Free The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering by Jeffrey Rotter Page B

gone.
    To prove it, Terry loaded us on a KC-135 cargo jet, the interior of which had been padded with stained futons. The pilot would fly to 32,000 feet and then dive straight down. For twenty-five breathless seconds we would float about, dizzy as chicken feathers from a busted duvet. It felt like the least fun bouncy castle you ever set foot in. Then, just before striking the ground, the KC would level out and gravity would grab you by the skin. I learned to position myself underneath Sylvia. I wanted to soften her fall, to be the object that drew her down.
    Training mostly concerned abstinence. Doing without: food, fresh air, human-scale toilets, elbow room. Gravity wasn’t the only thing we would leave behind. Europa is a world without warmth. The Reades hailed from Canaday and declared themselves impervious to cold, but having never traveled farther north than Sparkle Town, I thought ice was a substance developed by food engineers for the purpose of sno-cones.
    Terry wanted to prepare us for the hardships of a distant icy world, so he took us to an abandoned skating rink. When Bill peeled the plywood off the front door I gasped. I had seen such a place only in picture books like Blade Palace and Skate, Sister, Skate! A gust of cold rolled over my feet. I smelled teen funk, sparkly vinyl flashed in the dark. We clawed our way across the rink on steel crampons. Terry flipped a switch and colored lights crawled over the ice, over our jumpsuits, over Sylvia’s face like the every-flavor sno-cone kids called a suicide.
    In the center of the rink Mae stood grasping the handles of a Heat Poke. This implement is a thermal cousin to the jackhammer, engineered to penetrate solid ice. As she drove in the bit, the rink began to boil and steam. The heat was so intense, it baked my legs like a campfire. Suddenly there came a thud and Umma disappeared under a multicolored fog. Pop crawled across the rink on hands and knees, rising at last with my mother slung over one shoulder. I was sure she was dying, the ice had killed her, the colored lights.
    In the snack bar Pop elbowed a chip warmer onto the floor and laid her across the counter. Faron located a jug of ammonia, which Pop tipped onto a rag. “Quit it,” she said, shoving him off. “I didn’t pass out. I only wanted to touch the ice. I just wanted to lie down and know how it will feel.”
    I assumed she meant Europa. At the thinnest places its ice shield is said to be seven kilometers. It would take the Penguin, our diving bell and thermal probe, that many hours to boil through to the ocean below, seven more to resurface. Add a few hours for exploration, and at minimum we would deploy inside the Penguin for seventeen-hour tours.
    To inure us to the dark, the pressure, the cramped quarters, and silence, we got a simulated taste of those deathly conditions. We were taken in pairs by fishing boat to the middle of Indian River. A two-person deepwater diving bell hung from a winch off the stern. It looked like a snakehead with a pair of glass domes for eyes, and it opened like a jaw to receive its passengers. The red-upholstered cabin made it seem hungry. Early one Saturday morning it was our turn to be swallowed. Me and Sylvia.
    She stepped aboard without hesitation and slipped into the pilot’s seat, but I stood at the railing, paralyzed with fear. A line of clouds was penciled across the horizon; I watched it grow into a smudge to conceal the terminal cranes at Coco Beach. The submersible rose and fell on the chop, and the cable pulsed like a guitar string.
    Nguyen asked what I was waiting for, and I did not want to tell him the truth. That I was waiting to be less like me, more like Faron. Sylvia said give him a second. She offered me a sad smile. Not much in the way of reassurance, but it got me off the stern and into the cockpit beside her. As the first drops exploded on the glass, Nguyen swung the hatch closed. His features melted in the rain. The