Against the Day (201 page)

Now
and then, the Captain explained, there arose
osobaia obstanovka
—
“special situation,” his favorite military term—in which an exchange of
internees by train would be inadvisable. “Some person of particular interest,
who cannot be repatriated without certain awkwardness. You understand.”

Faces
remained blank, except for Miles, who was nodding gravely. “If we lacked the
necessary maps and charts,” he said, “you could lend them to us.”

“Konechno.
We regret that our ship is no longer built for speed demanded by
special
situation.
”

They
soon found themselves hovering in the dead of night over prisonerofwar camps in
the Balkans. They revisited Siberia for the first time since the Tunguska Event
to negotiate for captured members of the JapaneseAmerican expeditionary force,
and were also instrumental in the relocation of Admiral Kolchak’s government
from Omsk. They were shot at by everything from hundredmile guns to dueling
pistols, without result, sometimes on impulse, not always by someone with a
clear idea of what they were shooting at. It was a new experience for the boys,
and after a while they learned not to take it any more personally than bad
weather or faulty maps. It had not occurred to any of them, until Miles pointed
it out, that their involvement in the European war had really not begun until
they took refuge on neutral ground.

One morning in
Geneva
, out in the
street, Padzhitnoff, after a long night in the taverns down by the riverside
quays, and Randolph, a resolutely early riser in search of a brioche and cup of
coffee, happened to cross paths. The city was washed in a strangely circumspect
light. Birds had long been up

and about, but discreetly so. Lake steamers refrained from
blowing their sirens. Tram cars seemed to ride on pneumatic wheels. A
supernatural hush hung over the steeples, the mountains, the known world. “What
is it?” Padzhitnoff wondered.

“Today? nothing special.” Randolph
took from his pocket a bookletsize ecclesiastical calendar he used for writing
himself notes in. “Martinmas, I think.”

Toward noon the bell of the Cathedral
of Saint Pierre known as La Clémence began to ring. Soon all the bells in the
city had joined in. Back in Europe something called an armistice had taken
effect.

Once hostilities
were over
, contract
offers, which had previously so eluded the boys, began to pour in. The
Inconvenience
continued to fly in and out of Switzerland on the same kinds of relief and
repatriation jobs that had occupied it before, but now there were also civilian
assignments, more in the tradition of the boys’ earlier adventures. Spies and
sales representatives in particular could be found lurking at all hours in the
lobby of the Helvetia Royale with fists full of francs and propositions of a
grandiosity unknown to the world before 1914.

One lunchtime just as Darby was
preparing to scream, “Not fondue again!” Pugnax came strolling in to the mess decks
with a mysterious light in his eyes, and in his mouth a large embossed
envelope, sealed with wax and bearing a gilt crest.

   
“What’s
this? wondered Randolph.

“Rff rff rr RRrff!” commented Pugnax,
which the boys understood to mean, “Looks like some money!”

Randolph
scanned the letter thoughtfully. “A job offer, back in the States,” he said at
last. “Sunny California, no less. The lawyers who sent this are withholding the
names of their principals, nor does it seem clear what we’re to do exactly,
beyond wait for instructions once we’re there.”

   
“And,
eeyynnhh
. . .
how much were they
offering?” Darby inquired.

Randolph
held the sheet up so that all could see. The sum, clearly visible, represented
about twice the combined net worth of everyone on board.

   
“Something
criminal, one presumes,” warned Lindsay.

“This
offer must obviously be subjected to the most exhaustive moral and legal
scrutiny,” Darby declared, pretending to eyeball the sum once again. “OK,
everything looks fine to me. “

The
prospect of wellremunerated work in California—which up till then had
figured for the boys as a remote and mythical locale—soon overcame

scruples even as unresponsive as
Lindsay’s, though as selfselected conscience of the crew, he could not resist
asking, “Who will tell Captain Padzhitnoff ?”

Everybody looked at Randolph.
Randolph looked at his bulbous reflection in the silver teaservice for a while,
and finally said, “Rats.”

