“The other women are housewives of Lann, mostly my wife’s brizh-playing friends. I got them organized.” He grinned like an imp and launched into a lecture on aerostatics, pacing about and gesturing to indicate mathematical concepts.
7
Six days later, on the fifth of Perikles, the gum had dried and the balloon was ready. Boert Halran said: “I will send one of my daughters to make the rounds of the newspapers, asking each to send a reporter to witness this great event.”
“Hey!” said Marko. “If they see me …” “Oh. I forgot. Couldn’t you wear a mask?” Marko shook his head. “That would whet their suspicions.”
Halran sighed. “Very well. I need publicity to elicit more financial support, though; these experiments are fiendishly expensive. But we shall hope the sight of our soaring over the rooftops of Lann will furnish adequate excitement. I will send Viki merely to get the weather report. Not that it will help much; old Ronni is right about as often as if he stayed indoors and guessed.”
As Muphrid set, little Viki Halran returned with the report that there was no indication of a disturbance in the northeast tradewinds. Marko had been casting an “eye with a little more than purely academic interest on Halran’s four daughters. (A fifth, married, lived in Niok.) All were handsome, vivacious girls. He did not, however, go beyond looking. Besides the puritan-ism of his culture and his own introversion, he was inhibited by his inner turmoil about Petronela.
As for the girls, Marko thought that they regarded him as an amiable and amusing monster. All four girts had suitors of their own.
Marko had been horrified the first tune one of these youths had called for an evening and paid his respects (in a casual and impudent manner) to the older Halrans. Then he and the girl had retired to a bedroom, whence soon came audible creakings.
Marko’s overthrow was complete the next evening. The four girls quarreled shrilly over the fact that each had a lover and there were not enough bedrooms to go around. Viki broke the deadlock by asking Marko if he would lend his cot in the attic. Marko, red to the ears, could only gulp and nod.
“If it will inconvenience you,” said Viki, evidently mistaking his silence for unwillingness, “I can repay you by”
“N-no, no, do not of it think,” said Marko in his broken Anglonian. “I only too happy am.”
“Oh? If you hesitate on account of your wife, Petronela, she isn’t your wife anymore anyway.”
“No?”
“No. My sister Henrit saw the notice of divorce in yesterday’s paper. We meant to tell you, but such a little thing slipped our minds. So now you’re fair game for all of us.”
“Thank you. I am being much interested.” Marko bowed formally.
During the next few days, Marko thought he had been a fool not at least to have found out what Viki was offering. A man, once womaned but now woman-less, finds celibacy much harder to bear than one who has never known a woman at all. Marko had now been unwomaned long enough so that the primal urge drove him nearly crazy.
To the Halran family, however, he presented an effect of urbane dignity and good humor. He struggled to improve his command of the language and kept his eyes open for the minutiae of Anglonian manners. Inside, he was a mass of conflicting emotions.
When he got word that the good weather would hold, Boert Halran ordered Marko and his family to rig the balloon for inflation. The three moons were sweeping through the dark sky when they finished this onerous task. Halran lit the fire in the main peat stove.
“I hoped to get off several days earlier,” he explained to Marko. “This is the beginning of the hurricane season. But I think we shall make out all right, and that we shall arrive at the convention in ample time for the opening.”
It took all night to inflate the balloon. Marko and Halran took turns feeding the fire and sleeping. When the water clock indicated an hour before dawn, the bag of the balloon swayed overhead, holding the ropes taut. Halran explained:
“By filling it at night, one can conserve much ballast. As Muphrid strikes the bag, it warms the air and imparts extra lift to it. Are you ready?”
They placed in the basket the equipment that they were taking, including Marko’s ax but not, for weight, his shield. Marko climbed up the ropes to the small stove above the basket and got that fire going, too.
Halran’s women smothered him with embraces, and the girls made plain their intention of kissing Marko, too. Marko had been shocked with the freedom with which people kissed in public in Anglonia. By now, however, he was so hardened to these people’s loose ways that he even enjoyed the transaction.
Marko and Boert Halran climbed into the basket, cast off, and waved good-bye. Marko’s heart rose into his throat as the dark ground dropped away and the lights of Lann appeared below him. People were already abroad.
Marko thought that the ascent might be unnoticed, as the sky had not yet begun to pale. But the glow of the little stove overhead soon attracted attention. People shouted, ran, and looked up, pointing.
The swift rise of the balloon, however, soon caused the clamoring voices to fade. After the first few minutes, Marko could no longer gage their rate of ascent. As they rose, their horizontal movement speeded up also. Soon, the lights of Lann slid out from under them to the northeast. The temperature fell until Marko put on his sheepskin.
“If my calculations are correct,” said Halran, “the wind ought to drop us down within a few miles of Vien by his tune tomorrow.”
“I hope you’re right,” said Marko.
For the first hour or two, nothing happened. Muphrid rose through banded streaks of cloud, which soon thickened to hide it in a high overcast. Marko and Halran ate. Between intervals of climbing up the ropes to tuck another briquette of peat into the stove, Marko hung over the edge of the basket, gazing down upon toylike houses and farms.
“Now remember,” said Halran, “when we touch down, stand by to pull the rip cord just a second before the basket touches, or we shall be dragged and spilled out. I shall give you the signal.”
The rip cord, Marko knew, opened a great slit in the upper part of the balloon by pulling down the slide of a zip fastener. The garrulous little philosopher went on:
“I sent messages to my colleagues in Vien asking for a proclamation that, if a great bag came down out of sky with a man dangling under it in a basket, it was a harmless scientific experiment and not a visitation from Earth. When I made my first trial flight, I descended on a farm in the vicinity of Lann. The peasants thought I was a devil and would have killed me with pitchforks if I had not taken flight. They tore my balloon to fragments, too.”
He fussed about the basket, checking his altitude by a sighting device with cross wires. Once he dropped the sand from a ballast bag and told Marko to stoke up the peat fire. Then they went up too fast, and Halran had to valve air to bring them down again.
As time drifted silently by, little dark-gray clouds appeared below and on a level with them. At first they were so small and few as hardly to be noticed, but Halran muttered:
“I do not like that. Curse it, if I could only check our direction by Muphrid!”
The high overcast had become so thick that no trace of sun could be seen. The little clouds multiplied and grew, until the balloon seemed to be drifting in the midst of a great throng of them. Now and then a flash of lightning lit them up, and thunder rolled in the distance. Marko realized that they were drifting in the midst of a great storm. Because the balloon went with the wind, there was no feeling of motion or rush of wind.
The balloon, however, became hard to control. It either shot up until Halran had to valve air or dropped until he had to drop ballast, while Marko stoked the fire. Marko understood that, when they ran out of either ballast or peat, they would soon have to come down.