Chapter 2 The First Mission
Note: This is the second chapter of the novel Jove’s Chariot. If you haven’t read it, get up to speed with Chapter 1. The whole book is available on Amazon. Note that this is a novel-length advertisement for giant airship technology, and I’m publishing it partly in hopes that engineers will check my work. So if there’s anything unrealistic about what the airship does, please alert me to it so that I can change it.
First, I had better explain how Jove's Chariot came into existence, and how we came to own it, or at least, to possess it, with a claim that in our opinion no one could reasonably object to, even if it was never exactly ratified by the law of nations.
Like many of the early giant airships, the airship that became Jove's Chariot began life as a tycoon's toy. Ted Roland, the Texas oil billionaire, finally retired at over eighty, and wanted to relive his youth, when his greatest delight was hunting elk in Colorado. But he was too old to hike deep into the wild mountains, as he had done in his thirties. Even riding to the airport was hard. So in 2037-2039, he spent $165 million building what was then the 3rd largest airship in the world, so that he could float straight from his ranch outside of Houston to off-road destinations in the Colorado Rockies. The airship's altitude ceiling was higher then, because the ship was less well equipped. At 1,250 feet long, 315 feet in diameter, it had room in principle for 48 million cubic feet of helium, for a gross lift of nearly 2,000 tons, though useful lift was much less, and even gross lift was usually less in practice since it was generally less than fully inflated to give the lifting gas more room to expand with altitude or air pressure changes. He called it The Camper.
Ted Roland once had a forest of live pines planted on the deck, decorated it with lights for Christmas, and invited all his grandkids on a tour of the Rockies. I must say, that sounds so fun that I always felt we'd stolen a memory from them by owning it. We would sometimes find, in some corner or hole, bits of bright red tinsel that had once been on those Christmas trees. A couple of them sought us out to pay a visit to "Grandpa's airship," and relive a favorite childhood memory. Another time, he invited some buddies to see golden aspens in the fall, with vague plans to hunt from the air as well. The hunting never panned out, but they had fun all the same. Ted Roland put a huge stuffed elk's head above his banqueting table, his proudest trophy from his younger days as a hunter. It was a magnificent specimen, with 21 points on its antlers. It was one of the few things we inherited from him. We called it "Ted," after the old man, and kept him, and Ted loomed majestically over our table for every meal through all our adventures. Sometimes, for a joke, we called Ted "president of the feast" and asked for his permission to start eating. It was a kind of tribute to the builder of Jove's Chariot.
The original Ted only got to ride his airship five times in the years he owned it, before he died quietly at 85, but they say those rides were some of the happiest times the gentle old workaholic had ever spent. Maybe he deserved it.
Most of Ted's heirs didn't want The Camper when they found out about the maintenance costs and hazards. His nephew Dylan tried it for a year but found it was too complicated for him to figure out the staffing and whatnot. He gave up and put it on the market. Of various candidate buyers, the most determined negotiator was another, more eccentric and ruthless billionaire, who later, briefly, became our boss: Elton Davies.
Long before, Elton Davies had dropped out of a PhD program in computational biology, with a dream of transforming the pharmaceutical industry by replacing crudely empiricist methods with theoretical simulations. He scored a couple of world-beating drugs and made a billion, then his labs stumbled on a man-made microbe that could help clean up waste nanomaterials from landfills. He made a couple more billions, then cashed out, burdened with an unshakable conviction that he had outsmarted the experts, and could do it again. He became a serial entrepreneur, barging into one industry after another with big ideas, all of which were initially dismissed as crazy by some expert insiders, and always succeeded at least somewhat, enough to feel he had bragging rights, and could claim a few more experts' scalps. He happened to have airships on the brain when The Camper came up for sale, and he bought it for $70 million, plus a few shares in his new company, named Heavenborne Logistics. If the name suggests that Elton Davies had a touch of messiah complex, it does not mislead.
It was Elton Davies who named Jove's Chariot, and commissioned the signature painting of Jove and his chariot and the winged white horses.
He also hired the brilliant Russian engineer Pavel Shchersky to overhaul the airship for maximum maneuverability, buoyancy control, infrastructure independence, and ground accessibility. Shchersky installed bow thrusters so that the airship could turn in place. He added other vectored thrusters too, skillfully integrated with the avionics and flight controls so that a pilot could control the airship's position in 3-dimensional space without trying to manage dozens of thrusters individually. A lot of other airship designers were working on this problem at the same time, but Shchersky's solution was particularly elegant, and this is the most unanimously admired of his innovations, though it has been superseded since then. He added lots of cables and winches to the mooring system, as well as robotic "anchors" that could drill and screw and hook into the ground, then hold on with tremendous force. He installed metal compression tanks and pumps so that the crew of Jove's Chariot could control the airship's buoyancy by pressurizing and, what we called the pneumatic, or air-using, buoyancy control system or air BCS, while still using water ballast, or the "hydraulic buoyancy control system"' or hydraulic BCS, to get heavy where appropriate. He added solar fabric to the roof, sufficient to power the systems that served basic passenger needs and kept the communications running. He even added a system to regenerate hydrogen fuel from solar energy, but it was too slow to be practical. Essentially, the airship couldn't fly on solar power alone. It needed to regularly pump the tank full of hydrogen fuel to fly.
Shchersky also built into the airship a state-of-the-art 3-D printer that could print a replacement part for almost any part on the airship, so that in a sense, the airship could supply the parts to repair itself in-flight, provided, of course, that it had materials. You might notice a pattern here. Davies and Shchersky were aiming to build an airship with maximum self-reliance. Up to a point, Shchersky liked the project, but he started getting disgruntled, he told us later, when Davies made him install a dehumidifier to extract water from the air, if there was enough humidity, which Shchersky thought a poor use of lift. In theory, with its solar power and it's ability to replenish water ballast from the air, the airship could fly forever, if only the crew didn't need to eat, and if adverse weather didn't blow it into any mountains. That's not a very useful capability. We did use the hydrogen generation feature at one point, but we eventually uninstalled it because it generated hydrogen too slowly to be operationally useful, and every bit of weight you can spare is precious, on an airship. It was an example of Davies' baneful habit of overruling the experts, which became a very serious problem for us later on. The immediate result was that Jove's Chariot as a helium airship had too little payload. So Davies decided to use hydrogen as a lifting gas instead, which increased the payload to a respectable 550 tons, even with all Shchersky's fancy enhancements.
