Airship Over Atherton Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  THE NAVY CADETS SERIES

  THE AIR CADETS SERIES

  THE ARMY CADETS SERIES

  AIRSHIP OVER ATHERTON

  CHRISTOPHER CUMMINGS

  ALSO BY

  C. R. CUMMINGS

  THE GREEN IDOL OF KANAKA CREEK

  ROSS RIVER FEVER

  TRAIN TO KURANDA

  THE MUDSKIPPER CUP

  DAVY JONES’S LOCKER

  BELOW BARTLE FRERE

  *AIRSHIP OVER ATHERTON

  THE CADET CORPORAL

  STANNARY HILLS

  COASTS OF CAPE YORK

  KYLIE AND THE KELLY GANG

  BEHIND MT BALDY

  THE CADET SERGEANT MAJOR

  COOKTOWN CHRISTMAS

  THE SECRET IN THE CLOUDS

  THE WORD OF GOD

  THE CADET UNDER-OFFICER

  THE SMILEY PEOPLE

  AIRSHIP OVER ATHERTON

  CHRISTOPHER CUMMINGS

  Airship Over Atherton

  © Copyright C. R. Cummings 2009

  This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealings for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. The right of C. R. Cummings to be identified as the moral rights author has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright Amendment (Moral Rights) Act 2000 (Commonwealth).

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  Author: Cummings C. R.

  Airship over Atherton:

  A North Queensland story about air cadets/ Chris Cummings

  ISBN: 9781740085502

  Target Audience: For secondary school age

  Dewey Number: A823.3

  2012

  This eBook edition 2013

  DoctorZed Publishing

  www.doctorzed.com

  eISBN: 978-0-987249-1-7

  Map 1: Atherton

  CHAPTER 1

  AIRSHIP No. 1

  “You’re a mad bugger Willy! You’ll kill yourself!” Stephen said.

  Fourteen year old ‘Willy’ Williams looked up at his friend Stephen Bell. “It’ll be OK. It will fly,” he insisted. He glanced up briefly from watching the pressure gauge on the gas cylinder to look at his home-made airship.

  Stephen shook his head. “But why risk it?” he persisted.

  “Because I want to fly an airship, that’s why,” Willy replied.

  “It doesn’t look very safe to me,” Stephen went on. “Are those nylon ropes strong enough?”

  “Of course they are! They would hold down an elephant. I tied all the knots myself,” said Willy. He bent back to study the pressure gauge.

  He was in the process of filling a plastic Weather Balloon with Hydrogen gas. When it was filled he closed both taps on the cylinder and hose, sealed the end of the balloon and disconnected it.

  “Here you are ‘Stick’,” he called. A tall, thin youth with limbs so long and thin they resembled tubular steel framework ambled over to take the balloon. Without a word Stick’s sister Marjorie came over with another empty balloon. She smiled at Willy and bent over to help him clip the balloon to the gas cylinder.

  As she did the front of her blouse sagged open. Willy couldn’t help looking. She had been doing it all morning, as he was uncomfortably aware. Every time she did that her breasts were clearly visible. They were quite large and well rounded for a 13 year old girl. That she was doing it deliberately was embarrassingly clear to both him and Stephen.

  Willy looked up into Marjorie’s hazel eyes and returned her smile, but inside he just wished she would go away. Not only was she Stick’s sister, she was a year level below at school. She had been chasing him for a month and he was finding it a bit wearing.

  The four of them all went to the same High School in Cairns. Stephen was a Year 10, a year ahead of Willy and Stick. Stick was in Willy’s Year 9 class and they had become friends because both were Air Cadets. Marjorie was only in Year 8. For that reason alone Willy would have resisted Marjorie’s advances, although he was in fact only a few months older than her, having turned 14 only two weeks earlier.

  As Marjorie handed him the balloon their fingers ‘accidentally’ touched. Willy went red with embarrassment as he was confronted again by Marjorie’s cleavage. Stephen pushed his glasses back up his nose and a grin split his freckled face. This made Willy even more embarrassed. He turned away and concentrated on fastening the balloon. To his annoyance his fingers trembled and he had trouble screwing the valve onto the connection. Marjorie remained squatting beside him leaning forward.

  Through Willy’s mind flashed images of another girl, a beautiful red head with a lovely bosom and tantalizing long legs: Barbara Brassington. Barbara was in Willy’s class at high school and he was sure he was in love with her. ‘I wish it was Barbara and not Marjorie,’ he thought.

  Stephen spoke again: “How will you know when you’ve filled enough balloons to get this monster airborne?”

  “I worked it out. Hydrogen has a lift of about point one of a kilogram per cubic metre, give or take a decimal point. I weigh sixty five kilograms. The bicycle and propeller weigh fifteen. The ropes and net are another fifteen- bit less actually; and the empty balloons weigh ten kilograms. That’s almost exactly one hundred kilograms. So we need one hundred cubic metres, which is ten balloons.”

  “Doesn’t it depend on the air temperature?” Stephen asked skeptically.

