David Gerrold - The Flying Sorcerers

“I know,” he called back. “Wilville! Orbur!” he shouted to the outriggers. “How high are we?”

“At least a manheight. The airpushers are just out of the : waves —”

Purple unclipped his flashlight from his belt and aimed it at the balloons above. Only four still hung limp, the rest were swollen with the familiar and friendly bulge of hydrogen gas. He stepped to the side of the boat and aimed the light over the side. The water gleamed five manheights below.

“I will pull the plug,” I said. “It must be safe to drain the rest of this water now.” I splashed toward it; the water was I still knee-high in the boat.

“No!” shouted Purple and Shoogar together. Wilville and Orbur too. “Don’t touch that plug.”

“Huh?” I stopped, my hand on the bone cylinder.

“Don’t do it, Lant! Don’t touch the plug unless I tell you to!”

“But we’re so high above the water. Surely there’s no danger now.”

“I still have four balloons to refill. Where will I get the water I need if you will pull the plug?”

“Oh,” I said. I let go of it quickly.

“Wait a minute,” Shoogar said suddenly, “You can’t use that water for your hydrogen gas. That’s ballast water. It makes us go down, not up.”

“Shoogar, it’s water. Just water,” Purple said patiently.

“But it’s symbological nonsense to think that the same water can make us go in two directions!” And then Shoogar could only make gulping sounds. For Purple had casually dipped up a double handful of water from the bottom of the boat, and was drinking it. Drinking the ballast !

Shoogar choked m impotent rage; he tottered off.

“Why don’t you go sit down too?” Purple suggested to me. “Let me worry about the boat.”

“All right,” I shrugged and sat down on a bench. it was cold and wet like everything else on the Cathawk . From the stern came the sounds of damp rigging being pulled and stretched. Purple was just starting to fill another windbag.

We sailed on through the dark, shivering and miserable. Wilville and Orbur pumped and chanted. Purple filled the balloons. Shoogar and I froze.

A wind came up then and started pushing us north. Any Other time we might have appreciated it. In this sodden darkness though, it only set our teeth to chattering. Wilville and Orbur gave up on their pedaling then — it was too cold to continue. They huddled at the wet bottom of the boat with the rest of us. After a while even Purple joined us. Being wrapped with cold soaking blankets was still better than being exposed to the biting upper air.

Or should have been. My fingers were so numb, I could not even pull the icy cloth tighter about myself.

Sleep was impossible. I muttered constantly. “There’s no such thing as warm, Lant. It’s all your imagination. you’ll never be warm again. You’d better get used to freezing, Lant —”

When Ouells — bright blue and tiny — snapped up over the eastern horizon an hour later, we were still damp with chill, and there was a thin layer of frost on everything in the boat.

The morning was crisp, but rapidly warming.

The sea was a plate of restless blue far below. We seemed higher than we’d ever been in the airship. The edge of the world was almost curved.

Purple said that was an optical illusion. We were much too low to see any real curvature. Gibberish again.

We stretched the blankets across the rigging to dry them in the sun. Our togas as well. Even Purple shed his impact suit and stretched out against the bright morning.

The wind continued to blow steadily north, and Wilville and Orbur were resting on their outrigger cots.

I splashed around in the front of the boat, looking for any foodstuffs that either Purple or the water had missed. I found a half of a sour melon and glumly split it with Shoo-gar. None of the rest wanted any.

We still had water in the airboat, up to our knees, but Purple refused to let us dump it. “Look how high we are already,” he said. “There’s no point to throwing this water away. Later, when the windbags leak a little more, then we’ll need it. Besides, I may want to make some more hydrogen first.”

“Do you have enough electrissy?”

He smiled sheeplishly. “I — uh, I sort of miscalculated when I filled windbags. I didn’t realize they still had as much hydrogen in them as they did. I have enough power left to fill three airbags. Or to fill four if I don’t want to call my flying egg down.” He looked about him. “That should be enough. We should have at least four days of flying time left before the balloons are too weak again and I’m out of power. If we can’t make it by then, we’ll never make it.”

We sailed on hungrily; and steadily, steadily north.

We fought crosswinds for a while, but always the general direction of our motion was north.

We had lost our course line of hills under the water sometime during the thunderstorm. That we had been unable to find it again didn’t worry Purple as much as it might have. He still had measuring devices, and he charted our course by them.

When I asked him about it, he shrugged it off, “Well, it seemed like a good idea, Lant — but I think those hills of yours are too deeply submerged now to be seen. Maybe we’ll be lucky though, and see them again when we get over shallower water.”

The next day, he recharged the windbags, leaving himself only enough power to fill two bags completely until full, or one windbag and a call to his flying egg.

Toward evening we finally pulled the plug and drained away the knee-high water which had been our companion for the last two days. “I had thought his trip was going to be over water,” Shoogar grumbled, “not through it.”

Purple grinned as he watched the water spill away. We were too high to see if we were rising, but the feel of the craft told us that we were. He said, “But it was obvious, Shoogar, we should have thought of it sooner — always keep a quantity of water in the boat. It helps us to balance the craft so that it doesn’t rock so much when we move. It’s there for re-charging the airbags — we never have to go down to the water any more. And we can use it as ballast too.”

“I tell you that that’s nonsense!” Shoogar exploded. “Ballast, drinking water, gas-making water, wash water — What kind of a spell is it when you arbitrarily change the name of the object to suit your needs?”

And he stamped off to the bow to sulk, his sandals making wet squishy sounds as he went.

He was still there when darkness came, peering forward at the sky and chanting a moon-bringer spell.

It was Orbur who spotted our course line again. Far off to the left, a lighter-colored patch of sea could be seen.

We were lower now, despite the dumping of six bags of water. Purple said it was due to the airbags leaking faster than before. They were stretching, he said, and the seams weren’t as strong as he had hoped. He ordered the boys to come about and head the boat in a course that would eventually bring us over the spine of hills again.

I chewed thoughtfully on a lump of moldy hardbread. That the hills were visible under the water again meant that we were nearing shallower seas. Soon we might be over land, and our journey would be over.

The windbags above were taut, but rippling slightly in the wind. Soon the ripplings would increase some more, folds of cloth would hang loose, the bags would droop heavily — and all the while we would descend lower and lower.

Purple began emptying the last of the ballast bags — all except two which we would save for drinking water. Shoogar moaned, when he said that. The boat rose some as he dumped the ballast, but not by any significant amount. “Well, that’s it,” he said. “We make it on the gas we’ve got left, or not at all.”