But it came at a high cost. For one thing, it meant that the airship couldn't legally be flown in most places on Earth. But while no one knew this at the time, Davies had always planned to fly mostly in Africa, where laws against hydrogen airships were non-existent or ignored. So Davies didn't mind the legal issue. The more serious problem was that hydrogen impeded recruitment, since some airshipmen were disinclined to fly on a hydrogen airship. Hydrogen, of course, is flammable, and can explode. It's less explosive than gasoline, and the hydrogen in Jove's Chariot had chemical inhibitors in it that made it safer, but still, we were always paranoid about any kind of flame. That's why, later on, there was absolutely no smoking allowed on Jove's Chariot, and no one was allowed to carry guns, except Captain Jake himself. But I'm getting ahead of the story.
At that time, in late 2045, experienced airshipmen were in very high demand and rather short supply. The airship industry was growing at double-digit, by some measures even triple-digit rates. Davies had some trusted contacts he wanted on the crew, but he needed more experienced airshipmen, and that was where my cousin Jake came in.
Jake had run off to join a blimp crew at seventeen, lying about his age. It was an airship of sorts, though non-rigid and smallish, only useful for photography and advertising and sporting events and sightseeing and stunts. He came back a few months later when the blimp was parked in a hangar for the season. It scandalized the family, for we were a clan of overachievers, for whom college was sacred. The Daly family had been fecund a generation or two ago, and had spread out from Boston as far as Maine and New York City, with twenty to thirty cousins depending on how you account for a few divorces, and the pattern was that we all went to college, then got professional work, then developed hard core hobbies sometime in the thirties to stave off boredom, while generally crowning professional success with a suitable marriage. The Daly women used to have a lot of kids, now they had careers and few kids if any, but whether in the kitchen or the office, overachievement was the name of the game. There wasn't room in this plan of life for "running away with the circus," as I heard Jake's escapade disdainfully described.
Yet Jake may have guessed already that getting a bit of blimp crew experience was a shrewd career move just then. Skywalker Airlines' regular cargo airship service across the Atlantic had just started running a couple of years before. Internships were very scarce there and very competitive. Jake got his GED and started school somewhere, but no school in the area could teach what he wanted to learn. He got his real education online and by hanging out around the airship base in Portland, making friends with airshipmen, and picking up information from them. Plus a few books. And then, late in 2037, he got hired by Milt Whickutt, whose crews had been decimated by quits when he switched his lifting gas from helium to hydrogen. Skywalker Airlines had been a respectable company to work for, in the eyes of Portlanders, though the family down in Boston and New York was less sympathetic– and even to Milt Whickutt fans, it just seemed strange to sleep in the sky. Above all, though, everyone was terrified of him flying on a hydrogen airship. There were a lot of panicky conversations among the family, and my aunt Katie, Jake's mother, got scolded a good deal for "allowing" it, as if she could tell her willful 23-year-old son what to do.
Jake's Skywalker Airlines job fell through after a season, when the fear of hydrogen seems to have mitigated somewhat, and Milt could recruit more qualified people to replace the daredevils he'd had to resort to during his first year of hydrogen flying. Jake held nothing against Milt, though he did suspect his mother of exerting influence behind the scenes to get him laid off. But he had more against her than that.
It was about this time that my aunt Katie divorced Uncle Brendan, Jake's father. He hadn't done anything particularly wrong. He'd been my favorite uncle, and the mastermind of the great family camping trips, though he wasn't even part of the family by blood, but had married into it. Aunt Katie saw him as irresponsible, especially after his boat repair business failed because of poor marketing and staff turnover. And he was a beer-drinking, football-watching guy's guy, which bored her more and more as the cultured side of her character, loving classical music and intellectual conversation, grew more pronounced. There was really no pretext for the divorce, other than Aunt Katie's boredom and her unwillingness to support him financially after the setback. Jake thought the business failure was mostly her fault anyway, because she had so often asked Uncle Brendan to take time off to look after Jake to give her time for her legal career, and also because, not really liking boat repair as a way to earn a living, she refused to help Uncle Brendan with things she did well, like digital marketing and contracts. Later on, his bitterness increased after she joined the Catholic Church in order to marry a certain lawyer friend whose advice had helped bring her to the decision to divorce Jake's father, and got an annulment so that it was as if the marriage never existed. Jake never forgave the Catholic Church for that, except possibly at the very end.
At the time of the divorce, Jake dropped everything, left his mother's house, never to see her again as it turned out, though that wasn't all his fault, and stayed with his father in a docked boat for a few months, just trying to keep him from completely falling apart… to prevent, in fact, just what did eventually happen later. I suppose it's there that he learned something that became so importantly to his success as an outlaw airship captain: he was a masterful counselor, superb at listening, at feeling your pain, at being really with you in a moment of despair, and looking for chinks where the light of hope still shone through, and then building those little rays of hope into a purpose, something worth living for. I never needed that particular service myself, but I saw him do it for a lot of other guys. As you might imagine, a lot of marriages fell apart after we turned outlaw, and wives left behind in the United States found out they wouldn't see their husbands again for who knows how long. But Jake turned guys around. Come to think of it, there was one case of despair that Jake couldn't cure, and then Face, of all people, stepped up and did it for him, with very different results. Scout never turned to Jake during his dark night of the soul, but unfortunately, he turned to Face instead, with troublesome consequences. But I'm getting ahead of the story again.
My point, though, is that one reason guys were so intensely loyal to him as their captain was that he had met some of them where they were in their darkest hour, and brought them back from the brink of despair, like he had done for his father years before.
Uncle Brendan hated to interrupt his son's career like that, so he begged him to take up his career again. Jake wouldn't do that until his father was out of danger, so he helped him pursue an old dream by moving out to the Montana Rockies, and starting a little farm. Then Jake got back to his airships.
Jake found his next airship job quickly, in a new cargo airship service between California and Asia. The family didn't approve, and kept begging him to come home. The pay on airships was decent, but there was something irregular and not respectable about airship work. It didn't lend itself to family life. Too much time away from home. Too much time in seedy foreign countries. Too much lazy down time when weather conditions required an airship to wait somewhere. Too much drinking, it was said. And again, was it safe? He rejected advice until everyone but me stopped keeping in touch with him.
