The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

Jill, glancing at Piscator, saw that he was intensely curious about the stranger. His black eyes were narrowed, and his head was cocked slightly to one side, as if he were listening to some soft, faraway sound.

Firebrass shook hands with Thorn.

“Wow! What a grip! Glad to have you aboard, sir, if you are what Agatha claims you are. Sit down, take a load off your feet. Have you traveled a long way? You have? Forty thousand stones? Would you care for food? Coffee? Tea? Booze or beer?”

Thorn declined everything except the chair. He spoke in a very pleasant baritone without the usual pauses, hesitations, and incom­plete phrases that distinguished the speech of most people.

Finding that Thorn was a Canadian, Firebrass switched from Esperanto to English. In a few minutes of questioning, he got a capsule biography .of the newcomer.

Barry Thorn was born in 1920 on_his parents’ farm outside Regina, Saskatchewan. After getting a degree in electromechanical engineering in 1938, he enlisted in the British Navy while in England. During the war, he was the commander of a naval blimp. He married an American girl and after the war went to the States to live because his wife, an Ohioan who wanted to be close to her parents, had insisted. Besides, the opportunities were better there for blimp pilots.

He picked up a commercial pilot’s license also, intending to work for the American airlines. But after his divorce he quit Goodyear and became a bush pilot for several years in the Yukon. Then he had returned to Goodyear and married again. After his second wife died, he had gotten a job with a newly formed British-West German airship company. For some years he had captained a great blimp-tug which towed floating containers of natural gas from the Middle East to Europe.

Jill asked him a few questions in the hope that his answers would jog her memory. She had known a few airshipmen at Thorn’s company, and some of these might have mentioned him. He replied that he remembered one of them-he thought. He wasn’t sure because that had been so long ago.

He had died in 1983 while on leave in Friedrichshafen. He did not know the cause of his death. Heart failure, probably. He had gone to sleep one night and when he had awakened he was lying naked on a bank of The River-along with everybody else.

Since then he had been wandering up and down the Valley. One day, hearing a rumor that a giant dirigible was being built down-River, he had decided to find out for himself if the tale was true.

Firebrass, beaming, said, “This is luck! You’re more than wel­come, Barry. Agatha, will you make arrangements to house Mr. Thorn?”

Thorn shook hands with everybody and left. Firebrass almost danced with delight. “We’re coming along famously.”

Jill said, “Does this change my situation?”

Firebrass looked surprised. “No. I said you’d be the head instruc­tor and captain of the Minerva. Firebrass always keeps his prom­ises. Well, almost always.

“Now, I know what you’re thinking. I made no promises about who’ll be the first mate of the Parsevol. You’re a strong contender for the post, Jill. But it’s too early to decide on that. All I can say is, ‘May the best man win. Or the best woman.’ ”

Piscator patted her hand. At another time, she would have resent­ed the gesture. Now, she felt warmed.

Later, after they had left the office, Piscator said, “I am not certain that Thorn is telling the truth. Not all of it, anyway. His story may be true as far as it goes. But there’s something that rings falsely in his voice. He could be concealing something.”

“Sometimes you frighten me,” she said.

“I could be wrong about him.”

Jill got the impression that he did not believe that.

34

Each day, before dawn, the Minerva lifted for a training flight. Sometimes it stayed aloft until an hour after noon. Some­times it cruised all day, landing at evening. For the first week, Jill was its only pilot. Then she let each of the trainee pilots and the control gondola officers handle the controls.

Barry Thorn did not enter the blimp until four weeks after aerial training started. Jill insisted that he attend ground school first. Though he was experienced, he had not been in an airship for thirty-two years and it could be presumed that he had forgotten much. Thorn did not object.