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twenty-eight, but they can crack, sometimes they break in flight. And I’m nowhere near finished sanding.
    “Here’s what I need,” he says. “I need to build a reel that includes some kind of timing device. A stationary reel that I can set to pause at five-, maybe ten-minute intervals. Then instruments can record at selected altitudes. The Nairobi balloon, it was—well, it was famous. Written up in all the papers . . .” Bigelow trails off.
    “What I need,” he says after a minute, “is line that’s strong enough to go up for miles. And a reel that’s bolted down to some kind of platform. Because you can’t control a kite this big. Not manually. It would pull you off your feet.”
    The woman hands the muslin back to Bigelow, and he sees a fleck of blood on it, from her hands.
    “Silk. I thought silk,” he says. “But silk might fray on a reel. So it’s got to be metal, but flexible. Piano wire. Maybe that would work.
    “It’s going to change everything. Forecasts—it will make long-range forecasts possible.”
    He folds the muslin, folds it tight to fit back inside his rucksack. “See,” he says, laying the bag aside, “what they did in Nairobi was measure the air temperature over the equator. And found out that it isn’t hot.”
    He takes her fingers and gives them a shake. “It isn’t even warm,” he says. “It’s
cold.
Cold the way you’d expect air to be here.
Freezing.
”
    Bigelow releases the woman. He throws himself back on her bed, chewing his lower lip, thinking. “Everyone knows that winds move eastward around the globe, because of the earth, the rotating earth. That’s obvious. But it’s also true that heat rises.” He gets up, walks to the stove, holds a hand above its surface. “So you’d think air over the equator would be hot. Hot like it is near the ground. I mean, Nairobi! But. But.”
    Bigelow steps out of his boots and onto the chair, and from chair to table, avoiding the bloody bowl and the knife. He reaches to feel the air near the ceiling, jumps down before she can begin to scold. While she watches, he moves the chair from one part of the room to another, standing on its seat to test the air overhead. Then he sits down next to her with his pen and notebook and sketches her square room, floor, walls, stove, and ceiling. “See,” he says, and he draws arrows coming up out of the stove, arrows that move toward the middle of the ceiling and down the opposite wall, across the floor and back, big, spiraling circles. “That’s the way a closed system of air circulates.”
    He pulls her up from the bed and walks her through the room. “Warm. Cold. Warm. The earth, it’s a closed system, too. Heat from the equator rises. Cold air from the poles sinks. And it would make huge crosscurrents. Streams that flow across east–west winds.”
    The woman stands back, watches Bigelow sweep his arms around. “I bet,” he says, “that the air over Anchorage is warmer than the air over Nairobi. I just have to get the kite high enough.”
    The woman looks at him, her eyebrows drawn together. He’s made her forget the raccoon.
    “You’ll see,” he says. “You’ll come with me, up the bluff. I have a place picked out. A spot where the wind is always perfect.
    “The kite, it’s going to be huge. Enormous. This”—he picks up the rucksack with the fabric inside—“this is just to give you an idea. It isn’t even half of it. A kite big enough to carry all the instruments you could want. Barometer, thermometer, anemometer, hygrometer.” He ticks them off on his fingers. “Dry-cell battery, and rotating barrel for graphing readings simultaneously.”
    She sits on her bed, leaning back on her elbows, and he comes to her. He kneels and puts his arms around her waist.
    “You’ll come with me, up to the place I’ve found,” he tells her. And he tries, because he can’t not try, to get his tongue between her legs.
    HE BRINGS HER a bar of soap. He likes to think of her,