Ishmael gave no orders, not even to hold the ships steady. Their original order would stand until he countermanded it.
It was evident by then that if the ships did not shift course, they would sail above the Beast at a height of two hundred feet. And at the rate at which the Beast was climbing, it would be able to seize their ships long before the ships got to the other end. Even if the vessels increased their gas, they could not gain altitude as swiftly as the Beast. Nor was their admiral giving orders to feed the bladder-animals.
Namalee and Poonjakee were sweating, though the air was cold. The steersmen, also pale and wet, were biting their lips. None of them, as Ishmael knew, lacked courage. But this situation was something they had never experienced, and all their infant-born terrors were crawling out on the surface of their nerves, scratching and rasping.
Ishmael himself was far from being easy. This creature was indeed a kraken of the atmosphere but far more fearsome and deadly. It generated in him a feeling that something dark and unnatural had come from the evil areas of his own mind. It was a nightmare that had no right to exist in the flesh. Awakening should dissolve it, just as an evil dream evaporates when its generator awakens.
But this, despite its unnaturalness to Ishmael, was a natural being in a nightmare world. It was what the End of Time should spawn.
Ishmael remembered Ahab's words about a "six-inch blade to reach the fathom-deep life of the whale." Was he not trusting too much to the weapons he carried in these ships, weapons which might not have the devastating effect he had hoped for on this strange and largely unknown creature? If he, Ishmael, was wrong, then he had led all those who trusted him into death.
He looked back. The Booragangahns had quartered, probably with the intention of eventually beating to the wind.
Then Ishmael jumped, as did everybody on the bridge and, undoubtedly, every soul in the fleet.
A series of loud explosions broke loose from the monster. Flesh peeled back to reveal large round holes and the edges of some hard black substance, all looking very much like cannons. They spouted smoke and flame and noise, and the Beast moved swiftly to starboard. Then more smoke and noise, this time from the rear of the Beast, and it moved swiftly ahead into the wind.
Both fleets were above the center of the monster.
The purplish mass rose with sickening velocity as more explosions came. Ishmael could not see the smoke or flame from these because they came from the underside of the Beast. They were being used, like rockets, to propel the Beast upward.
Ishmael had not expected such demonic speed. The Beast was so huge and billowing that it had looked murderous but unwieldy. Now he saw why ships that ventured too closely, accidentally or otherwise, were so often lost. And he knew then that the Booragangahns, when luring the Beast to their enemies, must have paid a heavy price.
He rapped out his order and Poonjakee relayed it. Signals flashed; the sailors recovered their startled nerves and obeyed. The hatches in the bottom of the hull were opened, and the business of lighting the fuses and dropping the bombs through the hatches was begun.
The blood-red tentacles, however, were uncoiling. Their lower parts were lumpy, which meant, Ishmael supposed, that they were encased here and there with small gas bladders. This enabled the lower parts to unreel to at least fifty feet. The remaining portions were still coiled, waiting for the moment when they could snap out like whips.
Ishmael saw the black bombs with their red fuse-tips and pale gray smoke fall toward the billowing mass. The first landed on a patch of purplish skin near the base of a tentacle. It burned and then went off with a small bang. When the smoke had cleared, a large hole was revealed. There were great empty spaces inside the Beast crisscrossed by fragile lines of flesh or tissue. One egg-shaped end of a bladder protruded beyond a flap of skin.
The second bomb to burst was a firebomb. Its flaming oil spread out over the skin, burned it away and dropped into the interior. The interconnecting tissues and dark veins and arteries -- or so Ishmael classified them -- burned away. A bladder abruptly caught fire. And then the bladder exploded, and smoke and flames enveloped that part of the Beast directly below them.
Ishmael had not known what type of gas the Beast generated in its bladder until that moment. No one knew; everybody had taken it for granted that the gas was nonflammable, as it was in the bladders of the ships.
Ishmael was not as happy at the discovery as he should have been, because the first of the tentacles had reached the ship. They gripped the masts and arms of the lower mast and went in through the open port where several boats were kept, and shortly thereafter other tentacles followed. These writhed around the area, found no sailors -- they had all retreated before the tentacles got near the ship -- and wrapped themselves around beams, girders, catwalks and masts.
The vessel was pulled downward as more tentacles gripped it. Smoke from the burning Beast poured into the open parts of the Roolanga and quickly filled it. The sailors, coughing, eyes streaming, fell at their posts, though some stumbled up ladders to the higher levels.
The bombardiers continued to light fuses and throw out the bombs. These exploded and sent oil spraying everywhere, some of it actually touching the ship. But the fire burned away only the skin it touched and then was extinguished.
Suddenly the ship rose. Its breakaway was so violent that many were thrown to the deck, and some with precarious holds on kdders or catwalks were thrown through the air and out through the thin skin of the hull or through the open spaces.
The fires had burned away the bases of the tentacles gripping the Roolanga.
The unloading of half of its bombs had lightened the ship considerably. It kept on rising until it had cleared the smoke. Ishmael saw that his other vessels had dropped many of their bombs, too. The Beast was burning in a hundred places; even as he watched, he saw another gas bladder explode with a violence that lifted the ship above it. The explosion also tore loose the tentacles that had gripped the lower mast, and that ship rose.
The Booragangahn fleet was enwrapped in tentacles. Each ship had been pulled downward until it was half-enfolded in billowing flesh. The lower masts had pierced the body of the Beast, but evidently this did not perturb it. Its tentacles were in every opening of every vessel, and several vessels were broken open when the Beast discharged some of its "cannons." Other tentacles poured into the shattered hulls.
Ishmael transmitted more orders to his fleet. Those that had gotten away were to descend and help their trapped fellows. His own ship tacked and discharged gas at the same time, sliding about fifty feet above one of their vessels, the Mowkurree, which had not been able to pull loose. More bombs were dropped, some of which exploded so close to the ship they tore apart beams and walkways or started fires on the skin. But the Mowkurree was released. Its fore lifted up first, the tentacles sliding off and then collapsing from it, and then the aft lifted, and the ship was free.
More great bladders exploded. A Booragangahn ship was released when an explosion blew up a part of the Beast immediately by the ship. It rose at an angle and then rolled over on its side. Its starboard masts had been broken off by the blast, and the weight of the port masts was tilting it. Little figures fell onto the Beast fifty feet below. Some sailors had lost their holds when the vessel rolled.