"No, of course not," I said as he fell into step beside me. "How bad is it?"
"The crash?" He shrugged, a nervous twitch of shoulders beneath his shirt. "Not too bad, leastwise not as long as you're up in the air. Not goin' be much fun at ground level."
"They never are."
"No."
We'd reached the elevator before he spoke again. "So... how you been doin'? We ain't heard much from you since you left."
"Judging by my reception earlier, it's just as well," I told him, hearing an unaccustomed trace of bitterness in my voice.
He nodded heavily. "I talked to Kristin after my Jump. You know, she was kinda hurt the way you just upped and left."
"I didn't just 'up and leave'—"
"You know what I mean. Woulda helped, you know, if you'd told us why you were quittin'."
I looked at him sharply. Had he figured it out? "I had my reasons," I said.
"I reckon you did. But Kristin and Hale don't take a lot on faith. S'pose it's a little late to worry 'bout now. So what do you think of this mess?"
"What's there to think about it?" I replied grimly. The elevator arrived and we got in. "Like you say, it's a mess."
"What 'bout Shaeffer?"
"What about him?"
"Strikes me as a mite... over-wrought, I s'pose."
I snorted. "He has just lost both his employer and a long time friend. How would you expect him to act?"
"I'd expect him to be mad as a hornet," Morgan nodded. "Nothin' wrong with that. But there's somethin' under the anger that bothers me. I get a feelin' he's hidin' somethin' big up his sleeve. Somethin' he wants to do, but at the same time is scared of doin'."
I bit at my lip. Morgan had grown up in a backwoods area of Arkansas, and people tended to assume he wasn't particularly bright. But what he lacked in book learning he more than made up in people-sense... and if he thought there was something odd about Shaeffer, it was time for me to start paying better attention to the man. "Maybe he's involved in the discussions of revenge against whoever's responsible," I suggested slowly. "McCallum's never struck me as the sort to call in military strikes—maybe it's Shaeffer's job to convince him otherwise."
"Maybe." Morgan shook his head. "Well, whatever it is, I 'spect we'll hear 'bout it soon enough."
The elevator door opened and we stepped out. "See you later," Morgan said as he scooped up his jacket from a chair near the contour couch. "Good luck."
"Thanks." Squaring my shoulders, I headed over to be prepped.
—
Twenty minutes later, wired and tubed and mildly sedated, I was lying on the contour couch and we were ready for my Jump. "Okay," one of the operators called. "Here we go. Countdown: six... three, two, one, mark."
And abruptly I found myself in brilliant sunlight, floating beside Air Force One as it soared over the mountains on its unknowing way to death.
To see the past like this had been a horrible shock to me the first time, and though its impact had diminished since then I didn't think it would ever fade away completely. There was an immediacy to the experience; a sense of objective, 360-degree reality, despite the obvious limitations, that was nothing at all like viewing the event on a TV screen. For me, at least—and probably for most of the others, too—that sense came with a suffocating feeling of helplessness and stomach-churning frustration. I was here—really here—at the actual real-life scene of a real-life disaster about to happen... and there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Griff had once brought in a psychiatrist who'd tried to tell us that everyone felt similarly when they saw disasters that happened to have been caught on film. If that revelation was supposed to make us feel better, it hadn't worked.
But all this was standard reflex, the thoughts and emotions that had come in one form or another with every Jump I'd made, and even as the frustration rose in my throat, the old professional reflexes came up to cut it back. Gritting my teeth—a sensation I could feel despite having no real body at the moment—I moved forward over the wing and dipped beneath its surface.
It was dark inside the wing, but there was enough light coming in from somewhere for me to make out the details of the fuel tanks and piping and all. It was eerily quiet, of course—vision on Jumps is as crystal clear as if we'd brought our physical retinas back in time with us, but there's no sound or other sensory input whatsoever. Like being wrapped in soundproof plastic, Kristin had once described it. For me it was just one more macabre touch amid the general unpleasantness.
I floated around inside the wing for several minutes, keeping a close watch for anything that might precede the explosion about to take place. From the settings the operators had made I knew I'd have fifteen minutes before the engine caught fire, but time sense distortion was a normal part of Jumping and I didn't want to be caught unawares. I'd been tethered to the right inboard engine pylon, the tether length adjusted to let me get nearly out to the outboard engine in one direction or to the fuselage in the other. The tether was even more of a witchgadget than most of the Banshee equipment as a whole, consisting mainly of a charged electrical lead attached to a specific spot on a scale model of whatever your target vehicle or building was. With a tether in place a Jumper would stick with that piece of metal or wood or plasterboard through hell and high water; without it, there was no way to hold your position even in a stationary building.
The experts could just barely explain the mechanism. The rest of us didn't bother trying.
I was just starting to drift toward the engine itself when the Ping-Pong ball caught my eye.
I'd poked around planes like this one a lot during my time with Banshee and in some ways knew more about them than their designers did; and I was pretty sure there weren't supposed to be Ping-Pong balls floating around inside the fuel lines. Maneuvering around in front of it, I leaned in for a closer look... and it was then that I saw that the ball wasn't alone. A dozen more were coming down the line toward the right inboard engine, and a quick check showed that two or three more were already clustered up against the engine intake itself.
There had been a lot of times I'd wished I could touch something on a Jump, and this was one of them. But there was still a lot I could learn with vision alone. The balls were coated with something waxy looking—a gasoline-soluble paraffin, most likely. They were smaller than regulation Ping-Pong balls, too, small enough to have been dropped into the plane's fuel intake or perhaps even hosed in through the nozzle along with the fuel.
I settled down near the engine, watching the balls clustered there, and waited for the clock to tick down... and suddenly the balls began spouting clouds of bubbles. I had just enough time to notice that flickers of flame were starting to dance at the balls' surfaces when the whole thing blew up in front of me.
For a second I lost control, and an instant later had snapped back behind the wing to the full length of my tether. The trail of smoke Morgan and Hale had mentioned was coming out of the engine. In a handful of seconds the engine would explode and everyone aboard would die... and if I ended the Jump right now, I wouldn't have to watch it happen.
I stayed anyway. White House cartes blanches or not, someone was shelling out a quarter of a million dollars for this trip. They might as well get their money's worth.
Morgan had been right; it wasn't nearly as bad as some I'd seen. The right inboard engine caught fire and blew up on schedule, sending pieces of itself through the air toward me. I ducked in unnecessary reflex and watched as the rest of the wing caught fire, blazing more fiercely than it had any right to. The plane tilted violently, but for the moment the wing and the pylon I was tethered to were still attached and I stayed with it. Then the wing just seemed to disintegrate... and as I fell behind the plane with the tumbling debris I watched it arc almost lazily down toward the tree-covered slope ahead.