David Gerrold - The Flying Sorcerers

Shouting and cheering, the men dragged the Cathawk along, like a child with one of Purple’s tiny airbags. The villagers waved excitedly at the heroes above. Wilville and Orbur had ceased their pedaling and were waving back, big foolish grins across their faces.

The flight controllers were just positioning the airboat above the landing rack when one of them called, “Wait! — If Purple leaves in this boat, our tokens won’t be worth anything.”

The others looked at him, “So what?”

“We’ve got to do something about it —”

Meanwhile, Purple was shouting, “The landing cradle! The landing cradle! Pull us to the landing cradle!”

They ignored him while they argued amongst themselves. Trone was insisting that they obey his orders, but the others were too insistent and they ignored him. Finally one of the men shouted skyward, “We’re going on strike, Purple!”

“Huh? What’s that?”

The flight controllers are going on strike —”

“The what?!!”

“We want you to guarantee your tokens!”

“Of course, of course! Anything —”

Suddenly we saw Shoogar’s head over the railing. He had a ball of itching balls in his hand, and he was taking careful aim at us below. Three of the flight controllers started to let go of their ropes, but their leader marshaled them back. “If you drop it, Shoogar, we’ll let go and you’ll never get down!”

I backed away. I knew Shoogar.

Sure enough, he dropped it. It struck and burst and tiny flecks of black spotted the air, alighting on the nearest people — the ground crew.

From the air came Shoogar’s voice, “If you want to be cured, pull us down!”

Some of the men were trying to rub the black flecks away. Others had let go of their ropes and were rolling on the ground. The Cathawk swung out of position.

Shoogar called, “In about an hour you’re all going to be screaming for a magician!”

That did it. They swarmed for the ropes and started pulling.

Shoogar apparently wanted to drop more itch balls, but Purple was climbing down from the rigging and motioning frantically. Wilville and Orbur, no longer needed on the airpushers, slung them up into the outriggers exactly as planned, and began climbing back into the boat proper. They too were remonstrating with Shoogar.

“No more itch balls! We’re pulling! We’re pulling!” called the flight controllers.

Shoogar, Wilville and Orbur vanished below the side of the boat. There were curses and muffled noises. Purple was peering over the side and directing the landing manuever, “All right, all right — easy now. Watch the keel, the keel! Pull us to the landing cradle — the cradle! Don’t snap the keel!”

Grumbling and cursing the men pulled the boat down and into the cradle. They looped their ropes loosely around stakes in the ground. Gradually the boat was hauled down out of the sky. The keel slid into its slot in the landing frame, and I heaved a sigh of relief.

A gust of wind caught the clustered windbags then, just at the right angle and the wrong moment — there was a cra-a-ack! of bambooze. The keel had snapped.

Purple leapt out of the boat cursing. It bounced back into the air, but the men pulled it down again. Others dragged sandbags over, and quickly tossed them into the boat. It hit the cradle with a thump.

Wilville and Orbur got off Shoogar then. They had been holding him down on the floor of the boat. The three scrambled out.

Even the sandbags were not enough then. A sudden gust of wind caught the boat and swept it down the slope, bouncing and gliding. It was too heavy to fly with the sandbags in it, but too light to resist the force of the wind. It swept down the slope and into the water.

Ang’s fisherboys had to recover it.

When he saw it bobbing in the water, its outriggers balancing it gently against the waves, Purple’s only comment was, “H’m, I guess it didn’t need a keel after all.”

The next few days were busy ones indeed.

The waters had risen higher than ever, even to the middle slopes of the Upper Village. The tents which had served us so well in our journey across the desert were brought out again, so that affected families could move up to the Crag itself.

Trone and his crew of ground controllers carried the airboat back up to the Crag. They had little difficulty because the airbags offset most of the boatframe’s weight.

After some additional modifications and repair work by Wilville and Orbur, the last four balloons were added. This time there was more than enough ballast in the boat, and extra mooring ropes to hold it down.

We did not slow down the generator teams though. Purple attached the lead wires to his battery, and the output of all four machines was stored in that tiny device. Once I asked Purple about it, and he explained that as far as we were concerned the battery could hold an almost infinite amount of power.

There were advantages to its use. For one thing, Purple could release power at any rate he chose. It might take two hundred men five days to pump up all sixteen balloons, but if Purple had stored all that pedaled electrissy in his battery, he could fill the airbags almost as fast as we could add water to the pots and change the fittings on the funnels.

So it did not matter that the balloons up on the Crag were starting to droop. Purple would recharge them just before his departure. He planned to leave after two more hands of days had passed. That way, he estimated, he would have enough power to recharge the balloons two and a half times — maybe more.

Also, he said, he did not want to recharge the balloons before then because so much stored hydrogen could be dangerous. And this would give him a chance to measure their rate of leakage even more accurately.

“Danger?” I asked, when he said this. “What kind of danger?”

“Fire,” he said, “or sparks . That’s why we can’t even take a bicycle type electrissy maker with us. Besides not being fast enough — even with four people working it — it makes sparks. A spark could set everything off.”

A spark, he explained, was a very small dot of lightning. “Remember the way my housetree exploded?”

Lightning? Was that what we were working with? Was it lightning that fought back when we turned the pedals of the generators?

I shuddered — lightning! — Purple was definitely not one for half-measures!

He had proven it now. While the teams of men continued their roaring competitions on the generators, while Wilville and Orbur tended to the further provisioning of the Cathawk , Purple went about healing every sick person he could find.

“It looks like I can replace my first-aid kit pretty soon,” he told me. “I was saving it because I might need it myself, but now — might as well make use of it.” He cured Hinc the Hairless and Farg the Weaver; both began to grow new hair. Other men lost the sores they had carried for so many hands of hands of days — Purple blew wet air onto their skins from a tiny cylinder in his medicine kit, and within hours their flesh began to heal.

He didn’t stop with the men. He cured the wives of their hairlessness too. He treated Little Gortik, a boy of four conjunctions, whose arm had been small and withered from the day he was born. “Forced regeneration,” Purple had chanted over the boy, and had made him swallow two oddly translucent capsules. Now the boy’s bones had gone soft, and the arm seemed to be straightening out.

Purple moved daily about the Upper Village and among the tents above the timberline, with his spell kit in his hand and a fierce, eager light in his eyes, as if he suspected sick people were hiding from him.

When Zone the Vender fell out of a tree and broke his back, Purple actually came at a dead run! He reached Zone before the man could finish dying; he sprayed Zone’s back with something that went right through the skin, and forbade him to move at all until he could wiggle his toes again. He was there now, beneath the tree that had nearly killed him, while his wife fed him and changed his blankets. He was not dying, but he was getting terribly bored, and Purple had taken all his tokens.