Eternity Road (31 page)

Claver provided quarters for the Illyrians. In the morning
they inspected the gondola, which was larger than the basket they’d seen in storage. This one was oblong, rather than circular, and big enough to accommodate several people. Claver brought aboard a supply of rope, tools, and lanterns. He also loaded four blankets, “because it gets cold up there”; and an array of pots, tubes, rubber fittings, and glass receptacles, which he described as his portable laboratory. “To make hydrogen for the return trip,” he explained.

“You mean,” demanded Quait, “we can’t just set down and tie the thing to a tree until we’re ready to leave?”

“Oh, no,” he said, “unfortunately, it won’t be as simple as that. Once we’re on the ground, we’ll stay there until we can manufacture some hydrogen. That won’t be especially difficult, but we need to land near a city.”

“Why?” asked Flojian.

“Because we need sulfur. There’s always plenty in the ground around Roadmaker cities, if you know where to look. I have to tell you, I think all this fuss about Roadmaker knowledge is overblown. Damned fools were poisoning themselves.” They were talking more loudly than normal, trying to speak over a machine that chugged and gasped while the balloon, which was supported by the large wooden framework in back of the house, gradually filled. “We’ll also need to find coal. It burns hotter than wood. And iron. We’ll have to have iron.”

“Anything else?” asked Flojian.

“Well, water, of course.”

“Of course,” said Quait.

“What that means is that we won’t be able to land right on top of your target. We’ll pick the nearest Roadmaker city and set down there.”

Chaka frowned. “Orin, how long is it going to take us to get there?”

“Depends on the wind. If the wind cooperates, and your maps are right, we can make it in about twenty hours.”

“What happens,” she asked, “if the wind
doesn’t
cooperate?”

“We won’t be going there at all.” He grinned. “It’s okay, though. The wind always cooperates. To a degree.”

“Twenty hours,” she said doubtfully. “And we can’t set down until we get there?”

“We won’t have much privacy,” he admitted. “I’m sorry about that, but balloons have some drawbacks when you use them for long-distance travel. But we’ll have a bucket available.”

The balloon was made of a tightly woven fabric coated with varnish. There was a valve on top to permit the release of gas, thereby allowing the pilot to descend. The gas-filled bag, which Claver called an
envelope
, was enclosed within a hemp net. Sixteen lines, passing through a suspension hoop, secured the gondola to the net.

“This is the rip-panel rope,” Claver explained. “When we get close to the ground, during landing, we’ll open a panel in the top of the envelope and dump the remaining hydrogen.”

“Why?” asked Flojian. “Why not just try to tie up somewhere? And save whatever’s left?”

“Only if you like broken limbs. No, we need to get rid of it when we touch down. It doesn’t matter; there won’t be that much left anyhow. Just enough to drag us along the ground.” He laughed. “I know it sounds a little dangerous but balloons are really much safer than traveling by horse.”

Bags of sand were strung around the exterior of the gondola. That was their ballast, Claver explained. “We want to go up, we get rid of some ballast.”

The process of filling the envelope was finished by about midnight. Quait and Chaka had watched from the back porch. When Claver disconnected the hydrogen pump, an eerie silence fell across the grounds. The balloon strained against its frame, bathed in moonlight, anxious to be free of the ground.

“We’ll top it off tomorrow, before we leave,” said Claver.

The pump was mounted on a cart. He threw a couple of covers over it, said goodnight to his guests, and went inside.

Quait put an arm around Chaka. “You excited?”

“Yes. It’s been a long haul, and I’m anxious to see the end of it.”

“I hope it doesn’t fizzle.”

“The project?” She moved close to him. “Or the balloon?”

Next day, they brought aboard a supply of fruit, water, dried fish, and meat. Drawn by the activity, a small crowd of children and adults arrived to see them off. The adults, of whom there were about twenty, insisted on shaking hands with Claver and each of his passengers. “Good luck,” they said. As if they would need it. The kids yelped and chased one another around the gondola.

Claver added a rope ladder to their supplies and handed out pairs of smoked goggles. He made a show of adjusting his (which were somewhat flashier than their mates), zipped up a leather jacket, threw a white scarf around his neck, and announced that it was time to go. Two burly volunteers separated themselves from the crowd and took up posts beside dangling ropes on either side of the wooden framework.

