Chapter 3 The Storm

Note: This is a novel-length advertisement for giant airship technology. If you’re jumping in here, you might want to go back and start from Chapter 1.

It's funny how, in many ways, Jove's Chariot was quite low tech. From what I hear, in sky yacht design studios, the most common conversation occurs when a wealthy ignoramus walks in and says, "I want an airship exactly like Jove's Chariot."

"No, you don't," says the engineer. "Let me tell you why."

For example, any modern airship the size of Jove's Chariot would have an internal rail system to move crew to different places on the airship. The airships I fly now do. It's a safety feature, for one thing. If there's a malfunction, and the copilot gets on a com link with a specialist technician to follow instructions to implement an in-flight repair, he's probably in a hurry, so the rail system delivers him fast to where he needs to be. Not on Jove's Chariot. We walked, and climbed ladders. Some points on the airship were fifteen minutes away. And the worst of it was that for a ridiculously long time, there were no toilet facilities in remote parts of the airship. If you had any assignment there, you had better not drink anything, because if nature called, you had a long way to go before you could get relief. When we were renovating the ship for the Antarctica mission in 2052, we finally threw some composting toilets into the project to reduce the fear factor on long walking assignments.

We poor crewmen of Jove's Chariot often felt like we were living inside the brain of Pavel Shchersky. And it was a strange place. No engineer loved heroic capabilities more than he. No engineer cared less about user-friendliness.

It wasn't all his fault. Refueling, for example, was absurdly primitive on any airship in those days. I learned all about that since I was soon appointed resorting technician, relieving Muscle, who had the job before, and disliked it, but was promoted to cargo operations manager, to his great relief. When airshipmen today see videos of it, they laugh. Refueling an airship is a lot like refueling a normal hydrogen fuel tank car, or even the gasoline cars that people drove when I was a kid. A hose connects two tanks, and a pump moves fluid from the source to the destination. Only you can't pull up to the pump in the same way. It's much more convenient to keep the airship in the air. So how do you connect the tanks? With a very long hose. But how do you aim it? 

Today, a vertical pipe or "vertipipe" rises up from the hydrogen tank below, and a hose unspools down from the airship above, with four tethered drones to guide it into place. It locks and seals, and the fuel starts flowing. The nozzles are standard and they all fit. And the hose is eight inches in diameter so that a lot of fuel can flow. But in those days, there was no vertipipe, no drone guides for the drop hose, and no standard size for the nozzles, and the hoses were typically much thinner, so that refueling was slow, and could occasionally take an hour or more. The long wait times were the most wasteful part of the process, but the most ridiculous part was that the fuel technician on the ship had to fetch the end of the drop hose from mi-air manually, by waving a magnetized 20' pole in the air trying to make contact, as the hose swung around in the air above. On an unlucky day, this could take twenty minutes, as the huge airship fought the winds and micromanaged buoyancy to maintain position. 

Over the years, I met hundreds of ground or shipboard fuel technicians over the radio in the course of duty, and we made conversation while we watched the gauges slowly change. The most common topic was complaining about the protocols, which had failed to standardize nozzles, necessitating that every airship keep an arsenal of adaptors, and which, even more stupidly, had assumed automotive standard fuel pumping rates. After 2051, we started talking about the drone-guides-and-vertitipe system that some corporate fleets had installed, and wished the protocols would be updated to require that. Then in 2054, a five-year phaseout of "manual refueling" in favor of drone-guides-and-vertitipe was announced, and airship fuel technicians realized we would soon be out of a job, because the new system was too reliable and automated to need a technician.

Pavel Shchersky's modular decks weren't exactly primitive, but they didn't feel technological because they weren't electronic or even motorized. Just a lot of nanocellulose panels on flaps and tracks to permit a lot of rearrangement. Nowadays, most airships don't have modular decks, but in those that do, they are motorized and electronically controlled, and rearrange themselves fast and smooth. On Jove's Chariot, it was not so easy.

En route to Taiwan from the Tierra del Fuego, the task at hand was to prepare the decks for a maximum opening size in order to lift in the Inner Torus. As I mentioned, the Torus was 150 ft long and 80 ft wide, so the deck had to have an opening bigger than that for the Torus to come up through it, hauled straight up by enormous wire ropes that would hang from the ceiling of the cargo deck. To make the opening, we would have to unscrew floor panels, and then slide them along tracks to move them off to the side. The tracks were part of the "ribcage," the aluminum alloy beams that stretched under the decks, undergirding them and holding them up. But the beams were separable in the middle, and had joints and hinges so that they could be folded up, too, after the floor panels had been slid back. It was as if the whole deck was not a deck, but a deck construction kit that happens to be configured into some sort of deck at any given moment. Our job, as Jove's Chariot crossed the Pacific, was to disassemble the deck and pack it up, like you do with a tent at the end of a camping trip, so that the Inner Torus good come inside.

In the wide corridor to the cockpit, there was a table of scale models of the airship and some of its major components, provided mainly for the instruction and inspiration of the crew, and to impress guests. They seemed to valuable to touch, but we were instructed to touch them to learn about what Jove's Chariot was and how it worked. We also had the whole structure of the airship in CAD, which allowed you to zoom and get more details, and for multiple simultaneous users, but I liked the physical models, and some things I learned better from them than from looking at a computer screen. One of the models was of the deck, and I learned how the deck worked, more or less, by physically manipulating the scale model. But it was difficult to translate the small into the large, and we sometimes confused, and follow the instructions like a treasure hunt, not understanding why. Then there were the eureka moments where a piece of the project came together, and progress became clear. 

