port for connecting a computer. The locker was barely tall enough for me to squeeze into it; I had to keep my chin pressed down on my chest.

The next morning I groaned as I unfolded myself out in the corridor. Sam, on the other hand, was chipper and as bright as a new-minted penny.

“Whatsamatter, Zorro,” he asked, almost solicitously, “you in pain or something?”

Stretching in an effort to ease the crick in my neck, I explained that the privacy booths were too cramped for comfort.

“Gee,” Sam said, bouncing lightly off the floor to rise to eye level with me, “I always thought they were really spacious.”

Over breakfast in the minuscule galley I asked, “Why are you here, Sam, instead of in your office in Selene City? Surely you can hire engineers to supervise the work here.”

He gave me a sour look as he spooned up oatmeal. “Yeah, sure. I can hire the entire graduating class of MIT if I want to.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Because every engineer I hire costs me money, and money is something I don’t have much of, that’s why.”

“But the High Asia Sunsat Combine must be paying at least minimum rates for your maintenance contract.”

He chewed thoughtfully for a moment; the oatmeal was that lumpy. Then he swallowed and said, “Nobody would sign a contract with S. Gunn Enterprises unless our bid was considerable under standard rates. Your sweetheart Ms. Chatsworth has seen to that.”

“But that’s illegal. It’s restraint of…” My voice trailed off as I realized the import of what he was telling me.

“C.C. and her connections in the government saw to it that I got screwed out of my old corporation. She’s got a vendetta going against me. The only work I can find is these crappy maintenance contracts, and even then I’ve got to do it at a helluva lot less than standard pay.”

I heard myself ask weakly, “Well, how many contracts do you have?”

“Six, right now. Three sunsats, a couple of orbiting astronomical telescopes, and the laundry facility at the new retirement center in Selene City.”

“Laundry?”

He laughed bitterly. “Great job for a pioneer, isn’t it? Washing old folks’ dirty sheets.”

Sam had truly been a pioneering entrepreneur, I knew. The zero-gee hotel, the first asteroid mining expedition, even the early work of cleaning debris out of the low-orbit region around Earth—he had been the trailblazer. Now he was reduced to maintenance contracts, and hiring fourth-rate technicians because he couldn’t afford better.

Yet… somehow he was getting rich on the commodities futures market.

“Well,” I said, “at least maintenance contracts provide a steady income.”

“Oh yeah, sure.” A frown puckered his brows. “They’re usually safe and easy, all right. But this bunch of clowns trying to operate Sunsat Seventeen are making this particular job a pain in the butt.”

“The magnetrons?”

“The everything!” Sam exclaimed. “The hardware’s crappy. The technicians don’t know what they’re doing. And I’m supposed to make it all come out peachy-keen.”

“In the meantime, though,” I pointed out, “you’re piling up quite a fortune in the commodities market.”

He toyed with the oatmeal remaining in his bowl. “Am I?” he asked softly.

“According to our records, you certainly are.”

Sam sighed mightily, like a man weary of being dragged down by lesser mortals. “I’ve been pretty lucky, I guess. In the market, I mean.”

From the gleam in Sam’s eye, I knew he was enjoying the fact that C.C. was annoyed enough to send me to investigate him. He certainly did not appear to be worried about my presence. Not in the slightest.

After breakfast I retired to my locker and plugged in my pocket computer, scrunching myself up close to its tiny microphone so that my lips almost touched it. I didn’t want Sam to hear me.

All that morning and right through lunch I searched through Sam’s records. Not that I hadn’t before, but now I was looking specifically into his transactions in the commodities market. There was a pattern to be found; there always is, in any crooked scheme. Find the pattern and you find the crook.

It quickly became clear that Sam was buying and selling almost exclusively in the metals market: meteoric iron and precious metals, mostly. He speculated on the cargoes bound inward from the Asteroid Belt on the factory ships, guessing which ships would return laden with profitable cargoes and which would not. He was right ninety-three percent of the time, an impossible score for pure luck.

