“Here it is in a nutshell,” Randolph confided later. “Going up is like going north.” He stood blinking, as if expecting comment.
“But,” it occurred to Chick, “if you keep going far enough north, eventually you pass over the Pole, and then you’re heading south again.”
“Yes.” The skyship commander shrugged uncomfortably.
“So . . . if you went up high enough, you’d be going down again?”
“Shh!” warned Randolph St. Cosmo.
“Approaching the surface of another planet, maybe?” Chick persisted.
“Not exactly. No. Another ‘surface,’ but an earthly one. Often to our regret, all too earthly. More than that, I am reluctant—”
“These are mysteries of the profession,” Chick supposed.
“You’ll see. In time, of course.”
As they came in low over the Stockyards, the smell found them, the smell and the uproar of flesh learning its mortality—like the dark conjugate of some daylit fiction they had flown here, as appeared increasingly likely, to help promote. Somewhere down there was the White City promised in the Columbian Exposition brochures, somewhere among the tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke, the effluvia of butchery unremitting, into which the buildings of the leagues of city lying downwind retreated, like children into sleep which bringeth not reprieve from the day. In the Stockyards, workers coming off shift, overwhelmingly of the Roman faith, able to detach from earth and blood for a few precious seconds, looked up at the airship in wonder, imagining a detachment of not necessarily helpful angels.
Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alleyways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. “The Great Bovine City of the World,” breathed Lindsay in wonder. Indeed, the backs of cattle far outnumbered the tops of human hats. From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor.
Close to sundown, south of the city, as the Inconvenience bobbed in fitful breezes above a sweeping stretch of prairie which was to be the site this week of the great international gathering of aeronauts being held in conjunction with the World’s Fair, “Professor” St. Cosmo, spying at length a clear patch of meadow among the vast population of airships already berthed below, had given the order, “Prepare to descend.” The state of reduced attention into which he seemed then to have drifted was broken soon enough by Lindsay, advising, biliously, “As I am sure it has not escaped your attention, Blundell’s ineptness with the Main Valve, grown I fear habitual, has increased the speed of our descent to a notable, if not in fact alarming, degree.”
Indeed, the well-meaning but far from dextrous Miles Blundell had somehow contrived to wrap the pull-rope leading to the valve mechanism around his foot, and could be seen moving that extremity to and fro, a bewildered look on his wide, honest face, in hopes that the spring-loaded valve would thus, somehow, close again—for it had already allowed an enormous quantity of hydrogen gas to escape the envelope in a sudden rush, causing the ship to plummet toward the lakeside like a toy dropped by some cosmic urchin.
“Blundell, what in Heaven’s name!” Randolph exclaimed. “Why, you will destroy us all!”
“Say, it just got tangled up, Professor,” declared Miles, plucking ineffectually at the coils of hemp, which only grew more snarled as his efforts continued.
With an inadvertent yet innocuous oath, Lindsay had sprung to the side of young Blundell, grasping him about his ample waist, in an attempt to lift him, in hopes that this would relieve the tautness in the pull-rope and allow the valve to close. “Here, Counterfly,” the second-in-command snapped at Chick, who, jeeringly amused, had been lounging against a gear locker, “do rouse yourself for a moment and bear a hand with Blundell,” that awkward fellow, disposed to ticklishness, meanwhile having begun to scream and thrash about in his efforts to escape Lindsay’s grasp. Chick Counterfly rose indolently and approached the lurching pair with some caution, unsure of which part of Miles to take hold of, lest it but increase his agitation.
As the vital gas continued to stream in unsettling shriek from the valve overhead, and the airship to plunge ever more rapidly Earthward, Randolph, gazing at the feckless struggling of his crew, understood too well that the responsibility for the disaster nearly upon them was, as always, none but his own, this time for having delegated duties to those unskilled in them. . . .
His broodful reflections were interrupted by Darby, running over to tug at the sleeve of his blazer—“Professor, Professor! Lindsay has just now made a defamatory remark about Miles’s mother, yet he’s forever after me about using ‘slang,’ and is that fair, I ask you?”
“Insubordinate drivel, Suckling,” sternly declared Lindsay, “will earn you someday what is known among the lower seafaring elements as a ‘Liverpool Kiss,’ long before you ever receive one of the more conventional variety, save perhaps for those rare occasions upon which your mother, no doubt in some spell of absentmindedness, has found herself able to bestow that astonishing yet, I fear (unhappy woman), misplaced, sign of affection.”
“You see, you see?” squealed Darby, “going after a fellow’s mother—”
“Not now!” screamed Randolph, flinging off the young mascotte’s importunate grasp and frightening him nearly out of his wits. “Counterfly, the ballast, man! leave that spastical oaf be, and jettison our sandbags, or we are done for!”
Chick shrugged and released his grip on Miles, proceeding lackadaisically to the nearest gunwale to unlash the ballast bags there, leaving Lindsay, with no time to adjust to the increased burden, to crash to the deck with a panicked cry, and the now all but hysterical Miles Blundell on top of him. With a loud twang that may as well have been the Crack of Doom, the line around his foot was yanked free of its attachment to the Main Valve, though not before pulling beyond its elastic limit the spring meant to restore it to a safely-closed position. The valve now remained ajar—the very mouth of Hell!
