Read Nothing by Chance for Free Online Page B

quick-moving air.
    “Ready to go?” Paul shouted.
    “Just a minute!” I didn’t like his word about “going,” for I meant to stay right where I was. I dug my heels into the ground, unsnapped the safety catch on the quick release that would spill the canopy if anything went wrong.
    “Don’t punch the Capewell,” Paul said. “It will get the canopy all tangled up again. If you want to spill the chute, pull on the bottom risers. You ready?”
    Directly downwind was a low fence of timbers and steel cables. If I dragged, I’d drag right into it. But then again I’m 200 pounds all dug in here, and no little breeze could drag that much all the way to the fence. “Ready!”
    I braced against the wind and Paul and Stu tossed the skirt of the canopy into the air, with what seemed like altogether too much enthusiasm. The wind caught the chute at once, it popped out like a racingboat spinnaker, and every ounce of that force snapped down the risers and into my shoulders. It was like a tractor lurching into gear, and all hooked to me.
    “HEY!” I flew out of my special braced place, and out of the second place I dug my boots into, and out of the third. I thought of losing my balance behind this big thing, and being whipped across that fence. The monster jellyfish pulled me in jerks, wham-wham-wham across the ground while Paul and Stu just stood and laughed. It was the first time I had heard Stu laugh.
    “Hold on there, boy!”
    “This is just a little breeze! This is nothing! Hey, hang on!”
    I got the idea about wind and parachutes and grabbed forthe lower risers to collapse the thing while I skidded for the fence. I pulled, but nothing happened. If anything, I skidded faster, and nearly lost my balance.
    At that point I ceased to care about the delicacy of Stu’s canopy, and pulled hard on all the bottom lines I could get hold of. Very suddenly the chute collapsed and I was standing in the mild wind of afternoon.
    “What’s the matter?” Paul called. “Couldn’t you hold the thing?”
    “Well, I thought I’d just as soon not cut your lines all up on the fence, there. Save you some repair work.”
    I unsnapped the harness, quickly. “Stu, I don’t think you’d better jump today. This wind’s up a little too high. Of course you want to jump anyway, but it’s wiser for you just to stay down this afternoon. I think it’s a lot wiser.”
    We rounded up the giant canopy and bundled it into the calm of the hangar.
    “You really ought to jump sometime, Richard,” Paul said. “There’s nothing like it. That’s real flying. Man, you get up there, no engine or nothing. Just … you. Dig? You really ought to do it.”
    I have never had any intention of jumping out of an airplane and Paul’s pitch did not make me eager to start now.
    “Sometime,” I said. “I’ll give it a whirl, when the wings fall off my airplane. I want to start right out with a free-fall, and not go through all those static-line things they make you do in the jump schools. At the moment, let us say that I’m not quite ready to begin my jumping career.”
    Al’s Sinclair pickup truck arrived, and with him in the cab was a tall distinguished fellow we met as Lauren Gilbert, who owned the airport. Lauren couldn’t do enough to make us welcome. He had learned to fly when he was fifty years old, was completely caught up in the fun of flying, and hadjust yesterday passed the tests to earn his instrument-flight license.
    Our policy insisted that he have a free ride, since he owned the field, and the biplane was airborne ten minutes later on its first flight of the afternoon. This was our advertising flight; the first one up, to tell the town that we were in business and already flying happy passengers and why weren’t they up in the sky with us, looking down at the city?
    We had to work a flight pattern over each town, and the pattern over Rio was takeoff west, climb south and east in a shallow left turn, level at 1,000 feet, turn back and