And then I smelled the fragrance of coffee brewing. Sam was in the galley, right behind the closed hatch of the cockpit, clattering dishes and silverware. In a weird way, I felt almost relieved. Quickly, I popped the chip out of the computer and slipped it into the waistband of the undershorts I was wearing.
Just in time. Sam pushed the hatch open and handed me a steaming mug of coffee.
“You’re up early,” he said with a groggy smile.
“Couldn’t sleep,” I answered truthfully. That’s where the truth ended. “I’ve been trying to think of where I could stash the chip.”
He nodded and scratched at his wiry, tousled red hair. “Find a good spot, Gar. I think we’re going to have plenty of fireworks before this job is finished.”
Truer words, as they say, were never spoken.
The three asteroids Sam had chosen were samples of the three different types of ’roids in the belt. The first one had been a rocky type. It looked like a lumpy potato, pockmarked with craterlets from the impacts of smaller rocks. The one we were approaching was a chondritic type, a loose collection of primeval pebbles that barely held itself together. Sam called it a beanbag.
He was saving the best one for last. The third and last asteroid on Sam’s list was a metallic beauty, the one that some Latin American sculptress had carved into a monumental history of her Native American people; she called it The Rememberer. Sam had been involved in that, years ago, I knew. He had shacked up with the sculptress for a while. Just like Sam.
As we approached the beanbag, our collision-avoidance radar started going crazy.
“It’s surrounded by smaller chunks of rock,” Sam muttered, studying the screen.
From the copilot’s chair, I could see the main body of the asteroid through the cockpit window. It looked hazy, indistinct, more like a puff of smoke than a solid object.
“If we’re going to orbit that cloud of pebbles,” I said, “it’d better be at a good distance from it. Otherwise, we’ll get dinged up pretty heavily.”
Sam nodded and tapped in the commands for an orbit that looped a respectful distance from the beanbag.
“How long are we going to hang around here?” I asked him.
He made a small shrug. “Give it a day or two. Then we’ll head off for The Rememberer.”
“Sam, your wedding is in two days.” Speaking of remembering, I thought.
He gave me a lopsided grin. “Jill’s smart enough to figure it out. We’ll get married at The Rememberer. Outside, in suits, with the sculpture for a background. It’ll make terrific publicity for my tourist service.”
I felt my eyebrows go up. “You’re really thinking of starting tourist runs out here to the belt?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“I thought that was just your cover story.”
“It was,” he admitted. “But the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.”
“Who’s going to pay the fare for coming all the way out here, just to see a few rocks?”
“Gar, you just don’t understand how business works, do you?”
“But—”
“How did space tourism start, in the first place?” Before I could even start thinking about an answer, he went on, “With a few bored rich guys paying millions for a few days in orbit.”
“Not much of a market,” I said.
He waggled a finger at me. “Not at first, but it got people interested. The publicity was important. Within a few years, there was enough of a demand so that a real tourist industry took off. Small, at first, but it grew.”
I recalled, “You started a honeymoon hotel in Earth orbit back then, didn’t you?”
His face clouded. “It went under. Most of the honeymooners got space sick their first day in weightlessness. Horrible publicity. I went broke.”
“And sold it to Rockledge Industries, right?”
He got even more somber. “Yeah, right.”
Rockledge made a success of the orbital hotel after buying Sam out, mainly because they’d developed a medication for space sickness. The facility is still there in low Earth orbit, part hotel, part museum. Sam was a pioneer, all right. An ornament to his profession, as far as I was concerned. But that’s another story.
“And now you think you can make a tourist line to the belt pay off?”
Before he could answer, three things happened virtually simultaneously. The navigation computer chimed and announced, “Parking orbit established.” At that instant we felt a slight lurch. Spacecrafts don’t lurch, not unless something bad has happened to them, like hitting a rock or getting your airtight hull punctured.
Sure enough, the maintenance program sang out, “Main thruster disabled. Repair facilities urgently required.”
Before we could do more than look at each other, our mouths hanging open, a fourth thing happened.
The comm speaker rumbled with a deep, snarling voice. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”
The screen showed a dark, scowling face: jowly, almost pudgy, dark hair pulled straight back from a broad forehead, tiny, deep-set eyes that burned into you. A vicious slash of a mouth turned down angrily. Irritation and suspicion written across every line of that face. He radiated power, strength, and the cold-blooded ruthlessness of a killer. Lars Fuchs.
“Answer me, or my next shot will blow away your crew pod.”
I felt an urgent need to go to the bathroom. But Sam stayed cool as a polar bear.
“This is Sam Gunn. I’ve been trying to find you, Fuchs.”
“Why?”
“I have a message for you.”
“From Humphries? I’m not interested in hearing what he has to say.”
Sam glanced at me, then said, “The message is from Mrs. Humphries.”
I didn’t think it was possible, but Fuchs’s face went harder still. Then, in an even meaner tone, he said, “I’m not interested in anything she has to say either.”
“She seemed very anxious to get this message to you, sir,” Sam wheedled. “She hired us to come all the way out to the belt to deliver it to you personally.”
He fell silent. I could feel my heart
