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.