The Flying Sorcerers

Blue dawn of the third day revealed us to be only a few manheights above the water. Great swells swept before us, the water rising and falling in constant uneasy motion. As Wilville and Orbur climbed out onto their bicycles they muttered about our lack of height. The wind is more effective at pushing us higher up.” Orbur said.

Purple nodded thoughtfully. He was peering up at his balloons.

I was peering uneasily down. The surface of the water was greasy and black, and crinkled with flecks of light. I could see the foam on the waves, and smell the wetness in the air.

We had been moving erratically north for two days now, sometimes pushed by the wind, and sometimes by the airpushers. Whenever the flying machine had dropped too low, Purple poured sand out of the ballast bags until we rose again. But we only had one sandbag left, and Purple was beginning to worry.

He had been measuring the balloons regularly since the first night. Periodically, he would climb up into the rigging and poke one experimentally, then climb down, tsk-tsk’ing and shaking his head. The windbags were drooping sadly now; we could see that without climbing the ropes.

He spent all morning leaning over the rail trying to estimate the distance to the water below.

I spent long hours leaning over the rail myself, but little of it was in contemplation of the water. The continual height had begun to unnerve me — and the motion, the constant sway of the boat, the uneasy rocking whenever someone shifted his position.

It was Purple’s observance of me that gave him the idea of how to measure our height. He would drop an object and time how long it took to fall. He could do that even in the dark if he listened carefully for the splash.

After his latest calculation — made by dropping a sour melon over the side — Purple announced that we were losing gas very rapidly and would have to pump up the balloons as soon as possible.

He climbed up into the rigging then, while Wilville and Orbur manned the bicycle frames. Hopefully, he said, after we came down in the water, the propellers would keep us balanced and headed in the right direction. He began untying the neck of one of his windbags.

He hung from the ropes above us, a puffy figure against a background of limp and bloated cloth, and he called instructions to the rest of us. “Lant, Shoogar, pull hard on that rope — I must push this balloon aside. Loosen your pace, Wilville! Orbur, backpedal now! Hard right! Keep on course.” Carefully, he manipulated the long hose-like neck of the windbag, and let some gas seep out. We sank toward the water.

He let more gas out, then tied the neck of the bag again.” He readjusted himself in the rigging and grabbed another bag. We continued sinking. “How high are we?” he called.

I looked over the edge. We were less than one manheight above the water. Already the propellers were slashing across the tops of the swells, dipping in and out of them, churning them to froth. A foamy wake appeared behind us.

“Check to see that the boat rudder is straight, Lant!” Purple called. I wobbled to the back of the boat to where the rudder was mounted. It too was an aircloth-hardened frame. I straightened it out, and looped a rope around it to hold it so.

“How high are we?”

I looked again. We were still one manheight over the water. We had stopped sinking.

Purple loosed a little more gas from the bag and we sank, sank — oof! — smacked into the water, slid sickeningly downward, then up again, across the tops of the swells, up and down, up and down. Wilville and Orbur kept pedaling. Amazing! The airpushers kept churning the water behind us, and we moved steadily forward — the airpushers worked in water too! What a marvelous device they were!

Purple then unslung the hoses from the windbags, so that they hung down into the boat frame. Sixteen long nozzles — I looked up and thought of a milkbeast’s belly.

Purple brought out a wooden frame which Pran the Carpenter had made for him. There was a slot in it to hold the battery. Two copper wires led out across separate arms. One of them ended in a clay funnel. To this Purple attached the first balloon nozzle. He hooked the whole affair over the boat rail and let the wires and funnel arm dip into the water. He made an adjustment on his battery. From the oxygen wire came the familiar furious bubbling. We could not see the bubbling on the other wire, it was inside the funnel. But we did see the gentle puffing of the balloon neck, and we knew that the gas was leaping upward through it.

Suddenly there was a yelp from Orbur, “Hey! We’re rising again!”

Sure enough, we were. The annoying up-and-down motion of the boat across the swells had stopped. We had swung back into the air. I could see our shadow slipping across the water beneath us. Only the propellers still skimmed through the surface, and then they too were free.

“Curse it,” said Purple. “I never thought of that.”

There was a wind pushing us along. We watched glumly as our wake disappeared behind, lost in the swells.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

He switched off his battery. “We wait.”

“But there’s hardly enough gas in the balloons to lift us, Purple. We’ll be hitting the water again in five minutes.”