The commodities futures market was a crapshoot, and like all gambles, the odds were stacked against the gambler. Yet Sam was beating those odds a staggering ninety-three percent of the time. Impossible, unless he was cheating somehow.

You see, there were a huge number of variables in each mission out to the asteroids, too many for anyone to guess right ninety-three percent of the time. Or even fifty-three percent of the time, for that matter.

There were thousands of independent miners out there in the Asteroid Belt hunting down usable asteroids, chunks of metals and minerals that could be mined profitably. The factory ships went out on Hohmann transfer orbits, using the minimum amount of energy, spending the least amount of money to reach a destination in the belt.

Picking the right destination was crucial. No sense spending a year in space to arrive at a spot where no miners and no ore were waiting for you. Rendezvous points and times were selected beforehand, but a thousand unforeseen factors could ruin your plans. Usually the small mining teams auctioned off their ores to the highest bidder. But often enough they decided not to wait for you because somebody else showed up with ready credits for the ores.

All these factors were heavily influenced by timing and distance. The Asteroid Belt is mostly empty space, even though there are millions of asteroids floating out there between Mars and Jupiter. Think of mega-trillions of cubic kilometers of nothingness, with a few grains of dust drifting through the void: that’s what the so-called “belt” is like.

It takes propulsion energy—which means money—to maneuver in space, to move the millions of kilometers between usable asteroids. The miners were mostly small-time independent operators who were always short on funds; they were always willing to take immediate credits instead of waiting for your particular factory ship to reach the rendezvous point you were aiming for.

There were more pending lawsuits over broken contracts for ore deliveries than there were divorce cases on Earth. The miners evaded the law, by and large, because it cost a corporation more to catch and fine them than the fines could possibly return. Besides, fining a miner was a study in frustration anyway. Most of them simply declared bankruptcy and started up again under a new name.

All this made the commodities market an arena fraught with uncertainties. How do you know which factory ship will come back with a rich cargo of metals or minerals? How can you guess what such cargoes will be worth on the market, when it takes a year or more for the factory ship to make the return journey to Earth?

The answer is, you wait as long as you possibly can before you invest your money (or, more accurately, make your bet). The safest thing to do is to wait until a factory ship has actually taken on a specific cargo of metals, check with the price of such metals on the futures market, and only then sink your money into that particular ship.

So investors waited eagerly for communications from the various factory ships. It takes more than half an hour for a message to travel from the belt to the Earth-Moon system. There’s no way around that time lag. Even moving at the speed of light as they do, electronic or optical laser messages average about thirty minutes to cover the distance between the belt and the Earth-Moon region.

As soon as a favorable message is received, investors start bidding up the price of that ship’s cargo.

But some investors, the ones with more guts than brains, put their money into a ship’s cargo before the good word comes from the Asteroid Belt. They bet that the news will be good before the news is received. Most of those investors quickly go broke.

Sam Gunn invested that way. And he was not going broke. Far from it. He was getting rich.

There was no way for him to do that legally. Of that, C.C. Chatsworth was convinced. So was I. But I had to find out how he was cheating the system. Or face the wrath of C.C. She was determined to put somebody’s testicles on her office wall. If she couldn’t get Sam’s, she’d take mine.

The OTV duly arrived and carried Sam and me back to Selene. The city was almost entirely underground, as all lunar cities were in those days. Even the imposing grand plaza, as long as six football fields with a dome of seventy-five meters’ height, was totally enclosed, except for the huge curved glassteel windows at its far end.

The plaza was grassed and landscaped and dotted with flowering shrubbery, however, so it looked very Earthlike even though the light lunar gravity allowed tourists to soar like birds on big, colorful plastic wings they rented.

The ISC was paying for a minimum-sized studio apartment at the government-rented set of rooms on Level One, barely large enough for a bed, mini-kitchen and phone-booth-sized bathroom. I had to hunch over to squeeze into the shower.

Sam, on the other hand, ensconced me in a spacious office next to his own, in the imposing headquarters tower of Moonbase Inc., where he had rented space for his own S. Gunn Enterprises. I was surprised that his offices were so spacious, until I realized that he slept in his own office and saved himself the cost of an apartment. It was strictly against the building’s regulations, of course, but somehow Sam managed to get away with it.