“Suckling! aloft, and quickly!”
The ready little fellow scurried up the lines, as Randolph, preoccupied with the crisis and staggering across the deck, somehow tripped over Lindsay Noseworth attempting to extricate himself from beneath the squirming mass of Miles Blundell, and abruptly joined his horizontal shipmates. Looking up, he observed Darby Suckling gazing down at him, inquisitively.
“What is it that I am to do up here, Professor?” called the ingenuous mascotte.
As tears of frustration began to gather in Randolph’s eyes, Lindsay, sensing in his chief a familiar inertia, his speech only temporarily muffled by Miles’s elbow, rushed, or more accurately crawled, into the vacuum of authority. “Return the valve manually,” he shouted up at Darby, “to its closed position,” adding, “you little fool,” in a barely audible tone. Darby, his uniform fluttering in the outrush of gas, gallantly hastened to comply.
“Like me to break out some of them parachute rigs, Noseworth?” drawled Chick.
“Mr. Noseworth,” Lindsay corrected him. “No, Counterfly, I think not, there scarcely being time—moreover, the complexities that would attend rigging Blundell in the necessary paraphernalia would tax the topological genius of Herr Riemann himself.” This irony was lost, however, on Chick as well as its object, who, having at last somehow regained his feet, now went stumbling with serene insouciance over to the rail, apparently to have a look at the scenery. Above him, Darby, with a triumphant “Hurrah!” succeeded in closing the valve, and the huge airship accordingly slackened in its downward hurtling to a velocity no more ominous than that of a leaf in autumn.
“Well, we certainly scared those chaps down there, Professor,” commented Miles, gazing over the side. “Dropping all those sandbags, I’ll w
ager.”
“Eh?” Randolph beginning to regain his air of phlegmatic competence. “How’s that?”
“Well, they’re running just lickety-split,” Miles continued, “a-and say, one of them hasn’t even got any clothes on, that’s sure what it looks like all right!” From an instrument locker nearby, he produced a powerful spyglass, and trained it upon the objects of his curiosity.
“Come, Blundell,” Randolph arising from where he had fallen, “there is quite enough to be done at the moment without more idle shenanigans—” He was interrupted by a gasp of terror from Miles.
“Professor!” cried that lad, peering incredulously through the burnished cylinder, “the unclad figure I reported—it is not that of a chap, after all, but rather of . . . a lady!”
There was an “eager stampede” to the rail, and a joint attempt to wrest the telescope from Miles, who, however, clung to it stubbornly. All meanwhile stared or squinted avidly, attempting to verify the reported apparition.
Across the herbaceous nap below, in the declining light, among the brighter star-shapes of exploded ballast-bags, running heedless, as across some earthly firmament, sped a stout gentleman in a Norfolk jacket and plus-fours, clutching a straw “skimmer” to the back of his head with one hand while with the other keeping balanced upon his shoulder a photographic camera and tripod. Close behind him came the female companion Blundell had remarked, carrying a bundle of ladies’ apparel, though clad at the moment in little beyond a floral diadem of some sort, charmingly askew among masses of fair hair. The duo appeared to be making for a nearby patch of woods, now and then casting apprehensive looks upward at the enormous gasbag of the descending Inconvenience, quite as if it were some giant eyeball, perhaps that of Society itself, ever scrutinizing from above, in a spirit of constructive censure. By the time Lindsay could remove the optical instrument from the moist hands of Miles Blundell, and induce the consequently disgruntled youth to throw out grapnels and assist Darby in securing the great airship to “Mother Earth,” the indecorous couple had vanished among the foliage, as presently would this sector of the Republic into the falling darkness.
DARBY SWUNG LIKE a regular little monkey hand over hand down the anchor line, gained the ground and, tripping briskly about beneath Inconvenience, adroitly caught each of the mooring lines flung down to him by Miles Blundell. With a mallet driving home, one by one, sturdy wooden pegs through the eye-splices at the ends of the hempen strands, he soon had the giant vehicle, as if charmed into docility by some diminutive beast-wrangler, tethered motionless above him.
The Jacob’s-ladder now came clattering over the side, and upon it, presently, in uncertain descent, Miles, surmounted by a giant sack of soiled laundry. There remained in the western sky only an after-glow of deep crimson, against which could be seen Miles’s silhouette, as well as those of the heads of the other boys above the curved rim of the gondola.
Since that morning, before the first light, a gay, picnic-going throng of aeromaniacs of one sort and another had been continuing all day now to vol-à-voile in, till long after sundown, through the midwestern summer evening whose fading light they were most of them too busy quite to catch the melancholy of, their wings both stationary and a-flap, gull and albatross and bat-styled wings, wings of gold-beaters’ skin and bamboo, wings laboriously detailed with celluloid feathers, in a great heavenwide twinkling they came, bearing all degrees of aviator from laboratory skeptic to Jesus-rapt ascensionary, accompanied often by sky-dogs, who had learned how to sit still, crowded next to them in the steering-cabins of their small airships, observing the instrument panels and barking if they noticed something the pilot had failed to—though others could be observed at gunwales and flying bridges, their heads thrust out into the passing airflow, looks of bliss on their faces. From time to time, the aeronauts hailed one another through megaphones, and the evening was thus atwitter, like the trees of many a street in the city nearby, with aviatory pleasantries.
