Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology (40 page)

Nick Bottom stirred from his long, rapt silence. “You figured out how to navigate just from some bloomin’ books? How did you know you was going to hit the mountains?”

“Remember, I was Ma’s star pupil,” answered Ganesh. “She graduated from a fancy women’s teacher college Back East. You can bet she made sure all us kids got our lessons straight. Taught us all to read and write and do our sums. Some of us she taught algebra and geometry, even calculus. Latin and Greek, geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics. But that day the geometry was the most useful.

“Seems to me, mate,” Nick says, “you’re closer to being educated than not.”

“I know enough to get by,” said Ganesh. “Just don’t try to plunk me down in some fancy-ass drawin’ room. Them swells will spot me for a fraud in a hot second. I might have been around the world a few times, but I’m just a simple farm boy turned aeronautical sailor.”

Anyway, knowin’ our altitude, and having so many high mountains as landmarks, it was easy to fix our position on the chart, estimate the angle to a distant landmark, time our passage with the chronometer, and calculate our speed.

The winds at that altitude were lots faster than on the ground. We was movin’ at more than a hundred miles an hour, straight toward Mount Evans, one of the highest of the mountains on the Front Range of the Rockies. A lot of those peaks are over fourteen thousand feet, a couple of thousand feet higher than we were flying. And the way I figured it, we was goin’ to get there just after full dark.

The sunsets in the Rocky Mountains are really something to see, I can tell you. When it’s clear, like it was that night, the sunset arches all the way across the sky, from burnished gold against the western horizon, through the colors, from orange, to crimson, then purple, indigo, and finally to inky black. But we was going away from the sunset at a wonderful clip, so that sun disappeared in a real hurry.

For a while I could still see the snow caps on the peaks of Mount Evans reflecting the red glow of the sunset, like bloody fangs rushin’ at me out of a dark closet. That was bad enough. But when the light was gone completely it was worse: I knew that mountain was there, and that we wasn't high enough to get over.

Not being able to see it made it even scarier. I imagined us plowin’ into the mountainside a thousand feet below the summit, high up on those permanent snowfields, way high up where nobody one would ever find us. If anyone ever bothered to try.

I tried again to rouse Ozzie, but it was completely useless. No help there. He didn't expect us to get to the Front Range until at least the following day, so he figured we was completely safe just driftin’ along. A man doesn't get more asleep than that without bein’ dead.

“Well, that tears it,” I says to myself. “I know he said not to touch anything, but if I don't, we'll die for sure.”

I stood and stared at the maze of pipes and gauges and fireboxes and valves and gears and fly wheels and push rods that connected the boiler to the propellers, trying to make sense of it all. It couldn't be all that different from the steam engine that drove the sugar beet processing machinery at the Co-op, could it? I had watched Pa operate that often enough. Ought to be the same, right? At least in principle?

But I had no more than an hour to figure it out, get it fired up and up to pressure—without blowin’ us to kingdom come—before we hit the side of that mountain. We were flyin’ at it straight as an arrow.

Then it dawned on me, like a lump of lead landin’ at the bottom of my stomach, that the boiler at the Co-op took more than an hour to get up to pressure. If Ozzie had left the ground in an organized and orderly way, he'd have made steam before he cast off. But no one ever accused Ozzie Osmond of doin’ anything organized or orderly.

I hurried and laid a fire in the boiler, slowly started feedin’ in coal, made as sure as I could that water was flowing in to cover the firebox, started watching the pressure gauge with one eye, the chronometer with the other.

It was a race: could I get up enough steam to get the propellers turnin’ enough to get us across the wind and get through a pass on either side of those fangs? Or would time run out? Would I be watchin’ the boiler gauges when we plowed into the side of the mountain and the hydrogen in the blimp went up in a giant fireball?

Below us was mile after mile of smaller mountains and forest. No sense even thinkin’ about venting gas and tryin’ to land; hittin’ the ground here would be as fatal as hittin’ the side of Mount Evans. I had to either steer us around the mountain, or up and over.

My options wasn't good: either I would get the propellers turnin’ and be able to steer, or I would have to dump ballast. But I had no idea how to dump enough to get us up the couple of thousand feet we needed, without sendin’ us too high--so high there would be no air to breathe.

Quickly I figured my point of no return, the moment when I would be forced to dump ballast or die. Would the blimp climb as fast as it did leavin’ the ground? I had no idea. I watched the minutes tick away, knowing that out there in the darkness that mountain was coming at me so fast that if I crashed into it, I would die instantly, and never know what hit me.

Since then I've learned all the things I should have done, the finer control I might have used, but just didn't know about at the time. As it turned out I might just as well have sat down and waited for the crash, for all the good any of it did me. Because the steam pressure gauge never moved off the bottom.

I knew I was making steam, but I had no idea Ozzie had opened all the pressure valves when he shut down the boiler. I was making steam, but it was just puffing out behind the blimp, not turning the propellers.