  “Yes, and on the altitude. I factored that in. We are about 400 metres above sea level here. I could calculate it exactly but I reckon if we just keep adding gas until the airship starts to lift, until it is just off the ground, that will be fine,” Willy explained. He pointed. “That is why that last balloon has a long plastic tube on it. We will put it into the net empty and fill it up until the airship lifts off the ground.”

  Stephen looked doubtfully at the ‘Airship’. He shook his head. To him it was just another of Willy’s mad ideas. But it did seem to be working. The lift was being provided by hydrogen in weather balloons. These were being pushed into a huge bag made of nylon fish net. Already this formed a mass half as big as the farm machinery shed they were behind. “Are you sure this will work?” he asked.

  “Certain. I saw it done on ‘Mythbusters’ on TV,” Willy replied.

  “Oh on ‘Mythbusters’!” Stephen replied in a tone laded with sarcasm. “Then it has to be true.”

  “I saw that too,” Stick added. “But they had a long string of balloons, dozens of them.”

  Stick stood holding one of the nylon ropes which fastened the ‘balloon’ to a bicycle. The balloon was now floating aloft and tugging at the bicycle. The bicycle was another of Willy’s crazy inventions. He had bolted a frame to the back on which was mounted a two metre
diameter wooden propeller. The propeller mechanism was connected through gears to the bike’s chain drive. To propel the airship Willy proposed to sit on the bicycle and pedal. To steer it he had fashioned a bamboo frame covered with painted calico which was fastened to the bike’s front wheel. By turning the handlebars the ‘rudder’ would also turn.

  It was a Saturday morning. The weather was still and clear. The morning mist had evaporated and the breeze had not yet begun. It was April, so North Queensland’s ‘wet season’ had now drizzled to a stop. The four were spending the weekend on the Atherton Tablelands on the farm of Willy’s Uncle Ted. The farm was located near Davies Creek, not far from the main highway between Kuranda and Mareeba.

  Willy had been working for this day for months, ever since he had seen the photo of the pedal-powered Airship in the Aircraft Magazine. It had taken a lot of effort to obtain all the parts but Willy was lucky in that both his parents were doctors and they gave him a liberal allowance. The balloons had been the hardest to get but Stephen had obtained them somehow and sold them to him.

  Keeping it all secret from the adults had been the most difficult bit. The two big cardboard cartons had been easy enough to place unnoticed in the trailer, but not the two gas cylinders or the propeller. The bike was just a bike. Secrecy was why the four were now down behind the machinery shed beside the bottom paddock soon after dawn.

  Willy filled another balloon. Marjorie went to get another while Stephen took the full one over to Stick. The two boys had to haul the net down to insert the balloon through the opening. When the net was released the ‘balloon’ floated up so fast it almost jerked the bike off its stand.

  “I reckon one more should do it,” Stick called. “She’s nearly lifting off now.”

  “No. Two more according to my calculations,” Willy replied. He looked up as Marjorie walked back with another balloon. Her breasts wobbled so much in her thin cotton blouse that he suspected she was walking that way deliberately. Again she bent over to give him an eyeful. Again Stephen grinned. Willy blushed and tried to concentrate on his task. He was uncomfortably aware of the first strong stirrings of lust and didn’t want anyone to notice.

  As the gas hissed into the balloon Willy surveyed the field. It had been freshly ploughed. On three sides of it were tall white-trunked river gums, but they were a good few hundred metres away and on a slight downslope. The field sloped gently down on one side to the creek which was marked by a green belt of rainforest trees.

  Willy looked up. Not a cloud in the sky. He licked his finger and held it up. Still no breeze. Good! Conditions couldn’t be better.

  This time he went with Stephen to help insert the full balloon into the net. It took all three of them to haul the net down low enough to push the balloon in.

  “How do you stop it going up?” Stick asked as they eased the ropes to allow the balloon to rise.

  “The last balloon has got a valve on it to release gas,” Willy replied.

  “Don’t balloons just keep on rising until they burst?” Stephen asked.

  “Yes. Once they get past their ‘Pressure Height’, where their pressure and the air pressure are the same. After that they expand as the air pressure decreases with altitude. That’s why we have the valve, to vent gas,” Willy explained.

  “What are those bags of sand tied to the bike for then?” Stick asked.

  “Bags of sand? They are ballast. They make the airship heavier and help hold it down,” Willy replied.

  “They don’t look very secure,” Stick said.

  “They aren’t. They are only tied on with slip knots,” Willy answered.

  Stephen tugged at one of the ropes and felt the bike. “This thing is ready to lift off,” he observed.

  They all looked up at the net full of balloons. It looked enormous. Stick let go of the bike and stepped back to get a better view.

  “Hey!”

  Stephen suddenly made a quick grab at the framework. His fingers closed on the frame as the bike shot up level with their faces. Willy also snatched at the bike. The speed at which it had risen gave him a worrying surprise.

  Stick stood there looking both astonished and foolish. “Strewth! That was quick,” he cried.

  Stephen nodded. “Too right! She is ready to fly now,” he agreed. They pulled the bike back down to the ground.

  “See if one person can hold her,” Stephen suggested.

