It tried, with great lassitude, to rise again on the breeze, but the man was on his feet, being walked away by it, struggling to untie himself from it, fighting with a fierce single-mindedness to stop it; got himself free, and began to haul his thing in with violent tugs as it rippled and rose across the ground like a compact fog. I came with a stone and threw it on top to pin it. It was easy then; he piled it up anyhow and turned to face me.

"Mongolfier," he said, and I didn't know what to say to that.

He was a pale, unsmiling man, with lank black hair that fell always over his eyes. Top to toe he was dressed in tight brown, a snug manypocketed coat and pants, and strange glossy boots that reached to his knees, tightly thonged with yards of lacing. I smiled, and nodded, and made to come closer - at which he drew back, never looking away from me with eyes dark and wide, eyes such as I have seen only in wild things that have suffered some terrible hurt.

Just then Brom came warily out of the bushes behind me; and seeing him, the man cried out. He backed up, seemed about to fall over - there was a pack on his back as large as himself - and fumbled desperately for something in a holder at his side. He whipped it out: it was a hand-sized engine of some sort, with a grip and a black metal finger which he pointed at Brom. He stood stock still with the thing, staring. Only when Brom, sensing his fear, crept behind me and sat warily peeking out did he pocket his thing, and then without taking his eyes from Brom, he squatted, so that the bottom of his huge pack touched the ground. He pressed a black spot on his belt, and stood up. The pack remained standing in the meadow.

"Mongolfier," he said again. There were no straps at all attached to the pack, which was an irregular shape covered up in what looked like my own black and silver cloth, which clung closely around it as though wet, or as though wind pressed on it from all sides at once.

"How did you do that," I said, "with the pack?"

He held his hand up to silence me. With the other hand he reached into one of his many pockets and pulled out another small black machine. This one he fitted over one of his ears, fiddling with it to make it stay; it looked like a great black false ear. Which is just what it was. He made a "come here" motion with his hand, eyes cocked to the false ear, but when I stepped up to him he jumped away.

"You're jumpier than a cow I used to have," I said; at that he ducked his head and listened at his ear. He screwed up his eyes and bit his lip.

"More jumping," he said slowly, like a sleeptalker, and we stared at each other in confusion. He waved at me to come on again, and I was about to step toward him again when I understood what he was about. We didn't speak the same. He understood nothing of what I said, nor would I understand anything he said. But the false ear apparently could; it whispered to him what I said, and then he spoke back to me in my way, as well as he could. If that were so, it would be a long time before I could ask him what he had been doing up in the sky, so I sat down slowly, and started to talk.

He sat down too, after a while, and listened - to his ear, not to me, nodding sometimes, sometimes throwing up his hands in confusion; he clenched his fist in front of his mouth till the knuckles went white. He understood pretty quickly some hard things I said, but when I said, "Nice weather," he looked baffled. Late in the day, we were talking back and forth pretty well; he chose his words carefully and made sense as often as not. His eyes were never still, but darted always to the source of small noises, birds and bugs; a butterfly made him jump to his feet when it came near. Here he sat with me, not surprised at all by me, making me speak to him as though we had a long-standing agreement to meet here and do that, but every ordinary thing scared him. The only thing that distracted him from his fear was listening and speaking, which he struggled with fiercely.

Finally he waved me silent. He drew up his shod knees and closed his hands around them. "Yes," he said. "Now I must tell you why I am here."

"Good," I said. "You might tell me how, too."

He gritted his teeth with impatience, and I waved him calm. "I've come," he said, "to get back property of ours, which I think you have."

The strange thing was that "property" wasn't a word I had used to him. I don't think I've said it twice in my life. "What property?"

From another of his pockets he drew out a fine silver glove, dull in the sunlight. "A glove," he said, "like this one; and more important, another thing, a small thing, like a, like a..

"Ball," I said. It was my turn to be afraid. "Could you," I said, and swallowed the fear, "could you answer a question for me?"

"Three," he said, holding up three fingers. "Three questions."

"Why three?"

"Traditional."

"All right. Three," I said. I counted them off in the List's way: "Ay: what is this ball and glove, and what does it have to do with the dead men, like Uncle Plunkett? and bee: how did you know I had it? and see: where did you come from?"

When he heard my questions, eyes toward his false ear, he began to nod; he looked at me, and for the first time since he had fallen, began to smile, a strange, dark smile that was more remote than his tightly closed face had been. "Very well," he said. "I answer them starting with the last - also traditional. I have come" - he pointed skyward - "from there. From a City there, some call it Laputa. I knew you had our property because of the sound it makes - not the sound you hear, but another, far subtler sound, which an engine in the City detected. And it has everything to do with the man Daniel Plunkett whom you call dead, and whom I have brought on my back from the City. That's that." And he pointed to the black shape which squatted amid the grasses of the meadow.

"You're an angel, then," I said, "to tell me such things." He stopped smiling to listen, and then made his gesture of not understanding. "I don't think," I said after a long time, "that three questions are enough."

He set himself, nodding, as though to begin a great task. He made a start three different ways, and each time stopped, strangled up; it was as though each word were a piece of him, drawn up out of his insides with pain. He told me there were not cities in the sky, only this one called Laputa, which the angels had built when the last days were at hand; it was a great half sphere a mile wide at its base, and all transparent - a fine lacework of triangular panes, he had a word for them which meant they were joined in such a way as to bear their own weight, and the panes not glass at all but something - nothing, rather - a thing or a condition that allowed light through but was not itself anything, but through which nothing could escape -.

"Like way-wall," I said, and he looked at me, but didn't say there was no such thing. He tried to explain how the air inside was heated, and the air outside colder, and got confused, and I said I know: just because of that, the whole was lighter than air.

"Yes," he said. "Lighter than air." And so it rose into the sky, the whole mile of it, and, supported by its perfect simplicity, had floated ever since, while generations of angels had been born and lived and died there. He talked of engines and machines, and I wondered at first why they would choose to fill up their City with such stuff, until I saw he meant their machines were still perfect: still did what they were made to do. I looked at his false ear, and then at the pack in the meadow; he saw my look. "Yes," he said. "Even that still works."