Old Mars

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!”