The Dark Design by Philip José Farmer Read Free Book Online Page A

inconvenience; it would be inefficient. You had to make your choice between survival and efficiency, though in the long run survival was optimum efficiency, no matter how much time and effort it took.
    Death was no longer a temporary event in the Rivervalley. Resurrection seemed to have stopped, and with its cessation the ancient terror had returned.
    Now the fire was bright enough for her to see the huge toadstool shape. The blaze was just beyond it. Four figures, black outlines, moved by the flames. She could smell the smoke of bamboo and pine, and she thought she whiffed cigars. Why had the disgusting cigars been provided by the Mysterious Donors?
    They were talking in somewhat slurred English. Either they had been drinking or English was not their native tongue. No. The voice now booming through the fog belonged to an American.
    “No!” the man bellowed. “By the holy flaming rings of buggered Saturn, no! It’s not sheer ego, downright stinking hubris! I want to build the biggest ever built, a fabulous ship, a true queen of the skies, a colossus, a leviathan! Bigger than Earth or The Riverworld has ever seen or will ever see again! A ship to make everybody’s eyes bug out, make them proud they’re human! A beauty! A wondrous behemoth of the air! Unique! Like nothing that ever existed before! What? Don’t interrupt, Dave! I’m flying high, and I’m going to keep on flying until we get there! And then some!”
    “But, Milt!”
    “But me no buts! We need a big one, the biggest, the grandest, for purely logical scientific reasons. My God, man, we have to go higher, further, than any dirigible ever has! We have to range 16,900 kilometers maybe, depending upon where the boat is! And God only knows what winds we’ll run into! And it’s all one vast one-shot! Do you hear me, Dave, Zeke, Cyrano? A one-shot!”
    Her heart would not quit racing. “Dave” had spoken with a German accent. They must be the very men she was looking for. What luck! No, not luck. She had known how many kilometers distant, counted by the grailstones spaced along the bank, her destination was. And she had been told exactly where the headquarters of Milton Firebrass was. And she knew that David Schwartz, the Austrian engineer, was one of Firebrass’ lieutenants.
    “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