CS I - The Ultimate Egoist by Theodore Sturgeon

Author:Theodore Sturgeon [Sturgeon, Theodore]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781583947456
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2013-04-09T04:00:00+00:00

To Shorten Sail

WHEN WE ROUNDED the last buoy and headed home, the Barnacle of Port Elizabeth seemed to embrace the breeze in her canvas grip, haul herself along hand over hand. But for her heavy keel, she was drawing mere inches. She was careened, lee rail under. She had a bone in her teeth and her lover at her helm. She was fast, and she was beautiful. From the lift and pull of her, a shift of a couple of inches would capsize her; you knew it, and you didn’t care. It was glorious.

Percy lay on the slanting deck, his spindly arms wrapped around the tiller, his head thrown back, and he laughed from the sheer joy of it. Day after day, Percy was a pen pusher in an insurance office. But on weekends, he was master of the tiny sloop Barnacle, a little white-hulled dream of a craft. And this was the regatta; today Percy and I were living in fact that of which we had dreamed each night for a year, and of which we would dream for the year following.

We had never won the regatta. But this year we had everything with us. The wind was blowing half a gale, and we could barely run safely with every stitch aloft. The great new balloon jib flew tautly ahead of us, gave us wings. It was what we needed to show our heels to anything on the sound—except Granger’s sable-sailed racing sloop, the Black Flame.

It was nip and tuck between us and the Flame. She stood about twenty yards to starboard, booming along on exactly our course, at exactly our speed. We hadn’t a knot’s advantage, either of us. The wind whipped a prayer from my lips. Granger, with his steel mast and his electric winches, had won three years straight. I begged old King Neptune to give us a break.

And then the wind’s howl in the rigging rose an octave. I saw that squall on the way. A vicious little slate gray williwaw bunching its muscles for a rush at us. I edged toward Percy, screamed at him, “Squall coming up—we’ll have to shorten sail!” Topsails were tumbling down aboard most of the boats.

“If the Lord wants me to shorten sail,” Percy squealed, “He’ll blow some off!” He was quoting the great old clipper captains of the days when American ships were the finest on the seven seas. It was throwing the race and the craft into the laps of the gods; it was foolhardiness supreme; but it was more than a little magnificent.

I saw the Black Flame’s topsail sag and belly; Granger was frightened, for all his chrome and stainless steel. And then the sail lifted again and began to draw. He had seen that we were going to run with every stitch aloft; he was calling our bluff. I screamed to Percy, “The squall will yank the mast out of us! We’ll have to shorten!”

“Go ahead and shorten then,” said Percy.

I crawled over to the pinrail, tugged at the peak halyard (the line that holds the sail up).

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