Anyhow, the MLTV itself still needed test flights. Nobody was too keen to risk it, so far away from the Mars landing itself.

Nobody except somebody so desperate to get on the selection roster he’d do almost anything.

Gershon took the MLTV up to maybe sixty feet and slowed the ascent.

The principles of the strange craft were obvious enough. You stood on your jet’s tail. You kept yourself stable with the four peroxide reaction clusters, the little vernier rockets spaced around the frame, squirting them here and there. In fact, he found, he didn’t even need to work the RCS control when he was trying to hold the craft level; the little rockets would fire by themselves, in little solenoid bangs and gas hisses.

He experimented with his controls. He had a full 360-degree yaw capability, he found; he could make the MLTV rotate around its vertical axis, back and forth. He whooped as the world wheeled around him. And he had some pitch and roll control: he could make the vehicle tip this way and that. But when he tried it, of course, the thrust of his single big downward jet was at an angle to the vertical, and he’d find himself shooting forward, or sideways, or backward across the painted tarmac -

Curval shouted in his ear. “Hey, take it easy!”

— and that was evidently the way you had to fly a MEM. But he had to take care not to tip too far in any direction, or he could feel the stability start to go.

The low sunlight got in his eyes, which were still watering, and made it hard to read his instruments.

He came to rest perhaps a hundred feet above the ground, facing the control truck.

“Maybe you should get back down here for that eye bath, Ralph,” Curval said.

“So how much fuel does this thing carry?”

“Enough for maybe seven minutes.”

“And how long would a landing sequence take?”

“Ralph—”

“Tell me.”

“Three, four minutes.”

He checked his watch; he’d been up no more than two minutes. Time to spare.

He took the MLTV straight up in the air.

“Ralph, get your ass down here!”

“There’s only one way I’m coming down, bubba, and that’s by a Powered Descent.”

“You’re not trained for this.”

“I’ve done over fifty sims. Come on, man. I know what I’m doing. This bird is working as sweet as a clock. Let me bring her in.”

Curval sounded as if he was choking. “Goddamn it, you asshole, you smash up that trainer, and I’ll sue you myself.”

Gershon grinned. “Sure.” What, after all, could Curval do? Nothing, as long as Gershon was in the trainer, and Curval was stuck on the ground.

Gershon took her to three hundred feet. “This high enough to initiate?”

He could hear Curval take a few breaths. “Find the button for the automatic control sequence.”