Old Mars

The Wreck of the Mars Adventure DAVID D. LEVINE

WILLIAM KIDD KNELT UPON THE COLD STONE FLOOR IN THE complete blackness of the Condemned Hold in Newgate Prison. Heavy iron shackles lay loose upon wrists and ankles grown far thinner than when they’d first been fitted, the skin torn and scabrous from too-long acquaintance with the cold, rough metal. Chains rattled as he shifted into a somewhat less uncomfortable position.

All of these were familiar, and could be ignored. But the commotion in the hall beyond his locked door was new, and a terrible distraction. No doubt some of the other prisoners were celebrating the imminent demise of their most famous neighbor.

“Keep quiet out there!” he cried, or tried to. “Leave a condemned man to make peace with his Lord!”

There was no possibility that the revelers could have heard Kidd. His Dundee brogue, once powerful enough to carry across a hundred yards of open ocean in the midst of a gale, was now reduced to little more than a whisper. Yet, almost at once, the babble of voices dropped away to nothing.

A moment later came the rattle of keys in the lock.

This too was unexpected. For anyone at all to enter Kidd’s cell was a rarity, by order of the Admiralty Board and the House of Commons. A visit in the middle of the night was unprecedented. And on the very eve of his execution …

Kidd levered himself up into a sitting posture, chains clanking as he settled back on his haunches. Weary from months of imprisonment, despondent from years of rejection, disappointment, and defeat, he could think of no reason for such an untimely visit other than more bad news. Perhaps the House had decided to advance his execution to the small hours of the morning for some political reason. Or perhaps they intended to shave his head, or perform some other indignity, before marching him to the gibbet. He’d long given up any thought of comprehending the constant fickle changes of Parliamentary whim.

Whatever the news, Kidd meant to take it as a man should. Exerting himself to his utmost, he strained to rise to his feet. But he had barely struggled up to one knee when the door clashed open.

The dim, flickering light of torches blinded him. He tried and failed to raise an arm to shield his eyes. But before he could do so, two burly keepers entered and pinned his arms behind him. New irons clasped him at elbow and wrist, tight and hard and cold, and new chains ran clattering down to the ringbolts fixed in the stone floor. The guards forced Kidd to his knees, and in a moment he was trussed immovably in place. A hand gripped the back of his head, forcing his gaze to the floor. Was he to be beheaded here in his cell?

“P-prisoner secured, m’lord.” The voice belonged to one of the prison’s harshest and most brutal wardens. What could reduce this man to stammering servility?

“Leave us.” A cold, brusque voice, one used to immediate compliance. It had an accent Kidd couldn’t place. Dutch?

“M’lord?”

“Leave us. Alone.”

The warden gulped audibly. “Yes, m’lord,” he whispered.

The hand released Kidd’s head and two sets of feet shuffled out of the cell. A moment later, the door creaked closed, shutting more quietly than Kidd would have thought possible.

A single torch remained, and the sound of one man breathing.

Kidd raised his head.

The stranger was tall, over six feet, and the dark cloak that covered him from head to toe could not disguise his imperious bearing. He held an embroidered handkerchief to his nose, no doubt soaked in vinegar to combat the prison’s stench.

“To what do I owe the privilege, m’lord?” Kidd rasped, masking his terror with ironic courtesy.

The man pushed back his hood. “Surely an investor can pay a visit to his client?”

For a moment, Kidd failed to recognize the face, with its proud black eyes and its hard, humped beak of a nose. Then he gasped and ducked his head. Though they’d never before met in person, he’d seen that face in profile on a thousand coins. “Your Majesty,” he whispered, though cold anger burned beneath his ribs.

William III, King of England and Ireland, also William II of Scotland, placed the vinegar-soaked cloth again beneath his nose. “My time here is short,” he said, his voice muffled. “Even men as deeply stupid as my beloved advisers cannot be counted upon to miss my absence for long. So I must come directly to the point.” He drew the cloth aside, his dark eyes fixing Kidd’s. “I am here to offer you a pardon.”

At first, Kidd could form no reply. Surely this was only a dream? Or a cruel jape, intended only to deepen his suffering? Hope warred with anger and disbelief in his breast. “Your Majesty?” he managed.

“You heard me,” the king snapped. “I will spare your filthy, piratical neck from the noose my Parliament has woven for you from your own ill-considered words.”

Kidd matched the king’s level stare. “I but spoke the truth.”