Meanwhile, Jake seemed to get more and more restless. He quit and took a new job on an airship line that ran mainly between China and Australia, but with changing schedules that sometimes touched South Pacific islands. For a couple of years he never set foot in the United States. When he did, he visited Uncle Brendan in Montana, where he had a long new beard, new hippie friends, and his farm had become a small new cattle ranch, with a large marijuana crop alongside the cow fields, for sale as well as use. Uncle Brendan gave him some advice around that time that sank in deep. "Never marry," he told his son, "and live for yourself, the way you want to live." Now to my mind, that's just bad advice. But Jake was loyal to his father and took it for gospel truth. "He seemed so happy," Jake said of him later. "So at peace." So Jake took the advice by giving himself up to complete hedonism. His pleasures became more and more focused on the magical city of Hong Kong.
Hong Kong was the world's leading boomtown of airship speculation at that time. There were startups galore, preaching the future airship industry and its boundless possibilities, the death of distance, the roadless revolution, Globalization 2.0, and fifty other cliches, and raising tens of millions in venture capital on PowerPoints and promises before they had an org chart. Jake Munro, as an old airship hand, could make $1,000 per hour as a consultant for startups, only on an intermittent basis, but still, that's good money. Moreover, a friend of his was one of those startup founders, and he had bought an early stake that was deemed to be worth millions at that time, though it was not very liquid. And Aunt Katie and her new lawyer husband had plenty of money and no heirs but him. So Jake thought he was set for life. He did less and less real airship work, "consulting" instead, and bought an absurd number of speed boats on his exorbitant fees. These he used to cruise near certain docks, where groups of girls hung out around nightfall, and offer to give the prettiest ones rides. The Hong Kong waterfront is lovely at night, all towering castles of glittering jewels.
All in all, he did whatever he liked, all the time, like his father had told him to. And the odd thing was, he got more and more bored and depressed. He was doing something wrong.
Then three disasters, or at least, two disasters and one shocking alteration, struck him almost at once, within two weeks.
First, his father died, in what the coroner graciously if implausibly called a gun accident under the influence of drugs. Well Jake knew the reason. He had heard the arguments in favor of it a hundred times and those months on the boat with his father after the divorce. "What's the point of it all?... Why unravel slow and quiet when you know you have wounds that won't heal?... There's something to be said for ending one's life story as one chooses…" And the same thoughts had been haunting him of late, even in the midst of his prosperity. He blamed himself for not sending his father more money, though there was no real evidence that lack of money had been the cause of it. Yet maybe it would have helped. Never marry, and live for yourself, the way you want to live. That's where it had led his father. The advice appeared in a new light.
Second, the Airshipmania bubble crashed, and with it his livelihood. Investors whom Jake's "voice of experience" had helped lure into pouring their life savings into airship startups saw 10% of their wealth erased in one black day, then over 20% in another black day two weeks later, and down, and down, with no floor in sight. The startups withered on the vine. The stake in his friend's company went from millions in notional value to nothing in a few weeks. Gone were Jake's lucrative board seats and $1,000/hour consulting gigs. Jake was bitter at first, because he still thought he was right, and the markets were wrong. Soon, he accepted that he was an idiot about high finance, but he still believed in his hopeful old pitch about airships. And an odd little motive that he had, alongside many others, during his long career as captain of Jove's Chariot, was to prove that he had been right all along as an airship promoter in Hong Kong in 2045, and that airships could do all the amazing things that he had said they could.
Meanwhile, Jake had debts. They had seemed quite moderate and responsible in his prosperity, for they were small not only compared to his income, but compared to the value of the highly fashionable and luxurious boats he owned. But now, not only did his income stop, but fancy boats were no longer in demand as the Hong Kong economy crashed. Yet he still had to pay dock fees. He saved money by giving up his apartment and living in one of the boats he was trying unsuccessfully to sell. That brought his father's shadow closer than ever.
Third, Aunt Katie learned that her new husband had four children whom she hadn't known about, and had unexpectedly got custody of them when their mother's situation changed for the worse. Aunt Katie welcomed the surprise joyfully, and one of her Facebook friends congratulated her on the consolation "for the son she had lost," as if Jake were dead. A mere Facebook comment shouldn't have mattered so much, but Jake was still seething at the recent annulment, and he felt that his mother was trying to erase him from her life by getting those new children. They also meant he was an unlikely to see any inheritance from his mother and stepfather. And Jake thought it proved that his stepfather was a scoundrel, to have concealed such a thing, and that his mother was a self-deceiving fool, to pretend to herself that she welcomed it.
That's when he got an offer, sight unseen, to work for Elton Davies, on the crew of Jove's Chariot. (He wasn't recruited as captain, that happened later.) He had a bad feeling about it, he told me later, even though it was generous on the surface, at $250K/year in salary, with vague possibilities of earning an ownership stake in Heavenborne Logistics. But he didn't have a choice, if he was to keep one step ahead of bankruptcy.
Let me stop a moment to explain a mysterious turning point in Jake's life that took place at this time, for it's key to understanding the man, though the narrative must become more psychological and inward than I prefer. For a few days, he had hungered to follow his father, for sudden oblivion and a release from pain. The job offer didn't help at all. What may have mitigated the agony slightly, and prevented the fateful step, is that financial ruin supplied a pretext for exiting several overlapping romantic intrigues into which he'd gotten himself entangled. By becoming a bankrupt, he avoided being called a cad. And later on, he was very grateful for the way his sudden impoverishment dispelled a coterie of false friends. "You don't know who your friends are till you become poor," he used to say in later years. Still, the first shock of his fairy gold vanishing in a puff of smoke made him wish he were dead.
Then, as he told me long afterwards, something broke in him one day, by the water, in the pink light of dawn, and he was changed. He lost all his pride and fear in a moment, and life and love and the spirit of adventure poured into his soul. His precious self suddenly stopped mattering so much, and he forgot his grievances, and the beauty of the world rose triumphant above them. He was filled with a dizzying, intoxicating joy. He was beginning again, beginning a new life, a new Jake Munro, and he had no idea what the life or the man would be like. But he had learned a great lesson. He had learned that he didn't know how to live the way he wanted to live. He was waiting to be taught how. He was waiting for life and love and the spirit of adventure to teach him how, and give him purpose. And then a favorite phrase habitually used by, of all people, his mother, “Live for others,” which had long disgusted him as trite cant, suddenly reentered his mind like a chariot of fire, illuminating the darkness in his soul, taking command.
And in the light of that new principle, how worthless his own life looked!
He had rarely considered, until that moment, whether the way he was living was right or wrong, good or bad.