“I know that, Lant. That’s what I’m hoping for.”

He began looking around him. He laid aside the recharging framework and started rearranging the supplies in the bottom of the boat; checking and tying the aircloth covers to see that they were secure. “Find me a pail,” he called.

There was one in the bow of the boat. We had been using it to hold wash water, but it was empty now. Shoogar ! brought it back to where we waited.

As soon as we were skimming through the tops of the swells again, Purple leaned far over the rail, the bucket trailing in his hands. He pulled it up, half full, and emptied it into the boat. Again he leaned over the edge.

When he had poured ten bucketsful into the boat we were again splashing through the waves. Another ten bucketsful and we were dipping into the troughs. Ten more and we were firmly in the water. Up and down. Up and down.

“We need ballast,” he explained. “And there’s nothing else to use.” He peered over the side and measured how low the boat was riding in the waves. He poured fifteen more bucketsful into the boat before he was satisfied. It was up to our knees at its deepest point.

He picked up his battery and funnel device again and started to lean over the side — “Eh? What am I doing? I can just as easily use this water —” He sat down on a cloth-covered seat and placed the device in the water before him. It began bubbling and he beamed delightedly.

We were all delighted. On all sides splashed the restless ocean. If Purple’s gas-making magic were to suddenly stop working, we would be trapped here, a tiny craft bobbing across an uncaring sea.

Whether Purple worried about this or not, I did not know. Apparently he had full confidence in the power of his battery and he worked steadily. Within seven hours, he had recharged all sixteen balloons. They hung taut, and full-bellied overhead. Several times we had added more water to the boat to offset their increased lifting power. There were more than a hundred bucketsful in the boat now.

At last though, Purple tied off the last windbag, and began disconnecting his battery wires. He tsked thoughtfully as he did so, “H’m, we have used more power than I thought we would. We will have to be careful.”

He put the device aside and began gathering up the empty ballast bags. “Fill these with water,” he instructed. “We will use that as ballast instead of sand.”

While Shoogar and I did as he instructed, he began bailing the water out of the boat. After fifteen bucketsful had been poured out, the boat began rocking harder in response to the waves. A few more bucketsful and we were splashing through them, the swells smacking the bottom of the boat. Á few more and we were level again while the water skimmed harmlessly below.

“Are we off the water?” Purple called to Wilville.

Wilville nodded. “By half a manlength easily.” He and Orbur were still on their bicycles, still hanging down on to the sea — they were pumping steadily, and keeping the airpushers spinning to maintain our heading in the proper direction.

Purple bailed one last bucket and straightened up. “Do you want me to bail for a while?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Uh, uh. There’s no need for any more bailing, Lant.” He put the pail aside.

While I scratched my head in confusion, he splashed forward to the Cathawk’s toolbox. He came back carrying a drill, and proceeded to make a small hole in the narrow deck slats.

It took only a few moments, and then he stood up proudly and wetly. Almost immediately Orbur called, “We’re on our way up again!”

Indeed we were. The ocean dropped away at an ever increasing pace. The water spilled out of the hole at a steady rate, and gradually there was less and less water in the boat. Like Purple’s first windbag so many hands ago; we fell upward.

I leaned over the railing in excitement. “Why, it works just like the sand ballast,” I said. “When you throw it away, the boat rises.”

“Of course, you nit!” said Shoogar. “That’s part of the ballast spell.”

“It’s the weight, Lant — it doesn’t make any difference what your ballast is. It’s the throwing away of weight that makes the boat rise.”

“Nice thinking,” commented Shoogar. The ballast goes automatically. No jerks, no bumps.”

“Thank you,” Purple beamed. It was the first compliment he had ever gotten from Shoogar.

He checked our course heading then — the wind was blowing almost directly north — so the boys could either rest of pedal in the same direction, as they chose. They chose to rest and stretched out on their outriggers. There had to be one son on each outrigger at all times, or no son on either otherwise the airboat slanted all askew.

Purple dried himself off as well as he could, then climbed into the rigging to tie up the airbag nozzles. They were still hanging down. By the time he had finished, all the water had drained out of the boat. He toddled back to where we waited and pounded a heavy bone plug into the hole.

Once more the sea glistened far below us. Indeed, it seemed we were higher than ever. When we dropped a sour melon over the side, it dwindled to a distant speck and vanished without a splash.