“Except now it’s unrolled.”
“Doesn’t change the mass. Relax. Everything’s going to be fine.”
At thirty-seven hundred meters, they began to slow. By then the fourth lander had joined the support group, and they were approaching the chimney’s extension limit. When the pickup they’d left behind showed them they had exactly the situation they wanted, the anchor lines pulled tight, and the base of the chimney off the ground, they halted the ascent.
“Bill,” said Julie, “activate the helicopter and put it in position.”
Bill acknowledged.
The helicopter was a gleaming antique unit, a Falcon, which had become legendary during the long struggle with international terrorists during the later years of the last century. CANADIAN FORCES was stenciled on its hull. It was equipped with lasers and particle beam weapons, but of course none was functional.
Bill started the engine and engaged its silent-running capability, which wasn’t really all that silent. When it was ready, he lifted it a couple of meters into the air, navigated it between the two trees Marge had selected, and inserted it directly beneath the base of the chimney.
“Ready,” said Bill.
“Okay.” Julie was doing a decent job hiding her qualms. “We want the blades turning as fast as possible, but we don’t want it off the ground. We just want to move the air around.”
“Ground idle,” said Bill.
“Yes. That sounds right.”
The blades picked up speed. The helicopter strained upward and Bill cut back slightly. “Perfect,” Marge said.
“What next?” asked Julie.
Marge smiled. “I think from here we can just relax and enjoy the show.”
A column of warm moist air moved skyward. Up the chimney. More warm air rushed in to fill the vacuum, and gradually the flow took over on its own. Bill had to cut the blade rotation back again to keep the Falcon from lifting off.
“Moving along nicely,” he reported. And, finally: “I believe it is self-sustaining now.”
Marge gave it a few more minutes, then Julie directed Bill to move the helicopter away. “Be careful,” she added.
Bill brought the Falcon out, squeezing past the same two trees. When it was clear, he gunned the engines, and it lifted off into the steady winds that were racing around the chimney. It fought its way into the sky and turned west toward Utopia.
Avery Whitlock’s Notebooks
The ship is asleep.
Digger seems to be okay. We were worried for a while that there might be some brain damage. He still doesn’t have his memory back completely, can’t recall how he got into the ocean, or even being on the beach. But Bill says that’s not an unusual result in cases like this. I guess we’ll know for sure in the morning.
I haven’t been able to sleep. It’s not so much that I’m worried about Digger, because I think he’ll be okay. But watching a creature that one thinks of as rational try to end its life for the most irrational of purposes. I cannot get it out of my mind. Knowing that it happens, has happened to us, and seeing it in action. It gives me a sense of how far we’ve come. Of what civilization truly means.
— December 5
chapter 39
On board the AV3, west of Hopgop.
Saturday, December 6.
“LEVEL OF CONVECTION is sufficient,” said Bill.
“All right.” Marge rubbed her hands together. “Now we do the magic.” She glanced out at the sky. The chimney, which they’d been supporting for several hours, was all but invisible to the naked eye. Julie had noticed that the drag on the AV3 had lessened, had in fact all but disappeared. “Cut them loose,” she said. “Cut everything loose.”
“The landers, too?”
“Everything. Send them to Utopia.”
Julie knew how it was supposed to work. But this kind of operation flew in the face of common sense. And she had a bad feeling about what would happen when she released her grip on the chimney. Ah, well. “Bill,” she said, “do it.”
The AI acknowledged. She felt the clamps release the chimney, watched the status board light up with reports that the four landers had simultaneously turned loose, heard Bill say that the action was completed. And all her instincts told her that the elongated structure they’d so laboriously hauled up several thousand meters would now collapse, crash down on the countryside and, God help them, maybe on Hopgop.
Marge was smiling broadly. “Let’s take a look,” she said.
Julie took the hauler around in a large arc so they could see. The chimney was constructed of stealth materials. When she looked through the goggles, it was voilà all the way to the ground. It was standing on its own, a great round cylinder extending down through the clouds, supported by no visible means.
She knew the theory. Surface air is warmer, heavier, and more humid than air at altitude. It wants to rise but generally can’t do so in any organized fashion, or in sufficient volume to create clouds unless there’s substantial pressure or a temperature gradient. Nightfall and pressure fronts provide that in nature.
To do it artificially, a chimney was needed. Once it was in place, the warm air started up on its own. It kept moving up because there was no place else for it to go. They’d put the Falcon at the base to provide a fan, to help things along. Once the system got going, the chimney became an oversize siphon, perfectly capable of keeping itself inflated.
At the moment, warm moist air was spreading out from the top of the rainmaker. It would shortly begin to create clouds.
“We just have time,” Marge said, “to get the next package and run it down to the Sakmarung site so we can be ready to go tomorrow night.”
That would leave enough time for Julie to get back to the Jenkins and pick up her two caballeros, who’d be looking forward to another day of planting their projectors and getting ready for the big show. She wasn’t entirely sure Digger would be able to go back down, and in fact she thought he should stay put. Since Whit was too inexperienced to go down alone, that meant both of them should take a day off.
But Digger had insisted the night before that he was okay, that he would be able to go back in the morning. Then he’d passed out, helped along by some medication. It occurred to Julie that she should let Kellie know what had happened.
“Better to wait,” said Marge.
“Why?”
“Wait till you get back to the ship. Make sure he’s really okay. She’ll want to know, and you won’t want to be telling her you think he’s fine.”
But Kellie called her and the issue became moot.
“Bill says he’s fine,” she told Kellie. “Not to worry.”
Kellie thanked her and said she hoped Digger would take it easy for a bit.
Whit seemed to have been affected by events there. His rational, cautious, and thoughtful self had been replaced by someone more romantic, more willing to take a risk. He was in love with the idea of helping rescue the Goompahs. But she wondered how he’d react if things didn’t go well.
THEY COLLECTED THE second chimney, and, as dawn was breaking over the Intigo, delivered it to an island thirty kilometers west of Sakmarung. Julie’s first act on returning to the Jenkins was to look in on Digger, who was sleeping peacefully. Bill assured her he was fine, all signs normal.
WHIT HAD DEVELOPED a hobby. He loved being invisible, and he never missed an opportunity to record the Goompahs at work, at play, or during their frequent gambols. He watched them frolicking in the parks, families coming down to the pier to see ships coming and going, young ones playing ball games. It was all of a piece. Life in the Intigo seemed to be one long celebration.