by Ben Bova
Three things struck me, as I sat strapped into my seat, encased in my space suit. One: Sam didn’t have to duck his head to get through that low hatch. Two: he wasn’t wearing a space suit. Three: he was probably going to pilot the orbiter himself.
Was there a copilot already in the cockpit with him? Surely Sam didn’t intend to fly the orbiter into space entirely by himself. And why wasn’t he wearing a space suit, when he insisted that all the rest of us did?
No time for puzzling over it all. The flight attendants came down the aisle, checking to see that we were all firmly strapped in. They were in space suits, just as we passengers were. I felt motion: the 747 beneath us was being towed out of the hangar. The windows were sealed shut, so we couldn’t see what was happening outside.
Then we heard the jet engines start up; actually we felt their vibrations more than heard their sound. Our cabin was very well insulated.
“Please pull down the visors on your helmets,” the blonde flight attendant singsonged. “We will be taking off momentarily.”
I confess I got a lump in my throat as I felt the engines whine up to full thrust, pressing me back in my seat. With our helmet visors down I couldn’t see the face of the elderly woman sitting beside me, but we automatically clasped our gloved hands together, like mother and daughter. My heart was racing.
I wished we could see out the windows! As it was, I had to depend on my sense of balance, sort of flying by the seat of my pants, while the 747 raced down the runway, rotated its nose wheel off the concrete, and then rose majestically into the air—with us on top of her. Ridiculously, I remembered a line from an old poem: With a sleighful of toys and St. Nicholas, too.
“We’re in the air,” came Sam’s cheerful voice over our helmet earphones. “In half an hour we’ll separate from our carrier plane and light up our main rocket engines.”
We sat in anticipatory silence. I .don’t know about the others—it was impossible to see their faces or tell what was going through their minds— but I twitched every time the ship jounced or swayed.
“Separation in two minutes,” Sam’s voice warned us.
I gripped my seat’s armrests. Couldn’t see my hands through the thick space suit gloves, but I could feel how white my knuckles were.
“You’re going to hear a banging noise,” Sam warned us. “Don’t be alarmed; it’s just the explosive bolts separating the struts that’re clamping us to the carrier plane.”
Explosive bolts. All of a sudden I didn’t like that word explosive.
The bang scared me even though I knew it was coming. It was a really loud, sharp noise. But the cabin didn’t seem to shake or shudder at all, thank goodness.
Almost immediately we felt more thrust pushing us back into our seats again.
“Main rocket engines have ignited on schedule,” Sam said evenly. “Next stop, LEO!”
I knew that he meant Low Earth Orbit, but I wondered how many of the tourists were wondering who this person Leo might be.
The male flight attendant’s voice cut in on my earphones. “As we enter Earth orbit you will experience a few moments of free fall before our anti-disequilibrium equipment balances out your inner sensory systems. Don’t let those few moments of a falling sensation worry you; they’ll be over almost before you realize it.”
I nodded to myself inside my helmet. Zero-gee. My mouth suddenly felt dry.
And then I was falling! Dropping into nothingness. My stomach floated up into my throat. I heard moans and gasps from my fellow tourists.
And just like that it was over. A normal feeling of weight returned and my stomach settled back to where it belonged. Sam’s equipment really worked!
“We are now in low Earth orbit,” Sam’s voice said, low, almost reverent. “I’m going to open the viewport shutters now.”
Since I had paid the lowest price for my ride, I had an aisle seat. I leaned forward in my seat harness and twisted my shoulders sideways as far as I could so that I could peer through my helmet visor and look through the window.
The Earth floated below us, huge and curving and so brightly blue it almost hurt my eyes. I could see swirls of beautiful white clouds and the sun gleaming off the ocean and swatches of green ground and little brown wrinkles that must have been mountains and out near the curving sweep of the horizon a broad open swath of reddish tan that stretched as far as I could see.
“That’s the coast of Africa coming up. You can see the Sahara a little to our north,” Sam said.
The cabin was filled with gasps and moans again, but this time they were joyous, awestruck. I didn’t care how much the ticket price was; I would have paid my own way to see this.
I could see the horn of Africa and the great rift valley where the first proto-humans made their camps. Sinbad’s Arabian Sea glittered like an ocean of jewels before my eyes.
Completely around the world we went, not in eighty days but a little over ninety minutes. The Arabian peninsula was easy to spot, not a wisp of a cloud anywhere near it. India was half blotted out by monsoon storms, but we swung over the Himalayas and across China. It was night on that side of the world, but the Japanese islands were outlined by the lights of their cities and highways.
“Mt. Everest’s down there under the clouds,” Sam told us. “Doesn’t look so tall from up here.”
