We lifted more rapidly. I looked at the pyrometer and saw it moving close to the red line, and I knocked Linda’s hand off the blast valve.
“What are you doing!”
“Melt the top of this thing open, and we’ll drop.” She understood and watched the gauge with me. It went on up right to the edge of the red and then began to fade back. The inclinometer needle held steady. I guessed we were at about eight hundred feet. I looked back and down and could see the knots of people, flailing away and struggling and falling. The other balloons were airborne, both at a lower altitude, one ahead of us and one behind us. The flabby one was half deflated on the ground. People were fighting close to the basket of the other one, and it seemed to be deflating. Bodies lay silent in the grass. The cook tent was aflame, as was Josie’s trailer-dressing room. As I watched, three of them caught up with a running man and beat him to the ground and kept on beating him.
“They’ve gone crazy!” Linda said. “Look! There’s two cop cars. They’re parked down the road there. They’re not going to even try to stop it!”
“You people didn’t make many friends.”
“We brought a lot of money into this hick town,” she said. “What the hell has happened to everybody?”
“I can guess. I think the little Hatcher girl told her best girl friend what you wonderful moviemakers did to her, and after the two kids were killed in that accident, the girl friend decided she didn’t have to keep quiet any more. She didn’t have to keep her word.”
“Oh.” She turned on Kesner. He was sitting with his back against the wicker, his arms wrapped around his upraised knees, his face quite blank. “I told you that girl was too damned young.”
“I didn’t ask for a driver’s license. She said nineteen.” He pulled himself up. He looked back and saw the fires, pallid in morning sunlight. “They don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “They don’t know what they’re destroying.”
“Hey, we’re coming down!” she said.
“We better try to fly low,” I said. “Take a look.” The pickups and vans were streaming away from the pastureland, taking the roads that led southeast, that followed our drifting pattern.
“Why don’t we go high?” Kesner asked.
“Because these things won’t go all that high. The higher you go, the less efficient they are and the more gas they use up. And we’d stay in clear sight even at ten thousand feet, and they could follow us until we come down. If we go low enough, maybe we can lose them.”
When we were at fifty feet and descending ever more rapidly, she opened the valve. It continued to sink. The basket brushed the top of low bushes. A red barn was rushing toward us. Kesner pointed at it and screamed. The lift finally took effect, and we rose above the crest of the barn roof, missed the silo, and then, because of the long blast, went right on up to five hundred feet.
“Short blasts, dammit,” I said. “You have to use short blasts.”
“Run it yourself!” she said.
And so I did, badly at first. The response always came so late, it was difficult to time. When I had the hang of it, I gained some altitude, found the wrench, and changed to fresh tanks. I could see chase cars a mile away on a parallel road, kicking up dust. I took it back down, and soon we came to a big agribusiness installation, a line of tractors, in offset pattern, working a giant expanse. They waved to us.
It was Kesner who pointed out the balloon that was spoiling our strategy. It was above us, in a fresher breeze than ours, well behind us and gaining on us. It was pumpkin and green, with bands of white. The chase cars could follow him easily. I took us up to where we could yell at him to fly low, as we were.
Linda recognized him first. “Hey, it’s Dirty Bob. All alone! Wouldn’t he be alone, though?” She yelled at him. “If you fly lower, they might lose you. Hey! Fly low, Dez. Low!”
He ignored us. I worked our balloon back down again. He was even with us for a time and then moved a little ahead and a little farther off, to the left of our line of drift.
I kept glancing at him too often. I didn’t see the power lines in time. The big ones, the high structural towers, the spiderweb look of the thick cables swooping from tower to tower. Even with a constant blast I did not think we could lift over them. “Get ready to land!” I said.
“No!” Kesner yelled. “I saw them following us, right over there, past those trees.”
“We’ve got to come down right now!”
I yanked on the line that opened the maneuvering port just as Linda sprang and opened the blast valve. We were too high to risk opening the deflation port at the top by pulling the red line. I jumped at Linda to pry her hand free, but she was too wiry and strong. We started to lift, and I made the almost mortal decision that we were as low as we were going to get. So I went over the side, hung, kicked free, and dropped, facing the direction of flight.
If I had to swear on all the books, I would say it was a forty-five-foot drop, at ten to twelve miles an hour. I went down toward the cultivated browndark earth. I dropped, pinwheeling my arms for balance, trying to remember everything I knew about falling, relaxing, rolling. The laws of motion state that a body falls at thirty-two feet per second, but it did seem to take a lot longer. One doesn’t get much practice at stepping off the roof of four-story buildings.
I landed on the balls of my feet, inclining slightly forward, and as I hit I hugged my chest, tucked my chin down, and turned my right shoulder forward and down. I felt the right knee go, and the forward momentum took me into a shoulder roll. I went over and right back up onto my feet, where I didn’t especially want to be, and then tried to take some big running steps to stay there. But the knee bugged out, and my body got ahead of my legs, and I took a long diving fall onto my belly that huffed the wind out of me and chopped my teeth into the dirt of a corn row.
I pushed myself up, gagging for air, spitting dirt, and saw the balloon angling up toward the wires. Relieved of my weight all of a sudden, it had taken a good upward surge. But it was still going toward the power lines. In retrospect I decided that the upward bounce had not been lost on Peter Kesner. The racket of the gas blast stopped abruptly, and an instant later a figure came tumbling down, falling away from the basket. She had, I would say, seventy feet to fall. She was a tough little woman, athletic and nervy. I learned later that she had done some sky diving, and I think that she spread-eagled her arms and legs in an attempt to stop the tumbling caused by her being thrown out of the basket by Kesner. Maybe the tumbling would have stopped if she’d had more falling room. A lot more room. She made a single lazy turn and landed at a head-down angle that snapped her neck a microsecond before the heavy thud of her body into the soil.
Kesner was higher. The blast was ripping away, jacking that long blue flame up into the envelope. He was going to make it over the power lines. From my angle of sight he was already clear when the basket and cables struck the power lines. There was a stunning crack, loud as an antitank gun, a condensed flash of blue lightning, and then a big orange ball as the propane tanks blew up. The orange and crimson ball melted the striped crimson and blue envelope almost instantly, and a stream of debris came tumbling down in free fall, one morsel of it the flame-shrouded mannikin which had been Peter Kesner, landing under the power lines, thumping down beside the shredded and blackened basket with an impact that blew the flames out and left him smoking for a moment before the flames began again.