Karkri had unfolded the enormous rudders, horizontal and vertical, used to steer the ship. He gave it over to the steersman and crawled as close to the central part of the boat as he could. In this light vessel, balance was important, and every shift of weight had to be carefully performed.
The sails caught the wind, and the boat forged swiftly ahead, overtaking the enormous mother ship even though it was departing at an angle from it. Ishmael, as the green hand, tended to the care of the upper sail. Koojai watched the other sail through the clear skin of the boat, ready to pull or release lines as ordered. If Koojai failed to receive an order because the harpooner was too busy or incapacitated, Koojai would carry out the operation on his own. It was also necessary for him to keep an eye on the inexperienced man and to make sure that he carried out his functions at the same time. It would never do to swing the upper boom one way and the lower another.
Karkri, having secured himself in the seat at the bow, then told his crew that they were out for air sharks, too.
"We need meat, men. Meat to feed us and the bladder-creatures. Even if we killed every one of the thirty giants in the pod ahead of us, we still would not have enough. So when the sharks come nosing around to tear at our quarry, we will tear at them."
The boat passed the ship. Ishmael saw Namalee standing on a catwalk on the starboard side, and he smiled at her. She smiled back and then she disappeared.
Ishmael saw that the bow of the ship was now opened and asked Koojai about it.
"When the ship enters the brit-cloud, it will act like a wind whale," Koojai said. "The tiny creatures will billow into the funnel-like opening, and they will be caught in nets and reaped. They are hard on the teeth if a man tries to crunch them raw, but cooked they become soft. They make a very nutritious and passably palatable soup."
There were four other boats out. One was teamed with Karkri's, and it sailed about a quarter of a mile to the north on a parallel course with his. The common quarry was a leviathan the color of a ripe plum. Koojai said that it was a bull, and it was the rear sentinel of the pod. It rolled from side to side and traced an invisible wiggly line on the horizontal plane as it tried to keep all four boats in its sight. Then it was within the red cloud, and a moment later Ishmael's boat plunged after it. But the crew had placed goggles over their eyes and wrapped thin skins around their mouths. Thousands of tiny parachute shapes, each about the size of a pumpkin seed, pelted Ishmael. They broke up against the hard skin of his goggles and smeared them with red. He had to keep wiping away at them to see anything, though there was nothing to see even when they were clean.
The impacts felt as if enormous hands were gently patting him all over his body. He turned his head away and saw that Koojai had slipped off his mouth-protection for a moment. He collected a mouthful of the red creatures and then replaced the mask. After he had chewed gently for a minute, red juice trickled from the corners of his lips.
Presently Karkri ordered that everybody should scoop out with one hand the piles of tiny bodies collecting on the bottom of the boat. Ishmael, keeping one hand free for handling the lines, scraped up handful after handful and cast them to one side. But others fell in a reddish snowstorm and piled up, and the boat became sluggish.
There were spaces within the cloud free of the brit, however, for some reason of which no one had informed Ishmael. The illumination within was like twilight, and the monster ahead had become quite black. There was also less wind, and the sails did not belly out so fully. This loss of speed was matched by that of the whales, who had gained weight while going through the cloud. They had taken on great cargos of the brit, which were being distributed through the stomachs looped like spaghetti strings along the bones of the tail.
Ishmael dipped his hand again and again until the brit, like seeds, had been scattered outward. By then the two boats were about two hundred feet apart and about three hundred feet behind the great tail-fins. There they stayed, unable to catch up with the beast, and then they dived into the semisolid cloud again.
Once more they emerged into a cleared space, as if coming from a forest into a meadow. This time they found themselves between two of the monsters, the second meal having slowed most of the pod. And, after being bailed out again, the boats increased their speed. Soon Ishmael's was even with the whale's head and drawing up to the eye, red as the heart of a forge, big and round as a factory chimney, yet seeming small in the Brobdingnagian skull.
