It was the geology museum that did it Henry Bowman reflected as he stretched out on the closed-cell foam mattress, pulled his sleeping bag loosely over his legs, and reflected on what he was sure was his final choice of school.

He had entered the nondescript brick building and almost immediately been confronted with an absolutely immense mastodon skeleton that was mounted in the main room. He would come to learn that it was one of the largest in the world. After Henry had been staring at it for fifteen or twenty minutes, a geology professor with a limp had struck up a conversation with him, and had invited Henry to a screening of a film entitled San Francisco: The City That Waits to Die. The professor was showing it for some summer interns from the state University two miles away, and offered to let Henry join them. Henry had been fascinated by the film, and impressed that he was included with the group.

Henry checked the mosquito netting in his tent and switched off the flashlight. He was at the edge of Quabbin Reservoir, about twenty miles north of the school, where he had spent two hours shooting after dinner, until it got dark. A mile away was the Orange Sport Parachuting Center, opened in 1959 as the first such facility in the country. Henry had taken their First Jump Course that day, at a cost of $65. It was his first airplane flight where the number of takeoffs had been greater than the number of landings.

This place is worlds better than what's in Boston Henry thought as he lay in his tent. He relived the excitement of his first parachute jump: the exhilaration of the exit, followed by the quiet, peaceful experience under the canopy. Henry knew he would make many more parachute jumps in the future.

Then he recalled the horrendous traffic that he had endured hitchhiking in Cambridge to get to what he had assumed was a tour for prospective students, only to wind up listening to a pompous nitwit explain at length about 'The Statue of the Three Lies'.

I could get to like this place Henry thought as he listened to the crickets and slowly drifted off to sleep.

October 22,1970 "Can you hear me all right?" the voice crackled over the radio. Henry Bowman looked around at his three passengers. All were nodding their heads. He picked up the microphone and squeezed the "talk" button. "Loud and clear, Professor Foose. This altitude suit you?" he asked the man in the six-passenger Piper a half mile ahead.

"It's good for now. It's a little bumpy this low, so if anyone starts feeling queasy, we'll have to go higher."

"Sounds good," Henry replied. "We're all ears." Henry put the microphone back in the clip on the instrument panel and leaned out the mixture on the Cessna Skyhawk until the reading on the exhaust gas temperature gauge peaked. His altimeter read 2500 feet, which was a little more than 2200 feet above the ground. He was on a southern course, flying directly over the eastern edge of the Connecticut River from Northampton, Massachusetts, to Long Island, New York.

"All right. The first thing you'll notice is what we discussed in the lecture on Thursday: the river's path is almost never straight for very long, and you can see how it has grown more and more crooked-serpentine is the official term-because of fluid dynamics." Henry dipped the right wing to give his passengers, particularly the one directly behind him, a better view of the river. "Anything which disturbs the course speeds up the water at the outside of the curve. Look at the erosion at the outside of the bend in the river about a half mile ahead, where the water is travelling fastest." Henry saw that the bank was undercut, and trees were about to topple into the river. Ann Ellis, in the front passenger seat, raised her Nikon for a photo. "Up ahead you can see a place where the river curved so much that during the next flood, the water broke over the land and made an ox-bow," Professor Foose continued on the radio.

"Can you fly down lower where I can get a better shot of the cut?" the young woman asked Henry. Ann Ellis was a Geology major in her Junior year at Smith College, taking a geo course at Amherst as part of the five-college exchange program. The hydrodynamics class was on an aerial field trip to observe firsthand some textbook examples of maturing rivers and beachfront erosion.

Ann Ellis had been somewhat startled when she had discovered that three of the students were going to be flown by a freshman who wouldn't even be eligible to take the course for another year. She had volunteered to be one of the three when she had overheard Henry telling Professor Foose that the visibility and photo opportunities would be much better out of the high-wing Cessna than the low-wing Piper that was being flown by a charter pilot.

"Dropping down to eight hundred for some quick photos, Chuck," Henry announced over the radio as he reduced power slightly and dropped the nose of the Skyhawk into a fast descent.

"Isn't this a little steep?" asked Mark Keller, a sophomore taking the course.

