Free Lift

by Alexander Friedmann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

At a quarter to seven the thermometer in the screen read minus nine, and Antonina Erastovna Lyubimova put on her husband's felt boots to cross the yard to the gas shed.

The shed smelled of acid and wet iron. The generator stood in the corner, a copper cylinder the height of a child, with a rubber hose coming out of its lid and a basket of iron filings beside it. She had charged it the night before. Now she opened the cock, listened to the hiss, and fixed the neck of a red balloon over the nozzle. Thirty grams of rubber, from the works in the city, the new kind that came in boxes of fifty and had to be warmed by the stove first or it split. Kostya was supposed to warm them. The box sat on the stove in the kitchen, and the balloons were warm, so he had done that much.

The balloon filled. She pinched the neck, drew it off the nozzle, hung the brass weight from it, and let go.

It did not rise. It did not fall. It hung at the height of her chest, turning very slowly, the weight hanging under it like a plumb bob. Forty grams of brass, and the balloon held it exactly. That was the free lift: forty grams, what the gas could carry beyond the rubber's own weight. From the free lift and the weight, the table on the wall gave the rate of ascent. Forty grams, and thirty grams of rubber: two hundred metres a minute. She had looked it up so many times she no longer looked.

She tied off the neck with linen thread, took the weight away, and held the balloon by the thread at arm's length while she went back across the yard. It pulled up at her fingers, forty grams' worth.

---

The station stood on the north shore of the gulf, at Olgino, between the dachas that were empty in winter and the ice. The Observatory had built it in 1912: a hut with two rooms and a stove, a screen on legs, a wind vane on a mast, a concrete pillar for the theodolite, and a telephone line on poles to the post office in Lakhta, from which the figures went into the city by telegraph. Ivan Petrovich had run it for eight years. He had died in the hut's back room in the January of 1920, of typhus, and in February a man from the Observatory had come out on a sledge to collect the instruments and found her taking the morning observation, and had gone away again without them.

Four years now. The man from the Observatory came twice a year and signed the log. The city had changed its name in January. The telegrams still went.

Kostya was at the pillar already, with the stopwatch round his neck and the observing book open on the board. He was seventeen. He had his father's shoulders and her mother's habit of standing on one foot. He did not look round when she came, and she saw that the letter was in his coat. The corner of the envelope showed above the pocket: grey paper, a Moscow stamp. It had come on Tuesday. On Tuesday night he had put it on the table between them, and she had read it and put it back in the envelope and said they would talk about it after the thaw. That was five days ago. The gulf would not thaw before the end of April.

"Ready," she said.

He held up the watch. She bent to the eyepiece, found the balloon in the bottom of the field, and opened her fingers.

"Now."

---

A pilot balloon is a simple thing. It goes up at a known rate, and the wind takes it sideways. You follow it in the theodolite and read two angles every minute: how high it stands above the horizon, and in which direction. You know its height, because you know how long it has been going up and how fast. From the height and the elevation, by one line of trigonometry, you have its distance from you over the ground. Distance and direction, minute by minute: you plot them on the board, and the gaps between the points are the wind at every level of the sky.

"One minute," said Kostya.

"Forty-two point one. Azimuth one-oh-seven."

He wrote. She turned the slow-motion screw. The balloon was a red point now, very bright against the blue. The sky was clear to the horizon, the kind of morning that comes after a north wind, hard and thin.

"Two minutes."

"Thirty-seven point five. One-oh-nine."

The figures came. Three minutes, four, five. Kostya called them without waiting; he had a good clock in him. At six minutes, twelve hundred metres by the table, the balloon was going away south-east over the ice at a steady eight metres a second, toward the dark line four or five kilometres out where the current off the river kept a lead of water open all winter. At seven minutes the elevation dropped as it should: twenty-six point seven.

At eight it went up.

"Twenty-seven point nine," she said. "One-one-four."

Kostya wrote it, and then he looked at the column, and then at her.

"Nine minutes."

"Twenty-eight point seven."

"It's coming back," he said.

"It isn't coming back. Read the time."

"Ten minutes."

"Twenty-nine point two."

It was climbing in the field. Going away from her, it should have been sinking toward the horizon, smaller and lower, minute by minute. Instead it climbed. At eleven minutes the climb stopped and the angle began to fall again, as if nothing had happened.

She followed it to twenty minutes, and then the red point went into the glare of the low sun and she lost it. She straightened up. Her back hurt. Kostya had already started the computation. He worked fast, sliding the rule with his thumb, and she watched the figures come down the column: eight metres a second at the sixth minute, eight at the seventh, and then at the eighth, ninth and tenth, between sixteen hundred and two thousand metres, four, four and a half, five. Then eight again.

