“What did you say about a vomit something or other?”
Hector laughed again. It was a very pleasant, warm sound. “At Houston, they call the training plane the Vomit Comet. That’s because they fly a couple dozen parabolic arcs each flight. You go from regular gravity to zero-g and back again every few minutes. Makes your stomach go crazy.”
So Sam’s entire space adventure was a total shuck. A sham. A hoax. I had felt disappointed when I’d first suspected Sam. Now that I had the evidence, I felt even worse: bitter, sad, miserable.
I know, Uncle Griff! You told me he was no good. But—well, I still felt awful.
That evening I just couldn’t bear the thought of eating alone, so I invited Hector to have dinner with me. He was staying at the Ritz, too, so we went to the hotel’s shabby old restaurant. It must have once been a splendid place, but it was tacky and rundown and not even half-filled. The waiters were all ancient, and even though the food was really good, the meal left me even more depressed than I had been before.
To make it all worse, Hector reverted to his monosyllabic introversion once we left the airport.
Is it me? I wondered. Is he naturally shy around women? Is he gay? That would’ve been a shame, I thought. He was really handsome, in a dark, smoldering sort of way. Gorgeous big midnight eyes. And I imagined that his hair would grow out curly if he ever allowed it to. His voice was low and dreamy, too—when he chose to say a word or two.
I tried to make conversation with him, but it was like pulling teeth. It took the whole dinner to find out that he was from New Mexico, he wasn’t married, and he intended to make a career of the Air Force.
“I like to fly.” That was his longest sentence of the evening.
I went to bed wanting to cry. I dreamed about Sam; I dreamed that I was a hired assassin and I had to kill him.
Hector and I trailed Sam’s plane again the next day, but this time I brought a video camera and got his entire flight sequence on tape. Evidence.
A job is a job, and no matter how much I hated doing it, I was here to get the goods on Sam Gunn. So he wasn’t smuggling drugs. What he was doing was still wrong: bilking people of their hard-earned money on phony promises to fly them into space. Scamming little old widows and retired couples living on pensions. Swindling honeymoon couples.
And let’s face it, he swindled me, too. In more ways than one.
That afternoon I had Hector fly me over to Colon and, together, we went to the offices of Space Adventure Tours.
Sam seemed truly delighted to see us. He ushered us into his elegant office with a huge grin on his apple-pie face. Then he shook hands with Hector, bussed me on the cheek, and climbed the ramp behind his walnut and chrome desk to sit down in his high-backed leather Swivel chair. Hector and I sat on the two recliners.
“Are you two a thing?” Sam asked, archly.
“A thing?” I asked back.
“Romantically.”
“No!” I was surprised to hear Hector blurt the word out just as forcefully as I did. Stereophonic denial.
“Oh.” Sam looked slightly disappointed, but only for a moment. “I thought maybe you wanted to take a honeymoon flight in space.”
“Sam, you never go higher than thirty-five thousand feet and I have a videotape to prove it.”
He blinked at me. It was the first time I’d ever seen Sam Gunn go silent.
“Your whole scheme is a fake, Sam. A fraud. You’re stealing your customers’ money. That’s theft. Grand larceny, I’m sure.”
The sadness I had felt was giving way to anger: smoldering burning rage at this man who had seemed so wonderful but was really such a scoundrel, such a rat, such a lying, sneaking, thieving bastard. I had trusted Sam! And he had been nothing but deceit.
Sam leaned back in his luxurious desk chair and puckered his lips thoughtfully.
“You’re going to jail, Sam. For a long time.”
“May I point out, oh righteous, wrathful one, that you’re assuming the laws of Panama are the same as the laws of the good old U.S. of A.”
“They have laws against fraud and bunko,” I shot back hotly, “even in Panama.”
“Do you think I’ve defrauded my customers, Ramona?”
“You certainly have!”
Very calmly, Sam asked, “Did you enjoy your flight?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Did you enjoy it?” Sam insisted.
“At the time, yes, I did. But then I found out—”
“You found out that you didn’t actually go into orbit. You found out that we just fly our customers around and make them feel as if they’re in space.”
“Your whole operation is a fake!”
He made an equivocal gesture with his hands. “We don’t take you into orbit, that’s true. The scenes you see through the spacecraft’s windows are videos from real space flights, though. You’re seeing what you’d see if you actually did go into space.”
“You’re telling your customers that you take them into space!” I nearly screamed. “That’s a lie!”
Sam opened a desk drawer and pulled out a slick, multi-color sales brochure. He slid it across the desk toward me.
“Show me where it says we take our customers into orbit.”
I glanced at the brochure’s cover. It showed a picture of an elderly couple smiling so wide their dentures were in danger of falling out. Behind them was a backdrop of the Earth as seen from orbit.
“Nowhere in our promotional literature or video presentations do we promise to take out customers into space,” Sam said evenly.
“But—”
“The contracts our customers sign say that Space Adventure Tours will give them an experience of space flight. Which is what we do. We give our customers a simulation: a carefully designed simulation so that they can have the experience of their lives.”
“You tell them you’re taking them into space!”
“Do not.”
“You do too! You told me you’d fly me into orbit!”
Sam shook his head sadly. “That may be what you heard. What you wanted to hear. But I have never told any of my customers that Space Adventure Tours would actually, physically, transport them into orbit.”
“You did! You did!”
“No I didn’t. If you’d taped our conversations, you’d find that I never told you—or anybody else—that I’d fly you into space.”
I looked at Hector. He sat like a graven idoclass="underline" silent and unmoving.
“When we were in the orbiter,” I remembered, “you made all this talk about separating from the 747 and going into orbit.”
“That was part of the simulation,” Sam said. “Once you’re on board the orbiter, it’s all an act. It’s all part of the experience. Like an amusement park ride.”
Exasperated, I said, “Sam, your customers are going home and telling their friends and relatives that they’ve really flown in space. They’re sending new customers to you, people who expect to go into orbit for real!”
With a shrug, Sam answered, “Ramona, honey, I’m not responsible for what people think, or say, or do. If they wanna believe they’ve really been in space, that’s their fantasy, their happiness. Who am I to deny them?”
I was beyond fury. My insides felt bitter cold. “All right,” I said icily. “Suppose I go back to the States and let the news media know what you’re doing? How long do you think customers will keep coming?”
Sam’s brows knit slightly. “Gimme two more months,” he said.
“Two more months?”
“Let me operate like this for two more months, and then I’ll close down voluntarily.”
“You’re asking me to allow you to defraud the public for another two months?”
His eyes narrowed. “You know, you’re talking like a lawyer. Or maybe a cop.”