"Hey, buddy, come on out!" Matt cried. 'The view is great." Matt made a show of jumping up and down on the gangplank as if it were a diving board.
Justin carefully stepped up to the edge of the gangplank, which looked like a diving board with handrails on the side, and then made the mistake of looking over the side.
Instinctively he clutched the handrails for dear life, his knees turning to jelly. Earth was five hundred klicks straight down. The city of Rio was directly below, and the Atlantic Ocean sparkled to the east. To the south the coastline curved away and he could clearly see the line of glittering white beaches that separated the blue of the ocean from the dark green of tropical growth. Early morning clouds were just beginning to appear over the jungle, soon to grow into towering thunderheads. Far to the west he thought he could see the peaks of the Andes catching the first light of dawn.
He knew it was beautiful he tried to focus on that but the end of the diving board was only a couple meters ahead.
"Hey, Bell, look out for this next step, it's a killer!" Matt chortled.
"All right, you two," Brian announced. "Times awasting. No fancy chute work, just let it float you down. If you can get into the target zone, great. If not, no sweat. Winds are calm, visibility unlimited, a good morning for a jump."
"Ten seconds, Everett."
Justin listened as Brian received a final jump clearance from the control room.
"Three, two, one! Jump, Everett, jump!"
Matt bent his knees, extended his hands over his head as if he were simply going to fall a few meters into a swimming pool, and vaulted off.
"Look out below!" Matt shouted.
"Ten seconds, Bell. Move it up to the edge!"
As if pulled by a force beyond his control, Justin took the final step up to the edge of the board and then looked down again. Without the support of the suit servos he knew he would have collapsed into a mound of quivering protoplasm, all resemblance to human form lost forever. He wondered as well if sixteen-year-olds could die of heart attacks, because if so, he knew he was dying his heart was out of its usual slot and was currently banging away some where up behind his mouth.
Brians words echoed, dragging out with maddening slowness as if he were talking like some demented spirit trapped in a nightmare, " Threeee twoooo "
There was still time to protest, to stop this ridiculous stunt, Justin thought All I gotta do is say no. Hell, discretion is the better part of; "One! Jump, Bell, jump!"
He tried to move, but his knees were gone flesh, muscles, tendons, bones had melted into a puddle somewhere down in the toes of his suit.
He tried to say something, anything.
A sharp nudge tapped him from behind.
The universe tipped over. First he saw the horizon of the Earth, then the morning sun, spinning up and out of view again the Earth, directly below. Weightlessness, no real sense of speed, just weightlessness. He slowly tumbled over, plummeting head down. The tower was racing past him. A car was slowing down for entry into the five-hundred- klick station; it whisked past and for an instant he saw astonished faces peering out at him. He continued his roll; now he was looking back up. Funny, the platform was far above, or was it below and he was falling up? It was a couple hundred meters away, in any case. He saw a dot separating from the platform.
It was Seay, damn him! He pushed me!
" Yeee Haaa! How we doing boys?" Seay cried.
"On my way!" Matt shouted. "What a rush!"
" Bell?"
A stream of obscenities escaped from Justin, directed at Brian, Matt, and the universe. This was simply too damn much!
His slow somersault continued. After several rotations it was clear that velocity was increasing. The side of the tower was becoming an indistinct blur. As he fell the circular ring around the tower was growing smaller, details disappearing. Directly below he could see the Earth rushing up. The rotations continued; each upward turn showed the docking station receding until it was only a barely visible bulge on the side of the tower. The horizon was contracting: the peaks of the Andes were no longer visible, and the bay of Rio was standing out sharp and clear; he could even see different shadings in the colors of the ocean.
" Everett ten seconds to stabilization, thirty to shield deployment, retros kick in at forty. Hang on and check in. Bell, ten seconds after Everett."
Justin held his breath, counting down, barely hearing Matt's shout that he had stabilized.
Justin was still somersaulting; as he looked down he caught a brief glimpse of Matt. Suddenly a stabilizer jet on his backpack fired as the suit's inertial guidance system activated. The jet neutralized the slow head-over-heels tumble. Another jet fired, this one strong, positioning Justin on his back, instantly augmented by a third jet, which held him in a flat back-down position looking up. The tower seemed to have drifted farther away. A dim thought registered that this was because of the Coriolis effect. The angular momentum of jumping from a tower five hundred klicks above the Earth's surface deflected him away from the tower relative to a straight line back to the center of Earth's gravity.
" Bell! Hey, Bell, you all right?"
"Stabilized," Justin announced grimly.
He counted off the seconds. If the shield failed to deploy, he was going to be a blazing light flashing across the morning sky. "Damn all, never again," he mumbled. "Never, ever again."
He felt a sharp jolt from behind. An instant later he felt as if he were lying face up inside an umbrella. The reentry shield packed into his suit had deployed; a dozen meters across, it would protect him from the fiery heat of reentry.
"Wow! Hey, these retros are a kick!" Matt shouted.
Justin waited, breathing hard, and suddenly it felt as if someone had punched him squarely in the back. Weightlessness was replaced by a two-gee counter-blow that caused him to grunt from the shock.
"Retro," Justin shouted.
Looking up, he could see Brians ant-like figure disappear behind the disk shaped shielding. Seconds later there was a flare of light as the senior cadets retro-pack kicked on.
"All right, kiddies, get ready for the ride of a lifetime!" Seay declared.
Hie retro continued to fire. Looking to one side, Justin noticed a glow rimming the edge of his shield. Even as he watched, it shifted from a deep bluish-red, to scarlet, and then to a brilliant orange. When he glanced up he saw a cone of light pulsing around his shield. He'd reached the atmosphere, and the friction of reentry was ionizing the thin air a hundred and twenty klicks up.
A blinking red light projecting on to his faceplate startled him for a second and then he saw that it was the retro shutting down. The gees were increasing as the friction of the air became sufficient to blunt his speed. The cone of light pulsed higher, turning bright yellow and then nearly white. He heard a distant sound. It was Matt, laughing with maniacal glee.
Buffeting blurred his vision and deceleration pushed the load up to nearly four gees. He grunted hard as he fought to take in short gasps of air. Beyond his own fireball he could see the back of Seay's shield glowing white-hot.
Strangely, it was silent. In the old movies a roar like a tornado always accompanied reentry. He was silent fire streaking through the morning sky. I'm the fire, the pillar of light coursing down from the heavens. In ancient times, he thought, I'd be seen as a god, coming on my fiery chariot. A sense of power coursed through him: he was in the center of the inferno, untouched, unscathed.