The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  “Well, Major?”

  “Well?”

  “Thinking again, I see. And I can imagine what you are thinking about.”

  He carefully does not make a roguish smile, but the signs of its suppression are visible behind the mustache.

  “Can you?”

  “The sight of the pigeon flying off. You know. Makes us think of … our—loved ones.”

  “Loved ones?”

  He thinks it is rather dense of me not to get the drift by this time. “Miss Hickman. Eh?”

  I glance briefly at Theodor to see his reaction. No reaction at all. To judge from his face he might not even have heard; but of course he has heard. I decide to follow a mock-dignified and slightly offended line, calm but my chin raised just a fraction of an inch.

  “You forget we are still travelling north. And the farther north we get, the less my thinking concerns itself with such—carnal matters.”

  Waldemer really is embarrassed. The roguish smile emerges from behind the mustache; his defence is to treat the thing as a joke. “Well, Major. I wasn’t really referring to—h’mm. Carnal matters. It’s just that, you know. One’s more tender sentiments …”

  “Whenever I notice any such, I go to a doctor. He gives me a medicine for them.”

  “Ahah. Bravo, Major.”

  Theodor, by way of ignoring this whole conversation, or pretending to, has been studying the chart, checking our course with the parallel rules and verifying the distance run by stepping it off with the dividers. His glance is intent on this crisscrossing track of pencil lines that begins at the camp on Dane Island, passes between Amsterdam Island and Vogelsang until it clears the Spitsbergen group, and then verges off northward onto the blank part of the chart. Finally, sensing I am watching him, he looks up.

  “Well?”

  For a moment he hesitates, afraid perhaps that with his lack of experience he has made some blunder in the calculations. “You can check whether I’m right, Gustavus. It seems to me our speed has averaged eleven and a half knots instead of eight. And we’re being deflected a little to the east.”

  Standing in absolute silence at his side, so that our elbows touch, I pretend to check his figures. But I know without looking that he is right. I frown over this for a moment with my finger on the chart. After a while Waldemer notices that I have fallen into thought again, my Swedish vice.

  “Something up with the weather?”

  “I think so.”

  “Still looks lovely. Not a cloud in the sky except for this infernal haze.”

  “What is happening would be a long distance away. Invisible to your mortal eyes, I’m afraid.”

  “Ahah. Perturbations in the ether. Well, you’d better consult the Spiritual Telegraph, Major.”

  This is said in his usual tone of good-natured banter, but it is exactly what I plan to do. With a quickening excitement that I seek to control, or at least to conceal from my companions, I bend down and unstrap the lid of the leather case stored under our feet. Inside is the apparatus that has occupied my private thoughts for so many months, the climax of my investigations into the relation between aeroelectricity and geomagnetism that go back as far as the Greenland expedition of 1882. It consists of a coil of fine wire wrapped precisely around a fiber cylinder, a condenser made of tinfoil and waxed paper, and a crystal of galena over which is poised a tiny hairspring. The crystal is connected through a pair of insulated copper wires to the magneto-auditory converter, which to tell the truth is an ordinary telephone receiver manufactured under the Bell-Edison patents. Finally, there is the aerial coil or catching basket, consisting of more copper wire wound around a frame and rotatable through a pair of pivots. I erect all this and verify that the connections are tight. Then, holding the receiver to my ear with one hand, with the other I gently touch the hairspring to various points on the galena crystal.

  The scrap of mineral is very tiny, no bigger than an English farthing, but over the months I have come to know every detail of its surface as the husband knows the body of the wife. There, next to that double ridge and in the pit no bigger than a flyspeck, is a particularly sensitive spot. The end of the hairspring descends with a tremble into this concave triangle, and in the earpiece I hear sounds until recently never apprehended by the ear of man. A rustling, rushing, crackling, hissing, rubbing, muffled cracking noise, like celestial bacon being fried. Adjustments of the coil and condenser slightly increase the volume of these sounds. What am I hearing? No one is quite sure. What is certain is only that these cryptic sounds have coursed through the atmosphere from the beginning of time, but have been audible to the human ear only in the decade—less, in the five or six years—since the development of the detection apparatus. Where they come from—what intelligence or blind force it is that sends them crackling and hissing on their way to us—is an enigma. But I think I have begun to guess. I have guessed that the cracklings are produced by the agitations of the atmosphere that we ordinarily refer to as weather. Weather consists of various collisions between airs of different sorts. Some masses of air are dry, some are wet, some are compressed and others rarefied. In this way, following the laws of physics, they drift about in relation to each other and shift their respective positions. The wet masses, becoming rarefied, lose the strength of their grip and release rain. The dry masses, becoming warm, ascend upward, and others rush in to take their place. The atmosphere is the battleground of invisible monsters. This is well known. But what is not well known—if my guess is correct and my discoveries are not the product of a disordered fancy—is that these lumps of warm, cold, wet, dry, and other kinds of air, by dint of rubbing against each other like huge animals, produce electromagnetic vibrations exactly similar to the cracklings and sparkings that result when sealing wax and fur, or silk and a lump of amber, are rapidly frictionated. Further, that these emanations are directional in nature. Should there be, for example, a rarefied air to the westward, the prevailing wind will be from the south. It is to the area of low pressure that the lumps of air rush most vigorously and begin circling in cyclonic pattern, causing the most collisions and therefore the most cracklings in the electromagnetic apparatus. It is possible that this is only a metaphor. Nevertheless, like those well-known metaphors that men in some ages have called gods, it works and can be understood if a man studies the manner of its interpretation. I believe it was Goethe who said, with a prescience only possible in a scientist who was also a great poet, “Nature is infinite. But he that will take note of symbols will understand all of it. But not altogether.” Or he said something like that; I haven’t the text at hand and have to rely on my memory.

