Old Mars Read online

  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?”

  Sexton glared right back. “It is the only way.”

  For three weeks, the ship had been subject to the whims of the interplanetary atmosphere, tossed here and there by every changing breeze and tumbled every which way as it flew. Though they’d fastened down everything they could, the men still floated freely in the air, and the ship’s unpredictable turns and tumbles had resulted in many injuries and several men nearly lost overboard. Kidd had learned much about how to sail in this new world, but still the ship seemed to fight him at every turn.

  Sexton had proposed a new sail plan of radical novelty. The mainmast and mizzenmasts would be unshipped and remounted forward on the lower hull, sticking down and out to form a great equal-armed Y with the foremast. According to Sexton’s theory, putting all sail forward in this way would cause the ship to present her stern to the prevailing wind rather than constantly heeling over; distributing the sails equally in the vertical plane would give them control over the ship’s direction and her orientation in the air. But no ship in history had ever had masts below the waterline!

  “We’ll have to saw the masts from the keelson!” Kidd protested. “She’ll never be whole again!”

  Sexton patted the air placatingly. “I promise this new design will balance the ship out,” he said. “If you can but make the masts secure in their new locations.”

  Kidd and his men would have to work out an entirely new system of rigging to support the masts. But their spare cordage was limited, and it would have to work perfectly the first time: If the rigging proved inadequate to hold the sails against the pressure of wind, the remounted masts would tear the hull apart. He shook his head. “I don’t know if it can be done. Give me time, damn it! We can yet learn to sail her as she stands …”

  “No. We’ve bickered enough.” Sexton crossed his arms on his chest and glared down his nose to where Kidd floated some feet closer to the hull. “We must gain better control of the ship, and quickly, or come the next storm we’ll wind up lost and tumbling, or broken to bits.”

  Kidd strove to relax his clenched jaw. “Is that an order?”

  “If I must.”

  The two men held each other’s gaze for a long, tense moment. Edmonds and the carpenter looked on, their eyes darting from the captain to the philosopher and back.

  Once, Kidd had been captain of his own fate. Now he found himself subordinate to a scraggy, wispy-bearded schoolboy, and he rankled at the diminution.

  But still … Sexton’s ideas had gotten them this far. And if they could but complete their mission, the legend of Kidd-the-voyager-to-Mars might eclipse the slanderous lie of Kidd-the-pirate.

  He bent down and looped the line from his ankle over his shoulders, cinching up the slack and leaning back to press his bare feet against the rough, barnacled hull. “Give me the axe,” he said to the carpenter. Then he hauled off and began chopping through the X.

  If anyone was going to murder Kidd’s ship, it would be Kidd himself.

  Mars shimmered in Kidd’s telescope, a great, dull, copper-colored sphere. Where the Earth had gleamed like glass, the sun shining off her clouds and oceans and lakes, Mars seemed lusterless as dry, unpolished wood. A dead world.

  Snapping the telescope shut, Kidd gazed at the approaching planet with his unaided eye. Mars’s disc was already too big to cover with a thumb, and growing visibly day by day.

  It should have been an exciting time.

  The disaster had arrived imperceptibly, by stages. Mars Adventure had left London with food and water for three months, a month more than the longest possible round-trip voyage predicted by Sexton’s theories. The outbound voyage had taken nearly eight weeks, longer than expected, but once they had refitted the masts and sorted out the working of the ship in air, Sexton’s bizarre new sail plan worked beautifully. At the six-week mark, all hands had agreed to accept short rations and press on to Mars, expecting a quicker return trip.

  When they’d broached the first empty water cask, they’d thought it just a fluke. But the second and the third dry cask began to raise alarms in Kidd’s mind. He and the quartermaster had gone into the hold and thumped every remaining barrel.

  Nearly one-third were dry. Even on half rations, they’d surely die of thirst long before they reached London.

  “Damn that Yale!” Kidd muttered, clenching the telescope in his hands as though it were the accursed chandler’s neck. But even more than Yale, Kidd cursed himself. Years hunting pirates, only to be betrayed and abandoned by his own backers, should have taught him better than to extend any trust beyond his own two hands.

  Suddenly, Sexton’s hand clapped down upon Kidd’s shoulder, startling him out of his reverie. “Do not curse the chandler,” he said, entirely too brightly. “ ’Tis not his fault.”

  “How so?” Kidd replied, struggling to regain his composure. “Either he cheated me—that is, the king—or else he is incompetent.”

