SteampubkPrime

by Mike Ashley

  III

  A DULL concussion shuddered through the Imperatrice, then two more in quick succession. Flames gushed, aft. Confused cries, shouts, and tumult rose on the night. Everywhere echoed that most terrible of all sounds; the shrieking of women. Came the trampling of feet running along the decks, which already — as the stupendous aerocraft slowed, drunkenly swaying — had begun to slant at a perilous angle.

  Flung against him by a jostling of terrified passengers, the girl caught Norford Hale’s arm. She sensed how hard and rigid that arm was, as he stiffened himself to shield her and braced himself against the bending, creaking rail to meet the shock.

  Still another detonation, aft, shivered through the mangled liner, now yawing off in a wide, descending spiral. All at once the lights died. The frozen moonlight stared in on a panic-maddened mob driving along the promenade past them, as the two clung to their sheltering corner behind the kinetogram house.

  Groaning, suddenly splintering, a whole long section of the rail ripped outward. With a gasp, Jeanne buried her face on Norford’s breast to shut away the horrifying sight of more than a hundred human beings hurled in fantastic gyrations into black space. That sight she did not witness; but not even her gloved hands, pressed tight against her ears, could shut away the screams of the lost wretches — screams almost instantly muted, far below, to silence.”

  “A meteor!” Cried the man, staring aghast. “Everything provided for — foreseen — but this!”

  Scrambling away from the horrible void; clutching with mad hands, tearing at one another, grappling anything that promised any slightest hold, the stampeded horde of men and women — with all too many children — God knows — fought away from the blank vacancy where the rail had vanished.

  On hands and knees they scrambled up the steeply-slanted deck, in the moonlight, utterly brutalized by sickening panic. No traditions of self-restraint and heroism controlled them, such as had prevailed in the old sea-days. All pretenses of organization and authority were instantly swept away. Discipline there was none, in that lax-fibred multitude. In one moment of time, decades of calm, sleek, full-fed civilization, civilization perfectly balanced and urbane, civilization poised, confident, and self-satisfied, had all been starkly swept away.

  The primitive in man had instantly surged hot, brutal, raw, to the surface.

  Unheeded now were the perfectly futile commands of such few officers as still strove to restore order. The shouts of the stewards — themselves paralyzed with terror — made no slightest impression as they tried to direct the donning of the life-preservers, crying that there was no danger — a palpable lie, since already the Imperatrice was staggering to her death.

  Hale shuddered with a profound horror as he sheltered the half-fainting girl in his arms. He hears her crying out some unintelligible thing.

  “There, there, Romney! Don’t look.” He mechanically tried to soothe her, himself transfixed with fear, but still he stood his ground. He remained there, steadfastly, shielding her from the surge and thrust of the mob. By the hard moonlight and the waxing glare of the flames now licking the after decks, he watched the panic-stricken wretches tear at one another, crawl swarming over one another, push and crowd and fling one another back to death. A certain wondering pain filled his analytic soul that such things could be. He, all his life a physician, used to the follies and weaknesses of human beings, had never yet witnessed such anguished selfishness. For many years a writer and an imaginer of things, he never once had imagined anything like this reality.

  The man was afraid, horribly and agonizingly afraid, yet he retained his self-command. He knew, even, it was not death he feared. He had lived richly and fully. Death, as such, could not terrify him. Yet he too sensed the clutch of panic. Men can face the slavering sea that rolls to engulf them, and with some composure yield themselves to its embrace; but to feel an aircraft — a speeding aircraft that bears one through the emptiness of space-suddenly stricken helpless, to sense its reeling fall, to see the hungering abysses of the sky yawn black and void beneath — this thing no man can experience without physical nausea and a profound and agonizing torture of the soul.

  Yet the man fought it back. He struggled to clear his brain and senses. Pale to the lips, with the sweat of anguish on him and with staring eyes, he still sheltered the hysterical girl. He still kept from wildness and mad, futile deeds; still forced himself to reason and to think. Swiftly he tried to plan what he must do to save Jeanne Hargreaves.

