The Weather Balloon

Part One · Goal

The plan, as Hattie Marchetti wrote it across the top of a brand-new notebook, was to send a camera to the edge of space and retrieve it in time for the county science fair in March. Her twin brother Jude said the plan was excellent but the title was tedious, and that anybody launching an expedition to space should at least be permitted to decorate the capsule. The capsule was a foam picnic cooler about the size of a loaf of bread, with a circular hole cut in one side for the camera lens and a padded compartment inside for the tracker. Jude painted it a loud, unapologetic orange, the precise color of a traffic cone. Hattie said it looked like a toy. Jude said that was the point, and then he lettered a message on the lid in thick black capitals, for anybody who happened to discover it lying in a field.

Mr. Oduya, who taught eighth-grade science and had volunteered to supervise, explained the physics to them on the whiteboard after school. The balloon was made of thin white latex, and when they inflated it with helium it would stand roughly as tall as a person, which sounded enormous until he described what happened next. The higher a balloon climbs, the less atmosphere there is pressing on it from outside, so the gas within expands and the balloon swells, and keeps swelling, until somewhere around twenty miles up it is as wide as a house and the latex simply cannot stretch any further. Then it bursts. The payload tumbles, a small parachute opens, and the whole apparatus drifts back to earth on the wind. Jude asked where, exactly, it would land, and Mr. Oduya said that was the interesting part.

They typed the launch time and the weather into a prediction program on the school computer, and it drew a neat line on the map that ended at a reservoir twenty miles to the east, which Hattie copied into the notebook and underlined twice. On a cold Saturday in February they carried everything to the middle of the school playing field, where a small crowd of classmates had gathered in hats to watch. Hattie wanted to weigh the lift before they let go. Jude said it obviously looked big enough, and the crowd was getting cold, and Mr. Oduya was busy with the tank. So they guessed. The balloon rose to about the height of the gym roof, hesitated there as if reconsidering, and then sank slowly sideways across the field and settled into the soccer goal, where the orange box hung in the net like a fish.

Nobody laughed, exactly, but several people took pictures, and on Monday one of them was taped to Hattie's locker with the word GOAL written underneath. She took it down and put it in the notebook, because she had decided that a scientist kept the evidence even when the evidence was embarrassing. The balloon itself was ruined, torn on the netting, and the tank had enough helium left for exactly one more. Mr. Oduya did not seem upset. He said the first launch had taught them something useful, which was that a balloon could look full and still be too weak to carry its load. Next time they would measure the lift properly, by tying a jug of water to the neck that weighed the same as the box plus a little extra, and filling the balloon slowly until the jug just left the ground.

They tried again two Saturdays later, with fewer spectators and considerably more care. Jude held the jug while Hattie monitored the gauge on the tank, and when the jug lifted off the frozen grass and hovered there, swaying, a finger's width above the ground, Mr. Oduya closed the valve. This time, when they released it, the balloon did not hesitate for a moment. It rose straight up, more rapidly than any of them had anticipated. It shrank from a ball to a marble to a white speck that Jude kept losing and rediscovering against the clouds, with the orange box revolving slowly beneath it on its line. Hattie realized that she was holding her breath, and that her brother was clutching her sleeve, and that neither of them had uttered a single word until the speck had vanished entirely.

Part Two · Off the Map

For the first hour the tracker behaved exactly as Mr. Oduya had promised. Every few minutes a new dot appeared on the laptop in the science room, each one a little farther east, and the line of dots followed the prediction toward the reservoir as obediently as if the balloon had studied the notebook. Then the dots began to stretch apart. The wind at high altitude, Mr. Oduya explained, could be far stronger than the wind at ground level, occasionally more than a hundred miles an hour, and the program had underestimated it. After that the tracker fell silent, because it had climbed too high to reach anything that could receive its signal. They ate sandwiches without tasting them and stared at the screen. Jude circled the room eleven times while Hattie counted, because counting was preferable to imagining lakes and rivers and highways.

Nearly two hours after the launch the tracker revived. It was descending now, the parachute open, and it was nowhere near the reservoir: the new dots were sixty miles to the northeast, over a region of the map that consisted of nothing but pale green rectangles and a single winding road, and they arrived in quick succession, three of them, each lower than the last. The final one said nine hundred meters and dropping. After that there was nothing, however often Jude refreshed the screen, and Mr. Oduya suspected the box had come down behind a hill or somewhere beyond the reach of any signal. Sixty miles of farmland, Hattie thought, and one small box. Jude said very quietly that he was sorry about the guessing, and Hattie said it had been her guess too, which was true, and then she opened the notebook.

