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had passed in a blur, for the entire crew was busy tending to the ship, refueling and reprovisioning her. Overnight we’d topped up our gas cells with hydrium and pumped water into our ballast and drinking tanks.
    And the food! What we took on was quite something—and I should know for I helped lug it all on board: sixteen hundred pounds of potatoes, thirty-two hundred eggs, a thousand pounds of butter and cheese. All in all we loaded up close to twelve thousand pounds of food for the voyage, and when you’ve seen it spread out in the loading bay and hefted it up on your shoulders, you wouldn’t think an entire nation could eat so much food.
    Now, here was the amazing thing. With all her provisions and cargo and gear and passengers and crew, the Aurora weighed more than two million pounds. She was a giant to be sure, nine hundred feet from stem to stern, fourteen stories high. But fill her up with hydrium, and it was like she weighed nothing at all. This morning, all it took were two men, one at the bow, one at the stern, to take hold of her and carry her out of the hangar and across the airfield to the mooring mast.
    Easy as that.
    First time I saw it, I could barely believe my eyes, for it seemed to defy every law of nature. And then all the Aurora had to do was dump a few hundred pounds of water and she was lighter than air.
    There’s fancy math to explain all this, of course. It had to do with hydrium being the lightest gas in the world. Much lighter than helium and even lighter than hydrogen. But when you saw the Aurora , saw her floating and rising, you forgot all about the math and just stared.
    Up ship!
    No time for gawking out windows now. I was cabin boy, and there were a hundred twenty passengers on board and all of them needed settling. I was busy showing them to their cabins and staterooms, explaining how the sinks and toilets and showers worked, opening trunks and telling about meals and showtimes for our onboard cinema and piano recitals in the A-Deck starboard lounge.
    “When do we set off?” one lady asked me.
    “Ma’am,” I said, “we set off twenty minutes ago.”
    She turned to the cabin window, amazed. “But I felt nothing!”
    “That’s right, ma’am. She’s like riding a cloud.”
    And then it was breakfast time, and everyone needed feeding.
    Breakfast!
    A maelstrom of noise and activity in the galley, all the electric elements blazing and the ranges like kilns. Platters of fresh bread and rolls and cinnamon buns. Sausages and bacon sputtering in the pans. Portobello mushrooms and tomatoes simmering under the grill. And the eggs! Not in a henhouse would you see more eggs than in our kitchen at breakfast time. Eggs served up any way you could want: poached, scrambled, over easy; eggs Benedict, omelettes.
    If I hadn’t already eaten a rib-busting breakfast at four thirty this morning, the smell and sight of all this food would have had me running around like a mad dog, cramming my mouth.
    Chef Vlad and his cooks and kitchen help had been up for hours, cutting peppers and tomatoes and mushrooms for the omelette fillings and making dough, for everything we served on board was fresh. Not like some of these cost-cutting liners you have now, where you practically have to bring your own provisions on board if you don’t want to starve halfway over the ocean.
    The main kitchen was on A-Deck, and the bakery directly below it on B-Deck. The fresh rolls and croissants came up piping hot in the dumbwaiter, almost faster than we could serve them. Baz and Kristof were on duty with me in the first-class dining room. We’d worked together long enough so that you might have thought we were auditioning for the ballet. We swirled about one another as the ship sailed on and the passengers ate and clinked glasses and ordered more morning glories at table nine and laughed at the sheer delight of having a meal six hundred feet in the air.
    Serving in the dining room was hardly my favorite part of being a