Against the Day (199 page)

   
“I’m
goin with you, Frank,” Jesse’s voice slurred with exhaustion.

   
“You
need to go with your Ma, make sure she gets out of here in one piece.”

   
“But
the fightin ain’t over.”

“No,
it ain’t. But you already put in a long day of good fightin, Jesse, and these
ladies here, babies and so forth, they need a trusty rifle shot who’ll cover
’em till they can get over to that little ranch past the tracks. There’ll be
plenty more fightin to do, everbody’ll get their share.”

He
knew the pale smudge of the boy’s face was turned to him, and Frank was just as
glad not to have to see the expression on it. “Now that I know how to get to
your Uncle Holt and Aunt Willow’s place, ’cause you drew me that map and all,
I’ll come down there quick as we can get this wrapped up.”

They
both heard that “we,” not the one they’d hoped for but this other collective of
shadows, dead on their feet, not half a dozen words of English among them,
rifle butts dragging in the dirt, filing away east up the wagon road into the
Black Hills now, trying to stay together.

“We’ll
be up there,” moving his head toward the Hills, “supposed to be a mobilization
camp someplace. Jesse you take care now—” and the boy ran to embrace him
with such unexpected fierceness, as if he could hold everything, the night
about to end, the shelter of the arroyo, hold it all still, unchanging, and
Frank could feel him trying not to cry, and then making himself unclasp, step
away, get on with this terrible onset of morning. Stray
was
there just
behind him.

“O.K., Estrella.” Their embrace might
not have been so close or desperate, but no kiss he could remember had ever
been quite this honest, nor this weighted with sorrow.

   
“There’s
trains heading south all the time,” she said, “we’ll be fine.”

   
“Soon
as I can—”

“Never mind that, Frank. Jesse, you
want to carry this here?” And they were gone, and he wasn’t even sure what it
cost them not to look back.

That summer had been memorable for its high temperatures. All
Europe sweltered. Wine grapes turned on the vine to raisins overnight. Piles of
hay cut and gathered early as June burst spontaneously into flame. Wildfires traveled
the Continent, crossing borders, leaping ridgelines and rivers with impunity.
Naturist cults were overcome with a terrible fear that the luminary they
worshipped had betrayed them and now consciously planned Earth’s destruction.

Reports had reached
Inconvenience
of
an updraft over the deserts of Northern Africa unprecedented in size and
intensity. To feed the great thermal ascent, air masses were being drawn down
from the Alps and the Mountains of the Moon and the Balkan heights, and a
skycraft, even one the size
of
Inconvenience,
had only to approach the flow and Saharan antigravity would take
care of the rest. All that was really needed was to let go.

There was discussion, of course,
about the financing. These days the boys were pretty much on their own. The
National Office had finally become so cheap with budget allocations that the
crew of
Inconvenience,
after a meeting which lasted five minutes
including the time it took to brew the coffee, had voted, finally, to
disaffiliate. Nor were they alone in this decision. For some time, in fact,
worldwide, the organization had been drifting into a loose collection of
independent operators, with only the “Chums of Chance” name and insignia in
common. There were no repercussions from above. It was as if the National had
vacated its premises, wherever they’d been to begin with, and left no
forwarding address. The boys were all free to define their own missions and
negotiate their own fees, whose entire amount they would now get to keep,
rather than tithing half and even more back to the National.

   
This
greatly improved flow of revenue, along with recent advances in lightweight
engines of higher horsepower, had allowed
Inconvenience
to expand to
considerable size, with the mess hall alone occupying more space than the
entire gondola of the previous version of the ship, and the kitchen grown
nearly as enormous. Miles, as commissary, had installed patent refrigerators
and hydrogenburning stoves of the latest design, and hired a topnotch cooking
staff, including a former souschef at the wellknown Tour d’Argent in Paris.

Tonight’s
meeting was about whether or not to take the
Inconvenience
into the
great updraft over the Sahara without somebody paying for it in advance. Miles
called the session to order by bashing upon a Chinese gong acquired years
before from an assassination cult active in that country, during the boys’
unheralded but decisive activities in the Boxer Rebellion (see
The Chums of
Chance and the Wrath of the Yellow Fang
)
, and wheeled around a refrigerated Champagne cart, refilling
everyone’s glass from a Balthazar of ’03 Verzenay.

“Not
‘on spec,’ skybrothers,” protested Darby, whose appreciation for the field of
contract law had by now grown perhaps to the fringes of unhealthy
obsessiveness. “We’re not in this racket for free. No client, no cruise.”

“Don’t
you boys just have adventures anymore?” piped up Pugnax’s companion Ksenija,
though she barked it in Macedonian. Not long before, Pugnax had met up with the
fiercely beautiful
šarplaninec
sheepdog, and convinced her to come
aboard
Inconvenience.
Sometimes he thought he’d been waiting for her all
his life, that she had always been down there, moving somewhere just visible,
among the landscapes rolling beneath the ship, deep among the details of tiny
fenced or hedged fields, thatched or redtiled rooftops, smoke from hundreds of
human fires, the steep shadowed mountains, pursuing by day the ancient minuet
with the flocks
. . . .

The
vote was unanimous—they would venture into the updraft, and pick up the
costs out of overhead. Darby had apparently voted against his own legal
principles.

Because
no one had yet measured the forces likely to be in play, ordinarily no skyfarer
with his wits about him would have ventured within a hundred miles of the
desert phenomenon, yet hardly had the boys secured the Special Sky Detail than
they began to feel tremors in the hull, which presently became leaps of metal
exhilaration, almost a breaking into some unimagined freedom, as the ship was
seized and borne downslope off the Balkan Peninsula, faster and faster
southwestward across the Mediterranean and the coast of Libya, directly toward
the huge vertical departure somewhere ahead.

