High Road
to the East
The Admiral moved around the bridge nervously, aware of the uselessness of the compass, the latest shift of the stars, and the ugly temper of the crew. He heard the sound of a sword loosened in its scabbard, and Alfonso Gomez plucked at his sleeve.
“Sir,” said Gomez, “here are the crew’s spokesmen.”
The Admiral looked up angrily. A barrel-chested crewman drifted in, accompanied by a swarthy, intense-looking man and a thin, frightened individual. The barrel-chested crewman spoke with great firmness:
“We want to go home.”
The Admiral glared at him.
“Go home! How, as paupers?”
“Alive. We want to go back now, while we can.”
“Never,” said the Admiral. “We go straight ahead.”
The intense, swarthy crewman spoke up. “Sir,” he said, “we’re loyal. We’ve come with you, though all the world says this latest venture is folly. But, sir, we have limits, and you stretch our strength too far!”
“Folly!” roared the Admiral, bringing his fist down on the rail. “What did they say the first time? The truth of my idea is plain and obvious, and if you weren’t frightened half to death by old women’s superstitions, you’d see it!”
“Sir,” said the crewman, “perhaps if you’d explain it again—?”
“It’s clear as sunlight,” said the Admiral, spreading his hand. “Look now, the earth’s a globe.” He glared at them. “Surely we don’t have to go through that again.”
“Oh, no, sir,” they said in unison, “we see that.”
“All right,” said the Admiral. “Here’s Spain, on this side. Around on the other side, here, are the Indies. And here’s Cathay. If we can trade direct with them, our fortunes are made. Bring back a shipload of pepper, for instance. —Everyone wants it, and it brings a high price.”
The crewmen’s eyes were rapt. They nodded to show they understood so far.
“All right,” said the Admiral. “Now, the Portuguese have this idea of a route around Africa. That’ll work, but why bend and wind all over the surface of creation when you can go straight!” He brought his hand out in a straight chopping motion. “Cut off all that winding and twisting. Go direct. Right to the goal!” His eyes flashed.
The crewmen looked uneasy. The intense crewman coughed apologetically. “We tried that, Admiral. It didn’t work.”
The Admiral looked pained.
The barrel-chested crewman cleared his throat. In the manner of one treading on treacherous ground, he added, “There was land in the way.”
The Admiral studied the deck. There was always this being thrown in his face. “Well,” he said irritatedly, “how was I to know that? The idea was right. All we had to do was make a little . . . correction.”
The intense crewman nodded vigorously. “That’s the part we want to hear about again. We don’t understand that. Tell us about the correction again.”
“Well,” said the Admiral, “there we were, with that long stretch of land right in the way. It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. But if we went around it, we’d be winding along a length of coastline again. It’d make the journey too long. The whole idea was to go straight!”
The room was silent as they listened.
“All right,” said the Admiral. “If you’ve got a gun, you don’t tie the bullet on a turtle and have it crawl up and down over every little bump and rise in the ground, do you? No. You shoot it straight to the mark. And if there’s an obstruction in the way, why, you just aim a little higher and loft it over the obstruction.”
There was an intense silence. No-one seemed to be breathing.
“Well,” said the Admiral, “so I just explained my new idea to the King, and kept after him till he finally gave me, for once, a ship that wasn’t worm-eaten. And then I just—well—remodeled it a little, and got a good lot of gunpowder collected, and here we are.”
“That’s it,” said the intense crewman. “We’re here. But where is here?”
“Where’s the bullet,” said the Admiral, “before it hits the mark? We’re in the air, of course.”
“We’ve been here a long time. It seems like we ought to come down, sooner or later.”
The thin, nervous-looking crewman began to whine. “I don’t see why we should stand it. First, all those terrible explosions, then that wind, and nothing but float around and plug leaks twenty hours a day. Half rations, and quarter-rations, and what good will it do anyway? Maybe we’ll never make it and we’ll break to pieces on the mountains. Or maybe we’re over already, and right now we’re down on the bottom of the sea and we’ll NEVER COME UP!”
