"Gee, that's too bad! Just what is the surface gravity on Ganymede? About one-third V isn't it?"
"Thirty-two per cent. Or from my point of view, everything here weighs three times as much as it ought to. Including me."
Matt nodded. "As if two other guys were riding on you, one on your shoulders, and one on your back."
"That's about it. The worst of it is, my feet hurt all the time. I'll get over it-"
"Sure you will!
"-since. I'm of Earth ancestry and potentially just as strong as my grandfather was. Back home, I'd been working out in the centrifuge the last couple of earth-years. I'm a lot stronger than I used to be. There's Oscar." Matt greeted Oscar, then hurried to his room to phone his father in private.
A copter transport hopped Matt and some fifty other candidates to the site of the variable acceleration test-in cadet slang, the "Bumps." It was west of the base, in the mountains, in order to have a sheer cliff for free fall. They landed on a loading platform at the edge of this cliff and joined a throng of other candidates. It was a crisp Colorado morning. They were near the timberline; gaunt evergreens, twisted by the winds, surrounded the clearing.
From a building just beyond the platform two steel skeletons ran vertically down the face of the two-thousand-foot cliff. They looked like open frames for elevators, which one of them was. The other was a guide for the testing car during the drop down the cliff.
Matt crowded up to the rail and leaned over. The lower ends of the skeleton frameworks disappeared, a dizzy distance below, in the roof of a building notched into the sloping floor of the canyon. He was telling himself that he hoped the engineer who had designed the thing knew what he was doing when he felt a dig in the ribs. It was Tex. "Some roller coaster, eh, Matt?"
"Hi, Tex. That's an understatement if I ever heard one."