The beast rolled forty-five degrees each way on its axis, striving to learn if there were other hunters below or above it. Then it steadied and sailed on, though it could have evaded its pursuers by discharging a ballast of water or loosing gas. It would not if it followed the age-old ways of its ancestors; a whale never seemed to learn that a lance would fly out for the hole in the skull about ten feet back of the eye.
Karkri stood up, his feet shoved under straps on the floor. He raised his goggles and he checked again the coiling of the line around the fore post. Then he raised his free hand, the other holding the long thin bone shaft with the long thin bone head, and he made a short chopping movement.
Koojai stood up also. He twisted the end of a short stick of polished brown wood and then hurled it into the air straight up. It turned over and over, high above the upper mast, high above the head of the beast. Almost at the same time, a similar stick appeared on the other side of the head. Both exploded at one end. Smoke curled out in streamers that described circles as the sticks, still rotating, began to fall.
The twisting of one end had broken off a chemical which flowed into another and set off a generation of gas. This ruptured the thin end and, with the inrush of air, the chemicals began to burn.
The sticks were the signals that the boats were ready. Whoever threw the first stick waited until the second gave its signal before taking action.
Karkri balanced himself, rocking a little, the floor giving way to each shift of weight and the boat also rocking. Then he hurled the lance and the line, thin almost to the point of invisibility, followed. The shaft tore through the skin of the beast and disappeared.
Karkri had sunk to one knee after the throw. Now he fell back and grabbed the strap and buckled its wooden tongue to hold him fast to the bow position. The line whirled off a spindle as the beast loosed from its underside several tons of silvery water. It rose swiftly, rotating its wing-sails so that they would present the least surface to the air during its ascent.
Ishmael had but one chance to look at the leviathan, and then he was busy furling the sail. Koojai worked to draw up the sail of the undermast. The rudderman waited for the jerk that would either snatch the craft upward or break the line.
Karkri waited with his bone knife in hand. He could do nothing now but hang on until the beast got tired, but he must be alert for the situation that would require cutting of the line.
Ishmael tied up the sail and secured the boom. He looked upward. The whale was dwindling, though it was still huge. The other boat was even with them, its crew waiting tensely for the first jerk of the line. The harpooner turned his dark face and flashed white teeth at Karkri.
The line raced outward and upward from the whistling spindle, which leaned forward a little on the hinge at its lowest end. Abruptly, the spindle stopped, and the nose of the boat turned upward, and then the boat was rising. Though the line looked fragile enough for Ishmael to pull it apart with his hands, it held. Together, the two boats soared.
The wind whale was almost two hundred yards above them. Below, the red cloud drifted by. The Roolanga was hidden in it for a moment and then it emerged from the western side, beating against the wind. The other boats were a mile to the east and somewhat below, also being dragged upward by a beast.
The wind whistled through the rigging. The air became colder and the sky darker. Their heads grew light, and they had to suck in deep breath. Far below, the Roolanga was a stick with wings.
Karkri, despite the weakness caused by the thin a
ir, was winding the spindle with a stick he had inserted through a hole. It was now necessary that the boats be drawn as closely as possible to the animal before he decided to dive. Rising, he could not jerk the line nearly as violently as he would when he loosed the gas from the bladders and upended and fell head-foremost. And so Karkri and the harpooner in the other boat worked as swiftly as they could. And when they could not move an arm, and their breaths came so strongly that it seemed they must burn their throats, they secured the spindle and crawled aft. Ishmael relinquished his post to Karkri and took up the task. Though he was larger and more heavily muscled, he did not last as long as Karkri. If they had been at sea level, where he had spent most of his life, he might have surpassed the little brown man. But here, in the upper reaches to which Karkri was accustomed, Ishmael's breath gave out and his arms felt as if he were convalescing from a long illness.
