Of course, he didn't want to give up his fan. I didn't waste any time on him—only to say to the flag-lieutenant that it was just the class of fan that Furlong ordered, and the flag-lieutenant tells the officer—still kicking he was—that he'd get an order from the admiral if he desired. On reflection, the officer didn't think a special order from the admiral was necessary, and in a minute or two I was pumping nice cold air on the converter with the fan.
Then the brush-holders and the brushes kept getting out of adjustment or something. They were too light to carry the extra current. Before this Furlong had passed the word to the chief electrician, and he had switched on juice enough to run a central office plant ashore. We fixed up the brushes, and everything was doing fine, I thought, when all at once Furlong looks across the table and says: "O, Lord! The condenser-plates!"
I never knew before I was shipmates with any such gadgets, but I look around and there are four glass plates about an inch thick and a foot and a half across that the current was boring through.
"Sure enough!" I says—"the condenser-plates going to hell. What'll I do with them?"
"Find out if there are any thick sheets of glass in the storeroom," says Furlong.
There was. Not a lot, for glass lying around loose doesn't stand overmuch of a chance on any battleship. We got what sheets of glass were below, but in the hurry of rushing them up topside I fell back down an iron ladder to the splinter-deck port side aft, and when I hit it—a two-and-three-quarter-inch chilled steel-plate deck—I near cracked my skull. And all because I was only trying to save the glass, holding it out from my body while I was falling. And while I'm trying to find my feet the officer I'd borrowed the electric fan from rushes out from his room and was going to put me in the brig for the noise I'd made. There happened to be enough glass left for another set of condenser-plates, and while they were cutting it to shape Furlong calls for another electric fan.
I thinks of a young officer, the freshest one ever, who had an ancestor related to Peter the Great, and an uncle or granduncle or grandmother or somebody or other in the family who was even then a general. Now, of course, there's no great harm in talking a little about your family, but when you begin to think it gives you a rating to ride over other people! And the living ancestor was such an old granny of a general, according to all accounts, and the dead one such an old robber! "Mr. Kaminoff, sir, has a specially powerful fan," says I to the flag-lieutenant.
"Yes—O yes—true!" says the flag-lieutenant and bounces down to Mr. Kaminoff's quarters himself, and Kaminoff didn't know what happened till he found himself gulping down big gobs of darkness by way of getting his breath. It was a hell of a hot night, and nobody less than a four-striper would have dared to leave his port open that night, because Kaminoffskis or Romanoffskis, the old man made them all toe the mark when he gave out an order.
The illustrious Kaminoff howled around some in the dark, but nobody minded him now the powers were sitting on him. When he came out on the gun-deck in his silk pajamas to get the air, he probably wished he was an ordinary seaman without any ancestry and owned a hammock to swing to a couple of hooks somewhere.
By letting that second fan play onto the glass plates they stayed cool for a time. But only for a time. By and by they showed signs of melting again. And the flag-lieutenant, deliberating on the possibility of the Plantagenet getting her message away and the probability of the Jap fleet bearing down on them if he did get it away, he sends a man down to the chief engineer to ask again how long before we could get up steam.