No Wind

A Stone In Heaven, I.

After the noise and chaos, snow covers everything and:

"Suddenly there was no wind, as if that also had been seized and overwhelmed." (p. 11)

Wind is such an active force in Poul Anderson's descriptive passages that the suggestion that even it might be overwhelmed becomes significant! And, in fact, we recently encountered windlessness as an appropriate accompaniment of apparent death. See Wind In Zorkagrad.

Yewwl has been communicating long-distance with a human observer whom she knows as "Banner." On the tenth page of the text, we learn that "Banner" is Miriam Abrams whose name we might remember from Ensign Flandry. We should at least remember Miriam's father, Max Abrams. References to the planets Dayan and Terra soon establish that this novel is a volume of Poul Anderson's Technic History. The text had not told us that yet.

Chapter I ends as Miriam Abrams asks a colleague:

"'...have you ever perchance heard of Admiral Flandry?'" (p. 16)