Three dots made a line, and a line could be extended, so Mr. Oduya helped them calculate the rest on the whiteboard. The parachute, according to the packet it came in, would lower the payload at roughly five meters per second, which meant that from nine hundred meters it had needed about three more minutes to reach the ground. The spacing of the dots revealed how swiftly the wind had been carrying it sideways near the end. Hattie did the arithmetic twice. Jude laid a ruler along the dots on a printed map and continued the line by a little less than a mile. Where it stopped, they drew an oval, to be honest about the uncertainty. The oval sat squarely on a farm outside a village called Ashby Cross, and by three o'clock their mother had the car warmed up, with Mr. Oduya in the passenger seat.

The farm lay at the end of a long lane behind a wooden gate, with a sign that said PRIVATE in faded letters and, beyond it, a field of brown stubble that stretched all the way to a line of trees on the horizon. Jude was out of the car before it had properly stopped. The gate was low enough to climb, he pointed out, and the oval was only a few hundred meters beyond it, so they could be in and out in ten minutes and nobody would ever know. Their mother said nothing, in the particular way that communicated a great deal. Hattie considered the field, and the farmhouse with smoke drifting from its chimney, and the word on the sign, and it seemed to her that somebody lived and worked here, and that their box had landed on this ground without permission. She walked past the gate and up the lane to knock.

Part Three · The Long Field

The woman who answered was tall and wore a heavy green sweater with straw clinging to the sleeves, and she listened to the entire explanation on the doorstep without interrupting once, while a black and white collie sat on her boot and scrutinized Jude. Her name was Mrs. Pellow. She farmed four hundred acres, she said eventually, and she had not noticed anything plummet out of the sky that morning, but she did not receive many visitors who arrived with a map and asked permission first, and she would like to examine the map. Hattie showed her the oval. Mrs. Pellow studied it, tapped one end of it with a weathered finger, and identified it as the long field down by the old pump house. Then she fetched her keys, and the collie was in the back of the truck before anyone had invited it.

They searched in a line, the way Mr. Oduya said rescuers did, everybody ten paces apart and walking slowly across the stubble with their eyes on the ground. The field was enormous and brown and full of things that were nearly orange: a feed sack, a fox's back disappearing into the hedge, a single leaf that made Jude shout and then go quiet. The light began to turn gold. Hattie walked and thought about the oval, and about the arithmetic, and about whether she had carried a number wrongly somewhere in the middle. Then Mrs. Pellow, who was standing up in the back of the truck to see farther, pointed toward the hedge at the bottom of the slope and remarked that she had never once in her life grown anything that color.

The box was lying upside down in the long grass at the margin of the field, not two hundred meters from the center of the oval, with the parachute tangled in a hawthorn branch above it and the shreds of white latex still attached to the line. It glowed; there was no other word for it. Against the brown stubble and the gray hedge it looked like a lamp somebody had switched on, and in any other color it would have been practically invisible. Hattie turned it over and read the message on the lid, which said, in Jude's thick black capitals, HELLO, YOU HAVE FOUND SCIENCE, PLEASE CALL. Then she looked at her brother and admitted that the orange had been right. Jude said he knew, but that it was gratifying to hear, and wondered whether she could possibly repeat it in front of their mother.

They watched the footage that evening in Mrs. Pellow's kitchen, crowded around the laptop with mugs of tea, because she announced that she was not letting them drive home without seeing it. The school field fell away, then the town and the river, until the clouds lay beneath them like a white floor. As the camera ascended, the sky deepened from blue to a darkening violet and finally to something close to black, at midday, with the sun still blazing. The edge of the earth was no longer straight but curved, gently, like the rim of a bowl, with a thin luminous blue line along it. Then the latex shuddered and burst, the picture spun wildly, and the parachute blossomed against the darkness. Nobody in the kitchen said anything for a long time, not even the collie.

The last pictures, taken in the final minute of the fall, showed a long brown field rising up to meet the camera, and a hedge, and a small farmhouse with smoke coming from its chimney. Mrs. Pellow asked if she could have a copy of that one. At the science fair in March it hung in the middle of their display, beside the curved horizon and the burst balloon and the photo of an orange box in a soccer net, which Hattie had insisted on including, because a scientist kept the evidence. Underneath she wrote the whole story of the oval in small, careful handwriting. The twins did not win first prize. They won second, and the following week a letter arrived from Ashby Cross with a photograph inside it, of a farmhouse kitchen with a picture of a field framed above the stove.