The Balloonist (32 page)

As bad luck would have it, my use of the pass from the ministry had evoked the apparition of a curator, who insisted on accompanying us and explaining what it was that we wanted to see. I had no interest at all in Cugnot's
steam carriage of 1770, or a diagram showing the coal production of France from 1789 to 1888. We came to the Renard-Krebs apparatus. Behind it was a drawing of the entire airship, showing how the propulsion machinery fitted onto the rest. Present in material form were only the motor, the air propeller, and some tangled-up wires to connect them to the battery jars. The air propeller was something of a joke; it resembled a Dutch windmill and had vanes of sailcloth. It was the motor that interested me. It was the size of a small keg of nails and probably almost as heavy. There was also a cast-iron gear box to reduce the speed of the motor, probably several thousand revolutions a minute, to one that would not rip the Dutch windmill to shreds. I inquired as to the weight of these items but the curator had no opinion. Then, as his complexion became purple with all the instincts of a curator, and he stood afraid to lift a hand against me because of the card from the ministry, I stepped over the iron chain and tested the heft of the motor. I could barely budge it; sixty kilos at least, and the gear box was worse.

I filled several pages of the notebook. The problem of weight was explained to Luisa, who suggested, “Perhaps one could make a smaller motor, which would go faster and thus be just as powerful.”

I offered a brief stare, devoid as I could make it of any sarcasm. “You've hit upon it. I wonder why Renard didn't think of that.”

“It would be more efficient, you see. Because the yield in mean torque of an electric motor, expressed in foot-pounds per second, is a function of the speed of rotation.”

The devil you say. She had impressed the curator at least. I didn't bother to explain to her that the faster the motor went, the more its speed had to be reduced by the gears, and the larger and heavier the gear box. In addition to which Renard, being a graduate of the École Polytechnique, knew more about torque and foot-pounds than she could have learned by spending a whole month of nights over her library books. In any case, I was more interested in battery jars. Where, I asked the curator, were the battery jars? He pointed out one or two. They were cells of the Leclanché design, employing solid depolarizers of magnesium dioxide with a carbon plate. They were not exactly as light as feathers either, and it was impossible for me to find out from the curator how many of them Renard and Krebs had required for their motor. It was easy for me to make a rough calculation. The motor probably ran at something
like a hundred volts, and Leclanché cells were known to produce a volt and a half each. Thus sixty-seven of these weighty jars would be required. Moreover, another rough calculation showed that, with the expected current drain, the batteries would be exhausted in something like seventeen minutes. Not enough to go from Spitsbergen to the North Pole. Hurrah! I controlled my elation only with a certain effort. Renard and Krebs were on the wrong track, and their imitators would never get farther than around the Champs de Mars on a Sunday in front of a crowd of spectators. There was still Dr. Wölfert, who didn't require any batteries—well, I would worry about one thing at a time.

I folded up the notebook, which by this time contained several drawings and diagrams and a copious collection of mathematics, most of them guesswork.

I forgot to note that about halfway through these researches Luisa had exhausted her curiosity on the subject of motors and Leclanché cells and had departed for the west wing and its collection of clocks, where I was supposed to come and collect her when I was finished. She herself was a collector of rare and curious timepieces and had several dozen in Quai d'Orléans, and had even learned something about their mechanism. This interest, which seemed a rather odd one at first, was on further reflection comprehensible and even logical, woman being God's best effort at making a clock, supposed to strike every fourth week but sometimes subject to alarming delays. I found her amid the celestial globes, clockwork figurines, and automatons of various sorts moved by springs.

“Gustavus, come and see.”

“What?”

“Just come and see.”

She led me to a glass case in which a small feminine figure, the size perhaps of a cat, was holding two little hammers in her hand and was seated before a musical instrument. She was indeed very elegant in the manner of the eighteenth century: pale beige satin gown with rosebuds and green trim, a beige-silver wig. “No. 7501. Dulcimer player. Automaton of Roentgen and Kintzing. Belonged to Marie Antoinette. Plays eight airs extracted and arranged from the Armide of Gluck.” The satin gown came down over the stool, which evidently hid the machinery. The female attendant, charmed by Mademoiselle's own elegance in her frock and paletot, opened the glass case and set this doll going for us. The hammers descended, the airs from the previous century tinkled accurately and delicately, in rather slow tempo. Luisa clasped her hands in pleasure; she and the attendant exchanged smiles.