It felt primitive that the process relied so much on muscles, screwdrivers, hooks and ropes. Not that the floor panels were very heavy, but they were very bulky. The real problem, though, was that as we worked, the floor we needed to walk on was gradually disappearing. A fabric sheet called the "undercurtain" had been suspended below the airship, and that was all that separated us from a drop hundreds of feet down into the Pacific waves. In theory, it would bear a man's weight. But you didn't want to test that. And so– and this is where it started to seem ridiculous– for safety, we workmen deconstructing the deck were suspended by bungees from the ceiling! We had to move slowly and carefully, looking up frequently to make sure the bungees didn't get tangled. But that also meant we could "jump," or rather swing, over large spaces of empty air, as we deconstructed the deck from the outer edges in. It was a lot like a theater version of Peter Pan that I saw when I was a kid, where ropes suspended the characters from the ceiling and enabled them to "fly." Of course, it was also much like the "rope and remote" method of getting on and off the airship. There we were, ten little Peter Pans, flying through the air as we made the mighty deck of the great airship fold up and vanish. Below us, the undercurtain rippled gently in the wind of the airship's hundred mile per hour progress, and through it we could sometimes hear the Pacific waves crashing. Finally, when we reached Taiwan, the undercurtain was rolled away, and we looked straight down into the Lightning Bolt factory, where the retractable roof had been folded back to reveal the gleaming, $250 million Inner Torus.

The next part of the job belonged to what we call "the cables," huge spools of wire rope built into the ceiling of the cargo deck. Ceiling almost seems like the wrong word. In a house on land, the floor is firm, and the ceiling is dependent on it. But in our castle in the clouds, the ceiling was firm, integrated strongly with the bones of the airship itself, while the floor was more or less suspended from it. By removing the floor, we exposed the airship's real strength. Now sixteen cable spools turned together, and the lines of wire rope descended, slowly, straight down, and, for no particular reason other than they were controlled by the same computer, precisely synchronized. Meanwhile, Muscle and Jake and a few others went down by rope to inspect the attachment of the cables to the prize. It would have been better to keep them on board, because the hardest part of the operation was just to hold the airship's position amidst the shifting winds. Hooking hooks was easy. But for delicate reasons of commercial diplomacy, most of the experienced people were picked for the ground mission, while Archie Jones ran the cockpit single-handedly. He was equal to it, though. On the ground, teams of workers for Lightning Bolt moved the heavy hooks, two by two, connected them, and then called the cockpit to ask that they be made taut. Finally, the Inner Torus was fully supported from underneath by the cables, and the engines that turned the spools in the ceiling above us began to rumble and strain, and it began to rise. There were some cheers, but mostly a sense of awe, or peril, prevailed. A few minutes later, it was suspended above us, sixty feet up, still supported from below by the cables, and the undercurtain was rolled back, and the pilot launched us on our way again. And then we were off, and I still hadn't set foot in Taiwan. As we flew away, the Peter Pans rebuilt the deck.

We never became very intimate with the technological marvel that we were transporting, and my only impression of it was the amazing perfection of its form, its perfect roundness and smoothness at all points, its total lack of variation in color or texture. We thought about it a good deal though, because it was so important, a looming, silent presence. It was the witness of all our adventures over the next few weeks: of the manifesto of "Jove's Chariot against the world!" and of our brush with death, of the velvet mutiny and of the founding of the Flying Republic of Outlaws.

Of all the places we passed on our way to Africa, I was most impressed by the Malacca Straits, a narrow passage that is crowded with shipping because it is by far the quickest way from East Asia to the Indian Ocean. I had never seen so many ships in my life, nor have again since. I watched them for an hour, fascinated. Later, when we stopped in the Maldives to refuel, I was fascinated by the white sands, blue waters, luxury resorts, sand the crowds of rich Indian tourists gawking at us from below.

Other than that, when off duty, I spent my time exploring the ship. I did my best to understand everything about it, and to run scenarios in my mind about what might go wrong, and what to do. I also came across some odd things. Some rooms had gorgeous Oriental rugs. In the kitchen, there was a richly stocked wine cabinet. But strangest of all, there were horses! There was a stable tucked away on the far side of the old crew quarters-- now the crew had taken over the more luxurious passenger rooms instead-- and in it were two horses, an old grey mare and a beautiful white stallion. This made me very inquisitive about what missions Elton Davies had in mind for Jove's Chariot after we delivered the Inner Torus. 

My own future was very vague. I had signed W-2s in Jamaica, and I assumed that paychecks were being deposited in my bank in Boston, though I didn't bother to check, but whether they would need me after the Zambia mission, I had no idea. I hoped that I would have enough for a plane ticket home from Lusaka if I weren't retained. I didn't want to ask Mom and Dad for help with that, though of course they would have eagerly given it, because relations with them had taken a rocky turn lately. It was bad enough that I had suddenly quit school, but the job I was doing was now being denounced furiously on Fox News, the background noise of my mom's life, as "smuggling an H-bomb reactor into revolutionary black Zambia." It felt like my mom and I had the same conversation over and over again on a Zoom link, only a little more heated. 

"Mom, Tucker Carlson doesn't know what he's talking about," I would say. "You can't turn a fusion power plant into an H-bomb."

"How do you know?" she would say. "You're only a college sophomore. Jake is getting you in big trouble."

And so it went.

I wanted to stay away long enough for tempers to cool, and to come home, if need be, on my own dime. I also felt a burning conviction that flying Jove's Chariot was the coolest job ever, and I wanted to stay at it as long as I possibly could.

My curiosity heightened, I asked around and learned that the caretaker of the horses was Sid "Scout" Shepard, long-time airshipman and a passionate and skilled horseman. He didn't know the specific missions planned (none of us knew much, as it turned out, other than Face, and to a lesser extent Archie Jones) but he had been told he would be doing scouting work on horseback, riding around to make contacts on the ground to help secure resources or landing sites, in places where roads were either non-existent or else unsafe. He explained how the white horse would be lowered in a basket. This had been tried a few times, and it was hard to keep the horse calm at first, but now it was more used to it.

Also surprising was the grand piano on the deck. We got to hear it frequently, for Archie Jones, the deputy captain and the most experienced airshipman on board, who was piloting the ship when on duty, was a brilliant pianist, playing everything from Beethoven to jazz. He played for a couple of hours every day, filling the decks with live music. When I asked him whether the grand piano was just for the crew's benefit, he responded evasively. He was close with Elton Davies, and clearly knew more than he was willing to tell. But he said this much: "It may come in handy to entertain VIPs in a way that gives pleasure."

