Dinosaurs & A Dirigible

by David Drake

  Carl turned onto Central Avenue, letting the horses ease along despite his desire to oblige the Professor. The brick avenue was slippery, and it would be easy to throw a shoe if haste brought nothing worse. Carl pulled around the yellow-brick building of the dairy and backed expertly to the loading dock, clucking to his team. “Won’t be a moment,” he said to his passengers. He poised on the wagon seat, then vaulted over the milk cans to land on the pine bed with a crash. “Charlie!

  “Jess,” he shouted into the dairy. “Lend me a goddamn hand! I’m in a hurry.”

  Erlenwanger and his daughter watched with silent interest. Carl rolled the heavy cans on their rims up the loading gate to the dock where the two dairymen manhandled them into the building. His muscles rippled, but the familiar effort did not even raise sweat-stains on his shirt. “Christ, you guys’re slow,” Carl grumbled as he rolled the last can onto the dock. “I’ll hook out the empties myself.” It took him two trips, carrying a pair of the heavy cans in either hand each time. They would be hauled back and refilled the next day. Life was an endless cycle of milk cans and horse butts, Carl thought savagely to himself.

  As he settled back onto the wagon seat, Carl noticed for the first time that the Professor’s two camera cases were on the shelf beneath. “Frummelt’s is just down Central,” he said. “Say, you carry that camera most everywhere, don’t you?”

  “I do indeed,” Erlenwanger agreed. “No amount of trouble in carrying the apparatus along is too great to be justified by the capturing of one scene that cannot be duplicated. And compared to the effort of bringing the apparatus . . . to the vicinity . . . any trouble to be endured on the ground, so to speak, is nothing.”

  Carl pulled in through the gate in the green-painted hoardings, into the yard of Frummelt’s Coal and Ice. It was crowded with delivery wagons. Carl locked wheels with one and traded curses with the Irish driver as he angled into a place at the dock.

  “We need twenty cans of coal oil,” Carl shouted to the squat loading master.

  The Frummelt employee cocked an eyebrow at them, lifting the brim of his bowler. “Christ, boy,” he said, “I see why you came here steada’ the front. If it’s charge, you’ll have to go up to the front anyhow, though.”

  “It’s cash,” said the Professor, balancing his weight carefully as he stepped onto the dock with his camera. He reached into his coat and brought out a purse from which he poured silver dollars into his left palm. One of the coins slipped and rang on the concrete. Carl knelt and handed it back to the older man. It bore an 1890 date stamp, but the finish was as bright and clean as if the coin had just been issued. Carl’s eyes narrowed, but the loading master took the payment without comment. He counted a quarter and two dimes from the change-maker on his belt and shouted an order to a pair of dock hands.

  “I wonder if I might photograph you and your men at work?” Erlenwanger asked as he watched the load of lacquered rectangular cans being rolled out on a hand truck.

  “Good God, why?” demanded the loading master, ignoring the driver of an ice wagon waiting for orders.

  “Today, this is the petroleum business,” the Professor explained obliquely. “If a time comes during which all carts and wagons are replaced by self-powered vehicles, the whole shape of the world will change. You and your men here will be important in the way the first lungfish to scramble onto dry land to snap at an insect was important. Your feelings, your sense of place in the world—this will never come again.”

  The loading master touched the right curl of his handlebar moustache. “You can’t get all that in a picture,” he said.

  “What I call my photographs capture more than one might think,” Erlenwanger responded.

  “Then go ahead and waste your time,” grunted the squat man as he turned away. “So long as you stay clear of the wheels and don’t waste my time too.”

  As the bays plodded back along Bluff Road, Carl said, “I’ve thought about what you were saying back at Frummelt’s, Professor.”

  “And?” the older man prompted.

  Carl turned and saw Molly’s intent smile instead of the Professor. He lost his train of thought for a moment. At last he said, “Well, it won’t happen. The wagons with motors, I mean. Not in Iowa, at least.” He gestured toward the road in front of them. “When it rains, this’s mud. Two, sometimes three feet deep, up to the bed of a wagon. I’ve seen traction engines get stuck in fields in a wet year and us have to hitch the plow horses, three teams all told, just to get the milk to town. They’ll never make an engine that’ll handle mud like a good team will.”