  For the moment their peril was not deadly — barring, of course, any general explosion that would hurl the wreck into the sea, a mile and a half below. The Imperatrice, though punctured, might still survive a while. The swarming stampede, now rapidly thinning as some climbed up through doors and windows, and as dozens and scores of screeching maniacs slid and dropped away from the almost vertical decks, could not reach them in their vantage-corner. This constant lightening of the ship, too, might delay its plunge. The horrible jettison of human lives might help to save their own.

  The Imperatrice had now heeled over almost directly on what, in the old days, would have been called its beam-ends. Lying on its side, the shattered hull staggered in drunken spirals vast and slow. Nearly all the passengers on its lower side had already been slid into the sea. Those on the upper side were still safe from this peril; but the flames now licking upward and along that higher side of the ship explained the agonizing screams that drifted from those decks out into the stillness of mid-heaven.

  Quivering with horror, Norford tightened his grasp on the girl. As the ship had rolled over, he had adjusted his position, so as to remain upright, with Jeanne.

  “Come, come!” He adjured her sharply. “Look alive, now! No time for hysterics here! Your foot, there, beside mine — so — now, then, lean back against the deck!”

  Their feet now rested on a stanchion connecting the deck with the one that had been above it. The deck itself, now vertical, gave them support against which to brace themselves. Their position, fairly secure, was none the less terrifying.

  Far below them now appeared nothing but the dazzling shine of the moonlit clouds — clouds ever drawing nearer — on which the ink-black shadow of the ship drifted idly before the wind. And through gaps in the cloud-floor, ever they beheld the waiting blackness of the sea.

  IV

  “LIFE-PRESERVERS! We’ll jump!”

  The idea, oddly enough, now first occurred to Hale. None of the preservers seemed to have been used, on his deck. So swift had been the catastrophe and so sudden the heeling-over of the ship that few of the passengers there had even so much as tried to strap on one of the devices.

  Decades of complete aerial safety had rendered even the idea of peril absolutely remote. For many years these gyroscopic devices, actuated by a leap from aloft, had been carried only as a matter of routine. Now in the moment of disaster they were not used, they could not be.

  Hale determined to make at least a try for the girl’s life and his own. Action followed hard on that decision.

  “Stand right here,” he commanded. “Don’t move. So long as you keep your feet braced on this metal beam, with your shoulders to the deck, you’re all right. I’m going to leave you for a minute.”

  “Leave me? What for?” She stammered, aroused by his words.

  “Life-preservers. See there?” He pointed where they hung, dangling ten feet away, alongside the now vertical wall that had formed the deck-roof.

  “How — can you?” She gasped, staring at the life-belts, dimly visible in the heavy shadows now shrouding all the under portion’ of the ship.

  “How? Along this stanchion, of course.”

  “You — you can’t!”

  For all answer he merely commanded: “Stay where you are. Don’t move.” Carefully gauging the distance, he threw off his furs and dropped them into the gulf, then boldly walked forward along the aluminum girder.

  This girder had a breadth of no more than four inches. It lay horizontal, or almost so. Be
neath it, nothing but the sheer vacancy of a mile and a half drop to the Pacific. On either hand, nothing to grasp. The distance to the belts was only a few feet, but those few feet held appalling possibilities.

  Hale did not hesitate. Steadily; he advanced along the beam, step by step; both arms: extended sideways, swaying as he balanced. He reached the life-preservers — each a combination of anti-gravity apparatus and vacuum-belt, with water-distiller, signal light, and, concentrated food — unhooked two with considerable difficulty, and, turning, faced the girl.

  She, shivering and blanched to a dull waxen pallor, stared at him as though hardly comprehending. Far above, from the upper side of the doomed liner; confused cries and screams still drifted down to them; but these had now grown fewer and fainter. The burst of flames along that upper side had swiftly thinned the multitude of trapped wretches.

  Now all at once a greenish glare began to flame around the stem of the vast fabric. Its widely-spreading brilliance cast leaping lights and shadows all along the up-tilted deck, swept bare of life.

