He grinned at me and told me to hang on. We swung around, passed over the edge of the roof, and turned south. The core thrusters fired, and we began to accelerate.
A couple of kids were walking on the beach. And somebody in the downtown park was flying a kite. Otherwise, Walpurgis might have been deserted.
If you had to drive, this was the kind of area you wanted to be in. There was nothing else in the sky, save a lone vehicle coming from the west. We soared out over the marshlands, which dominate the land immediately south of the city. A few klicks out, we passed into a gray haze. The sensors showed no traffic ahead, but I knew Alex didn’t like driving when he couldn’t see. So he took us higher, and we emerged into sunlight at about two thousand meters. A few minutes later, the clouds broke up and we glided out over Goodheart Bay. There were a few boats, and I thought I saw a long tentacle rise out of the water and slide back in.
I told Alex, and commented they better stay alert.
Alex enjoyed driving. He didn’t get to do it often. But I think it made his testosterone surge.
The bay is big, 150 klicks before we’d hit land again, and Alex didn’t seem disposed to talk, so I closed my eyes and let my head slip back. I was almost asleep when I realized my hair was rising.
“Something wrong,” I told him.
“What? You’re not feeling well?”
“Zero gee.” That wasn’t a good sign. “We’ve lost all weight.”
He looked at the instrument panel. “You’re right. How’s that possible?”
“I don’t know. What’d you do?”
“Nothing. Are we going down?”
“ Up. We’re going up. ”
I know everybody reading this rides his or her skimmer around and never thinks much about the mechanics of it. As I always did prior to the incident I’m about to describe. The vehicles are usually equipped with two to four antigrav pods. The standard setting for them is.11 gee. You switch them on, eighty-nine percent of the weight cancels out, and you can lift off and go where you want. The way it works is that the pods create an antigrav envelope around the skimmer. The dimensions and arrangement of the envelope differ from one vehicle to another, but it’s designed for economy: The envelope is no larger than necessary to ensure that the entire aircraft, wings, tail assembly, whatever, is enclosed. If you could see it, it would resemble a tube.
The pods can be dangerous, so to change the setting you have to open a black box located in the central panel and do it manually. Alex looked down at it. He didn’t like black boxes. But he pulled the lid up, pressed the control square, and waited for the gravity to come back.
Nothing happened.
He tried again.
We were still going up.
I took a shot at it and got the same lack of result. “It’s not working,” I said. Alex made a face that told me that wasn’t exactly news. I pried the face off the unit and pulled a couple centimeters of cable out of the system. “It’s been disconnected.”
“You mean deliberately?”
I thought about it. “Hard to see how it could happen on its own.”
The skimmer was a dual, which is to say it had two antigrav units, both mounted beneath the aircraft, one just forward of the cockpit, one toward the rear between the cabin and the tail. The control cable, which I held in my hand, divided in two and linked into both pods. When I tugged again on the individual strands, there was still no tension. “It’s been disconnected at both ends,” I said. “Or cut.”
“Can we fix it?”
“Not without getting under the skimmer.”
The color drained out of his face, and he looked down at Goodheart Bay, which was beginning to look pretty small. “Chase,” he said, “what are we going to do?”
We were passing three thousand meters, going up like a cork in a lake. “Lower your flaps,” I said. “And kick in the thrusters.”
He complied. We accelerated, and the rate of climb slowed. But it wasn’t going to be nearly enough.
He got on the radio and punched in the Air Rescue frequency. “Code White,” he said. “Code White. This is AVY 4467. We are in uncontrolled ascent. Request assistance.”
A woman’s voice responded. “AVY 4467. Please state the nature of your emergency.” I wondered if it was the same person we’d talked to last time we got in trouble. “Be as specific as you can.”
“I thought I just did that.” Alex’s temper surfaced. “The pods are on full, and I can’t cut them back. We are stuck at zero gee. Going up.”
“AVY 4467, there is a manual control for the pods, usually located between the front seats. Open the-”
“Rescue, I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.”
“Understood. Wait one.”
Alex looked out at the sky, looked at me, looked at the black box. “We’ll be okay,” he said. I think he was reassuring himself.
We rose into a cumulus cloud, passed through, and came out the top.
“Four four six seven, this is Rescue. Assistance is on the way. ETA approximately thirteen minutes.”
We didn’t have thirteen minutes, and we both knew it. We passed through four thousand meters. The numbers on the altimeter were blurring.
“Rescue, that will probably be too late.”
“It’s our nearest aircraft. Hang on. We’ll get to you.”
“Chase,” he said, “help.”
Suddenly I was in charge. The only thing I could think of was We could jump.
Get outside the bubble and the ascent would stop quickly enough. “I don’t see an easy way, Alex.”
Lines creased his face. “Air’s getting thinner.”
Skimmers are not designed for high-altitude flight. They have several vents, and if the oxygen gets scarce outside, the people inside are going to feel it. My head was beginning to hurt, and there was already pressure in my chest. “Breathe faster,” I said.
“It’ll help.”
I looked around the cabin. There was a time that these things carried parachutes or glide belts, but accidents were so infrequent that more people died from experimenting with the escape gear than from crashes, so it was eventually decided that it was safer in an emergency for ordinary citizens to ride the aircraft down. But that assumed the aircraft was going down.
“How about,” he suggested, “we shut off the pods?”
“We don’t have that option,” I said. “They’re on and disconnected, so they’re going to stay on.”
We cleared five thousand meters.
“Well,” he said, “if you’ve an idea, this would be a good time.” He was speaking more deliberately by then, inhaling and exhaling with every couple of words.
“You have any cable in this buggy?” I was climbing into the backseat, to get access to the cargo compartment. “Something we can use for a tether?”
“I don’t think so.”
I made a show of looking around, but I knew there was nothing like that.
“Okay,” I told him. “Shut down the thrusters and take off your shirt.”
“I don’t think we ought to be joking around.”
“Do it, Alex.” He complied while I opened the cargo compartment and found the tool box. I took out a pair of shears, a wire cutter, and the key. The key, of course, was a remote that would open panels on the bottom of the aircraft.
“What are you going to do?”
I pulled off my blouse. “I’m going to try to give you back control of the pods. Or at least one of them.” He handed me his shirt, and I used the shears to cut it and my blouse into strips.
He demanded to know how I intended to do that. But we were a trifle short of time, and I was in no mood to go into a long explanation. “Watch and learn,” I said.
I slipped the key into a pocket. Then I climbed back into my seat and tied the cloth strips into a line. I looped one end around my waist and tied the other end to my seat anchor. “Wish me luck.” I opened the door, and the wind roared through the cabin. It was frigid.
Alex was horrified. “Are you crazy? You can’t go out there.”
“It’s safe, Alex.” We were both shouting to get over the wind. “It’s zero gee out to a couple meters from the hull. All I have to do is not drift too far away.” Or get blown off. “But I need you to keep us as steady as you can. Use the verticals if you have to, and hang on to the yoke. Okay?”