I longed for a fire, blessed warmth, but Purple would allow us none — no flame, no fire, no spark-making device of any kind. Nothing that might endanger the violently explosive hydrogen.
Had it not been for the ample supply of Quaff, we would have been twice as unhappy and twice as cold. But Shoogar and I passed the flask back and forth between us, and after a while the sun came out and we didn’t care any more.
Purple sighted our course then, and Wilville and Orbur climbed out onto the outriggers. They turned us in the proper direction and began pedaling across the sky. Purple retired to his sleeping cot in the back of the boat. He snored like an awakening mountain.
Shoogar was grumpy again. The few times he had poked his head out from under his blanket during the darkness, there had still been no moons. The first time of dark, there had been mist. The second time had been clear, but there were still no moons! It was annoying and frustrating: the sign of Gafia, when all the gods have stopped listening.
Shoogar was unapproachable. He climbed up into the rigging, onto a little platform Purple called a bird’s nest, and sat there moodily.
Later, when Purple awoke, he asked why Shoogar was so angry. I told him that it was the moons. Shoogar needed them and he could not see them — I didn’t tell him why he needed them though.
Purple called up to him, “Shoogar, come down — I will , explain to you about the moons.”
“You?” he snorted. “You explain about the moons?”
“But I can tell you about them,” Purple insisted.
“It wouldn’t hurt to listen,” I called.
“Humph,” said Shoogar to me, “what do you know?” But he began climbing down.
Purple pulled out an animal skin and began marking lines on it. “Before I brought my flying egg down, I studied the paths of your moons, Shoogar. Apparantly they are all fragments of one larger moon and they stay close together in its orbit. At least they are all together now. I suppose there are other times when they are all far apart”
Shoogar nodded. This much at least was correct. They change their configurations often,” he said. “But they go in cycles of close configurations alternating with loose ones.”
“Ah,” said Purple. “Of course, they interfere with each other too, and some get lost, and others get picked up from the stream of rocks that follows in your sign-of-eight orbit; but for a while, at least, the moons should behave like this. Especially this one, which is very important to me —”
I stopped listening and wandered to another part of the airship. I am no magician and shop talk generally bores roe.
Later though I noticed that Shoogar had kept the spell chart that Purple had made, and was poring over it interestedly. He had a fierce look in his eyes, and was muttering grumpily and happily to himself.
Blue dawn of the third day revealed us to be only a few manheights above the water. Great swells swept before us, the water rising and falling in constant uneasy motion. As Wilville and Orbur climbed out onto their bicycles they muttered about our lack of height. The wind is more effective at pushing us higher up.” Orbur said.
Purple nodded thoughtfully. He was peering up at his balloons.
I was peering uneasily down. The surface of the water was greasy and black, and crinkled with flecks of light. I could see the foam on the waves, and smell the wetness in the air.
We had been moving erratically north for two days now, sometimes pushed by the wind, and sometimes by the airpushers. Whenever the flying machine had dropped too low, Purple poured sand out of the ballast bags until we rose again. But we only had one sandbag left, and Purple was beginning to worry.
He had been measuring the balloons regularly since the first night. Periodically, he would climb up into the rigging and poke one experimentally, then climb down, tsk-tsk’ing and shaking his head. The windbags were drooping sadly now; we could see that without climbing the ropes.
He spent all morning leaning over the rail trying to estimate the distance to the water below.
I spent long hours leaning over the rail myself, but little of it was in contemplation of the water. The continual height had begun to unnerve me — and the motion, the constant sway of the boat, the uneasy rocking whenever someone shifted his position.
It was Purple’s observance of me that gave him the idea of how to measure our height. He would drop an object and time how long it took to fall. He could do that even in the dark if he listened carefully for the splash.
After his latest calculation — made by dropping a sour melon over the side — Purple announced that we were losing gas very rapidly and would have to pump up the balloons as soon as possible.
He climbed up into the rigging then, while Wilville and Orbur manned the bicycle frames. Hopefully, he said, after we came down in the water, the propellers would keep us balanced and headed in the right direction. He began untying the neck of one of his windbags.
He hung from the ropes above us, a puffy figure against a background of limp and bloated cloth, and he called instructions to the rest of us. “Lant, Shoogar, pull hard on that rope — I must push this balloon aside. Loosen your pace, Wilville! Orbur, backpedal now! Hard right! Keep on course.” Carefully, he manipulated the long hose-like neck of the windbag, and let some gas seep out. We sank toward the water.
He let more gas out, then tied the neck of the bag again.” He readjusted himself in the rigging and grabbed another bag. We continued sinking. “How high are we?” he called.
I looked over the edge. We were less than one manheight above the water. Already the propellers were slashing across the tops of the swells, dipping in and out of them, churning them to froth. A foamy wake appeared behind us.
“Check to see that the boat rudder is straight, Lant!” Purple called. I wobbled to the back of the boat to where the rudder was mounted. It too was an aircloth-hardened frame. I straightened it out, and looped a rope around it to hold it so.
“How high are we?”
I looked again. We were still one manheight over the water. We had stopped sinking.
Purple loosed a little more gas from the bag and we sank, sank — oof! — smacked into the water, slid sickeningly downward, then up again, across the tops of the swells, up and down, up and down. Wilville and Orbur kept pedaling. Amazing! The airpushers kept churning the water behind us, and we moved steadily forward — the airpushers worked in water too! What a marvelous device they were!
Purple then unslung the hoses from the windbags, so that they hung down into the boat frame. Sixteen long nozzles — I looked up and thought of a milkbeast’s belly.
Purple brought out a wooden frame which Pran the Carpenter had made for him. There was a slot in it to hold the battery. Two copper wires led out across separate arms. One of them ended in a clay funnel. To this Purple attached the first balloon nozzle. He hooked the whole affair over the boat rail and let the wires and funnel arm dip into the water. He made an adjustment on his battery. From the oxygen wire came the familiar furious bubbling. We could not see the bubbling on the other wire, it was inside the funnel. But we did see the gentle puffing of the balloon neck, and we knew that the gas was leaping upward through it.
Suddenly there was a yelp from Orbur, “Hey! We’re rising again!”
Sure enough, we were. The annoying up-and-down motion of the boat across the swells had stopped. We had swung back into the air. I could see our shadow slipping across the water beneath us. Only the propellers still skimmed through the surface, and then they too were free.