  Leaving poetry out of it, what are we to think of these emanations that seem to speak to us out of the invisible emanations that have all the attributes of occult phenomena and yet are detectable only by the latest scientific apparatus? Perhaps this is the sixth sense that men have pondered over in all ages, from the ancient to the modern, without understanding very clearly what they are talking about. Supposing you had no sense of smell—the idea of such a sense would hardly occur to you except through a sort of mysterious intuition. And this thing I have found is mysterious all right. I remember that August day in a pasture in Varmland when I first heard lightning—I don’t mean that I heard thunder, but that a half-darkened shed with the Edison receiver pressed to my ear I heard the crash of fire striking from a cloud still a dozen miles away, a full minute before the sound of thunder reached my ear. The lightning bolt had signaled its existence through certain mysterious vibrations; but vibrations of what? Something had vibrated, some fine gas our organs are too crude to detect had trembled at the stab of the bolt. What purpose can this shimmering of the ether have? Has it waited patiently, over the billions of years, for the moment when I happened to connect up my earpiece to the crystal of galena and became the first to hear it? If so its accents are a little cryptic. Perhaps I have only intercepted a message intended for someone or something else.

  I will confess that this thi
ng I have stumbled across fascinates me to the point of ecstasy, and also that it seems to me vaguely dangerous. Dangerous how? I don’t know. It is simply that there is an element of necromancy in all this which, in the privacy of my own mind, I quite candidly regard as ominous. If you go sticking your finger in nature’s private parts you do so at your own risk, and at the risk of all humanity. In the Middle Ages the alchemists, without understanding what they were doing, groped about with their cauldrons and retorts in an effort to turn lead into gold. Instead they discovered the principle of chemical combination, which in turn gave birth to gunpowder, and an entire civilization of castles and cathedrals crashed to the ground, the alchemists bleeding under the ruins along with everybody else. (It is true that gunpowder was invented by the Chinese, but I am speaking analogically.) It is characteristic of man that he is annoyed by secrets, that as soon as he is aware there is something to be known that he does not know he wants to know it, whether or not the knowing will make him happy. In the end it is perhaps this that will destroy him.

  In the meanwhile, however, it is likely that we have a century or more to be happy or unhappy before this development takes place. Particularly in the case of aeromagnetic waves, it is unlikely that they will destroy us in the near future. On the contrary, it is probable that for a time they will be of great practical use. I am perfectly well aware of the investigations being conducted in this sphere by Hertz, by Signor Marconi, and by others. In my opinion these endeavours have every chance of succeeding. Consider: if static electricity is made to leap from one brass ball to another, the spark will cause a compass needle to be deflected in the room below, as much as thirty feet away. The fact was noted by Trowbridge as early as 1880. This being the case, there is no reason why, if the electric spark upstairs is interrupted in accordance with the system of Morse’s code, a message cannot be read downstairs on the compass, even though no wires connect them. Could such a contrivance work in an airship? Undoubtedly. Over long distances? Possibly. In no case am I going to hint of this to Waldemer. He has quite enough to occupy his mind as it is. If he ever suspected that the apparatus in the leather case might be used to send messages to the outside world, he would be composing drivel for it night and day. Including, no doubt, our “sensations,” such as the fact that our noses are cold and we are enjoying our dinners, and also our delight at the efficient functioning of the apparatus. This has already happened in the case of the ordinary telegraph worked by wires. A man sits in Chicago and taps out, “How well this telegraph works.” And the operator in New Orléans replies, “Yes, the telegraph is a great invention.” No, decidedly, the practical possibilities of aeromagnetism must be concealed from Waldemer.

  In prophesying the weather, however, a great deal is possible even with my limited understanding. Having tickled the galena crystal with the hairspring, I satisfy myself that a normal amount of bacon frying is going on in the earpiece. Now comes the difficult part—detecting the direction of the chief mass of the emanations. Ahah, Professor Eggert, we are back to directions! Your suspended iron rods and your duck didn’t quite work, but you were on the right track. By listening to these ethereal scratchings I will send this airship not in the direction it wants to go but in the direction I want it to go. This is made possible by a modification to that part of the apparatus called by some investigators the aerial wire and by others the antenna, through analogy to the fragile erections attached to the brains of certain insects for receiving emanations, no doubt, of their own sixth sense. This wire—and here my invention is unique—I have wound into a flat coil mounted on a frame that can be rotated, so that it intercepts the maximum amount of aeroelectricity when facing toward it and none at all when it is turned on edge. In this way the bearing of a meteorological disturbance from the operator can be precisely determined. Turning this contrivance back and forth, I establish that the direction of the loudest cracklings is east-northeast. Out with the chart again. There is undoubtedly a region of rarefied air in the direction of the cracklings. The wind turns dumbly about it in accordance with the well-known laws of rotating bodies, and the Prinzess, like a bemused lover, just as dumbly follows the winds. I dismantle the apparatus, put it away in the case, and strap the lid shut.

