The Sam Gunn Omnibus (17 page)

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 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 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.