The Sam Gunn Omnibus (16 page)

Sam took me to lunch.

But not to dinner. He explained over lunch that he had a business
conference that evening.

“This space-tour business is brand new, you gotta understand,” he told me,
“and that means I have to spend most of my time wining and dining possible
customers.”

“Like me,” I said.

He laughed, but it was bitter. “No, honey, not like you. Old folks, mostly.
Little old widows trying to find something interesting to do with what’s left
of their lives. Retired CEOs who want to think that they’re still on the
cutting edge of things. They’re the ones with the money, and I’ve got to talk
forty of ‘em out of some of it.”

“Forty?”

“That’s our orbiter’s passenger capacity. Forty is our magic number. For
the next forty days and forty nights I’m gonna be chasing little old ladies and
retired old farts. I’d rather be with you, but I’ve gotta sell those seats.”

I looked rueful and told him I understood. After he left me back at my
hotel, I realized with something of a shock that I really was rueful. I missed
Sam!

So I trailed him, telling myself that it was stupid to get emotionally
involved with the guy I’m supposed to be investigating. Sam’s business
conference turned out to be a dinner and show at one of Colon’s seamier night
clubs. I didn’t go in, but the club’s garish neon sign,
The Black Hole,
was enough for me to figure out
what kind of a place it was. Sam went in with two elderly gentlemen from the
States. To me they looked like middle-class retired businessmen on a spree
without their wives.

Sure enough, they were two more customers, I found out later.

Sam was busy most evenings, doing his sales pitch to potential customers
over dinners and night-club shows. He squired blue-haired widows and played
tour guide for honeymooning couples. He romanced three middle-aged woman on
vacation from their husbands, juggling things so well that the first time they
saw one another was at the one-day training seminar in Sam’s rented hangar.

It didn’t quite take forty days and forty nights, but Sam gave each of his
potential customers the full blaze of his personal attention. As far as I know,
each and every one of them signed on the dotted line.

And then he had time for me again.

I had extended my stay in Colon, waiting for the flight that Sam promised.
Once he had signed up a full load of paying customers, he brought us all out to
the hangar for what he called an “orientation.”

So there we were, forty tourists standing on the concrete floor of the
hangar with the big piggyback airplane cum orbiter looming in front of us like
a freshly painted aluminum mountain. Sam stood on a rusty, rickety metal
platform scrounged from the maintenance equipment.

“Congratulations,” he said to us, his voice booming through the echo
chamber of a hangar. “You are the very first space tourists in the history of
the world.”

Sam didn’t need a megaphone. His voice carried through to our last row
with no problem at all. He started off by telling us how great our flight was
going to be, pumping up our expectations. Then he went on to what he said were
the two most important factors.

“Safety and comfort,” he told us. “We’ve worked very hard to make
absolutely certain that you are perfectly safe and comfortable throughout your
space adventure.”

Sam explained that for safety’s sake we were all going to have to wear a
full space suit for the whole four-hour flight. Helmet and all.

“So you can come in your most comfortable clothes,” he said, grinning at
us. “Shorts, T-shirts, whatever you feel happiest in. We’ll all put on our
space suits right here in the hangar before we board the orbiter.”

He explained, rather delicately, that each suit was equipped with a waste
disposal system, a sort of high-tech version of the pilot’s old relief tube,
which worked just as well for women as it did for men, he claimed.

“Since our flight will be no more than four hours long, we won’t need the
FCS—fecal containment system—that NASA’s brainiest scientists have developed
for astronauts to use.” And Sam held up a pair of large-sized diapers.

Everybody laughed.

“Now I’m sure you’ve heard a great deal about space sickness,” Sam went
on, once the laughter died away. “I want to assure you that you won’t be
bothered by the effects of zero gravity on this flight. Your space suits
include a special anti-sickness system that will protect you from the nausea
and giddiness that usually hits first-time astronauts.”

“What kind of a system is it?” asked one of the elderly men. He looked
like a retired engineer to me: shirt pocket bristling with ballpoint pens.

Sam gave him a sly grin. “Mr. Artumian, I’m afraid I can’t give you any
details about that. It’s a new system, and it’s proprietary information. Space
Adventure Tours has developed this equipment, and as soon as the major
corporations learn how well it works they’re going to want to buy, lease, or
steal it from us.”

Another laugh, a little thinner than before.

“But how do we know it’ll work?” Artumian insisted.

Very seriously, Sam replied, “It’s been thoroughly tested, I assure you.”

“But we’re the first customers you’re trying it on.”

Sam’s grin returned. “You’re the first customers we’ve had!”

Before Artumian could turn this briefing into a dialogue, I spoke up. “Could
you tell us what we’ll feel when we’re in zero gravity? Give us an idea of what
to expect?”

Sam beamed at me. “Certainly, Ms. Perkins. When we first reach orbit and
attain zero-gee, you’ll feel a moment or two of free fall. You know, that
stomach-dropping sensation you get when an elevator starts going down. But it’ll
only last a couple of seconds, max. Then our proprietary anti-disequilibrium
system kicks in and you’ll feel perfectly normal.”

Artumian muttered “Ah-hah!” when Sam used the term anti-disequilibrium system.
As if that meant something to his engineer’s brain.

“Throughout the flight,” Sam went on, “you may feel a moment now and then
of free fall, kind of like floating. But our equipment will quickly get your
body’s sensory systems back to normal.”