Japan, Alaska, and then down over the heartland of America. It was an unusually clear day in the mid-west; we could see the Mississippi snaking through the nation’s middle like a coiling blood vessel.
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. Reentry 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 Col6n 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 reentry 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 personall
y 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 tiptoe.
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 anti-disequilibrium 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.”
“But you’ve patented the system, haven’t you?”
His eyes became really evasive. “Not yet. Patents take time.”
Suddenly our celebration dinner had turned glum. The mood had been broken, the charm lost, the enchantment gone. Maybe we were both tired from the excitement of the day and our adrenaline rush had petered out. Whatever the reason, we finished dinner and Sam drove me back to my hotel.
“I guess you’re going back to the States,” he said, once he’d stopped the convertible at the hotel’s front entrance.
“I guess,” I said.
“It’s been fun knowing you, Ramona. You’ve been a good-luck charm for me.”
I sighed. “Wish I didn’t have to leave.”
“Me too.”
“Maybe I could find a job here,” I hinted.
Sam didn’t reply. He could have said he’d find a position for me in his company, but it’s probably better that he didn’t, the way things worked out.
The hotel doorman came grudgingly up to the car and opened my door with a murmured, “Buenas noches.”
I went up to my room, feeling miserable. I couldn’t sleep. I tossed in the bed, wide awake, unhappy, trying to sort out my feelings and take some control of them. Didn’t do me one bit of good. After hours of lying there in the same bed Sam and I had made love in, I tried pacing the floor.
Finally, in desperation, I went back to bed and turned on the TV. Most of the channels were in Spanish, of course, but I flicked through to find some English-speaking movie or something else that would hypnotize me to sleep.
And ran across the weather channel.
I almost missed it, surfing through the channels the way I was. But I heard the commentator say something about a hurricane as I surfed through. It took a couple of seconds for the words to make an impression on my conscious mind.
Then I clicked back to the weather. Sure enough, there was a monster hurricane roaring through the Caribbean. It was too far north to threaten Panama, but it was heading toward Cuba and maybe eventually Florida.
When we orbited over the region, not much more than twelve hours ago, the Caribbean had been clear as crystal. I remember staring out at Cuba; I could even see the little tail of the keys extending out from Florida’s southern tip. No hurricane in sight.
I punched up my pillows and sat up in bed, watching the weather. The American mid-west was cut in half by a cold front that spread early-season snow in Minnesota and rain southward all the way to Louisiana. The whole Mississippi valley was covered with clouds.
But the Mississippi was clearly visible for its entire length when we’d been up in orbit that morning.
Could the weather change that fast?
I fell asleep with the weather channel
bleating at me. And dreamed weird, convoluted dreams about Sam and hurricanes and watching television.
The next morning I packed and left Col6n, but only flew as far as Panama city, on the Pacific side of the canal. I was determined to find out how Sam had tricked me. Deceived all forty of us. But I was taking no chances on bumping into Sam in Colon.
Within a week Sam was doing a roaring business in space tours. He hadn’t gotten to the point where he was flying two trips per day, but a telephone call to his company revealed that Space Adventure Tours was completely booked for the next four months. The smiling young woman who took my call cheerfully informed me that she could take a reservation for early in February, if I liked.
I declined. Then I phoned my boss at the DEA in Washington, to get him to find me an Air Force pilot.
“Someone who’s never been anywhere near NASA,” I told my boss. I didn’t want to run the risk of getting a pilot who might have been even a chance acquaintance of Sam’s. “And make sure he’s male,” I added. Sam was just too heart-meltingly charming when he wanted to be. I would take no chances.
What they sent me was Hector Dominguez, a swarthy, broad-shouldered, almost totally silent young pilot fresh from the Air Force Academy. I met him in the lobby of my hotel, the once-elegant old Ritz. It was easy to spot him: he wasn’t in uniform, but he might as well have been, with a starched white shirt, knife-edged creases on his dark blue slacks, and a military buzz cut. He’d never make it as an undercover agent.
I needed him for flying, thank goodness, not spying. I introduced myself and led him to the hotel’s restaurant, where I explained what I wanted over lunch. He nodded in the right places and mumbled an occasional, “Yes, ma’am.” His longest conversational offering was, “Please pass the bread, ma’am.”
He made me feel like I was ninety! But he apparently knew his stuff, and the next morning when I drove out to the airport he was standing beside a swept-wing jet trainer, in his flier’s sky-blue coveralls, waiting for me.
He helped me into a pair of coveralls, very gingerly. I got the impression that he was afraid I’d complain of sexual harassment if he actually touched me. Once I had to lean on his shoulder, when I was worming into the parachute harness I had to put on; I thought he’d break the Olympic record for long jump, the way he flinched away from me.
