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this Hell for a science-fiction writer, where physical laws are whimsical and puzzles have no answers?) was nothing compared to the hurricane we were backing into. We moved flat against the slope, clutching at the rock and digging into the dirt for footholds.
    Benito yelled, “Minos called you Carpenter. Not Carpentier.”
    I’d been wondering how the monster knew. “I was born Carpenter,” I shouted down at Benito. “I added the ‘i’ to make the name more interesting, easier to remember. I wrote under Carpentier.” And when I talked to myself (I didn’t add) it was Carpentier I talked to. I’d started that in an effort to memorize the new pronunciation.
    We’d backed onto a broad ledge. I stayed flat as I looked around.
    Someone was dancing to the music of the howling wind.
    He was bones and paunch and long flying hair just graying unevenly at the temples. He jumped and danced and flapped his arms like a bird, grim determination on his homely face.
    I hollered into the wind. “Hey, friend—”
    He didn’t wait for the question. “If I could just get off the ground!” he wailed. “The guy in the helmet’s got a dozen !”
    Hey, yeah, I’d been right the first time! It was a futuristic loony bin geared for psychodrama on the grand scale! Let them work out their delusions here, and maybe they’d be fit for whatever unimaginable society they’d flunked out of . . . And I had answers to all the questions, in that wonderful moment before I followed his eyes upward.
    The air was full of flying people.
    They weren’t exactly guiding their flight. The winds had them. Here they churned them in a momentary funnel, then flung them outward. There they came in a straight blast; it hit a shoulder of the mountain and churned the trapped beings into eddy currents. The people flew like Kleenex in a hurricane, but they looked like people, and they howled like Kansans caught outside in a flash tornado.
    Most of them were flying in man-and-woman pairs. But, yeah, there was one guy surrounded by a good dozen girls, all in a whirling clump at the top of a rising air column.
    The bony guy on the ledge ran off flapping his arms. There were others along the base, men and women, all trying to fly. I had different ideas. I gripped the rock hard and stayed flat.
    “The Carnal,” Benito screamed into the wind. “Those who warped all that mattered in their lives for lust. I imagine those at the base of the cliff were unsuccessful lovers. We will be in less danger on the next ledge.” He started crawling.
    “Benito! That’s it!” I cried. “We’ll fly out of here!”
    He turned in astonishment. It was a mistake. The wind slipped under his raised shoulders and lifted him and flung him at me.
    I got him by the ankle. He nearly tore me loose, but I had a handhold in a split rock and I hung on. He doubled on his own length and pulled himself down my forearm until he was flat to the ground again.
    “Thank you,” he bellowed.
    “S’okay. I wish you could have seen your expression.” I was rather pleased with myself, as if I’d managed to catch a glass somebody’s elbow had knocked off a table. Good reflexes, Carpentier!
    “We’ll fly out of here,” I screamed happily into his ear. “We’ll fly over the wall. We’ll build a glider!”
    “I was stubborn too, once. Perhaps I still am. Is this really your wish, Allen?”
    “Damn right. We’ll build a glider. Listen, if we’re light enough to be blown away by the first wind, we probably won’t need much more than a big kite! Hey, let’s get out of this wind and talk it over.”
    We crawled.
    T
    he weather changed as we lost altitude. It didn’t get any better. The wind died down; we didn’t need to clutch at the rocks, and we could hear ourselves speak. But a freezing drizzle started.
    Now that I was thinking glider , the loss in altitude bothered me. “We need a place to build it,” I said. “Out of the wind. We need fabric, a lot of fabric, and we need wood. We