Heavy Planet

and her fire hot. The great expanse of shimmering, nearly transparent fabric amused him; like the mate, he was thinking of Reejaaren, though in this case it was of what the interpreter?s reaction would be if he saw the use to which his material was being put. Not possible to trust sewn seams, indeed! Barlennan?s own people knew a thing or two, even without friendly Flyers to tell them. He had patched sails with the stuff before they were ten thousand miles from the island where it had been obtained, and his seams had held even in front of the valley of wind. He slipped through the opening in the rail, made sure it was secured behind him, and glanced into the fire pit, which was lined with metal foil from a condenser the Flyers had donated. All the cordage seemed sound and taut; he nodded to the crewmen. One heaped another few sticks on the glowing, flameless fire in the pit; the other released the moorings. Gently, her forty-foot sphere of fabric bulging with hot air, the new Bree lifted from the plateau and drifted riverward on the light breeze.

UNDER

“That looks all right. Come aboard, Cookie. Then reach out and light it. Hars, lift — NOW!” Neither crewman acknowledged the orders verbally; they acted. Karondrasee whipped aboard in normal centipede fashion, scooped a coal from the lifting fire into the long spoon waiting for the purpose beside the furnace, reached through the handiest crenellation in the Bree’s mostly solid gunwale, and steadied the burning fragment over the frayed-out end of rope fuse beside the basket. He wasn’t bothered by the form of address; there was need for haste, “Cookie” was shorter than “Flight Engineer,” the duties overlapped heavily, and he was filling both of them. He was, however, annoyed and uneasy for other reasons; he had had to spend many days treating the three lengths of cord with meat juice and, as he saw it, wasting two of them. As cook of the old Bree’s crew he was used to seeing the results of his labors vanish, but he disliked seeing them burn up. That was the annoying part. He was uneasy as well, because things might not work this time as they had on the two test burns. The first had not been dangerous, of course; it had simply served to show whether his juice treatment would really turn rope into a useful fuse. That sample was short enough to need only a day or so to make. The second test should either not have worked at all or produced a simple, harmless fire fountain. By doing the latter it had encouraged everyone. Now the third and potentially most dangerous trial was under way. The captain seemed unsure, too. He was watching the fuse as closely as Karondrasee was. So was Sherrer. Hars was not. He was tending his lifting fire and eyeing the tensely swollen bag of the third Bree. He knew enough about the present test to want the ship to lift quickly, but if it rose too quickly, that would of course be the captain’s fault. Hars was obeying orders. That last thought was also in Barlennan’s mind, and he was watching the delivery of the bit of fire tensely. If he had given Hars his order too soon— Strictly speaking, he had. He felt the basket’s deck stir under him, and saw the figures on the Flyers’ instrument change. He would have stopped breathing for a moment if he had been a breather. Karondrasee, however, also knew the plan, knew what would have to be done if the fuse failed to light, and certainly didn’t want to get out and push the coal to the right place while the balloon rose without him. As he saw his spoon rising slowly from its target, he tipped it over without waiting for an order. No one actually saw the coal drop; falling, here, was much too fast for even Mesklinite vision. Cook and captain did see, as the air below it was compressed enough to speed its combustion rate by perhaps an order of magnitude, a sudden flash on the ground half an inch to one side of the fuse end. Before either could comment or even curse, the rope ignited — apparently from radiation, but conceivably from a flying spark, though neither witness could vouch for the latter. They didn’t really care; the wadded rope-end was starting to glow, and that was all that mattered. “Lighted all right?”

“Yes.” Barlennan didn’t bother to look at the block of polymer from which the question had emerged. “Hars, up as fast as you can. Never mind checking wind. I’d like to keep on this side of the rock to see what happens, but getting to the other may be safer and staying out of reach will be safest of all. I wish someone knew what ‘out of reach’ was, but if we do blow that way up will mean a lot more than sideways.”

