Free Beyond the Blue Event Horizon by Frederik Pohl

disappearing.
    I started to get up. Talking of food reminded me that lunch should be about ready, and I was not only hungry, I had plans for an afterlunch break. I tied the robe around me-and then remembered the message about the lawsuit. Lawsuits are nothing special in any rich man’s life, but if Morton wanted to talk to me I probably ought to listen.
    He responded at once, sitting at his desk, leaning forward earnestly. “We’re being sued, Robin,” he said. “The Food Factory Exploitation Corp., the Gateway Corp., plus Paul Hall, Dorema Herter-Hall and Peter Herter, both in propria persona and as guardian for codefendant Janine Herter. Plus the Foundation and you personally.”
    “I seem to have a lot of company, at least. Do I have to worry?” Pause. Thoughtfully, “I think you might, a little. The suit is from Hanson Bover. Trish’s husband, or widower, depending on how you look at it.” Morton was shimmering a little. It’s a defect in his program, and Essie keeps wanting to fix it-but it doesn’t affect his legal ability and I kind of like it. “He has got himself declared conservator of Trish Bover’s assets, and on the basis of her first landing on the Food Factory he wants a full mission completed share of whatever comes out of it.”
    That wasn’t too funny. Even if we couldn’t move the damn thing, with the new developments that bonus might be quite a lot. “How can he do that? She signed the standard contract, didn’t she? So all we have to do is produce the contract. She didn’t come back, therefore she doesn’t get a share.”
    “That’s the way to go if we wind up in court, yes, Robin. But there are one or two rather ambiguous precedents. Maybe not even ambiguous-her lawyer thinks they’re good, even if they are a little old. The most important one was a guy who signed a fifty-thousand-dollar contract to do a tightrope walk over Niagara Falls. No performance, no pay. He fell off halfway. The courts held that he had given the performance, so they had to pay up.”
    “That’s crazy, Morton!”
    “That’s the case law, Robin. But I only said you might have to worry a little. I think probably we’re all right, I’m just not sure we’re all right. We have to file an appearance within two days. Then we’ll see how it goes.”
    “All right. Shimmer away, Morton,” I said, and got up, because by now I was absolutely sure it was time for lunch. In fact, Essie was just coming through the door, and, to my disappointment, she was fully dressed.
    Essie is a beautiful woman, and one of the joys of being married to her for five years is that every year she looks better to me than the year before. She put her arm around my neck as we walked toward the dining porch and turned her head to look at me. “What’s matter, Robin?” she asked.
    “Nothing’s the matter, dear S. Ya.,” I said. “Only I was planning to invite you to shower with me after lunch.”
    “You are randy old goat, old man,” she said severely. “What is wrong with showering after dark, when we will then naturally and inevitably go to bed?”
    “By dark I have to be in Washington. And tomorrow you’re off to Tucson for your conference, and this weekend I have to go for my medical. It doesn’t matter, though.”
    She sat down at the table. “You are also pitifully bad liar,” she observed. “Eat quickly, old man. One cannot take too many showers, after all.”
    I said, “Do you know, Essie, that you are a thoroughly sensual creature? It’s one of your finest traits.”
    The quarterly statement on my food mines holdings was on my desk file in my Washington suite before breakfast. It was even worse than I had expected; at least two million dollars had burned up under the Wyoming hills, and another fifty thousand or so more was smoldering away every day until they got the fire all out. If they ever did. It did not mean I was in trouble, but it might mean that a certain amount of easy credit would no longer be easy.