Old Mars

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.