  Sexton shook his head. “I realized last night what the reason must be. Those casks were full when we loaded them, but they were built for Earthly climes. Have you not noticed how parched of moisture the atmosphere has become?”

  “Aye …” Kidd licked chapped lips with a tongue dry as old leather. The air had been growing steadily colder and drier as Mars drew near.

  “The air’s thirst first dries out the casks’ wood, then draws the water out through the seams between the staves. On our next voyage, we can line the casks with wax or lead to prevent this evaporation.”

  “Next voyage?” Kidd laughed without amusement. “There’ll be no next voyage for us.” He cast his eyes out over the empty, cloudless air and the dead, dry planet below. “The sea may be an inhospitable mistress, but at least she offers the occasional island, with a spring or pond of freshwater. There are no islands in the air.”

  “No islands, perhaps. But there are … canals.”

  Kidd blinked. “Canals?”

  “Give me your glass.” Sexton peered through Kidd’s telescope at Mars, then handed it back, pointing. “There. Near the planet’s limb.”

  For a long time, Kidd saw nothing. Then, wavery and blurry, a few thin straight silvery threads appeared, glinting in the reduced sunlight.

  Kidd lowered the instrument from his eye. “Mere mirages.”

  “Canals,” Sexton insisted. “And what could be in them but water? If the ship can but make landfall and rise from it, we might yet survive.”

  Again Kidd licked his dry lips, considering. Then he turned to the bosun. “Send word for the carpenter,” he said. “The ship’ll need some sort of legs if we’re to land on sand.”

  Mars now loomed above the bow, glowing red and huge as the dome of St. Peter’s at sunset. The great north polar cap gleamed white and pristine atop the ruddy globe, but Sexton had rejected Edmonds’s idea of landing there to melt water from snow, fearing that the air of the polar regions might be so cold that their limited supply of coal could not heat it sufficiently to raise the ship again. Instead, they were aiming for an area at about forty degrees north longitude, where several great canals converged. Sexton swore he’d seen through his telescope evidence of a city at that nexus; Kidd’s eyes, twice as old, could not confirm this. But, at least, the presence of multiple canals increased their chances of finding water.

  Assuming, that is, that those silvery threads were indeed canals and did contain drinkable, liquid water and not some unknown Martian substance. And also assuming that they could land where they intended and survive the landing.

  Even Sexton had no idea what conditions they might encounter on the fast-approaching Martian surface.

  The winds were now shifting hard and fast as the ship entered the zone of turbulence where the interplane
tary atmosphere met Mars’s own rotating sphere of air. But Kidd’s crew was now seasoned in aerial seamanship, the ship’s rigging well proven, and unlike on Earth there seemed to be no storm clouds in the offing. “The air here’s too dry for storms,” Sexton opined through lips as cracked as every other man’s. “Or even clouds, for that matter.”

  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.

  The oarlocks had been reinforced with blocks, great knots of oak and cordage, and loops of the heaviest cable connected each block to its partner on the opposite gunwale. Running under the keel, the network of cables cradled the ship in a vast basket of rope.

  “This will never work,” Sexton muttered. “I was a fool even to suggest it.”

  It was unlike Sexton to lose faith in his own ideas. Usually, he would cling to a notion, no matter how impractical it seemed to Kidd, until indisputable success or failure settled the question definitively. But now, with the whole crew’s lives riding on this one mad inspiration, the philosopher was shivering in near panic.

  “It will work,” Kidd said, clapping Sexton on the back—though he himself was far from certain of it. “It must.”

  Ahead and below, Mars now bulked so large that he could no longer be encompassed by the eye as a sphere. Instead he seemed a horizon, albeit a horizon unnaturally curved. Mars’s proximity and the pressure of his atmosphere upon the ship’s hull also gave Kidd a feeling of weight, a pressure of the deck against his boot soles he’d not felt in nearly two months. Sexton said that the pressure would never amount to more than a third what it did on Earth, which was good, because after so many weeks adrift, Kidd’s knees felt as weak and wobbly as a newborn fawn’s.

  Or perhaps that was merely terror.

  Kidd strode to the forward edge of the quarterdeck to address the crew, doing his best to put confident strength into his step. On an ordinary ship, he’d have climbed into the rigging of the mizzenmast, but Mars Adventure’s mizzenmast was now fastened to her starboard hull. “We’ll not be rowing, lads!” he called above the rush of air. “Not in the ordinary way. You all know the command ‘hold water,’ d’ye not?”

  A chorus of confused assent. “Hold water” was never used on a ship this large; it meant to brace the oar with one’s body, to bring a small boat to a rapid halt.