In short order, the boys had set up their mess-tent, gathered wood, and ignited a small fire in the galley stove, well downwind of Inconvenience and its hydrogen-generating apparatus. Miles busied himself in the miniature galley, and soon had fried them up a “mess” of catfish, caught that morning and kept all day on ice whose melting had been retarded by the frigidity of altitude. Around them the other groups of sky-brothers were busy at their own culinary arrangements, and roasting meat, frying onions, and baking bread sent delicious odors creeping everywhere about the great encampment.
After dinner and Evening Quarters, the boys dedicated a few moments to song, as a group differently engaged might have to prayer. Since their Hawaiian escapades a few years previous (The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna), Miles had become an enthusiastic ukulelist, and tonight, after securing the scullery and restoring the mess decks to their usual spotless state, he produced one of many of the four-stringed instruments which he kept in his sky-chest, and, after strumming a brief introduction, accompanied the boys as they sang,
There’s fellows live in little towns,
And those who live on farms,
And never seem to wander far
From smiles and loving arms—
They always know just who they are
And how their lives will go—
And then there’s boys like us, who say
Good-bye before hello,
For we’re the
Aces of the Altitudes
Vagabonds of the Void. . . .
When some folks shrink with terror, say,
We scarcely get annoyed.
Let the winds blow clear off the Beaufort Scale,
And the nights grow dark as can be,
Let the lightning lash,
And the thunder thrash,
Only cheerful young hearts have we!
For . . .
the Chum of Chance is a pluc-ky soul,
Who shall neither whine nor ejac-u-late,
For his blood’s as red and his mind’s as pure
As the stripes of his bla-a-zer immac-u-late!
That evening Chick and Darby, as the port section of the crew, had watch-duty, while Miles and Lindsay were to be allowed “ground-leave” in Chicago. Each in his own way excited at the prospect of attending the Exposition, the two lads shifted rapidly into dress uniform, although Miles encountered such difficulty in lacing his leggings, knotting his neckerchief with the needed symmetry, and securing correctly the forty-four buttons of his dickey, one for each State of the Union, that Lindsay, after having applied a few drops of Macassar oil to his own locks and combing them carefully, was obliged to go to his unskillful shipmate’s assistance.
When Miles had been rendered as fit to be seen by the populace of “The Windy City” as he would ever be, the two boys came smartly to attention, dressing right at close interval in the circle of firelight, to await inspection. Pugnax joined them, tail still, gaze expectant. Randolph emerged from his tent in mufti, every bit as spruce as his liberty section, for he, too, was bound for earthly chores, his Chums of Chance flight uniform having been replaced by a tastefully checked Kentucky hemp suit and Ascot tie, with a snappy fedora topping off the ensemble.
“Say, Randolph,” called Darby, “you look like you’re going over to meet a girl!”
As his bantering tone, however, was not unmixed with manly admiration, Randolph chose not to respond to the innuendo with the pique it would otherwise have merited, instead riposting, “I had not been aware that fellows of your years recognized any distinction between the sexes,” drawing from Lindsay an appreciative chuckle, before promptly returning to moral seriousness.
“About the fringes,” Randolph reminded the liberty-goers, “of any gathering on the scale of this Exposition, are apt to lurk vicious and debased elements, whose sole aim is to take advantage of the unwary. I will not dignify it by naming that sinister quarter where such dangers are most probably to be encountered. The very vulgarity of its aspect, particularly by night, will spea
k for itself, disinclining all but the most reckless of their well-being to linger in contemplation upon, much less actually investigate, the unprofitable delights offered therein. A word to the wise . . . or, in this case . . . hrrumph, hmmm, howsoever . . . good liberty, boys, I say, and good luck.” Wherewith Randolph saluted, turned, and vanished soundlessly into the great fragrant darkness.
“You have the watch, Suckling,” Lindsay advised before departing. “You know the penalties for falling asleep—be sure that you impress them upon your watchmate Counterfly, who inclines, I suspect, toward sloth. Perimeter check once every hour, as well as a reading of the tension of the gas within the envelope, corrected, I need scarcely add, for the lower temperatures of the nighttime.” He turned and strode away to join Miles, while Pugnax, whose tail had regained its customary animation, was left to scout the bounds of the encampment, searching for evidence of other dogs and their humans who might seek unauthorized entry.
Darby, left solitary in the glow of the watch-fire, applied himself, with his customary vivacity, to the repair of the main hydrogen valve whose mechanical disruption earlier had nearly spelt their doom. That unpleasant memory, like the damage beneath Darby’s nimble fingers, would soon be quite unmade . . . as if it were something the stripling had only read about, in some boys’ book of adventures . . . as if that page of their chronicles lay turned and done, and the order “About-face” had been uttered by some potent though invisible Commandant of Earthly Days, toward whom Darby, in amiable obedience, had turned again. . . .
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