The Air Seller

Someone is stealing the air.Across the world the trade winds have begun to bend. Barometers fall. Aircraft engines miss at altitudes that should be safe. Every current of air on Earth is turning toward a single point in the frozen emptiness of Yakutia - and the Yakut hunters say that no one who follows the wind there comes back.Georgy Klimenko, a Soviet meteorologist, follows it anyway.Beneath the Verkhoyansk mountains he finds a city sunk eight floors into the permafrost, staffed by the sons of bankers and run by an English industrialist named Bailey - a man who has learned to compress the sky into gleaming spheres the size of walnuts. A single one holds a cubic kilometer of air.Bailey is not a madman. He is a businessman, and he has been waiting for a seller's market.As the world begins to gasp, he prepares his terms.First published in 1929 by Alexander Belyaev - the writer often called the Russian Jules Verne - The Air Seller imagines a commodity nobody thought could be owned, and a man patient enough to corner it.Newly translated from the Russian. Complete and unabridged.