He worked as hard as anybody and harder than most. His hours for sleeping were not as many as he wished. It was difficult at first to sleep during the long day, when he knew that there was light to work by. The original cycle of eight hours of sleep and sixteen of waking still conducted men's lives. The lengthening of day and night had not interfered with that rhythm. These people were born to the practice of sleeping part of the daytime and working part of the nighttime. He found it a practice to which he, accustomed to strange hours of on-watch and off-watch, soon became adjusted.
The time came when the great ship was built and loaded with supplies and the cargo of fire-oil bombs. The ten men who were to crew it said goodbye and the mammoth vessel, the Woobarangu, lifted slowly, its sails spread, its goal the city of Booragangah thousands of miles to the northwest.
Four of the whaling vessels followed it five days later, that is, twenty of the days of Earth when its sun was white-hot. Ishmael commanded the Roolanga, the flagship. They were headed for a group of mountains which Ishmael thought had once been the Hawaiian Islands, though he could not be sure. In all the millions of years, possibly a billion or more, islands must have sunk and new ones risen and in turn been eroded to nothing and other islands taken their place. And all this long before the oceans dried up.
Sailing at an average of ten knots ground speed, the fleet could have reached its destination in about two hundred hours or two days and nights. But Ishmael had ordered that supplies be very short, since he wanted to use all the space he could for bombs and weapons. Thus, it was necessary on the second day to hunt whales to add to the food supply. And they were held up again when they caught up with the giant Woobarangu. They trimmed their sails to keep pace with it. When they were several hundred miles outside Booragangah, they began to circle, waiting until another long night began.
At the same time, they kept a sharp watch for enemy sails, since whaling ships could be coming from any direction this close to the city.
The giant red disk finally dropped, its weak rays turning the distant top of the mountain that was their goal to a purplish point.
The captain of the other ships had boarded Ishmael's for the last conference. Once more, he made sure that each understood his part. Then they drank a toast in shahamchiz and departed. They looked pale but determined. The existence of their nation depended upon them, and their nation could not afford to lose even one of them, no matter if all the gods were restored. Moreover, if they were taken alive, they would suffer horrible torture. The enemy knew how to drag out agony and put off the end of it as the sun knew how to drag out the light.
As if stuck in the throat of night, the sun hung on the horizon. Then it was swallowed and in a moonless night the ships ceased circling and beat to the wind toward the distant spire. After an hour the top of the moon rose leprously above the east horizon and quickly flooded the dark with a bright illumination. It shone dully on the sails, which had been dyed black, and on the hull, also black. A second deck had been added to the bridge. This projected above the top of the hull and increased wind resistance, but it couldn't be helped. The captain and the steersmen had to see where they were going.
At an estimated hundred miles from Booragangah, all except the flagship began to circle upward. They would rise as high as they could, their crews breathing from wooden flasks of compressed air which Ishmael had designed. They would then sail to a point above their destination and begin circling again. After an hour, as regulated by the sand clocks Ishmael had made, they would descend. They would do this slowly until they saw the signal, after which they would release gas swiftly. The great Woobarangu would discharge its gas even more swiftly.
The Roolanga continued straight ahead, steadily descending. When it was about twenty feet above the tops of the shivering vegetation, it leveled out. Long before the other ships had reached the top of their spiral, it was sliding along quietly and slowly into the wind, its sails furled, its lower mast drawn up. Grappling hooks dragged through the jungle, making more noise than Ishmael cared for. But eventually the hooks caught, and men swarmed down the lines and secured them to plants.
Ishmael had put on his dark clothes and blacked his face. A moment later, Namalee, similarly dressed and darkened, joined him. Ishmael gave his final instructions to Pavashtri, the first mate, who would be in command while Ishmael was gone. Then he and the girl went down a ladder to the main walkway and along it to a whaling boat port. There were six others who would go with them in the boat, since this had been built especially large. It strained against its moorings, the bladders having been fed earlier until they had made enough gas for a swift rising. The crew climbed aboard and strapped themselves in. Each wore in a sheath a long sharp knife made of a bamboo-like plant. Their short spears and short stout bows and quivers of arrows were in leather cases on the bottom of the boat. The bows were something that Ishmael had had to force on the Zalarapamtrans. They knew about them but despised them for some reason lost in their past. Men did not use them, they said. Ishmael had replied that in his time -- stretching time a little but for a good cause -- bows were very manly indeed. The point was that they were deadly and the pathetically tiny party invading Booragangah needed all the firepower it could get. Ishmael knew this was true because the gods had said so.
By this time, Ishmael was not above telling them that he knew what their gods wanted of them. He acted as if he were receiving divine commands by thought transmission, and the others began to act as if he were. Perhaps they did so because they wanted to believe that their gods had not entirely deserted them.
There were no lights permitted aboard, of course, so the signal to release all six boats simultaneously was passed by yanking on a system of lines rigged for the occasion through the ship.
The lines restraining the boats were slashed, and sailors shoved the boats out before they would rise and get stuck in the hull. The side of a boat bumped against the upper part of the wide port as it shot up. A sailor was feeding the amorphous mostly-mouth beasts at the necks of the bladder, and these were manufacturing the gas to increase the buoyancy even as the boat ascended.
The moon had passed below the western horizon before the Roolanga had entered the final fifty miles of her journey. The immense shelf above placed the small boats in shadow. The front of the mountain, a vertical cliff here, went by at a distance of several hundred yards. The boats, their sails folded and the masts and arms shipped and folded, rose at the mercy of the wind. This was slight at this point, so the boats drifted about half a mile before they were just below the overhang. Karkri, in charge of maneuvering, began to let the gas out. The other boats also slowed their ascent. The men in charge were born to the air. Almost without thinking, they estimated to an inch the amount of buoyancy to lose. The top of the fat oval ring that formed the outer part of the boat bumped against the stone. The people in it were stretched out flat on their faces, but even so outcrops scraped against the backs of some. Then the crews turned over on their backs and propelled the boat slowly outward by reaching up and grabbing the rough stone and pushing.
It was slow and laborious work, since the shelf projected for a half mile from where they had first struck it. And they could not go swiftly if they had wished to. It was a matter of pulling and hoping the scraping of the hull against the rough stone would not abrade through the skin. The skin was tough but very thin for the sake of lightness.