“Steve didn’t make me wear a parachute,” said Syd.

“I know,” said Dar. “But if you fly with me, you wear one of these.”

His older parachute had been freshly repacked and now he had cinched and tightened and adjusted until it fit Syd perfectly. The morning grew later and hotter as Dar went over and over the instructions on kicking free of the plane and pulling the rip cord, controlling the risers, spilling air from the chute to change direction, bending knees on landing, and other anxiety-producing details.

Finally Syd had said, “Have you ever bailed out of a glider?”

“Never,” said Dar.

“Have you ever used a parachute?”

“Just once, about ten years ago,” said Dar. “Just a regular sky dive to make sure I could do it if I had to.”

“And?”

“It scared the everlasting shit out of me,” Dar said truthfully, and then began going through the instructions again.

They had argued briefly about Syd bringing along her Sig semiautomatic and the magazine clips on her belt. Dar pointed out that there was no need for handguns in a sailplane trip and that the holster, weapon, and three leather-wrapped extra magazines would just get in the way of the parachute harness and restraint belts. Syd had pointed out that she was a law officer and it was her legal duty to have the weapon with her at all times. Dar gave up that argument, warning her that the weapons would become a literal pain in the ass half an hour into the flight.

He had brought the oxygen because of Ken and Steve’s enthusiasm over the day’s prospects of wave soaring—a glider’s most dramatic means of gaining real altitude—and it took several more minutes for him to instruct Syd on how to stow the small oxygen canister and use hand signals to communicate when the mask prevented conversation.

“One important item,” Dar had said as Ken’s towplane began pulling them west into the breeze. “If we go to oxygen, don’t throw up in the mask.”

“What do I do if I get sick?”

“There’s a little bag tucked into the right side of your seat there. Take the mask off, throw up in the bag, put the mask back on.”

“Wonderful,” Syd had said as the Twin Astir lifted off. “You’re really making me look forward to this flight.”

Syd had not shown any signs of sickness during the flight. In fact, she’d shown only exhilaration as they were towed west toward the mountains into the so-called foehn gap—a whirling rotor of upward-spiralling air—between the stack of lenticulars and the mountains, and released on the upwind side of it. Dar had soared them around and back, working the rotor like a ski-slope lift, flying across the invisible elevator of lift in repeated sweeps.

He had been careful to point out that even on a beautiful, clear day such as this, there might be a lot of turbulence upon entering the rotor. “Are the wings supposed to do that?” she had asked over her shoulder, looking dubiously as the Twin Astir seemed to be imitating a snow goose trying to get airborne.

“Absolutely,” said Dar. “If they don’t flex like that, they break. Much better to flex.”

Having mapped the wave front through successive approximation, Dar flew through the turbulence of the outer waves again and found the true center of lift. After that, the ride was silky and soundless and breathtaking.

“My God,” Syd had cried. “It’s like we’re in an elevator.”

“We are,” said Dar.

“It doesn’t seem like we’re moving at all in relation to the ground, the mountain,” said Syd.

“We aren’t right now,” agreed Dar. “The wind’s strong enough to give us great lift right now, but our ground speed is zero. I’ll have to make another turn and pass in a minute or we’ll be blown back toward those lenticulars and lose the rotor…but for now, we’re in perfect balance.”

Syd had answered by putting her hand back over her seat and Dar’s low console. He hesitated only a second before reaching out and holding it, squeezing it.

At eight thousand feet he had them dutifully go to oxygen, just to be cautious.

They continued the smooth soar and climb, circling to the right, then hanging on the lift like a hawk balanced on an invisible pillar of a thermal, watching the sky get bluer and the horizon grow.

Dar held a mental three-dimensional map of the controlled and uncontrolled airspaces in this part of California, ranging from Class A to Class G, and he knew that they were well within an “E” space. This meant they were within controlled airspace but nowhere near a control tower, flying on visual flight rules. They could fly up to a ceiling of 18,000 feet above mean sea level, which was where the jet routes and commercial lanes began. He leveled the sailplane by flying out of the rotor at 14,500 MSL and widened their circles while increasing their airspeed to keep altitude.

Dar had Syd take the front stick and control the aircraft for a while, showing her how to take slow turns without stalling or losing too much altitude.

Syd loosened her mask and asked, “Can we do some acrobatics?”

Dar frowned but lowered his mask again, feeling the bite of cold in the air. “Do you mean aerobatics?”

“Whatever,” said Syd. “Steve told me that you can do loops, rolls, all sorts of things in this special kind of glider.”

“I don’t think you’d like those,” said Dar.

“Yes, I would!” said Syd.

“Put your mask back on,” said Dar. “You’re getting hypoxic, I think.” But he added, “And hang on…but not to the stick. Keep your feet away from the pedals.”

They were still in the lift zone, crabbing fairly dramatically as Dar kept the Twin Astir’s nose to the breeze, and now he put the nose down to gain some airspeed. Without shouting another warning through his mask, he used the ailerons to put the sailplane through a snap roll, while simultaneously using the rudder and elevators to keep the Twin Astir’s nose aimed at a point just above the horizon. The sailplane recovered perfectly, aimed exactly where it had been headed.

“Wow!” shouted Syd. “Again!”

Dar shook his head. But then, aware that he was showing off (for a girl, he thought), he banked right, dropped the nose below the horizon line to gain some airspeed, applied continuous up elevator while fine-tuning the aileron and rudder, and put the Twin Astir through a 360-degree barrel roll while flying a descending helix around their invisible horizontal axis. The sky and earth traded places, once, twice, three, four times.

Dar leveled off, checking his real altitude, glancing at control surfaces, and fiddling with the MacCready Speed Ring bezel around the variometer to estimate his best transit time to the next thermal.

“More!” shouted Syd.

Dar brought the nose up until the glider lost lift at its angle of attack and they stalled. The effect was roughly the same as stepping into an empty elevator shaft. The nose dropped and the Twin Astir plunged directly toward the earth, now some ten thousand feet below them. It was as if someone had cut the strings that held them aloft and the elegant sailplane had turned into so much dead metal and useless fabric, falling like an aluminum coffin dropped out of a cargo plane.

Syd screamed and Dar felt guilty for a minute until he recognized the scream as one of pure joy rather than terror. He loosened his mask and said, “You’ll have to save us from this.”

“How?”

“Push the stick forward.”

“Forward?” cried Syd through her mask. “Not back?”

“Most assuredly not back,” said Dar. “Forward. Gently at first.”

Syd pushed the stick forward, the wing surfaces began finding lift, and slowly, under Dar’s guidance, she pulled them out of the stall until the variometer told them that they were no longer losing altitude.

“This stupid stunt is called a wing-over,” said Dar. He took the controls, told Syd to hang on, and then pulled the nose to an impossible steep-pitch attitude. Their speed dropped precipitously. Just before they reached true stall speed, Dar applied full rudder to the yaw, slewed the Twin Astir around 180 degrees, pointed the nose almost straight down to pick up airspeed, and finally brought the plane to its normal, sedate glide attitude.