He considered himself, above all, a victim. His family had rejected him for his choice of a perfectly honest career. His childhood home had been shattered. His mother had married a stranger and adopted strange children to help forget him. He was worse off even than his father. To his father, at least, it had been vouchsafed to live in the fool's paradise of marriage for twenty years. For Jake, just as he had come of age to drink of the cup of love, it had been smashed by an irrevocable disillusionment, the mask was off the world, and only momentary pleasure was left to live for. I'm echoing words that he used later in mockery of his past attitude, his old victim complex, and maybe he exaggerated his self-pity. But he must really have felt a little like that.
Meanwhile, if he had thought about whether he was living right, he would have been easy and complacent about it. He was educating investors, helping to launch a promising new industry, and giving some girls a good time. Now, suddenly, he thought about all the poor, desperate people in the world, for whom, with all his formidable talents about which he had been so conceited, he was doing nothing. Instead, how little resistance he had made to the spin which each new paymaster had asked him to put on his vaunted "voice of experience!" How much he had thought of his consulting fees, and how little, of the real welfare of the roomfuls of sucker investors he had addressed! How easily, almost eagerly, he had submitted to persuasion about implausible build timelines and materials cost estimates, and silenced his doubts about whether this or that feature could really perform to specs! How quick he had been to dismiss his own feelings of unease about the character and motives of shadowy moneybags who were eager to pay him any fees he cared to name, but practically threatened to kill him if their names ever appeared in the papers! He felt the shame of it with burning intensity, and just at that moment, the call from Elton Davies came like life, love and the spirit of adventure answering the cry of his spirit.
By the way, when, in an uncharacteristically confessional mood, he told this story later to me and our jolly, fierce little priest, Father Finn Clancy, Father Clancy melted into helpless laughter for two or three minutes, until we begged him to explain himself. "Life and love and the spirit of adventure…" he echoed Jake with mild sarcasm. "God put His hand on you, that is all." He smiled, then slipped away too quickly for us to ask him any questions.
Anyway, by this time, Jove's Chariot had been pumped full of helium and limped to Jamaica, a hydrogen airship haven, where the helium was traded out for hydrogen. That's where Jake, freshly arrived from Hong Kong, first laid eyes on it. It was love at first sight. He told me later that he ran around the decks leaping and whooping with excitement at the fabulous machine for an hour, before Pavel Shchersky slowed him down enough to give him a proper tour. With an incomplete crew of ten, they began test flights around the Caribbean. Meanwhile, Elton Davies was scheduling the first missions for his airship.
It's about this time that I come into the story.
I was a college sophomore at Harvard, doing well in an aerospace engineering major, and also a lefty dittohead, with a penchant for ranting on Facebook about the hot topic of the day. I had just posted a long philippic against Koch Industries' sabotage of the Lusaka Captive Sun, when my cousin Jake messaged me:
"I see you're pretty angry about things in Zambia. Want to do something about it?"
More explanation is needed here, of course, and whatever I may have said in the heat of the moment back then, now, in retelling the backstory for the first mission of Jove's Chariot, I want to be fully just, and say everything that can be said in favor of our enemies, especially since Koch Industries has long since apologized.
First, Koch Industries wrought a technological marvel when they built the Lusaka Captive Sun. My saying so isn't worth much, since the design of nuclear fusion reactors is far from being my area of expertise, but everyone who should know seems to agree on that. There were cost overruns, but performance exceeded even the very high expectations that had been set. In its huge outer torus, captive hydrogen isotopes were heated to temperatures exceeding those in the core of the sun, and generated enough net energy output to power fifty times the whole electricity consumption of Zambia, with nothing but limitlessly abundant hydrogen as the atomic fuel. From what I understand, the inner torus, with whose replacement the crew of Jove's Chariot was to become so intimately familiar, was the key innovation. People said it was "nanodesigned down to the atom," layered into shape by ultraprecise robots for maximum symmetry and magnetic capacity, so that it could contain a plasma so dense and hot as to ignite the nuclear fusion process, after which the plasma would pass through a spillway into the outer torus, and ignite fusion there. The inner torus could then serve to input new hydrogen fuel and evacuate helium byproduct. It was the most original, difficult to make, and indispensable piece of equipment in the power plant.
Second, I think Koch Industries really did care about the people of Zambia, in their abstract, paternalistic way, up to a point. They had a vision for the economic development of the country, involving the use of cheap electricity to capture more of the value chain for Zambia's metal exports, as well as attracting other energy-intensive industries. And they probably really cared about delivering cheap or free electricity to Zambia's poor masses, and pushing electrification further into rural areas, though their plans for that never made much sense.
Third, Koch Industries was betrayed by the aid agencies that promised to fund most of the project and then didn't follow through. I can understand they found it painful to face losses on a project they had executed so well. They had just completed an IPO and had shareholders to answer to for the first time. It's plausible that the pricing commitments they had made were legally lvoided by the withdrawal of funding from aid agencies that had been the counterparties for those commitments.
Fourth, it was the Zambians themselves that had shirked on promises to maintain latent electricity generation capacity, for the sake of redundancy, resilience, and so forth. They let themselves become too dependent on the Lusaka Captive Sun too fast.
And finally, there may even be some merit in Koch Industries' argument that their aggressive use of "willingness to pay" pricing extracted resources disproportionately from corrupt Zambian officials and companies, thus reducing inequality in Zambia, as well as from the very same aid agencies that had reneged on their promises, but were still providing budget support to hospitals and schools.
Still, what it came down to is that by the spring of 2046, a foreign electricity monopolist was ruthlessly squeezing all Zambian society for money to pay foreign shareholders. Plenty of poor people were still getting free or nearly free power, but hospitals had to stop paying doctors and nurses, and schools had to stop paying teachers, in order to keep the lights on. Chiefs and churches and local magnates had to stop sorely needed charitable giving in order to pay skyrocketing electric bills. And so there arose the eloquent and merciful Joseph Bwalya, with his Power to the People Party and his message that Zambian electricity belonged to Zambia, and the voters heeded his call. Naturally, the new president was all the more eager to fulfill his campaign promises to nationalize the power industry when it came to light that Koch Industries had attempted to induce the military to prevent him from taking power. If, at that point, they had done the right thing, cut their losses, and handed the new, democratically elected leader of Zambia the keys of the Lusaka Captive Sun, they would have left behind a legacy to be proud of.
What they did instead will live in infamy. They destroyed the inner torus. Not completely. It was still there, but full of cracks that made it useless. All Koch Industries staff were evacuated in the dead of night. And all Zambia was engulfed in a power outage with no end in sight.
Generators came on in some places, but within days, patients were dying in hospital beds for lack of oxygen, schools closed for lack of light, food spoiled in refrigerators, and Zambia was full of hunger and fear. The death toll was anyone's guess, because an electricity blackout largely meant a communications blackout as well. But there were rumors of mass graves and runaway malnutrition.
