The Dark Design

"Yes, I know it's never been tried out, except on paper,'' Frigate said. "But here's our chance to try something unique."

"Yes," Martin said. "But you say Jules Veme proposed that idea in 1862. If it was such a hot idea, why didn't anyone ever try it?"

"I don't know. I would have done it on Earth if I'd had the money, Look. It's the only way we can get a considerable distance. If we use a conventional balloon, we'll be lucky to get four hundred and eighty kilometers. That still might eliminate a million kilometers of surface travel. But with the Jules Verne, and a lot of luck, we could get all the way to the polar mountains."

After much argument, the others finally agreed they should give his plan a try. But when the project began, Frigate became uneasy. As the time for lift-off neared, he became downright anxious. Several nightmares about balloons showed him just how deep his apprehension was. Nevertheless, he expressed only the greatest confidence in the project to the others.

Jules Verne had proposed in his novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, an idea which seemed feasible-though dangerous. It worked in his book, but Frigate knew that reality often failed to give diplomatic recognition to literature.

The balloon was made, and the crew took twelve practice flights. These, to everybody's amazement, especially Frigate's, suffered only minor mishaps. However, all the training runs were made at low altitudes which kept the aerostat below the top of the mountains walling the Valley. To rise above them was to be carried away from a reasonable distance of New Bohemia and so make it impossible to return before they were ready for the final flight.

The crew would have to get on-the-job training when they ven­tured into the stratosphere. ,

Doctor Fergusson, Verne's hero, had made a balloon based on the fact that hydrogen, when heated, expanded. This principle had been used in 1785 and 1810 with disastrous results. Veme's imagi­nary heating device was, however, much more scientific and pow­erful and worked-on paper. Frigate had available a more advanced technology than that in Verne's time, and he had made some modifications to the system. When the balloon was finished, he bragged that this was the first of its type in reality. They were making history.

Frisco said quite vehemently that nobody had tried Veme's concept because nobody had been crazy enough. Though he agreed with him, Frigate did not say so. This was the only type of aerostat that could go the immense distances to be traversed. He wasn't going to back out. Too many times, on both worlds, he had started something and then had failed to see it through. Even if this killed him, he was going all the way.

That it might also kill the others bothered him. However, they knew the dangers. No one was forcing them to go.

The final lift-off went according to schedule just before dawn. Arc lights and torches blazed on the immense crowd on the plain. The envelope of the balloon, painted with aluminum, floated like a wrinkled sausage skin hanging from an invisible hook.

The Jules Verne, at this stage of flight, did not correspond to the layman's idea of a balloon, a completely expanded sphere. But as it rose the bag would fill out from applied heat and decreasing air pressure around it.

The speeches had been made and the toasts drunk. Tom Rider noticed that Frisco was using a bumper twice as large as the others. He said something about "Dutch courage" but not loudly enough for Frisco to hear him. By the time Frisco entered the car, he was smiling and waving merrily to the onlookers.

Peter Frigate completed the weigh-off. Until now, this had al­ways involved making sure that the weight-envelope, gas, net, cargo chute, load ring, car, ballast, equipment, supplies, aeronauts-was slightly less than the lift. The Jules Verne was the first aerostat in which the lift-off weight was slightly more than the upward pull of the gas.

The car hanging below the bag was pumpkin shaped, and its hull was a double-walled magnesium alloy. In the center of its deck was a vertical L-shape, the vemian. Two thin plastic pipes ran from the metal contraption holes in the overhead. These were tightly packed to prevent escape of air from the car.

From there, the plastic pipes extended upward and for some distance beyond the hermetically sealed neck of the envelope. Their ends were fitted to light alloy pipes which rose to varying heights inside. One was longer than the other; both were open-ended.

The crew had been talkative before boarding. Now they looked at Frigate.

"Close the main hatch," he said, and the lift-off ritual began.

Frigate checked a gauge and two stopcocks affixed to the vernian. He opened a little hatch on the side near the top of the L-shape. He adjusted another stopcock until he heard a slight hissing. This came from a narrow nozzle at the end of a steel pipe inside the highest compartment.

He stuck an energized electrical lighter at the end of an aluminum rod into the furnace. A tiny flame popped from the nozzle. He turned the stopcock to increase the flame, adjusted two more to regulate the mixture of oxygen and hydrogen feeding the torch. The flame began heating the base of the large platinum cone just above it.

The lower end of the longest pipe extending into the bag was fitted into the apex of the cone. As the heat was expanded in the cone, the hydrogen in it moved upward, flowing into the bag and causing it to expand. The cooler hydrogen in the lower half of the bag, aided by a suction effect, flowed into the open end of the shorter pipe inside the envelope. It went down this pipe into the side of the vemian and into the side of the cone. There it was heated and rose, completing the circuit.

One of the compartments at the base of the vernian was an electrical battery. This was far lighter and much more powerful than the battery used by Fergusson in Veme's novel. It broke water into its elements, hydrogen and oxygen. These flowed into separate compartments, and then went to a mixing chamber, where the oxyhydrogen was piped to the torch.

One of Frigate's modifications to Verne's system was a pipe that led from the hydrogen storage chamber to the shorter pipe. By opening two stopcocks, the pilot could allow hydrogen from the storage chamber to flow into the balloon. This was an emergency measure used only to replace hydrogen valved off from the bag. When this was done, the torch was turned off, since hydrogen was highly inflammable.

Fifteen minutes passed. Then, with no motion noticeable, the car lifted off the ground. Frigate shut off the torch several seconds later.

The shouts of the spectators became less audible, then died out. The huge hangar shrank to a toy house. By then the sun had cleared the mountain, and the stones alongside The River thundered like artillery.

"That's our thousand-gun salute," Frigate said.

No one moved or spoke for a while after that. The silence was as intense as that at the bottom of a deep cave. However, the alloy walls of the hull had no sound-absorbing qualities. When Frisco's stomach rumbled, it sounded like distant thunder.

A slight wind sprang up now, carrying the vessel southward, away from their goal. Pogaas stuck his head out of an open port. He felt no sensation of movement since the balloon traveled at the same speed as the wind. The air around the hull was as still as if he was in a sealed room. The flame of a candle set on top of the vernian would have burned straight upward.

Though he'd gone up in aerostats many times, Frigate was always gripped by ecstasy during the first minutes of lift-off. No other form of flight-even gliding-could thrill him so. He felt as if he was a disembodied spirit, free of the shackles of gravity, of the cares and worries of flesh and mind.

This was a delusion, of course, since gravity had the balloon in its paws, was playing with it, and was likely to bat it around at any moment. Nor was there much respite from worries and cares. There was often work for both body and brain.