“Ha!” exclaimed the Great Inventor happily. “Listen to who’s calling who pig-ignorant, eh?”
“Takes one to know one,” snapped Flip.
“But I’m still not going to tell you.”
“Gnatbrain,” remarked Samzing easily. “Why not?”
“Because I haven’t the foggiest idea how to get out of the Everwoods,” replied the Great Inventor. “Don’t you people know anything?”
“Ah,” said Samzing, the wind taken out of his sails. “That does present certain difficulties.”
“There’s only one way you could find out,” the Great Inventor continued, “but even if I told you about it you wouldn’t understand, so I won’t.”
“Come on,” said Flip to his two friends. “Let’s get out of here. This doddering old creep obviously hasn’t got anything for us.”
Sir Tombin seemed to think this was a good idea, because he turned toward the open door.
“Wait a moment,” said Samzing, holding up an arm. He addressed the Great Inventor again. “What’s this thing you say we wouldn’t understand, dotard?”
“Oh, nothing, pukefeatures,” responded the Great Inventor breezily.
“That’s right,” Willfram chipped in, “best not to tell these oafs about the Great and Wondrous Ship that Sails Through the Air.”
The Great Inventor gaped at the other opposome. “You sweet creature, you,” he said darkly.
Sir Tombin paused on his way to the door. “An airship, you mean? Er, puddinghead,” he added nervously.
“You’ve let the strogwort out of the bag now, darling,” hissed the Great Inventor at Willfram.
“Ahem,” said Sir Tombin as offensively as he could.
“Yes, yes, it’s an airship, buttfeatures.” The Great Inventor sucked air in whistlingly through his teeth, then seemed to come to a decision to tell all. “I only finished inventing it last week, so I’m not a hundred and fourteen percent certain yet that it actually works, but if it does work, one would be able to go high enough to see how to get out of the forest. In fact, you could even use it to travel right out of the Everwoods. But this is all hypothetical, because if you think I’m going to let fartwits like you pollute my airship, you’ve got another think coming.”
“I suppose,” said Samzing measuredly, “someone as morally corrupt as you would be open to a bit of bribery?”
“Ha!” said the Great Inventor. “And what makes you believe that scum-dwellers like yourselves would have anything I might want to exchange for a ride on my Great and Wondrous Ship that Sails Through the Air?”
“A few magical spells?” said Samzing hopefully. “I have a whole arsenal of interesting and useful conjurings at my disposal, and I might be persuaded to share a few arcane secrets. Hm?” He waited expectantly, then added, “Oops. Bottomfeeder. Meant to say that.”
“I don’t believe in magic,” said the Great Inventor testily. “There ain’t no such thing. D’you take me for a nice guy or something, you pile of garbage?”
“But—” began Samzing before Sir Tombin waved him to silence.
Quite right, thought Flip. Magic wouldn’t work for this crackpot. To make magic work you’ve got to believe, and if your mind’s dead-set against its very existence …
“We have all sorts of treasures from distant places with us,” the Frogly Knight was explaining. “Ah, gooseberry.”
Have we? thought Flip, and then Sir Tombin pointed toward Samzing’s back. The old boy brought Sagandran’s backpack as well as his own. Oh, yes! Flip clucked his teeth excitedly.
There were bound to be a few goodies from the Earthworld in there. Sagandran had shown him some of them. Once their purposes had been explained they didn’t seem so mysterious, but before that, their alienness was very, well, it certainly sent a tingle of excitement through the spine of a non-Earthworlder.
Samzing shrugged off the extra backpack into Sir Tombin’s eager hands. The Frogly Knight put it down on the floor and had its top unstrapped in a moment, then began rooting around in it. Flip, clinging onto the brim of Sir Tombin’s hat, could see the various things that came to the surface. A pair of socks. Not much use. Another pair of socks, but this time, even though they were rolled up, obviously full of holes where socks shouldn’t have holes. Better, but still not ideal. A toothbrush. I found that one really puzzling until Sagandran told me what it was for, but the Great Inventor might not. A length of string. That’s a pretty standard piece of equipment here in Reversa. A flashlight. Same as for the toothbrush, I’d guess.