The Illyrians climbed in. Flojian whispered a prayer, Chaka glanced at the envelope, and Quait took a final lingering look at the ground. Claver was last to come aboard. He asked if they were ready and, on receiving assent, signaled the two volunteers. They tugged on the ropes, the wooden framework creaked, and the balloon began to rise.

A loud cheer went up with them. People stopped in roads and fields to wave. Others, apparently drawn by the commotion, came out of houses, looked up, and joined in.

Nothing in Quait’s life, not getting shot at, not the maglev, not even the ghostly voice in Union Station, quite touched his primal fears as near to the bone as did watching the earth fall away. He’d never been bothered by heights, and was surprised that rising above the treetops induced such an unseemly sensation. The others, to his annoyance, seemed to be enjoying the experience.

“We’ll not only be flying over
terra incognita
,” said Claver, “but you’ll be interested in knowing that we’ll be going almost twice as far from home as the balloon has ever traveled before.” If that piece of information excited the old man, it did nothing to ease Quait’s apprehension.

“Look at these.” Claver indicated two lines that hung down from the interior of the balloon. One carried a yellow flag, the other a red. “This one,” the yellow one, “controls the hydrogen valve on top.
This
one,” the red, “you already know about. It’s the rippanel.” He nodded somberly. “It would be a good idea if nobody touches either. Okay?”

Quait looked east across rolling countryside, farms and orchards and a tangle of roads and rivers fading gradually to forest. There were vehicles on the roads, boats in the rivers, people in the fields. Then these too were gone, and they drifted above pure wilderness. He listened to the wind, to the creaking of the gondola, to the barking of a distant dog.

“It’s lovely,” said Chaka.

Quait had looked down from high places before, from mountaintops and the Iron Pyramid and the bridge on which they’d lost Silas. But this was a different order of experience altogether. It incorporated a disconnectedness, a sense of having broken away from the ground, a suggestion of both freedom and vulnerability. If it could not be said that he was enjoying the ride, he could at least understand why others might become addicted to floating in the clouds.

But they were drifting south. The wrong way.

“Be patient,” said Claver. “We have to find a friendly wind current.” With which remark he plunged a scoop into one of the sandbags attached to the handrail, filled it, and gave the sand to the sky. The balloon went higher.

“You’re sure we won’t have any trouble getting down,” said Quait.

Claver squeezed his shoulder. “None whatever, my young friend. I can assure you that eventually, one way or another, we
will
get down.”

Flojian was working on a diagram of the balloon’s inflating appendix, but the wind kept worrying at the paper until he finally gave up. He seemed far more interested in the mechanics of the vehicle than he did in the view.

Claver found his wind and they drifted through the afternoon, moving at a steady clip toward the northeast. “I’d estimate about thirty miles an hour,” he said. Quait was impressed. Thirty miles needed a day and a half on the ground.

There were Roadmaker towns, often no more than a few charred ruins.

“You get a better sense of the scale of destruction from up here.” Claver adjusted his goggles. He did that a lot.

“The Plague must have been terrible,” said Flojian.

“That’s a safe guess.” Claver looked down. “There were a lot of people during Roadmaker times. You ever see Boston or New York? Oh, you’d know if you had.
Very big
. Enormous. Not anything like Brockett. You get a good sickness into that population, it’d run wild.”

They picked up a dirt road and followed it east.

“How high are we?” asked Chaka.

Claver sucked his lips. “About a mile and a half.”

The road came to a river, which it leaped on a new log bridge. A stockade guarded the near side. “The frontier,” Claver explained. Thick forest and rugged hills ran to the horizon. Even the road seemed to fade out. “We’ll have the same problem eventually.”

“Plague?” asked Flojian.

“Population. If we come back in thirty, forty years, this’ll all be farmland.”

By sundown they were crossing a Roadmaker double highway. It came out of the north, broad and straight, and from their altitude it looked unbroken. Ahead, a range of white-capped peaks loomed.

It was cold, and getting colder. They distributed the blankets and pulled them around their shoulders. “If we went lower,” suggested Flojian, “we might get warmer air.”