“The truth is nothing against politics! And were it not for politics, I’d never find myself here in this stinking rathole with you.” The king sighed. “You are troublesome, Kidd. You and I both know you are no pirate, but my advisers would see you swing for the damage you’ve done your backers’ reputation. And with your impetuous bravado and your damned honesty, you’ve made so many enemies I could never defend you in public without losing the whole Whig party. But for all your faults, and for all the stories your enemies have spread about you, you’re too good a captain to waste on the gibbet. So, again, I have come to offer a pardon.” A small strange smile played upon his lips. “But if you accept this pardon, you will be required to undertake a certain charge for me. When you hear the charge, and the conditions, you may wish to decline this offer of clemency.”

“What charge and conditions,” Kidd snarled through gritted teeth, “could make a man esteem the hangman’s noose above a king’s pardon?”

Infuriatingly, the smile broadened. “I desire that you plan, outfit, equip, crew, and carry out an expedition to the planet Mars.”

Rage flared in Kidd at the king’s callous jest, but he held his tongue; he did not even allow the contempt he felt to show on his face.

This prudence was a new thing for Kidd. Even one year ago, freshly detained on false and libelous charges, he would have railed and spat and fought at such a ridiculous slight. But capricious imprisonment had taught him caution.

He paused and gave due consideration to the words of a king—a king not known for levity or insanity. This was a new century, a time of exploration and discovery and wonders. With the New World now nearly as well mapped as the Old, men were setting out in search of even newer worlds. Balloons were rising from all the capitals of Europe, and after Dampier’s successful circumnavigation of the Moon, a journey to Mars, though outlandish, was not entirely inconceivable.

“I’ve heard the charge,” Kidd said, swallowing his anger. “And the conditions?”

“Primus,” the king said, holding up one finger, “you may not disclose the terms of the pardon to any man, upon penalty of death. Secundus, you will be placed under the command of the physiologer John Sexton. You will obey his orders, serve him faithfully, and remain within one hundred feet of him at all times until the successful completion of the expedition, under pain of death. Tertius, you will be held personally responsible for the safety of the said Sexton. Should any harm whatsoever befall him, you will suffer death.” He put down the hand with its three extended fingers and crossed his arms on his chest. “On the other hand, if you should somehow manage to return to London with your own head and Sexton’s intact, you’d have the gratitude of a king. Perhaps even a baronetcy.”

Kidd considered the king’s words, considered them most seriously. He knelt in chains, in the darkest cell of the worst prison in England, faced with a choice between an impossible task—an insane expedition, from the attempt of which neither he nor any man he might recruit would be likely to return—and certain death upon the morrow.

And he began to laugh.

Rough, hacking chuckles burst from a throat left parched and ruined by a year of prison food, prison water, prison air. The king took a step back, the white cloth held tight against his nose, as though he feared Kidd might somehow burst his manacles and attack the royal person.

“I accept your pardon, Your Majesty,” Kidd gasped when the fit had passed. “I never could pass up a challenge.”

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.

The carpenter had chalked a large X on the hull, between the dried barnacles and shipworm holes. “This’d be the spot, Captain,” he said. “If’n you’re sure …”

Kidd wasn’t sure, not at all. He cast a baleful eye at Sexton. “This is madness. To cut holes in our own hull?”

Sexton glared right back. “It is the only way.”

For three weeks, the ship had been subject to the whims of the interplanetary atmosphere, tossed here and there by every changing breeze and tumbled every which way as it flew. Though they’d fastened down everything they could, the men still floated freely in the air, and the ship’s unpredictable turns and tumbles had resulted in many injuries and several men nearly lost overboard. Kidd had learned much about how to sail in this new world, but still the ship seemed to fight him at every turn.

Sexton had proposed a new sail plan of radical novelty. The mainmast and mizzenmasts would be unshipped and remounted forward on the lower hull, sticking down and out to form a great equal-armed Y with the foremast. According to Sexton’s theory, putting all sail forward in this way would cause the ship to present her stern to the prevailing wind rather than constantly heeling over; distributing the sails equally in the vertical plane would give them control over the ship’s direction and her orientation in the air. But no ship in history had ever had masts below the waterline!

“We’ll have to saw the masts from the keelson!” Kidd protested. “She’ll never be whole again!”

Sexton patted the air placatingly. “I promise this new design will balance the ship out,” he said. “If you can but make the masts secure in their new locations.”

Kidd and his men would have to work out an entirely new system of rigging to support the masts. But their spare cordage was limited, and it would have to work perfectly the first time: If the rigging proved inadequate to hold the sails against the pressure of wind, the remounted masts would tear the hull apart. He shook his head. “I don’t know if it can be done. Give me time, damn it! We can yet learn to sail her as she stands …”

“No. We’ve bickered enough.” Sexton crossed his arms on his chest and glared down his nose to where Kidd floated some feet closer to the hull. “We must gain better control of the ship, and quickly, or come the next storm we’ll wind up lost and tumbling, or broken to bits.”

