Twice we coasted completely around the world. It was glorious, fascinating, an endless vision of delights. When Sam asked us how we were enjoying the flight the cabin echoed with cheers. I didn’t want the flight to end. I could have stayed hunched over in that cumbersome space suit and stared out that little window for the rest of my days. Gladly.
But at last Sam’s sad voice told us, “I’m sorry, folks, but that’s it. Time to head back to the barn.”
I could feel the disappointment that filled the cabin.
As the window shutters slowly slid shut Sam announced casually, “Now comes the tricky part. Re-entry and rendezvous with the carrier plane.”
Rendezvous with the carrier plane? He hadn’t mentioned that before. I heard several attendant call buttons chiming. Some of the other tourists were alarmed by Sam’s news, too.
In a few minutes he came back on the intercom. In my earphones I heard Sam explain, “Our flight plan is to rendezvous with the carrier plane and reconnect with her so she can bring us back to the airport under the power of her jet engines. That’s much safer than trying to land this orbiter by herself.
“However,” he went on, “if we miss rendezvous we’ll land the orbiter just the way we did it for NASA, no sweat. I’ve put this ninety-nine ton glider down on runways at Kennedy and Edwards, no reason why I can’t land her back at Colon just as light as a feather.”
A ninety-nine ton feather, I thought, can’t be all that easy to land. But reconnecting to the carrier plane? I’d never heard of that even being tried before.
Yet Sam did it, smooth as pie. We hardly felt a jolt or rattle. Sam kept up a running commentary for us, since our window shutters had been closed tight for re-entry into the atmosphere. There were a few tense moments, but only a few.
“Done!” Sam announced. “We’re now connected again to the carrier plane. We’ll be landing at Colon in twenty-seven minutes.”
And that was it. I felt the thud and bounce of the 747’s wheels hitting the concrete runway, and then we taxied back to the hangar. Once we stopped and the engines whined down, the flight attendants opened the hatch and we went down to the ground in the same banana-smelling cherry picker.
The plane had stopped outside the hangar. There were a couple of photographers at the base of the cherry picker taking each couple’s picture as they stood on terra firma once again, grinning out from their space suit helmets. The first tourists in space.
Sam popped out of the cockpit and personally escorted me to the hatch and went down the cherry picker with me and my seat companion. He posed for the photographer between us, his arms on our shoulders, standing on tip-toe.
The thirty-nine other tourists went their separate ways that afternoon, clutching their photographs and smiling with their memories of space flight the way a new saint smiles at the revelation of heaven. They were converts, sure enough. They would go back home and tell everyone they knew about their space adventure. They were going to be Sam’s best sales force.
I had a decision to make. I had started out investigating Sam for you, Uncle Griff, with the probability that his so-called tourist operation was a front for narcotics smuggling. But it sure didn’t look that way to me.
Besides, I really liked the little guy. He was a combination of Huckleberry Finn and Long John Silver, with a bit of Chuck Yeager thrown in.
Yet I had come on to Sam as a wide-eyed tourist. If I hung around Colon, sooner or later he’d realize that I hadn’t told him the exact truth about myself. I discovered, to my own surprise—shock, really—that I didn’t want to hurt Sam’s feelings. Worse, I didn’t want him to know that I had been spying on him. I didn’t want Sam Gunn to hate me.
So I had to leave. Unless Sam asked me to stay.
Like a fool, I decided to get him to ask me.
He invited me to dinner that evening. “A farewell dinner,” he called it. I spent the afternoon shopping for the slinkiest, sexiest black lace drop-dead dress I could find. Then I had my hair done: I usually wore it pinned up or in a ponytail, part of my sweet-sixteen pose. Now I had it sweeping down to my bare shoulders, soft and alluring.
I hoped.
Sam’s eyes bugged out a bit when he saw me. That was good.
“My god, Ramona, you’re…” he fished around for a compliment, “… you’re beautiful!”
“Thank you,” I said, and swept past him to settle myself in his convertible, showing plenty of thigh in the process.
Don’t growl, Uncle Griff. I was emotionally involved with Sam. I know I shouldn’t have been, but at the time there wasn’t much I could do about it.
Sam was bouncing with enthusiasm about his first flight, of course.
“It worked!” he shouted, exultant, as he screeched the convertible out of my hotel’s driveway. “Everything worked like a mother-loving charm! Nothing went wrong. Not one thing! Not a transistor or a data bit out of place. Perfect! One thousand batting average. Murphy’s Law sleeps with the fishes.”
He was so excited about the successful flight that he really wasn’t paying much attention to me. And the breeze as we drove through the twilight was pulling my carefully-done coiffure apart.
Sam took me to a quiet little restaurant out in a suburban shopping mall, of all places. The food was wonderful, but our conversation—over candlelight and wine—continued to deal with business instead of romance.
“If we start the flights at seven in the morning instead of nine, we can get in an afternoon flight, too,” Sam was musing, grinning like an elf on amphetamines. “Double our income.”
“Will your customers be able to get up that early?” I heard myself asking, intrigued by his visions of success despite myself. “Some of them are pretty old and creaky.”
Sam waved a hand in the air. “We’ll schedule the oldest ones for afternoon flights. Take the spryer ones in the morning. Maybe give ’em a slight break in the price for getting up so early.”
I wanted Sam to pay attention to me, but his head was filled with plans for the future of Space Adventure Tours. Feeling a little downhearted, I decided that if I couldn’t beat him I might as well join him.
“It was a great flight,” I assured him. Not that he needed it; I did. “I’d love to go again, if only I could afford it.”
Either Sam didn’t hear me or he paid me no attention.
“I was worried something would go wrong,” he rattled on. “You know, something always gets away from you on a mission as tricky as this one. But it all worked fine. Better than fine. Terrific!”
It took a while before Sam drew enough of a breath for me to jump into his monologue. But at last I said: “Sam, I’ve been thinking. Your antidisequilibrium system—”
“What about it?” he snapped, suddenly looking wary.
“It worked so well…”
His expression eased. His elfin grin returned. “Sure it did.”
“Why don’t you license it to NASA or some of the corporations that are building space stations in orbit? It could be a steady source of income for you.”
“No,” he said. Flat and final.
“Why not? You could make good money from it—”
“And let Masterson or one of the other big corporations compete with Space Adventure Tours? They’d drive us out of business in two months.”
“How could they do that?” I really was naive, I guess.
Sam explained patiently, “If I let them get their foot in the door they’ll just price tours so far below cost that I’ll either lose all my customers or go bankrupt trying to compete with ’em.”
“Oh.”
“Besides,” he added, his eyes avoiding mine, “if they ever got their hands on my system they’d just duplicate it and stop paying me.”