The Mark of the Beast and Other Fantastical Tales

by Rudyard Kipling

  ‘In heavy weather you jockey her with the screws as well,’ says Captain Hodgson, and unclipping the jointed bar which divides the engine-room from the bare deck, he leads me on the floor.

  Here we find Fleury’s Paradox of the Bulkheaded Vacuum – which we accept now without thought – literally in full blast. The three engines are assisted-vacuo Fleury turbines running from 3,000 to the Limit; that is to say, up to the point when the blades make the air bell – cut out a vacuum for themselves precisely as do overdriven marine propellers. 162’s Limit is low on account of the small size of her nine screws, which, though handier than the old colloid Thelussons, bell sooner. The ‘midships engine generally used as a reinforce is not running; so the port and starboard turbine vacuum-chambers draw direct into the return-mains.

  The turbines whistle reflectively. From the low-arched expansion-tanks on either side the valves descend pillar-wise to the turbine-chests, and thence the obedient gas whirls through the spirals of set blades with a force that would whip the teeth out of a power-saw. Behind, is its own pressure, held in leash or spurred on by the lift-shunts; before it, the vacuum where Fleury’s Ray dances in violet-green bands and whirled tourbillons of flame. The jointed U-tubes of the vacuum-chamber are pressure-tempered colloid (no glass would endure the strain for an instant), and a junior engineer with tinted spectacles watches the Ray intently. It is the very heart of the machine – a mystery to this day. Even Fleury, who begat it and, unlike Magniac, died a multi-millionaire, could not explain how that restless little imp pirouetting in the U-tube can, in the fractional fraction of a second, strike down the furious blast of gas into a chill greyish-green liquid that drains (you can hear it trickle) from the far end of the vacuum through the eduction-pipes and the mains back to the bilges. Here it returns to its gaseous – one had almost written sagacious – state and climbs to work afresh. Bilge-tank, upper-tank, dorsal-tank, expansion-chamber, vacuum, main-return (as a liquid) and bilge-tank once more is the ordained cycle. Fleury’s Ray sees to that; and the engineer with the tinted spectacles sees to Fleury’s Ray. If a speck of oil – if even the natural grease of the human finger touch the hooded terminals,Fleury’s Ray will wink and disappear and must be laboriously built up again. This means half-a-day’s work for all hands, and an expense of one hundred and seventy odd pounds to the GPO for radium-salts and such trifles.

  ‘Now look at our thrust-collars. You won’t find much German compo there. Full-jewelled, you see,’ says Captain Hodgson, as the engineer shunts open the top of a cap. Our shaft-bearings are CDC (Commercial Diamond Company) stones, ground with as much care as the lenses of a telescope. They cost thirty-seven pounds apiece. So far we have not arrived at their term of life. These bearings are over fifty years old. They came from No. 97, which took them over from the old Dominion of Light, which had them out of the wreck of the Perseus aeroplane in the years when men still flew tin kites over Thorium engines.

  They are a shining reproof to all low-grade German ‘ruby’ enamels, so-called ‘boort’ facings, and the dangerous and unsatisfactory aluminia compounds which please dividend-hunting owners and turn skippers crazy.

  The rudder-gear and the gas lift-shunt, seated side by side under the engine-room dials, are the only machines in visible motion. The former sighs from time to time as the oil-plunger rises and falls half an inch. The latter, cased and guarded like the U-tube aft, exhibits another Fleury Ray, but inverted and more green than violet. Its function is to shunt the lift out of the gas, and this it will do without watching. That is all! One tiny pump-rod wheezing and whining to itself beside a sputtering green lamp. A hundred and fifty feet aft, down the flat-topped tunnel of the tanks, a violet light restless and irresolute. Between the two, three white-painted turbine-trunks, like eel-baskets laid on their side, accentuate the empty perspectives. You can hear the trickle of the liquefied gas flowing from the vacuum into the bilge-tanks, and the soft gluck-glock of gas-locks closing as Captain Purnall brings 162 down by the head. The hum of the turbines and the boom of the air on our skin is no more than a cotton-wool wrapping to the universal stillness. And we are running an eighteen-second mile.

  I peer from the fore-end of the engine-room over the hatch-coamings into the coach. The mail-clerks are sorting the Winnipeg Calgary and Medicine Hat bags: but there is a pack of cards ready on the table.

