The Practice Effect (34 page)

They had waited long for a favorable wind. At last one had come that blew the right way but that would not force them past the battle too soon.

Underneath rode a convoy of support troops ready to catch anchoring ropes when the time came to tether the lighter-than-air flotilla.

Gath was filled with excitement. To be aloft and in action was wonderful after all the waiting. It was a vindication of all the work he and Stivyung had put in with the L’Toff makers and practicers.

They drifted eastward with the wind. It felt like hours, but actually they were soon over the Ruddik heights, where the enemy had made their deepest penetration so far. Stivyung’s contingent floated over the south spur, rimming that side of the canyon. There his aeronauts dropped anchors to waiting
men. The L’Toff soldiers below scampered over the rocks to seize the anchors and tie them down.

When Gath’s forces were over the north spur, they repeated the procedure.

The aeronauts had not had a chance to practice the technique. Fortunately, only one balloon from the south contingent drifted free, floating unanchored off to the east, rising rapidly.

That was a smaller loss than Gath had expected. They had planned to send one eastward anyway, with a report to the King of Coylia. Even Kremer’s gliders could not stop the message if the balloon gained enough altitude in time.

If the L’Toff on the ground cheered when the balloons hove into view, the enemy below stared up in dismay. Rumors had already spread of the great, round monster that had roared into Zuslik one night, months ago. And now here were
ten
of the behemoths, glaring down with fierce, painted faces. The attackers fell back nervously from the high redoubts and muttered nervously while their captains conferred over this new development.

Here, where the L’Toff had chosen to make their chief stand, the terrain was extremely rough. A series of deadly prearranged rockfalls would make any direct ground assault costly.

But all these defenses required that Kremer’s gliders be kept away so the L’Toff fighters on the heights could work unmolested.

That was the purpose for which the balloon detachment had been sent. The test was not long delayed.

“There!” One of the young bowmen in Gath’s gondola pointed.

Against the sunlit clouds, high in the noontime sky, at least two dozen black shapes were outlined. The gliders looked like hawks in the distance, and they stooped, suddenly, like great birds of prey.

“Get ready!” the captain of a neighboring gondola cried.

The enemy looked small and distant for what seemed the longest time. Then, in an instant, they were down upon them! All around Gath, his bowmen were shouting.

“There! Shoot!”

“They’re coming in too fast!”

“Quit complainin’, kid! Just stop em!”

The babble of voices was almost as unnerving as the wicked black wings that rushed amongst them.

“Yahoo! I got one!”

“Great! But don’t get cocky!”

“Watch out for those darts!”

There were screams of pain and cries of triumph, all in a matter of seconds. Then, almost as swiftly as they had come, the gliders were speeding away along the ridgetops toward carefully charted updrafts. They left behind three of their squadron, wrecked and scattered on the rubble below.

One more glider, unable to recover from a tear in its dragon wing, crashed directly into a cliff face as Gath watched. The defenders, both above and below, cheered.

“All right!” Gath yelled hoarsely as soon as he caught his breath. “They’ll be back, and it won’t be as easy to drive them off next time!

“Until they return, though, we concentrate on the enemy on the ground! Mark your targets, and make those arrows count!”

It would be difficult to get more ammunition. Resupply would be slow and chancy by bucket. And now the enemy’s ground commander would certainly throw everything he had at the points where the covering balloons were anchored. Already Gath could see the invaders marshaling their forces for an assault on the other slope of the crumbled canyon, where Stivyung Sigel’s four balloons were moored.

The attacks came, thereafter, at hourly intervals. The archers took a terrible toll of invaders on the ground. But each arrow lost was precious—in the making, in lost practice, and in the difficulty of hauling up supplies under fire.

And the defenders died in ones and twos as the battle went on. The L’Toff fighters on the surface fought to hold their ground and to defend the anchor points. The forces of the barons fought just as desperately to take those ridges.

The long afternoon passed like a slow agony, punctuated by moments of sheer terror. Within a few hours, the tactical picture began to emerge.