“Sensory systems,” Artumian muttered knowingly.

Sam and two people in flight attendants’ uniforms showed us through the
orbiter’s passenger cabin. The attendants were both really attractive: a
curvaceous little blonde with a megawatt smile and a handsome brute of a Latino
guy with real bedroomy eyes.

We had to climb a pretty shaky metal ladder to get up there because the
orbiter was still perched on top of the 747. The plane and the orbiter were
gleaming with a fresh coat of white paint and big blue
space adventure
tours
running along their sides. But the ladder was flaking with rust.

It made me wonder just what kind of shoestring Sam was operating on: this
big airplane with a NASA surplus space shuttle orbiter perched atop it, and we
all had to clamber up this rusty, clattery ladder. Some of Sam’s customers were
pretty slow and feeble; old, you know. I heard plenty of wheezing going up that
ladder.

The orbiter’s cabin, though, was really very nice. Like a first-class
section aboard an airliner, except that the seats were even bigger and more
plush. Two seats on either side of the one central aisle. I saw windows at each
row, but they were covered over.

“The windows are protected by individual opaque heat shields,” Sam
explained. “They’ll slide back once we’re in orbit so you can see the glories
and beauties of Earth and space.”

There were no toilets in the cabin, and no galley. The passengers would
remain strapped into their seats at all times, Sam told us. “That’s for your
own safety and comfort,” he assured us.

“You mean we won’t get to float around in zero gravity like they do in the
videos?” asked one of the elderly women.

“’Fraid not,” Sam answered cheerfully. “Frankly, if you tried that, you’d
most likely get so sick you’d want to upchuck. Even our very sophisticated
anti-disequilibrium equipment has its limitations.”

I wasn’t close enough to hear him, but I saw Artumian’s lips mouth the
word, “Limitations.”

That evening all forty of us, plus Sam, had a festive dinner together on
the rooftop of the local Hyatt Hotel. It was a splendid night, clear and filled
with stars. A crescent moon rose and glittered on the Caribbean for us.

Sam flitted from table to table all through the dinner; I doubt that he
got to swallow more than a few bites of food. But he ended the evening at my
table and drove me to my hotel himself, while all the other customers rode to
their hotels in a rattletrap gear-grinding, soot-puffing big yellow school bus
that Sam had rented.

“Tomorrow’s the big day,” Sam said happily as we drove through the dark
streets. “Space Adventure’s first flight.”

My romantic interest in Sam took a back seat to my professional curiosity.

“Sam,” I asked over the rush of the night wind, “how can you make a profit
if you’re only charging ten thousand per passenger? This flight must cost a lot
more than four hundred thousand dollars.”

“Profit isn’t everything, my blue-eyed space beauty,” he said, keeping his
eyes on his driving.

“But if it costs more to fly than you make from ticket sales you’ll go out
of business pretty quickly, won’t you?”

He shot a glance at me. “My pricing schedule is pretty flexible. You got
the bargain rate. Others are paying more; a lot more.”

“Really?”

“Uh-huh. That’s another reason I’m operating here in Panama. Let the fat
cats open their wallets wider than ordinary folks. If I tried that in the
States I’d have a ton of lawyers hitting me with discrimination suits.”

I thought about that as we pulled up in front of my hotel.

“Then how much will you make from this flight?” I asked, noticing that Sam
kept the motor running.

“Gross? About a million-two.”

“Is that enough to cover your costs?”

Sam grinned at me. “I won’t go bankrupt. It’s like the old story of the
tailor who claims that he sells his clothing at prices
below
his own costs. ‘On each and every individual
sale we lose money,’ he tells a customer. ‘But on the volume we make a modest
profit.’“

I didn’t see anything funny in it. It didn’t make sense.

Suddenly Sam shook me out of my musing. He grabbed me by the shoulders,
kissed me on the lips, and then announced, “I’d love to go up to your room and
make mad, passionate love to you, Ramona, but I’ve got an awful lot to do
between now and takeoff tomorrow morning. See you at the hangar!”

He leaned past me and opened my door. Kind of befuddled, I got out of the
car and waved good-bye to him as he roared off in a cloud of exhaust smoke.

Alone in my room, I started to wonder if our one night of passion had merely
been Sam’s way of closing the sale.

The next day, Space Adventure Tours’ first flight was just about
everything Sam had promised.

All forty of us gathered at the hangar bright and early. It took nearly
two hours to get each of us safely sealed up inside a space suit. Some of the
older tourists were almost too arthritic to get their creaky arms and legs into
the suits, but somehow—with Sam and his two flight attendants pushing and
pulling—they all managed.

Instead of that rickety ladder, Sam drove a cherry picker, across the
hangar floor and lifted us in our space suits, two by two like Noah’s
passengers, up to the hatch of the orbiter. The male attendant went up first
and was there at the hatch to help us step inside the passenger cabin and clomp
down the aisle to our assigned seats.

Sam and I were the last couple hoisted up. With the visor of my suit
helmet open, I could smell the faint odor of bananas in the cherry-picker’s
cab. It made me wonder where Sam had gotten the machine, and how soon he had to
return it.

After we were all strapped in, Sam came striding down the cabin, crackling
with energy and enthusiasm. He stood up at the hatch to the flight deck and
grinned ear to ear at us.

“You folks are about to make history. I’m proud of you,” he said. Then he
opened the hatch and stepped into the cockpit.

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 f
i
rmly
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.