President Bwalya howled with indignation to a horrified world against Koch Industries. Koch responded coolly that they regretted the turn of events, and a new inner torus was being made, and could be installed as soon as an appropriate court clarified the total illegality of President Bwalya's nationalization order, the impossibility of its being repeated, and the duty of every Zambian to resist it if it were. They offered to help craft the language of an "Anti-Kleptocracy Oath" that might be taken by all soldiers and police to make sure they would disobey similar orders from corrupt, lawless regimes in future. They also declared that upon a closer examination of their booking records, there had been a "crisis of accidental overbilling" in the country over the past few months, due to a bug in the computer code, and they owed everyone in Zambia a rebate! But of course, they couldn't send money into a country that was ruled by "thieves," since it would just get "stolen." Instead, they would save the money until a "restoration of law, order and property rights" was accomplished by "patriotic Zambians," and then celebrate with rebates for every customer. They sent every one of their former customers an e-mail, telling them exactly how much money they would get as soon as the Bwalya regime was removed from power.
President Bwalya then begged for some other company to come fix the Lusaka Captive Sun, and said he would pay any price. Experts thought there were probably six or seven companies in the world with the technological prowess to have done it. Of course, they would probably have had to violate several Koch patents, a major lawsuit risk. Either that, or just a certain big corporation solidarity, kept most of them on the sidelines, claiming incompetence.
But one company stepped up. Lightning Bolt International of Taiwan, formerly the R&D arm of the state-owned Taiwan Power Company, recently spun off as a private company, did not merely claim that they could build an inner torus for the Lusaka Captive Sun, but unveiled an inner torus that, anticipating events, they had already built! They were eager to deal a blow to Koch Industries, which was carrying out major investments in, and transferring a lot of key technology to, Taiwan's mortal enemy, China. Soon a stream of engineers went to Taiwan to verify whether Lightning Bolt's inner torus was up to standard, including one engineer who had recently defected from Koch Industries in disgust over the Zambia affair. All agreed that it looked as if Lightning Bolt had replicated the Lusaka Captive Sun’s inner torus, a major engineering feat.
The difficulty was how to deliver it. It was 150 feet long, 80 feet wide, and weighed 240 tons. No airplane could carry a thing like that. The shipment of the first inner torus had been a huge project in itself, costing, by some estimates, almost one-tenth of the whole construction budget for the Lusaka Captive Sun, including the construction of a dedicated railroad car, the renovation or complete reconstruction of hundreds of miles of railways, mostly in Tanzania. If Tanzania had been willing, a second inner torus shipment project could have cost much less, since the needed infrastructure was already built.
But all of Zambia's neighbors except the chaotic Democratic Republic of the Congo quickly declared that they would never permit the inner torus to be shipped through their territory. They didn't much like the Bwalya regime, which they feared might be a harbinger of velvet revolutions in their own countries. Nor did they like the Lusaka Captive Sun, which was turning Zambia into a formidable economic competitor. And Koch Industries was soon whispering to each country that they might build the next "captive sun" power plant in a country that proved its commitment to property rights by imposing sanctions on the thieving government of Zambia. As for the DRC, it scarcely had paved roads into Zambia, much less the kind of infrastructure that could move a monster like the inner torus. It looked as if Lightning Bolt's gallant attempt to rescue Zambia was checkmated.
At that moment, Elton Davies announced to the world that the first mission of what he called his "new airship," Jove's Chariot, and his new company, Heavenborne Logistics, would be to transport Lightning Bolt's inner torus directly from its fabrication site to the Lusaka Captive Sun.
The noble new mission exhilarated Jake, who was still in the ecstasy of his life’s awakening, and was waiting for the joy of his new life to reveal a new path or vocation. Would he rather rescue a desperate nation from a humanitarian crisis, than flirt with girls and play with speedboats in Hong Kong? Yes, of course! And so he threw himself into the new mission, starting with recruitment. Some strong candidates withdrew when they heard what the first mission would be, foreseeing that it might put the crew in legal jeopardy. Two of their crewmen quit. On the other hand, there was a flood of new job applications from people who wanted to help Zambia, but most were wildly unqualified. So was I, of course. But at least he knew me, and knew I was a fast learner. And that, in spite of my small stature, I could bench 150 pounds.
And so I got that cryptic Facebook message. "I see you're pretty angry about things in Zambia. Want to do something about it?" A few minutes later, I was on a call with my brave, beloved cousin, and I couldn't believe my ears. I felt like Frodo when Gandalf told him the truth about the ring. One gets so used to being helpless and not mattering. Now suddenly, the stage of history was beckoning, to me, little 20-year-old Tommy Daly.
I'm ashamed to say that I asked for a day to decide, and spent that beautiful fall day, warm and full of blazing autumn foliage, wandering around Harvard Yard, mooning over the great sacrifice of interrupting my education, when 35 million Zambians were facing turmoil and hunger and death. After I said yes, I spent another day congratulating myself on my lofty ethical ideals. The day after that, I stepped in the plane from Boston to Kingston, Jamaica, never guessing that I wouldn't set foot on US soil again for thirteen years.
The day that I first set foot on Jove's Chariot is one of two days in my life when my soul was transfigured by rapturous admiration of a machine, changing all my dreams, overhauling my ambitions, and becoming the epitome of everything wonderful and strong and virile, the masterwork of the mind of man. The first one had been when I was 6 years old and visited my Uncle Jerry's fire station. The huge red fire truck, the mighty tires, the ladders, the hoses, the flashing sirens– Uncle Jerry let me turn them on– filled all my longings for ingenuity and adventure and heroism. There were no burning buildings at hand just then, but I hardly knew that, my imagination supplied them so amply, and every feature of the wonderful machine did its life-saving work in my mind's eye.
In the months afterwards, I kept talking about what a happy day that had been, and sometimes standing and staring in a happy dream merely at the photograph of little Tommy and the fire engine that my parents had printed and posted on the wall. And of course, I was determined to be a firefighter when I grew up, like Uncle Jerry. My parents laughed that off at first, thinking it a passing fancy, but when it endured and took on the character of a serious resolve, they had a delicate task. They couldn't say bluntly that Uncle Jerry was rather a disappointment and working beneath his class. But I was already, at age 6, a good reader, and knew my multiplication table and most of the periodic table too, and was clearly destined for something more than driving a fire truck. So they tactfully redirected my admiration from the men who worked on the fire truck to the men who designed it. And so it became my ambition to be an engineer, until I laid eyes on Jove's Chariot.
