FullReads

“Air’s a perfectly elastic fluid,” roars George above the tumult. “About as elastic as a head sea off the Fastnet, aint it?”

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 electric tensions, one must not complain of any rudeness in the reception. Tim met it with an unmoved countenance, one corner of his under lip caught up on a tooth, his eyes fleeting into the blackness twenty miles ahead, and the fierce sparks flying from his knuckles at every turn of the hand. Now and again he shook his head to clear the sweat trickling from 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 wulli-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 rushing click of the midship-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 for an instant. At last we began to claw up on a cant, bow-rudder and port-propeller together; only the nicest balancing of tanks saved us from spinning like the rifle-bullet of the old days.

“We’ve got to hitch to windward of that 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 beneath his inflated hood!

“Look!” he said. “We must clear those refugees with a high lift.”

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 trying to lie 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 wulli-wa and was blown up spinning like a dead leaf. Instead of shutting off she went astern and, naturally, rebounded as from a wall almost into the Mark Boat, whose language (our G. C. took it 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 enough lift. 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, so the T. A. D. was flipped out like a pea from off a fingernail, braking madly as she fled down and all but over-ending.

“Now I hope she’s satisfied,” said Tim. “I’m glad I’m not a Mark Boat…. Do I want help?” The C. G. 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?”

“A Rimouski drogher on the lookout for a tow.”

“Very kind of the Rimouski drogher. 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, it seemed, like a stone in a well.