The Balloonist Read Online Free PDF Page A

this energy, the Prinzess swells and rises. The three guide ropes, which were previously streaming behind us in the sea, now hang directly down with their ends clear of the water. We can no longer estimate our course by the snaky trails they leave in the water, and from now on we must depend on the sun compass. Waldemer is correct as well about the time, which he has derived from his reliable pocket watch, manufactured in Massachusetts. It is true that it is about time for breakfast, and even more true that he would be glad to fix it. He is always happy to do anything of immediate and practical benefit to himself and others, especially if itinvolves the use of any sort of mechanical apparatus. Breakfast not only involves the primus stove—a simple but admirable machine in its own right—but the contrivance which Waldemer has invented to prevent the stove from igniting the hydrogen in the immense silken bag over our heads. First the coffee pot is filled with water and charged with the proper amount of coffee. Then it is set on the stove and held in place by a clamp, and the whole affair is lowered below the gondola on a rope some ten metres long. Waldemer carefully jerks away at two strings, one attached below to a patent English stove lighter and the other to the lever controlling the fuel. Finally, after a number of failures there is a yellow flicker underneath, along with the odour of burning kerosene. The flame turns blue; the stove is operating properly.
    â€œAhah,” sighs Waldemer. He is pleased with himself. I smile too and am happy for him that the stove lighter has worked properly. He is really a splendid fellow, a hero of our time. Even though he is a journalist by profession, his true mission in life is to preside over his stove lighters, firearms, and all the other clever mechanical devices that an overbred civilization has come to regard as necessities. He is an emblem of our century, and even more of the century to come, the era of self-propelled carriages that will eventually do away with legs. He prefers tinned roast beef to a cow, not because it tastes better, but because the manner of its containment in the tin is ingenious. He is free from sentiment about nature. An animal to him is something to be looked at through a gun sight, something that falls down and turns into meat when the exquisite mechanism of the trigger is actuated. He has no hostility to animals, he simply regards them as somewhat inferior machines, smelly, you know, and prone to brucellosis and other mechanical maladjustments. Waldemer is an old companion of my adventures. He is necessary to me because without him I am only something more than half a man; I am incapable of taking an interest in a stove lighter. Together we are at least a man and a third. Machines are not perfect of course and neither is Waldemer. Occasionally things do not work out as he plans. This is fortunate, because if he were as infallible as machines are in the dreams of their designers he would not be humanand I would not care for him as I do. Machines turn; their wheels turn, and with each turn of the wheel a minute atom of substance is worn away and the machine is no longer the same. Besides, there are—imponderables. This Waldemer has never understood. Sometimes a machine of this sort, believed to be perfect but actually possessing a soul, will turn on its maker with a quiet treachery far more dangerous than that of any animal. But—
    In a reverie I imagine that it was my ancestor who invented fire and Waldemer’s who invented the wheel.

    The first glimpse I ever had of him was emblematic of the whole man: he overtook me one summer day on a country road in Pennsylvania, borne along on a bicycle, that ingenious device that man has contrived as an extension of his locomotor apparatus. A bicycle is interesting to a mathematician. It deals with the well-known difficulty with legs, that there are only two of them. One being constantly brought