When Archie Jones played dance music, you couldn’t stop your feet from tapping, and the few women on board, commerce officer Andrea Jastrow and the two Hispanic cleaning ladies Marta and Luz, were besieged with cries of “please, dance with me!” And they did! Andrea, I think, enjoyed both the dancing and the popularity, yet she was a little embarrassed, feeling uncertain whether it was compatible with her professional dignity to be danced to exhaustion by half the crew. I think she only danced with the rest of us for the sake of the occasional chances to dance with the dashing Willy Blayne, not yet nicknamed “Face." Marta was too timid to say no, but too shy to really have fun. But Luz, ah, she had had the time of her life, whirling in the arms of so many dashing desperadoes. Face, as I can't help but call him in retrospect, was the best dancer among us, and I sometimes caught myself just watching his moves. Yet even he didn’t dance quite as beautifully as Luz. How often I dreamed, in the long years that followed, of holding her in my arms again… but never mind. That’s not really part of this story. 

By the way, concerning Face's nickname, one of the legends about its origins dates to this time. Some of the guys were getting to know each other by talking about their relevant background and the jobs they expected to do on the airship. The tone of the conversation was slightly boastful and competitive. Face happened to be present, so someone asked him:

"What about you, Willy? What's your job? What are you here for?"

"Who, me?" he asked in a very modest and innocent tone. "Oh, nothing, I'm just a pretty face." 

They laughed and started calling him "Pretty Face," which was soon shortened to "Face." So the story goes. The anecdote is absolutely typical of Face, his self-deprecating tact, his physical vanity, his gift for putting people at their ease, and the only reason to doubt it is that there are other plausible stories of how his nickname originated.

I noticed early on that almost everyone had been touched by Jake's charisma. Several had been recruited by him, or at least, with his help. They had all, except me, served with him on some other airship at one time or another. But they noticed a change in him too, subtle but profound, and they liked it. His sense of mission was contagious. And he had a gift of insight into people's souls. He had a way of summing up a man in a way that wasn't mere flattery, but that a man liked because it was true, and astute about his talents and aspirations, and maybe also his wounds. Later, I'd come to think of this trait in Jake as wisdom, a peculiar kind of wisdom that helps a man know and lead other men. Everyone felt calm and brave in Jake's presence. I was a distinguished person in everyone's eyes because I was Jake's cousin.

The days were so full of wonder, of billowing clouds and sparkling seas, tropical islands and here and there a whale breaching, gulls and albatross, music and dancing, that the faraway noise of politics back home didn't seem to matter. And yet ugly rumors kept filtering through. People were upset. People were angry. The reasons why I seemed so silly, so obscure, that it took a long time for us to take them seriously. The strange, high-minded greed of Koch Industries was one thing. I understood it in a way. But what we were all slow to realize was how Koch Industries had played sorcerer's apprentice to darker forces. Koch Industries believed in technology, but others feared it and wanted to rain it in. Koch Industries was not racist. But others were. They certainly didn't object to a black country having a fusion power plant; on the contrary, they had built one for them. They just wanted to get their power plant back, and to pay shareholders a decent dividend. But in puppeteering the opposition to our mission, they had hinted, quite cynically but also vaguely, for plausible deniability, that a nuclear fusion reactor in hostile hands might conceivably have "sinister cross-applications." They didn't say "bomb," but they probably intended for some people to hear that. But soon the rumors were out of control, and Koch Industries' own projects were threatened now, by the groundless fears they had cynically stoked in their own technology. Now the fear had a life of its own.

When Senator Tom Cotton told a crowd that "we must not let revolutionary Zambia obtain hydrogen, the nuclear fuel that powers the sun," we thought it was a gaffe. We circulated the Onion article about "Senator Tom Cotton's Plans to Desiccate Zambia," which described how the senator was determined "not to leave one single drop" of hydrogen-rich water in the rebel country. And we laughed. We circulated the clip of the furious woman, dumpy and middle-aged, ranting on Fox News about how "these guys say they're Americans, they say they're patriots, but here they are all gung-ho about giving a fusion power plant to Zambia, when no American city smaller than Dallas has one. Why don't they take care of their own people?" As if we had unlimited fusion power plants to hand out like candy! But I suppose it's a nuance that we were only delivering a part, not a whole power plant, and that we didn't own either the plant or the part. You have to try to be charitable, but sometimes it's very hard.

Then we saw the protests. Dallas. Los Angeles. Washington, DC. "America First," said the signs, and "No Nukes for Zambia," and "Down with Kleptocracy." We scratched our heads, and felt pity and disgust. But they didn't seem all that long. And the protesters looked like old fogeys, a little ugly, a little uncouth, not charismatic at all. But has one day after another brought us closer to the coast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where we would enter Africa, the troubles intensified, and the fear and anger and panic grew more urgent and hysterical. Sober commentators, whom I had always considered trustworthy, started to voice strange opinions. "Maybe now is not the time for an expedition like this," said one, as if ending the Zambian power outage could wait for a convenient time! That my mother was caught up in the hysteria prevented me from completely dismissing it. But when the blow fell, it took me as much by surprise as anyone.

In some people, the shame of ignorance metamorphoses into a kind of solidarity, and even a kind of pride. To such people, all claims to expertise sound like a conspiracy. Their minds run away from information. Public opinion was becoming a runaway train, and the politicians had to jump on board to avoid getting run over. And Koch Industries at its lobbyists busy in every capital in the world, encouraging and exploiting these fears with amazing speed and skill. They had decided to ride the tiger the bed unleashed, and they were riding it masterfully. I think their pitch to undecided to senators and to Nations was that this is only a "temporary" measure, to give time for "fact-finding," and probably they really didn't have an inkling of the sheer "inertia that the resolution would take on, once it had been passed. So as we were cruising along the coast of Namibia, looking out over the desert, the famous resolution was published. We thought it was fake news at first, it seemed so incredible. But reputable sources were reporting it. Debates broke out. Captain Scott settled the issue in an all crew meeting, displaying on a big screen the full text of the resolution that has just been jointly passed by 122 nations:

"We the people of the peace-loving nations of the world, urgently desiring to prevent the spread of nuclear peril, hereby resolve that the delivery of parts to the illegal and kleptocratic regime of Zambia, which would restore the operations of the Lusaka Captive Sun, must not take place at this time, as it jeopardizes the peace and the balance of power throughout the world. 

