Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (70 page)

‘Five thousand-six, six thousand eight hundred' – the dip-dial reads ere we find the easterly drift, heralded by a flurry of snow at the thousand fathom level. Captain Purnall rings up the engines and keys down the governor on the switch before him. There is no sense in urging machinery when Eolus himself gives you good knots for nothing. We are away in earnest now – our nose notched home on our chosen star. At this level the lower clouds are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the East. Below that again is the strong westerly blow through which we rose. Overhead, a film of southerly drifting mist draws a theatrical gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the lower strata to silver without a stain except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff Double Lights (those statelily inclined beams over Severnmouth) are dead ahead of us; for we keep the Southern Winter Route. Coventry Central, the pivot of the English system, stabs upward once in ten seconds its spear of diamondlight to the north; and a point or two off our starboard bow The Leek, the great cloud-breaker of Saint David's Head, swings its unmistakable green beam twenty-five degrees each way. There must be half a mile of fluff over it in this weather, but it does not affect The Leek.

‘Our planet's over-lighted if anything,' says Captain Purnall at the wheel, as Cardiff-Bristol slides under. ‘I remember the old days of common white verticals that 'ud show two or three thousand feet up in a mist if you knew where to look for 'em. In really fluffy weather they might as well have been under your hat. One could get lost coming home then and have some fun.
Now
it's like driving down Piccadilly.'

He points to the pillars of light where the cloud-breakers bore through the cloud-floor. We see nothing of England's oudines – only a white pavement pierced in all directions by these manholes of variously coloured fire – Holy Island's white and red – St Bees' interrupted white, and so on as far as the eye can reach. Blessed be Sargent, Ahrens, and the Dubois Brothers who invented the cloud-breakers of the world whereby we travel in security!

‘Are you going to lift for The Shamrock?' asks Captain Hodgson. Cork light (green fixed) enlarges as we rush to it. Captain Purnall nods. There is heavy traffic hereabouts – the bank beneath us is streaked with running fissures of flame, where the Atlantic boats are hurrying Londonwards just clear of the fluff. Mail-packets are supposed to have the five-thousand foot lanes and above to themselves, but the foreigner in a hurry is apt to take liberties with English air. 162 lifts to a long-drawn wail of the air in the fore-flange of the rudder, and we make Valencia (white-green-white) at a safe 7,000 feet, dipping our beam to an incoming Washington packet.

There is no cloud on the Atlantic, and faint streaks of cream round Dingle Bay show where the east-driven seas hammer the coast. A big SATA liner
(Société Anonyme des Transports Aériens)
is diving and lifting half a mile below us in search of some break in the solid west wind. Lower still lies a Dane in trouble: she is telling the liner all about it in International. Our General Communication dial has caught her talk, and beginsto eavesdrop. Captain Hodgson makes a motion to cut it off, but checks himself. ‘Perhaps you'd like to listen,' he says to me.

‘
Argol
of St Thomas,' the GC whispers. ‘Report owners three starboard shaft collar-bearings fused. Can make Flores as we are, but impossible further. Shall we buy spares at Fayal?'

The liner acknowledges, and recommends inverting the bearings. The
Argol
answers that she has already done so without effect, and begins to relieve her mind about cheap German enamels for collar-bearings. The Frenchman assents cordially, cries: ‘
Courage, mon ami!
'and switches off.

Their lights sink under the curve of the world.

‘That's one of Lundt and Bleamer's boats,' says Captain Hodgson. ‘Serves 'em right for putting German compos in their thrust-blocks.
She
won't be in Fayal tonight! By the way, wouldn't you like to look round the engine-room?'

I have been waiting eagerly for this invitation, and I follow Captain Hodgson from the control-platform, stooping low to avoid the bulge of the tanks. We know that Fleury's gas can lift anything, as the world-famous trials of '78 showed, but its almost indefinite powers of expansion necessitate vast tank room. Even in this thin air the lift-shunts are busy taking out one-third of its normal lift, and still 162 must be checked by an occasional downdraw of the rudder, or our flight would become a climb to the stars. Captain Purnall prefers an over-lifted to an underlifted ship, but no two captains trim ship alike. ‘When I take the bridge,' says Captain Hodgson, ‘you'll see me shunt forty per cent of the lift out of the gas and run her on the upper rudder. With a swoop upwards instead of a swoop downwards,
as
you say. Either way will do. It's only habit. Watch our dip-dial. Tim fetches her down once every thirty knots as regularly as breathing.'

