The cab didn’t have to do it—it could have delivered me to the foot of the pier—but it got clearance and took me right out to the slip where my Skyjump was moored.
I said good-bye to the cab, collected my bags from its boot, and walked down the gangplank into the upper hatch of the Sky-jump. It piped me aboard with a warm simulated voice recorded by the great American actress Katharine Hepburn almost a century ago. “Good day, Mr. Peripart. Our flight to Surabaya is cleared for eighty-two minutes from now but earlier departures may be available if we’re ready before then. It will take about fourteen minutes to reach the starting point for our jump run, so we must depart no later than sixty-eight minutes from now. Will that be possible, Mr. Peripart?”
“It will,” I said. “It’s good to be aboard again.”
There are lots of other fine jump boats in the world, I’m sure, but there couldn’t possibly be a more beautiful one than the ’54 Studebaker Skyjump. It had a lean, eager, fierce look, a bit like a miniature Messerschmitt commando launch, but expressed in softer curves like a Volvo Seadancer, and with the same classic proportions as a Rolls or a Mitsubishi yacht. And it was made right in Little San Diego, by the Studebaker company itself—the only expat American vehicle company. Like classic American aircraft, when its wings were fully deployed they were long, thin, and elliptical, unlike the European tendency to deltas or the Japanese love for the squared-off stubby wing; I had no idea what was actually aerodynamically effective but I knew what was graceful.
The real elegance, however, was in the curves of the slim, deadly-looking fuselage, and the rearward sweep of the outward-splayed rudders on the ends of the short stabilizer. It wasn’t the fastest ship built, by far, but it looked like it damned well should be.
Every time I sat at the controls, my heart warmed and my spirit leaped up. It had indeed been too long since I’d had her out for a long trip.
“Mr. Peripart, I am looking very good on my autocheck,” the Skyjump said, “with nothing outside normal range.”
“Is there anything near the edges of its range?” I asked. You have to do that kind of thing if you want a really taut vehicle; just like freshmen or recruits, precision doesn’t come naturally to them, and it has to be carefully taught and reinforced. Otherwise they get sloppy and imprecise, and then the only warnings you get are from the human protection hardwired modules, which have an unnerving habit of activating with a siren sound and a proclamation of “Danger! Danger! Immediate Attention Required! Range Exceeded on Interior Lighting Voltage” or the like. If you won’t teach them judgment, they won’t learn it.
“Just two things, Mr. Peripart,” the boat said. “Emergency coolant for my brain is only nine percent above minimum, and variable blade pitch in number two engine is requiring sixteen percent more force than expected. I believe the cause of the latter is probably some missed lubrication the last time I was serviced, Mr. Peripart.”
“Very well, then,” I said. “Order replacement coolant and have the marina bring it around. You would be authorized to do that without my needing to approve it. And I’ll go have a look at the blades in number two. If you suspect that you’ve been ill-maintained, from now on you are to call me about it as soon as you become aware of it.”
“Very well, Mr. Peripart,” the Hepburn voice said, with studied graciousness. Some expats preferred Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne, and there were even a few fans of Judy Garland, but I always felt like the Hepburn voice sounded the way I needed it to sound—like a competent first officer ready to do her duty. When you’re making ballistic leaps as big as a sixth of the way around the planet, it’s reassuring—however illusory—to feel like the hemispherical black lump under your chair is a trusted comrade.
Sure enough, the jump boat was right; the lubricating wells hadn’t been topped up, and when she’d done an engine check on herself earlier today, she’d probably released a few bubbles in the system, resulting in just low enough levels of the high-temperature silicon grease to make the variable pitch blades move a little roughly. I got a can of the grease and topped up the wells, had her run a quick engine check, and topped them up again. Meanwhile a courier robot rolled onto our gangplank and delivered the coolant direct to the boat’s supply, so that we were now truly ready to go.
I took another ten minutes to crawl around on her, partly because she was beautiful and it was such a pleasure to own her, and partly so that I could talk to her about things that she ought to worry about, keeping her properly fixated on safety and reliability issues.
Even with all the careful going over, when we pulled out of the slip and began the slow crawl out into Auckland harbor and thence to the appointed place for starting our jump run, we were still a good half hour early. Traffic was light today, at least for a Friday morning, and the tower control didn’t seem to think they’d have any problem squeezing me in.
Of course the Skyjump could take me to where I was going all by itself—some people routinely sat in the passenger seats in back of their jump boats, except during the legally required phase of landing—but there would have been no fun in that. I took her out of the harbor manually, just as God and the Wrights intended, the small propulsion pump thrumming away below me as we made the long slow crawl, in which one is merely a very awkward motorboat, out to the jump point. There must have been little traffic on the trajectory I was taking, for approval came through for an early jump almost immediately.
With a thrill of the pleasure that never got old, I pointed the nose into the appointed jump corridor and kicked in the main thrusting pumps to bring the boat up to hydroplaning at 110 knots. At that speed you start to feel like you’re doing something—the whole hull shakes and thunders, pushing and bumping against your feet, the main engines howl up to speed as they drive the turbines that drive the pumps, and the great rooster tail of white spray streams three stories tall behind you.
I exalted in that sensation for half a minute until we entered the area where takeoff was authorized; the six countdown lights across the panel in front of me began to wink on, and as the sixth came on, I triggered the launch sequence that I had loaded into the Skyjump’s brain—no human nervous system has the reaction time to handle an accurate suborbital jump.
In much less than a second the wing rotated into position to lift the Skyjump instead of holding it down, the pumps hurled the last water out of the jets on the bottom of the fuselage, and the twin jet engines cut their turbines and went to full thrust, lifting the boat out of the water and shoving me back far into my seat as the boat climbed to gain altitude. For half a minute I hung there as the Skyjump flew itself, and Katharine Hepburn’s voice counted off the increasing meters of altitude. The nose crept up toward nearly vertical, the engines screamed until they entirely took over the job of lift from the wings, the condensers extracted liquid oxygen from the air to fill the jump tanks, and the sky began to grow darker.
I whooped from pure pleasure, as always, at the brief, terrifying lurch as the engines shut down and the wings furled. Then, its wings tucked back like a peregrine’s, the boat went over to rocket power, feeding the pure liquid oxygen, which it had made minutes ago, into the engines and rising on a towering plume of flame, on a long trajectory outward away from the Earth. The sky darkened to black, the horizon below contracted away from me into a curve, and the gentle balanced tugging of the wings was replaced by the shudder of the rocket engines. A few minutes later, the bulldozer blade of acceleration ceased to bury me in my seat, and a wonderful silence fell on the cockpit and passenger space. Now, for about twenty minutes, I would be as weightless as the Germans themselves in their orbiting cities.