They struck in an irregular pattern all around the ship. Four or five were very near misses but there was not one direct hit. Great waterspouts leaped from the surface of the sea. A sheet of flame seemed to run around the horizon. It was a queer, dancing, intensely brilliant, blue flame. It looked like the discharge from some huge electric arc.
Even above the roar of the barrage, Craig heard the tearing sound. Somehow it reminded him of somebody tearing a piece of cloth. Only, to make a sound as loud as this, it would have to be a huge piece of cloth and the person tearing it would have to be a giant.
The blue light became more intense. It flared to a brilliance that was intolerable.
At the same time, the sun jumped!
"I'm going nuts!" the fleeting thought was in Craig's mind. He wondered if a bomb had struck the ship. Was this the nightmare that comes with death? Had he died in the split fraction of a second and was his disintegrating mind reporting the startling fact of death by telling him that the sun was jumping?
The sun couldn't jump.
It had jumped. It had been almost directly overhead. Now it was two hours down the western sky.
Tons of water were cascading over the bow of the ship. Waves were leaping over the deck. The Idaho seemed to have sunk several feet. Now her buoyancy was asserting itself and she was trying to rise out of the sea. She was fighting her way upward, rising against the weight of the water.
A wind was blowing. There had been almost no wind but now a gale of hurricane proportions was howling through the superstructure of the ship.
A heavy sea was running. The sea had been glassy smooth. Now it was covered with white caps.