Kidd strove to relax his clenched jaw. “Is that an order?”

“If I must.”

The two men held each other’s gaze for a long, tense moment. Edmonds and the carpenter looked on, their eyes darting from the captain to the philosopher and back.

Once, Kidd had been captain of his own fate. Now he found himself subordinate to a scraggy, wispy-bearded schoolboy, and he rankled at the diminution.

But still … Sexton’s ideas had gotten them this far. And if they could but complete their mission, the legend of Kidd-the-voyager-to-Mars might eclipse the slanderous lie of Kidd-the-pirate.

He bent down and looped the line from his ankle over his shoulders, cinching up the slack and leaning back to press his bare feet against the rough, barnacled hull. “Give me the axe,” he said to the carpenter. Then he hauled off and began chopping through the X.

If anyone was going to murder Kidd’s ship, it would be Kidd himself.

Mars shimmered in Kidd’s telescope, a great, dull, copper-colored sphere. Where the Earth had gleamed like glass, the sun shining off her clouds and oceans and lakes, Mars seemed lusterless as dry, unpolished wood. A dead world.

Snapping the telescope shut, Kidd gazed at the approaching planet with his unaided eye. Mars’s disc was already too big to cover with a thumb, and growing visibly day by day.

It should have been an exciting time.

The disaster had arrived imperceptibly, by stages. Mars Adventure had left London with food and water for three months, a month more than the longest possible round-trip voyage predicted by Sexton’s theories. The outbound voyage had taken nearly eight weeks, longer than expected, but once they had refitted the masts and sorted out the working of the ship in air, Sexton’s bizarre new sail plan worked beautifully. At the six-week mark, all hands had agreed to accept short rations and press on to Mars, expecting a quicker return trip.

When they’d broached the first empty water cask, they’d thought it just a fluke. But the second and the third dry cask began to raise alarms in Kidd’s mind. He and the quartermaster had gone into the hold and thumped every remaining barrel.

Nearly one-third were dry. Even on half rations, they’d surely die of thirst long before they reached London.

“Damn that Yale!” Kidd muttered, clenching the telescope in his hands as though it were the accursed chandler’s neck. But even more than Yale, Kidd cursed himself. Years hunting pirates, only to be betrayed and abandoned by his own backers, should have taught him better than to extend any trust beyond his own two hands.

Suddenly, Sexton’s hand clapped down upon Kidd’s shoulder, startling him out of his reverie. “Do not curse the chandler,” he said, entirely too brightly. “ ’Tis not his fault.”

“How so?” Kidd replied, struggling to regain his composure. “Either he cheated me—that is, the king—or else he is incompetent.”

Sexton shook his head. “I realized last night what the reason must be. Those casks were full when we loaded them, but they were built for Earthly climes. Have you not noticed how parched of moisture the atmosphere has become?”

“Aye …” Kidd licked chapped lips with a tongue dry as old leather. The air had been growing steadily colder and drier as Mars drew near.

“The air’s thirst first dries out the casks’ wood, then draws the water out through the seams between the staves. On our next voyage, we can line the casks with wax or lead to prevent this evaporation.”

“Next voyage?” Kidd laughed without amusement. “There’ll be no next voyage for us.” He cast his eyes out over the empty, cloudless air and the dead, dry planet below. “The sea may be an inhospitable mistress, but at least she offers the occasional island, with a spring or pond of freshwater. There are no islands in the air.”

“No islands, perhaps. But there are … canals.”

Kidd blinked. “Canals?”

“Give me your glass.” Sexton peered through Kidd’s telescope at Mars, then handed it back, pointing. “There. Near the planet’s limb.”

For a long time, Kidd saw nothing. Then, wavery and blurry, a few thin straight silvery threads appeared, glinting in the reduced sunlight.

Kidd lowered the instrument from his eye. “Mere mirages.”

“Canals,” Sexton insisted. “And what could be in them but water? If the ship can but make landfall and rise from it, we might yet survive.”

Again Kidd licked his dry lips, considering. Then he turned to the bosun. “Send word for the carpenter,” he said. “The ship’ll need some sort of legs if we’re to land on sand.”

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!”

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.”

It was unlike Sexton to lose faith in his own ideas. Usually, he would cling to a notion, no matter how impractical it seemed to Kidd, until indisputable success or failure settled the question definitively. But now, with the whole crew’s lives riding on this one mad inspiration, the philosopher was shivering in near panic.

“It will work,” Kidd said, clapping Sexton on the back—though he himself was far from certain of it. “It must.”