So it is shown on the dip-dial. For five or six minutes the arrow creeps from 6,700 to 7,300. There is the faint ‘szgee' of the rudder, and back slides the arrow to 6,500 on a falling slant of ten or fifteen knots.

‘In heavy weather you jockey her with the screws as well,' says Captain Hodgson, and unclipping the jointed bar which divides the engine-room from the bare deck, he leads me on the floor.

Here we find Fleury's Paradox of the Bulkheaded Vacuum – which we accept now without thought – literally in full blast. The three engines are assisted-vacuo Fleury turbines running from 3,000 to the Limit; that is to say, up to the point when the blades make the air bell – cut out a vacuum for themselves precisely as do overdriven marine propellers. 162's Limit is low on account of the small size of her nine screws, which, though handier than the old colloid Thelussons, bell sooner. The ‘midships engine generally used as a reinforce is not running; so the port and starboard turbine vacuum-chambers draw direct into the return-mains.

The turbines whistle reflectively. From the low-arched expansion-tanks on either side the valves descend pillar-wise to the turbine-chests, and thence the obedient gas whirls through the spirals of set blades with a force that would whip the teeth out of a power-saw. Behind, is its own pressure, held in leash or spurred on by the lift-shunts; before it, the vacuum where Fleury's Ray dances in violet-green bands and whirled tourbillons of flame. The jointed U-tubes of the vacuum-chamber are pressure-tempered colloid (no glass would endure the strain for an instant), and a junior engineer with tinted spectacles watches the Ray intently. It is the very heart of the machine – a mystery to this day. Even Fleury, who begat it and, unlike Magniac, died a multi-millionaire, could not explain how that restless little imp pirouetting in the U-tube can, in the fractional fraction of a second, strike down the furious blast of gas into a chill greyish-green liquid that drains (you can hear it trickle) from the far end of the vacuum through the eduction-pipes and the mains back to the bilges. Here it returns to its gaseous – one had almost written sagacious – state and climbs to work afresh. Bilge-tank, upper-tank, dorsal-tank, expansion-chamber, vacuum, main-return (as a liquid) and bilge-tank once more is the ordained cycle. Fleury's Ray sees to that; and the engineer with the tinted spectacles sees to Fleury's Ray. If a speck of oil – if even the natural grease of the human finger touch the hooded terminals,Fleury's Ray will wink and disappear and must be laboriously built up again. This means half-a-day's work for all hands, and an expense of one hundred and seventy odd pounds to the GPO for radium-salts and such trifles.

‘Now look at our thrust-collars. You won't find much German compo there. Full-jewelled, you see,' says Captain Hodgson, as the engineer shunts open the top of a cap. Our shaft-bearings are CDC (Commercial Diamond Company) stones, ground with as much care as the lenses of a telescope. They cost thirty-seven pounds apiece. So far we have not arrived at their term of life. These bearings are over fifty years old. They came from
No. 97,
which took them over from the old
Dominion of Light,
which had them out of the wreck of the
Perseus
aeroplane in the years when men still flew tin kites over Thorium engines.

They are a shining reproof to all low-grade German ‘ruby' enamels, so-called ‘boort' facings, and the dangerous and unsatisfactory aluminia compounds which please dividend-hunting owners and turn skippers crazy.

The rudder-gear and the gas lift-shunt, seated side by side under the engine-room dials, are the only machines in visible motion. The former sighs from time to time as the oil-plunger rises and falls half an inch. The latter, cased and guarded like the U-tube aft, exhibits another Fleury Ray, but inverted and more green than violet. Its function is to shunt the lift out of the gas, and this it will do without watching. That is all! One tiny pump-rod wheezing and whining to itself beside a sputtering green lamp. A hundred and fifty feet aft, down the flat-topped tunnel of the tanks, a violet light restless and irresolute. Between the two, three white-painted turbine-trunks, like eel-baskets laid on their side, accentuate the empty perspectives. You can hear the trickle of the liquefied gas flowing from the vacuum into the bilge-tanks, and the soft
gluck-glock
of gas-locks closing as Captain Purnall brings 162 down by the head. The hum of the turbines and the boom of the air on our skin is no more than a cotton-wool wrapping to the universal stillness. And we are running an eighteen-second mile.