"The kink," Kostya said.

"Yes."

"Papa's note says smooth it."

"I know what Papa's note says."

The note was pinned inside the cover of the observing book, in Ivan Petrovich's upright hand on a square of squared paper gone brown at the edges. Over the gulf, between 1500 and 2500 m, single readings sometimes show a sharp fall in speed. This is an artefact of the instrument (backlash in the vertical circle) and of glare off the ice. Interpolate from the levels above and below. He had signed it with his initials and the date: 14.III.1916.

She had interpolated for four years. She had seen the kink perhaps forty times. Always in the morning, always in clear weather, always when the balloon went out over the ice toward the open water, never when it went north over the land. She had smoothed it every time, as the note said, and telegraphed eight metres a second to the city, and the city had drawn its maps.

She went back to the pillar, unclamped the vertical circle and turned it slowly through ninety degrees and back with her ear close to it. There was no backlash in this instrument. There had been none since she had sent it to the city to be overhauled in 1921, and the kink had come before that and after it, the same.

When she straightened Kostya was standing with the board under his arm, looking south-east at the ice. The light lay across the gulf like a sheet of tin. Far out, a long way beyond where the eye could separate one white from another, the lead showed as a dark line, and above it, if you looked for it, there was a faint shimmer in the air, the kind you see over a road in summer.

"Fetch the other instrument," she said.

---

The second theodolite lived in a crate under the bed in the back room, where it had lived since before the war. It had come out with the first, in 1912, for double-theodolite work: two instruments at the ends of a measured baseline, two observers reading the same balloon at the same instant, and then you do not need to know how fast it is rising. You do not need the table. Two angles and a known baseline make a triangle, and the triangle gives you the height directly, whatever the balloon is doing. Ivan Petrovich had done it twice, in the summer of 1913, to check the tables. The tables had checked. After that the crate had gone under the bed.

The baseline was a post on the ice. He had set it himself, every winter, twelve hundred metres out on a bearing of one-six-five, and measured it with a steel tape and two men from Lakhta. There was a post there now. She had set it in December, from habit, because he had, and had never used it.

The field telephone was in the crate too, two handsets in leather cases and a drum of copper wire as big as a cartwheel hub.

Kostya carried the crate out. He carried the drum. He said nothing about the letter and she said nothing about it either, but he did it all very quickly, and his face had colour in it that the cold did not account for.

"You've used it?" she asked.

"He showed me. When I was eight."

"That's not using it."

"It's a theodolite," he said. "I can read a theodolite."

She looked at him. He could. He had been reading this one, the one on the pillar, every morning since he was fourteen, when she had needed someone at the stopwatch and someone at the eyepiece on the days her eyes ran from the cold. His readings had never needed checking, which she had never told him.

"Tripod first," she said. "Level it twice. Sight back on me before anything. Read me the bearing to the pillar and I'll read you the bearing to the post, and if they don't differ by a hundred and eighty to the tenth of a degree you level it again."

He put the tripod on his shoulder and the instrument case in his other hand, and she hooked the end of the wire to his belt, and he went out onto the ice with the drum paying out behind him.

She watched him go. The ice near the shore was grey and rough, with old snow in the hollows; further out it went smooth and pale. He walked like his father, leaning forward, and at about three hundred metres he stopped to shift the tripod to the other shoulder, and then he went on and got smaller. At twelve hundred metres he was a mark against the light, not quite the post and not quite separate from it.

The handset in its case on the pillar gave a click.

"Mama."

His voice came in small and clear, with a hiss under it, as though from a long way down a pipe. For four years she had heard no voice in a telephone but the clerk's at Lakhta.

"Level it," she said.

---

It took him twenty minutes. She heard him breathing on the line, and swearing once, quietly, when a leg of the tripod slid. Then he read her the back bearing, and she read him hers, and they differed by a hundred and eighty degrees and one tenth.

"Again," she said.

He levelled it again. A hundred and eighty exactly.

She filled the second balloon. Free lift, forty grams. It hung at her chest and turned. It was nearly ten o'clock and the shimmer over the lead was stronger.

"I'll call the minutes," she said into the mouthpiece. "You read on the word. Elevation first, then azimuth. Don't wait for me. Don't stop if you lose it. Tell me you've lost it and keep looking."

"Yes."

"Kostya."

"Yes?"

She had meant to say something else.

"Watch the glare," she said.

She let it go.

