Zachariah had borrowed a table after dinner. He spread his papers out and held them
down with pieces of metal that made up Gold Bug’s tool making supply. He went
over the notes, comparing things by one finger on one thing, while placing another
finger on a second thing.
The speed in the wind had been incredible as far as he could tell. He wondered if it
went over Corwin’s Mansions. That would make things incredibly easy for them if
the Rocket could lift to the edge of the sky and ride the moving current until they had
to descend to land at their target.
Brother Rabbit hopped across the landing field. Pearl rested on his shoulder. He
smiled as he approached the table.
“How’s it going, Zach?,” the pooka asked, hands in the pockets of his trousers, ears
drooping down over his expressive bunny face.
“Fairly well, Brother Rabbit,” said Zachariah. He held his place with a finger while
he considered what he could say to make the rabbit go away while he was working.
“That was really impressive how you went from dead last, to first,” said Brother
Rabbit.
“We caught a wind,” said Zachariah. “I think about right here.”
He pointed at a paper with the chart on it, and the speed and altitude of the Rocket.
He moved some of his research around to either side of the mark up.
“What’s all this?,” asked Brother Rabbit. He waved his hand at the paperwork.
“These are recordings copied from the instruments in the cockpit. They took down
everything that happened,” said Zachariah. “I’m trying to figure out a way to
duplicate the result.”
“Just fly high again,” said Brother Rabbit.
“The engine cut off in the thinner air,” said Zachariah. “We need to be able to switch
engines, fly in the wind, then drop down and switch engines again for regular flight
to the landing area, then land. Otherwise, we have to increase our weight carrying
onboard fuel and use that to power the main engine.”
He made a few notes in a notebook next to the papers. He drew a larger reserve tank
on a drawing of the Rocket. He nodded to himself.
“Now if we can map the current, we can fly anywhere faster than at lower altitudes,”
said Zachariah.
“Glad to be of help, Zach,” said Brother Rabbit.
“The current might change,” said Zachariah. “How would we note that?”
“I don’t have a clue,” said Brother Rabbit. “It’s not like you can plant flags in the
sky.”
He saw the machinist’s eyes glaze over and knew he had said the wrong thing.
“No,” said Brother Rabbit. “Think about doable stuff first. You can’t plant flags in
the sky.”
“I can,” said Zachariah. “I just don’t know how yet.”
“So anyone can ride this wind?,” asked Rabbit, trying to get his mind off the idea of
planting markers everywhere.
“Yes,” said Zachariah. “The Green Light that guided us in said they used it to respond
to emergencies. Maybe the route is constant.”
“Maybe it stops when it crosses the Mansions,” said Brother Rabbit. “Or it might turn
and go across the mountains to the coast.”
“Could it do that?,” said Zachariah. “I don’t know anything about how the air
moves.”
“Not many people do,” said Brother Rabbit. “How high did you fly?”
“We were at the edge of the sky,” said Zachariah. “We could see stars moving above
us.”
“That’s high,” said Brother Rabbit. “Not many people can do that.”
“The air cut off too,” said Zachariah. “Anything that needs air would choke before
they got that high unless they had protection, and a way to breathe.”
“The Shae need to breathe too,” said Brother Rabbit. “And I am not planting flags for
you either.”
“It was just a thought,” said Zachariah. He wrote down a need for indicators to check
the wind of the super current.
“You’re going to need to get helpers if you want to do everything in that book,” said
Brother Rabbit.
“They’re just ideas at the moment,” said Zachariah. “Getting into the race has opened
up avenues of thought that never occurred to me before this.”
“You have to win the race before you can think about chasing the wind, or flying to
a star in the sky,” said Brother Rabbit. “Practical things are the backbone of
anything.”
“I don’t really have to win the race,” said Zachariah. “I just have to get to the finish
line to prove my flying machine works. After that, I can improve the design until it
can do anything I want it to.”
“And you’ve already shown that it can handle a rough ride,” said Brother Rabbit.
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“Exactly,” said Zachariah. “The wind current intrigues me. If we could find a way to
put ships that high that were lighter than what we have now, it could act as a river.
Transportation time could be halved.”
“Only one way,” said Brother Rabbit.
“Excuse me,” said Zachariah.
“The wind only pushes in one direction,” said the pooka. “You would have to double
your time sailing against it, or even sailing at a lower altitude.”
“You’re right,” said Zachariah. “The only good it would do is to push people from
Messer’s Reach to Baldwin unless it traveled further west. If it wrapped around the
world in a track, we could send things like that. But going the other way would be
just as slow as always.”
“So what are you going to do,” said Brother Rabbit.
“I’m going to find out if the current changes paths and use that for shipping when I
can,” said Zachariah.
The bunny ears drooped.
“But first I am going to get to the finish line of this race,” said Zachariah with a smile.
“Good one, Zach,” said the pooka.
“Did you notice anything while you were in the air?,” asked Zachariah.
“Not really,” said Brother Rabbit. “But we didn’t fly that high. We were more
interested in staying away from those kids. They have weird written on them like you
wouldn’t believe.”
“My assistant says they like to cheat,” said Zachariah. “They probably didn’t get that
much of a chance in the short time between here and Messer’s Reach, but when we
head over the Mansions, we can expect them to try something on some of the other
racers and ourselves.”
“They have that eye,” agreed Brother Rabbit.
Gear Octo came across the field, face covered with grease. He smiled when he saw
the rabbit and his sleeping dragon.