“Might,” said Claver. “We might also get currents that are going the wrong way. We don’t have hydrogen and ballast to waste running up and down.”

They ate and watched the mountains approach. The land rose under them, snow and granite and forest. It mounted up and up, gradually at first, and then sharply, and they were drifting over peaks so close they could smell the spruce. And then the land fell away again. The sun went down and the darkness below went on forever.

A full moon rose. “With a little bit of luck,” said Claver, “we should be over the ocean by dawn.”

They arranged a rotating night watch.

Claver explained that they wanted to keep the north star forty-five degrees off the port side of their line of advance. “Obviously, we won’t maintain that with any degree of exactitude. But if we get too far off course, say thirty degrees or more for longer than a few minutes, wake me.”

They managed some privacy by holding a blanket for one another. A bucket hung from the underside of the craft, and this was hauled aboard when needed, and after use its contents were dumped. Flojian and Claver exchanged amused comments about the risks for travelers on the ground.

Quait took the first watch. Chaka stayed close to him for a while, and he was grateful for her warmth. Then she climbed beneath a blanket and was quickly asleep, rocked by the gentle movements of the gondola.

Following Claver’s suggested method, Quait picked out a landmark, a hill, a patch of trees, a river bend, occasionally a mountain, anything that was forty-five degrees forward of the north star. Then he settled down to watch it draw nearer. As long as it continued to do so in a more or less straightforward manner, he was satisfied. On one occasion, a highway intersection that he was guiding on veered far to starboard. That meant the balloon had begun to move almost due north. He woke the pilot.

Claver was cheerful enough about being disturbed, and seemed to enjoy having been called on to set things right. He tugged on the yellow line until the balloon started to descend. His manner suggested all this was really quite basic. Within a few minutes he had the vehicle back on course and, in his condescending manner, asked to be awakened again if there were any more difficulties.

Quait knew how to make the balloon rise and fall. What he did not understand was how to determine where favorable air currents would be. “I don’t know how to explain it,” Claver told him later. “Experience, I guess.”

Sleep came hard for Quait. It might have been the cold. Or the smell of salt air. Or the impending end of the hunt. But most likely it was Chaka’s proximity. On the trail, he had prudently maintained a discreet distance. Here, she lay breathing softly, within easy reach.

He sighed, got up, and joined Claver, who was at the helm, or whatever constituted a helm on this windrunner. The sky was ablaze with the rising sun, and they were running parallel to a rocky shore.

Claver was doing knee bends. “I recommend it,” he said. “Keeps you warm and flexible.”

“How are we doing?” asked Quait.

“Okay.” There was a note of self-satisfaction in his voice. “The wind wants to take us out to sea.”

“Don’t let it happen.”

“I won’t.” He flexed shoulders and arms, not unlike a boxer. “But we’re spending a lot of gas and ballast.”

“Is that a problem?”

“Starting to be.”

Quait settled back to watch the sunrise. The pilot passed him some nuts and water. “Not much of a breakfast,” Claver admitted. “But with luck, we’ll be on the ground anyway in a few hours.”

“I’ve seen the ocean before,” Quait said. “At the mouth of the Mississippi.”

“What direction was it from the land mass?”

“South.”

Claver thought it over. “I wonder if it’s the same body of water? It might be possible for you to go home by sea.”

Quait laughed. “Anything would be an improvement on the overland route.” He looked toward the rising sun and the curving horizon and wondered what lay beyond. “Could you get to Chicago in this thing?” he asked.

“If we had enough hydrogen. And the wind was right. But I don’t think I’d want to try it.”

They began to drift, and he had to take them up and then down to get the balloon moving forward again. It gave Quait a little satisfaction to see that even Claver didn’t guess right all the time. But the sandbags were emptying fast.

They floated north over a rugged coastline, an endless series of cliffs, shoals, inlets, and offshore islands. They saw deer and wild horses and, on occasion, signs of habitation. There were a few plowed fields, some orchards, a house on a bluff overlooking a harbor. Gray smoke billowed out of the chimney. Later they saw a small boat casting nets. But these were the exceptions. For the most part, there was only wilderness.