   
Those
not actually on watch stood at the windows of the Grand Saloon and stared as
the strangely red cylindrical cloud slowly rose, like a sinister luminary, up
over the horizon—sands eternally ascending, bright and calamitous off
their starboard bow and closing, empty and silent and forever rushing skyward,
pure aerodynamic lift, antiparadise
. . . .

And
as they entered and were taken, Chick Counterfly thought back to his first days
aboard the
Inconvenience,
and Randolph’s dark admonition that going up
would be like going north, and his own surmise that one could climb high enough
to descend to the surface of another planet. Or, as the commander had put it
then, “Another ‘surface,’ but an earthly one
. . .
all too earthly.”

The
corollary, Chick had worked out long ago, being that each star and planet we
can see in the Sky is but the reflection of our single Earth along a different
Minkowskian spacetime track. Travel to other worlds is therefore travel to
alternate versions of the same Earth. And if going up is like going north, with
the common variable being cold, the analogous direction in Time, by the Second
Law of Thermodynamics, ought to be from past to future, in the direction of
increasing entropy.

Now,
out in the suffocating heat of the sandstorm, Chick stood on the flying bridge,
in protective desert gear, and took thermometer readings, measuring altitude
meanwhile with an antique but reliable sympiezometer, salvaged from the wreck
of the first
Inconvenience
after the littleknown Battle of Desconocido,
in California.

With
the visibility only marginally improved, Chick was dismayed to note that the
column of mercury in the instrument now stood higher, indicating an increase of
atmospheric pressure and hence a lower altitude! Though the ship was still
being carried by a rising aircurrent, as Chick reported with some urgency to
Randolph, yet somehow it was
also making its descent
to a surface none
could see. The skyship commander chewed and swallowed half a bottle of sodamint
tablets and paced the bridge. “Recommendations?”

“We
still have our Hypops gear from the old Inner Asia assignment,” it occurred to
Chick. “It might enable us at least to see through some of this.” He quickly
rigged himself and the Commander into the strange futuristic arrangements of
helmets, lenses, airtanks and electrical powersupplies, allowing both aeronauts
to ascertain that the ship was indeed about to crash into a range of mountains
which appeared to be masses of black obsidian, glittering with red highlights,
the razorsharp crestlines stretching for miles before vanishing into a vaporous
twilight. “Lighten ship!” cried Randolph, and Miles and Darby hurried to
comply, the ominous red lights flaring after them, like molten lava at a time
of geologic upheaval.

After
the danger was averted with the usual “inches to spare,” Randolph and Lindsay
repaired to the chartroom to see if they could find any maps to

match the terrain, so far unfamiliar
to any of them, above which the ship now cruised.

After
a comprehensive review that extended through the night, the twolad Navigational
Committee determined that the ship had most likely come upon the Pythagorean or
CounterEarth once postulated by Philolaus of Tarentum in order to make the
number of celestial bodies add up to ten, which was the perfect Pythagorean
number. “Philolaus believed that only one side of our Earth was inhabited,”
explained Chick, “and it happened to be the side turned away from the Other
Earth he called Antichthon, which was why nobody ever saw it. We know now that
the real reason was the planet’s orbit, the same as our own except one hundred
eighty degrees out, so that the Sun is always between us.”

“We
just flew through the Sun?” inquired Darby, in a tone his shipmates recognized
as prelude to a quarterhour of remarks about the Commander’s judgment, if not
sanity.

“Maybe
not,” Chick said. “Maybe more like seeing through the Sun with a telescope of
very high resolution so clearly that we’re no longer aware of anything but the
Æther between us.”

   
“Oh,
like Xray Spex,” sniggered Darby, “only different.”

“Antichthon,”
announced Miles, like a streetcar conductor. “The other Earth. Watch your step,
everyone.”

It was like
their Harmonica Marching Band days
all over again. They were on the CounterEarth, on it and of it, yet at the same
time also on the Earth they had never, it seemed, left.

As if all maps and charts had
suddenly become unreadable, the little company came to understand that in some
way not exhausted by the geographical, they were lost. Deposited by the great
Saharan updraft on a planet from which they remained uncertain as to the
chances of return, the boys could almost believe some days that they were
safely back home on Earth—on others they found an American Republic whose
welfare they believed they were sworn to advance passed so irrevocably into the
control of the evil and moronic that it seemed they could not, after all, have
escaped the gravity of the CounterEarth. Sworn by their Foundational Memorandum
never to interfere in the affairs of the “groundhogs,” they looked on in
helplessness and a depression of spirit new to them.

   
Their
contractual operations began to bring in less revenue than sources

unrelated to the sky—rent on surface properties,
interest from business

loans, returns on investments of many years
standing—and the boys had begun to wonder if their days of global
adventure might not be behind them, when one night in the early autumn of 1914,
they were visited by a shadowy Russian agent going by the name of Baklashchan
(“An alias,” he assured them—“the more threatening ones were all spoken
for”), who brought news of the mysterious disappearance of their old friendly
nemesis Captain Igor Padzhitnoff.

“He’s
been missing since the summer,” Baklashchan said, “and our own operatives have
exhausted all clues. We wondered if someone in the same line of work might not
have a better chance of finding him. Especially given the current world
situation.”

“World
situation?” frowned Randolph. The boys looked at one another puzzledly.

“You
are
. . .
unaware . . .” Baklashchan
began, then hesitated, as if remembering a clause in his instructions
forbidding him to share certain information. He smiled in apology, and handed
over a dossier containing the most recently observed movements of Padzhitnoff’s
ship.