Jack McDevitt - Eternity Road

“We’ll top it off tomorrow, before we leave,” said Claver.

The pump was mounted on a cart. He threw a couple of covers over it, said goodnight to his guests, and went inside.

Quait put an arm around Chaka. “You excited?”

“Yes. It’s been a long haul, and I’m anxious to see the end of it.”

“I hope it doesn’t fizzle.”

“The project?” She moved dose to him. “Or the balloon?”

Next day, they brought aboard a supply of fruit, water, dried fish, and meat. Drawn by the activity, a small crowd of children and adults arrived to see them off. The adults, of whom there were about twenty, insisted on shaking hands with Claver and each of his passengers. “Good luck,” they said. As if they would need it. The kids yelped and chased one another around the gondola.

Claver added a rope ladder to their supplies and handed out pairs of smoked goggles. He made a show of adjusting his (which were somewhat flashier than their mates), zipped up a leather jacket, threw a white scarf around his neck, and announced that it was time to go. Two burly volunteers separated themselves from the crowd and took up posts beside dangling ropes on either side of the wooden framework.

The Illyrians climbed in. Flojian whispered a prayer, Chaka glanced at the envelope, and Quait took a final lingering look at the ground. Claver was last to come aboard. He asked if they were ready and, on receiving assent, signaled the two volunteers. They tugged on the ropes, the wooden framework creaked, and the balloon began to rise.

A loud cheer went up with them. People stopped in roads and fields to wave. Others, apparently drawn by the commotion, came out of houses, looked up, and joined in.

Nothing in Quait’s life, not getting shot at, not the maglev, not even the ghostly voice in Union Station, quite touched his primal fears as near to the bone as did watching the earth fall away. He’d never been bothered by heights, and was surprised that rising above the treetops induced such an unseemly sensation. The others, to his annoyance, seemed to be enjoying the experience.

“We’ll not only be flying over terra incognita,” said Claver, “but you’ll be interested in knowing that we’ll be going almost twice as far from home as the balloon has ever traveled before.” If that piece of information excited the old man, it did nothing to ease Quait’s apprehension.

“Look at these.” Claver indicated two lines that hung down from the interior of the balloon. One carried a yellow flag, the other a red. “This one,” the yellow one, “controls the hydrogen valve on top. This one,” the red, “you already know about. It’s the rip-panel.” He nodded somberly. “It would be a good idea if nobody touches either. Okay?”

Quait looked east across rolling countryside, farms and orchards and a tangle of roads and rivers fading gradually to forest. There were vehicles on the roads, boats in the rivers, people in the fields. Then these too were gone, and they drifted above pure wilderness. He listened to the wind, to the creaking of the gondola, to the barking of a distant dog.

“It’s lovely,” said Chaka.

Quait had looked down from high places before, from mountaintops and the Iron Pyramid and the bridge on which they’d lost Silas. But this was a different order of experience altogether. It incorporated a disconnectedness, a sense of having broken away from the ground, a suggestion of both freedom and vulnerability. If it could not be said that he was enjoying the ride, he could at least understand why others might become addicted to floating in the clouds.

But they were drifting south. The wrong way.

“Be patient,” said Claver. “We have to find a friendly wind current.” With which remark he plunged a scoop into one of the sandbags attached to the handrail, filled it, and gave the sand to the sky. The balloon went higher.

“You’re sure we won’t have any trouble getting down,” said Quait.

Claver squeezed his shoulder. “None whatever, my young friend. I can assure you that eventually, one way or another, we will get down.”

Flojian was working on a diagram of the balloon’s inflating appendix, but the wind kept worrying at the paper until he finally gave up. He seemed far more interested in the mechanics of the vehicle than he did in the view.

Claver found his wind and they drifted through the afternoon, moving at a steady clip toward the northeast. “I’d estimate about thirty miles an hour,” he said. Quait was impressed. Thirty miles needed a day and a half on the ground.

There were Roadmaker towns, often no more than a few charred ruins.

“You get a better sense of the scale of destruction from up here.” Claver adjusted his goggles. He did that a lot.

“The Plague must have been terrible,” said Flojian.

“That’s a safe guess.” Claver looked down. “There were a lot of people during Roadmaker times. You ever see Boston or New York? Oh, you’d know if you had. Very big. Enormous. Not anything like Brockett. You get a good sickness into that population, it’d run wild.”

They picked up a dirt road and followed it east.

“How high are we?” asked Chaka.

Claver sucked his lips. “About a mile and a half.”

The road came to a river, which it leaped on a new log bridge. A stockade guarded the near side. “The frontier,” Claver explained. Thick forest and rugged hills ran to the horizon. Even the road seemed to fade out. “We’ll have the same problem eventually.”

“Plague?” asked Flojian.

“Population. If we come back in thirty, forty years, this’ll all be farmland.”

By sundown they were crossing a Roadmaker double highway. It came out of the north, broad and straight, and from their altitude it looked unbroken. Ahead, a range of white-capped peaks loomed.

It was cold, and getting colder. They distributed the blankets and pulled them around their shoulders. “If we went lower,” suggested Flojian, “we might get warmer air.”

“Might,” said Claver. “We might also Ret currents that are going the wrong way. We don’t have hydrogen and ballast to waste running up and down.”

They ate and watched the mountains approach. The land rose under them, snow and granite and forest. It mounted up and up, gradually at first, and then sharply, and they were drifting over peaks so close they could smell the spruce. And then the land fell away again. The sun went down and the darkness below went on forever.

A full moon rose. ‘With a little bit of luck,” said Claver, “we should be over the ocean by dawn.”

They arranged a rotating night watch.

Claver explained that they wanted to keep the north star forty-five degrees off the port side of their line of advance. “Obviously, we won’t maintain that with any degree of exactitude. But if we get too far off course, say thirty degrees or more for longer than a few minutes, wake me.”

They managed some privacy by holding a blanket for one another. A bucket hung from the underside of the craft, and this was hauled aboard when needed, and after use its contents were dumped. Flojian and Claver exchanged amused comments about the risks for travelers on the ground.

Quait took the first watch. Chaka stayed close to him for a while, and he was grateful for her warmth. Then she climbed beneath a blanket and was quickly asleep, rocked by the gentle movements of the gondola.

Following Claver’s suggested method, Quait picked out a landmark, a hill, a patch of trees, a river bend, occasionally a mountain, anything that was forty-five degrees forward of the north star. Then he settled down to watch it draw nearer. As long as it continued to do so in a more or less straightforward manner, he was satisfied. On one occasion, a highway intersection that he was guiding on veered far to starboard. That meant the balloon had begun to move almost due north. He woke the pilot.