Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion (31 page)

“Just quickly, a word on how gyrosphere races were staged. Chiltern was voicing an oft-heard conceit about them; they were unsteerable and at the mercy of the winds. This is only partially true. They were indeed at the mercy of the winds, but only in the same way that a sailing boat is. A gyrosphere steers neither gracefully nor with alacrity, but she does steer thanks to two innovations. The first is the rudder sphere, to which I alluded earlier. This allows torque to be applied to the whole structure, causing it to twist this way or that around a vertical axis running through the gyro centre. The second is less technical, but just as efficacious. From either side of the machine, running from the lower surface of the sphere to the base of the basket, are sails. These provide the gyrosphere’s main source of forward movement, but by furling one or the other, they can also be used to steer. Between the rudder gyro and the sails, a competent pilot may make his craft perform quite sharp manoeuvres, although they are incapable of tacking or beating against the wind like a sailing vessel, and therefore a full 180° range of travel is denied them.

“The race was a timed affair, which is to say, the gyrospheres would take to the air at five minute intervals. The prevailing winds in the area are in the west, so a line was drawn along a longitudinal line of the map running through the nearby city of B—.” Danvers paused. “Ah.”

“Ha!” snorted Kay. “Hung by your own petard now, aren’t you, my boy?”

“Ba—,” said Danvers, but didn’t seem very convinced by this innovation.

“Banbury?” offered Kay innocently. “Or perhaps Barrow-in-Furness? Could it be Barking? Oh, but wait. You specifically said it was a city. Let me think — how many cities in Britain start with the letters ‘Ba’?” He pantomimed deep thought and then sudden inspiration. “Why, that is a list of precisely one. One city.”

He looked intently at Danvers, who crossed his arms and looked recalcitrant.

“One city,” repeated Kay. “Bath Spa, some fifteen miles east of Bristol.” His tone softened. “Really, Danvers, all this ‘—‘ business is entirely unnecessary.”

“A line running north and south through Bath,” said Danvers, affecting that he hadn’t heard Kay and this was his own decision. “All was in preparation. There were fourteen gyrospheres in contention, and the order in which they were to launch had been settled by lot. The
Davina
had drawn an early departure, which pleased McMurdo. ‘We’d no want the sky aheed of us t’be full of obstacles t’pass,’ was his comment.”

This, Danvers delivered in an ill-considered personation of a Scotch accent that would have filled Harry Lauder with dismay. Certainly it caused Robinson, the club’s resident Scot, to submerge behind his paper mouthing foul imprecations.

“The conditions were excellent: blue skies with only a few fleeting rags of cloud high in the firmament, the wind in the west, and a good steady blow of ten knots or so, according to the anemometer. The first ‘sphere was scheduled to lift at eight sharp, and my father’s at a quarter past. There was a decently sized crowd, many more people than anticipated, actually, and the men marshalling the area had their work cut out for them. Still, that was of no concern to my father and McMurdo as they readied the
Davina
to take to the air the very second that the official waved them off.

“You can imagine it was all getting quite loud, between the whisking of gyroscopes filling the air, the great armatures spinning just fast enough to ameliorate almost all the vessel’s weight, all but a statutory ton to keep them on the ground in that wind. There were shouts between crews and officials, the chatter of the crowd, and so it was understandable that neither my father nor his colleague took any notice of raised voices coming from an adjacent machine. The
Glory
, for that was her name, was scheduled to fly some ten minutes after the
Davina
, so you can imagine my father’s surprise when McMurdo tapped him on the arm and pointed, with a cry of, ‘What’s this about, then?’

“For the
Glory
was lifting, people running around in her shadow with cries of dismay and rage.

