The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

“It’ll take too much time, too much material,” a man said .loudly. His speech was that of a native of Maine. There was something, or was it just her overactive imagination, of the shriek of the wind in rigging, the creaking of rope and wood in a rolling ship, the thunder of surf, the flapping of sails, in his voice? Imagination, of course.

“Stop that, Jill,” she told herself. If Firebrass had not called him Zeke, she would not now be imposing open-sea-sailing-ship images. on the voice. He would be Ezekiel Hardy, captain of a New Bedford whaler, killed by a sperm whale off the coast of Japan-1833?- and he had convinced Firebrass that he would make an excellent helmsman or navigator for the airship. After suitable training, of course. Firebrass must really be hard up for a crew if he signed on an early-nineteenth-century whaling ship skipper. The man had prob­ably never even seen a balloon, maybe not even a steam-driven riverboat.

The grapevine had it that Firebrass had had little success so far in finding experienced airshipmen. Men, of course. Always men. So, he had accepted candidates who seemed most likely to benefit from training. Airplane pilots. Balloonists. Sailors. Meanwhile, the word had spread up and down The River for 60,000 kilometers, perhaps 100,000, that Firebrass wanted lighter-than-air men. Al­ways men.

What did Firebrass know about building and flying a gasbag? He may have journeyed to Mars and Ganymede, orbited Jupiter and Saturn, but what did that have to do with dirigibles? David Schwartz, it was true, had designed and built the first truly rigid dirigible. It had also been the first to have a structure and skin made completely from aluminum. This was in 1893, sixty years before she had been born. He’d then started to build a better airship-in Berlin, 1895?-but work had stopped on it when Schwartz had died-January, 1897?

She was not sure now. Thirty-one years on The River had dimmed much of memories on Earth.

She wondered if Schwartz knew what had happened after he had died. Probably not unless he’d met some gasbag freak, a layman Zepfan. Schwartz’s widow had carried on his work, and yet no book Jill had read had bothered to note her first name or her maiden name. She was only Frau Schwartz. She had gotten the second ship built, despite being only a woman. And some male jackass had flown the aluminum ship (which looked more like a thermos bottle than anything else), had panicked, and had wrecked it.

All that was left of Schwartz’s dream and his wife’s devotion to it was a crumpled mass of silvery-looking metal. So much for dreams in a high wind when a big phallus, lilliputian brains, and mouse courage were at the controls. Now, if the jackass had been a woman, her name would have been recorded. See what happens when a woman leaves the kitchen? If God had intended . . .

Jill Gulbirra trembled, a hot ache in her chest. Get hold of yourself, she murmured. Cool does it or you blow it.

She started from her reverie. While she had been dreaming of Frau Schwartz’s dream, she had allowed the canoe to be carried down-River. The fire had become smaller, and the voices fainter, and yet she had not noticed. Better bloody watch out, she told herself. She had to be ever alert, or she would never convince the powers-that-be that she was qualified to be one of the airship crew. To be captain?

“There’s plenty of time!” Firebrass thundered. “This isn’t any government-contract, low-fund, high-pressure project! It’ll be thir­ty-seven years or more before Sam gets to the end of The River. It’ll only take two-maybe three-years to complete the beast. Mean­while , we’ll use the blimp for training. And then we’ re off, heigh ho for the wild blue yonder, the misty sea of the north pole, where no Santa Claus, but somebody who’s given us gifts that make Saint Nick look like the world’s worst tightwad, lives! Off to the Misty Tower, the Really Big Grail!”

The fourth man spoke up now. He had a pleasant baritone, but it was evident that English was not his natal speech. What was it? It sounded like a French accent in some ways but. . . Yes, of course. That could be Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, if she could believe what she had heard at about hundredth hand. It just did not seem possible that she would soon be talking to him. Perhaps she wouldn’t be, since there were so many phonies on The River.