dead astern, a good wind, pushing them along at eighteen miles an hour.

Miran spoke in a soft voice to the first mate and the other officers, and they disappeared into the darkness shrouding the decks. They were giving prearranged orders, not by the customary bellowing through a megaphone but by low voices and touches. While they directed the crew, Miran stood with bare feet upon the foredeck. He held a half-crouching posture, and acted as if he were detecting the moves of the invisible sailors by the vibrations of their activities running through the wood of the decks and the spars and the masts and up to his feet. Miran was a fat nerve center that gathered in all the unspoken messages scattered everywhere through the body of the Bird. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, and if he hesitated or doubted because of the solid blackness around him, he gave the helmsmen no sign. His voice was firm.

"Hold it steady."
"... six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Now! Swing her hard aport! Hold her, hold her!"

To Green, high up on the topmost spar of the foremast, the turning about seemed an awful and unnatural deed. He could feel the hull, and with it his mast, of course, leaning over and over, until his senses told him that they must inevitably capsize and send him crashing to the ground. But his senses lied, for though he seemed to fall forever, the time came when the journey back toward an upright position began. Then he was sure he would keep falling the other way, forever.

Suddenly the sails fluttered. The vessel had come into the dead spot where there was no wind acting upon her canvas. Then, as her original impetus kept her going, the canvas boomed, seeming to his straining and oversensitive ears like cannon firing. This time the wind was catching her from what was for her a completely unnatural direction, from dead ahead. As a result, the sails filled out backwards, and their middle portions pressed against the masts.

The 'roller came almost to a stop at once. The rigging groaned, and the masts themselves creaked loudly. Then they were bending backwards, while the sailors clinging to them in the darkness swore under their breaths and clamped down desperately on their handholds.

"Gods!" said Green. "What is he doing?"

"Quiet!" said a nearby man, the foretop-captain. "Miran is going to run her backwards."

Green gasped. But he made no further comment, trying to visualize what a 

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