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 Vale 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.
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 reserved
to ourselves, we heard (and I for the first time) the morning hymn on a
Hospital boat.
She was cloaked by a skein of ravelled fluff beneath us and we caught
the chant before she rose into the sunlight. “Oh, ye 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 the
night, all ablaze in the sunshine. So took she the shadow of a cloud
and vanished, her song continuing. “Oh, ye holy and humble men of heart,
bless ye the Lord! Praise Him and magnify Him for ever.”
“She's a public 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 eight-thousand-foot level. Yes--consumptives.”
“Funny how the new things are the old thing I've read in books,” Tim
answered, “that savages used to haul their sick and wounded up to
the tops of hills because microbes were fewer there. We hoist 'em in
sterilized air for a while. Same idea. How much do the doctors say we've
added to the average life of man?”
“Thirty years,” says George with a twinkle in his eye. “Are we going to
spend 'em all up here, Tim?”
“Flap ahead, then. Flap ahead. Who's hindering?” the senior captain
laughed, as we went in.
We held a good lift to clear the coastwise 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 along. We met Hudson Bay
furriers out of the Great Preserve, hurrying to make their departure
from Bonavista with sable and black fox for the insatiable markets. We
overcossed Keewatin liners, small and cramped; but their captains, who
see no land between Trepassy and Lanco, know what gold they bring back
from West Erica. Trans-Asiatic Directs we met, soberly ringing the
world round the Fiftieth Meridian at an honest seventy knots; and
white-painted Ackroyd & 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. Argentine beef boats we
sighted too, of enormous capacity and unlovely outline. They, too, feed
the northern health stations in icebound 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 farther 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 the
Athabasca grain-tubs. But these last, now that the wheat is moved, are
busy, over the world's shoulder, timber-lifting in Siberia.
We held to the St. Lawrence (it is astonishing how the old water-ways
still pull us children of the air), and followed his broad line of black
between its drifting iceblocks, all down the Park that the wisdom of our
fathers--but every one 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 the 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:
Mother Rugen's tea-house on the Baltic
Forty couple waltzing on the floor!
And you can watch my Ray,
For I must go away
And dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!
Then, while they sweated home the covering-plates:
Nor-Nor-Nor-Nor
West from Sourabaya to the Baltic--
Ninety knot an hour to the Skaw!
Mother Rugen's tea-house on the Baltic
And a dance with Ella Sweyn at Elsinore!
The clips parted with a gesture of indignant dismissal, as though
Quebec, glittering under her snows, were casting out these light and
unworthy lovers. Our signal came from the Heights. Tim turned and
floated up, but surely then it was with passionate appeal that the great
tower arms flung open--or did I think so because on the upper staging a
little hooded figure also opened her arms wide toward her father?
* * * * * * * *
In ten seconds the coach with its clerks clashed down to the
receiving-caisson; the hostlers displaced the engineers at the idle
turbines, and Tim, prouder of this than all, introduced me to the
maiden of the photograph on the shelf. “And by the way,” said he to her,
stepping forth in sunshine under the hat of civil life, “I saw young
Williams in the Mark Boat. I've asked him to tea on Friday.”