All they had to do now was to wait for a favorable wind, then raise sails to catch it. When that wind shifted or died, as they invariably did, they’d strike the sails and coast on in the same direction until encountering another favorable one. The work was exhausting for the men, but, using this technique, they were making excellent time. Sexton estimated they’d be close enough to Mars to deploy the balloons in just a few days.
Kidd peered through his telescope, seeking the tiny scudding bits of airborne flotsam whose motion he’d learned would predict a shift in the breeze. But suddenly a flock of silvery fluttering shapes burst across his view.
Sexton had given the creatures a Latin name that Kidd could never recall. The men called them flying fish, though they resembled fish only superficially in shape and not at all in taste, and they did not so much fly as row through the air. But over the past weeks Kidd had learned that such a flock often rode the leading edge of a hard-blowing wind … which was exactly what Kidd had been hoping for.
“Set royals and t’gallants!” he cried, and the crew leapt into action, many of them literally leaping twenty or thirty feet through the air to their stations. They’d become adept at maneuvering through the air, hands and feet propelling them swiftly from line to yard to sail in the absence of weight—Sexton insisted that the phenomenon should be called “free descent,” though there was no descending at all. Kidd worried what would happen to the men when they returned to Earth, where a fall from a height could again kill them.
Kidd hauled himself hand over hand along the rope taffrail from one side of the quarterdeck to the other, peering over the sides at the mainmast and mizzenmasts. But the crews of all three masts knew their business now, and within minutes the sails were sheeted home.
A moment later, the hard gust hit them. The whole ship shuddered at the impact, yardarms rattling and masts groaning, and some of the men whooped as they bounced at the ends of their safety lines. Kidd and Edmonds leaned against the whipstaff, feet skidding on the deck as the air fought their attempts to turn the ship into the wind. But the rigging held, the oft-repaired sails stayed in one piece, and the ship shot forward, the planet growing with satisfying speed.
A few minutes later, Kidd was startled by the approach of Sexton, who scrambled down the length of a safety line with a panicked expression on his face. Somewhere the man had lost his wig.
“Stop! Stop!” Sexton called over the rush of air. “We’re already well into the planetary atmosphere! I was a fool not to realize that Mars’s gravity is less than Earth’s. His atmosphere must be less dense, and thus deeper!”
“I’ve no time for natural philosophy, Doctor!” Kidd shouted back.
“You don’t understand, Captain! We’re beginning to fall!”
Sexton’s announcement made Kidd realize consciously what his body had been trying to tell him for some time. The ship’s rapid and increasing forward motion was, in fact, the formerly familiar sensation of falling. And not only was the ship speeding downward toward the planet, but Kidd’s own weight was beginning to return, dragging him along the whipstaff and toward the ship’s bow. “Inflate balloons!” he called. “Smartly now! And make yourselves fast to whatever you can!”
Immediately, the waisters scrambled to the great chests on deck where the balloons had been stowed weeks before. It had taken them a full day to inflate them back on Earth; now they would have to do it in far less time and in the midst of a gale.
Kidd returned his eyes to the sails, constantly adjusting their tack to keep the ever-shifting wind from tearing the ship apart. Should he strike them completely, losing all control, in order to reduce speed?
But before he could answer that question, his attention was drawn back to the ship’s waist by a hideous screech of dismay. It was the captain of the waist. “Ruined!” he cried in anguish. “All ruined!”
In his hands he held a length of black and rotting silk.
Kidd dashed to the waist, rushing from chest to chest to assess the damage. Every balloon was more or less rotted where it had touched the wood of the chest. The parts in the middle of each bundle were still whole, but because of the way the balloons had been packed, every one was riddled with holes. There was no conceivable way that even one of them could be made to hold air in the limited time available.
Kidd looked down at the rotted cloth held taut between his fists.
It had been he, personally, who had packed the balloons away. He’d known how important they would be to their survival upon return to Earth, and he’d made sure they were properly folded and stowed.
What he had not considered at the time was that they had already been wetted by the first rains of the storm before being deflated and struck. The moist silk, no matter how carefully folded into the chest, was fated to mildew and decay.
Kidd, himself, had doomed Mars Adventure. He’d treated delicate silk like common sailcloth, and the sensitive stuff had wilted and died under his care.
Helplessly, he raised his eyes to Mars, the ruddy glowing ball rushing inexorably toward them, a great sphere of sand and rock against which the ship would now surely be dashed to flinders.
Sexton appeared by his side. Without a word, Kidd showed him the rotting silk. “Are they all like this?” the philosopher asked.
Kidd nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Had he not been nearly weightless, he might have collapsed in despair upon the deck.
Sexton immediately drew out his telescope, staring through it with such concentration it seemed that he intended to burn a hole through the storm with the intensity of his gaze alone. But at last he collapsed the instrument and turned to Kidd with slumped shoulders. “We cannot sail our way out of this,” he admitted. “We are already too deep into Mars’s planetary atmosphere; his gravitic attraction holds us fast.” He sighed. “If only we could flap our fins and fly away, like the caelipiscines.”
It took Kidd a moment to recognize the Latin as the name Sexton had given the flying fish. “Or row our way out of trouble.” So many times in his career, Kidd had put out sweeps to shift the ship in a situation where wind and wave had failed him.
But though Kidd’s heart lay heavy within his breast, Sexton’s eyes showed the light of inspiration. “The oars,” he said. “The oars! Perhaps they may be of use …”
“In this gale? They’d snap like twigs!”
Sexton shook his head. “Consider the fins of the caelipiscines.”
Struggling to follow Sexton’s reasoning, Kidd nevertheless tried to consider the fins. Great broad filmy things they were, stiffened with slim ribs of tough spiny tissue.
Each rib was no thicker than a pigeon’s quill, but there were so many of them that each one bore only a small proportion of the strain as the fish flapped through the air.
No. They didn’t exactly flap, not like birds. The action was more like rowing.
“Dear Lord,” Kidd said, understanding.
“But we must reduce our speed at once,” Sexton said, “or we’ll have no chance.”
“Strike all sails!” Kidd called. “And send word for the sailmaker, the rigger, and the carpenter!”
After the carpenter, the sailmaker, and the rigger had finished their work, there was barely room to move on the deck.
The least rotted parts of the balloon silk had been cut into strips, each strip then fastened between an oar and its neighbor; the whole assemblage was intended to form on each side a vast spreading wing like the sail of a Chinese junk. But at the moment, the ship’s waist seemed no more than a vast fluttering mass of white fabric streaked with black. Loops and billows of loose, rotted silk luffed wildly in the wind of the ship’s descending passage through the Martian air. Even two strong men could barely hold their oar steady against the pull of it.