I peer from the fore-end of the engine-room over the hatch-coamings into the coach. The mail-clerks are sorting the Winnipeg Calgary and Medicine Hat bags: but there is a pack of cards ready on the table.

Suddenly a bell thrills; the engineers at the turbine-valves stand by; but the spectacled slave of the Ray in the U-tube never lifts his head. He must watch where he is. We are hard-braked and going astern; and there is high language from the control-platform.

‘Tim's temper has fused on something,' says the unruffled Captain Hodgson. ‘Let's look.'

Captain Purnall is not the man we left half an hour ago, but the embodied authority of the GPO. Ahead of us floats an ancient aluminium-patched, twin-screw tramp of the dingiest, with no more right to the 5,000-foot lanes than has a horse-cart to London. She carries an obsolete ‘barbette' conning-tower – a six-foot affair with railed platform forward, and our warning beam plays on the top of it as a policeman's lantern flashes on the area-sneak. Like a sneak-thief, too, emerges a shock-headed navigator in his shirt-sleeves. Captain Purnall wrenches open the colloid to talk with him man to man. There are times when science does not satisfy.

‘What under the stars are you doing here, you sky-scraping chimney-sweep?' he shouts as we two drift side by side. ‘Do you know this is a Mail lane? You call yourself a skipper, sir? You ain't fit to paddle toy aeroplanes in the Strand. Your name and number! Report and get down!'

‘I've been blown up once,' the shock-headed man cries hoarsely as a dog barking under the stars. ‘I don't care two flips of a contact for anything
you
can do, Postey.'

‘Don't you, sir? But I'll make you care. I'll have your stinking gasogene towed stern first to Disko arid broke up. You can't recover insurance if you're broke for obstruction. Do you understand
that?
'

Then the stranger bellows: ‘Look at my propellers! There's been a wullie-wa down under that has blown me into umbrella-frames! We're leakin'! We're all one conjurer's watch inside! My mate's arm's broke; my engineer's head'scut open; my Ray went out when the engines smashed; and – and – for pity's sake give me my height, Captain! We doubt we're dropping.'

‘Six thousand eight hundred. Can you hold it?' Captain Purnall overlooks all insults, and leans half out of the colloid, staring and sniffing. The stranger leaks pungently. He calls – ‘We thought to blow hack to St John's with luck. We're trying to plug the fore-tank now, but she's simply whistlin' it away.'

‘She's sinkin' like a log,' says Captain Purnall in an undertone. ‘Call up the Mark Boat, George.' Our dip-dial shows that we keeping abreast the tramp, have dropped five hundred feet the last few minutes. Captain Purnall presses a switch, and our signal-beam swings through the night, twizzling spokes of light across infinity.

‘That'll fetch something,' he says, while Captain Hodgson watches the General Communicator. He has called up the Banks Mark Boat a few hundred miles west, and is reporting.

‘I'll stand by you!' Captain Purnall roars to the lone figure on the conning-tower.

‘Is it as bad as that?' comes the answer. ‘She isn't insured.'

‘Might have guessed as much,' mutters Hodgson. ‘Owner's risk is the worst risk of all!'

‘Can't I fetch St John's – not even with this breeze?' the voice quavers.

‘Stand by to abandon ship! Haven't you
any
lift in you, fore or aft?'

‘Nothing but the 'midships tanks, and they're none too tight. Yon see, my Ray gave out and—' he coughs in the reek of the escaping gas.

‘You poor devil!' This does not reach our friend. ‘What does the Mark Boat say, George?'

‘Wants to know if there's any danger to traffic. Says she's in a bit of weather herself and can't quit station. I've turned in a General Call, so even if they don't see our beam, someone's bound to – or else we must. Shall I clear our slings? Hold on! Here we are! A Planet liner, too! She'll be up in a tick!'

‘Tell her to get her slings ready,' cries his brother Captain.‘There won't be much time to spare … Tie up your mate!' he roars to the tramp.

‘My mate's all right. It's my engineer. He's gone crazy.'

‘Shunt the lift out of him with a spanner. Hurry!'

‘But I can make land – if I've half a chance.'