"Only if it makes you feel sick," Henry said in a voice loud enough to be heard over the increased wind noise. "We're still a good twenty knots from overspeeding the air-frame," Henry said, tapping the airspeed indicator, "and it's calm today. If I cut back on power, they'll get farther ahead of us. That Piper's already throttled back so we can keep up, and the geo department's paying by the hour. You feel funny or anything?" he asked as he glanced over his shoulder.

"No!" Keller answered, as if he had been accused of something shameful.

"Some people, it sneaks up on 'em," Henry said mildly. He levelled the plane about 500 feet off the ground and dipped the wing so Ann could get a clear shot of the undercut riverbank.

"Perfect," she announced after she had clicked off two frames. Henry looked over his shoulder. The two men in the back seat were also taking photos. They lowered their cameras and nodded that they had both gotten their pictures. Henry added power and raised the nose slightly to return to his previous altitude.

"We're dropping down to two thousand," the other pilot announced on the radio.

"Meeting you there," Henry radioed back. He saw with satisfaction that his separation from the lead plane appeared practically unchanged.

It was an hour and a half to Long Island, and by the time the planes flew over the strip of land, Professor Foose had given the class a full narration of many of the things they had only read about before. The lead plane had alternated between two and five thousand feet four times, temporarily sacrificing optimum viewing because of upset stomachs. Henry had dutifully followed the Piper's climbs and descents, and his three passengers made cracks about what "lightweights" Foose was stuck with in the other plane. Ann Ellis, Mark Keller, and Garrett Edison were all very comfortable with Henry's flying by the time Long Island appeared. As they passed over the far tip of the island, Foose's voice came over the radio again.

"We're going to speed up and climb to five thousand on the way back, to save the geo department a little rental time."

"Okay if we take our time getting back?" Henry radioed to the other plane. "I want to make sure everyone here gets all the good pictures they want."

"Fine with me, Henry," Foose replied.

"Any requests?" Henry said, looking around at all three of his passengers. He put the 172 in a gentle turn out over the Atlantic ocean.

"Can we get down close to the beach?" Ann Ellis asked. "Closer than we were over the river when we got down low?"

"Yeah!" Garrett Edison agreed. "Uh, how low can you go? Can you get in trouble?"

"The law says minimum five hundred feet from any person or structure in sparsely populated areas, which this edge is. If I stay a little bit out from the bank, I can get as close to the water as you want. Nobody has a tape measure around here. Long as we don't make anyone think we're about to hit them, we're fine." He thought for a moment. "Seems to me you'd want a little altitude for pictures, though." The Skyhawk was a mile out over the ocean and Henry had it almost all the way turned around towards land again.

"We'd like to get pictures of the different cuts in the coastline around the jetties," Ann Ellis said quickly. "I also think it would be fun to fly close to the land."

"You got it." Henry pushed the mixture control to full rich and pulled back the power a bit. He adjusted the trim and put the plane in a 135-knot dive. "I'm not trying to scare you," he explained. "Down low, if you have an engine problem," like it stops running he added mentally, "you can trade airspeed for altitude and give yourself more choices of where to land. I don't ever fly low and slow unless I've got a good place to put down right in front of me." He leveled the plane at what he judged was about twenty feet off the water and fifty yards from shore.

"Man, you really see your speed down here," Mark Keller said. "How fast are we going?"

"About a hundred fifty miles per hour," Henry replied. The three passengers busied themselves taking photos as the beach raced by. As they neared the end of Long Island, Henry gave the 150-horsepower Lycoming full throttle and eased back on the yoke. Soon they had two thousand feet of altitude again.

As they made their way north over Connecticut, Ann Ellis mentioned that her family lived in a suburb of Hartford.

"Want to get an aerial photo of your house?"

"Yes!"

"Things look a lot different from the air-a whole new set of reference points. Let's figure out where the house is." They spent several minutes analyzing major roads before homing in on Ann's neighborhood. The young woman used half a roll of film shooting photos of the property. Henry grinned at how excited she became.

"Have you ever had an engine failure?" Mark Keller asked when they back on course to Northampton.

"I've never had an actual malfunction," Henry explained. "But my dad taught me to fly, and he was a big believer in emergency preparation. He'd switch the ignition off and pull the key when we were out flying, and tell me to make a real engine-out emergency landing.