---

They read it together, minute by minute, his voice in her ear and her own in the cold air. At each minute she wrote both pairs of angles into the book, his in the right-hand column, hers in the left, and between the minutes she worked the triangle. It was not difficult. You know the baseline. You have the two bearings, so you have the angles of the triangle on the ground. The sine rule gives you the distance from each end to the point beneath the balloon. Then your own elevation gives you the height. Then his elevation gives you the height again, and if your two heights agree, you have both read well.

They agreed. At one minute, two hundred and six metres. At two, four hundred and ten. At five, a thousand and five. The table said a thousand. That was good; that was the table.

At seven minutes the table said fourteen hundred, and the triangle said fourteen hundred and five.

At eight minutes the table said sixteen hundred, and the triangle said seventeen hundred and thirty-five.

At nine minutes the table said eighteen hundred, and the triangle said two thousand and fifty-five.

At ten, the table said two thousand. The triangle said two thousand three hundred and eighty-five.

She worked it twice. Her hand was not quite steady and she put the pencil down and blew on her fingers and worked it a third time. It came out the same. Over three minutes the balloon had gone up nearly four hundred metres more than it could go. The gas had not changed. The rubber had not changed. Nothing in the balloon could do that.

The air had done it. The whole column of air the balloon was riding in had been going up, two metres a second, out there toward the lead where the open water lay black and warmer than the ice, and the balloon had gone up with it.

And the wind. She went back to the single-theodolite figures from the first run and put the true heights against the angles. Divided the true height by the tangent instead of the table's height. The distances came out longer. The speeds came out longer. Eight metres a second at the eighth minute. Eight at the ninth. Eight and a half at the tenth.

There was no kink. There had never been a kink. The wind at two thousand metres over the Gulf of Finland had been blowing steadily on those forty mornings at eight metres a second, and the balloon had been carried upward in it by air that rose over the open water, and Ivan Petrovich, who had assumed, as the table assumed, as everyone assumed, that the air stood still in the vertical while it moved in the horizontal, had seen the balloon climb when it should have sunk, and had looked for a fault in the instrument, because the instrument was the thing he could repair.

He had been a careful man. He had checked the tables in 1913, in the summer, over land, when the gulf was open everywhere and there was no lead and no ice for it to be warmer than.

"Mama?"

"Yes."

"Eleven minutes. You didn't call it."

"Eleven," she said. "Read."

"Twenty-six point one, one-one-seven." A pause. "It's coming down in my field. It's going normal again."

"Yes. Keep reading."

---

She lost the balloon in the glare at sixteen minutes. The red point simply went into the light of the sun and did not come out, and she held the eyepiece and turned the screws and found nothing but brightness.

"I've lost it," she said.

"I have it."

From where he stood, twelve hundred metres out on the ice, the line to the balloon ran wider of the sun than hers. The balloon was clear in his field against blue sky.

"Seventeen minutes," she said. "Read."

"Twenty-six point four, one-oh-three."

She wrote it in the right-hand column. There was nothing to put in the left. Without her angle there was no triangle, and his elevation alone gave her nothing but the old table's assumption again. It did not matter. She had what she needed: the heights to ten minutes, the column of rising air, the kink taken out of forty mornings.

"Eighteen minutes."

"Twenty-five point nine. One-oh-four."

She did not tell him to stop. He did not ask. She stood at the pillar with the pencil in her hand and the handset at her ear and the sun on the side of her face, and called the minutes, and he read them back, and she wrote them in the column that was his.

"Twenty-two minutes."

"Twenty-four point two." A pause. "It's very small. One-oh-six. I can still see it."

She looked out at the ice. He was a mark against the light, bent to the eyepiece, the long thread of wire lying back across the gulf to her feet.

"Twenty-three," she said.

---

That afternoon she telephoned the figures to Lakhta, and the clerk read them back to her, and they went into the city with the rest. Under Remarks she wrote: Double-theodolite ascent 10.05. Vertical current approx. 2 m/s between 1400 and 2400 m, toward the open lead SE. Single-theodolite speeds at these levels on previous dates are not reliable as recorded and should be recomputed. See attached. She copied out both ascents on a separate sheet for the man from the Observatory, who would come in May.

Then she took the square of squared paper out of the cover of the observing book. She did not throw it away. She put it in the drawer of the table, under the receipt from the chemists for the sulphuric acid, eleven roubles owing, and closed the drawer.

Kostya came in at dusk with the drum. He had reeled it in all the way across the ice, twelve hundred metres of cold copper, and his hands were raw. She put them in a basin of water off the stove and he hissed through his teeth. The letter was still in his coat on the hook by the door. The grey corner showed.

She dried his hands on the towel, and took the coat down, and took out the envelope, and laid it on the table, and went to get the ink.

---

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ab Alexandrō Friedmannō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Alexander Friedmann, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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