outsized gnat. A rattling and clattering unlike any found in nature accompanied the hiss.
The compressed-air catapult threw the aeroplane off the deck of the Dakota. Inside a space of fifty feet, it had accelerated the flying machine up past forty miles an hour, plenty fast enough for the aeroplane to keep on flying and not fall into the Pacific.
Carsten stood for a moment, watching the aeroplane gain altitude. He shook his head in bemusement. It was such a flimsy thing, wood and canvas and wire, a mere nothing when measured against the armour plate and great guns of a battleship. But if it spotted the enemy where the bulge of the earth still hid them from the Dakota, it made a formidable tool of war in its own right.
Up at the bow, the catapult crew were taking their toy apart and stowing it so it wouldn't be in the way if the guns of the Dakota had to go into action. That didn't take long. They had an interesting job up there, and people seemed to fuss more about aeroplanes with every passing month.
'People can fuss all they want,' Sam said. 'Let's see an aeroplane sink a ship. Then I'll sit up and take notice. In the meantime, guns are plenty good enough for me.'
He worked away for a while. Then horns blared and voices started shouting through megaphones. Sam sprinted toward the forward starboard sponson, one running sailor among hundreds. ' Battle stations!' officers and senior ratings shouted, over and over again. 'Battle stations!'
When he was working out in the open, Carsten hadn't too much minded the warm, muggy air. He would have enjoyed it, had the sun not pounded down on him. Down below in the sponson, the sun wasn't baking him. In that hot, cramped place, though, he felt as if he were being steamed like a pot of beans in the galley.
'This the real thing?' he asked Hiram Kidde.
The gunner's mate shrugged. 'Damned if I know,' he answered. 'Could be, though. That new wireless they've put on board the aeroplanes, it lets 'em pass on the news before they come back to us.'
'Yeah,' Carsten said. 'Wish we would have had a set like that last year, when we were steaming for the Sandwich Islands. Would have come in mighty handy, spying out the harbour and everything.'
Kidde nodded. 'Sure would. But the new aeroplanes got bigger engines, so they can carry more'n the ones we brought with us last year, and the new wireless sets are lighter than the ones they had then, too.'
'Things keep changing all the damn time.' Carsten could not have said for sure whether that was praise or complaint. 'Hell, one of these days, 'Cap'n,' maybe even battleships'll be obsolete.'
'Not any time soon.' Kidde set an affectionate hand on the breech of the five-inch gun whose master he was. But then he looked thoughtful. 'Or maybe you're right. Who the devil can say for sure? You're just a pup; the way it looks to you, the Navy hasn't changed a whole hell of a lot since you've been in. Me, though, I joined in 1892. An armored cruiser nowadays'd run rings around what they called battleships back then, and blow 'em to hell and gone without breaking a sweat. You look back on things, they ain't the same as they used to be. Nobody ever heard of aeroplanes when I joined up, that's for damn sure. So who really does know what things'll look like twenty, thirty years from now?'
'I was thinking about aeroplanes when we launched ours,' Carsten said.
'Probably thinking when you should have been working,' Kidde said with a laugh-he'd been in the Navy a long time, all right.
'Who, me?' Sam answered, drolly innocent. Kidde laughed again. Carsten went on, 'I was thinking how good they were for spotting, but that they couldn't really do anything to a ship. What you're saying, though, makes me wonder. If their engines keep getting bigger, maybe they'll be able to haul big bombs or even torpedoes one of these days.'
'Yeah, maybe.' Kidde frowned. 'I wouldn't like to be on the receiving end of something like that, I tell you. Torpedoes from submersibles, they pack more punch than a twelve-inch shell, even if they don't have the range. But you can outrun a submersible. You can't outrun an aeroplane.'
'You can shoot an aeroplane down, though, a lot easier than you can get at a submersible when it's under the water,' said Luke Hoskins, sticking an oar into the conversation.
Before either Hiram Kidde or Sam could answer the other shell-heaver, the all-clear sounded. Carsten let out a sigh of relief. 'Nothing but a drill,' he said.
'Got to treat it like the real thing, though,' Kidde replied. 'You never can tell when it's gonna be.'
