Land and Overland - Omnibus (58 page)

"First of all, gentlemen," he said, "have we learned anything new? Anything which in your opinion affects the plan for building the fortresses?"

"Only that we should do it as fast as possible, Toller," Umol replied, using permitted familiarity. "I swear this cursed place is colder than the last time I was passing by. Look at this!" He pulled down his muffler to reveal a nose that was distinctly blue.

"The place is the same as ever, old hand," Daas told him. "Your trouble is you no longer have any fire in your balls."

"Did I say gentlemen?" Toller cut in, quelling Umol's obscene response.
"Children,
we have work to do, and nobody wants our task completed faster than I, so let us make sure we know what we are undertaking."

He spoke mildly, knowing from the little he could see of their faces that his companions were pleased with the success of the air jets and that their confidence in the project had increased accordingly. For the next few minutes he rehearsed the sequential stages of the assembly plan in detail. The first step was to rotate the six ships through ninety degrees to bring the fortress sections into their operational attitudes, with their lateral portholes facing both planets. It would then be necessary to unclamp the false decks and fire short bursts on the jets to drive the balloons, still trailing the decks, a short distance away from the circular sections. Once the sections were floating free they could then be linked with ropes, drawn together and sealed to form two cylinders with closed ends.

At that point the work force was scheduled to split into two separate groups.

Those whose duty it was to man the fortresses would go inside them and prepare for their lengthy stay in the weightless zone. Meanwhile, the six pilots—each accompanied by a rigger—would begin returning the precious balloons and engines to Overland for use in further missions. The early stages of the descent were straightforward enough and caused no forebodings among the experienced pilots. It was a matter of rotating the stripped-down craft through a further ninety degrees, and—using the engines in the thrust mode—driving them a short distance into Overland's gravitational field. The ships would be travelling upside down, something no commander liked doing, but that phase would last only a few hours, until they had regained enough weight to give them the balloonist's much-cherished pendulum stability for the descent. A final rotation through half-a-circle would normalise the ships' attitudes, putting Overland in its rightful place beneath the crews' feet, where it would remain for the rest of the journey home.

So far the flight plan and its techniques were conventional—something which any surviving pilot from the Migration could have outlined in seconds—but the strictures of the crisis situation had yet to be applied. Toller could remember, with diamond clarity, all the relevant words from that first meeting with Chakkell and Zavotle, the words which told him that the sky and he had not yet tested each other to the limit…

"The descent is going to be the worst part," Toller said. "Quite apart from the cold—which will be severe—the men are going to be sitting on an open platform, with thousands of miles of empty air beneath them. Just think of it! Trip on a rope and over the edge you go! It was bad enough in the old-style gondolas, but there you at least had the sidewalls to give you some sense of security. I don't like it, liven—five days of that sort of thing would be a bit too much for any man. I think we…" He stopped speaking, surprised, as he saw that Zavotle was nodding his head in evident agreement.

"You're absolutely right, quite apart from the fact that we simply cannot allow five days for the return," Zavotle said. "We shall need you and the other pilots back on the ground again much sooner than that, to say nothing of the balloons and engine cores."

"So…?"

Zavotle gave him a calm smile. "I suppose you have heard of parachutes?"

"Of course I've heard of parachutes," Toller said impatiently. "The Air Service has been using them for at least ten years. What are you getting at?"

"The men must return by parachute."

"Wonderful idea!" Toller clapped a hand to his forehead in case his sarcasm had not been noticed. "But—correct me if I'm wrong—does a man with a parachute not descend at roughly the same speed as a skyship?"

Zavotle's smile became even more peaceful. "Only if the parachute has been opened."

"Only if…" Toller walked around the small room, staring down at the floor, and returned to his chair. "Yes, I see what you mean. Obviously we can save some time if a man doesn't deploy his parachute until he is well into the fall. At what height
should
he open it?"

"How about, say, one thousand feet?"

"No!" Toller's reaction was immediate and instinctive. "You can't do that."

"Why not?"

Toller stared hard at Zavotle's face, reading the familiar features in an unfamiliar way. "You remember the first time we entered the central blue, liven. The accident. We both looked over the side and watched Flenn being taken away from us. He fell more than a
day
!"

"He didn't have a parachute."

"But he fell for
more than a day
!" Toller pleaded, appalled at what the intervening years had done to Zavotle. "It's too much to expect."

"What's the matter with you, Maraquine?" King Chakkell put in, his broad brown face showing exasperation. "The end result is the same whether a man falls for a day or a single minute—if he has no parachute he dies, and if he has a parachute he lives."

"Majesty, would
you
like to take that drop?"

Chakkell gazed back at Toller in simple bafflement. "Where's the relevance in your question?"

Unexpectedly, it was Zavotle who chose to reply. "Majesty, Lord Toller has practical cause for concern. We have no idea of the effects such a fall might have on a man. He might freeze to death … or asphyxiate… Or there may be ill effects of a different ilk—a pilot who was physically sound but insane would be of scant value to you." Zavotle paused, his pencil tracing a strange design on the paper before him. "I suggest that, as I was the one who proposed the scheme, I should be among those who put it to the test."

You had me fooled, you little weasel,
Toller thought, listening to his former crewmate with a resurgence of his affection and respect.
And, just for that, I will ensure that you remain where you belong—right here on the ground.

In general, there was little difference in outlook between the men who had volunteered for the mission and those who had simply been told they were taking part. Both groups understood very well that defying the King's will in a time of war would result in summary execution, and some of the volunteers had simply been making a virtue out of necessity, but confirmation of the fact that they could fly independently of the ships and come to no harm had boosted the general morale. If we have not died thus far, the reasoning had been, perhaps there is no reason for us to die at all. The outward sign of that optimism had been the shouting with which the men filled the sky as they developed their new skills and prepared for the next phase of the undertaking.

