8:10

As the dirigible slowly lifted off the elegant ironwork mooring and turned its nose away from the wind, the crew were busy securing the lines and stowing the ground-side equipment that would be useless in flight and not needed for at least a week, if not longer. The captain was closely monitoring the instruments in front of him and occasionally emitting small huffing sounds while his navigator’s eyes shifted back and forth from his nervous lookouts posted on the two small fly bridges and scanning the horizon himself.

This was the most dangerous moment of any airship flight and no one could ever forget the daguerreotypes that had captured the destruction of the Graf Wilhelm and the loss of more than two hundred souls in that horrible flaming disaster. Without exception the entire crew’s minds were on the delicate task of guiding their ship swiftly up and away from the dangers of low altitude and into the wide-open skies that were the massive dirigible’s natural environs.

And that’s why no one was aware that the passenger manifest for this particular journey was not in fact completely accurate. This conscientious crew had missed the small furry shape that had slipped aboard from the mooring tower and moved swiftly into the spaces between the gas-filled bladders that provided the tremendous lift needed to raise the ship high into the sky. And no crew member was likely to discover that shape comfortably settling in for the journey as these spaces were where all suspected the disaster of the Wilhelm had begun and most believed had been caused by careless off-duty crew. No one was likely now to violate the spaces. At least no one from the crew.

The young boy, however, had both disobeyed the brass sign warning him away from the lift chamber and been comfortably placed to watch the takeoff and observe the last-minute addition to the crew.