The Dark Design (43 page)

For all she knew, they might be dead again.

What did it matter now?

It did not matter. Then why the second flood of tears?

Well, folks, here we are again. This time it’s the big one. The final takeoff. Heigh-ho for the Big Grail, the Misty Tower, the house of the Santa Claus at the North Pole, the Saint Nick who gave us the gifts of resurrection, eternal youth, free food, booze, and tobacco.

“There must be at least a million people here. The stands are full, the hills are crowded, people are falling out of the trees. The police are having a hell of a time keeping order. It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it always? The uproar is really something, and I don’t think you can hear a word I’m saying even through this PA system. So, folks, up yours!

“Aha! Some of you heard that. Just kidding, folks, just trying to get your attention. Let me tell you again about the
Parseval.
I know that you have pamphlets describing this colossal airship, but most of you are illiterates. Not that it’s your fault. You speak Esperanto, but you’ve never had an opportunity to learn to read it. So here goes. Only, wait a moment while I moisten my parched throat with some skull-bloom.

“Ah! That was smoo-oo-ooth! The only trouble is that I’ve been quenching my thirst since before dawn, and I’m having trouble seeing straight. I hate to think of tomorrow morning, but what the hell. You have to pay for everything good in this world, not to mention the others.

“There she is, folks, though it’s hardly necessary to point her out to you. The
Parseval.
Named by Firebrass for the man who first suggested that the airship be built though there was a lot of argument at first about what name’d be painted on her silver sides.

“Third Mate Metzing wanted to name her the
Graf Zeppelin III,
after the man who was responsible for the first airship commercial line and chiefly responsible for the military Zeppelins.

“First Mate Gulbirra thought that she ought to be called
Adam and Eve,
after the whole human race, since she represents all of us. She also suggested
Queen of the Skies
and
Titania.
A little bit of female chauvinism there.
Titania
sounds too much like
Titanic,
anyway, and you know what happened to that ship.

“No, you don’t. I forgot most of you never heard of her.

“One of the engineers, I forget his name at the moment, he was a crewman on the ill-fated
Shenandoah,
wanted to name her
Silver Cloud.
That was the name of the airship in a book called
Tom Swift and His Big Dirigible.

“Another wanted to name her the
Henri Giffard
after the Frenchman who flew the first self-propelled lighter-than-air craft. Too bad old Henri couldn’t be here to see the culmination of the airship, the acme of dirigible art, the last and the best and the greatest of all aerial vessels. Too bad the whole human race can’t be here to witness this challenge to the gods, the flying gauntlet flung against the face of the powers on high!

“Pardon me a moment, folks. Time for another libation to the gods to be poured down this dry throat instead of being wasted by pouring on the ground.

“Aaah! Mighty good, folks! Drink up! The liquor’s free, compliments of the house, which is the nation of Parolando.

“So, folks, our esteemed ex-president, Milton Firebrass, ex-American, ex-astronaut, decided to call this colossus the
Parseval.
Since he’s the chief honcho, the big enchilada, the boss, that’s what she’s titled.

“So… oh, yeah, I started to give you her statistics. Captain Firebrass wanted to build the biggest dirigible ever built, and he did. She’s also the biggest that will ever be built, since there won’t be any more. Maybe he should have called her
The Last Is the Best.

“Anyway, the
Parseval
is 2680 feet or 820 meters long. Its widest diameter is 1112 feet or 328 meters. Its gas capacity is 120,000,000 cubic feet or 6,360,000 cubic meters.

“The skin is of stressed duraluminum and it contains eight large gas cells with smaller cells in the nose and tail fairings. Originally, she was to have thirteen gondolas suspended outside the hull, the control gondola and twelve motor gondolas, each containing two motors. This exterior mounting was required because of danger from the highly flammable hydrogen. But tests of the gas-cell material, the Riverdragon intestinal layers, showed that it did pass some gas—that’s a joke, folks!—and so Firebrass ordered his scientists to make a plastic material that wouldn’t—in a manner of speaking—break wind.

“They did so—when Firebrass says jump, everybody sets a new record—and… ? What? My assistant, Randy, says everybody can’t set a record at once. Who cares? Anyway, the hydrogen leakage is nil.

“So, the control room and all the motors are inside the hull except for those in the nose and tail gondolas.

“The hydrogen, by the way, is 99.999 percent pure.

“In addition to the crew of ninety-eight men and two women, the
Parseval
will carry two helicopters, each with a thirty-two-person capacity, and a two-man glider.

“But there won’t be any parachutes. One hundred parachutes makes a heavy load, so it was decided not to carry any. That’s sheer confidence for you. More than I have.

“Look at her, folks! Ain’t she something! The sun shines on her as if she’s the glory of God herself! Beautiful, beautiful, and magnificent!

“A great day for mankind! There goes the orchestra, playing
The Lone Ranger Overture.
Ha! Ha! Just a little joke that’d take too long to explain to you folks. It’s really the
William Tell Overture
by Rossini, I believe. Chosen by Firebrass as the takeoff music, since he’s hung up on that fiery piece. Not to mention a few others, some of whom I see in the crowd.

“Hand me up another glass of ambrosia, Randy. Randy’s my assistant M.C., folks, a writer of fantasies on Earth and now Parolando’s chief quality-control inspector for the alcohol works. Which is like appointing a wolf to guard a steak.

“Aah! Great stuff! And here comes the
Parseval
now, moving out of the hangar! Her nose is locked into the only mobile mooring mast in the world. The takeoff will occur in just a few minutes. I can see through the windscreen of the control room or bridge, which is set in the nose.

