To Mark Chartrand, despite his puns
FROM THE REAR SEAT of the TF-15 jet the mountains of Utah looked like barren wrinkles of grayish brown, an old thread- bare bedcover that had been tossed carelessly across the floor.
"How do you like it up here?"
Chet Kinsman heard the pilot's voice as a disembodied crackle in his helmet earphones. The shrill whine of the turbojet engines, the rush of unbreathably thin air just inches away on the other side of the transparent canopy, were nothing more than background music, muted, unimportant.
"Love it!" he answered to the bulbous white helmet in the seat in front of him.
The cockpit was narrow and cramped. The oxygen he breathed through the rubbery mask had a cold, metallic tang to it. Kinsman could barely move in his seat. The pilot had warned him, "Pull the harness good and snug; you don't want anything flapping loose if you have to eject." Now the safety straps cut into his shoulders.
Yet he felt free.
"How high can we go?" he asked into the mike built into the oxygen mask.
A pause. "Oh, we can leave controlled airspace if we want to. Better'n fifty thousand feet." The pilot had a trace of Southern accent. Alabama, maybe, thought Kinsman. Or Georgia. "Thirty thou's good enough for now, though."
Kinsman grinned to himself. "A lot better than hang gliding."
"Hey, I like hang gliding," said the pilot.
"But it doesn't compare to this. . . . This is power.''1
"Right enough."
Power. And freedom. Six miles above the tired, wrinkled old Earth. Six miles away from everything and everybody. It 3 couldn't last long enough to suit him.
Ahead lay San Francisco and his mother's funeral. Ahead lay death and his father's implacable anger.
Life at the Air Force Academy was rigid, cold. A first-year cadet was expected to obey everybody's orders, not make friends. No matter that you're older than the other first-year men. A rich boy, huh? Spent two years in a fancy prep school, huh? Well, snap to, mister! Let me see four chins, moneybags! Four of 'em!
Yet that was better- than going home.
His father had refused to stop off in Colorado when he had taken his ailing wife from their estate in Pennsylvania to her sister's home in San Francisco. And Kinsman had delayed taking leave to visit his mother there. Time enough for that later, after his father had gone back East to return to running his banks.
Then, suddenly, unalterably, she was dead. And his father was still there.
Instead of taking a commercial airliner. Kinsman had begged a ride with a westward-heading Air Force captain.
