Old Mars Page 9

  Kidd strolled down Salisbury Court, heading for an appointment with Yale, the chandler whom he had engaged for water, cordage, and comestibles. Five weeks out of prison, it was still a wonder to walk unencumbered, to move for more than ten feet without encountering a wall, to breathe air untainted by the exudations of a thousand condemned prisoners.

  Sexton, the physiologer, walked with him. A lean, pale-eyed man of twenty-eight—half Kidd’s age—he was not only a member of the Royal Society and a lecturer at Gresham College, but had also invented a novel method for projecting the surface of the spherical Earth onto a flat paper map and discovered two new species of beetle. His theories on interplanetary shipcraft and navigation were, apparently, very highly regarded by his philosophic peers.

  And, for all his brains, he had the common sense of a turtledove.

  Though Kidd’s strength was improving, he still walked with a stick. But despite this handicap, he made better speed than Sexton, who paused periodically to converse with strangers, peer curiously at unusual bits of stonework, and scribble notes in a small notebook. The man was like a jackdaw—always darting hither and yon, his attention drawn to any shiny object, and easily startled into flight.

  Kidd had originally thought that the secret terms of the king’s pardon compelled him to remain close to Sexton to prevent him, Kidd, from escaping. He now believed that the real reason for this requirement was so that Kidd could protect Sexton from being run down by a coach, falling into a canal, or simply forgetting to breathe.

  “Please, Dr. Sexton,” Kidd called over his shoulder. “We are already late, and Mr. Yale is a busy man.”

  “Just a moment, Mr. Kidd,” Sexton replied, stooping to inspect a weed that grew in the crack between two foundation stones of the building they were passing.

  “Captain Kidd,” Kidd muttered under his breath. He no longer bothered correcting Sexton, but the omission still rankled, especially given how insistent Sexton was upon his own title of Doctor.

  “This is the ship?” said Edmonds, Kidd’s old shipmate.

  “Aye,” Kidd replied.

  The grizzled old sailor stood silent for a long time, casting a practiced eye on the little ship as she bobbed in the Thames. Edmonds had responded eagerly enough to Kidd’s call for a quartermaster; they’d served together upon the Sainte Rose, and Kidd would trust him with his life.

  “This’d be the strangest ship I’ve e’er served upon,” Edmonds said at last.

  To that assertion, Kidd merely nodded. “I’ll not argue with that.”

  The ship was tiny, barely seventy feet from stem to stern, and would carry a crew of only sixty men. But not only was she small, she seemed … spindly. Everything possible had been done to lighten her weight—bulkheads were screens woven from rattan rather than solid wooden panels, carved rails had been replaced by simple ropes, and canvas sheeting took the place of hatch covers. And Kidd knew of many other changes invisible to the eye, such as the deck planks planed down to half their usual thickness.

  “But sweeps?” Edmonds asked, incredulous, pointing to the row of oarlocks on either side. “In this day and age?”

  Kidd set his chin. “I’d not sail without them. Wind and waves cannot be trusted, but a man at an oar can always be counted on to pull a ship out of trouble. Sweeps have saved my skin more than once.”

  He did not mention that the sweeps that would be fitted to those oarlocks were made to push air, not water. Sexton had designed them to Kidd’s specifications, but Kidd could but hope they would work as well as Sexton promised—along with every other one of the thousand untried, theoretical pieces that made up the strange little ship.

  Edmonds left off his critical inspection of the ship and turned to Kidd with a questioning eye. “D’ye think she’ll really swim?”

  Kidd nodded. “She’s a strange one, all right, but there’s a reason for it, and if you’ll sign on with me, you’ll learn what it is.”

  “Aye, but do ye trust her?”

  There came a long, considering pause then.

  It didn’t really matter what Kidd thought. He was bound by the terms of his pardon to sail with Sexton, no matter the circumstances, and not to reveal the reason. But still, he felt he owed his old shipmate an honest answer.

  Though many of Sexton’s designs seemed completely daft at first, the man had an enormous brain, and where Kidd could follow his logic, it seemed unassailable. And Kidd himself had supervised the ship’s construction and provisioning, using the best men and materials the king’s money could buy. If he could assemble a whole crew as good as Edmonds …

  “I trust her well enough to sail in her myself,” Kidd said. “And it’ll be a long, long journey.” In miles, at least, he added silently, though Sexton theorized it would take but two months all told. There were no plans to land upon Mars, merely to survey it for a later expedition.

  Edmonds pursed his lips a long moment, then with a firm nod of his chin he stuck out his hand. “If she’s good enough for Captain Kidd, she’s good enough for me.”

  With genuine pleasure, Kidd took Edmonds’s hand and shook it. “Welcome aboard, Mr. Edmonds. Welcome aboard the Mars Adventure.”

  Kidd shielded his eyes from the rising sun, trying to ignore the babble of the crowd on the wharf as he inspected the ship’s bizarre rigging.

