As far as Gershon was concerned the contest wasn’t over until the bird left the pad, on April 21, 1985.

Gershon jammed his helmet on his head. He jumped up into the MLTV’s open frame. With a single twist he was able to lower himself into the single seat. “How about that. Just my size.”

Curval stepped forward. “Hey, Gershon—”

Gershon was strapping himself in. “The seat’s a Weber zero-zero, right?”

“Come on down from there, man, you’re not prepared. You’re not supposed to—”

“And the jet back there is a General Electric CF-700-2V turbofan. Come on, Ted, I know the equipment. I’ve come out here to fly the thing, not listen to you yack about it.” He glanced down at the control panel: a few instruments, a CRT, a couple of handsets. Just like the sims.

He found himself blinking; the sun was strong, almost directly in his face, and his eyes hurt. On the Plexiglas windshield in front of him he could see reticles — fine lines — etched in there, labeled with numbers -

But suddenly the pain in his eyes amplified. “Yow.” He threw his arm across his face. His eyes itched unbearably, and started to flood.

“For a start,” Curval called up drily, “you can close up your visor. You’re being hit by hydrogen peroxide leaking from the attitude controls. You sure you know what you’re doing, guy?”

Gershon snapped shut his visor and squeezed his eyes closed. “Let me bust my neck, Ted. It’s my neck. What do you care?”

“Okay,” Curval said at length. “Okay, you win.”

Curval, with York, went over to the control truck and clambered in the back. In a moment, Gershon heard Curval’s crisp voice sounding in his flight headset. “Okay, Ralph. What we’re going to do is take the MLTV up fifty feet, twice around the block, and back home again, just as nice as pie. Just to let you get the feel of her. And then you’re coming out for an eye bath. You got that?”

“Sure.”

Gershon kicked in the jet, and there was a roar at his back. Dust billowed up off the ground, into his face. Vapor puffed out of the attitude nozzles, as if this was some unlikely steam engine, a Victorian engineer’s fantasy of flight.

The runway tarmac fell away. The lift was a brief, comforting surge. The MLTV was like a noisy elevator.

Gershon whooped. “Whee-hoo! Now we is hangin’ loose!”

Of MLTV Number Three’s four cousins, two had crashed during the last half year. The pilots had ejected and walked away. Nobody was sure about the cause. Well, vertical takeoff and land vehicles were notoriously unstable; maybe you had to expect a percentage of failures. The hope was that these crashes weren’t showing up fundamental flaws in the design of the MEM itself.