“Or he’s found the control room but is afraid to enter because he knows it’ll be trapped.”
McKay said, “Maybe he’ll figure out a way to get in without getting caught.”
“By then he won’t be able to find us even if he wants to,” she said.
“The palace’ll be coming around again,” Kick-aha said. “Maybe by then …”
Anana shook her head. “I doubt the palace stays on the same orbit. It probably spirals around.”
On the primary, the palace was only a few feet above the ground. Here, for some reason, if floated about a hundred feet from the surface. Anana speculated that Urthona might’ve set the automatic controls for this altitude because the palace would accompany the moon when it fell.
“He could go down with it and yet be distant enough so the palace wouldn’t be disturbed by the impact.”
“If that’s so, then the impact must not be too terrible. If it were, the ground could easily buckle to a hundred feet or more. But what about a mountain falling over on it?”
“I don’t know. But Urthona had a good reason for doing it. Unfortunately for us, it removes any chance for us to get to the palace while it’s on the moon.” They did not see the palace. Evidently, it did follow a spiral path.
The days and sometimes the nights that succeeded the appearance of the building were busy.
In addition to hunting, which took much time, they had to knock over and kill trees and skin the antelopes they slew. Branches were cut from the trees and shaped with axe and knife. The skins were scraped and dehaired, though not to Anana’s satisfaction. She fashioned needles from wood and sewed the skins together. Then she cut away parts of these to make them the exact shape needed. After this, she sewed the triangular form onto the wooden structure.
The result was a three-cornered kite-shape. The rawhide strips used as substitutes for wires were tied onto the glider.
Anana had hoped to use a triangular trapeze bar for control. But their efforts to make one of three wooden pieces tied at the corners failed. It just wasn’t structurally sound enough. It was likely to fall apart when subjected to stress of operation.
Instead, she settled for the parallel bar arrangement. The pilot would place his armpits over the bars and grasp the uprights. Control would be effected, she hoped, through shifting of the pilot’s weight.
When the bars and uprights were installed, Anana frowned.
“I don’t know if it’ll stand up under the stress. Well, only one way to find out.”
She got into position underneath the glider. Then, instead of running, as she would have had to do on the planet, she crouched down and leaped into the wind. She rose thirty-five feet, inclined the nose upwards a little to catch the wind, and glided for a short distance. She stalled the machine just before landing and settled down.
The others had bounded after her. She said, grinning, “The first antelope-hide glider in history has just made its first successful flight.”
She continued making the short glides, stopping when she had gone two miles. They walked back then, and Kickaha, after receiving instructions again-for the twentieth time-tried his skill. McKay succeeded him without mishap, and they called it a day.
“Tomorrow we’ll practice on the plain again,” she said. “The day after, we’ll go up a mountain a little ways and try our luck there. I want you two to get some practice in handling a glider in a fairly long glide. I don’t expect you to become proficient. You just need to get the feel of handling it.”
On the fifth day of practice, they tried some turns. Anana had warned them to pick up plenty of speed when they did, since the lower wing in a bank lost velocity. If it slowed down too much, the glider could stall. They followed her prescription faithfully and landed safely.
“It’d be nice if we could jump off a cliff and soar,” she said. “That’d really give you practice. But there are no thermals. Still, you’d be able to glide higher. Maybe we should.”