Ahead and below, Mars now bulked so large that he could no longer be encompassed by the eye as a sphere. Instead he seemed a horizon, albeit a horizon unnaturally curved. Mars’s proximity and the pressure of his atmosphere upon the ship’s hull also gave Kidd a feeling of weight, a pressure of the deck against his boot soles he’d not felt in nearly two months. Sexton said that the pressure would never amount to more than a third what it did on Earth, which was good, because after so many weeks adrift, Kidd’s knees felt as weak and wobbly as a newborn fawn’s.

Or perhaps that was merely terror.

Kidd strode to the forward edge of the quarterdeck to address the crew, doing his best to put confident strength into his step. On an ordinary ship, he’d have climbed into the rigging of the mizzenmast, but Mars Adventure’s mizzenmast was now fastened to her starboard hull. “We’ll not be rowing, lads!” he called above the rush of air. “Not in the ordinary way. You all know the command ‘hold water,’ d’ye not?”

A chorus of confused assent. “Hold water” was never used on a ship this large; it meant to brace the oar with one’s body, to bring a small boat to a rapid halt.

“That’s what we’ll be doing. First, we’ll point oars astern, then, at the command, we’ll all bring ’em forward, smooth and handsome. Then hold those oars, hold ’em for dear life, for the whole ship’ll be hanging from them!” He glanced at Sexton for confirmation and received a nervous nod. “Then listen for commands to raise or lower your oars. But only shift them a wee bit! Just like trimming sail.”

He could only see a few of the men’s faces, appearing and disappearing behind waves of flapping, rotted silk. They seemed nervous and unsure of themselves.

Yet those faces also showed hope, and trust … hope and trust in him.

Kidd set his jaw. He would prove himself worthy of that trust, or die in the attempt. “Point oars astern!” he cried, and “Fasten oars to oarlocks!”

With the best discipline they could muster, the men struggled to comply with a command that no captain had likely ever uttered before, using equipment no ship had ever seen before. The forest of oars fell astern, the patched and rotten silk strung between them flapping with a series of sharp reports like small-arms fire as the men worked to tie each oar firmly into its reinforced oarlock.

“Ready, Captain,” the bosun reported after far too long a time.

Kidd took a breath. This was the moment that would prove Sexton’s mad idea or else doom them all. “Hold water!” he cried in a bellow as firm as any he’d ever possessed. “Handsomely, now!”

The men put their backs into it, grunting with effort as they worked to lever the oars forward. Though they pressed against only air, not water, the force of the ship’s great speed on the tattered silken membrane that stretched between each pair of oars was enormous.

They were good men, the best. They’d been fed well, on the finest rations the king’s money could buy. But would even their able seamen’s strength be enough?

The ship shuddered and yawed as the oars and their burden of fabric spread gradually wider, the rushing air snapping the silk taut. Men and timbers groaned under the strain, and Kidd felt himself pressed forward as the surge of air began to slow the hurtling ship. “Steady, lads!” he called, holding tight to his hat.

Juddering, trembling, fighting like a gaffed marlin, Mars Adventure began to transform herself from a ship of the air into something like a gigantic flying fish.

By now, the great ruddy curve of Mars’s horizon had begun to straighten. A few thin wisps of cloud scudded by to either side, and even above. Sexton, bracing himself against the binnacle with his telescope, called out directions and made broad hand gestures, which Kidd fought to interpret into commands to his men. “Larboard sweeps up a point!” he called, and “Starboard, hold steady!” The roar of the wind in the rigging was deafening.

Kidd didn’t always understand what Sexton was asking him to do. He suspected that Sexton himself didn’t know either. Often the men overcorrected, or misinterpreted Kidd’s commands—commands they’d never heard before. The ship rolled and pitched violently whenever a pair of men lost control of their oar for even a moment. Yet somehow no oar snapped and no man was lost overboard; nor did the ship tumble into an uncontrollable spin. And though the water-damaged silk continued to shred, it did not fall completely to bits … at least, not yet.

Closer and closer the ship drew to the land beneath, now whipping past in a red-and-ochre blur beneath the keel. Strange mineral formations sped by on either side, fantastical shapes of orange stone like nothing Kidd had ever seen in all his travels. A broad canal filled with shining water, straight as a spar and stretching from horizon to horizon, appeared, then fell behind in a flash. And then came an astounding city—towering spires, broad streets, and just a glimpse of what might be the scuttling inhabitants. Kidd gaped at the apparition as it receded astern.

“Captain!” cried Sexton.

Kidd turned about to find a tremendous dune of red sand looming ahead, Sexton gesturing madly with his arms.

“Starboard sweeps down five points!” Kidd cried. “Larboard up five!”

The men groaned with effort as they strained to comply. The whole ship creaked and shuddered as she leaned heavily to starboard. Kidd and Sexton put their whole weight into the whipstaff, providing what little help they could with the rudder.

