SteampubkPrime
Page 31
VI
Overborne with horror, Norford Hale lapsed from knowledge of all things. Then — after how long a time he knew not — he once more found his senses.
“Where is Romney?”
The thought stabbed him. He rallied his forces, shouting to the vacancy of night and moonlight-sparkling sea.
A voice answered him, on the third call-her voice, off somewhere to windward.
“Romney! Oh, Romney! Where are you!”
Lifted on a crest, he peered across the moving plain of waters vast and slow. Now the tiny dots of signal-lights had grown fewer, scattered wide and vanishing upon the bosom of the primal mystery of old ocean. Not all man’s towering achievement, not all his sublime skill and science, had yet dethroned the sea from its supremacy. Terribly unconquered, it still rolled indomitable as when first the naked savage faced it, awed and wondering.
Again and again Hale shouted, till his throat went raw.
A signal-light rose as though answering, two or three hundred yards away farther, perhaps-he could not tell. Hale thought he heard a cry drifting down-wind.
Drawing the aluminum paddle from its sheath alongside the vacuum-belt, he drove himself toward that reply.
“Romney!”
“Here! Oh, here, here!”
“Safe?”
“Yes!” She shouted, as he neared her.
“Are you?”
“Yes — thank God!”
He labored hard, and made his way to her. Each searched the other’s face, wan and haggard under the moonlight and the flare of the signals.
“Oh, Norford!” she gasped, her teeth still chattering violently, for even in those latitudes the sea was chill.
“Romney!” He exclaimed, reaching out to her. Their hands clasped and held. And silence fell between them.
So few now, and so far, had become the scattered signal-lights still remaining that the two seemed all alone there together in a universe of deep, impassive sky and restless sea that loomed away, away to nothingness. Above, the clouds had now cleared a little, showing patches of the heavens, infinite abysses of space where shone diadems of mild-glowing stars, softened by the tropic moonlight.
A sibilant hissing all at once drew’ Hale’s attention.
“What’s that?” He asked, listening keenly. At first he did not understand; but as the sound continued, with an ominous gurgitation of water, he suddenly knew. The greater depth to which he was now sinking — the rapid disappearance of his buoyancy — these alone would have told him the truth.
For a moment numb dread possessed him, but he mastered it. He forced himself to speak with an approach to calm.
“Romney,” asked he, “If — if you should be left all alone here, would you be very much afraid? Would you hold your nerve and — try to wait for rescue?”
“Alone?” She cried. “How — why?”
“You may as well know,” he answered plainly. “You’ll have to, anyhow, in a minute or two. My vacuum — belt has sprung a leak. Hear that sound? Air and water are entering it. In a very short time — well — ”
“You mean — ?”
“Yes, Romney. It’s a case of goodbye. Your belt, alone, can’t possibly sustain us both. Here, girl! Give me your hand again. I’ll just say goodbye, and God keep you! Then I’ll paddle away. Of course ‘you understand you mustn’t see — ”
Aghast, she stared at him. Then sudden fire leaped into her wide eyes. “Take mine, and let me go!”
“What?”
“I’m of no use in the world! It will never miss me. You, with all your splendid achievements and powers-”
“Nonsense, Romney! You’re mad!”
“I’m going to do it, I tell you I” she cried passionately. “You’ve been my ideal for years — it doesn’t matter now if I tell you. You shan’t die; you mustn’t! I showed myself a coward when you saved me from the ship. Now let me show myself a woman! I’ve lived empty and idle. Let me die to serve the world — and you!”
Already she was laboring at the buckles, to loosen them. He seized her hands and held them fast.
“No, no, no!” He forbade her. Already he was sinking far lower. “You mustn’t, Romney — mine-you can’t now it’s too late!”
She struggled to free herself for her stem purpose. He, seizing his paddle, struck out away from her.
“Norford! Come back, come back!” She gasped.
‘’’Good-by — God keep you, Romney!” He answered, now sunk far into the heaving hills of brine. A great calm and a supreme gratitude enfolded him. The girl, he felt, was safe. And he, unable to loosen the metallic belt, must in a minute or two be drawn into the depths of rest eternal.
“I’ve lived a man’s life” — the thought soothed him. “I shall die a man’s death. For that, thank God!”
He ceased his paddling, now that he had attained a fitting distance, and for a moment lay inert, hearkening the ever more rapid gurgle of the incoming air and water. More and more heavily now he wallowed, his buoyancy all gone. He reached a weary hand and extinguished his light. Romney should not, at least, see that disappear beneath the sea-floor, when the final moment came.
An echo of a long forgotten sonnet rose to him:
Drained is the cup that holds both Heaven and Hell; Peace deep as peace of those divinely drowned
In leagues of moonlit waters, wraps me round. And it is well with — me-yea! It is well!
Again he heard Romney’s call. He glimpsed her light, away to leeward. Vaguely he smiled, murmured a goodbye and with supreme abandon yielded himself to the engulfing sea.
VII
THE shock of a hard body in collision with his shoulder jarred him awake from this mood of euthanasia. Instinct flung out his arms. His clutching hands caught something, slipped, held, and once more wrenched loose; then finally got their grip and clung there.
He sensed he was no longer sinking, was not dead, might still survive. The ripe moonlight on that southern sea showed his reopening eyes that he was grappling the netted side of a monoplane life-raft-a raft that must have fallen from the Imperatrice rather than have been launched, for in that swift, all-mastering panic not a single one had been set free.