  Neither of my companions says anything, but clearly they are waiting for my prophecy from the invisible world.

  “There’s a mass of fluxuous air—here.”

  I draw in a rough oblong on the chart, to the east and somewhat to the north of us.

  “This is bending the wind in a slightly oblique direction. Consequently our course is taking us a little to the east of north.”

  “Ahah. H’mm.”

  He looks at the chart, a little troubled.

  “Never get to the Pole that way.”

  Here Waldemer is right, but in a far more complicated way than he thinks. In a pedagogical spirit only slightly tinged with malice, I decide to offer him a little lecture in mathematics.

  “On the contrary, an airship moving north-northeast will in the end—must inevitably—reach the Pole.”

  I look about for a scrap of paper and, not finding any, sketch rapidly on the edge of the chart. A rough polar projection: circles for the parallels of latitude, radials for the meridians.

  “If the airship continues to move north-northeast it will, by definition, cross all meridians at the same angle—the angle θ that I’ve indicated here—amounting to twenty-two and a half degrees.” With a winning but treacherous little smile I lead him into this logic. “Thus, viewed from directly above as I’ve drawn it, the course will describe a spiral around the Pole, coming closer and closer to it according to the formula for asymptotes as presented in the theorem of Geminus. After a time it will be only a mile from it. Then a foot. Then an inch. Then a millionth of an inch.”

  Waldemer knows there is something wrong here but he is not sure what. He is not attuned to these abstractions—asymptotes, theorems of Geminus, spirals that approach infinity.

  “Come off it, Major. You and your paradoxes of Zeno. I’ll settle for a millionth of an inch.”

  Theodor at this point gravely intervenes to demonstrate his own competence in mathematics, not so much at Waldemer’s expense as at my own.

  “Excuse me, Gustav. There is a slight error in your assumptions. The problem is not really geometric but trigonometric.”

  He takes the pencil himself and begins sketching on another part of the chart.

  “Let r indicate our distance from the Pole, V our forward velocity, and θ our course, or angle to the meridian. Now we may break down our velocity into two components.

  “The linear velocity at which we approach the Pole is constant and we must inevitably reach it in time. But what you have neglected is that the angular motion—the rate at which we are whirling about the spiral—becomes infinite as the airship approaches the Pole, so that the centrifugal forces involved will either destroy the airship or the laws of physics, one or the other.”

  Congratulations, Theodor. You are correct and have beaten your teacher in an open demonstration, even though the audience may not appreciate it.

  “H’mm.”

  Waldemer regards all these hieroglyphics and insect tracks with increasing sheepishness, suspecting now that both his legs are being pulled in different ways and feeling that it is hardly fair ganging up on a fellow in this way.

  “D’you know what I think, Theodor? I think the Major’s paradoxes of Zeno are catching. You’re as big a wag as he is. I would never have suspected it of you. I thought you were a more serious young fellow.”

  Waldemer’s American and pragmatic head is screwed squarely on his shoulders. Now that he has caught the expressions on our faces, he isn’t going to buy either of these theories. He grins a little himself. Actually, of course, the spiral isn’t a paradox of Zeno but a chimaera, a mythical beast existing only in the world of abstract mathematics. This wind if it continues to blow will bring us to somewhere in the neighborhood of Wrangel Island on the eastern co
ast of Siberia, an unattractive itinerary. But I know too that the cyclonic system to the east will very likely deepen and pass south of us, so that in a day or two this deflection in our course will be self-correcting. Still, I will leave Waldemer to wrestle in his mind with the spiral, even if he suspects—knows now—that it is only a joke. I have to confess that another of my vices (the first one is thinking) is that I am not candid by nature. In order for me to feel quite myself there must be something in me that I have not confided to my fellow human beings, even one I am as fond of as I am of Waldemer. For my self, to me, is simply—what I know and the others do not. Waldemer is afraid that if he can’t see himself in a mirror he will cease to exist, and I fear that if I tell all I know, I will cease to exist. I am aware of course that such a stance is petty and insincere, and also leaves me open to a charge of being unscientific. For a scientist—is he not?—is one who seeks selflessly for the truth in order to share it with his fellow men. If you discover secrets in your alembics and don’t publish them in the accepted journals, instead hug them to yourself and use them to carry out the schemes of your private will, then you are not a scientist but a sorcerer. Give us the truth! they clamour, like children pestering for candy. Well, probably they are happier without it. And what would they do with it if I shared it with them, this poetic and intoxicating thing I have discovered? Make a toy out of it, or a weapon.