I spent days digging into the personnel files of each and every individual who might be tipping Sam off about ore shipments from the Asteroid Belt. Using the ISC’s powers of subpoena I investigated their personal financial records. I could find nothing that hinted at bribery or collusion.

Besides, how could anyone tip Sam before the rest of the market? The news from the factory ships traveled at the speed of light from the Asteroid Belt to the Earth-Moon system. There was no way around that.

Evenings I spent with Sam. He wined and dined me as if I were a long-lost brother or a wealthy potential customer. He even found dates for me, lovely young women who seemed more interested in Sam than in me. But nevertheless, Sam saw to it that I was not lonely at Selene. I knew he was trying to bribe me, or at least make me feel that he was a fine person and incapable of chicanery. Yet I began to realize how lonely, how empty, my life had been up to that point. Being with Sam was fun!

On the other hand, each day I received a phone call from C.C., her quivering, jowled face grimacing at me angrily. “ ’Ave you nailed ’im yet?” she would demand. Each day she grew angrier, her fleshy face redder. It got so bad that I stopped taking all incoming calls. But she called anyway and left messages of rage that escalated daily.

I became so desperate that I asked him point-blank, “How do you do it, Sam?”

“Do what?”

“Cheat the market.”

We were in Selene’s finest restaurant, Earthview, waiting for our evening’s companions to show up. The restaurant was deep underground, rather than in the plaza. On the Moon, where the airless surface is bathed in deadly radiation and peppered by meteoric infall, the deeper below-ground you are, the more your prestige. Earthview was on Selene’s bottom level, where the executives kept their own plush quarters.

The restaurant was several storeys high, however. The volume had originally been an actual cave; now it was occupied by tiers of dining tables covered with the finest napery and silverware made from asteroidal metal. No two tables were on the same level. Each one stood on a pedestal atop an impossibly slim column of shining stainless steel while curving ramps twined between them. On Earth the human waiters and bussers would have been exhausted after an hour’s work. Here in the low gravity of the Moon they could work four-hour shifts with comparative ease. Still, one tipped generously at Earthview.

“Cheat the market?” Sam put on such a look of hurt innocence that I had to laugh.

“Come on, Sam,” I said. “You know that you’re cheating and I know that you know.”

He blinked his eyes several times. They were green now. I could have sworn they’d been blue. But Sam was wearing a trim leisure suit of forest green, and his eyes almost matched his attire. Contact lenses? I wondered.

“How could I possibly cheat the market?” he asked.

“That’s what I’d like to know,” I said.

Sam broke into a boyish grin. “Look, Zorro old pal, your ISC auditors have been plowing through my company’s files for more than a week now. They’ve even snooped into my personal accounts. What have they found?”

“Nothing,” I admitted.

“You know why?” he asked, with a devilish cock of one eyebrow.

“Why?”

“Because there’s nothing to find. I’m as pure as the driven snow. Clean as a whistle. Spotless. Unblemished. Unsullied. Right up there .with the Virgin Mary—well, maybe not that unsullied. But you’ll have to find another chest to carve your zee into.”

I had given up long ago on getting him to pronounce my name correctly. To him I was Zorro and there was no use wasting energy trying to change him.

In truth, I was getting to like Sam. He was enjoying this fencing, I saw. He liked to talk; he even seemed to enjoy listening to me talk. I found myself telling him about my boyhood in Cuba and my longing to explore the buried cities of Mars.

“Archeology, hey?” he mused. “Lots of good-looking women students. Lonely outposts far from civilization.” He nodded happily. “Could be a good life, Zorro.”

Sam was especially enjoying the fact that I was living on an ISC expense account, running up a huge dent in C.C.’s budget. That’s why he insisted that we dine at the Earthview. There was no more expensive restaurant in the solar system.

After that fruitless (although thoroughly enjoyable) dinner, I decided to cherchez les femmes. Sam was wooing half a dozen women simultaneously, and avoiding several others—including a judge of the World Court, a former United States Senator, Jill Meyers.