Here on the northern spur, the defense was going well, for now. Gath’s archers took a heavy toll of attackers trying to climb the slopes and beat back three separate glider sorties.

But on the southern spur things had begun to go badly.
Before the sun passed beyond the highest peaks, two of Sigel’s southern balloons were lost, one when its bag was pierced. It settled slowly to the ground. The other one drifted off over the eastern plains when its anchor point was taken. It was too slow at ascending and finally fell under a rain of darts as Kremer’s gliders converged from all around, like wolves upon a wounded lamb.

Gath wondered if Stivyung could hold out until nightfall. The two remaining southern balloons couldn’t give each other much support.

Gath watched helplessly as enemy reinforcements arrived late in the afternoon … including a dozen fresh gliders. Kremer seemed to have an endless supply of them! Either that or his generals were stripping the other fronts of air support to handle this sticky spot in the center.

As the afternoon wore on, Gath watched as the entire flock of gliders swooped down on the two balloons on the lonely slope. And there was nothing he could do to help!

“Slow down! Slow down!”

Dennis realized that both Arth and Linnora had taken up his chant. The practice resonance was fully upon them.

Silvery fire seemed to dance around the body of the cart, and their acceleration down the tumbled slope did, in fact, seem to be slackening. But that didn’t keep them from moving inexorably toward the cliff. It loomed ahead ten meters, five meters, two meters away.

At the very last minute the robot’s whirling treads took hold and brought them to a stop in a boiling cloud of dust, teetering at the edge of the precipice.

Arth grabbed the narrow trunk of a shattered sapling that had partly broken the cart’s momentum. The little thief held on for dear life.

Dennis wiped floating grit from his eyes and purposely avoided looking down. He tried to clear his throat of dust so he could politely ask the robot to redouble its efforts to back them away from the cliff edge. But the cart chose that
moment to settle forward a few more inches. It dropped with a thump, leaving the robot’s treads hanging out over open space.

“Okay,” Dennis sang, a little bit upset by this time. “Linnora? Arth? You folks all right? I’ve got an idea. Let’s all sidle backward, nice and easy.” He felt Linnora begin to loosen her strap. She obviously had the same notion. It was time to get the hell out of here.

Something whizzed past Dennis’s head. At first he thought it was some huge insect, but as he turned he glimpsed a second arrow passing through the space his ear had just occupied a second before.

“Hey!” Arth howled. An arrow quivered in the sapling’s trunk inches from his fingers.

Up the talus slope Dennis saw at least a dozen of Baron Kremer’s gray-clad archers working their way cautiously downward, getting into position to administer the coup de grâce. Capture, apparently, was no longer an option at this point.

They didn’t really have to bother, Dennis realized. Arth was visibly weakening and soon would have to let go of either the tree or the glider. He and Linnora could never slide back quickly enough to make a difference.

Is this it? Dennis looked around for some way out—while arrows zinged past them or stuck, humming, to the sides of the cart.

Linnora was fumbling for her knife. Dennis wondered what she was trying to do. Then it hit him.

The
glider
! If we can only detach it from the cart in time, we might be able to escape on it!

But first the wings would have to be let down. They were being held up—vertically, like sails on a boat—by a stout length of rope. Linnora was going for it with her knife.

It took almost half a second for it to occur to him to remember the amount of tension that was in that cable. He cried out in dismay, “No! Linnora, don’t!”

It was too late. She sliced the rope. The wings snapped down violently, knocking two deadly arrows out of the air.

Perhaps it was a rational decision, but Arth was never able to explain why he let go of the tree and not the cart. But when the little wagon bucked suddenly, like a mad stallion, Arth tumbled into the back of the cart behind the great
wings. Linnora and Dennis were whipped around to face forward as their strange vehicle teetered dangerously, rocking unstably on the edge.

The pixolet had hopped onto Dennis’s lap from the floor. The little creature had the expression of one who by this time had had quite enough. This trip was no longer fun.

About to abandon us again
? Dennis thought at the thing, unable to do anything else.

The Krenegee shrugged, as if it understood. It flexed its wing membranes in preparation to depart. Then, for the first time, it took a good look over the rim of the cart into the canyon below.

