Anti-man Read Free Page A

said. He eyed me suspiciously, obviously trying to remember something. "Don't let go of that wheel until beam contact," he repeated. He was getting to be a bore.
        "We won't."
        He shook his head. "I don't know. You people never seem to learn. Lots of people drop without gripping the wheel. Then, when freefall surprises them, they get excited and grab for anything, cut themselves on file console- And when the jolt from beam contact comes- Brother! Fireworks! They jump and throw their arms around, break their fingers on things-"
        "We'll grip the wheel," I said, feeling as if I were confronted with a broken record. I longed to reach out and swat him so that he could get on with other parts of his speech.
        "Be sure to."
        "We will."
        "We sure will," He said, smiling at the officer with that winning grin of His.
        The officer nodded, hesitated as if there were something he wanted to say. And, of course, there was something he wanted to say. Down deep in the sticky mud of his brain, there was a little voice telling him just who we were and what he should do about it. Fortunately for us, the voice was muffled by so much mud that he could not understand what it was saying. Finally he shrugged again, slid the cover shut and turned the latches on the outside, locking us in. I knew that his mind was struggling to make connections. I had come to know that look by now, the gaze of someone who is sure he knows us. Sooner or later, this drop officer would remember who we were. I only hoped it was not until we were out of Cantwell Port and on our way.
        "Don't worry, Jacob," He said, flashing His chalk-white teeth in a broad, flawless smile and eating into me with those ice eyes of His.
        He was trying to cheer me.
        So I smiled.
        Suddenly, lights flashed and buzzers bleeped. We dropped…

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    II
        
        Down…
        Dropping from a high-altitude passenger rocket is not uncommon. Thousands of capsules are discharged every day, millions in a year, though I suppose the process will remain a marvel to the earth-bound masses for another twenty years. When you have an overcrowded world with billions of people who want to move often and rapidly, you cannot have a transportation system that stops at every station on the route. Not too many years ago, the answer was to change flights. Take a regular major airline into the nearest big city to your destination, then transfer to a smaller company for the last leg of the journey. But the ports grew too crowded, the air controllers too frantic. With the coming of the rockets, the best answer was found swiftly and employed even faster. You encapsulate the passengers who want off at backwater places and shoot them, like a bomb, out of the rocket's belly without lessening the speed of the mother ship. They fall for a mile, two, three, then are caught by a control beam broadcast from the alerted receiving station and lowered gently into the receptor pod. But those first few moments of freefall…
        After what seemed like an overlong fall, we were gripped by a control beam. For a moment, I had the fleeting paranoid fear that they had recognized us and deemed to eliminate us simply by letting us smash unbraked into the unyielding earth of Cantwell, Alaska. Then we were safe, floating softly, being drawn down. The beam settled us into a pod, and the officers there, a wizened old gentleman surely past retirement age and a young trainee who watched and listened to his superior with carefully feigned awe, unlatched the hatch and slid it back, helped us out. We signed our arrival forms with our fake names, waited while the old man copied our stub numbers in a ledger (the boy looking eagerly over his shoulder but unable to completely mask his boredom), and we were on our way.
        From the capsule pods, we walked down a long, gray fluorescent-lighted service tunnel and into the main lobby of the Port Building.