Empire of the East (23 page)

“It will weigh less than air?” Yes, it all sounded mad; but Rolf despite himself felt some enthusiasm growing for this mad scheme. Wild as Gray's ideas were, they somehow began to feel right in Rolf's mind.

Gray spoke more rapidly, pleased that someone could halfway understand him. “Air is very light, true. But nothingness is lighter still. I tell you, the ancients made the idea work. Are you ready to try it with me, young technologist? I will need quick hands to help me and a quick mind, too, perhaps; Thomas tells me you have both, and I believe him. Of course you will help, you are ordered to. But are you really
with
me in this enterprise?”

Rolf took the time to give the question honest thought. “I am.”

Gray nodded. With a flourish, then, he beckoned to his balancing staff—that sprang lightly through the air into his hand. “Be silent for a moment now, while I evoke the djinn. He is an odd creature, even of his kind, irascible and not well-meaning. But he must labor for us, though he cares nothing for East or West, or for any man or demon.”

The calling-up was accomplished with quick confidence. After making a few controlled gestures over the array of toy tools and drawn lines, Gray uttered in a low rapid voice words that Rolf could not quite hear. Fire appeared in the air before the wizard with a belching of soot and acrid smoke, and accompanied by a sound of rapid pounding, as by unseen, crude and heavy implements. The voice of the djinn rolled forth, sounding one moment like splintering wood, the next like clashing metal. “I come as bidden, master. What is your command?”

Gray unrolled his sketch and held it forth toward the flaming image of the djinn, meanwhile intoning: “I first let be created four such great hollow spheres such as you see represented here—”

The djinn's voice hammered, interrupting. “You
let
be? That means you do not hinder?”

Asperity was in Gray's voice. “It means that I command! I order you to do it, and be quick! The specifications for the globes are as follows…”

The djinn did not dispute him further, but maintained its sooty glow in silence, evidently listening. A moment after Gray had finished detailing his order, there appeared from nowhere four crude blocks of metal, each half as big as a man. In another moment the blocks were glowing hot. At once there arose a mighty screeching, and a banging as of invisible hammers.

The few soldiers who had been standing in the middle distance, watching, were being joined momentarily by ever-growing numbers of their fellows, drawn by the prospect of seeing something spectacularly unusual in the way of magic. The camp had doubtless heard by now several versions of what had happened at the meeting in Thomas's tent. Rolf, for his part, backed up a few paces, and considered putting his fingers in his ears to dull the noise. The blocks of metal glowed incandescent and expanded under the powerful working of the djinn. They stretched out and up into enormous sheets of fiery metal, which then began to curve themselves, perfectly and surely, into spheres.

When the spheres, each the size of a small house, were almost completely closed, the djinn left them to cool on the sand. Meanwhile he received from Gray the specifications for the platform of the flying device, and for the ropes and sails and their attachments.

“So I let it be done!” Gray concluded.

The djinn began to work again, extruding from its smoke long coils of twine. And as it worked, it grumbled. “Just so you understand that it is I am gathering all the stuffs and doing all the work that you are letting. It does not come from nothingness, you know.”

“Nothingness,” said Gray sharply, “is what I want inside the spheres—when the craft is finished, we are aboard, and all's in readiness for flight. Then will I give you the order to empty them and seal them.”

The djinn emitted a burst of noise somewhat like the working of a broken sawmill. It took Rolf a little time to understand that this was laughter. “Nothingness! You do not know what you are ordering—beg pardon, what you are letting, master.”

“Contrary dolt!” A vein now stood upon Gray's forehead. Rolf made a prudent mental note that the wizard was not notably long on patience. Gray went on: “By nothingness I mean a lack of air, a vacuum, nullity; such as you yourself will soon become if you irritate me too sorely!”