I found that although several of Sam’s “dates” loathed most of the other women he was pursuing, none of them had a harsh word to say about Sam himself.

“I know he plays around,” said a lean, lanky young redhead from Colorado who was working at Selene as a tour guide. She shrugged it off. “I guess that’s part of what makes him so interesting—you never know what he’s going to do next.”

An older, wiser Chinese women who operated excavating equipment up on the surface told me, “Sam is like lightning: he never hits the same place twice.” Then she smiled sagely and added, “Unless you put out something that attracts him.”

The typical reaction was that of a grinning, curly-haired Dutch blonde, “At least he’s not a bore! Sam’s always a lot of fun, even if he does exasperate you sometimes.”

I would not get any useful information from his lovers. They had no useful information to give me.

It was frustrating, to say the least. Somehow Sam knew what the factory ships were bringing back toward Earth before the information was received on Earth. But that was impossible. The ships broadcast their information in the clear; no coded messages were allowed. The messages were received by the ISC’s own communications satellite and immediately relayed to every receiving antenna in the Earth-Moon system at the same time. All right, when the Moon was in the right part of its orbit, receivers on the Moon might catch the incoming messages a second and a half sooner than receivers on Earth. So what? That made no real difference. The Moon lagged a second and a half behind when it was on the other side of its orbit. I repeat, So what?

Yet, just to make certain, I ran a correlation of Sam’s right “guesses” with the position of the Moon in its orbit. Nothing. It made no difference whether the Moon was a second and a half ahead or behind.

Sam was enjoying my frustration. We became buddies, of a sort. He pulled me away from my desk time and again to show me around Selene, take me for walks up on the surface, even escort me to the gambling casino at Hell Crater and treat me to a pile of chips—which I promptly lost. Dice, roulette, baccarat, even the slot machines; it made no difference, I lost at them all, much to Sam’s glee.

I began to clutch at straws. Somehow, I knew—I knew—Sam was getting the incoming messages from the factory ships before the rest of the Earth-Moon system. He could make his buying decisions based on advance knowledge; of that I was certain. That meant that he was receiving those messages sooner than everyone else. In turn, that meant that the speed of light was not the same for Sam as it was for everyone else.

I was challenging Einstein; that’s how crazy Sam was making me.

He had somehow rigged the speed with which those messages traveled from the Asteroid Belt to Earth. But that was impossible! The speed of light is the one immutable factor in all of Einstein’s relativity. It can’t be changed. It travels at one speed in vacuum and one speed only. Sam couldn’t slow it down or speed it up.

Or—if he could—why would he be wasting his time playing the commodities market? He could be opening up the path to interstellar travel!

In desperation I asked my computer to search for any correlations it could discern in all of Sam’s market transactions. Anything at all.

The list that scrolled across my screen was even more frustrating than my other failed ideas. There were plenty of correlations, but none of them made any sense. For example, Sam’s buys of metals futures seemed to follow some astrological pattern: the computer actually worked out a pattern in which Sam’s investments correlated with the astrological signs for the days in which he made his buys.

Sam sold his futures, of course. That’s how he made money. He bought when the price was low, before most other investors dared to risk their money. Then he waited until the price for that particular cargo rose, and sold it off at a handsome profit. While his buys had that weird astrological correlation, his sales did not; they were strictly related to the market price for the metals.

I was losing weight worrying over this problem. And I started to have bad dreams, nightmares in which C.C. Chatsworth was fiendishly slicing me into thin sections on those volleyball wires, cackling insanely while my blood floated all around me in zero-gravity bubbles.

Sam, strangely enough, was very solicitous, fussing over me like a distraught uncle.

“You gotta eat better, Zorro,” he told me as I picked at my dinner.

We were back at the Earthview. Sam had just returned from another quick trip to Sunsat Seventeen. The magnetrons were still giving trouble. Sam grumbled about the Asian consortium’s insistence that seventy-five percent of the satellite’s hardware had to be manufactured in Asia.

“And not the Pacific Rim countries, where they know how to build major hardware,” he groused. “Not Japan or even China.”

