The Lavalite World

Anana spent an hour looking for the axe, failed to find it, and ran home because a moa had appeared in the distance. The next day the three went back to search for it. After half a day McKay found it behind a boulder that had popped out of the earth while they were looking.

The next stage in the project was to make a small test balloon. First, though, they had to build a windbreak. The wind, created by the passage of the moon through the atmosphere at an estimated ten miles an hour, never stopped blowing. Which meant that they would never be able to finish the inflation of the balloon before it blew away.

The work took four weeks. They dug up the ground with the knives, the axe, and pointed sticks. When they had a semicircle of earth sixteen feet high, they added a roof supported by the trunks of dead plants of a giant species.

Then came the antelope hunting. At the end of two days' exhausting hunting and transportation of skins from widely scattered places, they had a large pile. But the hides were in varying stages of decomposition.

There was no time to rest. They scraped off the fat and partially dehaired the skins. Then they cut them, and Anana and Kickaha sewed the panels together. McKay had cut strips and made a network of them.

Dawn found them red-eyed and weary. But they started the fire on the earthen floor of the little basket. Using a gallows of wood, they hoisted the

limp envelope up so that the heat from the fire would go directly into the open neck of the bag. Gradually it inflated. When it seemed on the brink of rising, they grabbed the cords hanging from the network around the bag and pulled it out from under the roof. The wind caught it, sent it scooting across the plain, the basket tilting to one side. Some of the fire was shifted off the earth, and the basket began to burn. But the balloon, the envelope steadily expanding, rose.

Pale-blue smoke curled up from the seams.

Anana shook her head. "I knew it wasn't tight enough."

Nevertheless, the aerostat continued to rise. The basket hanging from the rawhide ropes burned and presently one end swung loose, spilling what remained of the fire. The balloon rose a few more feet, then began to sink, and shortly was falling. By then it was at least five miles away horizontally and perhaps a mile high. It passed beyond the shoulder of a mountain, no doubt to startle the animals there and to provide food for the dogs and the baboons and perhaps the lions.

"I wish I'd had a camera," Kickaha said. "The only rawhide balloon in the history of mankind."

"Even if we find a material suitable for the envelope covering," Anana said, "it'll be from an animal. And it'll rot too quickly."

"The natives know how to partially cure rawhide," he said. "And they might know where we could get the wood and the covering we need. So, we'll find us some natives and interrogate them."

Four weeks later, they were about to give up looking for human beings. They decided to try for three days more. The second day, from the side of a shrinking mountain, they saw a small tribe moving across a swelling plain. Behind them, perhaps a mile away, was a tiny figure sitting in the middle of the immensity.

Several hours later, they came upon the figure. It was covered by a rawhide blanket. Kickaha walked up to it and removed the blanket. A very old woman had been sitting under it, her withered legs crossed, her arms upon her flabby breasts, one hand holding a flint scraper. Her eyes had been closed, but they opened when she felt the blanket move. They became huge. Her toothless mouth opened in horror. Then, to Kickaha's surprise, she smiled, and she closed her eyes again, and she began a high-pitched whining chant.

Anana walked around her, looking at the curved back, the prominent ribs, the bloated stomach, the scanty white locks, and especially at one foot. This had all the appearance of having been chewed on by a lion long ago. Three toes were missing, it was scarred heavily, and it was bent at an u

"She's too old to do any more work or to travel," Anana said.

"So they just left her to starve or be eaten by the animals," Kickaha said. "But they left her this scraper. What do you suppose that's for? So she could cut her wrists?"

Anana said, "Probably. That's why she smiled when she got over her fright. She figures we'll put her out of her misery at once."

She fingered the rawhide. "But she's wrong. She can tell us how to cure skins and maybe tell us a lot more, too. If she isn't senile."

Leaving McKay to guard the old woman, the others went off to hunt. They returned late that day, each bearing part of a gazelle carcass. They also carried a bag full of berries picked from a tree they'd cut out of a grove, though Kickaha's skin had a long red mark from a lashing tentacle. They offered water and berries to the crone, and after some hesitation she accepted. Kickaha pounded a piece of flank to make it more tender for her, and she gummed away on it. Later, he dug a hole in the ground, put water in it, heated some stones, dropped them in the water, and added tiny pieces of meat. The soup wasn't hot, and it wasn't good, but it was warm and thick, and she was able to drink that.

While one stood guard that night, the others slept. In the morning, they made some more soup, adding berries for an experiment, and the old woman drank it all from the proferred gourd. Then the language lessons began. She was an eager teacher once she understood that they weren't just fattening her up so they could eat her.

The next day Kickaha set out after the people who'd abandoned her. Two days later he returned with flint spear heads, axes, hand scrapers, and several war boomerangs.

"It was easy. I sneaked in at night while they were snoring away after a feast of rotten elephant meat. I picked what I wanted and took off. Even the guards were sleeping."

Learning the old woman's language proceeded swiftly. In three weeks Shoobam was telling them jokes. And she was a storehouse of information. A treasure trove, in fact.

Primed with data, the three set to work. While one of the three guarded Shoobam, the others went out to get the materials needed. They killed the plants which she had told them were likely to contain gallota

Kickaha made a crutch for Shoobam so she could become mobile, and Anana spent some time every day massaging the old woman's semiparalyzed legs. She was not only able to get around better, she began to put on some weight. Still, though she enjoyed talking to the three and felt more important than she had for a long time, I she wasn't happy. She missed the tribal life and especially her grandchildren. But she had the stoic toughness of all the natives, who could make a luxury out of what was to the three the barest necessity.

Several months passed. Kickaha and company worked hard from dawn to long past dusk. Finally, they had three parawings much superior in lightness of weight, strength, and durability to the original made by Anana. These were stiffened with wooden ribs and were not to be folded.

Told by Shoobam about a certain type of tree the bark of which contained a powerful poison, Kickaha and Anana searched for a grove. After finding one, they pulled a dozen plants over with lariats and killed them. During the process, however, they narrowly escaped being caught and burned with the poison exuded by the tentacles. The old woman instructed them in the techniques of extracting the poison.

Kickaha was very happy when he discovered that the branches of the poison-plant were similar to those of yew. He made bows with strings from goat intestines. The arrows were fitted with the flint heads he'd stolen from Shoobam's tribe, and these were dipped in the poison.