“Is that enough to cover your costs?”
Sam grinned at me. “I won’t go bankrupt. It’s like the old story of the tailor who claims that he sells his clothing at prices below his own costs. ‘On each and every individual sale we lose money,’ he tells a customer. ‘But on the volume we make a modest profit.’ ”
I didn’t see anything funny in it. It didn’t make sense.
Suddenly Sam shook me out of my musing. He grabbed me by the shoulders, kissed me on the lips, and then announced, “I’d love to go up to your room and make mad, passionate love to you, Ramona, but I’ve got an awful lot to do between now and takeoff tomorrow morning. See you at the hangar!”
He leaned past me and opened my door. Kind of befuddled, I got out of the car and waved good-bye to him as he roared off in a cloud of exhaust smoke.
Alone in my room, I started to wonder if our one night of passion had merely been Sam’s way of closing the sale.
The next day, Space Adventure Tours’s first flight was just about everything Sam had promised.
All forty of us gathered at the hangar bright and early. It took nearly two hours to get each of us safely sealed up inside a space suit. Some of the older tourists were almost too arthritic to get their creaky arms and legs into the suits, but somehow—with Sam and his two flight attendants pushing and pulling—they all managed.
Instead of that rickety ladder Sam drove a cherry picker across the hangar floor and lifted us in our spacesuits, two by two like Noah’s passengers, up to the hatch of the orbiter. The male attendant went up first and was there at the hatch to help us step inside the passenger cabin and clomp down the aisle to our assigned seats.
Sam and I were the last couple hoisted up. With the visor of my suit helmet open, I could smell the faint odor of bananas in the cherry picker’s cab. It made me wonder where Sam had gotten the machine, and how soon he had to return it.
After we were all strapped in, Sam came striding down the cabin, crackling with energy and enthusiasm. He stood up at the hatch to the flight deck and grinned ear-to-ear at us.
“You folks are about to make history. I’m proud of you,” he said. Then he opened the hatch and stepped into the cockpit.
Three things struck me, as I sat strapped into my seat, encased in my spacesuit. One: Sam didn’t have to duck his head to get through that low hatch. Two: he wasn’t wearing a spacesuit. Three: he was probably going to pilot the orbiter himself.
Was there a co-pilot already in the cockpit with him? Surely Sam didn’t intend to fly the orbiter into space entirely by himself. And why wasn’t he wearing a spacesuit, when he insisted that all the rest of us did?
No time for puzzling over it all. The flight attendants came down the aisle, checking to see that we were all firmly strapped in. They were in spacesuits, just as were we. I felt motion: the 747 beneath us was being towed out of the hangar. The windows were sealed shut, so we couldn’t see what was happening outside.
Then we heard the jet engines start up; actually we felt their vibrations more than heard their sound. Our cabin was very well insulated.
“Please pull down the visors on your helmets,” the blonde flight attendant sing-songed. “We will be taking off momentarily.”
I confess I got a lump in my throat as I felt the engines whine up to full thrust, pressing me back in my seat. With our helmet visors down I couldn’t see the face of the elderly woman sitting beside me, but we automatically clasped our gloved hands together, like mother and daughter. My heart was racing.
I wished we could see out the windows! As it was, I had to depend on my sense of balance, sort of flying by the seat of my pants, while the 747 raced down the runway, rotated its nose wheel off the concrete, and then rose majestically into the air—with us on top of her. Ridiculously, I remembered a line from an old poem: With a sleighful of toys and St. Nicholas, too.
“We’re in the air,” came Sam’s cheerful voice over our helmet earphones. “In half an hour we’ll separate from our carrier plane and light up our main rocket engines.”
We sat in anticipatory silence. I don’t know about the others—it was impossible to see their faces or tell what was going through their minds—but I twitched every time the ship jounced or swayed.
“Separation in two minutes,” Sam’s voice warned us.
I gripped my seat’s armrests. I couldn’t see my hands through the thick spacesuit gloves, but I could feel how white my knuckles were.
“You’re going to hear a banging noise,” Sam warned us. “Don’t be alarmed; it’s just the explosive bolts separating the struts that’re clamping us to the carrier plane.”
Explosive bolts. All of a sudden I didn’t like that word explosive.
The bang scared me even though I knew it was coming. It was a really loud, sharp noise. But the cabin didn’t seem to shake or shudder at all, thank goodness.
Almost immediately we felt more thrust pushing us back into our seats again.
“Main rocket engines have ignited on schedule,” Sam said evenly. “Next stop, LEO!”
I knew that he meant Low Earth Orbit, but I wondered how many of the tourists were wondering who this person Leo might be.
The male flight attendants’ voice cut in on my earphones. “As we enter Earth orbit you will experience a few moments of free-fall before our antidisequilibrium equipment balances out your inner sensory systems. Don’t let those few moments of a felling sensation worry you; they’ll be over almost before you realize it.”
I nodded to myself inside my helmet. Zero g. My mouth suddenly felt dry.
And then I was falling! Dropping into nothingness. My stomach floated up into my throat. I heard moans and gasps from my fellow tourists.
And just like that it was over. A normal feeling of weight returned and my stomach settled back to where it belonged. Sam’s equipment really worked!
“We are now in low Earth orbit,” Sam’s voice said, low, almost reverent. “I’m going to open the viewport shutters now.”
Since I had paid the lowest price for my ride, I had an aisle seat. I leaned forward in my seat harness and twisted my shoulders sideways as far as I could so that I could peer through my helmet visor and look through the window.
The Earth floated below us, huge and curving and so brightly blue it almost hurt my eyes. I could see swirls of beautiful white clouds and the sun gleaming off the ocean and swatches of green ground and little brown wrinkles that must have been mountains and out near the curving sweep of the horizon a broad open swath of reddish tan that stretched as far as I could see.
“That’s the coast of Africa coming up. You can see the Sahara a little to our north,” Sam said.
The cabin was filled with gasps and moans again, but this time they were joyous, awestruck. I didn’t care how much the ticket price was; I would have paid my own way to see this.
I could see the horn of Africa and the great rift valley where the first proto-humans made their camps. Sinbad’s Arabian Sea glittered like an ocean of jewels before my eyes.
Completely around the world we went, not in eighty days but a little over ninety minutes. The Arabian peninsula was easy to spot, not a wisp of a cloud anywhere near it. India was half blotted out by monsoon storms but we swung over the Himalayas and across China. It was night on that side of the world, but the Japanese islands were outlined by the lights of their cities and highways.
“Mt. Everest’s down there under the clouds,” Sam told us. “Doesn’t look so tall from up here.”
Japan, Alaska, and then down over the heartland of America. It was an unusually clear day in the Midwest; we could see the Mississippi snaking through the nation’s middle like a coiling blood vessel.