Ponderously, grudgingly, the hurtling ship’s course changed.

But not enough. They would not escape collision with the dune.

“All for’ard sweeps up! All aft sweeps down! Hold fast! And God save us all!”

With an enormous lurch, the prow rose up into the air, the horizon tilting madly as the ship reared back on her heel. Men cried out as the sudden change in bearing drove their sweeps hard against their bodies; one lost his grip and fell screaming down the length of the deck. Everywhere came the sound of ripping silk and the shuddering crack of tearing wood.

Kidd and Sexton scrabbled across the tilting deck to the binnacle and held on for dear life.

And then, with a horrific splintering crash, like God’s own broadside, the ship ran hard aground.

Kidd knelt in the cold sand, head bowed in an attitude of prayer. But he was not praying; he was merely resting his weary bones. Idly, he wondered if God heard the prayers of men on Mars.

The ship lay largely intact on the breast of the great soft dune of sand upon which she’d run aground. But the two lower masts had been smashed to splinters, and the hull bore two great gashes where they’d been rooted. The landing legs the carpenter had rigged had also torn away, taking with them several hull planks each. Cargo and coal lay scattered across a mile of sand. Somewhere out there, too, lay the bodies of three men who’d been thrown from the ship in the crash. Two more had died of their injuries; most of the rest were expected to recover. Kidd himself carried his left arm in a sling, counting himself lucky to have endured no more than a wrenched shoulder.

By day, the climate of Mars’s surface was not dissimilar from that of the air in the planet’s vicinity: cold and dry, with a thin wind that whistled across the vastness and whipped up dancing whirls of dust. But when the sun had set an hour after the wreck—the first darkness they’d seen after two months of sailing the shadowless air between planets—the cold had grown far deeper, biting hard even through Kidd’s heaviest coat. Most of the men had not even that much clothing to protect them. None of them had slept much, and the rising of the weak, wan sun had done little more than make the dismal situation more visible.

A chuffing sound of boots on sand made Kidd look up. It was Edmonds, the quartermaster, looking haggard and worn. “We’ve finished the inventory, sir.”

Kidd merely waited.

“There’s beef and pease for two months at half rations. But them water casks …” Edmonds shook his head. “Half of ’em sprung in the crash, sir. We’ve maybe two weeks.”

Kidd took a breath, not knowing what to say. Before he could form a reply, there came a shout from above. One of the men stood atop the ship’s prow, one foot braced on the fractured bowsprit, waving his arms and crying out words whose meaning was swept away by winds and lost in the vast thin desert air.

Awkwardly, Kidd levered himself to his feet and cupped his good hand behind his ear. “Say again?” he called.

The man made a speaking trumpet of his hands. “Martians!”

The natives somewhat resembled crabs—man-sized crabs with only four limbs, drawn out lengthwise and walking about on their hind legs. But though they had two arms and two legs, those limbs bent in all the wrong places, and both limbs and body were covered with a hard shell that shaded from white on the belly to the same red-ochre as the sand on the back. There was no distinct head, only a bulge at the top of the torso from which sprouted two black eyes on flexible stalks, like a lobster’s, and a vertical mouth like the working end of a blacksmith’s pincers. Each hand resembled a crab in itself, the fingers tipped with vicious-looking claws.

They waited in a group on the sand. There were over a hundred of them.

Kidd lowered his telescope and turned to Sexton. “D’ye suppose the savages speak English?”

Sexton looked terrible: his finery a shambles, wig long vanished, and cheeks gone black with stubble. “Unlikely. But they’re no savages.”

“How so?”

Sexton peered again through his telescope, and Kidd did the same. “Their clothing. Note the colors and patterns—very sophisticated. Somewhat reminiscent of Persian carpet. And especially that one in the center, the one with the hat. He appears to have jewelry at his shoulders and wrists.”

Kidd squinted, but still could not make out as much detail as the younger Sexton. “All I see is the swords.” Each native carried a long, thin sword, curved like a Persian shamshir, thrust scabbardless through his belt; smaller blades, likewise slim and curved, were also in evidence. They gleamed in the pale sunlight.

Sexton scoffed. “We are armed as well, are we not? And we are no savages.”

To that, Kidd had no reply.

Kidd did his best to hold his head high as he slogged awkwardly down the slope of soft sand, but between his injured arm and the satchelful of materials for negotiation—gold coins, glass beads, dried beef, a flask of water, a Bible—he had a hard time keeping his balance. The Martians, he noticed, had wide flexible feet well suited for walking on sand; their lower garments were loose pantaloons like the Hindoos’, cuffed at the knee, leaving the red-carapaced lower legs bare.

Focusing on these details helped keep Kidd from curling up on the sand in a terrified ball.