"First few times he had to take it away from me and put it down himself, to show me it could always be done.-He wouldn't restart the engine until we were on the ground. I got to where I was pretty good at always knowing where the wind's coming from and always noticing spots I could put down. So I must have made thirty or forty engine-out landings on bean fields and country roads. Put down on a golf course once, too."

"Isn't that illegal?" Ann Ellis asked.

"Not very," Henry said with a shrug. "We never hurt anything, and the few times anyone was around, they thought a biplane was so neat they didn't care where we'd landed."

"You learned to fly in a biplane?"

"A Stearman my dad used to teach aerobatics to Navy pilots in during World War Two."

"Do you do aerobatics?" Ann Ellis looked at the other two passengers. "Can you show us something?" Mark and Garrett were about to protest, but Henry shook his head and spoke before they could.

"Not in this aircraft-it's not approved for it. I could do a barrel roll, it wouldn't overstress anything. But an inverted maneuver's the kind of thing people can see and catch on camera, and you can lose your license. Not like flying a little too close to an empty beach shack, where no one can measure your exact distance, or putting down in a field, where you can claim you lost power.

"Flying's not like driving, where every state sets its own rules and they're all pretty reasonable. The FAA- that's the Federal Aviation Administration-they run everything, and those Federal guys can be a bunch of bastards. There's a lot more 'Federal' and 'Administration' in the Federal Aviation Administration than there is 'Aviation'. That's why there's almost no new designs coming out of the factories-too expensive to jump through all the government hoops. We're sitting in a two-year-old airplane that's no more advanced than some of the stuff you could buy in the 'thirties. That engine," he said, pointing towards the nose of the plane, "is essentially an oversized version of the 1939 predecessor to the Volkswagen. This old Lycoming is stone age compared to a Chevrolet V-8 you can buy new in the crate from GM for $700."

Henry stopped lecturing and thought for a few moments. "There is one precision maneuver I can show you that doesn't look like anything from the outside-just a climb and a dive. From inside the plane it's pretty interesting. It's how they train the astronauts." He nodded and came to a decision "Hold your camera about even with your chin," he said to Ann Ellis.

"Like this?" she asked.

"Point the lens straight forward. A little higher so Matt and Garrett can see it. Yeah, that's it. When I say 'now', let go of it, and start counting to ten in a loud voice, at about a one-second pace. Okay?" Ann Ellis looked dubious, but nodded. Her Nikon was on a wide strap around her neck. "Watch her camera, guys," Henry said to the pair in the back seat.

Henry gave the Cessna full throttle and lowered the nose until the airspeed needle was almost at the far end of the yellow arc, and scanned the air ahead and above him for any sign of traffic. He leveled the aircraft with the needle touching the end of the yellow and then pulled it up into a fairly steep climb. Ann Ellis felt her body press into the seat with three times its normal weight.

"Ready...NOW!" Henry commanded as he eased the yoke forward. Ann Ellis let go of her camera just as the pressure vanished and she felt herself levitate an inch off the seat cushion. The Nikon floated in front of her face, hovering magically in the air. She was so astonished at this spectacle that she completely forgot to count to ten.

Henry Bowman kept track of the airspeed needle with his peripheral vision as he looked at the floating camera and continued to apply precise pressure on the yoke of the aircraft while easing back on the throttle. When the needle was a half-inch from the end of the yellow arc, he yelled "Grab it!," yanked the power back to idle, and eased back on the yoke to bring the Skyhawk out of the dive.

"Man, what was that?" Garrett Edison yelled when the wind noise had subsided. Henry took a deep breath.

"When we were in the climb and Ann let go of her camera, from the reference point of the ground, the camera behaved as if it were a projectile launched at an upward angle in a vacuum. The upward angle was the angle of our climb at the instant I pushed the yoke forward, and the camera acted as if it was in a vacuum because the plane is a closed compartment, and the camera doesn't feel wind resistance any more than our faces do. With me so far?"

"Yeah..."

"The camera keeps moving forward at a constant speed relative to the ground, and that constant speed is the same as the forward component of the plane's speed at the instant Ann let go of the camera. Got that?" "Y-yeah....."

"Okay, now because of gravity, as soon as Ann lets go of it, the camera instantly starts accelerating towards the ground, at a rate equal to that of the force of gravity- about thirty-two feet per second per second. Right?"

