oe had evidently pulled it off.

Joe waved to the plane ahead. Two mechanics had come up to steady the
wings for the initial ten or fifteen feet of the motorless craft's
passage over the ground behind the towing craft.

Joe said to Max, "did you explain to the pilot that under no
circumstances was he to pass over the line of the military reservation,
that we'd cut before we reached that point?"

"Yes, sir," Max said nervously. He'd flown before, on the commercial
lines, but he'd never been in a glider.

They began lurching across the field, slowly, then gathering speed. And
as the sailplane took speed, it took grace. After it had been pulled a
hundred feet or so, Joe eased back the stick and it slipped gently into
the air, four or five feet off the ground. The towing airplane was
still taxiing, but with its tow airborne it picked up speed quickly.
Another two hundred feet and it, too, was in the air and beginning to
climb. The glider behind held it to a speed of sixty miles or so.

At ten thousand feet, the plane leveled off and the pilot's head
swiveled to look back at them. Joe Mauser waved to him and dropped the
release lever which ejected the nylon rope from the glider's nose. The
plane dove away, trailing the rope behind it. Joe knew that the plane
pilot would later drop it over the airport where it could easily be
retrieved.

In the direction of Mount Overlook he could see cumulus clouds and the
dark turbulence which meant strong updraft. He headed in that direction.

Except for the whistling of wind, there is complete silence in a soaring
glider. Max Mainz began to call back to his superior, was taken back by
the volume, and dropped his voice. He said, "Look, captain. What keeps
it up?"

Joe grinned. He liked the buoyance of glider flying, the nearest
approach of man to the bird, and thus far everything was going well. He
told Max, "An airplane plows through the air currents, a glider rides on
top of them."

"Yeah, but suppose the current is going down?"

"Then we avoid it. This sailplane only has a gliding angle ratio of one
to twenty-five, but it's a workhorse with a payload of some four hundred
pounds. A really high performance glider can have a ratio of as much as
one to forty."

Joe had found a strong updraft where a wind ran up the side of a
mountain. He banked, went into a circling turn. The gauge indicated they
were climbing at the rate of eight meters per second, nearly fifteen
hundred feet