  “Wait!” Willy cried. “Grab hold of this mooring line first in case he can’t.” He passed Stephen a nylon rope as thick as his finger which was attached to the bike frame. Willy stood tensed, ready to grab at the bike. “OK Stephen, let go. Stick, you keep hanging on,” he instructed.

  He let go himself but his hand hovered close to the frame. Stick gripped the bike frame. “Yeah, I can hold her down. But only just,” he said.

  Willy smiled with satisfaction “Good! Keep holding her. Come on Steve, let’s fill that last balloon,” he cried, feeling the excitement bubble up. He and Stephen walked over to where Marjorie waited with the last balloon. Returning her smile he took the balloon from her.

  “Go and take hold of the mooring rope Marjorie,” he instructed. “We will half fill this before we put it in, then fill it right up.”

  Stephen jerked his head in the direction of the mountains to the east. “We’d better hurry. The sun is coming up,” he said.

  Willy looked. The tops of the trees and of the ‘airship’ were bathed with a russet glow. He bent to fasten the balloon’s long plastic hose to the gas cylinder.

  “Hey!” cried Stick.

  Willy looked around. Stick was bending down. One of the ballast sacks had fallen off.

  “What did you do?” Willy called.

  “Nothin’. Just bumped it and it came undone,” Stick replied. He reached for the bag.

  “Don’t let go!” Willy cried.

  Too late! The airship suddenly shot upwards. As it did a pedal whacked Stick behind the ear and he stumbled.

  Willy sprang to his feet in alarm. “Marjorie! Hold on!” he shouted.

  Marjorie was caught by surprise. The mooring rope suddenly pulled through her fingers. She closed her grip at Willy’s yell. The rope scorched through her clenched hands and she cried out in pain and fright. The airship rocketed upwards at what seemed an incredible rate.

  “Hold on!” Willy yelled. He raced towards Marjorie. Stephen also sprang up but caught his foot in the plastic hose and went sprawling.

  Marjorie shrieked. She tried to grip the rope. The end had a stainless steel snap-catch spliced onto it. This came flailing up between her legs and into her hands.

  “Aaaah!” she screamed. The snap-catch slipped through her fingers and caught in her wavy long hair. She reached up to grab it just as the ten metre long rope jerked taut.

  Willy couldn’t believe his eyes. Even as he ran towards her he saw Marjorie start lifting off the ground! She screamed again, her mouth wide from fear. Her hands clutched at the rope entangled in her hair.

  “Help! Help! It’s caught in my hair. Help! Aaaargh!” she screamed.

  It all seemed to happen so quickly! Willy saw her feet rising up past the level of his face. Without thinking he sprang up and grabbed one of her ankles.

  To his amazement his feet did not come down onto the ground. He looked down and was dumbfounded to see that Stick was below him!

  Stick jumped up to try to grab Willy’s feet but didn’t quite make it. Willy noted the look of amazed horror on his face. Suddenly it dawned on him that a real crisis had developed. He was airborne; and so was Marjorie!

  ‘It isn’t possible!’ Willy thought as he looked down. He was appalled to see how small and foreshortened Stick and Stephen looked. ‘If I don’t let go I will hurt myself badly when I fall,’ he thought.

  Marjorie!

  She was above him, screaming in fear. Willy looked up and bit his lip. ‘If I let go the lightened balloon will shoot up to God knows what height,’ he thought. With a horrible feeling of dread he realized t
hat if she then fell off she would be killed- and it would be his fault. ‘I can’t leave her!’ he thought. Again he looked up to see what could be done. Marjorie was still screaming and kicking with her other leg. Several times she kicked his hands.

  “Stop kicking Marjorie! Calm down!” Willy shouted.

  “Help! Oh help! It hurts! I can’t hold on much longer. Oh help! We’ll be killed!” she wailed. She ended in a whimper of pure terror.

  Willy looked down and saw with a shock that she was right. To his horror and seamy he noted that he could see over the roof of the machinery shed! They were up level with the tops of the trees and still rising. ‘If I let go now I will be seriously injured, even if I’m not killed.’

  A wave of cold fear washed over him and he clung on with both hands to Marjorie’s ankle in near panic. ‘How long can I hold on?’ he wondered. Already his fingers and arm muscles were feeling the strain. How high would the balloon rise? Another spasm of fear hit him. He had no valve to vent gas.

  ‘We will just keep rising until the balloons burst. Then we will.... he made himself articulate his worst fear... will plummet to our death.’

  Willy cried out in fear. Then he realized that was stupid. ‘We won’t last that long. And it doesn’t matter how strong my arms are. It all depends on how long Marjorie can hang on.’ Both their lives depended on her strength- or until the hair was ripped from her scalp!

  Willy looked around desperately for some solution. Dimly he was aware that he could see out over miles of farmland to distant mountains.

  CHAPTER 2

  MARJORIE

  Marjorie screamed again, long and piercing- pure terror. “Help! I can’t hold on much longer!” she shrieked.

  “You must,” Willy cried. He looked up. Could he climb up over her to reach the rope? And what then? Could he somehow climb it to the airship? And what about Marjorie? How could he then save her?