“The man in the middle—sitting at the control panel—you can see his head, I’m sure—is chief pilot Cyrano de Bergerac. In his day he was an author, too, wrote novels about travel to the moon and the sun. Now he’s in an aerial machine the likes of which he never dreamed of, just as he never envisioned himself on such a voyage. Flying to the North Pole of a planet which nobody, not a single soul on Earth, as far as I know, had described in the wildest of tales. Soaring in the wild blue yonder in the greatest zeppelin ever built, the greatest that will ever be built. Headed for a fabled tower in a cold, foggy sea. An aerial knight, a post-Terrestrial Galahad, questing for a giant grail!

“Cyrano’s running the whole operation all by himself. The ship’s completely automated; its motors and rudder and elevators are tied into the control panel with electromechanical devices. There’s no need to have rudder men and elevator men and telegraph signals to the motor engineers as they did in the old dirigibles. One man could pilot the ship all the way to the North Pole, if he could stay awake three and a half days, the estimated flight time. In fact, theoretically, the ship could fly itself there without a soul aboard.

“And there by Cyrano’s right is the captain, our own Milton Firebrass. He’s waving now to the man who’s succeeded him as president, the ever popular Judah P. Benjamin, late of Louisiana and ex-attorney general of the late but not necessarily lamented Confederate States of America.

“What? Get your hands off me, friend! No offense intended to any ex-citizen of the C.S.A. Take the drunken bum away, officers!

“And there, standing at the extreme left, is pilot third officer Mitya Nikitin. He promised to be sober during the flight and not hide any booze behind the gas cells, ha! ha!

“To Nikitin’s right is First Mate Jill Gulbirra. You’ve given some of us a hard time, Ms. Gulbirra, but we admire…

“There go the trumpets again. What a blast! There’s Captain Firebrass, waving at us. So long,
mon capitaine, bon voyage
! Keep us informed by radio.

“And there go the cables from the tail. The ship is bobbing a little, but she’s settling down. I saw the balancing done a couple of hours ago. The ship’s so equili-bub-bub-rated that one man standing on the ground under that mighty mass could lift it with one hand.

“Now her nose is uncoupled from the mobile mooring mast. There goes a little of the water ballast. Sorry about that, folks. We told you to stand back, not that some of you couldn’t stand a shower.

“Now she’s rising a little. The wind’s carrying her backward, southward. But the propellers have already been swivelled at an angle to drive the ship up and northward.

“There she goes! Bigger than a mountain, lighter than a feather! Off to the North Pole and the dark tower!

“My God, I’m crying! Must have had too much of the cup that cheers!”

Up above the world so high, the airship twinkled, threading the needle eye of the blue.

At an altitude of 6.1 kilometers or a little over 20,000 feet, the crew of the
Parseval
had a broad view of The Riverworld. Jill, standing at the front windscreen, saw the twisting parallels of the valleys, running north and south directly below her but taking a great bend to the east about 20 kilometers ahead. Then the lines ran for 100 kilometers like thin Malayan krises, wavy blades, side by side, before turning northeastward.

Now and then, The River bounced back a ray of the sun. The millions along its banks and on its surface were invisible from this height, and even the biggest vessels resembled the backs of surface-cruising dragonfish. The Riverworld looked as it was just before Resurrection Day.

A photographer in the nose dome was making the first aerial survey of this planet. And the last. The photographs would be matched against the course of The River as reported via radio by
Mark Twain.
However, there would be large gaps in the map made by the
Parseval’s
cartographer. The paddle wheeler had traveled far south, to the edge of the south polar regions, several times. So the airship’s cartographer could only compare his pictures with the maps transmitted by the surface vessels in the northern hemisphere.

But he could make one sweep of his camera and cover areas where the
Mark Twain
would travel someday.

The radar was also making altitude measurements of the mountain walls. So far, the highest point was 4564 meters or 15,000 feet. At most points, the mountains were only 3048 meters or 10,000 feet. Sometimes the walls dipped as low as 1524 meters or 5000 feet.

Before coming to Parolando, Jill had assumed, along with everybody else she knew, that the mountains were from 4564 to 6096 meters high. These were eyeball estimates, of course, and no one she had known had ever tried to make a scientific measurement. Not until she was in Parolando, where late-twentieth-century devices were available, did she learn the true altitude of the mountains.

Perhaps it was the comparative closeness of the walls that deceived people. They reared straight up, sheer, so smooth after the first 305 meters that they were unscalable. Often they were thicker at the top than at the bottom, presenting an overhang that would daunt any would-be climber even if he had steel pitons. And these were available only at Parolando, as far as she knew.

At the top, the width of the mountains averaged 403 meters or a little more than a quarter of a mile. Yet that relatively small thickness of hard rock was impenetrable without steel tools and dynamite. It would be possible to sail north up The River until it curved for one of its southward travels. There, with enough drilling and blasting equipment, a hole could be bored through the mountain wall. But who knew what invulnerable ranges lay behind that?

The
Parseval
had bucked the northeasterly surface winds of the equatorial zone. Passing through the horse latitudes, it had picked up the tailwinds of the temperate latitudes. In twenty-four hours it had traveled approximately a distance equal to that from Mexico City to the lower end of Hudson Bay, Canada. Before the second day was over, it would run into headwinds from the arctic region. Just how strong these would be was not known. However, the winds here seldom matched the winds of Earth because of the lack of differential between land and water masses.