And now, there I was, with dangerous cousin Jake at my side, looking up at the marvelous machine, about to go on voyage around the world to rescue millions of people from ruin and starvation!
It was like the fire engine in the way it fascinated me, and it took a machine that big and powerful to fascinate the 20-year-old Tommy Daly as much as the fire engine had fascinated the 6-year-old Tommy Daly. But in another way, it was just the opposite of the fire engine. The fire engine has the hoses and ladders and pumps and tanks and ropes on the outside, but Jove's Chariot had them all on the inside, enclosed and concealed within the vast, smooth, aerodynamic hull, where air needed to flow smoothly to minimize drag, a majestic, misleading simplicity. But within that smooth shell, there were the ladderlike struts and girders, arranged in their intricate, repetitive geometry, arching over and under and around, meeting and reinforcing, solid and rigid and firm to the touch, yet as slender as spiderwebs compared to their herculean work of holding that enormous castle-in-the-clouds together as it went up and down, fast across oceans and continents, through wind and rain.
Then there were the real ladders, the internal ones that enabled the crew to access different parts of the hull for inspections and repairs, and the external ones, meant for use climbing on and off of the airship when it was stationary, only they didn't look like ladders, for they were soft rope ladders and also tubular to prevent falling. An ordinary, rigid ladder wouldn't have suited the purpose, because the stopped airship was unlikely to be reliably stationary. The closest it got was to be tied to a mast, and it might weathervane in the wind at any moment. So the ladder was designed to hang a few feet above the ground. There was a thick bar at the bottom, from which a man could hang, drop, and maybe roll on the ground, and then he was down. To get up, you would reach or jump up, grab the bar, and start climbing. But that wasn't how we preferred to get on and off.
The way we usually got on and off the airship was "rope and remote." At twenty-two different places on the airship, by the time we were done with it, there were coils of rope, which could be turned by an electric motor, which in turn could be controlled by a remote control. We had harnesses that secured a man's body and attached securely to the rope. And there were manhole openings in the hull, which could be unzipped. If you wanted to go down, you attached the harness, unzipped the manhole cover, made the motor release some slack rope, and then jumped. The ropes and harness were elastic enough to bounce, so it didn't hurt when the fall stopped. Now you were hanging in the air. You'd press "Down" on the remote and descend as fast or slow as you liked. As you approached the ground, you slowed your descent so that you'd touch down gently. Then, if you wanted to explore, you'd keep pressing "down" to get plenty of slack. And then you could do whatever your business was on the ground, dragging your rope behind you. When it was time to go, you'd press "up" on the remote, and the rope would start getting rewound into the airship, bringing you with it. You couldn't be left behind, but if a strong wind started moving the airship, you might have to think fast. You'd have half a minute as your rope became taut, and then you'd be dragged. But if you kept your wits, you could press "up" and start rising, easily fast enough to clear the treetops as you ascended. Alternatively, you could detach the harness from the rope, and avoid the tricky ascent, at the cost of being left behind.
Within, there were hundreds of yards of complicated hoses, soft fat pipelines, a little bigger than a man's arm, to move water about within the airship. And there were other hoses waiting in enormous spools to whirl, drop, go into a lake or river or ocean below, and then start sucking. Of course, the water was for a different reason here: not to put out fires, but to make the airship heavy, hold it down so it could transact with the ground. Powerful pumps could slurp water up at a gigantic speed, 100 gallons per second if they really needed to, though usually we uploaded water much more slowly, as we fine-tuned the airship's weight and controlled its descent, and also to avoid disturbing the water below with waves and whirlpools. Once they'd brought the water inside, the pumps distributed it among nine large, soft water tanks distributed around the bottom of the hull, internally segregated in complicated ways to prevent biota transfer while still allowing water to be moved to adjust the airship's center of gravity. When those tanks were big and fat and tight, Jove's Chariot was heavier than air, and could rest on the surface of a large lake or the sea, though with an incongruously slight draft, like a huge boat on tiptoe, barely touching the water. When the tanks were half-filled and flabby, like swimming pool sized waterbeds, that was normal. We were lighter than air, and flying, but we had enough ballast left to release it and increase our buoyancy if a downdraft or heavy rain threatened to push us into the ground. If the tanks were desiccated and dry, as sometimes happened, we were in a little bit of trouble, because we didn't have much buoyancy control, and we had no way to get lighter if we ran into hot air or a downdraft. But we would still have some buoyancy control because of the air tanks.
Four metal air tanks, equipped with pumps and communicating with the atmosphere, positioned in different directions from the center of gravity so as to maintain balance and far apart to mitigate structural pressure on the hull, could suck in and pressurize air in order to increase the weight of the airship, or release it, to reduce weight. The pilots could say better than I can how useful this was on Jove's Chariot. Compressed air as ballast, relative to water, has the important advantage of being always available, including in flight. So if you wanted to get heavier in mid-flight, you could turn the pumps on, and add a few tons of pressurized air to the airship's weight. If you wanted to get lighter, you could do that by releasing water, but you couldn't get that back until you were down. So if you had any, you might rather release pressurized air, especially if water ballast was low enough, and/or foreseeable opportunities to restock it were distant enough, that you wanted to manage it carefully. But compressed air is also a pain to work with, because it involves temperature changes. If you pump in air, it gets hot. There was a cooling system, involving fast water running through an intricate grid of tubes, but you still had to take your time loading compressed air if you didn't want the tanks to get dangerously hot. When you released air, the tanks got cold, which meant that the water in the cooling system, in spite of having antifreeze in it, could freeze, bursting the tubes. In that dangerous moment when we were losing altitude over the Congo jungle and headed for a smash, Archie Jones released air so fast that he knew it would freeze the coolant and break the air buoyancy control system, as it did, but in that emergency, it was a small price to pay. In normal times, you loaded or unloaded air slowly, to keep the temperatures in a safe zone. I'll have to ask Archie Jones how often he used the air BCS, because now I'm curious. I have one on the airships I fly now, as a safety feature, but I rarely use it. We're generally packing as much payload on as we can, and we have simple, predictable point-to-point missions, so we don't retain much compressed air. I'm sure we kept a lot more of it on Jove's Chariot, with payloads rarely at capacity and prizing operational flexibility. I seem to remember that it was not uncommon to hear the pumps humming.
