The drop was now so great that the view had passed from terrifying to interesting.
Sexton stood nearby, peering upward through his telescope, and Kidd moved closer to him. “Dr. Sexton,” he said, speaking low so that none of the other quarterdeck crew might hear, “I must confess myself uneasy. I’ve sailed through storms, battled pirates, and faced death by hanging, but this is the first time in my whole career I’ve felt such a tremulous sensation in my gut. My head is light as well, and my feet unsteady, and furthermore, the quartermaster has told me he feels the same. Could this be some disease of the upper atmosphere?”
Sexton snapped the telescope closed. “ ’Tis nothing more than the reduction of gravitational attraction.”
With all his learning, Sexton sometimes lapsed into Latin without realizing he had done so. “What is the treatment?” Kidd asked. “Bleeding? An emetic?”
At that Sexton laughed. “Fear not. It is no disease, but a natural consequence of our distance from the Earth. This phenomenon was predicted by Newton and confirmed by Halley on his first attempt to reach the Moon. As we travel farther from the mother sphere, the attraction of her gravity—in layman’s terms, our weight—will grow less and less. Already we weigh only three-quarters as much as we would at home.” He bounced on his toes, and Kidd noticed the man’s wig bounding gently atop his head.
Kidd too bounced on his toes, and was astonished to find the small effort propelled him several inches into the air.
“Before the day is out,” Sexton continued, “we will pass out of the Earth’s demesne and into the interplanetary atmosphere. There we will exist in a state of free descent, and will feel ourselves to have no weight at all. That is the point at which we will be able to retire the balloons and continue with sails alone.”
No matter how many times Sexton had explained this phenomenon, Kidd had never quite been able to comprehend it. But now, with his thirteen stone pressing so lightly against his feet, he felt that he was beginning to understand. Again, he hopped lightly into the air, feeling himself float giddily for a moment before his boots struck the deck. “I see,” he said.
While Kidd had been bouncing, Sexton had resumed his telescopic observations. “Of course,” he said, peering upward through the instrument, “we must first traverse the boundary between the planetary atmosphere, which rotates along with the Earth, and the interplanetary atmosphere, which orbits the Sun.” He collapsed the telescope. “There may be a bit of turbulence.”
“You call this ‘a bit of turbulence’?” Kidd shouted in Sexton’s ear.
The two men clung for their lives to the whipstaff that controlled the ship’s great sail-like rudder. Not only did it require the full extent of the two men’s strength to keep the ship on course through the air, but only by clinging to the staff could they be certain they would not be blown overboard, to vanish immediately into the vastness of the air. Two of the crew had been lost before Kidd had ordered the men to tie themselves to the masts.
The ship tumbled dizzily through the air, lashed by torrential rains, tossed this way and that by capricious winds that blew with hurricane force not just from north, south, east, and west, but also above and below. Even Kidd, who’d survived a storm in the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb without the least sickness, had sent his supper overboard.
“I had no idea!” Sexton yelled back. “Neither Halley nor Dampier ever encountered the like!”
“Sheet home the t’gallants, damn ye!” Kidd cried to his men. But all Kidd’s seacraft was of no avail; no matter how he set the sails, the ship only reeled and veered like a drunken madman.
Kidd had never in his life felt so disoriented. Storm clouds roiled in every direction; the compass spun crazily in its binnacle. Even the basic, eternal verities of up and down had been left behind. “How do we escape this chaos?” he asked Sexton.
“Watch for a bit of blue sky and steer toward it!”
But steering the ship with Sexton’s air-rudder was easier in Sexton’s theories than it proved in practice, achieving little more than a dizzying spin. And shipping sweeps in this gale would most likely either snap the oar in two or fling the oarsman overboard.
An eternity passed, an eternity in a sailors’ hell of unending, omnipresent wind and lightning, before a patch of blue appeared ahead on the starboard side. But though Kidd and Sexton jammed the rudder hard a-larboard and the men worked the sails with skill and alacrity, they achieved nothing but another wild tumble. “God damn this weather!” Kidd cried.
“Do not take the Lord’s name in vain,” Sexton responded. “But trust in Him, and He will provide.” And then he pointed.
Another patch of clear blue air, no bigger than an outstretched hand, had opened off the starboard beam. And, just at that moment, the wind happened to be blowing from the larboard side, pressing the ship toward it.
An inspiration seized Kidd. “Set the mainsail!” he called. “Brace sharp up on a larboard tack!”
The bosun, who had lashed himself to the mizzenmast, stared at Kidd as though he doubted his captain’s sanity. At the beginning of the storm, following long-standing naval custom, they’d struck all the sails and the balloons, facing the storm with bare masts rather than risking the sails being torn away; since then they’d set only the bare minimum of sail to control the ship. But now Kidd was telling him to raise the largest sail and turn it so that it would catch as much wind as possible.
“Smartly now!” Kidd cried, reinforcing his command with a demand for rapid action.
“Aye, sir!” the bosun replied. He and the maintop men unlashed themselves and crept cautiously, with at least one hand clutching the shrouds at all times, up the mainmast. Only the diligence, skill, and bravery of their decades of experience made it possible for them to unfurl the sail and sheet it home, the yard running fore and aft so that the wind from the larboard side caught the sail full-on.
No sooner was the sail set than it snapped open, filling with the rushing air. The frightening sound of tearing canvas could be heard even over the wind’s roar, but the ship surged beneath Kidd’s feet, lurching directly sideways toward the patch of blue. At sea, this sort of maneuver would be impossible, but with nothing but air beneath the keel, the game had entirely changed.
“Set all sails!” Kidd cried. “Brace all sharp on a larboard tack! Smartly now!” This stratagem could only succeed if they managed to press on all sail while the favorable wind continued.
The crew set to with a will, sheeting home one rain-lashed sail after another. With each new stretch of canvas, the ship rushed faster toward the open air.
The force of the gale on the crowd of sails also tumbled the ship to the side, heeling her so hard over to starboard that her keel pointed directly into the wind.
Kidd and Sexton clung hard to the whipstaff, but though the ship now lay entirely on her side, the Earth’s pull had grown so weak that no man fell overboard.
The patch of blue, now above the mainmast, grew larger and larger.
And then the ship rushed through it, tumbling up into blue and clear air. The storm fell away behind, a horrific ball of lightning-whipped black cloud.
“Thank God,” Kidd cried, “for able seamen!”
Kidd, Sexton, Edmonds, and the ship’s carpenter floated in the air off the ship’s starboard hull, each secured from drifting by a light line tied to an ankle. The storm lay three weeks behind them, but they’d passed within sight of many other such—great untidy knots of roiling cloud—and Kidd and Sexton had argued the whole time over how best to prepare for the next that could not be avoided.
The carpenter had chalked a large X on the hull, between the dried barnacles and shipworm holes. “This’d be the spot, Captain,” he said. “If’n you’re sure …”
Kidd wasn’t sure, not at all. He cast a baleful eye at Sexton. “This is madness. To cut holes in our own hull?”