"Yeah, right." Edison was starting to see where this was going.

"What I just did, was fly the plane on the exact ballistic path of the camera. The trick is to arc the plane over at just the right rate so that the camera doesn't move inside the plane. Too big an arc and it would have fallen in her lap. Too tight, and the camera would have bounced off the headliner. When you make an object 'float' like that, you achieve perfect 'zero-G' conditions. For about eight seconds there, we were all absolutely weightless, as I guess you noticed."

"No shit," Ann Ellis said meaningfully. Henry was momentarily embarrassed.

"That's how they train the astronauts for weightlessness," he explained. "They use a stripped Boeing 707 with padding all over the inside, and since it's a lot faster, they get a lot bigger arc. I think they can get around thirty seconds of zero-G conditions in a 707. They also do it over and over again, and the astronauts have nicknamed that particular plane 'The Vomit Comet'." He shrugged.

"It's one of the more difficult precision maneuvers, and it's not too hard on the equipment. Doesn't look like much from the ground, though." He smiled. "My dad could do that same trick while he made the plane do a barrel roll. That really looked weird. The camera-or whatever- would look like it was rotating all by itself while it floated in front of your face." He shook his head. "I'm not nearly that good."

Ann Ellis said nothing.

Obviously underwhelmed Henry thought to himself. That's okay. She had fun when we blasted down the beach.

In reality Ann Ellis was silent for a very different reason. The few moments of three-G pressure followed immediately by eight seconds of weightlessness had had a very interesting effect on her insides. She felt as if she were on the verge of orgasm. "Do you always have that kind of control?" she said under her breath. Henry glanced over, thinking the girl had said something. Guess I imagined it he decided.

Henry Bowman spent the next hour putting the plane in perfect picture-taking position over various points of geological interest. His passengers related to him some of the things Professor Foose had explained in class but not in the air.

Henry Bowman entered the traffic pattern at fifteen hundred feet over LaFleur Airport in Northampton, Massachusetts. He glanced at his gauges, pulled his mixture control to full lean, and pulled the key out of the ignition. His three passengers watched in horror as the propeller in front of them stopped spinning and came to a halt. There was still wind noise, but the geology students had grown used to the sound of the engine. To them, the airplane now seemed as quiet as death.

"I'm going to land, turn off the runway, and taxi into the spot next to that black-and-yellow clipped-wing Cub with the big tires down there," Henry announced. It was an old stunt that Duane Cole had made his trademark at the end of almost every one of his air-show routines. Henry turned on to base leg earlier than usual as he was descending faster than normal, flared cleanly, and greased the Skyhawk onto the asphalt a third of the way down the runway. As his forward momentum declined, he turned off onto the taxiway at midfield, steered over towards the tiedown spot, and braked to a halt on the centerline.

Matt and Garrett were impressed, and thanked Henry sincerely.

"Glad to do it, particularly since the department pays to rent the plane." He squinted and grinned. "And I think today has convinced me to major in geology, as well as economics."

"Best school for it," Matt asserted. Garrett concurred.

Ann Ellis had also made a decision, one that concerned Henry Bowman's plans for that evening. It was going to make her roommate very upset, but she decided she didn't care.

"Hi, I'm Dick Gaines. Mind if I sit here?"

"Free country, man," one of the six students at the lunch table said.

"Great! Listen, I won't take up your time, but I'm running for class president, and I'd like your vote," Gaines said as soon as he had put down his tray.

"President?" a young man with short black hair and acne said. "You're not even in our fraternity, are you? I know I've never seen you before."

"Class president, Artie. Not frat president," one of the others corrected as he turned towards Dick Gaines. "He got in here on an athletic scholarship," the young man explained.

"Hey, fuck you, asshole, I heard him wrong is all."

"Artie's just pissed off he didn't get laid at Stephens last week. He's been jacking off in the shower so much, every time it rains he gets a hard-on." The whole table laughed. Richard joined in nervously. "Ah, the freshman class hasn't had much of a voice in student government, and I'd like to change that," Richard said when the laughter had died down.

"Taylor here's got a voice. Should have heard him in algebra class yesterday-7 can answer that!'-pro'ly the only time he's ever paid attention. Thought the teacher was goin' t' drop his chalk."