“Our first guess was that they had misjudged her gyro speed and she had gained the air prematurely. It wasn’t unknown and, indeed, that exact thing had happened at a private demonstration in the Midlands a few months earlier, an unmanned gyrosphere ending up flying across the country steadily gaining height until it was lost to sight and the ken of man. Best calculation is that it ran out of fuel and crashed in the North Sea, but nobody saw it happen. As a further aside, when the first etheric gatherers were tested, a gyrosphere was used as a test machine and it, too, was lost in a similar manner. Using a gatherer at high altitude means it would have stayed aloft until a bearing failed and that could have taken months or even years.”

He paused to give the gathering a moment to reflect on the romantic notion of a ghost gyrosphere, endlessly circumnavigating the Earth borne on winds both palpable and not.

“But, I digress. That first supposition of an accidental launch was damned within seconds when they saw the sail booms rise and, the moment the path was clear, the sails were unfurled. McMurdo and my father, along with all the other crews I would guess, stood dumbfounded by this turn of events. “‘Somebody’s jumped the gun,’ said McMurdo, and then added with a degree of cynical satisfaction, ‘That’s them disqualified.’ Then he looked at the activity at the
Glory
’s launch spot and reconsidered. ‘Aye, but something’s afoot, Hercules.’

“And indeed there was. There were people milling around, talking animatedly amongst themselves and occasionally pointing upwards to the sky where the
Glory
was starting to catch the wind. One of the
Davina
’s riggers came running over in a state of much excitement. ‘There’s been a robbery!’ he called to my father and McMurdo breathlessly. ‘Plate and gems from the house. The police are coming!’ He pointed at the flying gyrosphere. ‘That’s the thieves! There they go!’

“’A fat mickle of use calling the police here will be,’ growled McMurdo.” From behind his newspaper, Robinson could also be heard growling. “’By the time they get here, the
Glory
will be a halfway to London.’ The reality was that it would have been ditched in a field somewhere by that point, of course, a pre-arranged rendezvous with confederates who would assist in having the thieves and their booty safely away in short order. In all likelihood, they would have set the gyros to ascend before abandoning the gyrosphere, leaving the evidence to blow away on the westerly winds.

“Both McMurdo and my father were instantly convinced that the thieves were the two suspicious men of the evening before. They had been sizing up which of the ‘spheres would be best for their plan, and clearly the less talkative but more knowledgeable of them was the pilot. No wonder he’d lost interest when they’d started to describe the new steering gear to him; he wasn’t interested in innovation in the controls, but only familiarity. My father and McMurdo looked at one another; they could not let this outrageous crime go unchallenged.

“As my father took the controls, McMurdo caused consternation among the ground riggers by demanding the safety lines be loosed immediately. The official assigned to the
Davina
asked what they were up to and my father shouted down that they would pursue the
Glory
to deny it a clean getaway. They would drop messages where they could in an attempt to keep the police apprised, but they would have to lift immediately if they were to have any chance of keeping the prey in sight. To the great credit of that worthy, he saw the sense of their plan immediately, wished them God’s speed, and waved them clear.

“And so lifted the
Davina
in the first and, I believe, only incidence of a gyrosphere pursuit.

“The
Glory
was already quarter of a mile away as they cleared the tree line, caught in a fresh south by south westerly. They were not manoeuvring yet, probably intent of getting a head start by running before the wind before starting to steer. You can imagine how unwelcome the sight of the
Davina
rising in their wake was to them. To my father’s astonishment, however, they held their height, gusting along barely ten feet above the tree tops, and not deigning to climb into the faster winds above. My father took this to be a wobble on their part and was about to capitalise upon it by climbing over them, when McMurdo, wilier than father, stayed his hand. ‘No,’ he warned. ‘They’re up to something.’ My father had long since learned to trust his friend’s instincts and drew back the rotary speed of the lifting gyroscope, but he was unable to stop their ascent until they were some twenty feet higher than the level of the
Glory
’s sphere-top. Once there, he was loath to descend again, for the trees were moving below them now, and it would be all too simple to overcompensate and put the basket down among the branches to snag there and bring the chase to a premature end.

