"Stand to the door!" The two files shuffled toward the ten-foot-wide exit, each jumper sliding his static line along his file's jump cable. Esau felt paralyzed; Jael's hand on his back helped him move. Now the first man in each file stood in the exit looking out, a jump master beside him, eddies of cold wind snapping at his trousers. The others crowded behind. Esau's guts churned, and it seemed to him he was suffocating. Actually he'd stopped breathing.

He didn't see the light flash above the exit, didn't even hear the buzzer. He knew only that Masadan voices were shouting "Go! Go! Go!" The men in the doors had stepped out, the trainees behind them following quickly. Jael's helping hand was pushing, and somehow Esau kept pace. Then 3rd Squad was out, and the exit's lip was at his feet-the exit and empty air. For just an instant he hesitated. His jump master's meaty hand slapped his shoulder, and his feet obeyed, his traitorous mouth wailing feebly. He felt the jolt as his chute opened… and suddenly he was floating beneath its mottled green canopy-with a sense not of fear but exultation! Beneath him-2,300 feet beneath him-was the ground. He laughed aloud. His mental paralysis of a moment before was gone as if it had never been.

He gave it no attention, simply looked around. Parachutes formed irregular twin lines in the chill air. Invigorating! Pay attention, he reminded himself. You're supposed to be learning. As if paragliding, he examined the field for nonexistent obstacles. As he approached the ground, it seemed to accelerate toward him, a false apparency they'd been warned about. Don't reach for it, he reminded himself. Landing straight-legged destroyed knees. At almost the last moment he looked ahead, then felt the impact, and reflexively did a proper landing roll. Coming to his feet, he pulled in his risers and suspension lines, collapsing his chute. It was over.

He'd have happily gone back up at once, and jumped again.

"At once" was not an option. The rest of the day they went back to the physical regimen of infantry training, harder than ever, as if to make up for an easy morning. After supper, they did a ninety-minute speed march with sixty-pound sandbags and flak jackets. But at 2130 that evening, the platoon and its company CO and XO, were back in the sweat shed, waiting for the platoon's first night jump. No one had failed to jump that morning. Esau wondered if any of the others had felt as he had. It seemed to him he wouldn't have made it without Jael.

I sure as heck won't let that happen again, he thought, and behind the thought was total warrior intention.

This time the selected platoons from A and B Companies were tabbed to go first. As 2nd Platoon shuffled to its carrier, Esau noticed the brisk breeze. When they'd arrived twenty minutes earlier, it hadn't been half as strong, he was sure. They'd been told in their first lecture that for safety reasons, War House had decreed that no training jumps be made in wind stronger than 18 knots. On New Jerusalem there were no anemometers, and he had no real sense of what an 18-knot wind felt like, but it seemed to him this might be stronger.

Still, he told himself, the Masadans knew what they were doing. Aboard the floater, he felt as calm as he had that morning when he'd boarded. But this time, he knew, there would be no water-kneed paralysis. Reaching, he squeezed Jael's hand in reassurance. Eight minutes later, the jump master ordered them to stand, and they went through the drill again, Esau grinning widely. He literally dove from the exit, and with his head-down attitude, the opening shock jerked him viciously.

He hardly noticed. The night was clear, quiet, dark-peaceful!-and seemed more beautiful than any he'd ever seen before. The sky glittered with stars. The wind began oscillating him like a pendulum, and he reached the ground on the upswing, softening the landing. Then the wind in his chute was dragging him briskly on his side, and he half-twisted onto his belly, powerful arms pulling in his front risers and suspension lines, spilling the air from his canopy.

He stopped. Jerking the safety clip on his harness, he hit the release sharply, gathered chute and harness into a great wad of fabric and cords, then strode toward the headlights of the bus coming to pick them up. He felt big enough, powerful enough, to eat the world.

The next day was Sevenday; for B Company, a pass Sevenday. They slept in till 0730 and there was no morning run. After breakfast, Speaker Spieler held a religious service for the trainees. An early lunch followed, then those who wanted to-Esau and Jael among them-rode trucks in to North Fork. Since week seven, when they'd become eligible for passes, they'd spent their free afternoons in a by-the-hour room at a small hotel. With so much night training, they hadn't been visiting the water heater room much.

When they'd spent themselves, they dressed again and went outside to walk, holding hands. Old wives' summer lay on the land. The air was still, the sun soft with autumn haze, and Riverfront Park was carpeted with fallen leaves.

"What was it like for you yesterday morning?" he asked. "Jumping and all."

"Not too bad," she said, "until I started toward the door. Then I felt really scared."

"Really?"

"Really."

"Not as scared as me, I'll bet. If you hadn't helped me, I couldn't have done it. My brain was froze, and my knees were like water. I wouldn't have been any scareder with a tiger chasing me." He paused. "But as soon as I was out the door-bang! No way can I tell you how great it felt! When I got down, I wanted to go up and do it again. Right away. And last night was just as good. Maybe better, because the sky was so beautiful."

"It was, wasn't it." Jael paused. "About being scared that first time, scared of going out the door- Remember what Hosea Innis said that night, when we talked about warbots with Sergeant Hawkins?"

"Remind me."

"He said if he'd ever come across a tiger and didn't have so much as his ax, why even innocent as the Lamb of God, he'd be scared to death. Because while the soul goes to heaven, the body knows it's going to get killed and eaten." She looked up at her husband. "It was our bodies were scared. They did not want to jump out that door! And when they found out it was all right, the relief was so big, we felt really really good."

Esau nodded thoughtfully, then stopped and kissed her. "You know what?" he said. "I'm married to the wisest woman in the world."

She chuckled. "How about the prettiest?"

"That too," he answered, and kissed her again. "You know something else I really really like?" he murmured. "Better than jumping out of a floater?"

This time she laughed out loud. "Let's go back to the hotel," she said.

Over the next two weeks, each of the paraglider platoons made three free-fall jumps with parasail chutes. The first was by daylight from 4,000 feet, wearing high-altitude jump suits. The trainees needed to get used to them, and even at only 4,000 feet, these autumn days were freezing, or close to it.

Combat jumps would be at night, but the Masadans, demanding though they were, knew the value of training gradients. The trainees had been given a target to hit, a hundred-yard circle a mile from the flight path. Every jumper in 2nd Platoon came down inside the circle. And they all liked the parasails, which set them down less hard than the mass-jump chutes they'd used before. The second parasail jump was at night from 12,000 feet, their target a ring of unlit cloth panels eight miles away, invisible till they were near it. Until close in, they'd been guided by passive gravitic matrix detectors, read as a heads-up display on the faceplate of their jump helmet. They'd done it in virtual training, but needed to experience it for real.