Despite the all-clear, the gun crew stayed at their station till the starboard gunnery officer poked his head into the sponson and dismissed them. Carsten went back to the upper deck at about a quarter of the speed at which he'd run to his gun. When you'd just wondered whether you were about to go into battle, fighting rust didn't seem so important any more.
A couple of hours after the all-clear was given, the aeroplane splashed down into the water not far from the Dakota. Before long, the battleship's crane hauled it out of the Pacific, only a few feet away from where Sam was working. He waved to the pilot as the fellow came level with the upper deck of the ship.
The pilot waved back, a big grin on his face. 'Always good to come home,' he called. 'Gets lonesome out there when all you can see is ocean.'
'I believe it.' As far as Carsten was concerned, you had to be crazy to go up there in one of those contraptions in the first place. If your engine quit when you were a hundred miles from anywhere, what did you do? Oh, maybe you could send a wireless message for help, and maybe they'd find you if you did, but did you want to count on that? Not so far as Sam could see, you didn't. The ocean was a hell of a big place; five years' sailing on it had taught him that. An aeroplane bobbing in the chop wasn't even a flyspeck on its immensity.
Not long after the aeroplane was hauled out of the ocean, one of the cruisers with the fleet, the Avenger, sent up a kite balloon. As always, the hydrogen-filled canvas bag put Sam in mind of an outsized frankfurter that had escaped its roll and floated up into the sky. From his distance, he couldn't see the cable that moored the balloon to its mother ship. He had a hard time making out the wicker basket that held the observer below the balloon and the wind cups that stabilized the gasbag as an ordinary kite's tail did for it.
Fleet orders were to have either an aeroplane or a kite balloon aloft as nearly continuously as possible. Balloons, of course, couldn't fly away from the U.S. ships the way aeroplanes could, but, floating four thousand feet above the fleet, could see a lot farther than lookouts on even the tallest observation masts.
The fellow up there had a telephone link to the Avenger. If he spotted any thing, he'd pass on the news and they'd haul him down as fast as they could. A kite balloon would stay up fine at cruising speed. You couldn't keep it up, though, if you needed to go flat out, the way you did when you had a battle to fight.
Carsten was glad to watch the sausage floating up there. It felt like a life insurance policy to him. If the Royal Navy or the Japanese spotted the Americans before the U.S. fleet saw them, that meant trouble, big trouble. You wanted to be in position to do what you intended to do, and do it first. What had happened at Pearl Harbor would have taught that to anyone foolish enough to doubt it.
Sam waved to the balloonist, as he had to the aeroplane pilot. Unlike the pilot, the balloonist didn't see him. That was all right. The balloonist had more important things to look for than one friendly sailor.
'And you know what?' Carsten muttered to himself. 'I hope to God he doesn't see any of them.'
George Enos peered out over the rail of the Mercy at the broad Atlantic all around. The Mercy flew not only the Confederate flag but also that of the Red Cross. It also had the Red Cross prominently displayed on white squares to port and starboard. Any submarine that got a good look at it would, with luck, sheer off.
With luck. Those were the key words. With luck, the Swamp Fox never would have spotted the Ripple in the first place, and Enos' ordeal in Confederate prison camps wouldn't have started. He hoped his luck was better now than it had been then.
There, in the east-not a star, but a plume of smoke. He turned to Fred Butcher and said, 'That's the Spanish ship-I hope.'
'Yeah, I hope so, too,' the Ripple's mate answered. 'If it's not a Spanish ship, then it belongs to… somebody else.' In these waters, somebody else might be the USA or Germany or England or France or the Confederate States. Maybe whoever it was would let the Mercy go on its way anyhow- ships from other nations performed similar duties, and wanted to keep reciprocal good treatment-but maybe it wouldn't, too.
'They were saying, before we set out, that ships from Argentina don't go into the open waters of the North Atlantic any more,' Enos said. 'They scurry across to Dakar in Africa where the ocean's narrowest, and then hug the coast the rest of the way up to England.'
' England would starve without that Argentine grain and beef,' Butcher said. 'I wish they would starve, but