"Therefore, we hereby resolve, exhort and command the crew of the airship Jove's Chariot, in which these parts are being carried, to abort their mission within ninety days. If this order is not heated, the following individuals will be deemed agents of nuclear proliferation by all the signatories of this resolution, subject to arrest and prosecution if discovered:

"SCOTT DAVIES

ARCHIBALD JONES

LEONARD LORD

SIDNEY SHEPARD

JACOB MUNRO

ANDREAS FULK

THOR HALVARSSON

PAUL JORDAN

ANDREA JASTROW

RANDALL WELLSTONE

MALACHI DREY

ROBERT JARVIS

FRANK LOGAN

WILLIAM BLAYNE

VINOD D'SOUZA

HUNTER KIRKCALDY

CHRISTOPHER CUMMINS

DANIEL JOYE

PIERRE LAFITTE

PETER GUNTHER

ROY DODGE

JOEL MARCOS

RILEY MULLIGAN

THOMAS DALY"

The spite was stunning. To be thus commanded and condemned by name by the representatives of so many countries felt sinister, surreal, and shameful. Later the resolution became a badge of honor, but at the time it felt like an insult and a humiliation, and I might have given up then if I'd had the chance.

It was very odd, too. Parts of it, like "within ninety days," didn't seem to make sense. We'd have finished the mission by then. And why wasn't Elton Davies targeted. He was the mastermind and the boss. We were only working for him. Mere haste might explain it, but we had a feeling that he was protected somehow by his riches. Maybe it was billionaire solidarity, and the Kochs didn't feel it sportsmanlike to try to get Davies, as a fellow billionaire, sent to jail. Or maybe Davies has used his own lobbying power, which was considerable, to keep himself personally safe. Risks like that were for hirelings like us. Maybe they thought the crew was more likely than the boss to yield to pressure. Maybe they wanted to give the boss the excuse that his workers, not he, had yielded to pressure.

Not everyone on board Jove's Chariot was outlawed that day. For some reason, the cleaning ladies, Marta and Luz, weren't in the list. Maybe they didn't count as crew. But Dr. George Bell also wasn't allowed. Maybe a medical doctor was too important and got immunity. Malachi Drey, meanwhile, was outlawed, even though he was only the cook. It was odd.

Elton Davies must have considered his options at this point, but we were not privy to his deliberations. By the time he communicated with us, he was resolute. The mission would go on. And yet he could hardly assume that we crewmen, in the face of such a threat, would be willing to keep going. At a meeting with the whole crew, through teleconferencing over satellite internet, Elton Davies shored up morale a bit by awarding every one of us a $10,000 bonus, then provided a few minutes of what was meant to be inspirational talk, before playing his trump card.

It was President Joseph Bwalya of Zambia. 

It’s an exhilarating experience to be part of a small group addressed directly by a head of state. You feel important. But in this case, he wasn’t just addressing us, but begging us, from the bottom of his heart, to save his country. And he was so persuasive! We knew at once why fifteen million Zambians had made him their spokesman. How that man could speak! He would die at the hands of a military firing squad three years later, after the coup, which was more revenge than even Koch Industries wanted. Maybe he deserved it. He had certainly played his part in causing the crisis. But that day, there was none of the self-justification I was used to hearing from politicians. He was humble and sincere, and spoke from the heart, like no one I'd ever seen. I think the doom that lay in store for him, which would have come about sooner but for our help, already cast its shadow, and gave him the dignity of suffering.

I realized later that one of the reasons why the speech was so spellbinding was that he never used the first person singular. There was no “I,” only “we.” “We” meant, in the first place, the people of Zambia, yet often his rhetoric seemed to reach beyond that, to all the poor of the human race. "We are hungry," he said. "We are afraid. We have scoured the land for fuel to cook what little food we have. It is getting hard to find it. Some of us have grown so desperate that we have taken to banditry. We cannot call the police. We fear the night, the unbroken darkness. We have watched our children die. Do you know how many years a mother cries, a father cries, when their child's eyes close for the last time? The eyes run out of tears. The heart never does." That's a bit that I remember. He acknowledged that he was asking a lot. "I know that you will be making a great sacrifice. Wicked corporate greed has corrupted many of your countries into exiling you if you help us. Yet we cannot but beg you all the same, for the sake of our children, to come to us. If you turn back, Zambia will forgive you. But if you come, how much greater shall be our gratitude! We will always remember a debt to you that we can never repay." By the end of President Bwalya’s speech, not an eye was dry among the crewmen of Jove’s Chariot. 

Then Elton Davies said, "So, my friends, is the mission still on?" We cheered "yes" and "hurrah" as with one voice.

And then someone shouted "Jove's Chariot against the world!" Others took up the cheer and shouted it out. "Jove's Chariot against the world! Jove's Chariot against the world!..." It was the first popular bumper sticker phrase to emerge from the career of Jove's Chariot. Who said it first? No one knows. No one claims the honor. Face hinted a few times, in his usual man-of-mystery way, that maybe it was him. But I doubt it. Among the various prime suspects, I may be the one most frequently mentioned, since I was the youngest and the most naively idealistic. Well, I've never admitted this before, but I didn't even join in the chant when everyone was shouting it. I was too timid. But I felt how fitting was the slogan for the moment. It captured our brave determination to do the right thing, the merciful thing, in defiance of the ignorant, cowardly, panicky powers that be, whatever the cost.

