“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.”