  Professor Erlenwanger nodded seriously. “There’s reason in what you say, Carl. Many men much older and better educated would say the same thing. But one of the most important lessons that people must learn if they are to deal with the coming age is that nothing, whether good or bad, cannot happen. If there is something to do with the way humans interact with their world, it probably will happen. It is only when we all recognize that as a fact that we have a chance to guide some of the change that will occur anyway.”

  The Professor waved as Carl had at the track of rich, black earth pulverized by horse hooves and the iron wheels of wagons. “No one today—or a century hence—will find it conceivable that sane human beings would build roads of concrete a hundred feet wide in place of this. Such roads would be to the benefit of self-moving vehicles and the detriment of everything else, humans in particular. Yet, if it shall have happened, the humans of the twenty-first century will have to accept it as true; and the humans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries will bear the burden of failing to have guided and controlled a development which they thought was impossible—until it became inevitable.”

  Carl looked at the horses ahead of him. He licked his lips, ignoring from long familiarity the gritty taste of the dust on them. “Professor,” he said without turning around, “I want to come with you. On your airship.”

  “Molly and I can use another hand on The Enterprise,” Erlenwanger said mildly, “and there is ample room and lifting capacity, to be sure. But have you considered just what leaving home will mean to you?”

  Carl risked a glance. Molly was looking straight ahead, twisting her ungloved hands in her lap. The Professor was leaning forward with a bland expression. Carl nodded, his throat tight. “I’m leaving, that’s decided,” he explained. “I thought it was going to be the Navy, is all. You see, it’s not that I don’t love my folks . . . or them love me, for that matter. But I’m the little kid. I’m eighteen and I’m the little kid. So long as I live and even one of my brothers lives, I’ll be the little kid—if I don’t get out now. Maybe after I’ve made my own way for a time, I can come back. Maybe I could even work the farm again, though I don’t guess I’d want to. But for now, I’ve got to cut the traces.”

  “Very well, Carl,” said the Professor. “I won’t insult you by questioning your decision. If I did not think you were capable of soundly assessing a situation, I would not have considered making you the offer. You no doubt realize that we will leave as soon as The Enterprise has been refueled?”

  “Oh, that’s best,” breathed Carl in double relief. “I’ll bundle my clothes and . . . say what needs to be said. Then it’ll be best all ’round if I leave.” His eyes sought the Professor’s, caught Molly’s instead. They both looked away.

  Carl’s mother came into the room her two youngest sons shared. Carl was rolling the extra set of dungarees around the rest of his meager belongings. He tied the bindle off with twine. Mrs. Gudeint said nothing. Carl glanced at her, saw her tears, and looked away again very quickly. She was in the doorway and Carl was finished packing. Looking out the window, he said, “Mom, I brushed down the horses before I came in. I’m not going to stay here, I never was—you know that. So just kiss me and don’t . . . all the rest.”

  Turning very quickly, the boy pecked his mother on the cheek and tried to swing around her in the same motion. She clung to him, her face pressed against his blue cotton work s
hirt. At last she said, “You’ve told your father?”

  “I’ll be back one day soon and I’ll tell him,” Carl said. He squeezed his mother closer and, in the instant that she relaxed, disengaged himself from her. “Mom, I love you,” he said. He reached the staircase in one stride and was down its ten steps in three great jumps. He did not look back after the screen door banged behind him.

  While Carl finished his business with the farm, Professor Erlenwanger had poured the twenty cans of kerosene into the funnel-mouthed nozzle he had extended from the rear of the gondola. Molly was stacking the empty cans up against the wall of the barn for the Gudeints to use or return for credit. She nodded to Carl as she entered the gondola and sat primly at a bank of sixteen levers, each with a gauge above it. The Professor himself stood at a helm like that of a ship. The spokes appeared to have additional control switches built into them. To the right front of the helm, along the glazed forward bulkhead, was a double bank of waist-high levers. The control room was no more spacious than the garret bedrooms Fred and George each had to themselves, but it was only the front third of the gondola.