That was the beginning of our outlawry, even if it wasn't locked in until we crossed the Zambian border. That was the moment when we accepted exile for the sake of President Bwalya and the suffering Zambians. And what a bond it created between us! Suddenly we were all embracing one another, and shaking hands, and embracing again. It was so splendid to have such a sense of shared peril and shared purpose. Every time I saw one of their faces I felt a feeling of exhilaration that was like a physical warmth. I admired my colleagues, and I felt so proud to be one of them. I hadn't even known everyone's names before. I learned them by reading the roster of outlaws in the Jove's Chariot Resolution. They were burned into my memory as they were burned into history.

But there was one with whom that moment did not create a bond. Elton Davies. He had, after a fashion, inspired and united us, and we were glad to be inspired and united. Yet he was urging us on into outlawry for his cause, while he himself was, seemingly, safe. It was hard, in our danger, not to resent his apparent safety. There was no reason to doubt that he really wanted to help the people of Zambia. But he also had some sort of plan to make vast amounts of money. And his schemes were making us outlaws. It pain, his gain. We too wanted to help Zambia. And yet that shared purpose didn't make us friends. We didn't feel like he trusted us. And in our turn, we didn't quite trust him. 

The next day was a big day. We were about to enter African airspace at last, crossing the short stretch of coast that connects the ocean to the vast expanses of the DRC. Captain Scott stamped our passports himself, having got special authorization from the DRC government to do it that way, since landing was complicated. Then just as we had almost arrived, our meteorologist, Leonard Lord, said no. Thunderstorm risk was moderately high all over the southwestern DRC. It wasn't safe to go on. "Maybe in a few hours," said Lord.

A day passed. We were stuck. Again and again, Leonard Lord said "maybe in a few hours." Scott was getting impatient. And so was his uncle, Elton Davies. They frequently spoke on the phone that day, his uncle insisting that the mission must go on. We learned later that in the DRC, there was a war of lobbying going on between Elton Davies and Koch Industries, which was trying to get the DRC to revoke out overflight rights. Elton Davies had deep business ties to the DRC, and he had many planned missions of Jove's Chariot there from which his contacts would profit handsomely. Koch Industries were newcomers in the DRC, and while they were willing to spend a lot, outright bribes were legally risky. But as we got closer and they got more desperate, it was a risk they were increasingly willing to run. Any day, they might hit the right decision makers, and get the overflight permission overturned. At that point, since Zambia was landlocked, we would have no way into Zambia without directly violating someone's sovereign airspace. So it was crucially important that we enter the DRC soon, while it was legal. Unfortunately, none of this was told to us. We didn't know the reason behind Scott's increasingly frantic impatience. 

Perhaps it wouldn't have helped even if we had. For there was a kind of firm principle among airshipmen that you don't take excessive risks with the weather, no matter what. I was a rookie but even I knew that much from training videos. For old hands the "rules of engagement" with adverse weather were holy writ. It wasn't just that to fly into a thunderstorm was to risk your life. It wasn't even that it risked a valuable capital asset, the airship, though it often seemed reasonable to owners that crewmen should value the airship more than their lives, since it was typically worth much more than the combined net worths of the crew. But breaches of air safety protocols jeopardized the whole future of the airship industry. 

All airshipmen knew all about the great airship disasters of the 1920s and 1930s. All knew that any repeat of such disasters would do great damage to the current airship renaissance. We knew firsthand the dazzling capabilities of the new giant airships, and their potential to deliver vast benefits to the human race, if only the industry were allowed to mature. But regulators might still shut it down at any time as excessively dangerous. There was no reason such accidents should be repeated, in an age of excellent global weather forecasting, for adverse weather was always the chief danger, but airships could always get out of its way with good planning. And so the meteorologist's veto was sacred. And the meteorologist was expected to follow the consensus rulings of the Aeronautical Forum (AF), an online community focused on ex post analysis of airship flight decisioning, and scenario generalization and derivation of principles. 

At first, Captain Scott accepted this. Then, in contravention of general airship protocols, he started pressuring Leonard. "How long can this go on?" he asked, only to hear that it was very improbable that adverse weather risks would remain heightened for more than three weeks, but the Congo rainforest was one of the most thunderstorm-prone regions in the world. What made it especially frustrating was that thunderstorm risk along the flight path was only a little above tolerable thresholds. It looked much more likely than not that we would sail through safely. And the risk was as likely to be worse as better tomorrow. Finally he attempted a decision. Near sunset, Captain Scott said, "I think we should just go in. Let's move." But he was met with a point blank refusal by Archie Jones.

"No," said Archie Jones. "We won't go into that. It's against AF rules." Jake was present and seconded Archie with a disapproving look at Captain Scott  And that was the end of it, for the moment. Captain Scott had been overruled.

But at 4AM Captain Scott ordered all hands on deck for an announcement. He looked white a sheet and was almost shaking, and I knew he must have been talking with his uncle, for nobody else could have scared him like that. I learned later that Elton Davies had hardly slept for six days, totally absorbed as he was in his political chess against Koch Industries. Maybe that's an extenuating circumstance. He had chewed Scott out, insulted him, threatened him, crushed his will, and forced him to blast through all obstacles and drive Jove's Chariot forward, no matter what. And yet he didn't lay his cards on the table even to Scott, quite. For Elton Davies didn't trust us, not even Scott. He thought that we were creating pretexts for delay to avoid being outlawed. And he thought that if we knew that our legal access to DRC airspace was in jeopardy, we'd be all the more likely to find pretexts for just a bit more delay, so that we could go home. And so Captain Scott met us that morning in the uncomfortable, unaccustomed role of enforcer. He had to show us he was in charge, or who knows what his uncle would do to him?

"Well, boys, the day has come," Scott told us. "We've been all around the world to get here. Today we're going into Africa!" 

There were some cheers at this from people who weren't aware of the disagreements, but Leonard Lord immediately began, "Not yet, Captain, the storm system still shows a pattern that could escalate into…" But Scott spoke over him.

