The captain held out an arm above the deck. In his hand he held a gold sovereign. “May I have a count, gentlemen?”
“Aye!” cried the assembled men.
The captain released the coin.
Slowly, slowly, glinting in the bright sunlight, the sovereign tumbled toward the deck some ten feet below. Arabella had never seen the like. Certainly nothing like this had occurred on the trip to Earth from Mars.
“One!” came the cry.
Gradually the falling coin began to gain in downward speed, still turning lazily over. It was now at the level of Arabella’s eyes.
“Two!” the men chorused.
Still faster the coin fell.
“Three!” the men all cried, just at the moment the coin struck the deck. The sound of its impact was lost in a loud hurrah, and Arabella felt a hard shove between her shoulder blades.
“Get it get it get it!” came the cry from all around her, and Arabella and the rest of the “new fish” scrambled to catch the coin as it rebounded into the air. But though the sovereign rose as lazily as it had fallen, she found it nearly impossible to lay a hand on it, for her feet skidded without purchase across the deck and whenever she reached for the flying coin she found her hand passing half a foot or more away from it.
Great was the mirth of the assembled crew as Arabella and the other new men scrambled about after the coin, grunting and scuffling, colliding with each other. Despite the apparent ease of the task, the lot of them seemed incapable of the simple action of catching a falling coin.
It was the gravity, she realized. The ship had risen far enough from the Earth that her attraction was substantially reduced; indeed, the gravitational attraction of Earth was now even less than the Martian gravity she had grown up with. She stopped and held herself still, observing the coin as it flew.
Every thing about the coin’s movement was wrong. It moved too slowly, bounced too high after each impact with the deck. But if she placed her hand just there …
The spinning coin was just about to strike her open palm when another hand, the wildly flailing hairy-knuckled paw of a massive red-bearded Scotsman, happened to snatch it away. The Scotsman held the coin aloft to a general huzzah, and a golden mantle was placed upon his shoulders.
“Now, as to the rest of you,” came Kerrigan’s voice—and it had a nasty edge to it—“you line up along the larboard rail.”
Arabella and the others were driven into line at the rail, where two of the burliest topmen waited with broad grins.
Just as Arabella realized she had been shoved to the front of the line by the other new men, the two brawny airmen grabbed her by her shoulders and hips and lifted her over their heads …
… then hurled her over the rail!
Arabella screamed. She could not have prevented herself from doing so any more than she could prevent her heart from beating. The scream was pulled from her lungs as though it were attached to the ship by a stout rope.
She tumbled end over end, sun and clouds and Earth and rail spinning dizzily all around her. What had been her crime, to deserve such a death?
And then the breath was driven out of her as she was caught up again by the same hands that had just released her. The two topmen hauled her back aboard, dumping her without ceremony onto the deck, and grabbed the man in line behind her. Despite his forewarning, he screamed nearly as high as Arabella herself as he was tossed over the rail. But so slowly did he fall that the topmen had no difficulty catching him again before he had descended more than two feet.
As she drew herself, trembling, to her feet, Taylor came over and thrust a cup of grog into her hand. “That weren’t so bad, now, were it?”
She merely gave him a withering look.
He laughed and clapped her on the back. “Well, you’re a real airman now in any event.” He took a great draught of his own grog. “And the coin struck the deck just at the count of three.”
Arabella sipped her drink, noting that the shaking in her knees was beginning to subside. “What does that mean?”
“It’s a good omen, innit? Any less than three means the captain’s too eager, wants to sway out before it’s safe. Much more and he’s being too cautious. But our Captain Singh always catches it right on the dot.”
Again the bosun’s pipe sounded. “All hands prepare to sway out!”
Taylor shrugged and drained his grog. Arabella took one last sip of hers and offered the remainder to him. “Much obliged,” he said with a grin, and drained it as well.
*