Anti-Ice

rugs and into the metal beneath.

As if from a great distance I heard the voice of Holden. “May God preserve us,” he cried. “The Phaeton is aloft!”

With a great effort I lifted my head once more to the port. Now the landscape was curved over on itself, an inverted blue bowl; but still there was the noise, the vibration, the stink of my own blood—

Darkness folded around me.

5 ABOVE THE AIR

It was as if I lay in the softest feather-bed in the world. I drifted in silence, content to doze like a child.

“…Ned? Ned, can you hear my voice?”

The words stirred my awareness. At first I resisted their probing, but the voice persisted, and at last I felt myself bobbing like a cork to the surface of consciousness.

I opened my eyes. The round face of Holden hovered over me, bearing every expression of concern; he had lost his cummerbund, his collar and tie were crumpled and pulled around through a right- angle, and his mussed hair appeared oddly to float around his face, like an oiled, black halo.

“Holden.” I found my throat was dry, and the taste of blood lingered in my mouth.

“Are you all right? Can you sit up?”

I lay there for a moment, allowing the sensations of my body, my limbs, to run through my mind. “I certainly feel stiff, as if I have been worked over by a few toughs; and yet I feel remarkably comfortable.” I turned my head, half-expecting to find that I was lying on some form of bunk bed, but only a rug—bloodstained—lay beneath me. “How long have I been out?”

Holden took my shoulder and lifted me to a sitting position; I seemed to bounce oddly on the Turkish rug and my stomach lurched briefly, as if I were falling. I dismissed this as dizziness. “Only a few minutes,” Holden said, “but—Ned, our situation has changed. I think you should prepare yourself for a shock.”

“A shock?”

I glanced around the craft. Holden himself was crouched on the rug, grasping its edge as if his life depended on it; poor Pocket remained strapped into his chair, his face as clammy as a plucked chicken.

And Traveller?

Sir Josiah stood before a porthole, his stovepipe screwed tightly to his head. In one hand he held a small notebook and pencil, and the other hand he held between his face and the window with fingers outstretched; blue-white light streamed in through the window, casting highlights from the polished platinum fixed to his face. (The other windows were darkened, I noticed, and the Cabin’s acetylene lamps had been lit.)

Then I wondered if I were still dreaming.

I have said that Traveller stood before his port, and such was indeed my impression on first glance; but as I studied him more closely I observed that his large shoes were some four inches above the oilskin. Indeed, a slight bend in Traveller’s knees allowed me to inspect the manufacturer’s name imprinted on the soles.

Thus Sir Josiah floated in the air like some illusionist, apparently without support.

I looked up into Holden’s face. His hand was on my shoulder. “Steady, now, Ned. Take it one item at a time—”

A wave of panic swept over me. “Holden, am I losing my mind?” I pushed at the rug with my hands, intending to draw my legs under me and stand up. The rug drifted from beneath my fingers, and I sailed into the air as if drawn by an invisible string. I scrabbled at the rug, first with my hands, then with the tips of my boots, but to no avail; and soon I was stranded, adrift in the air, arms and legs outstretched like some flailing starfish.

“Holden! What is happening to me?”

Holden remained seated on the rug, his fingers wrapped around it. “Ned, come down from there.”

“If you’ll tell me how, I will,” I shouted with feeling. Now, with a soft impact, my neck and shoulders collided with the upper, curving hull of the chamber. I reached behind my back with both hands, seeking a purchase, but my fingers slid over the frustratingly sheer leather of the walls, and I succeeded only in pushing myself forward so that I hung upside down in the air. It was as if Holden hung absurdly from the ceiling, and Pocket was suspended from the straps of his chair, while the Great Eastern model in its glass case dangled like some nautical chandelier.

My stomach revolved.

A strong hand shot out and grabbed my arm. “In God’s name, Wickers, keep your breakfast down; we’d never get the damn place cleaned up.”

It was Traveller; with his bony ankles wrapped in chair straps like some frock-coated monkey’s he hauled me through a disconcerting 180 degrees and hurled me bodily toward the floor. I landed close to a chair; with relief I grabbed at it, pulled myself down and strapped in.

In the exertion Traveller’s hat had become dislodged. Now it hung in the air, rotating like a dandelion seed; with grunts of irritation Traveller swatted at it until the hat sailed into his arms, and then he jammed it safely back on his head.

With comparative normality restored—save for the disturbing propensity of my legs to hover in mid- air—I remarked to Holden, quite coolly in the circumstances, “I have no doubt this all has a rational explanation.”

“Oh, indeed.” He brushed a hand over his black hair, plastering it into comparative order. “Although I suspect you will not enjoy the answer.”

Traveller floated once more before a blue-lit porthole (a different one, I noted, showing that the mysterious blue light had moved about the ship). I said loudly, “Sir Josiah, since you are responsible for our entrapment within this aerial brougham, I think you owe us some explanation of our condition.”

Traveller stood—or rather floated—quite at ease in the air, one hand resting on the sill of the port. From a pocket he extracted his small humidor, opened it and drew out a cigarette and—leaving the humidor dangling in mid-air!—struck a match, and soon the air was filled with tendrils of acrid gas. Traveller then mercifully stowed away the acrobatic humidor. “What is it that makes young men so damnably pompous? Our situation is obvious,” he said briskly.

I opened my mouth and would have replied intemperately, but Holden stepped in smoothly. “You must recall our unscientific vocations, sir; events are not always as self-explanatory to us as they are perhaps to you.”

“For example,” I said frostily, “perhaps you would be good enough to supply an explanation of this damnable mid-air floating. Is it some phenomenon connected with flight above the ground?”

Traveller rubbed the stub of human nose which remained between his eyes. “Good God, what do they teach in the schools these days? Is the work of Sir Isaac Newton a closed book?”

Stubbornly I said, “Please describe how the eminent Sir Isaac is arranging for you to float about in the air like a human dust-mote.”

“The Phaeton’s engines have been turned off,” Traveller said. “Perhaps you noticed a difference in the ambient noise.”

I was startled; for, until Sir Josiah pointed it out, I had not noticed the silence of the Cabin.

My heart leapt. “Then we are on the ground. But where?” I gazed out of the darkened windows—noting that the odd blue light had shifted once more, so that it shone through still another port. “It is night-time outside. Have we traveled to a region of darkness?” My mind raced; perhaps we were in North America or some other distant land—or what if we were stranded in some untrodden jungle? “But surely we have nothing to fear,” I said rapidly. “All we need do is climb down from the craft and seek out the nearest British Consul; no city on Earth is without representation, and comfort and aid will be provided—”

“Ned.” Holden looked at me steadily, although I noticed that his plump hands, still wrapped around the carpet, were trembling. “You must be still and try to understand. We are rather further from any Consulate than you imagine.”

Traveller spoke slowly and simply, as if to a child. “Let us take this one step at a time. The engines are still. But we are not on the ground. Surely that is obvious, even to a diplomat. Instead—without the rocket propulsion