The two masts, one on top and one on the bottom, were swiveled to the horizontal by a joint near the butt and locked in place. The masts and yardarms were very slim and very light sections of bones fitting tightly into one another. After the boat was cast loose the crewmen rose, crouching. One reached down through a hole in the bottom of the hull, which was only a thin transparent skin, and unlocked the joint. Then, pulling on lines, they straightened the mast out and relocked it at the joint. The yardarm of the fore-and-aft rig was unlocked, straightened properly and relocked.
The upper mast was shorter and its sail smaller to ensure that it was more than counterbalanced by the mast beneath. After it was raised, the sail of the undermast was unfurled by lines attached to it. There were many small holes on the skin of the bottom so that a sailor could reach through to do his work. These had to be watched for when a crewman walked around the boat, but there was little walking once the sails were set.
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.
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.