Old Mars

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.”