Despite my growing despair, I went for his bait. “Then where is the hardware being built?” I asked.

Sam frowned from across the circular dining table. “Upper Clucksville, from the looks of it. Afghanistan, Tzadikistan, Dumbbellistan—guys who had trouble making oxcarts are now building klystrons and power busses and I’m stuck with a contract that says I’ve gotta make it all work right or it comes outta my profits!”

“Why did you ever agree to such a contract?” I wondered out loud.

“Outta the goodness of my heart,” said Sam, placing a hand on his chest. “Why else?”

A bell rang in my mind.

Sam was gone the next morning, back to the same Sunsat Seventeen. I went up to my roomy office and immediately got to work. Ignoring the pretty view of the plaza’s greenery and the Olympic-sized swimming pool where young tourists were doing quintuple flips in lunar slow-motion from the thirty-meter diving platform, I booted up my computer and started checking out the hunch that had popped into my mind the night before.

In the back of my mind it occurred to me that Sam had generously given me this office next to his own so that he could keep an eye on me. He probably had the desktop computer bugged, too, so he could see what I was looking into. So I used my trusty old palm-sized machine instead. It was slower, because it had to access files stored back on Earth and that meant a second-and-a-half lag. But using Sam’s computer would have been foolish, I thought.

Yes! I was right. Every time Sam made a successful buy on the futures market he was in orbit, not on the Moon. Almost. He made a few buys from his office here in Selene City as well, but they were sometimes winners, more often losers. When he called in his buys from orbit they were winners, every time except once, and that once happened when a factory ship broke down months after Sam’s purchase of its cargo of industrial steel; the cargo was almost a year late in reaching the market. Everyone lost money on that one.

His sell orders came from Selene, from orbit, from wherever he happened to be. But his successful buys, the ones that were making him rich, always came from orbit.

I was so excited by this discovery that it wasn’t until late that afternoon that the reaction hit me. So what? So Sam makes his buy decisions while he’s working in orbit, instead of when he’s on the Moon. What does that prove?

It didn’t prove anything, I realized. It certainly reinforced the idea that Sam was cheating the system, somehow. But how he was doing it remained a mystery.

I felt terribly let down. As if I had spent every bit of my energy trying to break down a solidly locked door, only to find that the room beyond that door was totally empty.

I sat at the desk Sam had loaned me, staring out at the scantily clad tourists performing athletic feats that were impossible on Earth, feeling completely drained and exhausted. In my mind’s eye I saw C.C. roasting me over the coals of bureaucratic wrath. And Sam grinning at me like a gap-toothed Jack-o’-lantern, knowing that he had outsmarted me.

I should have been angry with Sam. Furious. The little trickster was ruining my career, my life. Yet I just couldn’t work up the rage. Sam had been kind to me. I knew it had all been in his own self-interest, but the little wise guy had actually behaved as if we were real friends.

Nevertheless, I had to get to the bottom of this. Sam was cheating and it was my job to nail him. Or I would be nailed myself.

I hauled myself up from the desk chair and headed for Selene’s spaceport, checking my palm computer for the departure time of the next OTV heading for Sunsat Seventeen.

I’m going to catch him in the act, I told myself. He’s not going to outsmart me any longer.

When I finally arrived at the sunsat, he was outside again, working with the same team of technicians while the same trio of engineers gave me worried frowns and mumbles as I pulled on the same slightly-too-small space suit.

“Sam told us we should stay inside,” said one of the women engineers.

“He said it’s going to be real hairy topside,” the other one added.

The bald, bearded man said, “He said he had to test the escape pod again.”

“Again?” The word caught my attention.

The man nodded solemnly while the two women checked out my backpack.

“How often does he check out the escape pod?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Every time he comes here, just about.”

One of the women said, from behind me, “Sam’s worried that this sunsat might be unsafe.”

My mind was clicking fast. I couldn’t imagine any disaster that could make this sixty-square kilometer slab of metal so unsafe that they would have to abandon it. The so-called escape pod was a modified OTV; it could fly all the way back to the Moon, if necessary.