Sexton preceded him, holding out his open, empty hands. “We greet you in the name of King William III of England and Ireland, and II of Scotland.”

The Martian with the hat stepped forward from the rest. He had a distinct but not unpleasant odor, something between horses and cinnamon, and the bright metal fixed to his carapace at several points had the appearance of real gold. Chittering and clattering in his own language, he pointed one chitinous hand up to the sky, then swept it downward in a gesture that encompassed the Mars Adventure, the Englishmen, and the Martians as well. Then he stood silent, with folded hands.

Sexton and Kidd exchanged a glance. Even the natural philosopher was plainly baffled by this display. “Perhaps we should show him the Bible?” Kidd suggested. “He waved up at Heaven …”

“I’ve no better notion,” Sexton confessed. Kidd handed him the heavy book, and he opened it to Genesis. “This is our most sacred book,” Sexton said to the native, presenting it reverently, “and this is the story of the creation of the universe.”

The Martian took up the book, examining it on all sides with chittered commentary to his fellows. He ran crab-leg claws down the columns of text, as though reading, and tapped delicately at the leather cover and spine. He held the book close to his face, the eyes bending in together in a most disturbing manner.

Then, to Kidd’s horror, he slowly and deliberately tore out a page, folded it, and crammed it between his hideous jaws.

Rigid with mortification, Kidd and Sexton could do nothing more than stand and stare round-eyed as the Martian chewed and swallowed the page with an apparent attitude of careful contemplation. No London gourmand in his favorite club had ever sampled a glass of wine with such keen attention. Even the black and lidless eyes appeared to lose focus, the native seemingly concentrating on the flavor of the vellum and ink.

Sexton was nearly vibrating with rage. “That is the word of the Lord!” he spat.

Kidd, too, was offended, but not so much as Sexton, and he was keenly aware of the dozens of armed Martians who had moved in to surround them on all sides. “Easy, Doctor,” he muttered low, putting a hand on Sexton’s shoulder.

With a visible effort, Sexton calmed himself. But Kidd had to physically restrain him when the Martian tore out a second and a third page, tearing each one into smaller bits and sharing them out among the other Martians nearby.

“It seems they find the word of our Lord quite … palatable,” Kidd said as he held Sexton back with his one good arm across Sexton’s narrow chest. He himself was so stunned by the Martians’ blasphemous feast that he felt near to breaking out into a fit of hysterical giggles.

Sexton took a deep breath, then patted Kidd’s hand. Kidd released him. “Forgive them, Lord,” Sexton said, casting his eyes heavenward, “for they know not what they do.”

While the two men had been talking, the lead Martian had handed the Bible to one of the others. A third native now came forward bearing a squat glass bottle, which the leader took and presented to Sexton. Spiraling marks, possibly writing, were etched into the bottle’s surface; the contents were a deep amber in color.

Sexton and Kidd exchanged a quizzical look. It was Kidd who removed the stopper, which was made of some kind of flexible resin, and delicately sniffed the liquid within. He quirked an eyebrow, not trusting himself to speak, before tasting.

The flavor was unusual, with hints of ginger and pine, but the rich mellow burn as the liquid slid down Kidd’s throat was so familiar that a tear stung his eye.

“It’s not quite Ferintosh,” he said to Sexton, “but damn me, that is fine whisky!”

Sexton blinked, then turned and bowed to the Martian. “It seems we have a basis for commerce,” he said.

Kidd warmed his hands over a Martian prince’s fire, marveling at how very far he’d come from Newgate Prison.

Despite the difficulties of communication, the Martians had been eager to trade their goods for books, belts, and anything else made of leather. The Martian meats were palatable, though spicy and a bit gamey in flavor, and Kidd and his men had been allowed the use of a small rounded building that appeared to have been carved seamlessly from a single piece of sandstone. Sexton theorized that the “stone” was in fact merely sand fused together with the Martians’ own saliva, but Kidd tried not to think about that.

As for Sexton, he was as happy as a clam at high tide. He occupied himself studying the Martian flora and fauna, the language, and astronomy—he said he’d found that the planet had two tiny moons. He seemed perfectly content to remain here for the rest of his life.

But the ship’s stores of acceptable trade items were limited. Some of the men had had success exchanging their labor and entertainments, such as playing on the pennywhistle, for the Martian liquor and other sundries, but they couldn’t go on like this forever. Already, Kidd thought, the Martian with the hat was beginning to cast inhospitable looks upon them with his protuberant black eyes.

Kidd stood up from the fire pit and made his way across the crowded common room to where Sexton sat studying one of the Martian “books”—a long spool of thin steel etched with spindly writing. Martian steel was plentiful and much better than English steel, easily the equal of the best Spanish steel.

