The Sky Has Three Rooms

That morning Polly set out to count the balloons and lost her place somewhere past sixty. "How many are allowed up at once?" she asked. "The sky here is divided into three parts," the pilot said, "and there are only one hundred and fifty-four flights permitted each day. Everyone is given a sector and a slot. That is how a sky this crowded stays a safe one."

Beneath every balloon, a chase truck was working its way along the dusty roads, keeping pace. The pilot spoke into his radio and a voice answered from somewhere below, and the two of them went on like that, the crew never once losing sight of the balloon, the way a family keeps hold of a kite they have no intention of losing.

Then the landing, which Polly had been quietly wondering about all week. The truck pulled up in a field with a flat trailer hitched behind it. The pilot gave one breath of fire, waited, judged it, and let the balloon sink. Slowly, deliberately, with the crew reaching up to steady it, the basket came down and settled precisely onto the bed of the trailer. Not near it. Onto it.

The passengers cheered rather more loudly than they had expected to. The crew gathered the enormous envelope in armfuls, pressed the air out of it, folded it flat and packed it away, and the whole apparatus that had filled the sky an hour earlier fitted back into a bag. Polly sat on the pilot's shoulder while everyone celebrated in the full morning sun.