We saw the president of Cuba smiling toothily, his daughter on one side of him and Sam Gunn on the other.
“World-wide publicity!” Sam crowed. “I’m a made man!”
Hector shook his head. “If anybody ever finds out that your orbiter never left the 747, Sam, the publicity won’t be so good.”
For Hector, that was a marathon speech.
Sam grinned at him. “Now who’s going to tell on me? The Department of State?”
Jones shook her head. “Not us.”
“NASA?” Sam asked rhetorically. “You think some rocket expert in NASA’s gonna stand up and declare that you can’t re-mate the orbiter with its carrier plane once it’s been separated?”
Before any of us could reply, Sam answered his own question. “In a pig’s eye! The word’s going through the agency now, from top to bottom: no comment on Space Adventure Tours. Zip. Nada. Zilch. The lid is on and it’s on tight.”
“What about you two?” Jones asked, arching a perfect brow.
Hector glanced at me, then shrugged. “I’m in the Air Force. If I’m ordered to keep quiet, I’ll keep quiet.”
“And you, Ms. Perkins?” Jones asked me.
I focused on Sam. “You promised to end this bogus business in two months, Sam.”
“Yeah, that’s right, I did.”
“Did you tell the president of Cuba that all he got was a simulation?” I asked.
Sam screwed up his face and admitted, “Not exactly.”
“What happens to Cuban-American relations when he finds out?”
Jones’s smile had evaporated. “Which brings us back to the vital question: are you going to try to blow the whistle?”
I didn’t like the sound of that try to.
“No, she’s not,” Sam said. “Ramona’s a good American citizen and this is a matter of international relations now.”
The gall of the man! He had elevated his scam into an integral part of the State Department’s efforts to end the generations-old split between Cuba and the U.S. I wondered who in Washington had been crazy enough to hang our foreign policy on Sam Gunn’s trickery and deceit. Probably the same kind of desk-bound lunkheads who had once dickered with the Mafia to assassinate Castro with a poisoned cigar.
“I want to hear what you have to say, Ms. Perkins,” Jones said, her voice low but hard as steel.
What could I say? What did I want to say? I really didn’t know.
But I heard my own voice tell them, “Sam promised to close down Space Adventure Tours in two more months. I think that would be a good idea.”
Sam nodded slowly. “Sure. By that time I oughtta be able to raise enough capital to buy a Clippership and take tourists into orbit for real.”
Jones looked from me to Sam and back again.
Sam added, “Of course, it would help if the State Department ponied up some funding for me.”
She snapped her attention to Sam. “Now wait a minute…”
“Not a lot,” Sam said. “Ten or twenty million, that’s all.”
Jones’s mouth dropped open. Then she yelped, “That’s extortion!”
Sam placed both hands on his flowered shirt in a gesture of aggrieved innocence. “Extortion? Me?”
“And that’s just about the whole story, Uncle Griff,” Ramona said to me.
I leaned back in my desk chair and stared at her. “That business with the president of Cuba happened two months ago. What kept you down there in Panama until now?”
She blushed. Even beneath her deep suntan I could see her cheeks reddening.
“Uh… well, I wanted to stay on Sam’s tail and make certain he closed up his operation when he promised he would.”
Sam hadn’t closed Space Adventure Tours, I knew. He had suspended operations in Panama and returned to the agency. Gone back on duty. He was scheduled for a classified Air Force mission, of all things. I had talked myself blue in the face, trying to get the astronaut office in Houston to replace him with somebody else, but they kept insisting Sam was the best man they had for the mission. Lord knows who he bribed, and with what.
“You didn’t have to stay in Panama all that time,” I pointed out to my niece. “You could have kept tabs on him from here in Washington.”
She blushed even more deeply. “Well, Uncle Griff, to tell the truth… it was sort of like a, you know, kind of like a honeymoon.”
I snorted. Couldn’t help it. The thought of my own little niece shacked up with…
“You were living with him?” I bellowed.
She just smiled at me. “Yes,” she said, dreamily.
I was furious. “You let Sam Gunn—”
“Not Sam!” Ramona said quickly. Then she grinned at me. “You thought I was living with Sam?” She laughed at me.
Before I could ask, she told me, “Hector! We fell in love, Uncle Griff! We’re going to get married.”
That was different. Sort of. “Oh. Congratulations, I suppose. When?”
“Next year,” my niece answered. “When Sam starts real flights into orbit, Hector and I are going to spend our official honeymoon in space!”
I wanted to puke.
So that’s why we had to fire Sam Gunn. Government regulations specifically state that you can’t be running a business of your own while you’re on the federal payroll. Besides, the little S.O.B. made a shambles of everything he touched.
It wasn’t easy, though. Actually firing somebody from a government job is never easy, and Sam played every delaying trick in the book. Just to see if he could give me apoplexy, I’m sure.
The little conniving sneak was even working out an arrangement to rent a section of a new space station and turn it into an orbiting honeymoon hotel before I finally got all the paperwork I needed to fire his butt out of the agency.
And he didn’t leave quietly. Not Sam. Know what his final masterstroke was? He left me a prepaid ticket to ride his goddamned Clippership into orbit and spend a full week in his orbiting hotel.
He knew damned well I’d never give him the satisfaction! Probably the little bastard thinks I’m too old to enjoy sex. Or maybe he expects me to bust a blood vessel while I’m making love in weightlessness.
But I’ll fool him. Good and proper. I’m growing a beard. I’m getting hair implants. He’ll never recognize me.
Who knows? If it’s really as good in zero-g as Sam claims it is, maybe I’ll even retire up there in orbit. Then I can drive Sam nuts, for a change.
That’s something worth living for!
(Editor’s Note: Sam Gunn appeared here earlier in “Sam’s War,” July 1994 and “Nursery Sam,” January 1996.)