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.