And Sam took out the escape pod almost every time he came to this sunsat.

Click. Click. Click. Those facts meshed together. They added up to something—but I didn’t know the full answer. Not yet.

“Tell Sam that I’m coming out to the escape pod,” I commanded. “Tell him not to leave until I get to him.”

I flew up the access tube as fast as I could and pulled myself hand-over-hand along the guard rail that led out to the escape pod. All the while, I was thinking that the pod ought to be stationed close to the habitat module, not out at the end of the structure.

I got there almost in time. Just as I reached the docking module, the pod detached and floated away into the emptiness.

“Sam!” I yelled into my helmet microphone. “Come back here! I’m going with you.”

“Sorry, Zorro, no can do,” Sam’s voice chirped cheerfully in my earphones. “Go on back inside and have a cup of coffee. I’ll only be out for a couple hours or so. Gotta check the emergency systems.”

The pod was drifting slowly away; he hadn’t fired its main engine yet.

“Sam, you’re full of bullshit and we both know it!”

“Such harsh language,” he replied. “That’s not like you, Zorro.”

I had to do something. I couldn’t just hover there and watch him get away with it. I don’t remember thinking over my options. I simply acted without rational thought.

I unclipped my tether and jumped off the satellite, trying to reach the slowly drifting escape pod.

Just as I did, I heard Sam warning, “Counting down to main engine ignition: ten, nine, eight…”

I desperately needed to reach the pod before its rocket engine lit up. Reaching awkwardly behind me, I tried to find the bleed valve for my air tank. If I could squirt a little air out, it would act as a rocket thrust and zip me out to the pod before Sam could light up its main engine.

My gloved fingers found the valve while I mentally tried to picture how it worked. I pushed down on the knob, then turned it just a hair.

Too much. I was snapped into a crazy spin, my arms and legs flailing wildly, pulled away from my body by centrifugal force. The escape pod, the sunsat, the stars whirled madly around me.

I could still hear Sam counting,”… three, two ..

A noiseless flash of light made me blink even while my head was whacking from side to side inside my helmet. I thought I heard Sam’s voice yelling something, but then everything went blurry. I thought I was unconscious or maybe dead, but my head was still thumping painfully and every part of my body was screaming with pain and I was getting terribly dizzy.

Finally I did black out. My last thought was that this was a thoroughly idiotic way to die, spinning like a rag doll while Sam rocketed off to do whatever it was he did to cheat the commodities market.

When I came to, the first thing I saw was Sam’s round, freckled face staring down at me. He was smiling, sort of, even though the expression on his face was far from pleased.

“You just cost me a couple hundred million bucks, Zorro,” he said. Softly.

I blinked. My head was throbbing, thundering with pain. My back and shoulders and arms and legs—all of me ached agonizingly.

But what cut through the haze of hurt was the sight of Sam. He was in his beat-up old space suit, helmet off. Something new had been added to his collection of patches and insignias. He had painted a slashing red zigzag across the suit’s chest. A letter zee. The mark of Zorro.

“Wh …” My throat was dry and raw. It took a real effort to work up enough saliva to swallow. “What happened?” I asked weakly.

Sam tried to frown at me but his face just wasn’t cut out for it.

“Just as I lit up the pod’s engine you went pin-wheeling past me like a bowling ball with legs.”

We were in the escape pod, I realized. A padded bulkhead curved above me, and beyond Sam’s back I could see the control panel and the small circular viewport above it. I was lying on one of the acceleration couches.

“You rescued me,” I said.

Sam hunched his shoulders. “It was either that or watch you zip all the way out to Mars. I figured you’d run out of air in about ten minutes, the way you were squirting it out of your backpack.”

I tried to sit up, but my head pounded like a thunder-burst and I got woozy.

“Take it easy, babe,” Sam said. “Just lay there and relax. We’re on our way back to the sunsat, but it’ll take an hour or so.”

“An hour … ?”

“I had to burn a helluva lot of propellant to catch you, Zorro. And then burn off that velocity and head back. Lotta delta-vee, pal. So we’re on a minimum energy trajectory, headin’ back to the ol’ corral.” Those last few words he pronounced with a fake western twang.

