Old Mars

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 interplanetary 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!”