‘You are mad!’
‘I have used the Personal Flotation Device many times, Mr Quare. It is quite safe, over relatively short distances.’
‘Right. Safe, is it? I suppose that’s why the gas is called “flammable air”. Because it is so much safer than ordinary air. You know, the nonflammable kind.’
‘The gas is dangerous only if it comes into contact with a spark or flame.’
‘Oh, that’s very comforting. And if it does?’
‘Then, Mr Quare, we shall both go out in a blaze of glory. But if you would rather return to your cell or remain here on the rooftop to await the arrival of Malrubius and his men …’
Quare grimaced. ‘I take your point. How does the damned thing work?’
‘There is not sufficient time to train you in its operation, unfortunately, so I am going to tether us together. Once you are aloft, touch nothing, do nothing, unless at my direction. Is that clear?’
‘As crystal,’ he replied.
‘Put on your coat,’ Longinus directed. ‘You’ll be glad of the warmth, believe me.’
Quare did so, donning his hat as well. Then Longinus fitted him into the leather harness, strapping it snugly about his thighs and across his torso and shoulders. All the while, the sailcloth bladder expanded, retaining its spherical shape; it was bigger than he had realized, perhaps twice his own size, if not more. Soon the sphere rose gently off the roof and into the air, a dark moonlet seeking its rightful place in the sky. Quare could feel it tugging at him. By that time, moving with practised efficiency, Longinus had opened the second bundle and spread it out, attaching a second tube – or ‘umbilical’, as he put it. As the device began to inflate, he strapped himself into its harness, spurning Quare’s offer of help.
‘You would only hinder me,’ he said, ‘or fail to secure the straps properly, and, in your ignorance, however well-meaning, kill us both.’
The whole operation did not take more than a few minutes, objectively speaking, yet all the same, Quare felt as if time had slowed to a crawl. He kept expecting to see armed men burst onto the rooftop, and so fixated was his anxious stare on the trap door that gave access to the roof that he was taken by surprise when, in a gust of wind, the sphere to which he was attached raised itself higher still, pulling him off his feet in the process. There he remained, dangling in the air above the rooftop like a puppet from its strings, secured only by the taut umbilical and the tether with which Longinus had bound their harnesses together. His hands clung to the ropes of the harness that rose from his shoulders to the sphere above as if by doing so he might somehow pull the device back to earth. It was all he could do not to scream. Then another gust of wind snatched the tricorn from his head, and he cursed loudly at the loss of it.
‘A moment more,’ Longinus said. He, too, would have risen into the air were it not for a pair of cables running from his harness to moorings set into the roof. His sphere bobbed below Quare like a cork.
Seeming to strain with the effort, Longinus bent over the canister and turned a small wheel there. Then he slipped the cables from the moorings. Both inflated spheres sprang upwards, carrying their human cargoes along. The umbilicals, pulled free of the spheres, fell back to the rooftop; even amidst his terror, Quare retained sufficient presence of mind to marvel at Master Magnus’s ingenious design, which must have included some sort of self-sealing mechanism.
‘ Allez-houp! ’ cried Longinus.
Quare contributed an incoherent cry of his own as the bladders zoomed up and away – and not a moment too soon, for even as the rooftop receded dizzyingly below them, the trap door opened. ‘Longinus!’ Quare shouted, hoping his voice could be heard over the rush of the wind.
If Longinus responded, Quare didn’t hear it. He watched in near -panic as the men on the rooftop – four of them, as small now as dwarfs, and a fifth, seemingly smaller stilclass="underline" Master Malrubius, nearly as spherical as the inflated bladder that had swept him aloft – raised what could only be pistols and seemed to follow their progress through the air, tracking them with steady hands. Quare felt as if he must loom as vast and ungainly in their sight as an airborne elephant. He cursed as a cluster of bright flashes marked the flintlocks’ firing and strove to somehow make himself smaller. He recalled very well what Longinus had told him about the result should the flammable air in the bladders encounter a spark or flame, and he wondered what effect the strike of a ball would have. Even if the gas in the bladder did not ignite, it was a long way down.
But the bullets did not find their marks – at least in so far as Quare could determine. Certainly he had not been struck, and it didn’t seem that the bladder carrying him ever higher and farther away had suffered injury, either. Nor did it appear that Longinus or his Personal Flotation Device had been hit. And their attackers could not reload fast enough to fire again. Quare watched in amazement, his heart aflutter like a frantic bird, as the men dwindled into insignificance, soon swallowed by shadows and the night.
They had done it. They were free.
A giddy exhilaration swelled in his breast, as if he had just swallowed a dram of strong liquor; under its influence, he could not forbear from shouting in triumph. Even his terror at dangling in mid-air like a mouse caught in the talons of an owl contributed to his sense of having escaped not only his prison cell and the fate Sir Thaddeus had planned for him but the laws of nature itself, as if it were an enchantment and not the application of scientific principles that had lofted him high above the city.
Here the air belonged to a colder season. For once, Quare was glad of Mr Puddinge’s coat, for despite its stench – which the wind of their swift passage kept at bay – it provided some welcome insulation from that same wind’s icy probings. Still, the exposed flesh of his hands and face soon began to sting, and his eyes to water; his mouth had grown so dry that he clamped it resolutely shut.
Longinus soared ahead of him, a dark shape visible against the softer coal of the night sky, where a ceiling of high cloud was silvered with moonlight, suggesting nothing so much to Quare at this moment as the surface of a great sail carrying the entire planet shiplike through the ether. That sail was torn in places, and through the ragged gaps he could see the glimmer of stars far brighter, it seemed, than he had ever perceived them from the level of the streets, even on moonless nights, and the moon, too, though not yet full, seemed, as it drifted behind the clouds, a brighter presence than he had known, a place it might, perhaps, be possible to travel to by this same method. What a journey that would make! What wonders might he find there!
But there were wonders nearer to hand. A wider rent had opened in the clouds, and in the plangent wash of moonlight the whole of London was revealed, extending as far as he could see. From his unaccustomed vantage, it seemed a different city than the one he had come to know, a fairy metropolis spun out of shadow and suggestion, of soft, silvery light and slate-grey webbings of fog, insubstantial as a dream. He passed over a weird terrain of rooftops and spires, chimneys belching smoke, deep valleys of streets, and squares in which the occasional torch flickered like a lonely star reflected in the mirror of a placid lake. There was no sound from below, only the rushing of the air, as noisy – and cold – as if he had plunged his head beneath a freezing cataract. Perhaps they had reached the moon after all, and this was no earthly city but the capital of some lunar country …