Life and the instinct to live gushed up in Norford Hale. Many long years still stood between him and his natural term of being; the blood still rushed hot and keen through his arteries. And “Life!” Cried every atom of him, in clamant choruses. He found that the struggle he had thought ended had only just begun.
With freshened energy he toiled up out of the welter and the foam, out upon the swaying safety of that float. One by one he undid the hampering buckles of the now water-logged life-belt, and saving only the paddle and the food-cartridges slid the useless apparatus back into the sea. Still sucking air and brine, it sank, eddying in the moonshine down and away to black deeps.
As it disappeared, hopes welled up in Norford Hale, and burning thoughts, and eager yearnings after supreme possibilities that set his pulses hammering. He stood up then, filled his domed chest with splendidly revivifying breath, and through hollowed palms belled into a long cry to Jeanne, across the night.
He listened, in suspense, searching the loom for her light, but seeing none. A sick fear crept upon him as he called and called again.
Her answer! He heard it, all at once, drifting down-wind to him. All at once her light showed once more, a star upon the vast waters.
Joy so poignant as his was almost pain, as he knelt, plunged the paddle overside, and with splendid energy began driving the raft toward Jeanne.
After a certain while, two figures sat together on the raft that cradled easily over the vast Pacific rollers. Millions of moving sparkles flashed from the sea, struck out by the moon — the moon now disked in solid silver, now “stooping through a fleecy cloud” and shining there with softened glory.
Night wore on; and now the moon, dimming as the east began to glow, hid drooped almost to the vague mists that pearled the horizon. The stars blanched and died; but, wat
ching them, the man saw one star moving on the edge of the sea — a star that waxed, that mounted on the sky — a star that spoke of life.
“Look In cried Norford, pointing. “A kinetogram was sent, after all! See there — rescue!”
The girl, all disheveled, wet and shivering, raised her eyes to the swift-approaching searchlight of the aerocraft. For a moment she peered at it in silence; then she smiled.
“Can this be A.D. 2O16?” She asked wonderingly. “Things like this happen only in books — books of the old days — ”
“Books of life!” Said Norford, with his arm about her. “Don’t you see — this plunge has been a plunge back into life, real life, for us? Romney mine, a story like this can have only one ending! And was it you, Romney, was it you, who told me that Romance was dead?”
She bowed her head, yearning against his breast. His arms made home for her.
“I told you that,” she faltered, “before I knew what a man could be — before either of us had drunk the wine of primitive emotion — before I owed you the life that’s yours now, if you want it!”
He slid the eagle ring from his finger.
“Give me your left hand, Romney,” he bade. “The air has made us one; the symbol of these wings shall always bind us!”
Her answer was to kiss the ring that he had put upon her finger. Kisses and tears, together, sanctified it.
“You would have died that I might live!” He whispered. “You are my woman, Romney girl!” He put her head back from his heart, turned up her face, and crushed her mouth to his. “Mine, mine!” Said he. “You are my woman now!”
SOURCES
“Mr. Broadbent’s Information” by Henry A. Hering, first published in Pearson’s Magazine, March 1909.
“The Automaton” by Reginald Bacchus and C. Ranger Gull, first published in The Ludgate, January 1900.
“The Abduction of Alexandra Seine” by Fred C. Smale, first published in The Harmsworth Magazine, November 1900.
“The Gibraltar Tunnel” by Jean Jaubert, first published as “Le Tunnel de Gibraltar” in Je Sais Tout, 15 March 1914. This translation by Ethel Christian first published in the American edition of The Strand Magazine, September 1914.
“From Pole to Pole” by George Griffith, first published in The Windsor Magazine, October 1904.
“In the Deep of Time” by George Parsons Lathrop, first published in The English Illustrated Magazine, March and April 1897.
“The Brotherhood of the Seven Kings: The Star-Shaped Marks” by L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, first published in The Strand Magazine, June 1898.
“The Plague of Lights” by Owen Oliver, first published in The London Magazine, October 1904.
“What the Rats Brought” by Ernest Favenc, first published in Phil May’s Illustrated Winter Annual, 1903-4.
“The Great Catastrophe” by George Davey, first published in The English Illustrated Magazine, February 1910.
“Within an Ace of the End of the World” by Robert Barr, first published in McClure’s Magazine, April 1900 and in The Windsor Magazine, December 1900.
“An Interplanetary Rupture” by Frank L. Packard, first published in The Monthly Story Blue Book Magazine, December 1906.
“The Last Days of Earth” by George C. Wallis, first published in The Harmsworth Magazine, July 1901.
“The Plunge” by George Allan England, first published in Snappy Stories, first April number, 1916.
Contributors
MIKE ASHLEY is the author and editor of over 90 books in the fields of science fiction, crime fiction and the supernatural. His books range from Algernon Blackwood: An Extraordinary Life to The Time Machines, the first in a series about the science-fiction magazines. He won an Edgar Award for The Mammoth Encyclopaedia of Crime Fiction, a Stoker Award for The Supernatural Index and received the Pilgrim Award for lifetime contribution to science fiction research.
PAUL DI FILIPPO has over twenty-five published books to his credit. He lives in Providence, RI, USA, with his mate of three decades, Deborah Newton, his chocolate-colored cocker spaniel Brownie, and a calico cat named Penny Century.
LUIS ORTIZ lives and works in New York City as a creative director and advertising artist. He is the editor, along with Earl Kemp, of Cult Magazines: From A to Z, and author of Emshwiller: Infinity X Two, which was nominated for both the Hugo and Locus awards.
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