Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (59 page)

‘We’ve got to hitch to windward of the Mark Boat somehow,’ George cried.

‘There’s no windward,’ I protested feebly where I swung shackled to a stanchion. ‘How can there be?’

He laughed – as we pitched into a thousand-foot blow-out – that red man laughed under his inflated hood.

‘Look!’ he said. ‘We must clear those refugees, anyhow.’

The Mark Boat was below, and a little to the sou’-west of us, fluctuating in the centre of her distraught galaxy. The air was thick with moving lights at every level. I take it most of them were lying head to wind, but, not being hydras, they failed. An under-tanked Moghrabi boat had risen to the limit of her lift, and finding no improvement, had dropped a couple of thousand. There she met a superb wullie-wa and was blown up spinning like a dead leaf. Instead of shutting off, she braked hard, and naturally rebounded as from a wall almost into the Mark Boat, whose language (our GC took it all in) was humanly simple.

‘If they’d only ride it out quietly, it ’ud be better,’ said George in a calm, as we climbed like a bat above them all. ‘But some skippers
will
navigate without power. What does that Tad-boat think she is doing, Tim?’

‘Playin’ kiss in the ring,’ was Tim’s unmoved reply. A Trans-Asiatic Direct Liner had found a smooth, and butted into it full power. But there was a vortex at the tail of that smooth, and the TAD was flipped out like a paper boomerang, braking madly as she fled down, and all but over-ending.

‘Now I hope she’s satisfied,’ said Tim, ‘If she’d met a lateral, she’d have poked up under us or thereabouts. I’m glad I’m not a Mark Boat… Do I want help?’ The whispering GC dial had caught his ear. ‘George, you may tell that gentleman, with my love – love, remember, George – that I do not want help. Who
is
the officious sardine-tin?’

‘Rimonski drogher on the look-out for a tow.’

‘Very kind of the Rimonski drogher – but this postal packet isn’t being towed at present.’

‘Those droghers will go anywhere on a chance of salvage,’ George explained. ‘We call ’em kittiwakes.’

A long-beaked, bright steel ninety-footer floated at ease, for one instant within hail of us, her slings coiled ready for rescues, and a single hand in her open tower. He was smoking. Surrendered to the insurrection of the airs through which we tore our way, he lay in absolute peace. I saw the smoke of his pipe ascend untroubled ere his boat dropped under like a stone in a well.

We had just cleared the Mark Boat and her disorderly chickens, when the storm ended as suddenly as it had begun. A shooting star to northward filled the sky with the green blink of a meteorite dissipating itself in our atmosphere.

Said George: ‘This may iron out all the tensions.’ Even as he spoke, the conflicting winds came to rest; the levels filled; the laterals died out in long, easy sighs; the airways were smoothed before us. In less than three minutes the covey round the Mark Boat had shipped their power-lights and whirred away upon their businesses.

‘What’s happened?’ I gasped. The nerve-storm within andthe volt-tingle without had passed; my inflators weighed like lead.

‘God He knows,’ said Captain George soberly. ‘That old shooting-star’s friction has discharged the different levels. I’ve seen it happen before. Phew! What a relief!’

We dropped from twelve to six thousand, and got rid of our clammy suits. Tim shut off and stepped out of the Frame. The Mark Boat was coming up behind us. He opened the colloid in that heavenly stillness and mopped his face.

‘Hello, Williams!’ he cried. ‘A degree or two out o’ station, ain’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ was the slow answer. ‘I’ve had some company this evening.’

‘So I noticed. Wasn’t that quite a little flurry?’

‘I warned you. Why didn’t you pull out round by Disko? The East-bound packets have.’

‘Me? Not till I’m running a Polar Consumptives Sanatorium Boat! I was squinting out of a colloid before you were out of your cradle, my son.’

‘I’d be the last man to deny it,’ the captain of the Mark Boat replied softly. ‘The way you handled her just now — I’m a pretty fair judge of traffic in a volt-flurry – it was a thousand revolutions beyond anything even I’ve ever seen.’

Tim’s back supples visibly under this oiling. Captain George on the c.p. winks and points to the portrait of a singularly attractive maiden pinned up on Tim’s telescope-bracket above the steering-wheel. She is Tim’s daughter.

I see. Wholly and entirely do I see.

