Again he looked upward. Atel handed him his binoculars. He focused on the nearest blimp. The huge gas bag and the gondola beneath—itself as big as many a Maurai ship—formed an aero
dynamically clean unit. The gondola seemed to be light, woven cane about a wooden frame, but strong. Three-fourths of the way up from its keep a sort of gallery ran clear around, on which the crew might walk and work. At intervals along its rail stood muscle-powered machines. Some must be for hauling, but others suggested catapults. So the blimps of various chiefs fought each other occasionally, in the northern kingdoms. That might be worth knowing. The Federation’s political psychologists were skilled at the divide-and-rule game. But for now.
The motive power was extraordinarily interesting. Near the gondola bows two lateral spars reached out for some fifty feet, one above the other. They supported two pivoted frames on either side, to which square sails were bent. A similar pair of spars pierced the after hull: eight sails in all. Shark-fin control surfaces were braced to the gas bag. A couple of small retractible windwheels, vaned and pivoted, jutted beneath the gondola, evidently serving the purpose of a false keel. Sails and rudders were trimmed by lines running through block and tackle to windlasses on the gallery. By altering their set, it should be possible to steer at least several points to windward. And, yes, the air moves in different directions at different levels. A blimp could descend by pumping out enough cells in its gas bag, compressing the hydrogen into storage tanks; it could rise by reinflating or by dropping ballast. (Though the latter trick would be reserved for home stretches, when leakage had depleted the gas supply.) Between sails, rudders, and its ability to find a reasonably favoring wind, such a blimp could go roving across several thousand miles, with a payload of no few tons. Oh, a lovely craft!
Ruori lowered his glasses. “Hasn’t the Perio built any air vessels, to fight back?” he asked.
“No,” mumbled one of the Meycans. “All we ever had was balloons. We don’t know how to make a fabric which will hold the lifting-gas long enough, or how to control the flight, so—” His voice trailed off.
“And being a non-scientific culture, you never thought of doing systematic research to learn those tricks,” said Ruori.
Tresa, who had been staring at her city, whirled about upon him. “It’s easy enough for you!” she screamed. “You haven’t stood off Mong in the north and Raucanians in the south for century after century . . . you haven’t had to spend twenty years and ten thousand lives making canals and aqueducts, so a few less people would starve. . . you aren’t burdened with a peon majority who can only work, who cannot look after themselves because they have never been taught how because their existence is too much of a burden for our land to afford it . . . it’s easy enough for you to float about with your shirtless doxies and poke fun at us! What would you have done, S’flor almighty captain?”
“Be still,” reproved young DOnoju. “He saved our lives.”
“So far!” she said, through teeth and tears. One small dancing shoe stamped the deck.
For a bemused moment, irrelevantly, Ruori wondered what a doxie was. It sounded uncomplimentary. Could she mean the wahines? But was there a more honorable way for a woman to earn a good dowry than by hazarding her life, side by side with the men of her people on a mission of discovery and civilization? What did Tresa expect to tell her grandchildren about on rainy nights?
Then he wondered further why she should disturb him so. He had noticed it before, in some of the Meycans, an almost terrifying intensity between man and wife, as if a spouse was somehow more than a respected friend and partner. But what other relationship was possible? A psychological specialist might know; Ruori was lost.
He shook an angry head, to clear it, and said aloud: “This is no time for inurbanity.” He had to use a Spaflol word with not quite the same connotation. “We must decide. Are you certain there is no hope of repelling the pirates?”