“Right, Captain. Up it is.” Up it was. Not rapidly; it took a lot of lift to start an upward motion near Mesklin’s south pole, even though once started acceleration tended to be high. That was why more than a thousand feet of fuse had been laid out, and the original test of its burn rate had been made. “Please keep this eye aimed at the rock, wherever we go.” The block spoke again. “Right. Sherrer will see to it,” the captain responded, still without looking at the communicator. “We have you blocked up far enough to look over the rail already, and he’ll wedge the back up more if it’s needed.”

“Are you set to turn it too, or will it be easier to rotate the whole balloon?”

“Much easier, though it’ll cost a little lift. It will also make it unnecessary for you to look across the fire. Don’t worry yet, it should take half a day to burn down.”

“I never worry. I just wonder.” Jeanette Parkos, who had taken up Charles Lackland’s communication duties when health had forced him to return to Earth, was rich in comments like that. She had greatly improved Barlennan’s Spacelang in the last few thousand days, and to his surprise and in spite of her alien hearing and vocal limitations she already spoke Stennish much more fluently and clearly than her predecessor ever had. “I’d appreciate a bit of down tilt whenever Sherrer can provide it,” she now suggested.?I can?t see up to the horizon, but I can?t see down enough for anything within a couple of miles, either. You?re a lot closer to the rock than that, according to the tracker readout, and I hope you?re closer still when it goes. I sometimes wish this thing had a wider field of view. Of course, I sometimes wish it could zoom closer too.? Barlennan was not entirely sure that he shared the hope, though he wanted a good view himself. The Flyer was on Toorey, Mesklin’s inner moon. Her communicator would let her see what went on. The closer to the rock the better for her, but nothing could, presumably, happen to her at that distance. Barlennan lacked both the distance and the seeing equipment, and wasn’t sure which he missed more. The Flyers had assured him that there couldn’t possibly be enough energy in the propellant cell now being tested to lift the rock above it any significant distance, but the Flyers had been wrong before. He remembered vividly the Foucault pendulum fiasco; they had been certain it would give a convincing demonstration, this close to the pole, that Mesklin rather than the sky was doing the spinning. Unfortunately no one, native or alien, had been able to observe the six-inch pendulum’s plane of motion; its period was too short, and like any tuning fork its vibration had been damped out by the air a few seconds after it had been started. They had all heard it, of course. None of the Flyers seemed to remember that now. Barlennan had not seen an explosive in action since Lackland had used his tank’s gun so many thousands of days before, since the previous cell test had produced only the hoped-for fire fountain; but he had been told in detail how such substances were used elsewhere in the universe. These accounts, and a vivid memory of the effect of the shells Lackland had used, left him wondering why no one seemed to worry about the behavior of pieces of the rock. Unlike Jeanette, Barlennan was a rather efficient worrier; he had not raised the question with her because he knew the aliens were extremely knowledgeable in spite of their occasional slips, and he still didn’t like to look ignorant. Answers beginning with “Of course” bothered him, especially in front of his crew, most of whom were now fairly fluent in the alien common language. “Can you tell if it’s still burning, and how far it has to go?” the Flyer queried. “’Fraid not. The fire doesn’t give any light to speak of by daylight. Too bad there’s no night now — though if there were, we’d have to plan pretty tightly so the fire would reach the cell by daylight and we could see what happens to the rock.”

“It might have helped, but since we couldn’t be sure just when the fuse would run out — well, it’s academic anyway. Even if you could control your landing point well enough you’d probably not have time to get there now, get out, cut the fuse, and start over. We’ll just wait and hope. Good work, Sher; I think I see the rock now, though I can’t be sure it’s the right one. It looks like the pictures we got before, but there are such a lot of them?rocks, I mean?this close to the edge of the plateau that I could be wrong. Too bad that fuse doesn?t smoke.? Since cooking fires on Mesklin don’t normally smoke either and other kinds of fire are extremely rare, some minutes were used in explaining the last word; but someone remembered the Stennish for “fog” eventually, and there remained an unknowable length of suspense time when interpretation was managed. The earlier tests had given the Flyers some idea of the fuse burning rate, but the two had disagreed by over ten percent. Tension mounted, therefore, as the minutes passed. Especially for the captain, as Bree Three was drifting toward the rock, keeping Sherrer busy and Barlennan worried. Their height should