The djinn evidently did not regard the threat as idle, for the work did pick up speed, and for the time being at least there were no further grumblings. What seemed to be a multitude of invisible hands spun twine into stout ropes, and fastened ropes to the basket as it was fabricated. It was of a size to hold three or four people without crowding, with a waist-high rim all round, woven of tough, flexible withes, and seemingly very light. Each corner of the square basket was secured with several ropes to one of the great metal spheres. Their overshadowing bulks creaked as they cooled, and all but hid the basket from observation. At Gray's direction, a central mast was now stepped in, and sails and pennants made and stowed folded in the bottom of the basket. Water and provisions, from more commonplace sources, went in also.

Full night had come when Gray was satisfied that all was in readiness for flight. He himself was the first to step into the basket, with a somewhat cautious scissoring of his long legs. “Now master Rolf, if you will.” And Rolf, feeling almost evenly balanced between eagerness and reluctance, hopped nimbly aboard.

Thomas and several others had drawn near, to wish the voyagers well and to observe at close range whatever might happen next. When the last word of encouragement had been called in between the surrounding metal globes, Gray gestured for silence. Facing the smoky glow of the djinn's image, he swept his pointing hand to one after another of the four spheres as he cried out: “Now, let there be exhausted from them all the air and other vapors, and let them then be sealed shut!”

A quartet of hissing noises suddenly surrounded the basket, issuing from the four orifices left in the spheres. Rolf felt his hair stirred by one of the jets of air. Tensely he gripped the basket's railing, waiting for the first surge of flight.

And almost at once the four enormous globes did stir themselves. But not to rise. Instead, as their hissings began to be drowned out by ringings and portentous metal groans, they rolled from side to side on the sand, they lurched and crumpled and deformed themselves. The sphere in front of Rolf seemed to be struck by some giant and invisible mace; it sounded a deafening clang as it drew into itself a vast dent that bent its surface to its center. Then all four spheres, in a great blacksmith's uproar of tortured metal, were shrivelling and flattening like so many fruit-husks thrown into a fire. As their obscuring bulks shrank down, Rolf saw Thomas and others tumbling away with as little thought of dignity or face as they would have shown before an enemy ambush that caught them unarmed. Rolf had one leg over the basket rim again, and would have fled himself, but one direction looked as perilous as another. Meanwhile the basket stayed firmly seated on the sand, only swaying with Gray's vociferous anger. The wizard spouted words at a tremendous rate, while Rolf dodged this way and that to avoid his gesturing arms.

Silence returned as suddenly as it had fled. The metal spheres, now reduced to shrunken, twisted wads of scrap, were still. Gray's speech faltered and ran down, and for the moment silence was complete. There quickly ensued a murmur of laughter from part of the watching army, a murmur that dissolved before it could grow too large, when Gray swept his glare around him like a weapon. The dim masses of people beyond the torchlight began to scatter and drift off; a number of them, once they had got some distance away, seemed compelled to utter muted whooping noises.

Thomas and others, drawing near once more, spitting dust and brushing it from their clothes, did not seem much amused. But none of them dared yet say anything to Gray.

Gray drew in a big breath, and shouted one more outburst at the djinn. Its flaming, fuming scroll flared on apparently unperturbed.

“Oh great master,” it answered in its clattering voice, “such a curse as you have just delivered would pain me like the grip of Zapranoth—if I were in fact such a disobedient traitor as you say I am. But, as things are, I feel no ill effects. I have followed your instructions to the letter.”

“Ahhg! Technology!” Gray flung down his arms. He climbed out of the basket, in his excitement of disgust catching his foot on the rim and nearly falling. Lowering his voice, he said to those nearby: “It speaks the truth. Technology! How can any man who means to keep his sanity go far in such an art?”

Rolf, having got out of the basket too, was thinking. Hesitantly he asked: “Can I put questions to this djinn?”

“Why not?” Gray snapped, as if answering only with the easiest thing to say.

Rolf turned to address the fiery image. “You, there. What made the balls crumple up like that?”

There was a brief silence, as if the djinn were assessing its new questioner. Then with a clatter the answer came: “Little master, they crumpled because the air was taken out of them.”

“Why?”

“Why not? The outside air pushed in with all its weight, and there was only thin metal to resist it.”