  Back toward the girl started Norford. Burdened now by the cumbersome apparatus; he found the return harder by far. But step by step he still advanced, now hesitating as he swung with the drunken yaw of the ship, now again creeping forward. And still in muted horror the girl watched him as he came that perilous way above the gulf. Her face showed ghastly as his own, in the weird virescence of the blazing aero-liner.

  A thunderous explosion, aft, echoed the-hissing rush of a tremendous, searing-geyser of flame.

  Hale, nearly overbalanced by the shock, leaped and caught the agonized hand she reached to him. Shaking and mute; they clung to each other.

  “Off with your furs — and into one of these-quick!” He panted.

  She struggled out of her coat, and dropped it, grotesquely flapping as it spun away through the clouds. Then she tried to adjust the life-preserver, but in vain. Numbed with, terror, her hands quivering violently and her-whole body shaking, she could-neither put on the belt nor adjust the straps. Gasping, she tried to speak. Dry tongue and quivering lips refused their office. Her teeth began to chatter violently with the cold.

  “Here; your arm through this — now, so — now the-other!” Hale directed, in a shaking voice. He clung there, precariously, to his footing; he helped her at imminent risk of being himself precipitated into the depths.

  The liner meanwhile, her whole stern now roaring into white-hot, gaseous flame, had become a monstrous torch against the sky, spiraling down ever down toward the clouds, with accelerating speed. Her huge prow rose, swaying helplessly and drunkenly toward the impassive moon. In the black of the night-sky she whipped her streaming hair of fire weirdly and terribly aloft.

  She had now assumed almost a vertical position. The flames, licking up along her from the stern and also bursting from the bow, had driven most of the survivors; fighting, clawing, screaming, to the forward observation-deck. Out from topsy-turvy saloons and staterooms — places of horrible, mocking luxury — they scrambled. Insanely battling for refuge, they crawled up, up the sickening angles of the aerocraft’s mad inversion.

  Some few, cooler than the rest, managed to put on their life-belts and launch away; but only a part of these made the correct adjustments. Most of them fell like lead, the gyroscopic neutralizers failing to work after the initial plunge. Probably not over two-score, in all, reached the surface of the Pacific still alive.

  Scorched from the liner by the anguish of shriveling heat or numbed by poisonous gases, the others dropped off. Some, actually on fire, leaped into the abyss and swirled away, torches of living flame. As ripe fruit falls, clustered, from the bough they fell. Men, women, children, singly and in groups, seared by the roaring gusts of incandescence, flung themselves into moonlit vacancy. Horribly whirling, they vanished.

  Merciful oblivion received all these before their bodies broke against the midnight blackness of the sea; its surface — struck at such speed — hard as a plate of burnished steel.

  Clinging to their perilous niche below the flaming, drifting hulk, Hale and Jeanne tugged with bleeding fingers at the adjustments of their belts.

  “Quick!” He commanded. “She’s going fast — we’ve got only a minute, now!”

  He drew the last buckle tight about her, while the glare of the on-sweeping conflagration flooded them with a ghastly, yellow-greenish glare. Puffs of hot smoke and strangling gases swirled about them. Within the wreck, dull concussions vibrated. The last sustaining vacuum-chambers were collapsing.

  “All right?” Demanded Hale, strapping his own belt fast. “Now, then, off with you! Jump!”

  The girl, shaking terribly, sank almost fainting against him.

  “Oh — I can’t, I can’t!” She gasped. “We’re still a mile high — and the sea — ”

  “It’s that or burn to a crisp here!” He shouted with sudden passion, above the roaring of the gas-flames.

  Still she could not muster courage for the leap.

  Brutally he seized her, with overmastering rage. They grappled a second. Reeling, they swayed together on the narrow beam. Then he dominated her; he broke her desperate clutch and hurled her bodily — her scream piercing his ears — into the void.

  A second he watched her drop like a plummet, in the moonlight, as he crouched pale and sick upon the dizzy perch.

  “Thank God!” He breathed, thinking to see her swift trajectory checked just before she plunged through the cloud-curtain still a thousand feet below.

