Titans of Chaos

Quentin said, "Where can we go that the goddess will not follow? She will pursue us to the ends ofthe Earth."

The word came to my lips without effort. "Mars!" I breathed. "The Red Planet!"

I gave Colin a kiss on the top of his head. "Kill the dogs for me, Colin, and we'll go put the firstfootprints on the planet Mars!"

When we engaged, Colin ripped the jawbone out of the first monster hound his hands found, andhe beat the others to pulp with it, and gore was sprayed in slowly falling crescents of mist acrossthe upper atmosphere.

The Red Planet

During those frantic moments when we had to cross several yards of high stratosphere to the hullof the ship, I think Victor actually killed more dogs, because they disintegrated into cloud whenhis azure beam lanced through them. But Colin fought like a demon, laughing. His skin was darkand hot as blood suffused it, and the hair on his head stood up like the arched back of a witch'scat.

Yes, it was in midair, in the troposphere, and yes, Colin should have simply fallen to his death, likea parachutist with no chute, and should have suffered frostbite and decompression, but no, hisparadigm did not work that way. He was inspired to slaughter the dogs. He went berserk.

Vanity sought and "found" an airlock leading into a space below the hull, a woodentorpedo-shape, reinforced with iron ribs, pierced by small, round portholes above and below. Itlooked like the type of submersible Jules Verne would have developed. The upper deck and themast could fold themselves into the dream-dimension (I don't know what that process looked liketo anyone but me), and the whole ship, now a spindle-shaped cylinder of ivory, silver, and wood,darted like a slender fish through the troposphere.

She still had a ram on her prow, painted eyes to either side. There were no lifting surfaces, orailerons, no source of thrust in the spacegoing aspect of the ship, any more than there had beensail or steering board in the seagoing version.

"Who built this ship?" I remember asking Vanity in wonder and awe. It was the perfect vessel toexplore the universe in.

Vanity fiddled with her glowing green necklace until she found and established a set of laws ofnature amenable to our needs. Aristotle thought the air was a transparency that conveyed thepotential for light to the eye, made of a continuous substance. No molecules, no partial pressures,none of the Pascalian air-has-weight stuff.