“All right. What’s my noon bearing?”
The men were keeping close track of the Bree’s position by means of the radiation from the vision sets, although it was quite impossible to see the ship from beyond the atmosphere with any telescope, and the meteorologist had no trouble in giving the captain the bearing he wanted. The sails were adjusted accordingly and the Bree moved off on the new course.
The weather was still clear, though the wind was strong. The sun arced across the sky time after time without much change in either of these factors; but gradually a high haze began to appear and thicken, so that the sun changed from a golden disc to a rapidly moving patch of pearly light. Shadows became less definite, and finally vanished altogether as the sky became a single, almost uniformly luminous dome. This change occurred slowly, over a period of many days, and while it was going on the miles kept slipping beneath the Bree’s rafts.
They were less than a hundred miles from the islands when the minds of the crew were taken off the matter of the approaching storm by a new matter. The color of the sea had shifted again, but that bothered no one; they were as used to seeing it blue as red. No one expected signs of land at this distance, since the currents set generally across their course and the birds which warned Columbus did not exist on Mesklin. Perhaps a tall cumulous cloud, of the sort which so frequently forms over islands, would be visible for a hundred miles or more; but it would hardly show against the haze that covered the sky. Barlennan was sailing by dead reckoning and hope, for the islands were no longer visible to the Earthmen overhead.
Nevertheless, it was in the sky that the strange event occurred.
From far ahead of the Bree, moving with a swooping, dipping motion that was utterly strange to the Mesklinites and would have been perfectly familiar to the human beings, there appeared a tiny dark speck. No one saw it at first, and by the time they did it was too near and too high to be in the field of view of the vision sets. The first sailor to notice it gave vent to the usual hoot of surprise, which startled the human watchers on Toorey but was not particularly helpful to them. All they could see as their wandering attentions snapped back to the screens was the crew of the Rree, with the front end of every caterpillarlike body curled upward as its owner watched the sky.
“What is it, Barl?” Lackland called instantly.
“I don’t know,” the captain replied. “I thought for an instant it might be your rocket down looking for the islands to guide us better, but it’s smaller and very different in shape.”
“But it’s something flying?”
Tes. It does not make any noise like your rocket, however. I’d say it was being blown by the wind, except that it’s moving too smoothly and regularly and in the wrong direction. I don’t know how to describe it; it’s wider than it is long, and a little bit Wee a mast set cross wise on a spar. I can’t get closer than that.”