“!!” it peeped out loud and shivered. Its little glider membranes were never meant for true flight. They wouldn’t keep it from being smashed to jelly after a fall like that! Dennis almost laughed as the smug little thing at last showed consternation.

All of this took about one second of telescoped time as the cart rocked, and then slid over the edge. A flight of arrows missed them by inches as their trusty machine toppled over the precipice. The pixolet wailed. Arth cried out. Dennis held on as the canyon opened up below them.

At that moment it was Linnora who saved them.

She started to sing.

The first, high note was of such startling clarity, that it seized their attention away from the hypnotizing view of the onrushing canyon floor. As a practice team, they had worked together for a long time. Her call served as a focus. Out of habit—quicker than volition—the
felthesh trance
snapped into being all around them.

Dennis felt Linnora’s mind touch brush against his own. Then he felt Arth, and even the Krenegee beast—taking this all seriously for the first time since he had known the smug little thing. Space around them seemed to flash and burn with energy. The power was there, and the desperate will to change reality.

Unfortunately, there was no focus. One had to be
using
something for the Practice Effect to operate!

Dennis’s conscious mind was in no condition to provide an answer. It was a good thing, then, when his unconscious stepped in and took over.

In that instant, with the ground rushing up at them, Dennis seemed to feel time contract all around him. In a haze of chaotic energy that felt strangely like the field around a zievatron, he blinked once, twice, then closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he found himself sitting next to a dark-haired young man with a thick, waxed moustache. The fellow wore a white leather coat that flapped in the stiff breeze, and a pair of old-fashioned flight goggles over his eyes.

They sat together in a strange contraption of white canvas and wooden struts, laced together by piano wire. Although air rushed past them, the hazy-edged reality that surrounded them seemed entirely gray and motionless.

“You know, we had the most bully awful time getting the proper approach to warping the wings,” the fellow explained over the rush and roar. He had to shout to be heard. “Langley never really understood, you see. He rushed ahead without testing his designs in a proper artificial wind tunnel, as Wilbur and I did.…”

Dennis blinked in surprise. And in the time it took to close his eyes and open them, his surroundings changed.

“… so I had to test the X-10 personally, get it? The engine took up over half the damned thing’s length! Busted the first few props we tried to smithereens! They called it a flying bomb! Couldn’t ask anyone else to take it up, see?”

The man with the handlebars and goggles was gone, replaced by a fellow with a thin moustache, a sardonic expression, and a floppy fedora hat. He shook his head and laughed.

“Hard work is what it took. Sure, I had inherited money and got to stand on the shoulders of giants. I admit it! But I sweated blood straight into each of my designs.”

The space around them was still that hazy, half real shimmering, like the boundaries of a dream. But the flimsy array of wood and canvas had been replaced by a thrumming cocoon of riveted metal and glass, vibrating with the power of a thousand horses.

“And don’t think I don’t already feel the shoes of later inventors sometimes,” the pilot of the monoplane grinned, “right here.” He patted his own shoulder and laughed.

The fellow looked familiar, though he couldn’t place him—
like someone he had read about in a history book somewhere. Dennis blinked again, and when he reopened his eyes the dreamlike scene had shifted again. The dark-haired man and the cramped cockpit were gone.

It was only a brief glimpse, this time. The engine roar had muted somewhat. There was the scent of chrysanthemums, and for the moment his eyes were open he saw a woman wearing a straw hat and a bright, pink scarf. She smiled at him from her controls, and winked. Through the cockpit window he saw water, all the way to the horizon. Then the transition happened again.

Now he was seated at the copilot’s station in a huge twin-engined airplane—a bomber, from the looks of it. There was the smell of gasoline and rubber. In his hands a wheel vibrated with a powerful rhythm. A balding man in a khaki uniform smiled at him from the other set of controls.

“Progress,” the gangly fellow grinned. “Boy, you sure are doing it the easy way, fella. It took us old-timers years and plenty of sweat to get this far, I’ll tell you!”