Try as she might, Margo spotted nothing that looked remotely like a survivable landing sight for miles in any direction. The fuel gauges read empty–and Margo knew the spare fuel canisters were just as empty as the main tanks. They started to drift rapidly off course.
It’s not fair! ! was so careful! I figured our exact fuel needs. I got it right for the inland flight! For all those maddening trips upriver My calculations should’ve been right for the return to the coast, too. Dammit, I put in every variable I could think of to balance weight against lift-even looked-up, how heavy that diamond-bearing soil would be! It’s just not fair!
But-as Kit and Sven had been so fond of saying, the Universe didn’t give beans for “fair.” It simply was. You got it right or paid the price. And Margo, for all her cautious calculations, had forgotten one simple, critical factor: the wind
Year round, the wind blew off the coast of Madagascar across the Drakensberg ranges, flowed around the foothills of the Limpopo valley and blasted inland, carrying moisture that kept the eastern half of Africa’s tip from baking into desert like the Kalahari and Skeleton Coast farther west. That wind never shifted direction. In all her careful planning, Margo had forgotten to calculate the effect of bucking headwinds all the way back along five hundred miles of river valley while summer storms drenched them and threatened to blow their little airship off course.
It wasn’t fair; it just was.
And now the fuel was gone.