Free Nothing by Chance by Richard Bach

brought both arms in close to his body, flung them out again, and the long bright rocketof a parachute streamed from his back. It didn’t slow him a bit. The narrow line of the chute simply stopped in the air as the man went streaking on down. Then it caught him. All in an instant the chute burst wide open, closed again, and opened to a soft thistle-fluff under which the man floated, still above me.
    Time fell back into gear at once, and Paul and I were airplanes flashing again through the sky, the earth was round and warm, and the only sound was the roar of wind and engine. The slowest thing in sight was the orange-and-white canopy drifting down.
    Paul arrived in the Luscombe, at high speed, and we circled the open chute, one of us on each side of our jumper. He waved, spun his canopy around, slipped heavily into the wind, which was stronger than he had bargained for. He slipped again, pulling down hard on the risers and almost collapsing one side of his canopy.
    All to no avail. We held our altitude at 500 feet while Stu went on down to smash into a tall field of rye that bordered the runway. It looked soft until the instant he crashed into the ground, and then it looked very hard indeed.
    I circled and dived to make one low pass over his head, then followed Paul in to land. I taxied to the edge of the rye and got out of the cockpit, expecting to see the jumper at any moment. He didn’t appear. I got out of the airplane and walked into the shoulder-high grass, the sound of the engine fading away behind me. “STU?”
    No answer. I tried to remember if I had seen him standing up and waving OK after he landed. I couldn’t remember.
    “STU!”
    There was no answer.

    CHAPTER SEVEN    
    THE RYE-FIELD WAS SET on rolling ground and the tops of the stalks made a waving unbroken carpet, hiding everything but the trees on the quarter-mile horizon. Darn me. I should have marked the place better where he went down. He could be anywhere in here. “Hey! STU!”
    “Over here …” It was a very weak voice.
    I thrashed through the tall grain in the direction the voice had come and suddenly broke through to an unconcerned jumper, field-packing his chute. “Man, I thought we lost you there. You OK?”
    “Oh, sure. Hit kind of hard. This stuff is deeper than it looks from the air.”
    Our words were strange and oddly quiet; the grass was a sponge for sound. I couldn’t hear the airplane engine at all, and had it not been for the trail I had left, walking in, I would have had no idea where it was.
    I took Stu’s reserve chute and his helmet and we beat our way through the Wisconsin Pampas.
    “Jumper in the Rye,” Stu mused.
    At last the engine-sound filtered in to us, and a minute later we broke out into the clear short grass of the strip. Ithrew his gear into the front cockpit and he stood on the wingwalk while we taxied back.
    There were four passengers waiting, and a small crowd of spectators wondering what we were going to do next. I flew the passengers, two couples, and that was the end of the midday jump experiment. Not bad, for the middle of a weekday.
    We tired of the airstrip after a while and ambled through the silent day to Main Street, three blocks long. We were tourists on the sidewalk, looking in the shop windows. There was a poster in the dime-store:
    ----
    AMERICAN LEGION & FIREMEN’S PICNIC
SULLIVAN, WISC.
Saturday-Sunday, June 25-26
    COLORFUL PARADE
    Drum and Bugle Corps    Kiltie Kadets
    Home made pies!    Sandwiches at all times!
    WRESTLING Both Nights
    2 out of 3 falls
    THE MASK      JOHNNY GILBERT
    from parts unknown  Michigan City, Ind.
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    The Firemen’s Picnic would be an exciting time. The wrestlers were shown, in their fighting togs. The Mask was a great mound of flesh, scowling through a black stocking mask. Gilbert was handsome, rugged. There was no question that the conflict between good and evil would be a colossal one, and I wondered if Sullivan, Wisconsin had a good