At this point there was nothing I could do. The salty water was already activating the distress beacon, sending a coded message to a satellite far above that relayed it to Valkyrie, who would, with luck, be able to find me in this heaving seascape of waves and wind. All that I could do was wait and hope. Sometimes you just have to put your trust in other people.
Jerry and Mariah both survived the jump. Mariah lost most of her gear when she tried cutting too close to the wall and blew her rig near the top of the comma. It was her cast-off gear that had struck me, not Mariah herself, I was relieved to discover. She barely managed to recover control with the small chute after she had fallen nearly four thousand meters. She hit the water just beyond the worse part of the storm, and had been tossed and tumbled in the wind-driven, foamy mountain range of waves for a full day before anybody could get near enough to recover her. A fall that long gave her a lot of time to think about other things, even while she was working hard to figure out how to save her life. Ever after that experience she has not been quite the risk taker she used to be.
Jerry made it through the whole profile, encountering no problems as he gamely worked his planned route to its logical conclusion. I have no doubts that he enjoyed every single minute of having everything come out exactly as he foresaw it.
I kept away from jumping for a couple of months, not easy since we three were suddenly the darlings of the jump community; targets of every para-journalist in the world. NOAA paid a nice bonus for the data from our computers and put that and our model out on the Internet for every jumper in the world to examine and copy. Now that someone had done it everyone could build on the experience. Sort of like putting pitons in the cliff face to mark the trail up Everest.
The next season our fame slipped away when Kit Strock’s team used my experience with the balloon rig to travel the primary energy cell’s up-welling winds, that’s nearly two million metric tons of air per second, clear to the top of the stack—the freaking stratosphere, for God’s sake; fifteen miles of vertical climb by her archaic measures—and returned, less a few toes and fingers to be sure, but alive! Kit was a fool, but a daring one, I’ll give her that.
To this day I wonder at my conquest of Janice: Did I successfully conquer the storm that raged around me or was I just lucky that I managed to maneuver myself out of serious trouble? For that matter, do any of us really have control over the momentous forces that shape our lives or are we merely content to tack with the wind and make the best of what is offered to us?
Mariah and Jerry called last week. They want to know if I’d like to go with them to Hawaii in the fell. They are thinking of trying some sustained jumps in some of the big typhoons that grow in the South Pacific. They’ve got to be even crazier than before to suggest that I’d do something that stupid.
I don’t know if I should call back or not.