Sexton sat engrossed for some time before noticing Kidd’s presence. “I think this may be a verb,” he said, holding up an inscribed strip of metal.

“I have a question for you,” Kidd said. “Of natural philosophy.”

“Oh?”

“Come outside with me.”

The two of them drew cloaks about themselves—rich, soft cloaks of the brightly colored Martian fabrics—for the tiny weak sun was long vanished from the sky. The street outside was quiet and very dark, the Martians being generally stay-at-homes at night, and a million stars stared down unwinking.

“Which of them is the Earth?” Kidd asked, clouds of breath puffing from his mouth.

Sexton looked upward for a moment, then pointed. “Just beyond the eastern horizon, I believe. She should rise within the hour.”

“I see.” Kidd gazed in the indicated direction. “What would it take to get there?”

“New balloons, of course,” Sexton replied without hesitation. He’d plainly considered the question in detail already, if only as an intellectual exercise. “But there’s plenty of this fine fabric available.” He rubbed his cloak between two fingers. “Food and water can be obtained from the natives, likewise coal to heat air for the ascent. The biggest problem is replacing the masts.”

“Aye, the masts.” The Martians did not seem to use wood for construction at all. In this city of stone and steel, they’d seen no wood bigger than kindling.

“And repairing all the other damage from the crash. But the masts are the sticking point.” Sexton clapped Kidd on the shoulder. “Still, it’s not so bad here, eh? Now come inside. ’Tis cold.”

“In a moment,” Kidd replied.

While Sexton returned to his books, Kidd stared off to the east, as though he could will the bright blue star of Earth to rise more quickly.

Kidd grubbed through the box of knuckle-roots near the fire pit, looking for the ones that were the least scrawny and fibrous. The white, knobby roots were tough and flavorless, but the Martians too cared little for them; a hundredweight could be obtained for just a few hours’ labor. Kidd suspected the roots of being animal fodder but preferred not to inquire too deeply into the question. They were keeping him and his men alive.

The ship’s books and leather had all been eaten weeks ago, putting an end to trade for luxuries such as meat and rum and sweets. But water and wood had to be hauled on Mars as well as anywhere else, and the men, with the Earthborn muscles of able seamen, could lift and haul far more than any Martian. There were things to herd, which were nothing like sheep and yet acted very much like sheep, and the canals required constant maintenance. All this work kept them supplied with food, of a sort, and water and coal. But it was no life for a sailor.

Selecting several roots from the pile, Kidd prepared to roast them, but when he went to stoke the fire, he found the cloth basket that served as a coal scuttle empty. Kidd cursed; bad as they were when roasted, raw knuckle-roots were completely inedible. “Sexton,” he called, tossing the basket his way. “Bring us some coal from the pile, would you?”

While he waited for the coal, Kidd arranged the roots in the fire pit, bemoaning his fate. But by the time he’d placed the last root, Sexton and the coal had still not appeared. “Damn you, man,” he called over his shoulder, “what’s the delay?”

But Sexton did not reply, and was nowhere to be seen.

Sighing with exasperation at the easily distracted philosopher, Kidd rose and stalked into the next room, where he found Sexton standing by the coal pile with the half-filled basket at his feet, staring with great intensity at a lump of coal. “Surely,” Kidd snapped, “you can leave off your studies for five minutes for the sake of our supper?”

In reply, Sexton thrust the filthy thing into Kidd’s hands. “What think you of this?”

The black lump was not coal at all but wood covered in coal dust. The Martians used small fragments of wood as kindling; this lump was much bigger than those, nearly as large as a fist, but apart from that it was not unusual. “It’s wood,” Kidd said with a shrug. “What of it?”

“The rings, man! Look at the rings!”

Kidd rolled his eyes, then peered closer … and his heart began to race. “From the curvature … this must have come from a tree at least three feet in diameter.”

“Exactly!” Sexton pointed to several similar lumps in the cloth basket. “And these are the same. Yet there’s not a tree to be seen anywhere near here.” He picked up a chunk of wood and held it up between them. “We must discover their source!”

Kidd slogged to the top of a dune, surveying the horizon ahead through his telescope. “Nothing!” he called to Sexton. “Not a damned thing.”

Not awaiting a response, he headed back down the dune, his feet sending cascades of the fine, cold sand sliding toward where Sexton sat rubbing his feet.

The natural philosopher’s face showed vexation and exhaustion both. “I would have sworn that adjective he used indicated a distance of between two and ten miles.” He took a drink from his waterskin. “My water’s over half-gone. Perhaps we should turn back.”

Kidd looked back along the well-trodden track they’d followed for the past four hours, then forward to where it vanished around a curve. “You’re certain he indicated this path? And that he understood what you were looking for?”