It's funny how much the airship and the fire truck turned out to have in common, when you think about it. I suppose all machinery has a lot in common, the same substances, the simple mechanisms and principles, combined in different ways to accomplish different objects. In the fire truck, the goal is to shoot a lot of water into a flame, and to get men into inaccessible places. In the airship, the goal is to contain a huge quantity of lifting gas, to achieve propulsion and control of the enormous object that results, thereby getting lighter than air and enabling flight.
I had seen many airships before, and I almost had no right to be quite as awestruck as I was at seeing Jove's Chariot. Of course, Jove's Chariot was bigger than other airships I had seen, and also more beautiful, with its splendid painting, but I don't think that was what made the difference. I had seen fire engines before Uncle Jerry's tour, but only by accident, as a bystander. It made a difference to be invited. And now I was invited not only as a guest, but as a crewman. I, with my fellows, was to be the master of this majestic vessel!
I had long had a dim inkling of something that now came home to me with infinite force: that an airship is at home in the sky, as an airplane never can be. An airplane can only run through the sky. An airship rests there, reposes there, reigns there, like a king on a throne. The vast airship rested there in the air above us, not moving, as comfortable as a ship in the sea. Since it had deigned to park by a mast, we went up an elevator, walked across a movable footbridge, and stepped aboard, and it took as little notice of us as the land itself does of a pedestrian's foot. And yet, as we walked, we sometimes felt move in the wind, shifting ponderously to a different direction, and we felt a moment and build and then dissipate, and had to lean to keep our balance. Sometimes, too, the floor became a little sloping, as a change in air pressure made the airship want to rise or descend, and the tail, following its will, sloped up or down from the nose, time to the mast. And we stopped, all senses on edge, fascinated, though in different ways. Jake, the seasoned airshipman, was testing and fine-tuning a dozen theories about the exact manner in which this airship moved, feeling the way forces propagated through the struts and girders and fabrics, alert for any sign of strain. I was simply lost in wonder at this new world, so impregnable and so vulnerable at once, immovable by a man but so sensitive to the slightest breeze, its strength and its weakness interwoven in such a strange and counterintuitive fashion.
"Wow," I said again and again, involuntarily, till I felt I just be boring Jake.
"I hear you," he answered, every time.
There was, fortunately, no hurry. The pleasure of reacquaintance and reminiscence, and the delight in exploring that empire of a machine, played out slowly together through the long hours of a meandering day. I learned enough by hearsay about a few of my crewmates that they seemed like living legends before I even met them. But there also seemed to be a troubling number of raw rookies like me. I learned about a voyages and places and storms, as one feature after another reminded Jake of somewhere he had been or some moment of beauty or peril. It was a slow business because of the airship's enormous size. Half of what needed to be learned could be learned in the cockpit, looking at gauges and monitors and controls, but the other half was spread out across points of interest all over the airship, and there were long walks between this propeller and that ballast tank, this ballonet and that observation manhole. And since the crew was not yet assembled and the airship could not fly, Jake took his time. Indeed, he was not in the master's confidence particularly, in spite of his recognized competence and his usefulness as a recruiter. That he could be spared for a whole day training such an unimportant recruit as myself shows of how little consequence he was at the time.
He showed me all the systems. Most of them I knew something about already from my college classes, though it was cool to see them up close. I kept thinking how much my fellow students and even some of my professors would have envied this tour. One system I had never even heard of before, and maybe you haven't either, for it's never become standard. Jove's Chariot had an anchor cannon. Various anchors could be attached to it, and it would shoot them with a force you chose, pneumatic of course, no combustion, at the ground or hillside or wherever you wanted to put an anchor to hold the ship in place. The anchor would pull a cable behind it. Usually, we shot the anchor gently, and sent guys down to screw it in. But it was also possible to shoot it so much force that it would sink deep and hold, even in hard surfaces. We didn't use that very often except in Antarctica, where it was a very handy feature to have. I still think mineral exploration companies in Antarctica are missing an opportunity by not installing anchor cannons.
What was most exhilarating about seeing Jove's Chariot for the first time that day, and walking its decks, was that I soon realized the heroic mission it was appointed to perform needn't even be very difficult. As I tested things for myself, punching fabrics and pulling cables to check their strength, jumping with all my might on the nanocellulose floors, and so on, I was trying to find the weak point, the flaw that would make the mission fail. If anything was going to break, it has better do it now, when we were moored over a field, not way out over the ocean or the African jungle. But as everything kept pushing my tests, I began to feel confidence, or rather, to grow giddy with it. The enormous deck, 300 feet long, 100 feet wide, with ceilings vaulting as high as 80 feet in places, had plenty of room in it for the inner torus. I looked at the huge cargo control cables and pictured them pulling with all their might on the gigantic white crystalline shape that was the inner torus. We saw the avionics in the control room and the gas bags (or in airship lingo, ballonets) in the hull and the engines in the thrusters, and I thought how much my professors at Harvard would have envied me for seeing this. I learned more in a day than they could teach me in a month.
And I started to meet my fellow crewmen as well. Most of the men I met that day became lifelong friends, in a way I'd never known before, nor have since. More than friends. Comrades. Brothers. I think that's why, when a first impression of someone from that day wafts back to me on the winds of memory, it seems odd and irrelevant, eerily out of sync with the man I came to know later. It was partly that I got to know them better, and much more, that we were all changed by what happened to us, what we went through together. My general impression was that they were a quite different kind of people from me, which I was not used to. I had been a semi-regular churchgoer all my life, and met some working-class people there, but otherwise, I'd lived a sheltered life, first in the bubble of an affluent suburb, then the bubble of an elite college campus. But I liked them all intensely, simply because we were about to embark on such a noble adventure together.
The man most like me may have been the captain, Scott Davies, nephew to Elton. He had majored in aerospace engineering at Harvard a few years before. Soon we got talking about the professors. And yet it was awkward too. I felt like he was trying to prove something, maybe to prove that he was qualified to be captain, and it wasn't just nepotism. On paper, he seemed qualified enough, but did he have the charisma to lead, and the judgment to make good decisions? I also didn't get the sense that there was mutual confidence between him and his uncle, of whom he seemed to be both a little afraid and a little ashamed.
