On day fourteen hundred and twenty, the new line ended in a square of white cloth.
Iven had put it there himself. Thirty-four meters from the starting block, beyond a stretch of firm, level ground, the cloth marked a landing wide enough for two comfortable steps. There were no loose stones under it. Behind it lay another six meters of clear runout.
Vela walked the course while he checked his cuff. She carried a small rake, though the ground had already been swept twice.
“It’s still ground,” she said on the way back.
“Good.”
“It hasn’t become better ground because you looked at it longer.”
He grinned. She had been saying variations of that since the second inspection.
The point was not courage. He knew he could cross thirty-two meters with a controlled impulse. He had done it with bolts in the air and people depending on the landing. The new work was making that movement a little faster without arriving as a falling body.