Koojai, grinning at Ishmael, crawled past him to take his turn. Then the steersman gave up his post to Karkri, and after a while Karkri was working again. Ishmael took his second turn, lasting a shorter time than the first. By the third turn of duty, he felt as if he could not crawl to the bow, let alone turn the spindle, which now seemed to have rusted tight. But he went up the almost vertical slope of the deck, using the holes in it as a ladder, and strapped himself in and strove mightily to make a few turns. He succeeded, locked the spindle, and crawled back. Once he looked back, and he wished that he had not. Where was the Roolanga?
The boats had drawn up steadily until they were now about thirty feet behind the gigantic fin-sails. Karkri called a halt then. If the whale dived now, he could not put too sudden a strain on the lines.
Ishmael's heart would not stop pounding, and his breath sawed in and out. The whale was getting dim; was this the prelude to the fuzziness of mind, the sometimes suicidal actions resulting from the drunkenness of the heights? He hoped that the others, who were better able to live in this poverty of atmosphere, would watch over him. Perhaps. . .
He came fully to his senses with the air rushing by and the sky suddenly not quite so dark. The boat was tipped almost vertically downward. The dead sea sparkled in the light of the red sun; the Roolanga was directly below and seemed destined to be struck headlong by the beast.
Indeed, this had happened before, though never, according to the sailors, by design. The whale sometimes miscalculated its vectors and struck a ship. And when that happened the ship was lucky to stay in one piece.
They shot within fifty feet of the Roolanga. Ishmael saw the men staring out at them from behind the transparent skin and in the open spaces. Some heads were also sticking up out of cockpits on the upper deck, or top, of the vessel. Some waved; others joined their hands together and bowed forward, praying to the lesser god of the ship and to Zoomashmarta that this dive end safely for their fellows.
Though several minutes must have passed, they seemed seconds. The earth spread outward; the shores of the sea shot away; and then there was nothing but water below.
Ishmael remembered how the whale had so successfully smacked the boat against the earth when he and Namalee watched. That happened seldom, the sailors had said. But it did happen.
Usually the whale ended the dive and began rising with plenty of room to spare for the boats swinging behind it. Say, twenty feet or so. Yes, it was scary. Even the oldest hand became frightened when this happened, unless you were talking of Old Bharanhi.
Old Bharanhi was the Paul Bunyan of the sailors of the air, and he was never frightened. He had lived long ago, when men were giants, and. . .
With an explosion, the giant wing-sails snapped out from the beast's side, where they had been tightly folded. The starboard wing narrowly missed striking the harpoon line. The whale checked its speed, and the boat gained on it. There was nothing for Karkri to do. To have tried to haul in even more line would have meant being caught in the middle of a turn, and the unlocked spindle would run out the whole length of line. The length of the arc the boat would then describe as the whale turned upward would be deadly.
Ishmael understood now why that first boat had crashed. The crew had not been able to haul up the boat to the animal as closely as they wished.
Koojai, behind him, shrieked something. Perhaps it was a prayer, though it was considered bad form to say anything beyond what duty required, and then the forward part of the boat was snapped upward with a force that drove Ishmael's thighs against the strap and sent a pain shooting across his back.
The sea charged them and then suddenly sprang aside. They were in the sky; then they were swinging back toward the sea.
On the second swing, Ishmael saw why Koojai had cried out. The other whale, also coming up out of the dive, was heading for them.
Apparently it saw that they were going to collide, for it rotated its wings to present a fully resistant surface to the air. It slowed and dipped, but not quite enough. Its head struck the other whale just back of its head, and the skin and the fragile bone of Ishmael's whale crumpled under the impact.
The head also rammed into the line, jerking the boat and snapping the line.
Ishmael was catapulted forward, saw the plum-colored skin expand out before him, hit it head-first, went through it like an arrow, struck a number of things -- organs and bones, probably -- was turned on his back, while still falling, and went through the skin on the other side or the underpart. He could never be sure. He was half-conscious and half-aware that he was falling. The two behemoths were blurs above him; another and smaller blur might have been one of the boats.