  He had warned the king that rumors would begin to spread once the crew was hired, and, indeed, in the last few weeks the press of the public for more information on the strange ship, with her secret mission and her infamous captain, had become intense. But Kidd kept a tight rein on his men and kept Sexton busy with his drafts and charts, so that little real news had gotten out. But when they’d begun to inflate the balloons after sunset last night, word had traveled fast and the rabble had begun to gather almost immediately.

  Soon everyone would know the secret of the Mars Adventure.

  Nine balloons bobbed and swayed above the little ship, nine taut white globes of fine China silk filled with coal-warmed air, glowing like enormous pearls in the light of the rising sun. Already the ship rode impossibly high in the water, and the tug of the Thames on her keel combined with the action of the breeze on her balloons to give her a sick, disturbing motion unlike anything Kidd had ever experienced before. Sexton had assured Kidd that, once airborne, the ride would be smooth.

  “Make fast that stay, there!” Kidd called, pointing. The bosun repeated his order, and two of the men scrambled up the great purse of netting that restrained the balloons to repair the flaw Kidd had spotted. Stays was what Kidd and the men called the great ropes that held the balloons to the ship, though they were no true stays at all; so much was new and unprecedented in this ship that they’d been forced to stretch existing sailing language to cover it all. It was better than the Latin that Sexton insisted on using.

  Sexton appeared at Kidd’s elbow. “Are we nearly ready to depart?” he said, his eyes darting about. “We must rise with the sun or the lift will be insufficient.”

  “Very nearly,” Kidd replied, turning his attention to the wharf. “We only await … ah, there he is.”

  The crowd parted like the Red Sea before a surging retinue of colorful and bewigged gentlemen, in the midst of which the king strode like Moses. As word spread through the crowd, heads bowed in rings like ripples from a dropped stone.

  “Good morrow to you, my subjects!” the king called once the clamor of his arrival had subsided. “I bring you good news! On this most momentous day, a new era of exploration and discovery dawns for England! Today my philosopher, John Sexton, together with a brave crew of handpicked men, sets sail on a most extraordinary voyage … an expedition to the planet Mars!”

  Pandemonium. Cheers, gawps of astonishment, and hoots of derision greeted the king’s announcement. Some of the most amazed reactions came from the crew, many of whom had greeted Kidd’s revelation of the ship’s destination with knowing winks and the assumption that the real purpose of the voyage would be disclosed later.

 
; For his own part, Kidd, bristling at his own dismissal as merely part of “Sexton’s crew,” whispered a few commands to his bosun. “Aye, sir,” the bosun replied, and scurried off to pass the word to the rest of the men.

  Kidd understood that the king might wish to distance himself from a notorious, though pardoned, pirate. But he didn’t have to like it, and he wasn’t going to let the slight go unpunished.

  If the king wanted a momentous day, he would have one.

  On the wharf, the king blathered on and on, while Sexton peered through his fingers at the ever-rising sun. “We’re losing too much time!” he whispered to Kidd.

  “Patience,” Kidd replied.

  Just then, the bosun returned. “All’s ready,” he murmured in Kidd’s ear.

  Kidd grinned. “On my signal.”

  “This is a marvelous day for England,” the king declaimed, “and for the glorious House of Orange-Nassau …”

  That was more than enough royal self-aggrandizement for Kidd. He turned and bellowed, “Cast off! Away ballast!”

  In one coordinated motion, sailors in the four corners of the ship slipped the mooring lines that held the ship down. A moment later came a rushing rumble from belowdecks, as other men opened the valves that let the ship’s ballast—thousands of gallons of Thames water, rather than the usual stones—run out to rejoin the river.

  With a great lunge that sent Kidd’s stomach rushing toward his boots, Mars Adventure sprang into the sky.

  The crowd’s reaction made its previous outburst seem a paltry whisper. Great cries of astonishment and delight leapt from a thousand throats; a storm of hats soared into the air; coats and shirts waved like banners.

  And in the midst of this uproar, the king’s face glared up at Kidd with mingled fury and admiration.

  Kidd raised his hat in salute. “See you in two months, Billy-Boy,” he muttered under his breath, an enormous smile pasted on his face. “You conniving bastard.”

  Kidd stood at the rope, which on any ordinary ship would be the taffrail, his stomach troubled.

  All of his seafaring instincts told him that his ship was completely becalmed. Floating beneath her balloons, she drifted along with the wind, so no breath of breeze freshened the deck. Sexton, with his instruments, assured Kidd that they were making good progress, but still he worried.

  An unimaginable distance below, the whole great globe of the Earth lay spread out to his sight: a shiny ball of glass, swirled in blue and white, suspended in the blue of the sky. He could span the width of the world with two hands held out at arm’s length, thumb to thumb and fingers spread.

  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.