"I hope it won't interfere with mustering your war levy… no, it's mobilization you call it, isn't it?" Rudi said.

Martin nodded crisply. "You'll find that nothing can interfere with our mobilization," he said proudly. "In fact, we're making arrangements for the refugees to help with the harvest, while our reservists are under arms. Speaking of which, I should get going."

"Don't go," Juliet said after her husband had shaken Rudi's hand and walked briskly out. "You were going to tell me about your mother."

"Fascinating," Father Ignatius said sincerely.

He absently wiped the sweat from his forehead; the summer morning was warm.

"How many cubic feet of hydrogen, did you say?" he went on.

"Couple of hundred thousand," the engineer replied. "That's not counting the central hot-air ballonet that we use to help with altitude control."

The Curtis LeMay was nearly three hundred feet long, crowding the arched sheet metal expanse of the hangar, but nearly all of that was the great orca shaped gasbag-from bluntly pointed prow through swelling midsection to the cruciform stabilizer fins at the rear.

The glider and airship field was well north of Boise proper, though it had probably been suburbs before the Change, and the land around showed the snags of burnt out ruins and some trees still living to mark the sites of gardens.

Tawny hills rose northward, fading into blue distance as they climbed towards the forested mountains, with a crest line at about eight thousand feet. An occasional ranch house speckled them. Just south was still a suburb, or at least the outside the-wall residences of wealthy men, often surrounded by barriers of barbed wire or concrete blocks, with gardens and stables around the big houses within.

The field itself had an X of runways as well, and a long ski-ramp launching mechanism with counterweights and hydraulic rams that could snap gliders into the air to catch the updraft over the hills. The winged craft were kept in a series of hangars salvaged from the old municipal airport; a larger one housed the airship and several uninflated balloons. There was a smell of metal and sharp acidic chemicals and paint and shellac, as well as the more usual scents of people and horses and vegetation.

"Do you find that the power to-weight ratio is sufficient, Major Hanks?" the monk asked.

The military engineer looked at him. "You are an unusual young fella," he said.

The Boisean was in his late forties himself, lean and with a crew cut of stiff, grizzled brown hair. Ignatius spread his hands.

"I received a classical education… the pre-Change sciences, or at least some of them," he said.

"Wish more did," Hanks said. "The young guys I get off the farm nowadays, you just can't convince some of them machinery can't be treated like a horse. I guess it comes of growing up without anything more complicated than their mom's sausage grinder."

An orderly came up and gave them both cups of hot herb tea-the stove was well away from this area. Things didn't explode the way they had once, but that didn't mean hydrogen wouldn't burn.

A lot of it catching all at once would burn very hot and very fast.

There were vats alongside the walls of the blimp hangar, where zinc shavings and sulfuric acid combined to generate the lifting gas as needed. Technicians were uncoupling the hoses that ran from those to the gasbag as he watched, coiling them away neatly. Others pulled ropes to open broad slabs of the roof, to make sure none of the gas lingered inside.

Everything about the air base was neat, almost fanatically so, the grounds swept, every piece of wood painted and every metal part polished or oiled or enameled. Ig natius profoundly approved, as a soldier and an engi neer and a monastic as well. Physical things were like time-both belonged ultimately to God; sloth and waste were a form of stealing from Him.

"Well, we've got twelve pedal sets on either side," Hanks said, returning to the cleric's question and pointing upward. "Set up recliner-fashion, that gives you maximum output."

Ignatius nodded, following the finger. The airship had an aluminum-truss keel along the bottom of the shark-like gasbag; that made it semirigid. The gondola below was covered in thin doped fabric, for streamlining, but enough panels were unlaced for maintenance that he could see the spiderweb scantiness of the interior structure as technicians made their final checks and fastened the sheets once again. Idle now, a twelve foot propeller stood at the rear, behind a long wedge of rudder.

"The rudder is worked from a wheel at the prow of the gondola. She carries twenty-four pedalers, and an other six reliefs who act as the deck crew-you can see their positions at the rear there, like a semicircle-plus the captain and second in command."

Ignatius smiled to himself. Hanks had not answered the question. The engineer caught the smile and shrugged.

"Well, in a dead calm, they can get her up to about the speed of a trotting horse."

"And against the wind?"

The engineer shrugged again, and smiled himself, a little bitterly. "You go up or down trying to find a wind going in the right direction. Or anchor and wait it out. Trying to fight a breeze in this thing is like trying to hammer a nail through a board."

Ignatius raised his brows. "Not very difficult, you mean?"

"Only the nail's made out of candle wax."

They shared a chuckle, and Hanks went on: "That's the downside. The upside is that you can stay aloft a lot longer than a glider can. Less speed and control than a glider, but a hell of a lot more than an ordinary balloon. If only we had a goddamned engine…"

Ignatius nodded. He recognized the engineer's bitterness without sharing it. The man had grown up before the Change, and like many such-particularly those who'd worked much with machines-he resented the limitations of the new world with a savage passion.

God must have His reasons for it, Ignatius thought. Though it would have been interesting to have such possibilities open…

He didn't voice the thought; it would be futile, and would serve only to further disturb the middle-aged engineer's soul. Instead he asked a technical question about the gearing. Hanks brightened, and they talked ratios and aspects and hollow-cast driveshafts for a few happy moments.

Outside an observer keeping an eye on the wind sock shouted, "Clear!"

Hanks strode away, and Ignatius stepped back po litely; the ungainly craft had to be brought out quickly, lest a cross wind catch it and smash it up against the edge of the big hangar's doors. The ground crew were all hefty looking young men, and they tallied onto the long metal tube skids beneath the gondola and simply walked the craft out into the open by main force, before hooking a long cable onto a ring at the front of the gondola. It stood bobbing at head height as they tallied on and pulled until the LeMay 's nose was close to the base of a tall metal pole.

"Crew aboard!" Hanks shouted.

Most of the crew were women, which surprised the monk for a moment. Then he took a long look at their builds underneath the gray overalls as they scrambled up the rope ladders. Every one of them was slender and wiry enough to be assembled out of steel cables and springs.

Ah, he thought to himself. Maximum leg strength with minimum overall weight per pound of leg muscle. This is an instance in which a female's relative lack of upper body mass is an advantage rather than a hindrance. Interesting.

Also very interesting to watch; he'd sworn celibacy, but found inner disinterest much more difficult. He sighed and closed his eyes for a second, praying for strength.

"You interested in a ride, padre?" Hanks called.