Ring of Fire III(17)

“We’re ready to go!” hollered Dina. “Hurry up!”

You didn’t want to dally when it came time to board an airship that used hot air instead of hydrogen. It was lifted and lowered by adjusting the heat produced by the burners, not by dropping a lot of ballast. Each passenger who came aboard added to the weight, which required more heat—which, if you overdid it, ran the risk of lifting too far while another person was trying to climb aboard.

The long dimension of the envelope had been aligned to face into the wind, and there was a bow line anchored to a tree stump that kept the ship fairly steady. But “fairly steady” is one thing, once a person is in a gondola; something quite a bit more challenging, when you’re trying to get into it in the first place.

Under normal conditions on a proper airfield this wouldn’t be so much a problem, because there would be half a dozen groundspeople who’d be holding the gondola down with ropes. Not to mention that they’d almost always be working in broad daylight.

It dawned on Bonnie that she’d given no thought at all to the problem of getting Hank Siers aboard. The surveyor was still unconscious.

Stefano sprang over the side of the gondola and landed lightly on the ground, by now almost six feet below the rail. He was a lithe and agile man.

Not a big one, unfortunately, nor a particularly strong one. With Willa and Maydene’s help, he was now trying to get Hank into the gondola, and...

Was not going to manage it. Bonnie hurried over, with Böcler right behind her.

Once there, she and the secretary lent a hand to the effort.

Still no success. The problem wasn’t simply Hank’s mass, it was the height of the gondola. Dina had replaced Stefano at the burner—she was more-or-less the expedition’s designated copilot—and was trying to lower the airship as much as she could. But, at best, that still meant trying to hoist more than two hundred pounds of dead weight over a railing that was never less than five feet off the ground.

“Use me as a stool,” Böcler said. He got down on hands and knees, right beside the gondola. “Quickly, please.”

Stefano didn’t hesitate for more than a second before he stood on Böcler’s back. “Pass him up to me.”

As stated, the proposition was absurd. Franchetti was barely more than half the size of Siers. But with four women pushing from below and using Stefano as a combination hoist and ramp—Amanda and Rita were pulling from above, too—they managed to get it done.

Bonnie helped Johann Heinrich back on his feet.

“Are you all right?” she asked. She was genuinely worried. He had to have taken something of a beating down there in the final frenzied push to get Siers into the gondola.

He took a deep breath. A bit of a shaky breath, too. “I have been better, at times in the past. But worse also. It’s not as bad as being bitten by a horse. Or kicked by a horse, which is still worse.”

She stared at him. Northern West Virginia had been a rural sort of place, especially a small town like Grantville. But the truth was that Bonnie, like many people in the area, didn’t really have any more experience with horses than a resident of Manhattan.

Or hadn’t, at least, until the Ring of Fire planted them all in the seventeenth century. But even then, Bonnie—also like many people in Grantville—still didn’t have much experience with horses. You could get pretty far by walking, when you got right down to it. And didn’t have to negotiate with a creature six or seven times bigger than you were in order to do it.

“You were bitten by a horse?”

“Oh, yes. They’re quite vicious animals, actually. I look forward to the day when we can all ride in automobiles everywhere and put horses in the zoo. Or, better yet, in the larders. The meat’s tasty, if you slaughter the animals before they get too old.”

“You’ve eaten a horse?”

“Not often. The meat’s too expensive unless you get the flesh from horses slaughtered late in life. And that’s no good except in sauerbraten. I’ve heard the Bavarians make a good sausage out of horse meat too, but I’ve never tasted it.”

It was their turn to get into the gondola, everyone else having already gone aboard. That was an awkward process. Neither of them was slender and Böcler had the further handicap of hands which were now almost useless. But with the help of the people pulling from above and a complete disregard for dignity, they managed the task.

As soon as they were in the gondola, Franchetti increased the output of the burners. At his order, Dina cast off the anchor line. They began rising immediately.

Panting a little from the exertion and half-sprawled on the floor of the gondola, Bonnie went back to staring wide-eyed at the secretary. “You ate a horse. Was that, like, a revenge thing?”