  “Carl, if you’ll take a seat at the other console,” Erlenwanger said, gesturing to the chair just aft of the gondola’s door. “Soon I’ll teach you how to operate the motor controls yourself, but now, in the interests of a prompt departure . . .”

  Carl nodded and sat as directed, eyeing the north field where his father and eldest brother were haying. The Professor leaned over him and threw a switch. “Since we ride on hydrogen,” he said cryptically, “it’s no difficulty to bleed some into the injectors in place of ether for starting . . .” He flipped a second switch. Something whined briefly and the motor grunted to life. It sank quickly into a hum that was felt but not really heard in the forward compartment. Erlenwanger listened for a moment, then said, “Very good.” He pointed to a knob with a milled rim. “When I direct you to, Carl, please turn this knob a quarter turn clockwise. It engages the airscrew, which we don’t want to do until we have a little altitude, do we?” He smiled brightly at both his crew members. “Not pointed at the house as we are, that is.”

  Erlenwanger returned to the helm. “There doesn’t seem to be enough wind today to require us to make an immediate jump for altitude. I’m always concerned about that, for fear that a line stoppage will lift us asymmetrically; so Molly, if you will fill tanks five and eight.”

  The girl quickly threw two levers. The gauges above them began to rise as the metal fabric trembled to a mild hissing. The older man said, “Each of the sixteen tanks is split in two by a movable partition. The partition acts as a piston when the pressure on one side of it becomes higher than that on the other side. One and sixteen, Molly; then two and fifteen,” the Professor continued.

  Molly worked the requested pairs of switches, pausing after the first to make sure the operation was smooth. She glanced at Carl over her shoulder and said, “What he means is, the gas pushes air out of the tanks when we want to go up, and the air pushes the gas out when we want to go down.”

  Erlenwanger turned and blinked. “That’s very good, Molly. I’m afraid I often talk more than I communicate. Though air is a gas as well as hydrogen, of course . . . still. If you will fill the next three pairs in order, please.”

  The hiss of gas was a living sound now. The gondola was rocking like a rubber ball on the surface of a lake, not lifting off the ground but responsive to every ripple in the air. “I think we’re about ready,” said Erlenwanger. “Carl, I’ll give you the word in a moment. Molly, fill the central tanks.”

  The gondola shuddered. The pattern of light through the side windows shifted as they swung beneath the lifting hull. The ship was rising at a walking pace, drifting toward the barn and rotating about thirty degrees in the grip of the mild breeze. “Carl, engage the screw,” said the Professor. The boy obeyed, his hand so tight on the knurled brass that it did not slip despite its sweatiness. Erlenwanger rocked his helm forward on its post as he felt the propeller bite. The side-slipping continued but was lost in the greater surge of the airship’s forward motion. They were still rising. Looking through the windows beyond Molly, Carl could see the hay-cutting rig at the point of the bright swathe cut from the darker green of the north field. The horses were the size of Chihuahuas. The two men in the field shaded their eyes with their hands as they stared at the shimmering oval in their sky. They were too far away for Carl to have recognized them by sight alone. They did not wave. After a moment, as the field and his former life slipped behind at locomotive speed, Carl did.

  Professor Erlenwanger released the helm and stepped over to where Molly sat. The airship continued moving smoothly at better than twenty miles an hour. The rolling land was now almost three thousand feet below. “We’re a little higher than I care to be without a reason,” Erlenwanger said. “Probably because the Sun is so bright. Molly, would you care to balance all the tanks at seventy-five percent? That should bring us down about a thousand feet. Besides, I prefer to have some pressure in all tanks rather than flying with some voided and others full.”