"In the next half hour, we'll cross the coastline and enter DRC airspace. The weather could get a little bit turbulent. If we need to, we can discharge water ballast, construction materials, or even food to reduce weight. Be ready to…"

"No," said Archie Jones. "We can't go into this."

"Mr. Jones," said Scott coldly, "you are hereby discharged from the crew of Jove's Chariot. You are requested to remain in your cabin, except as necessary for food and personal hygiene, until we arrive in Lusaka, at which time you'll get a plane ticket back to London." (Archie was an Englishman.) As we were reeling at this bombshell, Captain Scott continued. "Our route through DRC airspace will be continuously optimized to minimize weather risk, but at the moment, the plan is to swing north, along the border with Congo. I'll be piloting the airship, and Jake Munro will be serving as my copilot--"

"No, I won't," interrupted Jake. "We can't go into this."

"Jake Munro, you are hereby discharged…" Scott repeated the rigmarole, through "... back to the United States," then tried again. "Andreas Fulk will be serving as my copilot--"

"Not me either," said Andreas, "unless Leonard says the weather situation meets AF standards."

"Andreas Fulk, you are hereby discharged…" etc., said Scott, and then, "Thor Halvarsson will be serving--" Scott began again.

"I'm not a pilot," said Muscle, though he had a couple of years of airship piloting experience on the Norway-Iceland route several years before. Then, correcting himself, "I'm not a pilot for this kind of weather."

"Let's get this over," said Scott, turning his face now to a clique of old hands standing together instead of the crew at large. "Jake, Andreas and Muscle are discharged for insubordination. Sid, will you be my copilot?"

"No, sir. Safety first."

"Then stay in your cabin and you'll get a ticket home in Lusaka. Hunter, you had the training, right?"

"Didn't finish, sir," said Hunter.

"Well never mind then… Oh, how could I forget? Frank Logan! How about you, Frank Logan?"

There was no response from Frank Logan, this he looked uncomfortable, and Scott took silence for consent. "Frank Logan will be serving as my copilot." Frank didn't say no. Scott continued. "Everyone keep an earbud in at all times so that you can hear orders…" And he went on to assign duties and try to raise morale by praising us, but I wonder who could listen. By firing Archie, Jake, Andreas, Muscle and Sid, Scott had reduced the crew's total flight-miles of experience by about 70%. We were suddenly a crew of rookies, about to charge headlong into weather the AF considered unacceptable for airship navigation.

As the meeting broke up, Jake caught my eye and I approached him discreetly, trying not to be caught at it by Captain Scott. "I'm sorry I got you into this," he said. "Stay close to Scott if you can. Look for opportunities to bring him to his senses. Good luck!" So that's what I did, even to the point of following Scott and Frank Logan into the cockpit uninvited. Scott took it for a sign of solidarity with him in a moment of crisis, and seemed grateful.

While my principles of aeronautical professionalism forbid me to approve of the decisions that were taken that day, I can't regret that I got to see that amazing battle of wills between the great airship and the great storm. It was sad, it was stupid, but it was glorious!

In spite of everything, we cheered as the airship crossed the line of the coast. "Welcome to Africa!" Captain Scott announced. We felt it was very significant, even if no one had told us why. Two days later, the DRC government requested Elton Davies not to fly Jove's Chariot into DRC territory for three weeks, until some of the diplomatic ramifications could be sorted out. Elton Davies said sorry, he'd already used the overflight permission previously granted, but he'd bring the airship out of DRC airspace as soon as possible.

At first, we were just moving in and out of clouds. Far below was a sea of green, a rolling landscape of leafy canopies that totally concealed the ground. It was the great Congo rainforest, second largest in the world after the Amazon. Then a hard rain began, and furious, fussing little gusts of wind started to churn the air. The rain caused a phenomenon I hadn't seen before, which was remarkably beautiful, though also a little alarming. You've seen rain drip off of buildings. Here the rain rolled off the top of the airship as a steady waterfall. Because the airship was such a smooth geometric shape, the rain runoff formed a smooth, delicate curtain of falling water all around the airship. To get a better look, I excused myself from the cockpit quickly-- they didn't seem to notice-- and ran along the decks, looking out the windows in admiration, and down through the transparent floors at the mighty rainforest. The windows were all open, as if the crew wanted to hear and feel the wind conditions for themselves. 

I checked in with Jake. He wasn't in his cabin, but in the corridor, with the other old hands, talking with the other old hands about the airship and the storm. "So far, so good?" I suggested tentatively. "It's amazing that there's no turbulence with all this wind. It's howling out there, but we're going forward completely steady. That hasn't even spilled." I pointed to cup of coffee in the table.

"I'm glad Captain Scott can keep us steady in a heavy rain, at least," said Jake.

"The danger is we get caught in a thunderstorm cell," added Archie. "Updrafts and downdrafts. Or lightning." At that moment, there was a flash of lightning, and then a crash of thunder, in the distance.

Back in the cockpit, I noticed that we were gaining altitude slightly, and Scott was worried. He was trying to steer out of the updraft but wasn't sure where it was, where it extended to from our location. But he turned north and got out of it, and just then we got struck by lightning!

There was a blinding flash, and a fierce crash of thunder at exactly the same moment, and the lights went out for a moment. I thought I'd seen some kind of sparky lights dancing along a metal mooring spike. Then it was over, and we were apparently none the worse. But it was unnerving, and there could be damage. Captain Scott ordered all crew not on critical business to inspect the airship thoroughly for lightning damage. Then we got suddenly jolted. The kitchen was near and the doors were open, so I heard the sound of pots clattering to the floor. The main damage of the lightning was that the electricity surge knocked out most of the hydrogen sensors in the hull. We wouldn't know whether there was free hydrogen that could ignite, or not.

