John Sandford - Saturn Run

Clover subsided, and Sandy, curious, asked, “What happened?”

“I was sitting in an egg, not going anywhere, checking out a possible internal shot. That feature we were talking about, showing the groundhuggers how you control an egg. Anyway, your friend the handyman walked into the garage, with a tech, and they were talking about us. They were being sneaky about it. Joe kept glancing over at me, making sure I couldn’t hear.”

“You turned up the gain on the external mike,” Sandy said. All the eggs had external microphones and speakers. They were useless in space, but convenient when two people were working on an egg repair, one inside and one out.

“Yes, I did,” Fiorella said. “Anyway, it seems that the crew has a pool, on the day we fall into bed together. The pool is still open. The buy-in is one thousand dollars.”

That didn’t seem like much to Sandy, but Clover grunted. “There are what, ninety-plus people going on this trip? More or less? That’s ninety grand, if everybody buys in. Nice. That’s three months’ salary for a poor man like me.”

“Much nicer than that,” Fiorella said. “Because these guys are a bunch of scientists, they all think they’re statistical savants. They weren’t happy with a simple, pick-your-day pool. They set up a market.”

Sandy: “A market? You mean like a political market?”

“Exactly. You buy a date that you think it’ll happen. If you start to feel your pick was weak or if your date goes by without any action, you can buy back in, any date you want—but you have to pay the market price, which is set by consensus. Everybody who already has that date won’t want you to buy in at all—they’ll want to keep all the money to themselves. But if you have the right to buy in, they’ll want to jack up your reentry price as high as possible.

“On the other hand,” she continued, “people who don’t have that date, and don’t believe it will happen, will want other people to buy in—because the money stays in the pot if it doesn’t happen. So they want the buy-in price to be low enough to encourage people to buy in, but also high enough that the pot gets fatter downstream.”

“Okay,” Sandy said. “I got that.”

“Once the market price is set, you can put your money in,” Fiorella said. “Say that it looks like we’re going to get together on Friday. Okay, the price to buy in on that Friday could be quite large. With a basic, say, hundred thousand dollars on the scale, you might have to kick in another five or ten thousand dollars, or even more, to buy back in, if the event looks likely. If we’re all kissy in the corridors. The amount would depend on how many people already have that date… The market price for the gamble.”

“I don’t entirely understand that,” Sandy said.

“Look. Say there’s a hundred thousand in the pot, and only three people have that date,” Fiorella said. “If you can buy back in for, say five thousand, the pot is then a hundred and five thousand. Split four ways, that would be”—her eyes rolled up as she worked it out—“twenty-six thousand, two hundred and fifty each, a profit of twenty-one thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars on the five-thousand-dollar buy-in. But only if we get together that day.”

“Tell me again why the three original buyers let him buy in?” Clover asked.

“They don’t have any choice—the buy-in is by consensus of all the bettors,” Fiorella said. “And the people who don’t think it’s going to happen on one particular day, would always be a majority, and they can force the buy-in price down to an acceptable level. Because they want other people to buy in.”

“Because the money stays in the pot if it doesn’t happen, and they don’t believe it will,” Sandy said.

Fiorella: “Yes!”

Clover: “If Sandy doesn’t nail you on that Friday—”

“Please, John,” Fiorella said.

“If you and Sandy don’t have coitus on Friday—”

“Coitus? That’s even worse,” Fiorella said. “Anyway, to get to the point, the money stays in the pot and the action moves to the next day.”

Clover scratched his chin. “Hypothetically, if you and Sandy were to stretch this out, running hot and cold along the way, raising hopes, then disappointing them, the money could get… large.”

“I wouldn’t say large. I would say huge,” Fiorella said. “Actually, as the retained pot gets larger and larger, the amount will tend to snowball. It could go to, who knows? A million? More? If Sandy and I had a really loud argument on the morning of the day it happened…”

“The buy-in on that date would be really low,” Clover said.

“And if we picked a fight date that nobody had bought, and then jumped in bed later in the day, someone who bought in would keep it all,” Sandy said, his eyes narrowing.

“You and Sandy couldn’t bet on this, because then everybody would know that you could fix it,” Clover said to Fiorella. “But if a third person were to know the actual date, you and the third person could move things around so…”

“We could make a fuckin’ fortune,” Fiorella said. “Excuse the pun.”

Sandy said to Fiorella, “You have a criminal mind. I admire that in a woman.”

“So do I,” Clover said. He rubbed his hands together. “Who do I talk to about getting in the pool? The handyman?”

A few days later:

Becca said, “If this doesn’t work, I’ll kill you.”

Mark Vaughn, a computer tech safely ensconced on Earth, said, “It would have stopped the last one, or anything like that. We won’t have the same fault, I promise you that. Other faults—well, it’s your design, sweetie.”

“Call me sweetie again and I’ll kill you.”

“Anyway, Becca, ma’am, sir—you’re good. That last batch of code looked great if you didn’t look too hard, but basically, it was marginal, in my opinion, and you probably ought to burn down that code farm and switch all the contracts to us. This batch… this batch is the cleanest, most robust stuff in the world. I mean that literally. In the world.”

“If this batch blows us up again…”

“I know, you’ll kill me.”

“That’s correct.”

“Let me know what happens,” Vaughn said.

“Don’t worry about that: it’ll be all over your screen, one way or the other.”

A few days after that:

The other marines all looked at Sergeant Margaret Pastor, who said, “I know. I’m the smallest.”

“It’s not much of a leak,” said one of the guys.

“It’s not ‘how much.’ It’s what it is,” Pastor said.

What it was, was human waste, a brown trickle that could be seen spattering the floor. What was happening was a leak in a pressurized sewer pipe, and the fastest way to get to the leak was to send somebody down a cable tunnel, not meant for human access, with a laser cutter. That person would cut a hole in the wall of the cable tunnel, and then reach up and seal the leak in the sewer pipe with an epoxy injector.

“A shit job,” said one of the guys, and the rest of them, with the exception of Pastor, fell about laughing.

“I didn’t join the Marine Corps to clean up somebody’s poop,” Pastor said.

“No, but you volunteered to be cross-trained in maintenance, and none of the rest of us can fit into that pipe.”

“Give me the fuckin’ cutter. And get a garbage bag. I’ll wrap myself in the bag.”

The job took an hour: fifteen minutes to carefully cut through the cable pipe, another fifteen to plug the leak, during which time Pastor got liberally spattered with the effluent, another fifteen minutes to vacuum the crap out of the cable tunnel.

When she finished, she scooted herself backwards, until her feet were sticking out of the tunnel, and then the guys grabbed her by the ankles and pulled her out.