by Ben Bova
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 broch
ure’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.
“Nowhere in our promotional literature or video presentations do we promise to take our customers into space,” Sam said evenly.
“But—”
“The contracts our customers sign say that Space Adventure Tours will give them an experience of space flight. Which is what we do. We give our customers a simulation: a carefully designed simulation so that they can have the experience of their lives.”
“You tell them you’re taking them into space!”
“Do not.”
“You do too! You told me you’d fly me into orbit!”
Sam shook his head sadly. “That may be what you heard. What you wanted to hear. But I have never told any of my customers that Space Adventure Tours would actually, physically, transport them into orbit.”
“You did! You did!”
“No I didn’t. If you’d recorded our conversations, you’d find that I never told you—or anybody else—that I’d fly you into space.”
I looked at Hector. He sat like a graven idol: silent and unmoving.
“When we were in the orbiter,” I remembered, “you made all this talk about separating from the 747 and going into orbit.”
“That was part of the simulation,” Sam said. “Once you’re on board the orbiter, it’s all an act. It’s all part of the experience. Like an amusement park ride.”
Exasperated, I said, “Sam, your customers are going home and telling their friends and relatives that they’ve really flown in space. They’re sending new customers to you, people who expect to go into orbit for real!”
With a shrug, Sam answered, “Ramona, honey, I’m not responsible for what people think, or say, or do. If they wanna believe they’ve really been in space, that’s their fantasy, their happiness. Who am I to deny them?”
I was beyond fury. My insides felt bitter cold. “All right,” I said icily. “Suppose I go back to the States and let the news media know what you’re doing? How long do you think customers will keep coming?”
Sam’s brows knit slightly. “Gimme two more months,” he said.
“Two more months?”
“Let me operate like this for two more months, and then I’ll close down voluntarily.”
“You’re asking me to allow you to defraud the public for another two months?”
His eyes narrowed. “You know, you’re talking like a lawyer. Or maybe a cop.”
“What and who I am has nothing to do with this,” I snapped.
“A cop,” Sam said, with a heavy sigh.
Out of nowhere, Hector spoke up. “Why do you want two months?”
I whirled on the poor guy. “So he can steal as much money as he can from the poor unsuspecting slobs he calls his customers, why else?”
“Yeah,” Hector said, in that smoky low voice of his, “okay, maybe so. But why two months?”
Before I could think of an answer, Sam popped in. “Because in two months I’ll have proved my point.”
“What point?”
“That there’s a viable market for tourists in space. That people’ll spend a good-sized hunk of change just for the chance to ride into orbit.”
“Which you don’t really do,” I reminded him.
“That doesn’t matter,” Sam said. “The point I’m making is that there really is a market for space tourism. People have been talking about space tourism for years; I’m doing something about it.”
“You’re stealing,” I said. “Swindling.”
“Okay, so I’m faking it. Nevertheless, people are plunking down their money for a space adventure.”
“So what?” I sneered.
Hunching forward, leaning his forearms on the gleaming desktop, Sam said, “So with three whole months of this operation behind me, I can go back to the States and raise enough capital to lease a Clippership that’ll really take tourists into orbit.”
I stared at him.
Hector got the point before I did. “You mean the financial people won’t believe there’s a market for space tourism now, but they will after you’ve operated this fake business for three months?”
“Right,” Sam answered. “Those Wall Street types don’t open up their wallets until you’ve got solid numbers to show ‘em.”
“What about venture capitalists?” Hector asked. “They back new, untried ideas all the time.”
Sam made a sour face. “Sure they do. I went to some of ‘em. First thing they did was ask me why the big boys like Rockledge and Global Technologies aren’t doing it. Then they go to the ‘experts’ in the field and ask their opinion of the idea. And who’re the experts?”
“Rockledge and Global,” I guessed.
Shaking his head, Sam said, “Even worse. They went to NASA. To Clark Griffith IV, my own boss, for crap’s sake! By the time he got done scaring the cojones off them, they wouldn’t even answer my e-mail.”
“NASA shot you down?”