For an hour there were no definite events. There was lots of lightning, mostly not too far away, but not dangerously near. Captain Scott kept changing course to steer out of where the lightning seemed to be concentrated at any given time. Sometimes we lost altitude and Captain Scott pointed the thrusters more upward to offset that. Sometimes we gained altitude and he pointed the thrusters a little bit down. The altitude changes were making my ears pop. There was another hard bump and Captain Scott's favorite coffee mug was knocked to the floor and shattered. Then the steering seemed off, and one of the thrusters wasn't responding to pings from the control computer. I was still impressed by how the airship could generally keep so steady through the wind and rain.

Just when it felt like we were getting out into milder weather, we started gaining altitude alarmingly fast. Scott turned all the thrusters straight down to fight the altitude gain, which meant we had no horizontal thrust and were at the mercy of the winds. There seemed to be some weird imbalance in the strength of the thrusters, so that they created a pitch in the floor. And we were still rising at two hundred feet per minute. Just then, climber Danny Joye reported back on the thruster that wasn't pinging. It was clean gone! Somehow it had just come off altogether. Did it matter too much at the moment to lose one of twelve thrusters that were all doing the same thing, pushing down? We weren't sure. Worse, it shook our confidence in the airship, which suddenly seemed flimsy. Later we learned that the heat of the lightning had softened the metal, so that the arm connecting the thruster to the hull gradually gave way under the thruster's weight, with a little help from strong, gusty winds. And we were still gaining altitude. Captain Scott was beginning to lose his nerve. Frank Logan was watching helplessly. 

The risk now was that we would hit the altitude ceiling, and the hydrogen gas bags would run out of space and push against the frame, with risks of puncturing or simply increased leakage because of pressure. That meant free hydrogen in the hull, which could ignite. For two precious minutes, we forgot the obvious thing to do when caught in an updraft, namely, to turn on the gas compression module in the buoyancy control system, or the "air BCS." Frank Logan suggested it, and it was another blow to Scott, who was horrified at his own ineptitude for forgetting. So the fans turned on and began compressing air in metal tanks, making the airship heavier, better able to resist the updraft, but it takes the system time to work. We hit 5,000 feet, the altitude ceiling. 5,200. 5,500. From the hull, we seemed to hear a sort of creaking, squeezing little moan as the hydrogen inflated. 5,700 feet, said the altimeter ominously. Then 5,800…

"New strategy," said Scott suddenly. Amidst the shifting clouds he had seen something he liked. He turned all the thrusters horizontal and forward-facing. That would make the altitude gain worse, but it would be worth it if we could get out of the updraft, and he thought he knew how. We started forward, and suddenly I saw ahead of us an absolute wall of thick rain. As we smashed into it, there was a horrible jolt that sent us all sprawling. That was the most dangerous moment of all, for the updraft on one side of the airship and the rain and downdraft on the other could have torn the airship apart. It didn't, but for the next ten years we would be finding and repairing structural faults produced by Captain Scott's harebrained move. It turned the nose downwards for a half a minute, which dramatized the beginning of a terrifying descent. Stuff crashed all over, and we had to grab onto things to avoid falling. At the same moment, we were struck by lightning again, and there was the light and the noise, and the worst of it was that we now thought there was probably free hydrogen in the hull. For a few seconds, we expected the whole airship to ignite in a hideous Hindenburg-style flare-up. We froze with fear… then, after a few seconds, Frank Logan and I recovered enough to be marginally functional.

Captain Scott didn't. He was staring, immobile with horror, down into the abyss below.

"We're losing altitude," said Frank. "Turn off the BCS."

Captain Scott was still as stone.

"We're losing altitude now," Frank said again, shouting now. "Turn off the BCS."

No response from Scott. No movement. Frank and I looked at each other. 

"Should I call up the old hands? Should I get Archie and Jake?" I'd have gotten them anyway in a moment, but it would be nice to have Scott's consent.

"Yeah," Scott whispered, still frozen except for a slight movement of his lips. Then slightly louder, "Yeah."

"You run the cockpit till they get here," I said to Frank, who seemed to be unable to act on his own. He turned to the controls and began reversing the BCS gas compression flow and releasing water ballast. 

I ran over the tilting decks, weirdly heaving as the ship righted itself, towards the old hands' cabins. They were already on their way. "Captain Scott needs you," I said, stating the obvious.

"Good," said Jake. "Archie, you take the cockpit. Muscle and I will man the deck. Keep talking to me." I followed Jake as he and Archie called each other on their phones as they ran in different directions, and kept talking.

As we entered the cargo hold, another lightning strike caused the lights to go out for a second. When they came back on, Jake was in center stage. "Gentlemen!" he shouted. "We're too heavy. Throw overboard whatever we can spare!"

The crew had been at loose ends, either pointlessly prowling to look for lightning damage or just moping in fear of death. With that command, they sprang into orderly action. A gate was opened, the ramp dangling in mid-air, and forks and chairs and paper towels and curtains and potted plants and anything easy to grab started getting thrown into the abyss. The men were glad to have a task, but it seemed merely symbolic. “Get heavy stuff!” Jake shouted. And “leave the kitchen alone,” because throwing out handfuls of forks was a waste of time. He influenced us, I suppose, but we weren’t very rational. We were just moving to fend off panic. 

And no contribution of ours seemed to matter amidst the titanic forces that were in play. The BCS was hard at work, doing far more than we ever could, releasing all the pressurized lifting gas from the tanks to expel air from the hull, and dumping two hundred tons of water in vast torrents from thirty pipe ends. What with that and the Niagaras of rainwater runoff that poured to port and starboard, we had the strange feeling of having been suddenly metamorphosed into Noah’s Flood. Five minutes ago we were expecting death by fire, now death by water seemed to be closing in. We were losing altitude fast, six hundred feet per minute at first, and the altimeter raced down ominously. 3,000 feet. 2,000 feet… 

Yet we weren’t in free fall, and that was amazing! The waterfalls pouring off the hulls, visible through the windows about a hundred and fifty feet away, showed what free fall looked like. The force of that water was a measure of the great airship’s power of levitation, its mighty resistance to gravity. In the masterful hands of Archie Jones, it seemed to be a whole new airship, struggling valiantly against what seemed like its inexorable doom. The decks were straight and steady. The fatal descent was smooth, graceful, and majestic. It made me proud. It sounds crazy, but I was intensely happy as we descended slowly, with all the thrusters bravely pointing upward and exerting their full power, and the ship bearing all that weight of water before it poured down around us. I was exhilarated by the spectacle. Sheer wonder at that marvelous machine overwhelmed every other emotion.  

