Desperandum tried again. He rebaited the hook with the head of his new catch and dropped it overboard. Two new crewmembers took the windlass and began unreeling the line. Down it went, a hundred yards, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred.
Suddenly something took the hook and the windlass began unreeling at an insane speed, nearly fracturing the arm of one of the sailors. No one dared to set the catch that would stop the windlass; it might have taken his fingers off.
“Cut! Cut!” said the second mate.
“Ceramic fiber!” shouted Desperandum over the whir of the windlass. “ItH hold it!”
Abruptly we were out of line. The entire ship lurched, the deck tilted crazily, and with a terrific screech the windlass was ripped free of the deck, snapping some bolts and ripping others right up through the metal. In a flash, the windlass vanished beneath the surface.
Thoughtfully, Desperandum leaned on the collapsible rail and watched the dust swirl where the windlass had gone down. Then he turned to stare at the whaling hoists attached to the masts, as if he thought them admirable deep-sea fishing tackle. I saw several crew members exchange significant glances. Then Desperadum returned to his cabin. In a moment came the order to set sail again.
The two blacksmiths produced their hammers and welding equipment and repaired the holes in the deck that the bolts had made when they pulled through.
I was about to return to the kitchen when a sudden shadow flickered across the deck in front of me. I glanced up and was shocked to see some kind of winged monster sliding and darting through the air. It stopped, fluttered, and settled neatly inside the crow’s nest. It was Dalusa.
There came a coded series of blasts from the horns in the crow’s nest. On her scouting flight the lookout woman had seen a dustwhale, two miles to starboard. Desperandum was out on deck at once. At his orders, the Lunglance turned into the wind, in the position known as all aback. Then the foresail lines were rapidly hauled through their winches so that the foresails were almost perpendicular to the wind. For a moment the clew lines hung slack; then the sails filled with a muffled snap and the ship heeled onto a starboard tack. The foresails were straightened and the Lunglance moved sluggishly forward. The Lunglance always moved sluggishly. She was not built for speed, and there was little chance of wind with any force in the 500-mile Nullaqua Crater.
Soon the whale was in sight. As the ship crept up on the lethargic beast, three of the seamen opened veins in their elbows and collected blood in a beaker. Blackburn, our harpooneer, took the beaker and poured the blood into the central chamber of his piston-equipped harpoon with its four shiny barbed vanes. Then he walked nonchalantly to the starboard harpoon gun and loaded it. There was enough blood left for two extra harpoons if need be.
It was odd, but convenient, that human blood should be a lethal poison to the dustwhale. But it was no odder than the whale’s production of Flare. Like all good things, syncophine in sufficient quantity is a lethal poison.
We sailed closer to the creature, and it grew larger and larger. It seemed that no living creature had a right to be that huge.
Suddenly there was a loud chunk sound from the starboard. The vast bulk in the distance suddenly sprouted a harpoon. The silence was broken by a shrill scream. It was the whale.
The beast, bewildered, began to swim toward us. Blackburn took the opportunity to sink a second and a third poisoned harpoon into its vast, armored back. With a final frightened squeal the creature sounded, only a few yards from our bow. It was under for less than a minute; then it floated to the surface, dead.
The dustwhale was a vast flounderlike creature, seventy-five feet long and perhaps thirty feet across. The largest part of its body was its mouth, a huge crevasse bristling with tough baleen. It had teeth in its throat to crush the hard-shelled Nullaquan plankton. It used the large amount of silicon it ingested in this way to build a tough black armor, jointed by strips of gray whaleskin. Such armor is tough, but flexible; if it were rigid, the dustwhale would be forced to molt when it grew. This gave the whale an odd sort of hexagon checkerboard pattern of black and gray on its entire body. One could tell a whale’s age by counting the growth rings on an armor plate. The rings were not very well defined, since Nullaqua has no seasons and the food supply is constant. But they were there, and it was seldom that one found a whale more than fifty years old. Like all Nullaquan surface fish, the dustwhale is air-breathing and cold-blooded. Dustwhales often travel in pods.
We cruised to the side of the dead monster. Six crewmen, one of them Calothrick, leapt off the ship onto the creature’s back, carrying huge hooks attached to metal cables.
The lookout honked her horn twice, sharply. This was the warning signal for sharks. A coded blast off the smaller horn gave their position: three points off the port bow.
Mr. Grent, the second mate, was overseeing the loading operation. He grew agitated and the crew began to jump frantically, imbedding their hooks as deeply as possible into the flesh of the monster. It was best to snag a rib.
I had heard much about the Nullaquan shark, so I walked across the deck to see their approach. What a disappointment! Advancing from the west was a small flock of flying fish, their jewellike chitinous wings flashing green in the sunlight. Were these the legendary carnivores, these fluttery creatures little larger than earthly goldfish? But then perhaps there were vast numbers of them, with small, but sharp teeth and a total disregard for their own preservation. ...
Then I saw fins split the surface beneath the flying fish and a half-dozen shiny black bodies surged through the dust like advancing torpedoes. It was startling, almost macabre, to see the bulbous tip of each black fin suddenly open to reveal a large, staring blue eye!
So, then the flying fish were only pilot fish, leading the sharks to slaughter in exchange for tidbits. With their wings they could go much higher and see much farther than the dust-bound sharks.
Suddenly the third mate, Mr. Bogunheim, thrust a long whaling spade into my hand and yelled at me to help repel the creatures. Nothing loath, I ran across the deck to the rail to join the rest of the crew.
The sharks were already attacking. The dust roiled like lava, and thick gouts of purplish liquid burst from the lacerated body ef the whale. The sailors had finished imbedding their hooks, and they jumped to the relative safety of the deck. There came a loud clanking and clattering from the hoists and triple tackle as the whale was slowly, slowly, hauled on board. The ship began to list. I stabbed downward into the thrashing mass of sharks and felt my spade bite flesh. A sailor moaned through his mask as one of the pilot fish flew on deck and bit him stingingly on the calf. Those fish were small but they had sharp teeth. They fluttered on board to harass the sailors, fell to the deck, then scuttled overboard on their stiff wings like so many monster ants.
I stopped my attack on the sharks for a moment to stamp on a flying fish. Suddenly the whaling spade was almost wrenched from my grasp. Startled, I pulled up a five-foot metal stub, bitten clean through. I was taken aback. Then I saw a pilot fish flap toward me. Swinging my stub like a bat, I sent it splattered back into the sea.
Suddenly a swift shape, borne aloft on crooked batwings, swooped past the edge of the ship. It was Dalusa, dragging a metal-mesh net. The fluttering group of pilot fish stopped harassing the crew and quickly sought the safety of the sea.