“They didn’t know it was me. They talked to a team that the venture capitalists put together.”
I asked, “But shouldn’t NASA be in favor of space tourism? I mean, they’re the space agency, after all.”
“Some people in NASA are in favor of it, sure,” Sam said. “But the higher you go in the agency the more conservative they get. Up at the top they have nightmares of a spacecraft full of tourists blowing up, like the old Challenger. That’d set back everything we do in space by ten years, at least.”
“So when the venture capitalists asked ...”
“The agency bigwigs threw enough cold water on the idea to freeze the Amazon River,” Sam growled.
“And that’s when you started Space Adventure Tours,” I said.
“Right. Set the whole company up while I was still working at the Cape. Then I took a three-month leave to personally run the operation. I’ve got two months left to go.”
Silence. I sat there, not knowing what to say next. Hector looked
thoughtful, or maybe puzzled is a better description of the expression on his face. Sam leaned back in his high chair, staring at me like a little boy who’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but is hoping to get a cookie out of it instead of a spanking.
I was in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. I really liked Sam, even though he had quite literally screwed me. But I couldn’t let him continue to swindle people; that was wrong any way you looked at it, legally or morally.
On the other hand, Sam wasn’t really hurting anybody. Was he? Did any of his customers empty their retirement accounts to take his phony ride? Would any of those retired couples spend their declining years in poverty because Sam bilked them out of their life savings?
I shook my head, trying to settle my spinning thoughts into some rational order. Sam was breaking all kinds of laws, and he’d have to stop. Right now.
“All right,” I said, my mind finally made up. “I’m not going to report this back to your superiors at NASA.”
Sam’s face lit up.
“And I’m not going to blow the whistle on you or bring in the authorities,” I continued.
Sam grinned from ear to ear.
“On one condition,” I said firmly.
His rusty eyebrows hiked up. “One condition?”
“You’ve got to shut this operation down, Sam. Either shut down voluntarily, or I’ll be forced to inform the authorities here in Panama and the news media in the States.”
He nodded solemnly. “Fair enough. In two months I’ll close up shop.”
“Not in two months,” I snapped. “Now. Today. You go out of business now and refund whatever monies you’ve collected for future flights.”
I expected Sam to argue. I expected him to rant and holler at me. Or at least plead and wheedle. He did neither. For long, long moments he simply sat there staring at me, saying nothing, his face looking as if I’d just put a bullet through his heart.
At last Sam heaved an enormous sigh and said, in a tiny little exhausted voice, “Okay, if that’s what you want. I’m in no position to fight back.”
I should have known right there and then that he was lying through his crooked teeth.
Hector flew me back to Panama City and we repaired to our separate hotel rooms. I felt totally drained, really out of it, as if I’d spent the day fighting dragons or climbing cliffs by my fingernails.
Then things started to get weird.
I had just flopped on my hotel room bed, not even bothering to take off my clothes, when the phone rang. My boss from DEA headquarters in Washington.
“You’re going to have a visitor,” he told me, looking nettled in the tiny phone screen. “Her name will be Jones. Listen to what she has to tell you and act accordingly.”
“A visitor?” I mumbled, feeling thickheaded, confused. “Who? Why?”
My boss doesn’t nettle easily, but he sure looked ticked off. “She’ll explain it all to you. And this is the last goddamned time I let you or any other of my people go off on detached duty to help some other agency!”
With that, he cut off the connection. I was looking at a blank phone screen, wondering what on earth was going on.
The phone buzzed again. This time it was Hector.
“I just got a phone call from my group commander at Eglin,” he said. “Some really weird shit has hit the fan, Ramona. I’m under orders to stay here in Panama with you until we meet with some woman named Jones.”
“I got the same orders from my boss,” I told him.
Hector’s darkly handsome face went into brooding mode. “I don’t like the sound of this,” he muttered.
“Neither do I,” I confessed.
We didn’t have long to wait. Ms. Jones arrived bright and early the following morning. In fact, Hector and I were having breakfast together in the hotel’s nearly empty dining room, trying to guess what was going on, when she sauntered in.