But Sir Tombin was standing up triumphantly with the flashlight in his hand. “Here, goatbreath, is an invention from so far away that this world has never seen its like,” he said in a voice of impressive showmanship. “Tired of all those dusty dark corners where unmentionables accumulate? Fed up with standing on things the cat’s brought up because you didn’t notice they were there? Well, the answer is in my hand. The most marvelous, the most incredible, the most outlandish invention ever, er, invented. I give you, old nutty-as-a-fruitcake one, the incomparable Thing That Throws Bright Illumination Everywhere!”
“Got one of them,” snarled the Great Inventor. “It’s just a metal tube is all it is.”
“But wait,” cried Sir Tombin.
He pressed the side of the flashlight. There was a click, but nothing happened.
“It’s the other button,” whispered Flip.
“Just testing,” announced Sir Tombin with the kind of brash confidence shown by door-to-door sellers of vacuum cleaners all over the universe. “An extra special feature of this exquisite invention is that you have to press the other knob.”
As he spoke, he did exactly that.
A strong beam of light cut through the gloom, outshining the flickering light bulb overhead. The effect was startling, even for someone who’d seen it before. Flip squeaked and ducked, and Sir Tombin almost dropped the flashlight.
The Great Inventor did his best not to look impressed. His expression of disinterest was belied though, by the way his fingers kept clenching and unclenching; he was obviously desperate to get ahold of the gadget so they could start taking it apart and putting it together again.
“As I said, there is something truly inspiring about the Thing That Throws Bright Illumination Everywhere,” said Sir Tombin, lowering his tone conspiratorially.
Flip wondered where the Frogly Knight could have learned to deploy selling tactics so smoothly. There was much about Sir Tombin’s past that they didn’t know. Salesmen like this, though officially discouraged by signs pinned here and there through the village, and evicted by force if necessary, occasionally came to Mishmash. Flip had a whole cupboard full of useless junk at home to prove it.
“It could be yours,” Sir Tombin continued, staring intently at the Great Inventor, “yours to keep forever, if only you would permit us sorry wayfarers a ride in your airship.”
The Great Inventor scowled. “You have to ask me nicer than that,” he spat.
“Let me,” said Samzing, putting a hand on Sir Tombin’s shoulder. “It’ll be my pleasure.”
“If you think that’s wise, my old potato,” said the Frogly Knight, looking at him worriedly.
“Now look,” said Samzing in a loud voice to the Great Inventor, “I’m going to tell you just once, and if you’re too halfwitted to listen properly, I’m not going to waste my time telling you again. You may be so despicable a donkey would cut its own throat rather than excrete on you, and you may look even worse than you are, that it’s no wonder your mother threw you out at birth and pretended you were just something the butcher didn’t dare put in his sausages, but my esteemed companion here is making you an offer the like of which an armpit-dweller like you will never have again, d’you hear?
“You can have the Thing That Throws Bright Illumination Everywhere to impress all the opposomes who’re even stupider than you are, hard though that is to conceive; and you can have it in exchange for giving us a ride on your abject apology for an airship.
See? Got that? Has the message sunk into your spinal cord yet?”
“See?” said the Great Inventor to Willfram. “All they had to do was ask me nice.”
Sir Tombin tossed the flashlight to him. The Great Inventor plucked it out of the air with incongruous ease and began to examine it, his little hands moving feverishly all over it as he tried to work out how to reduce it to its component parts.
“Oh Mighty Inventor Fool,” said Willfram, bowing, “should I take the futtocks to the airship?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” wheezed the Great Inventor. “Can’t you see I’m busy? I have a few finishing touches to put to my masterpiece today, so you’ll have to wait until I’m done. Willfram will show you the ropes tomorrow morning. You know how to pull a lever as well as I do, don’t you, Willfram? Well, get them out of my sight, then.”
Then he was once more absorbed in his task.