Padzhitnoff’s shrug and smile were
notable for an absence of bitterness. “You don’t need my authorization,” he
said. “You’ve always been free to go.”

“But it feels like we’re deserting
you, Igor. Deserting—” he waved his hand a little desperately, as if to
include all the waiting populations of unconnected souls adrift, orphans and
cripples, unsheltered, sick, starving, incarcerated, insane, who must yet be
helped to safety.

“War is not over. May never be.
Consequences may never end. My crew have had four years, a University
education, in learning to manage famine, disease, broken cities, all that now
must follow what has happened. Horror, pointlessness—but we did get
educated. You may have been differently educated. Your own obligations may be
to different consequences.”

   
“American
consequences.”

“Nebotovarishch”—a hand on his
shoulder—“I cannot—would rather not—imagine.”

So it came about, one evening, just
as the first stars appeared, that the
Inconvenience
rose from the shores
of Lake Geneva and set her course westsouthwest.

“We should pick up prevailing
westerlies off the coast of Senegal,” reckoned Lindsay, who was Weather
Officer.

“Remember when we had to go where the
wind took us?” Randolph said. “Now we can just light off the engines and let
’er rip.”

“Our clients,” Lindsay reminded
everyone, “are insistent that we be on the Pacific coast as soon as possible,
travel costs being covered contractually only up to a certain sum, above which
we become responsible.”

   
“Eehhnnyyhh,
what idiot put a clause like that in there?” sneered Darby.

   
“You
did,” chuckled Lindsay.

Crossing the
Rockies
, they found
aloft an invisible repetition of the material terrain beneath them.
Threedimensional flows of cold air followed the flow of rivers far below. Air
currents ascended sunny sides of mountains at the same steep angles as colder
air drained down the shady sides. Sometimes they would be caught in this
cycling, and hung over the ridgeline repeating great vertical circles until
Randolph ordered the engines engaged.

It
proved a struggle after that, for the wind desired them to go south, and
numberless standard cubic feet of engine propellant were wasted against

the northerly imperative before Randolph, calculating that
they had exceeded their energy allotment, gave up the ship’s immediate future
to the wind, and they drifted thus over the Rio Bravo, and into the skies of
Old Mexico. So they were borne onward, before winds of obscure sorrow, their
clarity of will fitful as the nightly heatlightning at their horizon.

It
was just at that moment of spiritual perplexity that they would be rescued,
with no advance annunciation, here, “South of the Border,” by the Sodality of
Ætheronauts.

How
could they have ever crossed trajectories? Afterward none of the boys could
remember where it happened, during which toxic ascent, amid what clamor of
bickering by now grown routine, they had blundered into this flyingformation of
girls, dressed like religious novices in tones of dusk, sent whirling,
scattering before the airship’s starblotting mass, their metallic wings
earnestly rhythmic, buffeting, some passing close enough for the boys to count
the bolts on gearhousings, hear the rotary whining of nitronaphthol auxiliary
powerunits, grow rigidly attentive to glimpses of bared athletic girlflesh. Not
that these wings, with their thousands of perfectlymachined elliptical “feathers,”
even in this failing, grimefiltered light, could ever have been mistaken for
angels’ wings. The serious girls, each harnessed in black kidskin and
nickelplating beneath the inescapable burdens of flight, each bearing on her
brow a tiny electric lamp to view her control panel by, regrouped and wheeled
away into the coming night. Were glances, even then, cast back at the
lumbering, enginedriven skycraft? frowns, coquetries, indistinct foreknowledge
that it was to be among themselves, these sombre young women, that the Chums
were destined after all to seek wives, to marry and have children and become
grandparents—precisely among this wandering sisterhood, who by the terms
of their dark indenture must never descend to Earth, each nightfall nesting
together on city rooftops like a flock of February chaffinch, having learned to
find, in all that roofs keep out, a domesticity of escape and rejection,
beneath storm, assaults of moonlight, some darker vertical predation, never
entirely dreamed, from other worlds.