  Using the bar that fitted the full length of her panel, Molly slid the fourteen open switches down to three-quarters. Simultaneously, she slid the other pair up to the bar with her free hand. The airship lurched, steadied, and continued to skim through the air. It was dropping noticeably, a sensation less like diving into a pond than it was like a toboggan ride down Indian Mound Hill. Erlenwanger studied the line of silver in the etched glass column above his helm. His lips pursed and he touched another display to the side of the column. “We aren’t getting the lift we should out of the forward tanks,” he said to no one in particular, “though we seem to have leveled off satisfactorily. Moisture in the tanks, I suppose. We’ll have to empty them in the near future.”

  “Where do you buy your hydrogen, Professor?” Carl asked, staring down through the transparent quarter-panels of the gondola. He had seen fields from atop the sharp bluffs which wrinkled eastern Iowa, but there was something marvelous in watching solid ground flow by below like a river choked with debris.

  “I manufacture it from water,” the older man said. “Our motor powers an electrical generator. When it is necessary to fill a hydrogen tank, I simply run a current through a container of water and collect the separated hydrogen atoms above the cathode.”

  Warming to his subject—though little of what he had already stated made sense to Carl—Erlenwanger continued, “You see, that is where some theorists go wrong in asserting that helium is safer than hydrogen because it cannot be ignited. What they ignore is the cost of helium. The only way to keep an airship safe over a long period is to clear it of the condensate that otherwise—and inevitably—loads it down to the point that a storm smashes it. And the only sure way to clear the condensate is to vent your tanks and dry them periodically. Helium is rare and far too expensive to be ‘wasted’ in that fashion—so lives will be wasted instead. Hydrogen is cheap and can be manufactured anywhere, either from acid and iron filings or—much more practically—by electrolysis, as I do.”

  The Professor shook his head. “It will be a long time, if ever, that men will stop sending other men to their deaths by ignoring the practical realities which make their theories specious. We should not enshrine human realities, my young friends, whether economic or otherwise; but neither should we expect them to disappear because we ignore them.”

  Erlenwanger caught himself. He smiled wryly at both his companions. Their eyes were focused at about the level of his stick-pin in determined efforts not to look bored. “Well,” he said, “I think it’s far more important to teach Carl the rudiments of The Enterprise than it is for me to go on about things that only time will change. Molly, would you care to show our new recruit how your panel functions? I can listen and make suggestions if it seems useful.”

  The older man sat in Carl’s chair, watching as Carl moved over beside Molly. The airship flew on at a steady pace, over farms and wooded hilltops, water courses in which cat
tle stood to their bellies, and occasionally a small town in a web of dry, gray roads. Throughout the afternoon, Carl learned the workings of the machine which was less wonderful to him than was the girl at whose side he sat. The levers of the starboard panel controlled the flow of hydrogen between the buoyancy tanks and the storage reservoir in the keel. “It’s held in a liquid state,” the Professor interjected, “and the insulation of the reservoir is an improvement—a very great improvement—over previous applications of Dewar’s principles.”

  Understanding the technique of raising or lowering the airship was easy, but executing the technique was another matter again. Carl made several attempts to modify the craft’s buoyancy at Erlenwanger’s direction. Each experiment sent The Enterprise staggering through the air at an unexpected angle or altitude. At the end of the session, the boy had a fair grasp of what the duties entailed—and he had enormous respect for the girl who performed them.

  “How long have you been practicing this?” asked Carl as Molly brought them back to level flight at two thousand feet following his own series of unintentional aerobatics.

  “Well, about four days, now,” said the girl, glancing over at the Professor for confirmation. “I’ve been doing it ever since the Professor—oh dear.” She broke off in indecipherable confusion, blushing and looking away from both men. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Nor did you, my dear,” Professor Erlenwanger said calmly. “And in any case, I intended to explain the situation to Carl at once anyway. You see,” he continued, turning to the boy, “Molly is no more my daughter than you are my son—which is how I intend to describe you to those whom we meet on our travels. I assure you, there is no improper conduct involved in Molly’s accompanying me, any more than there would be had she been a blood relation. However, so as not to offend those persons whom we meet, I determined to tell an untruth—a lie, if you will. I dislike lying, and I will not lie to another’s harm, but the truth is less important than the fellowship of many humans meeting without enmity.”