“You saved my life,” I said, realizing that it was true. I felt an enormous sense of gratitude welling up inside me.

Sam brushed it off with a wave of his hand. “It was either that or have C.C. come after me for murder.”

“She couldn’t—”

“Couldn’t she? Once she figured out that you knew how I was getting a jump on the market, she’d automatically assume I killed you to keep you quiet.”

I blinked with shock. “But I didn’t—”

“Pretty smart cookie, Zorro, ol’ pal.” Sam was smiling, but it seemed a little on the bitter side. “That’s why I painted your zee on my chest. You got me, fair and square.”

There are times when a man should keep his big mouth shut and accept praise, whether he deserves it or not. This was certainly one of those times. Unfortunately, my brain was too addled from the beating I had just undergone to pay attention to my own advice.

“What do you mean, I got you?” I asked, befuddled. “What does the zee on your chest have to do with it?”

Sam’s grin turned more impish. He touched one end of the zee and said, “A factory ship.” Then, sliding his finger along the zigzag red line, he added, “The Baade Orbital Telescope,” the finger slid across the other leg of the zee, “the reflector I hung out at the Mars L-5 position,” finally the finger came to rest at the other end of the zee, “and the ISC’s main receiving telescope in Earth orbit.”

Then he pointed to the patch on his chest, just above the zee, the one that said Roemer. “He figured out the speed of light.”

I got it! Like a flash of lightning, I suddenly understood what Sam had been doing all along.

Everybody knew approximately when a factory ship was due to send its message back toward Earth, telling what kind of an ore load it was going to be carrying home. The messages are sent by tight laser beam to the ISC’s receiving facility in Earth orbit. Once the satellite gets the word, it broadcasts the news to all the market centers in the Earth-Moon system.

Sam intercepted the signal. It was that simple. He positioned one of the orbiting astronomical telescopes his company maintained to intercept the laser signal, bounce it to a reflector he had prepositioned along the orbit of Mars, and then finally send it Earthward. The signal was received at the Earth satellite station ten or twenty minutes later than it normally would have been and nobody was the wiser because nobody bothered to check the exact moment that the factory ship sent its signal.

Meanwhile, Sam used that ten or twenty minutes to buy metals futures before anyone else knew what the factory ship was carrying.

It was so simple! Once you understood what he was doing it seemed absolutely obvious.

And totally illegal.

“Sam,” I said, still somewhat breathless with the astonishment of discovery, “you could go to jail for twenty years.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

A dead silence fell between us. Sam got up from the couch and floated weightlessly to the control panel. I cranked the couch up to a sitting position, grateful that my head only felt as if it was being split open by a band-saw.

“You’ve been cheating the market, Sam.”

He glanced back at me, over his shoulder, an elfin grin on his round face. “I don’t think there’s anything in the ISC rules about intercepting laser signals. I checked those rules pretty thoroughly, you know.”

“Insider knowledge,” I said firmly, “is a crime.”

“What insider knowledge?” he asked, trying to look innocent. “I just happened to learn about the factory ships’ cargos before anybody else did.”

“By rigging their communications.”

“Nothing illegal about that.”

“Yes there is.”

“Prove it!”

“C.C. will prove it,” I said. “She’ll haul you up before the interplanetary tribunal and they’ll send you to the penal colony on Farside.”

“Maybe,” Sam said. I could see from the way his brow furrowed that he was actually worried.

Well, Sam knew me better than I knew myself, of course. He had already decided to stop tinkering with the market; C.C. and her minions (including me) were getting too close for comfort.

“I only did it to put together enough money to buy a couple of factory ships and go out to the Asteroid Belt again,” he told me.

“You mean this whole scheme was just your way of raising capital?” I was incredulous.

“What else?” he asked, wide-eyed. “None of the sheep-dip banks would lend me a dime. C.C blackballed me. The big-shot investors stick with the big-time operators, like Rockledge and Pogorny. Nobody’d loan me enough money to build an outhouse, let alone a few factory ships.”