“’They’re brave or desperate,’ opined McMurdo. ‘I believe they intend to thread the needle.’

“And indeed they did. The needle in question was the Avon Gorge beneath the Clifton Suspension Bridge, a vertiginous place where winds blows through at speed on some days, and that was such a day. The wind had already shifted towards the north-west at our back, and we had to use the sails to stay heading towards our target. Confined by the walls, the air would be moving at fifteen or perhaps even twenty knots upriver. Those were dangerous speed for a gyrosphere, but if handled correctly, would shoot her through like a cork from a bottle of champagne. They were already starting to descend, and her rudder gyro was bringing her about to enter the Gorge north of the bridge.

“The opportunities for disaster were many, but so was the chance for them to show the
Davina
a clean set of heels. ‘Well?’ my father asked of McMurdo.

“McMurdo didn’t hesitate even for a second. ‘After them,’ he said grimly, and so my father engaged on the dangerous pursuit.

“The
Glory
tried to enter the gorge tidily, but it was a manoeuvre that involved both vertical and lateral movement committed upon at the same moment, and she was not fitted out to manage such easily. She made the turn, but the change in attitude was handled less neatly. The
Davina
, in contrast, was fitted with the new control gear that had so disconcerted the villains the previous night. My father was able to conduct both operations simultaneously, and swept in behind them. Instantly the sails bloomed as the spirited wind entered them, blowing the creases taut and making the booms creak under the strain. They descended into the gorge where the wind blew hardest and also where they would be sure of missing the underside of the bridge, but not so low as to threaten the high masts of the shipping travelling the channel below.

“The
Glory
was cutting it much more finely. Above and ahead of them, my father and his colleague watched with horror as the stolen gyrosphere flew far too closely for comfort to the bridge’s deck. It would only take a perturbation in the wind or the gyroscopic levitation field to drive them up into it, possibly with enough force to deform the gyro cage, causing them to jam and the field to dissipate almost instantly with fatal effect.

“It was then that the chase took an unexpected turn.”

“I’m finding all manner of things about this tale unexpected,” muttered Kay, “not to mention unbelievable.” He was hushed immediately by the other members.

“My father could see a little band of blue sky between the top of the
Glory
and the bridge when, to his great astonishment, he saw something fall across the gap. ‘Did you see that?’ he asked McMurdo.

“’Aye,’ answered the Scot. ‘It was a body. I think I saw the outline of a skirted figure. Och, Hercules…’” Here Danvers rolled the “r” sound of “Hercules” quite unforgivably. “’Tis a woman who’s jumped!’

“There are, unhappily, certain places in the country that draw those who are in such a state of mental anguish that they seek self-destruction. Beachy Head is infamously one such, and — ever since its opening — the Clifton Suspension Bridge is another.

“As the
Glory
cleared the bridge and sunlight fell upon her once more, they could clearly see a figure spread-eagled across the trailing side of the upper surface of the ‘sphere, a woman in a blue dress clinging fiercely to the anti-bird netting with which the structure was swathed.

“I understand it is not unusual for the suicidal impulse to be purged when an attempt fails, and this seemed to be the case here. This poor woman, driven by unknown devils, had taken herself to that place for her own execution, placed herself on the rail, and flung herself into what she believed to be eternity and the judgement of an unamused God. We should all of us who have never felt that impulse thank our lucky stars, and not rush to judge those that have. In any event, the extraordinary coincidence of the moment of her jump and the passage of the
Glory
beneath her — illegal on several counts — had preserved her, and even the speed with which she fell those potentially deadly yards was moderated by her skirts ballooning in the wind to ameliorate the shock of her landing.

“My father and McMurdo apprehended at once that the stakes had risen that much higher. Their mission could no longer be simply shadowing the
Glory
to her clandestine landing, but they must instead do what they could to bring her down without injuring her unexpected passenger. Thus, my father traded a little speed for altitude, and rose up behind the
Glory
so that the
Davina
’s basket was on a level with the woman.