The Unwound Way by Bill Adams & Cecil Brooks

Author:Bill Adams & Cecil Brooks [Adams, Bill & Brooks, Cecil]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-04-06T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

Foyle threw the stone at me as hard as she could.

This time it got all the way across the river, passing just to one side of the squirming island of eels and the huge green globe they were inflating. It landed at my feet on the bank, and I picked it up and untied the end of the fine Elitist supercord that stretched back to her. Pulling the cord taut, I tied it to a shoulder-high branch of the tree behind me.

So much for the static line, the last connection we had to make. I waved, and a few minutes later, after crossing a bridge some fifty meters downstream, Foyle rejoined us. I untied another cord, the tension line, farther down the bank, and she helped me draw it in more tightly, despite an elastic resistance; then she tied it off again. “ ‘Night’ will fall soon,” she said. “For a time there, I was afraid we’d be too late. We might have had to cover some distance before we found another eel-mass so close to a bridge.”

“And the trees,” Helen Hogg-Smythe said a little faintly from where she sat in the grass nearby; her strength seemed to come and go since the moth attack. “Trees facing each other like this.”

She gestured at our theater of operations, the straight lines of cord on either side of the eel-mass, connecting feather trees on opposite banks. A puff of breeze set them to whispering, and we all flinched, inspecting ourselves for moths.

“Oh, the eels always mass between trees,” Foyle said when this latest false alarm had passed. “They need the windbreak during inflation. And our needs are considered, too.”

“You really think we’re meant to do this, don’t you?” I asked.

“Whether it’s safe or not, yes. Look at how all the details jibe. The lightness of the line, for instance—we couldn’t have made those throws with rope.”

“No argument. ‘Ingenuity or Endurance,’ the guidepost said. We’ve certainly had all the hiking we can endure. And this is pretty ingenious, if I say so myself.”

“Funny,” she said. “I remembered it as being my plan.”

“I thought up the gondola,” I pointed out.

“True.”

The breeze ruffled the feather trees; the river current chuckled around the eel-mass. We waited. And soon the central eel gave a whistle to announce that it was fully inflated, the bottom of its envelope touching our lowest cords on either side. Anchor eels began to drop off, and the balloon began to rise. But then it stopped.

Feathery branches high above on either side of the river, laced together crisscrosswise like a corset, gently held the green globe down. That had been the hard part, the tension line—climbing up to loop it around a branch, throwing the free end across, and climbing down to catch the return throw, again and again. It had taken hours. But the snare worked; we’d captured the balloon.

To the eels it could only seem as though there was still too much weight for the balloon to lift. Slowly, more and more of them dropped off.

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