Outside Reversa on the side of the village away from the river, stood a barn that, from the outside, seemed every bit as chaotic as the Great Inventor’s house. The inside, the three companions discovered as they followed Willfram into it the next morning, was surprisingly neat. It was as if the opposome engineers who worked under the Great Inventor’s guidance were more fastidious than he in their practices, whatever the genius might dictate.
Sir Tombin decided that he rather liked those engineers, even though there were none to be seen anywhere on the wide and slightly dusty but well-tidied floor. He stretched. He and Samzing had been given no choice but to sleep on Willfram’s floor, and it had been unyielding. Flip had been more comfortable: he’d bedded down for the night on Samzing’s stomach.
Standing in the middle of the floor was a rudimentary hot-air balloon. The basket was made of what looked like scavenged lengths of electrical cable, woven together in whatever order they came, so that the basketwork was a jumble of colors. There was a thick blue cable entwined with a thin red one, and these were further tangled with cords of intermediate sizes in green, white, black, bicolor stripes and brown. Wooden supports held up a bag made from old sacks stitched together. It was sagging at the moment, but could obviously be inflated by the furnace, whose chimney rose just below the bag’s center. Whether the furnace could be lit without setting the bag on fire was another matter altogether, but Sir Tombin assumed the opposome engineers had sorted this problem out.
At least, he hoped so. He tried to push his misgivings to the back of his mind.
“We’re going to fly in that?” piped Flip disbelievingly from somewhere behind Sir Tombin’s ear.
“And why not, small fry?” sneered Willfram, though he too looked uneasy. “It does work, you know, even though it’s still just a prototype.”
Samzing cleared his throat. Glancing at his old friend, Sir Tombin could see the wizard’s eyes rolling in what looked like terror. Surely not.
“I’ll just get the fire going,” Willfram was saying. He clapped then wrapped his arms around his waist, looking dubiously at the basket. “Just wait ’til I’m ready, can’t you?”
It seemed an odd remark. None of them had been trying to hurry the opposome.
“Oh well, here I go,” said Willfram with the shrug of one about to go over a waterfall in a barrel. He climbed up over the side of the basket, and soon they could hear the sounds of cursing and hauling. Not long afterward a tendril of smoke rose out of the chimney.
As the bag slowly inflated, Sir Tombin began to appreciate the cleverness of the Great Inventor’s design. Although the wooden struts supporting the balloon appeared to have been built haphazardly (like the cables of the basket-weave) and thrown together in whatever order they happened to be in at hand, in fact they held the sacking perfectly clear of the hot sides of the chimney and of any flames and sparks that might puff up out of it.
He was still musing on the fact that one shouldn’t always judge things by their appearances when Willfram emerged from the basket, looking a little more confident now.
“Soon be done, though why I bother for the sake of dog-dropping outsiders like you, I’ve no idea.” He stared at the bulging balloon with undisguised admiration. “Another couple of minutes and she’ll be full enough for you to get on her.”
Now that the moment was imminent, Sir Tombin felt his own confidence ebbing. Samzing still seemed to be lost on some plane of existence other than this one, and obviously hadn’t heard a word the opposome had said.
It was Flip who stopped Sir Tombin from deciding that discretion was the better part of valor – preferably discretion exercised some considerable distance away from Reversa.
“Golly, this looks exciting. I can hardly wait.”
His enthusiasm was infectious, at least so far as Sir Tombin was concerned. Well, not enthusiasm, exactly. It was more a matter that if Flip, the smallest and weakest of them all, could be anticipating the adventure with eagerness rather than trepidation, surely the bigger companions should be able to enter into it with at least a show of equanimity.
“Shouldn’t be long now,” said Sir Tombin, as if he, too, were impatient to get going.
Samzing said nothing, he just let his walking staff fall in a meaningful way.
Willfram was busy with a system of ropes and pulleys that hung around the barn’s walls. “Give me a hand, can’t you, greenface,” he said crossly.
“Why, certainly,” responded Sir Tombin with instinctive courtesy, remembering only after half a breath to add “wimp.”