But now, Toller noticed, they had again fallen silent.

The last of the balloons had been separated from its fortress section, and—burdened with only its circular false deck and engine unit—had retreated a short distance from the centre of activity. Insubstantial though they were, the sheer hugeness of the gas-filled envelopes had made them dominant features of the aerial environment. In the mind they were vast friendly entities with the power to transport humans safely from world to world—and now, suddenly, they were withdrawing their patronage, abandoning their minuscule dependants in the hostile blue emptiness.

Even Toller, committed to the enterprise as he was, felt an icy slithering in his gut as he took note of how
small
the unsupported fortress sections looked against the misted infinities all around. Until that point it had seemed to him that the worst thing a man could be called upon to do was to take the long drop to the planetary surface, but he now felt almost privileged in comparison to those who would remain in the weightless zone. Privileged, yet in another way—and the realisation jolted him—oddly cheated.

What is happening to me?
he thought, becoming alarmed. He had rarely given himself over to introspection, considering it a waste of time, but recently his emotional reactions to events had been so laden with ambivalence and contradiction that his mind had been obliged to turn inwards. And here was another example. In one instant he had pitied the fortress crews—and in the next he had come close to envying them! Few people knew better than he how illusory was the concept of military glory, therefore he could not have been seduced by his fleeting vision of a new breed of patriots, ultimate heroes, manning their fragile wooden outposts in the lonely reaches of the sky.

What is happening to me?
he again demanded of himself.
Why am I no longer satisfied by what satisfied me once? Why, unless I am deranged, do I press forward where any reasonable man would retreat?

Realisation that he was neglecting his duties prompted Toller to end the self-interrogation and propel himself closer to the first fortress under assembly. The mid-section and one end-section had been successfully aligned and brought together, and now the remaining component was about to be drawn into place. It had been deposited rather a long way from its companions, giving the men who were hauling on the link ropes time to develop a fast and effective rhythm. Clinging to the sides of the mid-section, four of them were working in unison with their free arms. The end-section, which had been sluggish at first, was now moving at a good speed and showed no signs of slowing down as it neared its assigned place. Toller knew it had no weight and therefore could cause no damage by colliding with the rest of the fortress, but on principle he disliked the use of excessive force in any engineering operation. He could foresee the section rebounding and having to be drawn in again.

"Stop hauling—it's coming in too fast," he shouted to the men on the link ropes. "Get ready to grip it and hold it in place."

The men acknowledged his command with waves and made ready to receive the advancing cylinder. Phamarge, who had been overseeing the task, signalled for another two men who were holding on to the short lashing ropes of the mid-section rim to assist their comrades. One of them pulled himself against the leather-covered rim and locked himself in place by clamping his thighs around it.

Toller watched the end-section close in on the waiting man. The wooden structure was losing very little speed and was easily compacting the stout ropes in its path—all of which, Toller thought, was rather strange for an object which was as weightless as a feather. Alarm geysered through his system as he recalled a similar anomaly at the end of Gotlon's first personal flight—the weightless man had delivered a surprisingly powerful impact, almost as though…

"Get off the rim!" Toller bellowed. "Get clear!"

The suited man turned towards him, but made no other movement. There was a frozen instant in which Toller recognised the rough-hewn features of Gnapperl, then the end-section drove against the remainder of the fortress. Gnapperl screamed as his thigh-bone snapped. The entire fortress bucked, dislodging men from its sides, and the end-section—still squandering kinetic energy—slewed a little and partially entered the main structure. Two opposing lengths of rim scissored across Gnapperl's body for a moment, ending his screams, before the fortress sections drifted apart and came to rest.

Toller reflexively triggered his air jet and only succeeded in pushing himself farther away from the scene. He twisted around, pumping more air into the unit, and propelled himself backwards into the confusion of drifting figures. Colliding gently with the mid-section, he grasped a lashing point to steady himself and looked at the injured man. Gnapperl was drifting free of the fortress, arms and legs spread, and there was a long rent across the front of his skysuit. Blood had soaked into the exposed insulation, making the tear resemble a dreadful wound, and bright red globules were floating in a swarm around him, glistening in the sunlight. Toller was left with no doubt that Gnapperl was dead.

"Why didn't the fool get out of the way when you told him?" Umol said, using a rope to draw himself closer to Toller.

"Who's to say?" Toller thought of the dead man's odd moment of paralysis before the impact, and wondered if Gnapperl would have been so slow to react had the warning come from anybody else. It could be that his mistrust of Toller had been responsible for his death, in which case Toller also bore responsibility.

"He was a down-looking brute, anyway," Umol commented. "If any of us had to go, he's the one I would have picked—and at least he taught us something useful."

"What?"

"That something which can crush a man on the ground can crush him up here. It doesn't seem to matter that nothing has any weight. Can you understand it, Toller?"

Toller wrenched his thoughts from morality to physics. "Perhaps being totally weightless affects our bodies. It's something we ought to be careful about in the future."

"Yes, and meanwhile there's a carcase to be disposed of. I suppose we could just leave it be."

"No," Toller said immediately. "We'll take him back to Overland when we go."

Upside down, the six ships had travelled all through the hours of darkness. In addition to the speed imparted by their jets, there had been a slight gain as Overland tightened her gravitational web, but the acceleration had been negligible so early in the descent. And as soon as daylight had returned—with Overland's binary dance swinging her clear of the sun—the engines had been shut down and air resistance had brought the vessels to a halt. The pilots had then used the tiny lateral jets to turn the ships over, an operation conducted in majestic slowness, with the universe and all the stars it contained wheeling at the behest of six ordinary men, and the sun obediently sinking to a new position beneath their feet.