Love and Hydrogen Read Online Free PDF Page A

nevertheless can’t resist comparing the invincible intensity of his feelings for Meinert with his pride at serving on this airship—this machine that conquers two oceans at once, the one above and the one below—this machine that brought their country supremacy in passenger, mail, and freight service to the North and South American continents only seventeen years after the Treaty of Versailles.
    Even calm, cold, practical minds that worked on logarithms or carburetors felt the strange joy, the uncanny fascination, the radiance of atmospheric and gravitational freedom. They’d watched the
Graf Zeppelin,
their sister ship, take off one beautiful morning, the sun dazzling on its aluminum dope as if it were levitating on light, and it was like watching Juggernaut float free of the earth. One night they’d gone down almost to touch the waves and scared a fishing boat in the fog, and had joked afterward about what the boat’s crew must have experienced: looking back to see a great dark, whirring thing rise like a monster upon them out of the murky air.
    THEY’RE BOTH PARTY MEMBERS. They were over Aachen during the national referendum on the annexation of the Rhineland, and helped the chief steward rig up a polling booth on the port promenade deck. The Yes vote had carried among the passengers and crew by a count of 103 to 1.
    MEALS IN FLIGHT are so relaxed that some guests arrive for breakfast in their pajamas. Tereska is one such guest, and Gnüss from his station watches Meinert chatting and flirting with her.
She’s only
an annoyance,
he reminds himself, but his brain seizes and charges around enough to make him dizzy.
    The great mass of the airship is off-limits to passengers except for those on guided tours. Soon after the breakfast service is cleared, Meinert informs him, with insufficient contrition, that Tereska’s family has requested him as their guide. An hour later, when it’s time for the tour to begin, there’s Tereska alone, in her boyish shirt and sailor pants. She jokes with Meinert and lays a hand on his forearm. He jokes with her.
    Gnüss, beside himself, contrives to approach her parents, sunning themselves by a port observation window. He asks if they’d missed the tour. It transpires that the bitch has forewarned them that it would involve a good deal of uncomfortable climbing and claustrophobic poking about.
    He stumbles about below decks, only half-remembering his current task. What’s happened to his autonomy? What’s happened to his ability to generate contentment for himself independent of Meinert’s behavior? Before all this he saw himself in the long term as First Officer, or at least Chief Sailmaker: a solitary and much admired figure of cool judgments and sober self-mastery. Instead, now he feels overheated and coursed through with kineticism, like an agitated and kenneled dog.
    He delivers the status report on the ongoing inspection of the gas cells. “Why are you weeping?” Sauter, the Chief Engineer, asks.
    RESPONSIBILITY HAS FLOWN out the window. He takes to carrying Meinert’s grandfather’s watch inside his pants. His briefs barely hold the weight. It bumps and sidles against his genitals. Does it show? Who cares?
    HE SEES MEINERT only once all afternoon, and then from a distance. He searches for him as much as he dares during free moments. During lunch the Chief Steward slaps him on the back of the head for gathering wool.
    Three hours are spent in a solitary and melancholy inspection of the rearmost gas cell. In the end he can’t say for sure what he’s seen. If the cell had disappeared entirely, it’s not clear he would have noticed.
    RHINE SALMON for the final dinner. Fresh trout from the Black Forest. There’s an all-night party among the passengers to celebrate their arrival in America. At the bar the man who’d thrown away his wristwatch on departure amuses himself by balancing a fountain