  Suddenly a bell thrills; the engineers at the turbine-valves stand by; but the spectacled slave of the Ray in the U-tube never lifts his head. He must watch where he is. We are hard-braked and going astern; and there is high language from the control-platform.

  ‘Tim’s temper has fused on something,’ says the unruffled Captain Hodgson. ‘Let’s look.’

  Captain Purnall is not the man we left half an hour ago, but the embodied authority of the GPO. Ahead of us floats an ancient aluminium-patched, twin-screw tramp of the dingiest, with no more right to the 5,000-foot lanes than has a horse-cart to London. She carries an obsolete ‘barbette’ conning-tower – a six-foot affair with railed platform forward, and our warning beam plays on the top of it as a policeman’s lantern flashes on the area-sneak. Like a sneak-thief, too, emerges a shock-headed navigator in his shirt-sleeves. Captain Purnall wrenches open the colloid to talk with him man to man. There are times when science does not satisfy.

  ‘What under the stars are you doing here, you sky-scraping chimney-sweep?’ he shouts as we two drift side by side. ‘Do you know this is a Mail lane? You call yourself a skipper, sir? You ain’t fit to paddle toy aeroplanes in the Strand. Your name and number! Report and get down!’

  ‘I’ve been blown up once,’ the shock-headed man cries hoarsely as a dog barking under the stars. ‘I don’t care two flips of a contact for anything you can do, Postey.’

  ‘Don’t you, sir? But I’ll make you care. I’ll have your stinking gasogene towed stern first to Disko arid broke up. You can’t recover insurance if you’re broke for obstruction. Do you understand that?’

  Then the stranger bellows: ‘Look at my propellers! There’s been a wullie-wa down under that has blown me into umbrella-frames! We’re leakin’! We’re all one conjurer’s watch inside! My mate’s arm’s broke; my engineer’s head’scut open; my Ray went out when the engines smashed; and – and – for pity’s sake give me my height, Captain! We doubt we’re dropping.’

  ‘Six thousand eight hundred. Can you hold it?’ Captain Purnall overlooks all insults, and leans half out of the colloid, staring and sniffing. The stranger leaks pungently. He calls – ‘We thought to blow hack to St John’s with luck. We’re trying to plug the fore-tank now, but she’s simply whistlin’ it away.’

  ‘She’s sinkin’ like a log,’ says Captain Purnall in an undertone. ‘Call up the Mark Boat, George.’ Our dip-dial shows that we keeping abreast the tramp, have dropped five hundred feet the last few minutes. Captain Purnall presses a switch, and our signal-beam swings through the night, twizzling spokes of light across infinity.

  ‘That’ll fetch something,’ he says, while Captain Hodgson watches the General Communicator. He has called up the Banks Mark Boat a few hundred miles west, and is reporting.

  ‘I’ll stand by you!’ Captain Purnall roars to the lone figure on the conning-tower.

  ‘Is it as bad as that?’ comes the answer. ‘She isn’t insured.’

  ‘Might have guessed as much,’ mutters Hodgson. ‘Owner’s risk is the worst risk of all!’

  ‘Can’t I fetch St John’s – not even with this breeze?’ the voice quavers.

  ‘Stand by to abandon ship! Haven’t you any lift in you, fore or aft?’

  ‘Nothing but the ’midships tanks, and they’re none too tight. Yon see, my Ray gave out and—’ he coughs in the reek of the escaping gas.

  ‘You poor devil!’ This does not reach our friend. ‘What does the Mark Boat say, George?’

  ‘Wants to know if there’s any danger to traffic. Says she’s in a bit of weather herself and can’t quit station. I’ve turned in a General Call, so even
if they don’t see our beam, someone’s bound to – or else we must. Shall I clear our slings? Hold on! Here we are! A Planet liner, too! She’ll be up in a tick!’

  ‘Tell her to get her slings ready,’ cries his brother Captain.‘There won’t be much time to spare … Tie up your mate!’ he roars to the tramp.

  ‘My mate’s all right. It’s my engineer. He’s gone crazy.’

  ‘Shunt the lift out of him with a spanner. Hurry!’

  ‘But I can make land – if I’ve half a chance.’