I thought it over for a few moments. “So… if I didn’t turn you in, you’d stop this market rigging on your own?”

“Yep,” he answered immediately. “Honest injun. Cross my heart. Scout’s honor.” And he held up one hand in a three-fingered Boy Scout salute.

The man had saved my life. I had done something foolishly stupid and he had saved me from certain death. I owed him that.

Besides, the thought of Sam in jail, or toiling away at the Farside penal colony… I couldn’t bear that.

But then the image of C.C. rose in my mind, like a volcano of blubber about to erupt and spew over me. The best I could hope for was to admit I hadn’t been able to find Sam’s scam and let her demote me to third-rank sewer inspector or something even worse. If she ever got a hint that I had discovered Sam’s trick and let him go—I’d be breaking rocks on Farside myself.

There was only one honorable thing for me to do. After getting Sam’s solemn pledge that he would never, never tamper with the market again, I returned alone to Selene City and called in my resignation from the ISC.

C.C. called me back in ten seconds. I was in my spartan studio apartment, packing for my return to Earth, when the wall screen lit up. There she was, Mt. Vesuvius in the flesh, steaming and glowering at me.

“ ’E got to you, did ’e?” she said, without preamble.

“No,” I replied, trying to shield myself as much as I could behind my garment bag. “On the contrary, I think I scared him enough so that he’ll stay out of the market from now on.”

“Oh, really?” she said, dripping sarcasm.

“Really,” I said, with as much dignity as a man can muster while he’s holding a half-dozen pairs of under-drawers in his hands.

“Then it might interest you to know that one Samuel Gunn as just bought an entire factory ship’s cargo of ’eavy metals, ten minutes before the news of the ship’s successful rendezvous with nine different ore miners reached the bloody market.”

Sam had broken his promise! I was stunned. Not angry, just sad that he really couldn’t be trusted.

“Well,” I said, “you’ll have to send someone else to snoop out how he does it. I failed, and I’ve quit. I’m out of the game.”

“You’ll be out more than that, you bleedin’ traitor!” For the next several minutes C.C. described at the top of her voice how she was going to blackball me and see to it that I never worked anywhere on Earth again. “Or on the Moon, for that matter!” she added, with extra venom.

I was ruined and I knew it. But actually, what made me feel even worse was the knowledge that Sam had gone back on his word. He’d continue to fiddle with the market until C.C. finally caught him. He couldn’t get away with it forever; if I figured his scheme out (even with Sam’s help) someone else could, too. Sam was heading for jail, sooner or later. The thought depressed me terribly.

That was before Sam’s final message reached me.

I was heading glumly out to the rocket port for the ride back to Earth and my lonely, dusty, empty apartment in Florida’s sprawling Tampa-Orlando-Jacksonville industrial belt. No job and no prospects. No friends, either. Just about everyone I knew worked at the ISC. They would all shun me, fearful of C.C.’s wrath.

There were two messages waiting for me at the port’s check-in counter. The clerk there—a lissome young woman whom Sam had introduced me to scarcely a week earlier—showed me to a booth where I could take my messages in privacy.

The first was from someone I had never seen before. He was white-haired, with a trim beard and the tanned, leathery look of a man who had spent a good deal of his life outdoors. Yet he wore the rumpled tweeds of an academic.

“Mr. Hashimoto, this is rather a strange situation,” he said into the camera. He was recording the message, not knowing where I was or when I would hear his words. “I am Hickory J. Gillett, dean of the University of New Mexico Archeology Department. We have just received a bequest of two hundred million dollars from an anonymous donor who wants us to create an endowed chair of archeology. His only requirement is that you accept the position as our first Professor of Martian Archeology.”

I nearly fainted. Professor of Martian Archeology. Endowed chair. It was my dream come true.

Hardly conscious of what I was doing, I touched the keypad for my second message.

Sam Gunn’s impish face grinned at me from the screen. “So I pulled off one final stunt,” he said. “See you on Mars, Prof. Save one of the female students for me.”

And he slashed one pointed finger through the air in the zigzag of a letter zee.