“That’s nonsense,” snapped the Admiral. “If we were in the sea we’d feel the motion.”
“Sir,” said the intense crewman, moving a bit forward, “some of us have a different worry. Suppose you aimed too high? Or that freak wind that caught us—suppose it flipped us away from earth like a—a stone from a sling?”
The Admiral’s face paled. Evading the issue, he said, “Don’t be like the donkey.”
The crewmen looked blank. “Donkey?”
The Admiral nodded. “Once there was a donkey that smelled hay over a high hill. He climbed to the top, made it over the worst places and started to descend. When he was almost there, the wind changed. He gave up and went back—and lost the prize.”
The intense crewman frowned. “What does that have to do with us?”
“We’re about there, too.”
“But where’s the proof?”
The Admiral shrugged. “It’s in the log.”
“Let us see. If you can show us, we’ll go on.”
The Admiral seemed to think it over. At last he gave an exaggerated shrug. He turned to Gomez, who was now staring out of the solitary small thick porthole the Admiral used for observations. “Gomez,” said the Admiral, with a peculiar emphasis, “the log.”
“Eh?” said Gomez absently. “Oh, yes sir. The log.” He picked up the log and came forward.
“Not that one!” roared the Admiral, losing his temper. He glanced at the crewmen, looked guilty for a moment, then excessively innocent.
“Two logs,” muttered the crewmen, looking dazed.
The intense crewman bared his teeth. “Treachery!” He whipped out a knife.
The Admiral’s sword hissed from its scabbard.
“We stay on course!”
Gomez was back at the porthole. “Admiral,” he said, “I think you’re right. Look out here!”
Their disagreement momentarily forgotten, Admiral and crewmen pulled themselves swiftly to the porthole and stared out.
“See,” said Gomez. “That’s the moon, isn’t it?”
“H’m,” said the Admiral. He blew on the glass and wiped a sleeve across it. There seemed to be two moons out there, different sizes and in different places. The waviness of the glass added a frustrating distortion, so that it was hard to tell what was real and what was due to the glass. “Blast the fellow that made this,” snapped the Admiral. “Yes, that must be the moon. What else can it be?” He craned his neck to squint ahead at an angle. “Ah,” he breathed, “and they called this folly! Look ahead, land! See there, coming closer below, a cloud drifting!”
“So it is,” said Gomez, awed.
“Sir,” said the intense crewman, trying to see. “Let me have a look. I was on a caravan to the East one time. Maybe I could tell where we are.”
“Go ahead,” said the Admiral. After a moment, he added, “What do you think?”
“H’m,” said the crewman. “It’s sort of red. And those lines stretching across. It can’t be the Indies.”
“Not the Indies?” cried the Admiral, anguished.
“It’s too much like desert, sir. We must have overshot. H’m. Those lines might be the Great Wall. —Maybe it’s Cathay.”
“Well,” said the Admiral, sounding relieved.
Gomez lifted a foot thoughtfully. “We’re falling, sir. I don’t know how I can tell, but I feel the tug of the Earth.”
The Admiral squinted out the porthole again. “What goes up must come down,” he said hopefully. “All right men, back you go to your posts.”
“Yes, sir.” The three crewmen obeyed with alacrity, relieved at the thought of land below.
The Admiral returned to the rail and bawled out, “All right now, men, get that slowmatch lit! Ready on the starboard number three fuse! But don’t touch her till I give the word!”
There was a scurrying sound as his orders were obeyed. “Ready on starboard number three, sir!” Another voice called, “Slowmatch ready, sir!”
The Admiral turned and took another look out the porthole. “Awfully red,” he said thoughtfully. “Well, I hope it’s Cathay.” He turned to shout his command and hesitated. Come to think of it, wasn’t Mars red? He looked out again. “God, I hope I didn’t discover another—” He gritted his teeth and glared out at it, whatever it was. Then he shrugged, turned away and took a deep breath.
“Starboard number three!” the Admiral shouted. “Ready now! Light it!”
There was a roar, and the ship turned.
“One way to find out,” groaned the Admiral.
They started down.