After three years of study and six months of serving on the Council that governed Menlo Park’s College for Versers, the rest of the Council started to give me suicide missions. We did not want the indigenous people on this world to know we were unaging. And only a few could host their own funeral and remain believable. So, I took increasingly dangerous missions for the Council.



Surprising enough, I survived on these mad-cap expeditions. In combat, the man ready to die often does not. He moves gracefully, and laughs as he dances among the falling bullets. Or at least I did. Eventually, the odds caught up with me.



I woke with the roar of an approaching engine speeding me to awareness. The curved concrete track held two low-slung race cars jostling each other as they raced down the track toward me. Apparently it was a practise because the stands that watched the mile-long oval were nearly empty.



I flipped backward, and out of the way just in time. Despairing I saw one of the drivers zip over my stuff, and his car start to joggle out of control. They both roared toward the curve, and the out-of-control driver pulled it together. Much to my surprise and relief they went around the curve neck and neck without a crash or spin-out.



Gathering my stuff, just-in-time, to avoid another such instance, I made my way out of the race arena. Outside, I saw firefighters race up a four-story ladder in a chain with hose resting on their shoulders, and their hands never touching the ladder. It was an incredible display of balance. After a few minutes of dumbfounded gaping, I headed down the street.



A Waffle House piped smells into the air, and I followed them inside. A crowded and bustling room with a rapid-fire buzz of jargon from the cooks and waitresses competed with the sight of glass plates being lofted in high arcs over the heads of customers to land on the arms of already burdened waitresses.



My food was hot, good, and homicidally fat-laden.



Outside, I watched kids skate up ramps and the sides of buildings. There were no cars for them to bash, and the streets were narrow.



Tubes delivered boxes of meat to a stand next to the cook. He often caught the twenty pound stacks that were flying out of the tubes, and had them ripped open before they stopped moving, so that he could more quickly dump them on the grill.



Runners with wagons loaded and mounded with bread ran up to the shop with the cold air making their breath steam, but they did not appear tired.



It took me a good bit of research, but I discovered this world’s secret. There were no cars. Without the automobile, Western Civilization had remained compact, and in excellent physical shape. The extreme sports craze hit earlier and harder here because it was a natural outgrowth of the way people lived. Coal had given way to nuclear power without any stopover for petroleum. The air was clearing now, and most people liked that because it meant they could run longer than when they were young.



A more physical lifestyle had led to a more balanced and sensible world. The stupidities that a life of the mind without risks to temper it did not arise her.



But, they hustled, and bustled. I joined in. But truth to tell, as I played the extreme games, I knew I was a faker. These people risked real death to bungie jump onto an empty bicycle that someone had escorted into the air from a ramp.

We versers can learn more at the very edge of human capabilities and stretch those capabilities to their real limits because death does not stop us. Most people in most worlds are sensibly lowballing what they could accomplish because a mistake ends their story in the mortal frame. But these people in this world challenged themselves, and I saw feats of grace and daring that astounded me, and humbled me.



I learned much about riding and climbing, and running naked in a snowstorm, and a dozen other feats that only the mad or the very brave would do. But even as I fell from the sky with the parachute that I had been supposed to pluck from that oh-so-blue sky smacking into the ground in front of me, I still felt like a faker.



Tadeusz