Rudyard Kipling's Tales of Horror and Fantasy (71 page)

‘You'll make the deep Atlantic in twenty minutes. You're less than fifty-four hundred now. Get your log and papers.'

A Planet liner – east bound – heaves up in a superb spiral and takes the air of us humming. Her underbody colloid is open, and her transporter-slings hang down like tentacles. We shut off our beam as she adjusts herself – steering to a hair – over the tramp's conning-tower. The mate emerges, his arm strapped to his side, and stumbles into the cradle. A man with a ghastly scarlet head follows, shouting that he must go back and build up his Ray. The mate assures him that he will find a nice new Ray all ready in the liner's engine-room. The bandaged head goes up wagging excitedly. A youth and a woman follow. The liner cheers hollowly above us, and we see the passengers'faces at the saloon colloid.

‘That's a good girl. What's the fool waiting for now?' says Captain Purnall.

The skipper comes up still appealing to us to stand by and see him fetch St John's. He dives below and returns – at which we little human beings in the void cheer louder than ever – with the ship's kitten. Up fly the liner's hissing slings; her underbody crashes home and she hurtles away again. Our dial shows less than 3,000 feet.

The Mark Boat signals that we must attend to the derelict, now whistling her death-song as she falls beneath us in long, sick zigzags.

‘Keep our beam on her and send out a general warning,' says Captain Purnall, following her down.

There is no need. Not a liner in air but knows the meaning of that vertical beam, and gives us and our quarry a wide berth.

‘But she'll drown in the water, won't she?' I asked of Tim.

‘I've known a derelict up-end and sift her engines out of herself, and flicker round the Lower Lanes for three weeks onher forward tanks only. We'll run no risks. Pith her, George, and look sharp. There's weather ahead.'

Captain Hodgson opens the underbody colloid, swings the heavy pithing-iron out of its rack which, in liners, is generally cased as a settee, and at two hundred feet releases they catch. We hear the whirr of the crescent-shaped arms opening as they descend. The derelict's forehead is punched in, starred across, and rent diagonally. She falls stern-first, our beam upon her; slides like a lost soul down that pitiless ladder of light, and the Atlantic takes her.

‘A filthy business,' says Hodgson. ‘I wonder what it must have been like in the old days.'

The thought had crossed my mind too. What if that wavering carcass had been filled with international-speaking men of all the Internationalities, each of them taught (
that
is the horror of it) that after death he would very possibly go for ever to unspeakable torment? And not a century since we (one knows now that we are only our fathers re-enlarged upon the earth) –
we,
I say, ripped and rammed and pithed to admiration.

Here Tim, from the control-platform, shouts that we are to get into our inflators and to bring him his at once.

We hurry into the heavy rubber suits – the engineers are already half-dressed – and inflate at the air-pump taps. GPO inflators are thrice as thick as a racing man's ‘heavies,' and chafe abominably under the arm-pits. George takes the wheel until Tim has blown himself up to the extreme of rotundity. If you kicked him off the c.p. to the deck, he would bounce back, But it is 162 that will do the kicking tonight.

‘The Mark Boat's mad – stark ravin' crazy,' Tim snorts, returning to command. ‘She says there's a bad blow-out ahead, and wants me to pull over to Greenland. I'll see her pithed first! We've wasted an hour and a quarter over that dead bird down under, and now I'm expected to go rabbin' my back all the Pole round! What does she think a postal packet's made of. Gummed silk? Tell her we're comin' on straight.'

George buckles him into the Frame and switches on the Direct Control. Now, under Tim's left toe, lies the port-engineaccelerator; under his left heel the reverse, and so with the other foot. The lift-shunt stops stand out on the rim of the steering-wheel, where the fingers of his left hand can play on them. At his right hand is the ‘midships engine-lever, ready to be thrown into gear at a moment's notice. He leans forward in his belt, eyes glued to the bow-colloid, and one ear cocked toward the General Communicator. Henceforth he is the strength and direction of 162, through whatever may befall.

The Banks Mark Boat is reeling out pages of Aerial Route Directions to the traffic at large. We are to ‘secure all loose objects,' hood up our Fleury Rays; and on no account to attempt to clear snow from our conning-towers till the weather abates. Under-powered craft can ascend to the limit of their lift, mail-packets to look out for them accordingly: the traffic lanes are pitting very badly with frequent blow-outs, vortices, and laterals. In other words, we are in for a storm with electric trimmings.