“But
couldn't we see how she works? The dress—”

“Ah non, mademoiselle, c'est défendu.”

“Gustav”—this in English—”show her your card from the ministry.”

In the end I had to show her not only my card from the ministry but a ten-franc bill. When disrobed the dulcimist was wooden and complete in every way, sitting on her complicated machine of sprockets and cogs, still bewigged and slippered, holding her little hammers delicately one in each hand. Garters were painted on her legs just above the knees. At the bottom of the machine was a kind of paddlewheel which rotated in the air, like that of a music box, to prevent her from playing too fast—her metabolism.

The attendant put the dress back on the doll—(her own face was a little pink! she suppressed a smile). Luisa too seemed pleased with herself. I was surrounded by females again, who exchanged understandings around me and over my head that concerned me, probably, in some obscure way. Why had Luisa obliged me to pay ten francs to disrobe a clockwork puppet? Did she wish to remind me that musicians, however talented, had underlinen? Or was it merely the interest in clockwork of a femme-savante? I had begun to doubt that she could separate these two things in her own mind. For my part, I was less interested in the wooden limbs of the puppet than in the air paddle. Machinery, left to itself, would overrace and destroy its own ingenuity. Only air, the thinnest and least palpable of the four elements, was capable of slowing it—the same air that had dragged at Renard's balloon and exhausted its battery jars in seventeen minutes. The visit to the automaton room had only confirmed what I had earlier guessed in the ruined Benedictine chapel: it is not by striking nature with iron bars that we can hope to subdue it, only by surrendering ourselves to it and floating in the direction it wishes.

At the gate of the conservatory I offered to escort Luisa to Quai d'Orléans—a scientific ruffian might disrobe her to inspect her paddlewheel—but she had to rush to her lesson in Passy. (Which was mysterious, because the
voice lessons, as I understood it, were supposed to take place in the morning.) I felt my afternoon had been well spent in spite of the fact that it hadn't commenced until a quarter after three. I decided to return on foot to rue de Rennes by way of Boulevard de Sébastopol and the Pont-Neuf. It was a clear cold day; the Seine ran like half-congealed lead, slowly, with greyish glints. In Place Saint-Germain I bought a newspaper. A government had fallen in Italy, a skyscraper had risen in New York. In Berlin Dr. Wölfert had made an ascension in his engine-driven balloon. There was an explosion in the air, the balloon fell, and Dr. Wölfert and his assistant were killed. The sun had begun to set behind the old grey pile of the church in the square. There was a chill in the street; back in my room it was warm.

F
or four days now we have
been stumbling and sliding our way across this landscape that when solid is more vertical than horizontal, and when thawed turns into soup into which we slip up to our waists. If we attempt to go by water, using the Faltboot, the water hardens into granite. As soon as we try to walk over it, it turns into water again. Under the tent, as we try to sleep, it groans most fearfully. It is always slipping, bumping, grumbling, complaining, and turning underfoot. I have lost track of the time and am convinced it is the twenty-second of the month now only because I have made little marks in my Stockholm pocket calendar each time we have camped-but suppose we have camped more than once a day? Impossible; Waldemer has his stout pocket watch, I have my own, and there are the two chronometers, Kullberg 5566 and Kullberg 5587, to verify them. But the climate or possibly the jolts we have subjected them to are not very good for these last instruments. Two or three nights ago (twenty-two minus three is nineteen, so it must have been Monday) I awoke or half awoke and heard them talking to each other in a smooth even ticking, muted so as not to awaken us.

K. 5566: “Let's speed up. Make the days go faster, bring their happy or unhappy fate to them more quickly and with less fatigue.”

