Actions and Reactions
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Rudyard Kipling >> Actions and Reactions
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"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
C.M.C. (Commercial Minerals Company) stones, ground with as much
care as the lens of a telescope. They cost L837 apiece. So far we
have not arrived at their term of life. These bearings came from
"No. 97," which took them over from the old Dominion of Light
which had them out of the wreck of the Persew aeroplane in the
years when men still flew wooden kites over oil engines!
They are a shining reproof to all low-grade German "ruby"
enamels, so-called "boort" facings, and the dangerous and
unsatisfactory alumina 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! A 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 gaslocks 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 run to the turbine-valves
and 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; there is language from the Control
Platform.
"Tim's sparking badly about something," says the unruffled
Captain Hodgson. "Let's look."
Captain Purnall is not the suave man we left half an hour since,
but the embodied authority of the G.P.O. Ahead of us floats an
ancient, aluminum-patched, twin-screw tramp of the dingiest, with
no more right to the 5000-foot lane than has a horse-cart to a
modern road. 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 sailor, sir? You
ain't fit to peddle toy balloons to an Esquimaux. Your name and
number! Report and get down, and be--!"
"I've been blown up once," the shock-headed man cries, hoarsely,
as a dog barking. "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 you towed
stern first to Disko and 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
wulli-wa down below that has knocked us into umbrella-frames!
We've been blown up about forty thousand feet! We're all one
conjuror's watch inside! My mate's arm's broke; my engineer's
head's cut 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 snuffing. The stranger leaks pungently.
"We ought to blow into St. John's with luck. We're trying to plug
the fore-tank now, but she's simply whistling it away," her
captain wails.
"She's sinking like a log," says Captain Purnall in an undertone.
"Call up the Banks 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 begins to
swing 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 North Banks Mark
Boat, a few hundred miles west, and is reporting the case.
"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.
She's mine."
"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 midship tanks, and they're none too tight. You
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 some one's bound
to help--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 have 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 St. John's if you'll stand by."
"You'll make the deep, wet Atlantic in twenty minutes. You're
less than fifty-eight hundred now. Get your papers."
A Planet liner, east bound, heaves up in a superb spiral and
takes the air of us humming. Her underbody colloid is open land
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 comes up, 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 pretty 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. The dial shows less than
3000 feet. The Mark Boat signals 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 ask. "Not always,"
is his answer. "I've known a derelict up-end and sift her engines
out of herself and flicker round the Lower Lanes for three weeks
on her 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 smoking-room settee, and at two hundred feet releases the
catch. We hear the whir 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 the men of the old days, each one of
them taught (that is the horror of it!) that, after death he
would very possibly go for ever to unspeakable torment?
And scarcely a generation ago, 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
dressed--and inflate at the air-pump taps. G.P.O. inflators are
thrice as thick as a racing man's "flickers," and chafe
abominably under the armpits. 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.
"The Mark Boat's mad--stark ravin' crazy," he 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 wasted
half an hour fussing over that dead duck down under, and now I'm
expected to go rubbin' my back all round the Pole. What does she
think a Postal packet's made of? Gummed silk? Tell her we're
coming on straight, George."
George buckles him into the Frame and switches on the Direct
Control. Now under Tim's left toe lies the port-engine
Accelerator; 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 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 A. B. .C. 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, we are told, can ascend to the limit of
their lift, mail-packets to look out for them accordingly; the
lower lanes westward are pitting very badly, "with frequent
blow-outs, vortices, laterals, etc."
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 irritability which the gibbering of the General
Communicator increases almost to hysteria.
We have made eight thousand feet since we pithed the tramp and
our turbines are giving us an honest two hundred and ten knots.
Very far to the west an elongated blur of red, low down, shows us
the North 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 back-wash of the bad vortex in
which (her beam shows it) she is even now reeling.
