Free Nothing by Chance by Richard Bach Page B

them shroud lines anymore. I guess that’s too scary …”), the flaking of the panels into one long neat skinny pyramid, the sheathing of the pyramid into the sleeve, the folding of corners that somehow is supposed to prevent friction burns during opening, and the smashing of the whole thing down into the pack.
    “Then we just slip the ripcord pins in like… so. And we’re ready to jump.” He patted the pack and tucked in some loose flaps of material with the packing paddle. Then he was the laconic Stu once again, asking tersely if we might be running another jump again this afternoon.
    “I don’t see why not,” Paul said, walking into earshot and casting an appraising eye at the finished pack. I wondered if he was tempted to jump again. It had been years since he had quit, a battered sky-diver after some 230 jumps, grounded with injuries that kept him in a hospital for months.
    “Might as well go up right now,” he said, “if you promise to come a little closer to the target.”
    “I’ll try.”
    Five minutes later they were off in the Luscombe, and I was watching from the ground, holding Paul’s movie camera and charged with the job of getting some good shots of the jump.
    In the zoom-lens viewfinder, Stu was a tumbling black dot, stabilizing in a cross, turning a huge diving spiral one way, pausing, turning the other way. He was in complete control of his body in flight; he could go any direction, I thought, but up. He fell for nearly twenty seconds, then his arms jerked in, and out, pulling the ripcord, and the chute snapped open. The sound of the nylon firing open was a single shot from a 50-caliber pistol. As loud and sharp as that.
    Like every jumper, Stu lived for the freefall part of the jump, that bare twenty seconds in a twenty-four-hour day.He was now “under canopy,” which term must be spoken in a very bored tone, for the real jump is over, although there is 2000 feet yet to fall, and some delicate handling still to do of a cloth flying machine that is 28 feet wide and 40 feet tall.
    He was tracking well, coming right down toward me as I stood by the windsock. I filmed the last hundred feet of the jump and his touchdown, moving back to keep his boots out of Paul’s expensive lens.
    A jumper, I saw in the viewfinder, is moving at a pretty good clip at that moment he crashes into the ground. I felt the world shudder as Stu hit, 20 feet away. The canopy drifted down to catch me, but I dodged north. I was proud of Stu, suddenly. He was part of our little team, he had courage and skill that I didn’t have, and he worked like a professional, a seasoned jumper, though there were only twenty-five jumps in his log.
    “Pretty nice, kid.”
    “At least I didn’t get off in the rye-patch.” He slipped out of the harness and began gathering the suspension lines into a long braided chain. A moment later Paul landed and walked over to us.
    “Man, I really burned off the altitude,” he said. “What did you think of that slip? I really had her stood up on the wing, didn’t I? Coming down like a ROCK! What did you think of that?”
    “I didn’t see your slip, Paul. I was taking pictures of Stu.”
    At precisely that moment a girl of six or seven walked into our group, offered a small blank book, and shyly asked Stu for his autograph.
    “Me?” Stu said, stunned to be on stage and in the center of the spotlight.
    She nodded. He wrote his name boldly on the paper and the girl ran off with her prize.
    “The STAR!” Hansen said. “Everybody wants to watchthe STAR! Nobody watches my great slip, because the old glory-hound is ON STAGE!”
    “Sorry about that, Paul,” said Stu.
    I made a note to get a box of gold stars at the dime-store and stick them all over everything Stu owned.
    The Star laid out his chute at once, and soon was lost in the task of repacking for tomorrow. I walked toward the biplane, and Paul followed.
    “No more passengers, this time,” he said.
    “Quiet before the storm.” I