Working under Willfram’s amicably abusive instructions, he found that the ropes and pulleys were arranged so that the two halves of the barn’s roof, which proved to be made of some stretched parchment-like material, could be hauled back out of the way. It wasn’t long before there was an irregular rectangle of blue sky above them, comfortably larger than the balloon’s largest dimension.
Willfram indicated it was time for the trio of travelers to climb aboard. Sir Tombin did so, then at Flip’s insistence, he let the little creature down onto the floor of the basket so he could rush around excitedly exploring. Samzing seemed more reluctant about the whole enterprise and had to be nudged fairly forcefully by Willfram in the direction of the basket. Sir Tombin handed the old wizard aboard, and Samzing collapsed in a slump in the basket’s corner.
“It’s time to cut you loose, fatheads,” said Willfram. “Be glad to see the back of you lot; it can’t look any worse than the front.”
He picked a long knife up from somewhere and began to saw at the first of a group of ropes which, Sir Tombin realized, were all that held the ramshackle little craft to the barn floor.
“Wait a moment,” the Frogly Knight called. “Wouldn’t it be advisable, ah, pants-on-fire, to tell us how we should steer this thing?”
“Oh,” said Willfram in a carefree fashion, severing the first rope with a grunt of satisfaction, “there isn’t any. You think we’re as daft as you? You just have to go wherever the winds take you.”
As Sir Tombin stared at the opposome in horror, Samzing suddenly rose to his feet. “My staff,” the wizard cried. “I’ve left it behind.”
Sure enough, the staff he’d fashioned in the forest lay where he’d dropped it in the middle of the barn floor.
“Excuse me, dear chap,” Sir Tombin was just beginning to say to a contemptuous-looking Willfram when Samzing scrambled back over the side of the basket, eyes fixed on the fallen stick.
“Hard to believe his mother loves him, innit?” said Willfram, resuming his work cutting the ties.
The balloon gave a sideways lurch that left Sir Tombin’s stomach behind.
“Hurry up, there’s a good fellow,” the Frogly Knight called to Samzing who, having picked up his staff, showed little inclination to return to the vessel.
“Ah, just checking,” said the wizard. “Just, you know, making sure it’s not broken or anything.”
“Hurry up!”
“You don’t want to stay in Reversa,” Willfram assured Samzing heavily.
Sir Tombin reflected that the opposome had p
robably never spoken a truer word.
Irresolutely, the wizard returned toward the balloon, which was now straining at its sole remaining tether.
Sir Tombin felt another jolt. The balloon was like a bird being released from a cage: eager to be back among the clouds.
“Get a move on!” Sir Tombin shouted, beginning to panic.
“All in good time, dear friend,” said Samzing, his eyes glassy. His feet seemed to be refusing to obey the somewhat half-hearted orders from his brain. They weren’t precisely rooted to the floor, but the most they could manage was a slow, uncertain forward shuffle. The wizard had almost reached the side of the basket when, with a pyoing, the final rope sundered.
As the balloon began its inexorable ascent, Sir Tombin made a grab for the old sorcerer’s robe. There was a confusing flurry of limbs and garments that didn’t stop until the balloon was rising cheerfully above the barn’s roof. When his vision had cleared sufficiently for him to see what had been going on, Sir Tombin discovered that he had indeed been able to secure his old friend. The wizard waswith them.
Sort of.
The bit of Samzing that Sir Tombin had finally been able to get a secure grip on was a bony ankle. Glancing downward over the rim of the basket, the Frogly Knight was treated to a most unusual perspective on a pair of underpants.
He coughed discreetly. “Are you all right, old chap?”
“I suppose so,” said a quavering voice from somewhere beneath the basket. “Did I ever mention to you that I have acrophobia?”
“I’m sorry, old chap, but I can’t hear you over the wind,” Sir Tombin answered.
“Acrophobia!” the wizard shouted.
“Still can’t hear you.” The Frogly Knight winked at Flip.
“Well, lean over the basket then, you dimwit.”
“Oh, I don’t know if I have the stomach for that. You see, I’m a little scared of heights.”
“Very funny,” the wizard mumbled.
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