Chapter 1: Section 1: Pages 6-7: Line 56

 Miles, with his marginal gifts of coördination, and Chick, with a want of alacrity fully as perceptible, took their stations at the control-panels of the apparatus, as Darby Suckling, meantime, went scrambling up the ratlines and shrouds of the giant ellipsoidal envelope from which the gondola depended, to the very top, where the aery flux was uninterrupted, in order to read, from an anemometer of the Robinson's type, accurate wind measurements, as an index of how rapidly the ship was proceeding, conveying these down to the bridge by means of a written note inside a tennis-ball lowered on a length of line.

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Here we go again with the "Miles is a fat klutz" shit! I know Pynchon hasn't given us an actual physical description of Miles but I would wager that 98% of all casting agents would only put a call out for overweight kids for this part. It's a trope for a reason and that reason is the same reason it was, for many years (and still today maybe?), to have every fat person in a film or television show shown holding food whenever they were on camera! Unless the reason is unimaginative script writers, directors, and casting agents?

If I were on dating apps, I would simply lift the description of Chick and use it to describe myself. "A want of alacrity fully as perceptible." Okay, maybe I'd have to change the wording a bit by taking out the "as"! But you get my point if you know the meaning of "alacrity" and "perceptible" and "want" used to mean "lacking" (which is what I guess it always means although it connotes a slightly different feeling when used as a verb, as if your desire for the thing you lack is the foregrounded idea).

What Pynchon does at the beginning of this sentence is to just cement the two-dimensional, cartoon nature of these two characters (which cements the idea that the whole Chums of Chance crew is a 70s cartoon (or, you know, Victorian era kid adventure dime novel). Miles is the blundering (Blundell!) fatty and Chick is the slackluster rebel (COUNTERfly!) without a fuck. So that's the subject of the first sentence of this sentence taken care of!

The other half of the sentence (the object, I guess? Because that half is about the object the subject is verbing? (Hee hee. So dirty!)) helps flesh out the description of the Inconvenience from the previous sentence. I thought maybe there was a ladder but now we see Darby is just climbing up the ropes surrounding the balloon (ellipsoidal!) to which the gondola is attached and that the anemometer is located directly on top of the balloon so as to get a perfectly clear and unobstructed reading of the direction and strength of the wind. So Darby's really risking his tail here!

The Robinson Anemometer (which is what the text under the anemometer says but you probably couldn't read it)

Darby sends the data back to Randolph by writing a note while clinging to the top of the balloon buffeted by the winds and then stuffing that note (if it hasn't blown away) into a cut open tennis ball (who hasn't cut open a tennis ball and then used it for all sorts of strange purposes one of which was almost certainly some weird new space vehicle for their Star Wars Jawa action figure) and lowering it down on a line. I know I just repeated a bunch of what Pynchon said but I wanted to highlight how difficult it probably was for poor Darby!