You can’t help feeling just a tad pathetic and sad when it takes you every last scrap of your courage and moral fibre to face something that’s just another stage in someone else’s daily commute. Hop in, she thought into his brain, as he teetered on the edge of the invisible platform, looking down in terror at what appeared to be four planks of wood hanging from two pink balloons. All around him, the wind screamed and howled, tugging at his shirt like a bored child. It was a yard from the edge of the glass (he could just see it, a slight refraction of sunlight against the blue backdrop of the far-too-distant sea) to the nearest plank. She skipped the distance lightly, then turned and scowled at him. Come on, I’ll be late for work.
One small step for a man. One giant leap of faith for a man on the verge of falling a very long way and then going splat. He closed his eyes and hopped, making the little raft shake horribly. She grabbed his hand and pulled him off the edge into the middle. Scaredy-cat. Well, yes.
He opened his eyes. She was standing behind him, engaged with a device that looked a bit like an old-fashioned mangle; she was turning a big wheel with a handle, and a couple of large wooden cogwheels were slowly going round and round. It occurred to him that he ought to offer to help, but that would involve standing up and moving, and besides, it might come across as chauvinistic. He stayed where he was.
She gave the wheel one last turn, then pressed a little wooden lever at the side. At once, a broad wooden propeller he hadn’t previously noticed began to spin at the back of the mangle, and the raft shot forward. She pounced like a cat and landed next to him, kneeling on the planks.
Off we go.
Mostly to keep from looking down, or sideways, which was almost as bad, he studied the mechanism she’d been messing about with. After a moment or so, he figured it out. The gear-train and the flywheel turned the propeller, which made the raft go. What drove them, and what she’d been winding, was a foot-wide, anaconda-thick rubber band.
Well, yes. Of course it works. Yes, you’ve got to wind it up again when it runs down, but so what? Well, you think of something better, then, if you’re so clever.
Desperately, Theo tried not to think of an internal combustion engine.
Oh, that’s just silly. That’d never work in a million years. For one thing, it’d blow up.
Well of course it would. Silly me. What on earth could I have been thinking of? (Well, this –)
Oh. Oh, that’s clever. So that’d stop the gas coming through all at once. And that bit there goes round and round, and the burnt gas gets pushed out through that tube there. Gosh.
Theo groaned. He didn’t have a rule book in front of him, but his instincts told him that utterly changing a society, almost certainly for the worse, was not the sort of behaviour to be expected from a well-mannered guest. He tried to think of –
Yes, but what would you run it on?
Good point. Excellent point. Yes, you’ve got me nailed to the floor on that one. So, let’s forget all about it, shall we? (Actually, methane, or alcohol distilled from rubber leaves, or – No! Stop it!)
That’s brilliant. They’re going to be so excited when I tell them about it. Just think. No more stopping every five minutes to wind up the stupid rubber band.
Theo started to hum. He made no audible sound, of course, but he’d heard once that it was what the Maharishi used to do, to blot out all conscious thought. It worked up to a point. He could still hear her in his head, jabbering on about how wonderful his invention was and how it’d revolutionise travel between the Floats, maybe make it possible for them to build new ones; but at least he couldn’t make out all of the words.
Eventually, after a dozen rubber-band-winding stops, they pulled up next to a long, low wooden hut, floating serenely under three enormous purple balloons. Getting off the raft proved easier than getting on, mostly because he wasn’t quite so sure he cared whether he fell off or not. Inside, it looked pretty much the same as the girl’s house had done, except that there were five chairs, and a pampered-looking rubber plant in