For the nine days that we stayed in Jamaica, the main thing that I was tasked with was learning the ropes, literally. I was supposed to get good at getting on and off the airship using the "rope and remote method." Boy, was that fun! The airship station was on high ground, looking out of the jungle and the sea. The air was warm and moist, just a little on the hot side for energetic activity, but really rather comfortable and nice. It was shady under the airship, and in memory, it seems that there was always a pleasant sea breeze blowing as I leapt again and again down through the manhole, fighting an instinctive fear at first, which soon wore off, and then descending fast, slowing down, making slack, and then running 50 feet to symbolize the beginning of an imaginary ground mission. And then "Where!" soaring back up to do it again. Little by little, I got my time down from 54 seconds to 17, that put me well behind my new friend Danny Joye, with 11, or the shy Ro Jarvis, with 12, let alone Mickey Tritt, who joined us later, who could drop a hundred feet and start a training ground mission in eight seconds.
I also washed the windows, which was an adventure, hanging 100 feet in the air from a wraparound track designed for the purpose, while using my mop, bucket, and squeegee! Sometimes the wind would change and the great airship would wheel ponderously around the mast as I hung there. Wheeeee…!
Off duty, I drifted over to the nearby town, and sampled the fruit market, and watched the form play a little. And in the evenings, live music and singing burst out on board, which was even then a bit of a cargo airship tradition. Sometimes there was piano, sometimes guitars. I have no musical talent, but I enjoyed listening, and mingling. Some people who showed up for the sing-alongs could be elusive otherwise.
I also helped load the airship's crew quarters, and was present at the birth of the first of Jove's Chariot's nicknames. A section of the deck could be lowered by cables to the ground, then loaded, then winched back up. It was a little risky, since the deck segment might drag and get damaged if the airship changed direction, but we gave it a lot of slack so that it could accommodate some play. Anyway, one of the things you brought on board was a huge freezer stocked with some ice cream but mostly frozen meat. After it was hauled up, me and three guys tried to move it. No luck. Wouldn't budge.
"We need some more muscle," said Pete Gunther.
I chuckled at that. "Yeah, right," I said. "We need a forklift!" That was easy enough to get, since there were two forklifts on board. The freezer, oversized and full of meat, seemed like way too much for a few guys to lift.
But Pete ignored me when he saw the gigantic Thor Halvarsson nearby.
"Hey, muscle!" he shouted to Thor. Thor turned to look at him with a puzzled expression on his face. "We need some help with this freezer."
Without a word, Thor came over, took a station in the middle of one side of the freezer, slipped his fingers under it, and begin to heave. We all helped. How those muscles of his flexed and strained as he bore the brunt of it. He brought to bear as much lifting force as the rest of us put together. And up it came. We moved it a few years and dropped it onto a dolly.
"Thanks, Muscle!" said Pete.
"Thanks, Forklift!" said two other guys. We all laughed.
And so Muscle got two nicknames for one exploit, and for the next few weeks, some called him Muscle, and some called him Forklift. But eventually, Muscle won out, and that's what we all called him for the next thirteen years.
By then, the countdown to takeoff was underway. Eight days. Four days. Two days. Tomorrow. Then takeoff day dawned, but they didn't tell us the hour. Captain Scott was in the cockpit, and at his side would be, not Archie Jones, who was too much of a backseat driver, but Jake. By 10:00 a.m., we were impatient. When 11:00 a.m. brought Archie Jones out of the cockpit, where he had been giving last minute coaching to the nervous Captain Scott, we knew it was about to begin. Archie Jones sat down at the piano, the gorgeous grand piano placed right in the middle of the transparent nanocellulose floor so that it seem to be floating in mid-air, and he began to play, his magic fingers making the notes ripple like the sun sparkling on the waves. Then we heard subtle hums beginning to sound from the air tanks, and the hint of a slope in the floor as the airship's growing buoyancy began to tug against the cable, and was imperfectly offset by water transfer among the water tanks. We didn't feel the moment when the cable let go, but we saw waterfalls as water ballast was released, and the ground began to fall away, and the music changed, and the singing of sea chanties began…
Blow ye wind high-O
A-rovin' I will go…
Hearty voices, hardly conscious of singing in their excitement, of which the song was the spontaneous overflow, and under the spell of Archie Jones' eloquent piano. And the propellers whirled, and the palm trees marched past, and then we were over the sparkling sea, running along on the sky, rounding the verdant coast of Jamaica, heading southeast across the Caribbean towards the Atlantic, circumnavigating the globe. The giant shadow of the airship painted an expanse of sea dark blue amidst the flashing waves. Gulls flew below us. Waves crashed on beaches and rocks. A wind off the sea threshed the forest canopy, making the trees bent and ripple and rustle and dance. Forty telescopes lined the signs of the deck, pointed towards the open windows. We hugged the shore, hugged it more than made nautical sense, in fact, so that some grumbled that Captain Scott was showing off, but Jake approved, holding that to be provided with spectacular views was part of the just wages of an airshipman. Around the Eastern tip of South America we ran, then down past Rio, and on to Patagonia, where it was late spring even as the first snows of winter fell far away in Boston, and I was often at the telescopes, marveling at giant rain forests, and huge flocks of scarlet ibis, and beholding the mouth of the Amazon, and the snowy mountains of the Tierra del Fuego. We were on our way!
But I was often on duty, too. A large team had been tasked with reconstructing the main deck, so that it could open wide enough to let the inner torus inside the airship. That sounded like too difficult to do mid-flight, and it reflected a little badly on the higher-ups that it hadn't been done already, in Jamaica. Yet the decks of Joe's Chariot have been designed in a peculiar modular way so that they could be deconstructed and reassembled in flight to achieve a wide variety of functionalities, so this feat was feasible and even became routine. The worst of it, though, was that we were having daily meetings to plan the loading of the inner torus with our colleagues at Lightning Bolt in Taiwan, and rather than explaining the modular decks to them, whether because they were being treated as a trade secret or because they feared the story would lack credibility, we were under orders not to tell them that the deck wasn't ready, which puts chief engineer Paul Jordan in very awkward situations, forcing him to be vague and evasive to avoid an outright lie. He was so disgusted that he told us on the second day he would quit as soon as we reached Lusaka.
We passed the Tierra del Fuego. We went west-northwest across the Pacific towards Taiwan. The internet was filling up with pictures taken of us from shore as we passed. I thought I had seen some of the photographers through the telescope. I was barraged with emails from Harvard acquaintances asking me frantically about how the voyage was going. I asked Captain Scott how to respond, considering that my correspondence was likely to end up in the media. "Just keep it positive!" he said cheerfully. There were a few old hands on the crew, who had over a million miles of airship voyaging between them. They didn't know how the onboarding of the inner torus would happen, that would take some figuring, but otherwise, they thought the trip would be easy, and their confidence was good enough for the rest of us. Boy, were we wrong!
Continue to Chapter 3.