There is some talk overhead of ‘coming round to tea on Friday,’ a brief report of the derelict’s fate, and Tim volunteers, as he descends: ‘For an ABC man, young Williams is less of a high-tension fool than some … Were you thinking of taking her, George? Then I’ll just have a look round that port thrust – seems to me it’s a trifle warm – and we’ll fan along.’

The Mark Boat hums off joyously and hangs herself up in her appointed place in the skies. Here she will stay, a shutter-less observatory; a lifeboat station; a salvage tug; a court of ultimate appeal-cum-meteorological bureau for a thousandmiles round in all directions till Wednesday next, when her relief slides across the stars to take her buffeted place. Her black hull, double conning-tower, and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to this planet of effective authority. She is responsible only to the Aerial Board of Control – the ABC of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons of both sexes governs this planet. ‘Transportation is civilisation,’ our motto runs. Theoretically we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic
and all it implies.
Practically, the ABC confirms or annuls most international arrangements, and, to judge by its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to lay the whole burden of private administration on its shoulder.

I discuss this with Tim sipping
maté
on the c.p., while George fans her along over the white blur of the Newfoundland Banks in beautiful upward curves of fifty miles each. The dip-dial translates them on the tape in flowing freehand.

Tim gathers up a skein of it and surveys the last few feet which record 162’s path through the volt-flurry.

‘I haven’t had a fever-chart like this to show up in five years,’ he says ruefully.

A postal-packet’s dip-dial records every yard of every run. The tapes then go to the ABC, which collates them and makes composite photographs of them for the instruction of skippers. Tim studies his irrevocable past shaking his head.

‘Hullo! Here’s a fifteen-hundred-foot drop at eighty-five degrees! We must have been standing on our head then, George.’

‘You don’t say so,’ George answers. ‘I fancied I noticed a bit of a duck.’

George may not have Captain Purnall’s catlike swiftness, but he is an artist to the tips of the broad fingers that play on the shunt-stops. The delicious flight-curves come away on the tape with never a waver. The Mark Boat’s vertical spindle of light lies down to eastward setting in the face of the following stars. Westward, where no planet should rise, the triple white verticals of Trinity Bay (we keep still to the Southern route)makes a low-lifting haze. We seem the only things at rest under all the heavens; floating at ease till earth’s revolution shall turn up our landing-towers.

And minute by minute our silent clock shows us a sixteen-second mile.

‘Some fine night,’ says Tim, ‘we’ll be even with that clock’s master.’

‘He’s coming now,’ says George. ‘I’m chasing the night already.’

The stars ahead dim no more than if a film of mist had been drawn under unobserved, but the deep air-boom on our skin changes to a joyful shout.

‘The dawn-gust,’ says Tim. ‘It’ll go on to meet the sun. Look! Look! There’s the night being crammed back over our bow! Come to the after-colloid. I’ll show you something pretty.’

The engine-room is hot and stuffy; the clerks in the coach are asleep, and the Slave of the Ray is near to follow them. Tim slides open the after-colloid and reveals the curve of the world – the ocean’s deepest purple – edged with fuming and intolerable gold. Then the sun rises and, through the colloid, strikes out our lamps. Tim scowls in his face.

‘Squirrels in a cage,’ he mutters. ‘That’s all we are. Squirrels in a cage! He’s running twice as fast as us … Just you wait a few years, my shining friend, and we’ll take steps that will amaze you. We’ll Joshua you!’

Yes; that is our dream – to turn all earth to the Vale of Ajalon at our pleasure. So far we can drag out the dawn to twice its normal length in these latitudes. But some days – even on the Equator – we shall hold the sun level in his full stride!

Now we look down on a sea thronged with heavy traffic. A big submersible breaks water suddenly. Another and another follows with a swash and a suck and a savage bubbling of relieved pressures. The deep-sea freighters are rising to lung up after the long night, and the leisurely ocean is all patterned with peacock’s eyes of foam.

‘We’ll lung up, too,’ says Tim, and when we return to the c.p., George shuts off, the colloids are opened, and the freshair sweeps her out. There is no hurry. The old contracts (they will be revised at the end of this year) allow twelve hours for a run which any packet can put behind her in ten. We breakfast in the arms of an easterly slant which pushes us along at a languid twenty.

