“Curse it,” said Purple. “I never thought of that.”
There was a wind pushing us along. We watched glumly as our wake disappeared behind, lost in the swells.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
He switched off his battery. “We wait.”
“But there’s hardly enough gas in the balloons to lift us, Purple. We’ll be hitting the water again in five minutes.”
“I know that, Lant. That’s what I’m hoping for.”
He began looking around him. He laid aside the recharging framework and started rearranging the supplies in the bottom of the boat; checking and tying the aircloth covers to see that they were secure. “Find me a pail,” he called.
There was one in the bow of the boat. We had been using it to hold wash water, but it was empty now. Shoogar ! brought it back to where we waited.
As soon as we were skimming through the tops of the swells again, Purple leaned far over the rail, the bucket trailing in his hands. He pulled it up, half full, and emptied it into the boat. Again he leaned over the edge.
When he had poured ten bucketsful into the boat we were again splashing through the waves. Another ten bucketsful and we were dipping into the troughs. Ten more and we were firmly in the water. Up and down. Up and down.
“We need ballast,” he explained. “And there’s nothing else to use.” He peered over the side and measured how low the boat was riding in the waves. He poured fifteen more bucketsful into the boat before he was satisfied. It was up to our knees at its deepest point.
He picked up his battery and funnel device again and started to lean over the side — “Eh? What am I doing? I can just as easily use this water —” He sat down on a cloth-covered seat and placed the device in the water before him. It began bubbling and he beamed delightedly.
We were all delighted. On all sides splashed the restless ocean. If Purple’s gas-making magic were to suddenly stop working, we would be trapped here, a tiny craft bobbing across an uncaring sea.
Whether Purple worried about this or not, I did not know. Apparently he had full confidence in the power of his battery and he worked steadily. Within seven hours, he had recharged all sixteen balloons. They hung taut, and full-bellied overhead. Several times we had added more water to the boat to offset their increased lifting power. There were more than a hundred bucketsful in the boat now.
At last though, Purple tied off the last windbag, and began disconnecting his battery wires. He tsked thoughtfully as he did so, “H’m, we have used more power than I thought we would. We will have to be careful.”
He put the device aside and began gathering up the empty ballast bags. “Fill these with water,” he instructed. “We will use that as ballast instead of sand.”
While Shoogar and I did as he instructed, he began bailing the water out of the boat. After fifteen bucketsful had been poured out, the boat began rocking harder in response to the waves. A few more bucketsful and we were splashing through them, the swells smacking the bottom of the boat. Á few more and we were level again while the water skimmed harmlessly below.
“Are we off the water?” Purple called to Wilville.
Wilville nodded. “By half a manlength easily.” He and Orbur were still on their bicycles, still hanging down on to the sea — they were pumping steadily, and keeping the airpushers spinning to maintain our heading in the proper direction.
Purple bailed one last bucket and straightened up. “Do you want me to bail for a while?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Uh, uh. There’s no need for any more bailing, Lant.” He put the pail aside.
While I scratched my head in confusion, he splashed forward to the Cathawk’s toolbox. He came back carrying a drill, and proceeded to make a small hole in the narrow deck slats.
It took only a few moments, and then he stood up proudly and wetly. Almost immediately Orbur called, “We’re on our way up again!”
Indeed we were. The ocean dropped away at an ever increasing pace. The water spilled out of the hole at a steady rate, and gradually there was less and less water in the boat. Like Purple’s first windbag so many hands ago; we fell upward.
I leaned over the railing in excitement. “Why, it works just like the sand ballast,” I said. “When you throw it away, the boat rises.”
“Of course, you nit!” said Shoogar. “That’s part of the ballast spell.”
“It’s the weight, Lant — it doesn’t make any difference what your ballast is. It’s the throwing away of weight that makes the boat rise.”
“Nice thinking,” commented Shoogar. The ballast goes automatically. No jerks, no bumps.”
“Thank you,” Purple beamed. It was the first compliment he had ever gotten from Shoogar.
He checked our course heading then — the wind was blowing almost directly north — so the boys could either rest of pedal in the same direction, as they chose. They chose to rest and stretched out on their outriggers. There had to be one son on each outrigger at all times, or no son on either otherwise the airboat slanted all askew.
Purple dried himself off as well as he could, then climbed into the rigging to tie up the airbag nozzles. They were still hanging down. By the time he had finished, all the water had drained out of the boat. He toddled back to where we waited and pounded a heavy bone plug into the hole.
Once more the sea glistened far below us. Indeed, it seemed we were higher than ever. When we dropped a sour melon over the side, it dwindled to a distant speck and vanished without a splash.
We were aloft for the rest of that day and most of the next, before we again had to dump ballast. Purple always waited until we had sunk below a certain level before he would throw any away. Otherwise, he said, we were just wasting it. “The idea is to stay aloft as long as possible,” he explained.
We were standing in the front of the boat looking down at the glass-colored water. All was blue and red with the fairytale quality of double daylight. Above, massive cloudbanks covered half the sky, the multi-colored sunlights painting them in gaudy hues and stark relief. Purple eyed them with a worried frown. “I hope the weather holds up,” he said.
The blue sun hesitated on the horizon, then winked out, leaving everything rose-colored. The silence of the upper air was perfect, but for the sssssss of the bicycles and the low chanting at the rear of the boat where Shoogar was trying to change the direction of the wind. It was northeast again, and the boys were pedaling west.
“How much longer do you think the voyage will take?” I asked.
Purple shrugged, “I estimate that we are covering fifteen miles an hour, maybe twenty — that is, in the direction we want to go. If we had a steady wind we could cover the whole fifteen hundred miles in three full days. Unfortunately, Lant, the winds over the ocean are most erratic. We have been journeying for three and a half days and still no land is in sight.”
“We were becalmed for a full day,” I pointed out. That did not help any either.”
“True,” he admitted, “but I had hoped —” He sighed and sank down onto a bench.
I sat down across from him. “I don’t see why you should be so impatient. Your test flight took at least this long.”
“Yes, but we didn’t go that far. Then the wind was blowing west, and we were swept over the mountains. We spent the whole three days just coming back.”
“You were fighting the wind?”
“Oh no. It had died away by that time, but we needed to figure out how best to handle the boat in the air — and then we had to prove to Shoogar that his sails wouldn’t work. It took a full day just to rig them, and then Shoogar would still not be convinced. He made us try over and over and over again. He kept insisting that the airpushers needed something to push against.