Still the clear dark holds up unblemished. The only warning is the electric skin-tension (I feel as though I were a lace-maker's pillow), and an intense irritability which the gibbering of the General Communicator increases almost to hysteria.

We have risen eight thousand feet since we pithed the tramp, and our turbines are giving us an honest two hundred an hour.

Very far to the west an elongated blur of light low down shows us the Banks Mark Boat, There are specks of fire round her rising and falling – bewildered planets about an unstable sun – helpless shipping hanging on to her light for company's sake. No wonder she could not quit station.

She warns us to look out for the backwash of the bad vortex in which (her beam shows it) she is even now reeling.

The pits of gloom about us being to fill with very faintly luminous films – wreathing and uneasy shapes. One forms itself into a globe of pale flame that waits shivering with eagerness as we sweep by. It leaps monstrously across the blackness, alights on the precise tip of our nose, grimaces there an instant, and swings off. Our roaring bow sinks as though that light were lead – sinks and recovers to lurch and stumble again beneath the next blow-out. Tim's fingers on thelift-shunt strike chords of numbers: 1.4.7; 2.4.6; 7.5.3; and so on; for he is running by his tanks only, lifting and dropping her by instinct. All three engines are at work; the sooner we have skated over this thin ice, the better. Higher we dare not go. The whole upper vault is charged with pale Krypton vapours, which our skin-friction may excite to unholy manifestations. Between the upper and the lower levels – 5,000 and 7,000 hints the Mark Boat – we may perhaps bolt through if…

Our bow clothes itself in blue flame and falls like a sword. No human skill can keep pace with the changing tensions. A vortex has us by the beak, and we dive down a two-thousand foot slant at an angle (the dip-dial and my bouncing body record it) of thirty-five. Our turbines scream shrilly; the propellers cannot bite on the wild air; Tim shunts the lift out of five tanks at once, and by sheer weight drives her bulletwise through the maelstrom till she cushions with a jar of the brake three thousand feet below.

‘
Now
we've done it,' says George in my ear. ‘Our skin-friction that last slide has played Old Harry with the tensions! Look out for laterals, Tim.'

‘I've got her,' is the answer. ‘Come
up
,you crazy old kite!'

She comes up nobly, but the laterals buffet her left and right like the pinions of angry angels. She is jolted off her chosen star twenty degrees port or starboard, and cuffed into place again, only to be swung away and dropped into a new blowout. We are never without a corposant grinning on our bows or rolling head over heels from nose to 'midships; and to the crackle of electricity round and within us is added once or twice the rattle of hail – hail that will never fall on any sea. Slow we must, or we shall break out back, pitch-poling.

‘Air's a perfectly elastic fluid!' roars George above the tumult. ‘Elastic as a head sea off the Fastnet!'

He is less than just to the good element. If one intrudes on the heavens when they are balancing their volt-accounts; if one disturbs the High Gods' market-rates by hurling steel hulls at ninety knots across tremblingly adjusted tensions, one must not complain of any rudeness in the reception. Tim met it with an unmoved countenance, a corner of his under-lip caught upon a tooth, his eyes fleeting into the blackness twenty miles ahead, and the fierce sparks flying from his knuckles at every play of the hand. Now and again he shook his head to clear the sweat trickling through his eyebrows, and it was then that George, watching his chance, would slide down the life-rail and swab his face quickly with a big red handkerchief. I never imagined that a human being could so continuously labour and so collectedly think, as did Tim through that Hell's half-hour when the flurry was at its worst. We were dragged hither and yon by warm or frozen suctions, belched up on the tops of wullie-was, spun down by vortices, and clubbed aside by laterals under a dizzying rush of stars, in the company of a drunken moon. I heard the swishing click of the 'midships engine-lever sliding in and out, the low growl of the lift-shunts, and, louder than the yelling winds without, the scream of the bow-rudder gouging into any lull that promised hold even for an instant. At last we began to claw up on a cant, bow-rudder and port-propeller together; only the nicest balancing of our lift saved us from spinning like the rifle-bullet of the old days.

‘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.