So there I sat, with my hand on the handle I hoped would dump ballast, watching the chronometer tick down the last few seconds to the point of no return, when the altimeter jumped to life. Suddenly, without me doing a blessed thing, we were climbin’ even faster than when we left the ground. Within a minute we had gained the two thousand feet we needed to clear the mountain, and just kept climbin’.

What I learned that night is that a strong wind doesn't want to hit a mountain any more than I do. It wants to go up and over, just like me. You know how when a strong wind blows a scrap of paper down the street, and it comes to a house, it lifts the paper up and over? Like it is ridin’ an invisible wave? ”

The altimeter just kept climbin’. Fifteen thousand feet, then seventeen, then twenty. It got so cold even the boiler wasn't enough to warm the cabin. My heart was poundin’ like a racehorse, my head was splittin’, and it was getting hard to think. Should I do somethin’? Should I vent gas from the blimp to bring us down? Was it better to crash than to freeze to death or smother without air?

I struggled to decide, but before I could make my brain work, the altimeter started fallin’ again. Seventeen thousand. Fifteen. Thirteen. It slowed. And leveled back out at twelve thousand feet. I had ridden the invisible mountain wave up and over the top of that mountain, down there in the dark somewhere, and back down the other side.

And that, my friend, is how I piloted an airship over the highest mountain I had ever seen, by sheer dumb luck, on the first day I ever got off the ground.

Nick stood up and stretched. “You tell a mean tale, you do! And after I fetch a tin of biscuits from the galley and pass by the loo mayhap you’ll get to the point.”

“Danged if it ain’t gone right out of my head what the point was in the first place!” Ganesh laughed. “Oh right! How did I come to be a megamech. How I come to be mechanized in the first place.”

“Too right!” Nick exclaimed. “But you just go right on. I don’t need to be in the salon to hear ya—your voice is the same all over the ship. Sunrise won’t be for hours, and I won’t sleep. So we may just as well keep swappin’ tales until orders come.”

Well, there was a great deal of cussin’ when Ozzie finally came to, but that wasn’t until way after the sun came up, nearly noon the next day. He sat up with a start, took one look out the window, and stomped around log jammin’, horse cloppin’, and runt buckin’, until his splittin’ hangover headache slowed him to a crawl and a whimper.

By the time he came to, we was way past the Rockies, out onto the Great Plains, and the wind had died down to a breeze. We was driftin’ along above eastern Colorado, with nothin’ but patches of wheat fields below us for landmarks.

He tried for a few minutes to figure out where the bleepity bleep we were. I tried a couple of times to tell him, but he just shouted me down. Finally he got desperate, or calmed down a little, I don't know which, and let me tell him. It's not that hard when you've been payin’ close attention to every possible landmark right through the night. I pointed out the smoke of a Transcontinental locomotive away to the north, and a couple of little hamlets thousands of feet below. I showed them to him on the chart.

We were about halfway between Denver, Colorado and Omaha, Nebraska. Covered seven hundred miles from where we started while Oz was sleepin’. And since you don’t know the middle of North America, let me just tell you it’s mile after mile after mile of wide open nothin’. They call it the Great Plains for a reason: because it goes on for days, with not a blessed thing but a farmhouse once in a while to break up the monotony.

He got busy firing up the boiler, and I got busy watchin’ really close how to do it. He knew enough to get the propellers turnin’, but not much more. Before he had to leave his pilot in San Francisco he had only been a passenger, and that only for a couple of weeks, so he didn't know a whole lot more than me.

I watched for a while which valves did what, which let me know why I hadn’t been able to get the propellers turnin’. Pretty quick I saw which pressure gauges went with which sections of pipe, and what lead to what. Being handy and all, right away I could tell how he had managed to use up all his coal getting’ from San Francisco to where he found me. After tryin’ a couple of times to explain how to regulate his steam, he finally listened to me, and we got pushin’ toward Omaha at a pretty good clip, what with the prevailin’ winds behind us and all.

Along the way we stopped at one little teeny farming town after another, all of them well away from the railroad towns, where the station masters might have gotten telegrams from Mr. Peterson to be on the lookout for the scoundrel that stole coal, groceries, and kidnapped a local boy. Before the first week was up I was doin’ all the flyin’, while Oz laid around with a pint bottle in his hand any time we was up in the air.

Every time we landed it was just like at home that day, folks comin’ at a gallop from all around the town. We would give rides in the blimp at five cents a head, and for another nickel Ozzie would supply pint bottles of a special patented elixir he said he got from an Apache medicine man, that had the venom of Gila monsters and komodo dragons, and was guaranteed to make faint women hearty, weak men strong, and grow hair on a bald grandfather's pate.

He told folks that I was a poor innocent deaf mute ten-year-old orphan that he had rescued from starvation on the streets of Sydney, Australia, and had fed on that amazin’ elixir all the way across the ocean. He was taking me home to my dear saintly grandmother in London, England, and couldn’t they see their way clear to help him on his way, on his errand of mercy?