As he screamed Al descended beside him, ruffled not me whit by the fall, still concentrating on the handlink. Sam retained enough presence of mind to duck his chin in toward his chest, getting his mouth out of the windstream, and yell, “Al! Do something!”
Al looked up, took the cigar out of his mouth, and asked reasonably, “What?”
Sam looked down at the whirling earth and screamed again. The wind of his fall dragged at his face, his clothing, whistled in his ears. Hair whipped into his eyes as the earth rushed up to meet him. It wasn’t fair, he thought, it wasn’t right, he couldn’t die this way, not now, not with his Observer right there and apparently unperturbed; he’d gone too far, done too many things, he wanted to go home, and he hit the end of the bungee cord with a terrific jolt and jerked back upward with Al still beside him, not a lock of hair out of place, and hit the top of the arc to see the balloon with the pilot waving enthusiastically, and fell again, and hit the end of the cord and swung upward, with Al, still beside him all the way, griping, “I wish to heck you’d Leap, Sam. I haven’t been this dizzy since I took zero-gravity in astronaut training,” and above them the woman in the balloon looked over the edge of the gondola, cheering, and all Sam could say as he ricocheted through the clouds was “Oh boy.. . OY...oy...OY...oy..."
And mercifully, Leaped.
FRIDAY
June 6, 1975
Thou art slave to fate, chance. . . .
—John Donne, Holy Sonnets IX
CHAPTER ONE
He was still dizzy, and carrying a weight on one shoulder, and it was dark, and the footing was wet and slippery, as if it had recently rained. It wasn’t surprising that he stumbled.
This time, he couldn’t even remember being in that other place, waiting for an identity, a Voice. This time he had fallen directly into his next Leap. Fallen ... He caught his breath and a nearby tree trunk and shook for a few minutes, fighting residual panic, grateful for the weight he carried if only because it pressed him firmly against the solid ground.
Maybe whoever was in charge of his ricocheting through Time—God or Fate or Chance, Time or Whatever—thought that bungee jumping from a 'not air balloon was just one of those interesting things he should be made to do occasionally for his own good. The fact that he was still shuddering inside from the terror of free fall was irrelevant. He glared up at the sky. “Thanks a lot."
“Hey, you haven’t earned your tip yet,” a slurry voice said from ahead of him and slightly to his right. “Let’s get that 1’il keg over here before you drop it, okay?”
Sam took two more steps forward and found himself in a wide clearing lit by a pair of roaring campfires. Some thirty young people were sitting or standing around, perhaps half of them looking at him expectantly. He could smell cooking meat and burning vegetation and water and pine trees.
By this time he was used to doing a rapid, almost unconscious assessment of Who Am I Where Am I What Am I. He gathered data without even being aware of the process: jeans/heavy laced boots/flannel shirt/“keg” = probably male, probably young; details like personal appearance he could check out later on. Luckily it wasn’t a full-sized keg. Quarter, he estimated. A baby keg. But damned heavy, nonetheless.
The others gathered by the fires, standing or sitting on deck chairs or blankets to protect themselves from the muddy ground, were all about the same age, in their late teens. They all wore slacks cut suspiciously full from the knee down, and variations on T-shirts and long crocheted vests. He automatically noted the fashions, wishing he were a computer using parallel processing so he could check them against a mental database while simultaneously keeping on his feet. At least the vertigo from the balloon jump was fading.
There was a definite nip in the air. Sam could feel himself drawn to the warmth of the fire, bright flames against the darkness, smaller cousin of the flames that provided enough hot air to keep a balloon sailing proudly through the clouds.
“Hey, bo, put it over there,” a young male voice instructed him. Still disoriented from the bungee jump, Sam carried the keg over to a rack set up between the two campfires and set it down, rubbing his shoulder. He didn’t care what condition this body was in, putting the cask down was a relief. It must hold seven or eight gallons of beer. He wondered whether these kids were planning to drink it all.
The owner of the voice, a boy/man sporting bushy light brown sidebums and a sneer, was waiting when he turned around, fingering bills out of a wallet. “Four bucks, right, with the delivery?” he said.
“Yeah, that sounds about right.” Sam had no clue whether it was right or not. From the look in the kid’s eye and the snigger he cast over his shoulder, Sam was being shortchanged. Well, it wasn’t his fault he didn’t know the going price in these parts. He hadn’t figured out where these parts were yet. Or when, for that matter.
He was up in the mountains, though, he could tell that much. The air was thinner, and the pine looked right. Not western mountains; somewhere back east, he thought, judging from the undergrowth he’d slogged through to get to the party. He’d have to find a newspaper, or a phone book, or a map.