The pits of gloom about us begin 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
till we sweep by. It leaps monstrously across the blackness,
alights on the precise tip of our nose, pirouettes 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 the lift-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 or lowering her against the
uneasy air. All three engines are at work, for 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 lower levels--5000 and 7000, 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 thin air; Tim shunts
the lift out of five tanks at once and by sheer weight drives her
bullet wise through the maelstrom till she cushions with jar on
an up-gust, 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; she'll want some holding."
"I've got her," is the answer. "Come up, old woman."
She comes up nobly, but the laterals buffet her left and right
like the pinions of angry angels. She is jolted off her course
four ways at once, and cuffed into place again, only to be swung
aside and dropped into a new chaos. 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 around 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 may break our
back, pitch-poling.
"Air's a perfectly elastic fluid," roars George above the tumult.
"About as elastic as a head sea off the Fastnet, ain't 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 wulii-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, while 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 finger-nail,
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 General Communicator 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 look-out 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.
We had just cleared the Mark Boat and her disorderly neighbours
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: "That 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 swells; the air-ways 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-store within and the
volt-tingle without had passed: my inflators weighed like lead.
"God, He knows!" said Captain George soberly "That old
shooting-star's skin-friction has discharged the different
levels. I've seen it happen before. Phew: What a relief!"
We dropped from ten 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?"
"May be," was the answer from the Mark Boat. "I've had some
company this evening."
"So I noticed. Wasn't that quite a little draught?"
"I warned you. Why didn't you pull out north? The east-bound
packets have."
"Me? Not till I'm running a Polar consumptives' sanatorium boat.
I was squinting through 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
replies softly. "The way you handled her just now--I'm a pretty
fair judge of traffic in a volt-hurry--it was a thousand
revolutions beyond anything even I've ever seen."
Tim's back supples visibly to 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.
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 A. B. C. man young Williams is less of a
high-tension fool than some. Were you thinking of taking her on,
George? Then I'll just have a look round that port-thrust seems
to me it's a trifle warm--and we'll jog along."
The Mark Boat hums off joyously and hangs herself up in her
appointed eyrie. Here she will stay a shutterless observatory; a
life-boat station; a salvage tug; a court of ultimate
appeal-cum-meteorological bureau for three hundred miles 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 the planet of that odd old word authority. She is responsible
only to the Aerial Board of Control the A. B. C. of which Tim
speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body
of a few score of persons of both sexes, controls 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 A. B. C. confirms
or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its
last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet
only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration
on its shoulders.
I discuss this with Tim, sipping mate on the c. p. while George
fans her along over the white blur of the 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 A. B. C., which collates and makes composite
photographs of them for the instruction of captains. Tim studies
his irrevocable past, shaking his head.
"Hello! Here's a fifteen-hundred-foot drop at fifty-five degrees!
We must have been standing on our heads then, George."
"You don't say so," George answers. "I fancied I noticed it at
the time."
George may not have Captain Purnall's catlike swiftness, but he
is all 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
verticals of Trinity Bay (we keep still to the Southern route)
make a low-lifting haze. We seem the only thing at rest under all
the heavens; floating at ease till the earth's revolution shall
turn up our landing-towers.
And minute by minute our silent clock gives 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, over his shoulder. "I'm chasing
the night west."
The stars ahead dim no more than if a film of mist had been drawn
under unobserved, but the deep airboom 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 dark being crammed back over our bows! Come to
the after-colloid. I'll show you something."
The engine-room is hot and stuffy; the clerks in the coach are
asleep, and the Slave of the Ray is ready to follow them. Tim
slides open the aft 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 going 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 into the Yale of Ajalon
at our pleasure. So far, we can drag out the dawn to twice its
normal length in these latitudes. But some day--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 fresh air
sweeps her out. There is no hurry. The old contracts (they will
be revised at the end of the year) allow twelve hours for a run
which any packet can put behind her in ten. So we breakfast in
the arms of an easterly slant which pushes us along at a languid
twenty.
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