Their
names were Heartsease and Primula, Glee, Blaze, and Viridian, each had found
her way to this Ætherist sorority through the mysteries of
inconvenience—a train arriving late, a loveletter mistimed, a
hallucinating police witness, and so forth. And now here were these five boy
balloonists, whose immediate point of fascination was with the girls’ mode of
flight. There were great waves passing through the Æther, Viridian explained,
which a person could catch, and be carried along by, as the seawind carries the
erne, or as Pacific waves are said to carry the surfers of Hawaii. The girls’
wings were

Ætherærials which sensed in the medium, all but
microscopically, a list of variables including weighted lightsaturation index,
spectral reluctance, and Æthernormalized Reynolds Number. “These are in turn
fed back into a calculating device,” said Viridian, “which controls our wing
parameters, adjusting them ‘feather’ by ‘feather’ to maximize Ætheric lift
. . . .
”

   
“It
would have had to be an Ætherist,” Chick whispered to himself.

“Fumes are not the future,” declared
Viridian. “Burning dead dinosaurs and whatever they ate ain’t the answer,
Crankshaft Boy.”

She immediately began to instruct him
in the Ætherodynamics that made it possible for the girls to fly.

“The Æther,” Viridian explained,
“like the atmosphere around a skyship, may produce lift and drag on the Earth
as it moves through space. As long ago as the MichelsonMorley Experiment
there’s been speculation about a boundary layer.”

“Which the planet’s irregular surface,”
Chick began to see then, “mountains and so forth, creates vortices to keep from
separating—”

“And we also know that its thickness
is proportional to kinematic viscosity, expressed as area per
second—making Time inversely proportional to viscosity, and so to the
boundarylayer thickness as well.”

“But the viscosity of the Æther, like
its density, must be negligible. Meaning a very thin boundary layer,
accompanied by a considerable dilation of Time.”

Darby, who happened to be listening,
wandered away at last shaking his head. “Like Sidney and Beatrice Webb around
here.”

“As well as a very rapid rise,”
Viridian had continued, “from zero to whatever the speed of the prevailing
Ætherwind is. So that to encounter it in its full force, one would not have to venture
far from the planetary surface. In our own case, not much higher than rooftop
level.”

Chick and Viridian would turn out to
be the most problematical, or offandonagain, of the five pairings. Chick acted
sometimes as if his heart were still back at the scenes of previous adventures,
and Viridian’s day was itself not without lapses into the sentimental
pluperfect.

Lindsay Noseworth, the diagnosed
gamomaniac, would be hit hardest of all, at no more than the first sidelong
smudge of Primula’s appearance. “Primula Noseworth,” he was soon discovered
whispering over and over, “Primula Noseworth . . .” no part of the ship nor
moment of the day being exempt from this confounded mooning. The audible
equivalent of a sailor’s tattoo.

As for Miles, “Oh Glee,” she was
playfully admonished, “you always were such a goose when it came to the deep
ones!” (Miles’s spoken feelings, though

recorded, were not readily made sense of.)

   
It
was Heartsease, meanwhile, who became fascinated by the somewhat distracted
Randolph (her genius for cookery and herbal knowledge, patiently exercised,
would eventually cure his dyspepsia).

Blaze
and Darby were a furiously passionate “item” right from the beginning, the
former mascotte finding himself, for the first time in the company of a woman,
not even tonguetied, no, in fact
dizzyingly aloft,
through aerial
resources which appeared to be entirely his own. “Have I lost my common sense,”
Blaze wondered, “here unchaperoned like this, with the likes of you and all?”
Her gaze attending him narrowly but not unkindly, framed by the rooftiles of
her night’s lodging spilling away in what might as well be infinite regress,
the corroded splendor of the late sky deepening as they stood and, it seemed to
Darby, waited, though for what exactly was beyond him. As stoves were lit
invisibly beneath their feet, woodsmoke began to seep and blow from the chimney
tops, cries of newsboys ascended from the streets below, piercing as song.
Arpeggios of bells, each with its own longcherished name in the local dialect,
joined in. Great disks of daywearied birds tilted and careened above the
squares big and small, brushed with penultimate light one moment, shed of it
the next.