Gray had spoken of his experiments, showing that air had weight. The wizard looked uncomfortable, but with a sharp motion of his head he signed Rolf to go on with his questioning.

Rolf considered. It seemed to him that Gray's theory was basically correct: a machine made lighter than air should rise in air, as wood rose in water; and air most certainly had weight. But obviously there were traps and dangers awaiting the technologist.

Rolf asked Gray: “Must it speak the truth to us?”

“Yes.” Gray sighed. “But not the whole truth; that's the catch. Go on, go on, ask it more. Perhaps you have a better head for this than I.”

Rolf took thought, tried to put from his mind the fact that everyone present was watching and listening to him, and faced the djinn again. “Suppose you make the walls of the globes thicker and stronger. That should keep them from being crushed when you take out the air.”

“You are right,” said the djinn immediately. “Shall I rebuild them so?”

“And would they still be light enough, when emptied, to lift us and the basket with them?”

There was a short delay. “No.” This time Rolf thought he detected disappointment.

He folded his arms, and took a few short paces to and fro. “Tell me, djinn, what did the folk of the Old World do when they wished to fly?”

“They made a flying machine, and rode in it. I myself was born with the New World, of course, and never saw them. But so I have been told, and so I truly believe.”

“How did they make these flying machines?”

“Describe a way, and I will tell you if it is right or wrong.”

Rolf looked at Gray, who shook his head and told him: “I cannot compel it to greater helpfulness. The djinn must give us what it knows of the truth, in answer to our questions, but if it wishes to be grudging it can yield only a small fragment at a time.”

Rolf nodded, accepting the rules of the game, which he found more and more fascinating. “Djinn. Were these flying devices lighter than the air?”

“Some of them.”

“Had they lifting spheres, as big as these were?”

“Sometimes.”

“Yet their spheres were not crushed.”

“That is true.”

The audience was silent. The time of half a dozen breaths had passed before Rolf chose his next question. “Were their lifting spheres empty?”

“No.” The monosyllable had a forced, reluctant sound.

“They were filled, then, with something lighter than the air?”

“They were.”

It was midnight before Rolf had extracted from the djinn what seemed to be the last necessary bit of information, and Gray could issue new orders: “—that the new spheres be made of fabric such as you have described, airtight and capable of stretching; and that they be filled, by this lighter-than-air gas that will not burn, to the point where they will lift the basket with us in it.”

Shortly before dawn, having managed a few hours' sleep in the meantime, Gray and Rolf were once more in the basket, attended by an audience much smaller and less hopeful-looking than that of the previous evening. Once more Gray gave orders to the djinn. The new balloons, that had replaced the crumpled metal spheres, rose from the sands as they inflated, then tugged boldly at their strong tethers, pulling them taut. The basket creaked and moved, and Rolf beheld the desert floor go dropping silently from beneath his feet.

The few who watched the launching cheered and waved. The camp was already astir with preparations for the day's march, and now a wider cheer went up to greet the swift-ascending flyer. Looking down upon an earth much darker than the lightening sky, Rolf saw his comrades' breakfast fires shrink steadily. The airborne flying machine was drifting slowly but steadily to the north. Gray was issuing sharp orders, planned beforehand, to the djinn, whose smoky image drifted without weight or apparent effort beside the basket. There came a hiss as flying gas was vented from the bags. Their giant shapes were spheres no longer but pressed together above the mast by their own bulging.

The hissing continued, as Gray had ordered, until their ascent had been stopped, or so the djinn informed them. Rolf could not say from one moment to the next that they were really on the same level, and he would have been hard put to judge exactly how high they were. The fires of the camp were now a scattering of sparks at some distance to the south, and the last people Rolf had seen there had been shrunken to the stature of small insects. Not that he was worried about their height. The tight grip he had taken on the rim of the basket when it lifted, was now loosening. Enjoyment was winning out steadily over fright.

Gray, too, seemed pleased. After exchanging with Rolf opinions that all was going well, he resumed giving orders to the djinn, for the attachment of rigging to the mast, and the readying of sails.