Muscle led by example. He levered a big freezer, at least three hundred pounds of weight, up onto a dolly, and pushed it through the gate into the abyss. “NOOO, not the ice cream!!!” shouted someone, who never fessed up afterwards. Muscle nearly fell overboard himself, and when he regained his balance, he shouted: “Bungees! Attach bungees there and there.” Climbers Danny Joye and Ro Jarvis understood, and clambered aloft to attach bungees to girders, to tie around the waists of pushers and catch them if they fell. These lifelines looked ominously like nooses, but it was a smart idea, similar to what we Peter Pans were used to.

“Muscle, Tommy, get the grand piano!” Jake shouted. We obeyed, rolling the huge instrument within ten feet of the gate’s mouth, before tying bungees around our waists for the final push. Just before the piano reached the lip, a jolt of wind tilted the deck and it rolled back. It crashed into me, rolling over my leg. Muscle leapt in the way to stop the piano, while Jake lifted me to safety. Then he put the bungee on, and he and Muscle ran to the gate. My eyes closed in pain, I didn’t see them fall into the abyss and climb back up. Other crewmen were throwing chairs and tables and pots. The altimeter countdown passed 1,000 feet. I wondered what ground elevation was. After wiping away tears of pain, I looked down through the floor and saw the giant trees looming. Overhead, lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. 

“Scout,” said Jake. “Get the horses.” 

Scout froze. His face turned white.

“Oh, no!” he whispered in horror. “What about the refrigerators? The pool table. The beds. The hay.”

“We’ll try that too,” said Jake. “But it’s slow. Horses. Can. Run!”

“I’d rather jump myself,” said Scout. 

“No good,” said Jake, without missing a beat. “You’re not heavy enough.”

I didn’t know it was possible for a man’s face to fill up with tears so fast. But Scout saw it was useless to argue. He turned and ran madly towards the stables. A minute later the two horses came galloping across the deck, the grey mare and the white stallion, with Scout on its back. The crew stepped back to make way, while still throwing things through the gap. Scout mounted the gray mare, donned the bungee, and prepared to ride into the abyss. The altimeter countdown passed 600 feet. 

It was about this time it hit me that our little efforts might make the final difference, after all. The BCS had nothing more to give. All the water ballast was gone. All the lifting gas was decompressed. And we were still descending. But its labors had not been in vain. We were descending much more slowly now. We hardly needed the altimeter anymore. We could see how near the rainforest canopy was. At that moment, too, the clouds ahead thinned. They didn’t break, yet the sun was visible through them ahead of us, like a song of hope. The waterfall shone with it. The beauty of that shining waterfall took my breath away. It didn’t help us for the moment, for our enemy was the rain, and that was still coming down in sheets all around us. But not so far ahead, it looked like better weather. If we could get just enough weight off, the descent might stop, and we might cruise into the light. Mere survival for the crew seemed likelier, too, for that matter, with a slower impact, but we hardly cared. If Jove’s Chariot was wrecked in the jungle, we would have failed, and the mission was everything.

Scout, his face bathed in tears, shouted “Giddyap!” and spurred his grey mare towards the fatal gate. Her name, as I learned later, was Cloudy. She’d been his horse since she was a foal, on his parents’ ranch in Kentucky. Long past her prime, she was the less valuable of the two horses, a mere companion to the great white stallion. But a good horse all the same, and he loved her. She ran forward at her master’s bidding. But she stopped at the lip and would not jump. There were shouts of dismay, and some said “Push her!” Jake silenced everyone with his hand. The trees came closer. Jake took Scout off the horse, and put the bungee on. Come to think of it, I never asked him where he learned to ride. I suppose it must have been on his father’s cattle farm in Montana. 

Jake’s face, too, was full of tears, as he mounted Cloudy. She grew calm at his touch. Despite his tears, his voice was calm, brave, encouraging, as he praised and caressed her. She stirred with excitement. Then he let out a wild yell and she surged forward. She ran with perfect confidence. How he could have such charisma with animals, I’ll never understand. “WHEEEEE!” his voice rang out, incredibly loud and free, as he and Cloudy sprang through the gate and fell into the abyss. Tears filled my own eyes at once, but not for Cloudy I think. Watching him fall, I couldn’t resist an irrational conviction that Jake was gone, though I knew better. Of course, he came up again a moment later, climbing the bungee, hand over hand, with other crewmen pulling the bungee up as well. 

Cloudy, wherever you are, thank you for your sacrifice. I wish we’d been able to take you back to the green fields of Kentucky. I hope you know that your courage saved all our lives! The outlaws of Jove's Chariot will hold you in honor forever.

Jake whistled for the white stallion, named Snowmane after the legendary horse of King Theoden of Rohan. He was about to jump, when the mechanics showed up. In the kitchens, our four mechanics, Roy Dodge, Pete Gunther, Joel Marcos, and Riley Mulligan, had been busy with screwdrivers, trying to take things apart and get heavy pieces ready to be thrown overboard. Now they showed up with cabinets and sinks and one fridge to throw overboard. Jake paused, watched the altimeter, and held Snowmane back, hoping it was enough. 

After almost a minute of terrible suspense, the voice of Archie Jones came over the intercom. “Pause, boys!” he said. “We’re holding altitude.” The rain must have lessened slightly then, for he was able to turn the thrusters slightly, pushing us forward. I fancied that he may have swerved left to avoid getting snagged on one tree that overtopped the rest of the canopy. But I’m not sure. 

And then the rain thinned and we began to rise. We cheered. Snowmane reared and whinnied. A vast vault of friendly light-grey clouds opened before us as we gained speed. 

We had beaten the storm!

Continue to Chapter 4.