“The place is the same as ever, old hand,” Daas told him. “Your trouble is you no longer have any fire in your balls.”
“Did I say gentlemen?” Toller cut in, quelling Umol’s obscene response. “Children, we have work to do, and nobody wants our task completed faster than I, so let us make sure we know what we are undertaking.”
He spoke mildly, knowing from the little he could see of their faces that his companions were pleased with the success of the air jets and that their confidence in the project had increased accordingly. For the next few minutes he rehearsed the sequential stages of the assembly plan in detail. The first step was to rotate the six ships through ninety degrees to bring the fortress sections into their operational attitudes, with their lateral portholes facing both planets. It would then be necessary to unclamp the false decks and fire short bursts on the jets to drive the balloons, still trailing the decks, a short distance away from the circular sections. Once the sections were floating free they could then be linked with ropes, drawn together and sealed to form two cylinders with closed ends.
At that point the work force was scheduled to split into two separate groups.
Those whose duty it was to man the fortresses would go inside them and prepare for their lengthy stay in the weightless zone. Meanwhile, the six pilots—each accompanied by a rigger— would begin returning the precious balloons and engines to Overland for use in further missions. The early stages of the descent were straightforward enough and caused no forebodings among the experienced pilots. It was a matter of rotating the stripped-down craft through a further ninety degrees, and— using the engines in the thrust mode—driving them a short distance into Overland’s gravitational field. The ships would be travelling upside down, something no commander liked doing, but that phase would last only a few hours, until they had regained enough weight to give them the balloonist’s much-cherished pendulum stability for the descent. A final rotation through half-a-circle would normalise the ships’ attitudes, putting Overland in its rightful place beneath the crews’ feet, where it would remain for the rest of the journey home.
So far the flight plan and its techniques were conventional —something which any surviving pilot from the Migration could have outlined in seconds—but the strictures of the crisis situation had yet to be applied. Toller could remember, with diamond clarity, all the relevant words from that first meeting with Chakkell and Zavotle, the words which told him that the sky and he had not yet tested each other to the limit…
“The descent is going to be the worst part,” Toller said. “Quite apart from the cold—which will be severe—the men are going to be sitting on an open platform, with thousands of miles of empty air beneath them. Just think of it! Trip on a rope and over the edge you go! It was bad enough in the old-style gondolas, but there you at least had the sidewalls to give you some sense of security. I don’t like it, liven—five days of that sort of thing would be a bit too much for any man. I think we…” He stopped speaking, surprised, as he saw that Zavotle was nodding his head in evident agreement.
“You’re absolutely right, quite apart from the fact that we simply cannot allow five days for the return,” Zavotle said. “We shall need you and the other pilots back on the ground again much sooner than that, to say nothing of the balloons and engine cores.”
“So…?”
Zavotle gave him a calm smile. “I suppose you have heard of parachutes?”
“Of course I’ve heard of parachutes,” Toller said impatiently. “The Air Service has been using them for at least ten years. What are you getting at?”
“The men must return by parachute.”
“Wonderful idea!” Toller clapped a hand to his forehead in case his sarcasm had not been noticed. “But—correct me if I’m wrong—does a man with a parachute not descend at roughly the same speed as a skyship?”
Zavotle’s smile became even more peaceful. “Only if the parachute has been opened.”
“Only if…” Toller walked around the small room, staring down at the floor, and returned to his chair. “Yes, I see what you mean. Obviously we can save some time if a man doesn’t deploy his parachute until he is well into the fall. At what height should he open it?”
“How about, say, one thousand feet?”
“No!” Toller’s reaction was immediate and instinctive. “You can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
Toller stared hard at Zavotle’s face, reading the familiar features in an unfamiliar way. “You remember the first time we entered the central blue, liven. The accident. We both looked over the side and watched Flenn being taken away from us. He fell more than a day!”
“He didn’t have a parachute.”
“But he fell for more than a day\” Toller pleaded, appalled at what the intervening years had done to Zavotle. “It’s too much to expect.”
“What’s the matter with you, Maraquine?” King Chakkell put in, his broad brown face showing exasperation. “The end result is the same whether a man falls for a day or a single minute—if he has no parachute he dies, and if he has a parachute he lives.”
“Majesty, would you like to take that drop?”
Chakkell gazed back at Toller in simple bafflement. “Where’s the relevance in your question?”
Unexpectedly, it was Zavotle who chose to reply. “Majesty, Lord Toller has practical cause for concern. We have no idea of the effects such a fall might have on a man. He might freeze to death… or asphyxiate… Or there may be ill effects of a different ilk—a pilot who was physically sound but insane would be of scant value to you.” Zavotle paused, his pencil tracing a strange design on the paper before him. “I suggest that, as I was the one who proposed the scheme, I should be among those who put it to the test.”
You had me fooled, you little weasel, Toller thought, listening to his former crewmate with a resurgence of his affection and respect. And, just for that, I will ensure that you remain where you belong—right here on the ground.
In general, there was little difference in outlook between the men who had volunteered for the mission and those who had simply been told they were taking part. Both groups understood very well that defying the King’s will in a time of war would result in summary execution, and some of the volunteers had simply been making a virtue out of necessity, but confirmation of the fact that they could fly independently of the ships and come to no harm had boosted the general morale. If we have not died thus far, the reasoning had been, perhaps there is no reason for us to die at all. The outward sign of that optimism had been the shouting with which the men filled the sky as they developed their new skills and prepared for the next phase of the undertaking.
But now, Toller noticed, they had again fallen silent.
The last of the balloons had been separated from its fortress section, and—burdened with only its circular false deck and engine unit—had retreated a short distance from the centre of activity. Insubstantial though they were, the sheer hugeness of the gas-filled envelopes had made them dominant features of the aerial environment. In the mind they were vast friendly entities with the power to transport humans safely from world to world —and now, suddenly, they were withdrawing their patronage, abandoning their minuscule dependants in the hostile blue emptiness.
Even Toller, committed to the enterprise as he was, felt an icy slithering in his gut as he took note of how small the unsupported fortress sections looked against the misted infinities all around. Until that point it had seemed to him that the worst thing a man could be called upon to do was to take the long drop to the planetary surface, but he now felt almost privileged in comparison to those who would remain in the weightless zone. Privileged, yet in another way—and the realisation jolted him —oddly cheated.