The bears were supposed to be entering into their winter mode, which was not hibernation but rather a state that made them kind of like zombie bears, as one of the program officers in Churchill had put it. But it sure didn’t sound like it to Amelia. From aft came subsonic, stomach-vibrating, vaguely leonine roars, and also barks suggestive of the Hound of the Baskervilles. “Unhappy polar bears?” she asked. “Are they looking out the windows at the storm? Are they hungry? They seem so upset!”
Then they were caught by the outer edge of Harold, and for almost ten minutes the noise of the wind was tremendous. They were buffeted hard, and whether the bears were still complaining was hard to tell, as it was too loud to hear anything, but Amelia’s stomach was still vibrating like a drumhead next to another drum getting hammered, so it seemed like they probably were. “Hold on, folks!” Amelia said loudly. “You know what this is like—the airship is going to be loud until it gets up to speed. Of course there’s hardly any resistance to us speeding up; it’s not like a ship on the ocean, which took me a while to understand, because up here we basically move with the wind, so the wind doesn’t fly by us, like it would a ship or even an airplane. If we shut down our turbines, we just get carried along with whatever wind there is. That’s why we can fly in hurricanes without danger, as long as we don’t try to go anywhere other than where it wants us to go. Just bob along like a cork on a stream, slow or fast, doesn’t matter to us. Right, Frans?”
Although this time it was pretty bumpy. There was turbulence as the whirlpool of wind interacted with the slower air around it; things would go better when they moved a bit farther into the hurricane, as Amelia explained, not for the first time. Even so, it would still stay a little bumpy; they were in clouds, and a cloud was like a diffuse lake, with some choppiness in it created by the variable distribution of water droplets, so that even when they were pulled to the ambient wind speed and were flowing in the flow, they were also deep in cloud, and the quick shuddering vibration and occasional dip or swing meant the sense of speed was still there, even though they couldn’t see anything. “This bumpiness is part of the laminar flow,” Amelia narrated. “The cloud itself is shimmying!”
Although maybe it was just the airship, flexing its aerogel frame. Amelia felt sure it was not usually this bumpy inside clouds, even hurricane clouds. They weren’t resisting the wind, weren’t trying to crab out of the storm; just riding the flow, with Frans trying to modulate the up-and-down of the clouds’ internal waves. And yet still they were rocking hard, irregularly, both up and down and side to side.
“I don’t know,” Amelia announced, “it doesn’t make sense, but I’m wondering if this rocking is being caused by the bears?”
It didn’t seem likely, but nothing else seemed more likely. Probably the bears weren’t throwing themselves from side to side in an organized manner; anyway, she hoped not. They weighed some eight hundred pounds each, so even without coordinating their motions, even just banging about, or perhaps fighting each other, throwing each other around like sumo wrestlers—yes, they would certainly have enough mass to rock the boat. The airship was only semirigid at best, and highly sensitive to internal shifts of weight. So, if they were carrying an enraged cargo … “Bears and bears and bears, oh my!”
She went back down the central hallway to take a look. There was a window in the hallway door to the animals’ half of the gondola, so she grabbed a hairclip camera and clipped it to her hair, and looked in to see how they were doing.
The first thing she saw was blood. “Oh no!” Red on the walls, some of it spattered drops, some of it claw marks. “Frans, what’s going on here!”
“All systems normal,” Frans reported.
“What do you mean! Take a look!”
“Look where?”
“In the bears’ room!”
Amelia went to the tool closet in the hall, opened it, and took a tranquilizer dart gun from the mounting on the back wall. Returning to the hall door and looking through the window, she saw nothing, so she unlocked the door and was immediately knocked back as the door burst open into her. Bloodied white giants ran past her like dogs, like immense albino Labrador retrievers, or big men in ill-fitting white fur coats running on all fours. She lay sprawled against the far wall, playing dead, and luckily did not catch any of the creatures’ attention. She shot one with a trank dart in the haunch as it ran forward along the hall toward the bridge, then when they were out of sight she scrambled to her feet and ran to the tool closet. She leaped in and pulled the door closed after her, twisted the handle latch into place on the inside, and right after that heard the door thumped hard on the outside. Great big paw whacking it! Whacking it hard!
Oh no! Locked in closet, at least three bears loose in the airship, possibly six; airship in hurricane. Somehow she had done it again.
“Frans?”
I am for an art that tells you the time of day, or where such and such a street is. I am for an art that helps old ladies across the street.
said Claes Oldenburg
The streets are sixty feet wide, the avenues are a hundred feet wide. You could fit a tennis court across one of the avenues. It was said that the streets were designed with the idea that the buildings lining them would be four or five stories tall.
The leaden twilight weighs on the dry limbs of an old man walking towards Broadway. Round the Nedick’s stand at the corner something clicks in his eyes. Broken doll in the ranks of varnished and articulated dolls he plods up with drooping head into the seethe and throb into the furnace of beaded lettercut light. “I remember when it was all meadows,” he grumbles to the little boy.
—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
g) Stefan and Roberto
Stefan and Roberto had not found a chance to recharge the battery that powered their boat, so they walked on skybridges west and got on the Sixth vapo north to go see their friend Mr. Hexter. It was raining hard, the canal surfaces crazy with fat raindrop pocks and the splash sprinkles around the pocks, their little rings expanding out into bigger rings, all overlaid on boat wakes and the perpetual scalloping of a strong south wind: crazy gray water under a rolling gray sky, movement everywhere they looked. People waited on the docks under rain shelters if there were any, or stood under umbrellas or stoically out in the downpour. The boys stood in the bow with big plastic jackets on, getting wet. They didn’t care.