Sexton shrugged. “It’s a pox’d difficult language.”

Kidd took a sip of water, shielding his eyes against the sun, and considered their situation. It was nearly noon, and all they’d seen in four hours of walking was endless sand and mineral formations that had once seemed exotic. Though his own waterskin was not as depleted as Sexton’s, he too was tempted to abandon this snipe hunt. Yet it was the only hope they had.

He stared out across the desert. So much like an ocean, yet red and dry and motionless. And, unlike the sea, with its constant rush of wind and wave, oppressively silent.

No … not quite silent. Could that be …?

“My feet are—” Sexton began.

“Hush!” Kidd snapped, and cut him off with a gesture.

Kidd listened hard. And heard a sound he’d not heard in many months.

Axes. Axes chopping wood. The sound had been hidden from them before by the noise of their own feet on the sand.

They hurried forward, around the curve, and soon found themselves on the edge of a canyon perhaps two hundred feet deep. They’d been only a few hundred yards from it and had not even suspected its existence. A sandy track, apparently carved from the canyon wall by Martians, switchbacked down from the desert’s surface. And at the bottom …

“My God,” Kidd said.

The bottom of the canyon was thick with trees. Enormous trees, a hundred or even a hundred and fifty feet tall, each honey-blonde trunk rose straight and smooth from the dark loamy floor to a single great tuft of foliage just below the canyon’s lip. Groups of Martians moved among them, tiny at the feet of these towering giants.

As they watched, one of the trees fell gently, slowly, to the canyon floor. The Martians leapt upon the fallen giant and began hacking it into tiny pieces with their axes.

“What in God’s name are they doing?” Kidd cried.

“The growing conditions at the bottom of this canyon must be nearly unique,” Sexton mused. “But, as we’ve seen, coal is plentiful here. Perhaps they are so accustomed to burning coal that they must cut their wood into coal-sized chunks.”

Kidd shook his head. “Prisoners of habit.”

While Kidd stared down into the canyon, Sexton paced excitedly. “I must determine how these trees survive in the midst of a desert!” he muttered. “This could be my life’s work!”

At that statement, Kidd’s eyes went wide, and his already-dry mouth grew drier still. These trees were the final piece in the puzzle of how to return to Earth, but if he returned without Sexton, he’d face the noose anew.

Furthermore, he realized, he’d grown rather fond of the silly goose.

“But Sexton,” Kidd said, placing an arm around the philosopher’s shoulders, “if you make of these trees your life’s work, who will help us to rebuild the ship? Surely there are improvements to be made in the design.”

“Surely …” Sexton said, his eyes unfocusing as he considered the question.

“And once we are airborne, we must find a new prevailing wind to bear us homeward. For this, we may require new theories of the motions of air.”

“A difficult problem indeed.” Sexton patted his pockets for his notebook.

“Consider, too, the problem of bringing the trees, whole, out from this canyon, transporting them to the ship, and raising them up as masts.”

Sexton’s head came up suddenly. “Masts?”

“Masts,” Kidd acknowledged.

“But that’s exactly what we need!” said Sexton, and laughed.

“Masts!”

“Masts!” Kidd cried, and he too burst out laughing.

The two men held hands and danced around and around, bouncing with glee high into the thin Martian air.

Mars Adventure floated fifty feet above the sand, straining against her mooring cables. Above her loomed eight vast balloons, each slightly larger than before—an enormous crazy patchwork of bright Martian colors. They had taken up nearly every yard of fabric in the city, purchased with many weeks of backbreaking labor, but both Martians and Englishmen seemed pleased with the exchange.

The new masts were astounding—straight and smooth and so very light that they’d taken only half the crew to hoist out of the canyon and fit into place. And this was not merely the lighter weight of everything on Mars … these trees, products of a tiny, dry, and alien planet, bore a wood lighter and stronger than any on Earth. They’d packed the hold with as many logs as they could cram in. “We’ll build a whole fleet of airships!” Sexton swore, “and come back for more! We’ll make our fortune with these logs!”

“Not I,” Kidd told him.

Sexton blinked in astonishment, then grinned. “Surely the famous Captain Kidd does not lack in avarice?”

Kidd returned Sexton’s grin. “Have no fears on that score. Upon my return, I expect the gratitude of a king! And with those proceeds, I intend to settle down in Scotland, my ancestral home, with all the Ferintosh I can drink.” He leaned over the taffrail, looking down upon a city full of Martians, all a-chitter with excitement to see the great ship fly. “Fare thee well, ye great crabs!” he cried, then turned to the bosun. “Cast off!”

The men leapt into action, and, a moment later, with a great soaring bound, Mars Adventure sprang away into the blue Martian sky.