He inched a little farther, lugging his equipment with him: oxygen, a box of instruments that would record his next few moments. And his parachute.
His beating heart echoed inside his helmet. He moved slowly, in time with that rhythm. Toes edged over the rim of the gondola.
Twenty miles to fall.
“Lord, take care of me now.”
He stepped out.
He felt no wind. The fabric of his suit didn’t ripple with passing air. No Newtonian forces of gravity and inertia grabbed him and wreaked havoc with him. His body turned lazily, floating with apparent weightlessness.
Damn. I’m too high. I’m not falling. This can’t be right!
He turned his head in time to see the immense silver globe of his balloon hurl away at terrifying speed, as if a hand had reached out and yanked it away from him. In moments it was only a flash against the blue-black sky of near space.
The sky was dark and the sun was shining, searingly bright.
Ninety-five thousand feet to fall.
He could no longer hear his heart.
95,000 feet above the New Mexico desert. 0710.
New Air Force jets had the capability to climb to higher altitudes than ever before. As pilots traveled to the upper atmosphere with greater frequency—and as the first astronauts began traveling into space—there was a chance they’d have to bail out. Joe wanted to prove that a pilot could eject at extreme altitude and survive the fall back to earth.
Parachuting out of a high-altitude balloon was cheaper than bailing out of a jet airplane and letting it crash.
Sixteen seconds after stepping from the gondola, Joe’s stabilizing chute deployed successfully on an automatic timer. This was a small chute that wouldn’t slow him, but would stabilize his descent. Without it, he ran the risk of entering a flat spin that would knock him unconscious and churn his internal organs to a pulp. They’d learned that from the test dummies.
The main chute wouldn’t deploy until around 18,000 feet. Any sooner and his descent would be too slow and he’d freeze or asphyxiate before he reached the ground. Also, at this altitude he was falling too fast, close to seven hundred miles per hour. The force of a chute deploying would break him in half.
He had to survive four minutes of free-fall, approaching the speed of sound without the benefit of aircraft.
Pilots had once held the staunch belief that the sound barrier couldn’t be broken. Strange things happened when they tried: they met massive turbulence, planes shook themselves apart. But the sound barrier had been broken. It had taken work, but they’d done it.
And here he was just falling through it. No sonic boom, no wind. Just him and the cloud layer coming closer. His mind froze, thinking of it.
Don’t think. Do. People would get into space yet. Colonies on the moon before the end of the century. His grandchildren would look back on this stunt and think it was quaint, the way he thought the Wright Flyer was quaint. This was just a step. The highest step, but only so far.
He was falling, straight and true as an arrow. “Perfect stability!” he said for the benefit of the tape recorder documenting the jump. It was marvelous! He could move his arms, he could breathe, he could look around.
A light flashed, and he flinched. Something skittered across the face plate of his helmet. Little objects danced in the wind, reflecting sunlight. Feathers. A handful of long white feathers fluttered around him.
He was falling through the feathers, and the feathers were coming off the wings of a boy who was falling with Joe.
He must have been about fifteen, thin and still baby-faced. He wore a short tunic belted around his waist and leather sandals laced up his calves. The fabric of the tunic and his shoulder-length hair rippled and tossed in the wind. It’s an angel—
The wings were artificial, bound to his arms and shoulders with leather straps. They were disintegrating, feathers whipping off in clumps. He flapped his arms, trying to steady himself, but he tumbled, legs flailing, wings bent back. They no longer had the right shape to give him enough lift for a proper glide.
Joe had to be seeing things. The boy shouldn’t even be alive. He was practically naked, no pressure suit, no oxygen. He should have been frozen solid and purple with broken blood vessels.
Joe fell toward him, and for a moment they fell together. The boy looked over and met his gaze, even through the barrier of his helmet. His young face was gaunt with terror. He reached for Joe, clawing the air, but he spun away, buffeted, his wings ripping apart and slapping him. His mouth was open, but Joe didn’t hear his scream. Joe plummeted away.
Too high! This is too high!
Joe’s arms and legs flailed, and for a moment he thought he might enter the dreaded flat spin, despite the stabilizing chute. The boy was falling to his death, and so was he. If only there was a way to go back to the balloon, if he could just slow down, the speed of sound was too fast for a lone human body to fly, oh God he was too high—
No. No, he wasn’t. He’d planned this jump. His team of engineers and technicians, the best in the Air Force, who he trusted with his life, had planned this jump. This was the first step. Only the first step. It wouldn’t even be the highest step for long. Humanity was destined to go in to space, destined to travel even higher, even farther.