  Delaying no longer, he stood up again. He leaped boldly outward from the flaming wreck; he plumbed after her into the horrifying nothingness of the abyss.

  V

  RETURNING consciousness — for the sheer drop before his own apparatus had functioned had robbed him of his senses — brought him a confused realization of cold, of motion, of dim light. For a moment he understood nothing. Then his mind cleared, and he knew that he was swinging on the surface of a troubled sea, heaving on league-long rollers, with moonlit clouds slow-drifting far and far above him.

  Buoyed by his vacuum-belt he rose, fell, and heaved up again on the crumbling surges. Here, there, he made out a few twinkling sparkles of light, like stars moving on the breast of the mighty waters; signal-flashes from such of the survivors as had lighted them. He vaguely distinguished dim forms, hardly distinguishable against the blackness of the sea-men and women who, like himself, had reached the sea with life-pelts. Living? Dead? He could not tell. But one or two nearer things, wallowing limply, in the supreme abandon of death, told him of those who had leaped with, no supporting apparatus.

  Vague thoughts drifted through his brain. Had any kinetogram been sent from the Imperatrice, for rescue, he wondered dully. And sharks — were they plentiful in this latitude? How long could one survive, under these conditions?

  Then the thought of Jeanne stabbed him full-awake. A great clarity of mind returned to him, with renewed vigor of body. He detached the now useless gyroscope from the belt, and let it drift away, in company with the welter of deck-chairs and wreckage that littered the sea. After this, he turned the knob of his signal-lamp, which flashed away bravely over the dark and gleaming swells.

  “Romney! … Ohe-e-e-e-e! … Romney!” He shouted through cupped hands, as he flung aloft on marching crests of brine.

  No answer. A few faint cries, but none from her.

  All at once he noted a greenish flare in the heavens, almost directly overhead. Now he could distinguish a vibrant roar, louder than the swishing hiss of the combers. Spiraling downward, the Imperatrice had just sunk through the clouds, which were illumined for a long distance by its streaming banners of incandescence.

  A moment he closed his eyes. The flaming aero-liner, now less than a mile aloft, threatened to precipitate its blazing, glowing wreck upon him. The anguish of death wrought strong in Hale; but through it all he felt a kind of wild, barbaric exultation.

  “This, this,” he thought subconsciously, “is an end such as in these days any ma
n might envy!” His only regret was that he might not live to write a stirring tale of the adventure; his only sorrow crystallized about the death of Jeanne, for even though the girl was living still, death was inevitable unless quick rescue could be made.

  He shouted again and again, vainly. Then he fell a-wondering where she might be; how many from the ship might still survive; how death might come to him; what the sensation of dying really might be like.

  The brightening glare of the liner once more drew his gaze. Down, ever downward, staggered the flaming craft, on which not a single being now remained alive. Slowly she wheeled about and about. Dark objects and a rain of dripping fire fell from her constantly. Out of her uprearing bow, flames were streaming full-volumed toward the zenith — a splendid, horrifying spectacle, affronting the calm moon.

  Once more the man hailed:

  “Romney! Romney!”

  A gust of incandescent gases puffed from the liners bow. The gigantic craft seemed to empty herself in a second. She staggered, rolled slowly over, and gathered momentum downward. In a vast and rushing spiral she plunged; roaring into white heat; shot swiftly off to the left, and — violently exploding — leaped into twisted wreckage.

  A stupendous concussion rolled its echoes over the sea as the shattered, glowing skeleton of metal surged into the waves.

  Up leaped a Vesuvius of steam, writhing in snowy belchings under the moonlight. Hissings of tortured waters drowned the seethes of the waves and the death-cries of the struggling wretches annihilated by the hulk.

  Then, for a moment, silence, while Norford — cradled upward on the breasts of the sea — dimly perceived a boiling, spuming writhe of brine that marked the liner’s grave.

  A column of gaseous blue flame belched from the waves, writhed aloft and vanished.

  Impassive, the sea covered all. The Imperatrice was dead.