To enjoy life, and tobacco, begin both on a sunny morning half a mile or so above the dappled Atlantic cloud-belts, and after a volt-flurry which has cleared and tempered your nerves. While we discussed the thickening traffic with the superiority that comes of having a high level to ourselves, we heard (and I for the first time) morning service on a Hospital boat.

She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us, and we caught her chant before she rose into the sunlight: ‘
Oye Winds of God,
’sang the unseen voices, ‘
bless ye the Lord! Praise Him, and magnify Him for ever!
’

We slid off our caps and joined in. When our shadow fell across her great open platforms, they looked up and stretched out their hands neighbourly while they sang. We could see the doctors and the nurses and the white-button-like faces of the cot-patients. She passed slowly beneath us, heading northward, her hull, wet with the dews of night, all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud and vanished; her song continuing –

‘O ye holy and humble men of heart, bless ye the Lord! Praise Him, and magnify Him for ever!
’

‘She’s a lunger, or she wouldn’t have been singing the
Benedicite;
and she’s a Greenlander, or she wouldn’t have snow-blinds over her colloids,’ said George at last. ‘She’ll be bound for Frederikshavn or one of the Glacier sanatoriums for a month. If she was an accident ward, she’d be hung up at the ten-thousand-foot level. Yes – consumptives.’

‘Funny how the new things are the old things. I’ve read in books,’ Tim answered, ‘that savages used to haul their sick and wounded to the tops of the hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist ’em into sterilised air for a while. Same thing, isn’t it?’

‘Did you ever read about the epidemics we used to have in the old days – right
on
the ground?’ said George, knocking outhis pipe. ‘It must have been bad. And we talked about Fresh Air, too! Fresh air – in a city – with horses and cows and pigs an’ rats and people in direct contact! I wonder we didn’t all the twice a week. We must have been an enamel-faced community.’

‘Dunno – we died at seventy or thereabouts (I’ve read), and a centenarian was a curio in those days. How much do the doctors say we’ve added to the average life of a man?’

‘Thirty years,’ says George, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Are you going to spend ’em all up here, Tim? Our letters’ll be a trifle discharged.’

‘Flap along, then. Flap along. Who’s hindering?’ The senior captain laughed, as we went in.

We held a good lift to clear the coast and Continental shipping, and we had need of it. Though our route is in no sense a populated one, there is a steady trickle of traffic this way about. We met Hudson Bay furriers out of the Great Preserve hurrying to make their departures from Bonavista with sable and black fox for the insatiable markets; we over-crossed Keewahdin liners small and cramped; but their captains, who see no land between Trepassy and Blanco, know what gold they bring back from West Africa. Trans-Asiatic Directs we met soberly ringing the world round the Fiftieth Meridian, at an honest seventy knots; and white-painted Ackroyd and Hunt fruiters out of the South fled beneath us, their ventilated hulls whistling like Chinese kites. Their market is in the North, among the northern sanatoria, where you can smell their grape-fruit and bananas across the cold snows. Brazilian beef-boats we sighted of enormous capacity and Teutonic outline. They too feed the Northern health-stations in ice-bound ports where submersibles dare not rise. Yellow-bellied ore-flats and Ungava petrol-tanks punted down leisurely out of the North like strings of unfrightened wild-duck. It does not pay to ‘fly’ minerals and oil a mile further than is necessary; but the risks of transhipping to submersibles in the ice-pack off Nain or Hebron are so great that these heavy freighters fly down to Halifax direct, and scent the air as they go. They are the biggest tramps aloft, except theAthabasca grain-tubs. But these, now that the wheat is moved, are busy over the planet’s left shoulder, timber-lifting in Siberia.

We held to the St Lawrence (it is astonishing how the old waterways still pull us children of the air!) and followed his broad line of black between its drifting ice-blocks, all down the Park that the wisdom of our fathers has saved to the world.

But everyone knows the Quebec run.

We dropped to the Heights Receiving-Towers twenty minutes ahead of time, and there hung at ease till the Yokohama Intermediate Packet could pull out and give us our proper slip. It was curious to watch the action of the holding-down-clips all along the frosty river front as boats cleared or came to rest. A big Hamburger was leaving Pont Levis, and her crew, unshipping the platform railings, began to sing ‘Elsinore’ – the oldest of our chanteys. You know it, of course?