He did not remember striking the water, and that he did awake testified that he had fallen in feet-first and straight up. He was choking with the saltiness in his throat and nose, and he was fighting to get his head above the surface.
Then his head cleared the heavy liquid, and a hundred yards away he saw something he never expected to see again, though he would never forget it. The black coffin floated on top of the water as if it were on the Styx and carrying Queequeg slowly, dawdling with the certainty that time did not count now, toward the other shore.
A shadow flashed by. Beyond the coffin-canoe, by several hundred yards, the two whales, one entangled in the entrails of the other, crashed.
The coffin lifted with the first wave, rolled, turned and headed toward him.
He looked for the two boats and their crews. One boat was lying bent in half on the surface about a hundred yards away. Its flatness showed that the gas bladders had been broken, but one mast, minus a boom, projected drunkenly.
He counted three heads of swimmers and several still floaters.
Above, while tacking, two boats were sinking toward them.
The coffin rushed bow-first at him. He reached up and gripped the carvings, as he had done after the sinking of the Pequod, and hauled himself onto it. The odor of pitch was still strong. After all, it had not been long, in terms of the days of his life, since the carpenter had nailed shut the lid and caulked the seams.
A man swimming toward him suddenly threw up his arms, screamed, and went down under the surface.
It was evident that he had not dived. And even if, for instance, he had suffered a heart attack, he was not going to sink. He would have floated.
Something had pulled him under. After a few minutes, Ishmael knew that it was keeping the man under. Up until then, Ishmael had taken it for granted that the seas were empty of life. He still could not believe that any fish existed in this poisonously salty element. The predator must be an air-breather.
Ishmael shouted at the other men, telling them what had happened. They began to pull themselves toward the shore, and he began to paddle the coffin-buoy. As he did so, he felt a tingling in the hands, born of his fear that something would tear off a hand as it dipped into the water.
But no such thing happened, and the other swimmers reached the shore unhurt. They helped Ishmael pull the buoy up on the quaking shore and then they gazed out over the sea. The bodies of the floaters had
disappeared. Whatever it was that had seized the swimmer had also disposed of the corpses. Ishmael asked the sailors if they knew what prowled under the heavy sullen surfaces, and they replied that they knew nothing of the dead seas. They had never seen, or heard of, any life in them. But then they were inhabitants of the air, and they entered the dead seas only by accident.
"But leave by permission of an unseen host," Ishmael said, shivering.
The two air boats drifted in, sails furled, undermasts folded, and threw out lines which the men grabbed. They pulled the boats down and climbed aboard. Ishmael, looking back down at Queequeg's coffin, longed for it because it was his only link to home, the planet orbiting about the sun of dead Time. It also might be the only key to return, since, if a man could go ahead of time in Time, why not backtrack in Time? And it could be that the mysterious schematics carved on the lid of the coffin were in some as-yet-incomprehensible manner keys to be twisted against the tumblers of Time.
On board the ship, he requested permission to be admitted to the captain. There he asked that a boat be sent back to pick up the coffin. At first Captain Baramha was outraged at the expenditure of time and energy if this were done. But Namalee overruled his denial, and Baramha accepted her ruling without apparent resentment. This was because she said that the coffin was a religious matter, and in religion she had the final word. Ishmael did not follow her reasoning, unless she thought that the coffin was his god, but he did not ask her to clarify. He was content to have the deed; the explanation could wait.
Two boats went down, and the coffin was taken aboard and lashed down, one half supported on one boat and the other half on the second boat. The two crafts had been tied together for greater buoyancy and each had only two crewmen. Then the double-craft arose slowly, the mouth-creatures of the bladders eating triple portions of food to generate gas. Eventually, while the captain strode back and forth on his bridge, his lips moving soundlessly, the boats were drawn into the ports of the ship. The coffin was tied down in the center of gravity of the ship, and the boatmen went to work to help cut up and store the two whales that had been killed.
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