“You two are the biggest liars I have ever met,” the pilot said. “My machine isn’t
really that fast. I want to start in the back so I can really test it out. And your flying
lizard. That thing got out in front and stayed there for a long time. I almost blew my
engines trying to keep up.”
“Pearl loves to fly,” said Brother Rabbit. “She doesn’t get to do that much back
home.”
“We were talking about the wind I caught,” said Zachariah. “Do you know anything
about it?”
“The one at the edge of the world,” said Octo. “Yes. All the old pilots talk about it.
It carries rain to this side of the mountains from the Western Ocean.”
“Does it turn?,” asked Zachariah.
“Yes,” said Octo. “It follows the mountains and falls into the Eastern Ocean.”
“So it doesn’t go over the mountains,” said Zachariah. So much for riding it down to
Lobster Castle.
“It turns and some it splinters through the passes, but for most part, it heads to the
ocean,” said Octo. “Some of our weather people say it might turn back from the coast
and head south, but not inland, but no one knows for sure the exact trail.”
“So we could measure it,” said Zachariah.
“How would you do that?,” asked Octo. “Floating buoys?”
Zachariah’s eyes went blank as he considered the idea. He could set up floating buoys
to measure wind speed. He could use a variant of his gravity engine in each buoy. The
fuel would be the air itself.
“See what you’ve done,” said Rabbit. “Snap out of it, Zachariah. That’s years out of
your lifetime trying to prove something’s real.”
“Not years, necessarily,” said the machinist. “I could build the first one and teach
others to build the other ones. The problem is the long term effect of using the air as
fuel. It’s bound to hurt something somewhere.”
“What’s the gain from knowing which way the wind blows?,” said Octo.
“We can use it to transport goods faster, predict the weather, and harness it for
power,” said Zachariah.
“You would need a host of people to make that happen,” said Octo.
“Or maybe two Baldwin Green Lights,” said the Rabbit. “I doubt they would lend a
hand unless you could convince them it was for the greater good.”
“I could do that,” said Zachariah. “The ambassador to Messer’s Reach seems like a
reasonable man. I could show him my ideas, and he could get some of the Lights to
help build them.”
“You better have a lot more than notes on a piece of paper to show him,” said Brother
Rabbit. “If you could set something like this up, where do you think it would take
you?”
“I don’t know,” said Zachariah.
“I think you should think about the ramifications of things first before you start
building things no one understands and does stupid things with before they can
understand them,” said Brother Rabbit. “You don’t want to wind up with a duckbilled
freak as a sidekick, do you?”
“The pooka has a point,” said Octo. “I have to deal with mad inventions all the time.
The inventors never think about the bad idea that led them to building something that
eats bricks and shoots fireballs with no off button.”
“I assure you both I would never be a bad example to my daughter,” said Zachariah.
“Let’s stick with this thing you’ve built,” said Octo. “What can it do? Is it safe? Will
it come to life and eat people?”
“It is perfectly safe and non-intelligent,” said Zachariah. “It exceeded our scale of
numbers on both speed and height. The only drawback is I couldn’t think of a way for
it to pilot itself for when the trip gets tedious.”
“Don’t try,” said Octo. “There are too many ways that can be turned around on you,
and in the air, that can be catastrophic.”
“Also any magician will be able to control your ship from the outside if it has an
artificial brain in it,” said Brother Rabbit.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Zachariah.
“Zachariah,” said Bolan. “Everything looks good from what Knife and I can see.”
“Bolan, this is Brother Rabbit, and Gear Octo,” said Zachariah. “This is my assistant,
Bolan. Everything looks good? We’ve been talking about the wind we encountered.
Everyone knew about it, but us, it seems.”
“We’re not dedicated fliers,” said Bolan. “Of course, real fliers knew about it.”
“We just can’t take advantage of it like you did,” said Octo.
“You’ll need a closed cockpit, air, and better fuel injectors,” said Bolan. “I don’t
think Pearl can climb that high, and, if she could, I don’t know how she would do
without air.”
“I could rig the both of you air supplies,” said Zachariah. “But the cold might be a bit
much, and I don’t know how to fix that.”
“Don’t worry,” said Brother Rabbit. “Pearl and I like it close to the ground.”
“I didn’t know we had visitors,” said Sola. Hardy carried a tray of food on his back
as they approached. “Give me a few minutes and I will get you something. You can
eat with us.”
“That would be lovely,” said Brother Rabbit. “We don’t eat meat.”
“Anything is good,” said Octo. “It doesn’t matter if it’s hot, or cold.”
She placed the tray on the paperwork and vanished inside the Rocket. Bolan and
Zachariah inspected their plates, sampling the food with their fingers. Pearl hissed at
the food. Zachariah handed her a chopped tomato. She took it in her forepaws and put
it in her mouth.
“Good manners, Pearl,” said Brother Rabbit. “We’re guests here.”
“How does she change size,” asked Zachariah. “She expanded a hundred times,
maybe a thousand times, her length from this.”
“I have no idea,” said Brother Rabbit. “I put it down to Shae finery. This is the first
dragon that wanted to compete in the air race.”
“She looked good,” said Octo.
“I don’t know if she has the stamina to finish the race,” said Rabbit.
“She’ll finish it,” said Octo. “She might not win, but she’ll finish it.”
Pearl offered them a toothy smile as she chewed on the tomato.
Sola returned with two more plates. One was a thing of greens and fruits that she
handed to Brother Rabbit. The other had a variation of what she had made for her
father and Bolan that she handed to Octo.
“Let’s eat,” said Sola.