The Sam Gunn Omnibus (18 page)

“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.

The ground crew helped me clamber up into the cockpit, connected my radio
and oxygen lines, buckled my seat harness and showed me how to fasten the
oxygen mask to my plastic helmet. Then they got out of the way and the clear
bubble of the plane’s canopy clamped down over Hector and me.

Once we were buttoned up in the plane’s narrow cockpit, me up front and
him behind me, he changed completely.

“We’ll be following their 747,” Hector’s voice crackled in my helmet
earphones, “up to its maximum altitude of fifty thousand feet.”

“That’s where the orbiter is supposed to separate from it,” I said,
needlessly.

“Right. We’ll stay within visual contact of the 747 until the orbiter
returns.”

If it ever actually leaves the 747, I thought.

Hector was a smooth pilot. He got the little jet trainer off the runway
and arrowed us up across the Panama Canal. In less than fifteen minutes we
spotted the lumbering 747 and piggybacking orbiter, with their bright blue
space adventure
tours
stenciled across their white fuselages.

For more than three hours we followed them. The orbiter never separated
from the 747. The two flew serenely across the Caribbean, locked together like
Siamese twins. Far below us, on the fringe of the northern horizon, I could see
bands of swirling gray-white clouds: the edge of the hurricane.

Sam’s 747-and-orbiter only went as high as thirty thousand feet, then
leveled out.

“He’s out of the main traffic routes,” Hector informed me. “Nobody around
for a hundred miles, except us.”

“They can’t see us, can they?”

“Not unless they have rear-looking radar.”

Hector kept us behind and slightly below Sam’s hybrid aircraft. Then I saw
the 747’s nose pull up; they started climbing. Hector stayed right on station
behind them, as if we were connected by an invisible chain.

Sam’s craft climbed more steeply, then nosed over into a shallow dive. We
did the same, and I felt my stomach drop away for a heart-stopping few moments
before a feeling of weight returned.

In my earphones I heard Hector chuckling. “That’s how he gave you a
feeling of zero-gee,” he said. “It’s the old Vomit Comet trick. They use it at
Houston to give astronauts-in-training a feeling for zero gravity.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You fly a parabolic arc: up at the top of the arc you get a few seconds
of pretty near zero gravity.”

“That’s when we felt weightless!” I realized.

“Yeah. And when they leveled off you thought his anti-space-sickness
equipment was working. All he did was start flying straight and level again.”

Magic tricks are simple when you learn how they’re done.

“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-gee 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 run-down 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 photographed his entire flight sequence. 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, shook hands with Hector, bussed me on the cheek, and
climbed the ramp behind his walnut and chrome desk and sat 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 video 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 deceitful.

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 US 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, multicolor 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.