She was checking the valve on the canister of helium and getting the bags doubled inside each other, when her closet door slammed shut on her with a huge bang, scaring her terribly. Some dim memory of the Hindenburg disaster must stay lodged in the unconscious minds of anyone flying in an airship, such that loud noises are unwelcome. On reflection she decided that another bear must have slid down the hallway onto his or her fellow bears. That was good, although it left one unaccounted for; this was a worry, but she couldn’t stay in the closet forever, so now seemed her best chance.
She filled four trash bags with helium and pushed them out into the hallway on the cord she had tied around their open ends. They worked like she hoped they would, tugging her up toward the bridge. Four didn’t seem enough, though. She let out more cord for the ones already filled, tugged down to test their lift, then sat down and filled four more bags. It seemed like a lot of helium, and enough of it was getting loose in the closet that she was beginning to feel a little yucky. “We’re off to see the wizard!” she sang, and yes, her voice was munchkinly high; it would be funny if she weren’t worried about blacking out. It was time to test her method before she inadvertently killed herself. Which gave her the idea of knocking out the bear on the bridge by filling the bridge with helium for a very short interval. Problems with that plan reared their heads, and there was a tranquilizer dart gun still with her in the closet she could find and reload and take with her, so she decided to stick with the plan of floating up to the bridge to see what was going on. But oh yeah: important to get her camera headband on, and turn it on, to record for the show, or for posterity!
“We’re off to see the wizard!” she sang again, just as high if not higher, and in that same Munchkin voice she began to narrate her ascent to the bridge.
“Here we go, folks! I’m going to let these bags of helium carry me up to the bridge, and I have a tranquilizer dart gun that I can use to deal with any bear that might be stuck up there. I think one is not yet accounted for, who is probably up there. I’ll catch you up on all that later, for now I’d better get out of this room, as you can hear. I definitely feel a little light-headed, I hope that will help lift me once I get out this door!”
She wrapped the lines around her belt and held them tight in her left hand, felt the upward tug of the trash bags, and launched herself out of the closet into the hall. The polar bears down in their room stared up at her, surprised, and one tried to stand. And in fact, now that she was fully suspended from the bags and hanging freely in the hallway, she found herself drifting slightly downward toward the bears. It felt like a couple more bags would have given her the buoyancy she needed, but no time for that now; she wedged herself in the ninety-degree angle between floor and wall, squeaking, “Oh no! Oh no!”
She put one foot against floor, one against wall, as if stemming up what climbers would call an open-book crack. The airship was not totally vertical, so she had a steep but climbable V slope to wedge into. She had only done a little climbing in her life, always following the lead of her old boyfriend Elrond, and she couldn’t remember if open-book cracks were usually more or less than ninety degrees open; anyway this was what she had to work with, so she pressed outward hard with both feet and clawed with the fingers of her right hand in the crack itself, while holding the lines to the trash bags above her and as far into the crack as she could, so that they would loft her upward without pulling her away from her hold. These moves seemed to stabilize her, and after that she found that she could, with care, stem up the hallway toward the bridge. The fact that it was not completely vertical was key, and as soon as she realized that, she felt that the airship was going even more vertical than it had before. “Oh no!” she said again, but at least it was in her own voice. The air felt good. “Frans, stop it! Hold your angle!”
She clawed the floor with her fingernails and pressed outward with her toes, and stepped with teeny steps up toward the bridge. The helium bags definitely helped; it was possible she was only a few pounds from neutral buoyancy. She slipped once or twice along the way, causing her to exclaim “Oh no!” and sweat, but luckily her head camera was pointed up at the balloon bags, and she would not be doing any selfies until she got onto a better platform, no matter how much Nicole lectured her about it afterward. The footage she was getting now, which included her hands for sure, would tell the tale more vividly than any selfie. Although it occurred to her that Nicole would have asked her to use some cam-drones. She could even have sent them up to do reconnaissance on the bridge. But in fact they were on the bridge now, in a cabinet. So whatever! She was on her way.
Although it took a while, eventually she found herself at the doorway to the bridge, now looking like a square hole leading up into an attic. She had to move the lines around without dislodging herself, to let all the helium bags up through the door into the space of the bridge; then she could scrabble up the last part of the hall until she could grab the door’s handle, hanging down toward her, after which she was able to pull herself halfway into the room she had been hoping to reach for the last thirty hours.
“I made it!” she told her future audience. Then she saw the last of the polar bears, a female it appeared, lying on the stern wall of the bridge looking confused and unhappy. “Oh!” Amelia said to it. “Hi! Hi, bear! Stay right there!”
This inadvertent little nursery rhyme inspired her to make a kind of Peter Pan lifted-by-wires move up into the bridge, pulling hard on the doorjamb to launch herself upward while she also tugged the tranquilizer dart gun out of her belt. She came within a few pounds per square inch of shooting herself in the belly, but did not. When she cleared the door she toed the floor and leaped upward, and the bags helped make it quite a balletic move, almost too much so, as the bags ran into the glass front wall and she soared into the bags and then started to fall back down, back toward the bear, who was rising on her haunches with an investigative or at least troubled expression. So Amelia without the slightest reluctance shot the bear in the shoulder, then again in the chest; then she landed on the back wall right next to it. It was looking at the dart in its chest unhappily. It brushed it off, then growled loudly, so loudly that Amelia instinctively jumped up again and got another surprising helium assist, afterward flailing a bit as she pendulumed around the air of the room right above the bear, who waved at her woozily. Then the bear grew content to lie down and sleep it off, and Amelia avoided plunging through the open door to the hall by way of some deft footwork, after which she landed and sat there on the back wall beside the open door, now like a trapdoor to doom, hyperventilating. “Oh. My. God.”
When the bear seemed to be really out, Amelia asked Frans to right the ship. Then she thought it over and countermanded that request, and approached the drugged bear’s side to see if she could move her to the doorway and let her slide senselessly down the hall to her proper quarters. But she couldn’t move the bear. Not at all. The bear was a big heavy lump, like a sleeping dog that knew where it wanted to sleep and wouldn’t be budged even when unconscious. Even a dog could do that with Amelia, and this bear weighed about seven hundred pounds. “If I had a lever, I could move the bear,” Amelia said aloud. This caused her to remember that there was a come-along in the tool closet, but that was no help now.
“Here, Frans,” she said, looking at the bridge carefully. “Bring yourself around in the air so that the bear will slide toward the bridge door. Do you see what I mean?”
“No.”
Amelia had to think out the directions, then tell Frans which way to tilt. She herself was not much better at it than the autopilot, and it took some experimenting, but eventually she got the airship tilting the right way, and the comatose bear slid toward the doorway, now a kind of trapdoor. When it was close to the edge, Amelia used a broom as a crowbar and levered the bear into the doorway. Prepared for this moment, Amelia ordered Frans to shift more off the vertical at the same moment the bear rolled into the hole, and it seemed like Frans tilted fast enough that when the bear hit the stern end of the hall, it was more sliding than falling. Then it plopped through the doorway down there into the bears’ quarters.