“Are you okay?” Bell asked his wife.
“I’d be better if your rescue plans weren’t always so cockeyed.”
“Not always,” Bell said in self-defense. “But like you like to say, I’m always either at the right place at the wrong time or the wrong place at the right one.”
She recognized her words. “So long as you’re not at the wrong place at the wrong time. What happens now?”
“Don’t forget this is my second time in this predicament. As more gas escapes through what must be by now multiple tears in the envelope, we’ll drift back to earth like a couple aeronauts in a balloon. The gas seems to be venting at a slow enough pace to make our journey leisurely and hopefully coming to a soft end.”
“How far out to sea were we?”
“Not sure, thirty or so miles if I’d have to guess.”
“Can we drift that far?”
“World record was just broken last year. They went for over twelve hundred miles.”
“Please tell me it was in a leaky torn-up airship?”
“Special-built balloon, sorry to say.”
“Like I said, cockeyed,” Marion said in a teasing pout. “Next time whisk me away in one of those or don’t bother coming for me at all.”
Bell couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of their situation and his beloved’s ability to make light of it so easily. Having come so close to death, most people would have broken down in tears, but not his Marion. She was probably already trying to work out how to film such an escape as this for her next motion picture.
The hatch was only ten feet above where they clung to the superstructure. Bell mapped out a climbing route and used handholds or the circular cutouts in individual support beams to clamber up to it. He forced open the hatch. Because they were drifting with the wind, he was met by an absolute silence, as profound as an empty cathedral. He studied the horizon but saw nothing. The nose rotated ever so slowly, eventually giving him a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama. There was no indication of land or distant lights. He wasn’t even sure if they were heading toward shore.
He climbed back to his perch next to Marion. They talked about their adventures since they’d parted at the dock near Panama City. She was jealous of his flight. She would have loved to have gone along and filmed the canal from the air.
Every half hour, by Bell’s wristwatch, he climbed up to see if any landmarks were visible and every time he climbed back to report they still had the world all to themselves. He estimated they were at an altitude of three thousand feet and knew the air would be uncomfortably cold if they weren’t in the tropics.
As the rising sun rouged the eastern sky Bell caught sight of land, or more accurately the creaming crests of waves breaking onto a beach. He shouted triumphantly.
“Land?” Marion yelled up to him.
“I see a beach. We’re too high, though. I think we’re going to drift right past, and then it’s nothing but jungle for fifty miles until we reach the Pacific.”
“We could try for the transcontinental balloon record,” Marion suggested, half joking.
“Now who’s cockeyed?”
The stairwell and hallway connecting the entry hatch to the gondolas had a solid metal decking but the walls and ceiling were nothing more than thin cotton cloth stretched between structural columns and spars. Bell cut through a wall with his boot knife to expose the shiny outer skin of the enormous hydrogen sack. In a million places it bulged through the mesh netting designed to keep it in place. Because they had sunk even lower into the atmosphere, the pressure against the giant bladder was building faster than it could vent. Bell didn’t know how long it could go before it burst and he feared it popping like a child’s rubber balloon when he pressed into it with his knife.
The blade sliced cleanly and he felt a rush of invisible hydrogen blow past his arm out the open hatch above his head. He cut more and more holes, reaching as far as he could without actually climbing out onto the bag. When he felt himself getting woozy from breathing more hydrogen than clean air, he ducked down below the cloud of leaking gas and breathed deeply to clear his lungs and mind.
Having filled his lungs to capacity, he climbed through the hissing gas cloud to poke his head out the hatch to determine if they were sinking at the proper angle. It took a few seconds to estimate they would land in the shallows just behind the breaking waves. Perfect.
He rejoined his wife inside the hull. “We should climb down as low as possible so we can jump into the water before this thing hits. It likely won’t explode, but it weighs a ton, and I have no idea which way it’s going to tumble.”
“Makes sense.”
“Just take your time and move slowly.”
“Right.”
As careful as possible, the pair made their way down to the scarred area where the airship had torn itself in two. A slip now would be fatal. There was nothing at the end of the corridor except a hole that looked down to the sea from a thousand feet up. They moved like mountaineers, always making sure they had contact with both hands and a foot, or both feet and a hand. Or, as sailors always say, “One hand for yourself, one for the ship.”
Closer to the bottom, the destruction was extreme, with torn metal struts wrenched out of position, cables and wires dangling, and the airship’s ripped outer skin flapping in the gentle air currents wafting through the improvised balloon.
The walls of the hallway had been
