The Sam Gunn Omnibus

by Ben Bova

  Sam looked at his wristwatch and said, “Hey! It’s just about time for our first space cruiser to land! Let’s go out and see it come in!”

  I felt a little like the first time I went out to buy a car on my own, without Daddy or any of my big brothers with me. But I let Sam take me by the hand to his own car—a leased fire-engine-red BMW convertible— and drive me out to an immense empty hangar with a newly painted SPACE ADVENTURE TOURS sign painted across its curved roof.

  “Used to be a blimp hangar,” Sam said over the rushing wind as we drove up to the hangar. “U.S. Navy used ‘em for antisubmarine patrol. It was falling apart from neglect. I got it for a song.”

  The DEA had considered asking the Navy to use blimps to patrol the sea-lanes that drug smugglers used, I remembered.

  “You’re going into space in a blimp?” I asked as we braked to a gravel-spitting stop.

  “No no no,” Sam said, jumping out of the convertible and running over to my side to help me out. “Blimps wouldn’t work. We’re using ... well, look! Here it comes now!”

  I turned to look where he was pointing and saw a huge, lumbering Boeing 747 coming down slowly, with ponderous grace, at the far end of the long concrete runway. And attached to its back was an old space shuttle orbiter.

  “That’s one of the old shuttles!” I cried, surprised.

  “Right,” said Sam. “That’s what we ride into space in.”

  “Gosh.” I was truly impressed.

  The immense piggyback pair taxied right up to us, the 747’s four jet engines howling so loud I clapped my hands over my ears. Then it cut power and loomed over us, with the shuttle orbiter riding high atop it. It was certainly impressive.

  “NASA sold off its shuttle fleet, so I got a group of investors together and bought one of ‘em,” Sam said, rather proudly, I noticed. “Bought the piggyback plane to go with it, too.”

  While the ground crew attached a little tractor to the 747’s nose wheel and towed it slowly into the old blimp hangar, Sam explained that he and his technical staff had worked out a new launch system: the 747 carried the orbiter up to more than fifty thousand feet, and then the orbiter disconnected and lit up its main engines to go off into space.

  “The 747 does the job that the old solid rocket boosters used to do when NASA launched shuttles from Cape Canaveral,” Sam explained to me. “Our system is cheaper and safer.”

  The word cheaper reminded me. “How much does a tour cost?” I asked still again, determined this time to get an answer.

  We had walked into the hangar by now. Technicians were setting up ladders and platforms up and down the length of the plane. The huge shadowy hangar echoed with the clang of metal equipment and the clatter of their voices, yelling back and forth in Spanish.

  “Want to go aboard?” Sam asked, with a sly grin.

  I sure did, but I answered, “Not until you tell me how much a flight costs.”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” he said, without flicking an eyelash.

  “Ten thou....” I thought I recalled that the shuttle cost ten thousand dollars a pound when NASA was operating it. Even the new Clipperships, which were entirely reusable, cost several hundred dollars per pound.

  “You can put it on your credit card,” Sam suggested.

  “Ten thousand dollars?” I repeated. “For a flight into orbit?”

  He nodded solemnly. “You experience two orbits and then we land back here. The whole flight will last a little more than four hours.”

  “How can you do it so cheap?” I blurted.

  Sam spread his arms. “I’m not a big, bloated government agency. I keep a very low overhead. I don’t have ten zillion lawyers looking over my shoulder. My insurance costs are much lower here in Panama than they’d be in the States. And ...” He hesitated.

  “And?” I prompted.

  With a grin that was almost bashful, Sam told me, “I want to do good for the people who’ll never be able to afford space flight otherwise. I don’t give a damn if I make a fortune or not: I just want to help ordinary people like you to experience the thrill and the wonder of flying in space.”

  I almost believed him.

  In fact, right then and there I really wanted to believe Sam Gunn. Even though I had a pretty good notion that he was laying it on with a trowel.

  I told Sam that even though ten thousand was a bargain for orbital flight it was an awfully steep price for me to pay. He agreed and invited me to dinner. I expected him to keep up the pressure on me to buy a ticket, but Sam actually had other things in mind. One thing, at least.

  He was charming. He was funny. He kept me laughing all through the dinner we had at a little shack on the waterfront that served the best fish in onion sauce I’ve ever tasted. He told me the story of his life, several times, and each time was completely different. I couldn’t help but like him. More than like him.

  Sam drove me back to my hotel and rode up the creaking elevator with me to my floor. I intended to say good-night at the door to my room but somehow it didn’t work out that way. I never said good-night to him at all. What I said, much later, was good morning.

  Now, Uncle Griff, don’t go getting so red in the face! It was the first time I’d let anybody get close to me since the divorce. Sam made me feel attractive, wanted. I needed that. It was like... well, like I’d run away from the human race. Sam brought me back, made me alive again. He was thoughtful and gentle and somehow at the same time terrifically energetic. He was great fun.

  And besides, by the time we were having breakfast together in the hotel’s dining room he offered to let me fly on his space cruiser for free.

  “Oh no, Sam, I couldn’t do that. I’ll pay my own way,” I said.

  He protested faintly, but I had no intention of letting him think I was in his debt. Going to bed with Sam once was fun. Letting him think I owed him was not.

  So I phoned Washington and told my boss to expect a ten-grand charge to come through—which you, Uncle Griff, will be billed for. Then I got into a taxi and drove out to the offices of Space Adventure Tours and plunked down my credit card.

  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.