"A great day for mankind! There goes the orchestra, playing The Lone Ranger Overture. Ha! Ha! Just a little joke that'd take too long to explain to you folks. It's really the William Tell Overture by Rossini, I believe." Chosen by Firebrass as the take-off music, since he's hung up on that fiery piece. Not to mention a few others, some of whom I see in the crowd.
"Hand me up another glass of ambrosia, Randy. Randy's my assistant M.C., folks, a writer of fantasies on Earth and now Parolando's chief quality-control inspector for the alcohol works. Which is like appointing a wolf to guard a steak.
"Aah! Great stuff! And here comes the Parseval now, moving out of the hangar! Her nose is locked into the only mobile mooring mast in the world. The take-off will occur in just a few minutes. I can see through the windscreen of the control room or bridge, which is set in the nose.
"The man in the middle, sitting at the control panel-you can see his head, I'm sure-is chief pilot Cyrano de Bergerac. In his day he was an author, too, wrote novels about travel to the moon and the sun. Now he's in an aerial machine the likes of which he never dreamed of, just as he never envisioned himself on such a voyage. Flying to the North Pole of a planet which nobody, not a single soul on Earth, as far as I know, had described in the wildest of tales. Soaring in the wild blue yonder in the greatest zeppelin ever built, the greatest that will ever be built. Headed for a fabled tower in a cold, foggy sea. An aerial knight, a post-Terrestrial Galahad, questing for a giant grail!
"Cyrano's running the whole operation all by himself. The ship's completely automated; its motors and rudder and elevators are tied into the control panel with electromechanical devices. There's no need to have ruddermen and elevator men and telegraph signals to the motor engineers as they did in the old dirigibles. One man could pilot the ship all the way to the North Pole, if he could stay awake three and a half days, the estimated flight time. In fact, theoretically, the ship could fly itself there without a soul aboard.
"And there by Cyrano's right is the captain, our own Milton Firebrass. He's waving now to the man who's succeeded him as president, the ever popular Judah P. Benjamin, late of Louisiana and ex-attorney general of the late but not necessarily lamented Confederate States of America.
"What? Get your hands off me, friend! No offense intended to any ex-citizen of the C.S. A. Take the drunken bum away, officers!
"And there, standing at the extreme left, is pilot third officer Mitya Nikitin. He promised to be sober during the flight and not hide any booze behind the gas cells, ha! ha!
"To Nikitin's right is first mate Jill Gulbirra. You've given some of us a hard time, Ms. Gulbirra, but we admire...
"There go the trumpets again. What a blast! There's Captain Firebrass, waving at us. So long, man capitalne, ban voyage! Keep us informed by radio.
"And there go the cables from the tail. The ship is bobbing a little, but she's settling down. I saw the balancing done a couple of hours ago. The ship's so equili-bub-bub-rated that one man standing on the ground under that mighty mass could lift it with one hand.
"Now her nose is uncoupled from the mobile mooring mast. There goes a little of the water ballast. Sorry about that, folks. We told you to stand back, not that some of you couldn't stand a shower.
"Now she's rising a little. The wind's carrying her backward, southward. But the propellers have already been swivelled at an angle to drive the ship up and northward.
"There she goes! Bigger than a mountain, lighter than a feather! Off to the North Pole and the dark tower!
"My God, I'm crying! Must have had too much of the cup that cheers!"
44
Up above the world so high, the airship twinkled, threading the needle eye of the blue.
At an altitude of 6.1 kilometers or a little over 20,000 feet, the crew of the Parseval had a broad view of The Riverworld. Jill, standing at the front windscreen, saw the twisting parallels of the valleys, running north and south directly below her but taking a great bend to the east about 20 kilometers ahead. Then the lines ran for 100 kilometers like thin Malayan krises, wavy blades, side by side, before turning northeastward.
Now and then, The River bounced back a ray of the sun. The millions along its banks and on its surface were invisible from this height, and even the biggest vessels resembled the backs of surface-cruising dragonfish. The Riverworld looked as it was just before Resurrection Day.
A photographer in the nose dome was making the first aerial survey of this planet. And the last. The photographs would be matched against the course of The River as reported via radio by the Mark Twain. However, there would be large gaps in the map made by the Parseval's cartographer. The paddlewheeler had traveled far south, to the edge of the south polar regions, several times. So the airship's cartographer could only compare his pictures with the maps transmitted by the surface vessels in the northern hemisphere.
But he could make one sweep of his camera and cover areas where the Mark Twain would travel some day.
The radar was also making altitude measurements of the mountain walls. So far, the highest point was 4564 meters or 15,000 feet. At most points, the mountains were only 3048 meters or 10,000 feet. Sometimes the walls dipped as low as 1524 meters or 5000 feet.
Before coming to Parolando, Jill had assumed, along with everybody else she knew, that the mountains were from 4564 to 6096 meters high. These were eyeball estimates, of course, and no one she had known had ever tried to make a scientific measurement. Not until she was in Parolando, where late-twentieth-century devices were available, did she learn the true altitude of the mountains.
Perhaps it was the comparative closeness of the walls that deceived people. They reared straight up, sheer, so smooth after the first 305 meters that they were unscalable. Often they were thicker at the top than at the bottom, presenting an overhang that would daunt any would-be climber even if he had steel pitons. And these were available only at Parolando, as far as she knew.
At the top, the width of the mountains averaged 403 meters or a little more than a quarter of a mile. Yet that relatively small thickness of hard rock was impenetrable without steel tools and dynamite. It would be possible to sail north up The River until it curved for one of its southward travels. There, with enough drilling and blasting equipment, a hole could be bored through the mountain wall. But who knew what invulnerable ranges lay behind that?
The Parseval had bucked the northeasterly surface winds of the equatorial zone. Passing through the horse latitudes, it had picked up the tail winds of the temperate latitudes. In twenty-four hours it had traveled approximately a distance equal to that from Mexico City to the lower end of Hudson Bay, Canada. Before the second day was over, it would run into headwinds from the arctic region. Just how strong these would be was not known. However, the winds here seldom matched the winds of Earth because of the lack of differential between land and water masses.
A difference in mountain altitude and valley width between the equatorial and temperate zones was apparent. The mountains were generally higher and the valleys narrower in the hotter region.
The narrowness of the valleys and the height' of the mountains made for conditions comparable to those in the glens of Scotland. Generally, it rained every day about 15:00 hours or 3 p.m. in the temperate areas. Usually, a thunderstorm accompanied by rain occurred about 03:00 hours or 3 A.M. in the equatorial zone. This was not a natural phenomenon in the tropics or at least it was believed that it was not. The Parolando scientists suspected that some sort of rain-making machines concealed in the mountains caused this on-schedule precipitation. The energy requirements for this would be enormous, colossal, in fact. But beings who could remake this planet into one Rivervalley, who could provide an estimated thirty-six billion people with three meals a day through energy-matter conversion, could undoubtedly shape the daily weather.