K. 5587: “We should go slower. That way it will be easier for them to keep up with us.”

K. 5566: “Their pace will accelerate with ours.”

K. 5587: “Whatever
we do, we must agree. For one chronometer's time means nothing. It may be out of adjustment. But what two chronometers say is the truth, and the solar system must follow it. Thus if we speed up so will the sun and the planets…”

And so on. Their voices were unhurried, rational, leisurely, discussing all sides of the question with care. I was struck with the fact that they seemed to have our welfare in mind; this mildly surprised me, and I was also impressed that they had talked quietly so that we should have the maximum amount of sleep and be rested for the next day. When I awoke, however, the implication was that as timepieces they were no longer to be trusted very much. Certain other evidence suggests that the rate of one or the other has changed. Which one? Impossible to tell, since I can verify their accuracy only by comparing one with the other. At that time I was not as tired as I am now and I had the wit to notice that the frozen milk overhead had cleared away temporarily so that the sun and the moon were both visible at the same time. Ah! Professor Crispin. Time for a bit of higher mathematics. The method of lunar distances, which may be used not only to find one's position but also to check chronometers, has ever since the days of Gemma-Frisius been regarded as the most troublesome and difficult calculation in the art of nautical astronomy. Besides, my hands are numb, all the pens are frozen, and our only pencil has been broken so many times that it is hardly longer than a joint of my finger. But I set to it anyhow: first I cock the sextant at a horizontal angle and draw the two limbs of the sun and moon together to measure the angular distance between them. (The two orbs are approaching each other at a dizzying rate and I have to keep turning the vernier. Perhaps, I think, they will run into each other and that will be the universal end of all problems, including our own.) Then I correct for semi-diameters, enter the logarithm tables and the almanac, and begin covering one of our last pieces of paper with hen scratches.

This method, complete with mistakes and the natural inaccuracies involved in taking arcs with a half-frozen sextant, established our position at 81˚ 42' north, 36˚ 20' east, give or take a few hundred miles either way (the pencil was very blunt, my hand a numb primordial paw). Since then we have made our way more or less southward as the configuration of the half-thawed pack permitted. Franz Josef Land is somewhere up ahead
and to the left, the main mass of Spitsbergen out of reach to the west. Our hands curved permanently to the diameter of the pulling ropes, we go on toiling over a landscape composed partly of white grand pianos set on edge and partly of soup. Theodor's face, as I anticipated, is not really suited to this climate. It has turned to a darkish and ironlike blue, the points of the cheeks black with frostbite. The shawl is wrapped around it completely now so that nothing shows except the eyes. But he pulls as hard as the rest of us, and as steadily, setting first one foot and then the other into the yielding and soggy ice. It is Waldemer who seems to be tiring, he that I imagined would be the strongest of us. But he makes no complaint either and seems confident that we will eventually arrive wherever it is that we are headed; he leaves the navigational details to me. He is stocky and his breath comes short; perhaps he has a tendency to asthma. When he talks—and he talks frequently, not for the most part to impart information, but to cheer up himself and us, to improve the morale of the expedition—he confines himself to shorter sentences and often waits between them, to see if he can't wring a little more oxygen out of this frozen skim milk he is inhaling into his lungs.

“If I ever get out of this … I know where I will spend … the rest of my days.”

The sentences, although short, and separated by intervals of breathtaking, are perfectly constructed at least by journalistic standards; he has no pretensions as a stylist.

“The Lunatic Asylum … at Halifax, Nova Scotia …” Pause for breath. “… is pleasantly situated in the midst … of cheerful green hills, and … provides a very … English, I might say … comfort. I recommend it especially.”

But he is fooling himself; there is no chance of Waldemer being admitted to a lunatic asylum. A single glance would be enough for any alienist to tell that he is hopelessly sane. He encounters one of the grand pianos and measures his length on the ice, and remarks without rancor, “The polar region … is certainly the source … of the idea of the stumbling block.” And a little later, after a slightly more serious mishap (Theodor falls through a soft spot and goes in up to his armpits in a mixture of water and slush, and Waldemer in his efforts to pull him out does the same), he comments, “There's no hurry … about dying, you know … if we miss it this time … we'll always have another chance.”