“Well,” Sam said, running a hand over his sweaty brow, “whattaya think? Worth the price of a ticket to orbit?”
“Yes! Well worth it. I believe people will gladly pay to come here for vacations.”
“And honeymoons,” Sam added, with his impish grin. “You haven’t even tried the best part of it yet.”
I laughed lightly. There was no sense getting angry at him. “I think I can imagine it well enough.”
“Ah, but the experience, that’s the thing.”
I looked into his devilish hazel eyes and, for the first time, felt sad for Sam Gunn. “Sam,” I said as gently as I could, “you must remember that Esmeralda loves the young poet, not Quasimodo.”
His eyes widened with surprise for a moment. Then his grin returned. “Hell, you don’t have to follow the script exactly, do you?”
He was truly incorrigible.
“It must be time for dinner,” I said. “We should get back to the galley, shouldn’t we?”
So we started up the tube and, as the gravity built up, found ourselves clambering down the rungs of the ladder like a pair of firefighters descending to the street.
“You mean you’re in love with somebody else?” Sam’s voice echoed along the metal walls of the tube.
He was below me. I could see his face turned up toward me, like a round ragamuffin doll with scruffy red hair. I pondered his question for a few moments.
“I think I am,” I answered.
“Somebody younger? Somebody your own age?”
“What difference does it make?”
He fell silent for several moments. At last he said softly, “Well, he better treat you right. If he gives you any trouble you tell me about it, understand?”
I was so surprised at that I nearly missed my step on the next rung. Sam Gunn being fatherly? I found it hard to believe, yet that was what he seemed to be saying.
Spence was already in the galley when we got there.
Sam showed me how to work the food dispensers as he explained, “This glop is barely fit for human consumption. I think Rockledge has some kind of experiment going about how lousy the food has to be before people stop eating it and let themselves starve.”
I accepted a prepared tray from the machine and went to the table where Spence was sitting. There were only ten tables in the galley, and most of them were empty.
“Experienced workers bring their own food up with them and microwave it,” Sam kept rattling on. “Of course, when I open the hotel I’ll have a cordon bleu chef up here and the best by-damn food service you ever saw. Cocktail lounge, too, with real waitresses in cute little outfits. None of those idiot robots like they have down at the Cape….”
He chattered and babbled straight through our meager dinner. In truth, the food was not very appetizing. The soy burger was too cool and the iced tea too warm. I am sure it was nutritious, but it was also bland and dull.
Spence could barely get a word in, the way Sam was nattering. I was content to let him do the talking. Suddenly I felt extremely tired, worn out. It had been a demanding day, with the flight from the Cape and Sam’s zero-gee acrobatics. I had barely slept the night before and had arisen with the dawn.
I yawned in Sam’s face. And immediately felt terribly embarrassed. “Sorry,” I apologized. “But I am very tired.”
“Or bored,” Sam said, without a trace of resentment.
“Tired,” I repeated. “Fatigued. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“Too much excitement,” Sam said.
Spence said nothing.
“I must get some sleep,” I said, pushing my chair back.
“Can you find your room all right?” Spence asked.
“I think so.”
“I’ll walk you to your door,” he said, getting to his feet.
Sam remained seated, but he glanced first at me and then at Spence. “I’ve got a few things to attend to,” he said, “soon as I finish this glorious Rockledge repast.”
So Spence walked with me along the sloping corridor toward the area where the sleeping compartments were.
“Sam works very long hours, even up here,” I said.
Spence chuckled. “He’s working on a couple of Rockledge people. Of the female variety.”
“Oh?”
“The little guy’s always got something going. Although I’ve got to admit,” Spence added, “that he gets a lot of dope about what Rockledge is doing from his—uh, contacts.”
“A sort of masculine Mata Hari?” I asked.
Spence laughed outright.
As we neared the door to my compartment I heard myself asking Spence, “Why don’t they have windows in the compartments? It makes them feel so small and confined.”
Even as I spoke the words I wondered if I wanted to delay the moment I must say good-night to Spence, or if there was another reason.
“The station’s spinning, you know,” he replied, completely serious. “If you had a window in your compartment you’d see the stars looping around, and then the Earth would slide past, and maybe the Moon, if it was in the right position. Could make you pretty queasy, everything spinning by like that.”
“But Sam said the view was magnificent.”
“Oh, it is! Believe me. But that’s the view from outside, or down at the observation blister in the hub.”
“I see.”
“Sam plans to put a video screen in each of his hotel rooms. It’ll look like a window that gives you a steady view of the Earth or whatever else you’d like to see.”
So after all his talk about seeing “the real thing,” Sam was prepared to show his hotel guests little more than video images of the Earth from space. That was just like the gringo capitalist exploiter, I told myself.
Yet I heard myself asking Spence, “Is the view truly magnificent?”
“Sam didn’t show you?”
“No.”
His face lit up. “Want to see it now? You’re not too tired, are you? It’ll only take—”
“I’m not too tired,” I said eagerly. “I would like very much to see this fabulous view.”
All the way along the long tube leading to the station’s hub a voice in my mind reprimanded me. You know why you asked him about the windows, it scolded. You wanted Spence to take you to the zero-gee section.
We floated into the big padded gym. Spence propelled himself to a particular piece of the padding and peeled it back, revealing a small hatch. He opened it and beckoned me to him. I pushed off the curving wall and swam to him, my heart racing so hard I feared it would break my ribs.
Spence helped me wriggle through the narrow hatch, then followed me into a small, cramped dome. There was barely room enough for the two of us. He swung the hatch shut and we were in total darkness.
“Hang on a minute….” he mumbled.
I heard a click and then the whir of an electric motor. The dome seemed to split apart, opening like a clamshell. And beyond it—
The Earth. A huge brilliant blue curving mass moving slowly, with ponderous grace, below us. The breath gushed out of me.
Spence put his arm around my shoulders and whispered, “Lord, I love the beauty of thy house, and the place where thy glory dwells.”
It was—there are no words to do it justice. We huddled together in the transparent observation blister and feasted our eyes on the world swinging past, immense and glorious beyond description. Deep blue seas and swirling purest white clouds, the land brown and green with wrinkles of mountains and glittering lakes scattered here and there. Even the dark night side was spectacular with the lights of cities and highways outlining the continents.
“No matter how many time you’ve seen it,” Spence said, “it still takes your breath away. I could watch it for hours.”
“It’s incredible,” I said.
“We’ll have to build more observation blisters for the hotel guests. Stud the whole zero-section with them.”