  ‘You’ll make the deep Atlantic in twenty minutes. You’re less than fifty-four hundred now. Get your log and papers.’

  A Planet liner – east bound – heaves up in a superb spiral and takes the air of us humming. Her underbody colloid is open, and her transporter-slings hang down like tentacles. We shut off our beam as she adjusts herself – steering to a hair – over the tramp’s conning-tower. The mate emerges, his arm strapped to his side, and stumbles into the cradle. A man with a ghastly scarlet head follows, shouting that he must go back and build up his Ray. The mate assures him that he will find a nice new Ray all ready in the liner’s engine-room. The bandaged head goes up wagging excitedly. A youth and a woman follow. The liner cheers hollowly above us, and we see the passengers’faces at the saloon colloid.

  ‘That’s a good girl. What’s the fool waiting for now?’ says Captain Purnall.

  The skipper comes up still appealing to us to stand by and see him fetch St John’s. He dives below and returns – at which we little human beings in the void cheer louder than ever – with the ship’s kitten. Up fly the liner’s hissing slings; her underbody crashes home and she hurtles away again. Our dial shows less than 3,000 feet.

  The Mark Boat signals that we must attend to the derelict, now whistling her death-song as she falls beneath us in long, sick zigzags.

  ‘Keep our beam on her and send out a general warning,’ says Captain Purnall, following her down.

  There is no need. Not a liner in air but knows the meaning of that vertical beam, and gives us and our quarry a wide berth.

  ‘But she’ll drown in the water, won’t she?’ I asked of Tim.

  ‘I’ve known a derelict up-end and sift her engines out of herself, and flicker round the Lower Lanes for three weeks onher forward tanks only. We’ll run no risks. Pith her, George, and look sharp. There’s weather ahead.’

  Captain Hodgson opens the underbody colloid, swings the heavy pithing-iron out of its rack which, in liners, is generally cased as a settee, and at two hundred feet releases they catch. We hear the whirr 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 international-speaking men of all the Internationalities, each of them taught (that is the horror of it) that after death he would very possibly go for ever to unspeakable torment? And not a century since 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 half-dressed – and inflate at the air-pump taps. GPO inflators are thrice as thick as a racing man’s ‘heavies,’ 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 tonight.

  ‘The Mark Boat’s mad – stark ravin’ crazy,’ Tim snorts, returning to command. ‘She says there’s a bad blowout ahead, and wants me to pull over to Greenland. I’ll see her pithed first! We’ve wasted an hour and a quarter over that dead bird down under, and now I’m expected to go rabbin’ my back all the Pole round! What does she think a postal packet’s made of. Gummed silk? Tell her we’re comin’ on straight.’

  George buckles him into the Frame and switches on the Direct Control. Now, under Tim’s left toe, lies the port-engineaccelerator; 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 bow-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 Aerial Route 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 can ascend to the limit of their lift, mail-packets to look out for them accordingly: the traffic lanes are pitting very badly with frequent blowouts, vortices, and laterals. In other words, we are in for a storm with electric trimmings.

  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 intense irritability which the gibbering of the General Communicator increases almost to hysteria.

  We have risen eight thousand feet since we pithed the tramp, and our turbines are giving us an honest two hundred an hour.

  Very far to the west an elongated blur of light low down shows us the Banks Mark Boat, There are specks of fire round her rising and falling – bewildered planets about an unstable sun – helpless shipping hanging on to her light for company’s sake. No wonder she could not quit station.

  She warns us to look out for the backwash of the bad vortex in which (her beam shows it) she is even now reeling.

  The pits of gloom about us being to fill with very faintly luminous films – wreathing and uneasy shapes. One forms itself into a globe of pale flame that waits shivering with eagerness as we sweep by. It leaps monstrously across the blackness, alights on the precise tip of our nose, grimaces there an instant, and swings off. Our roaring bow sinks as though that light were lead – sinks and recovers to lurch and stumble again beneath the next blowout. Tim’s fingers on thelift-shunt strike chords of numbers: 1.4.7; 2.4.6; 7.5.3; and so on; for he is running by his tanks only, lifting and dropping her by instinct. All three engines are at work; the sooner we have skated over this thin ice, the better. Higher we dare not go. The whole upper vault is charged with pale Krypton vapours, which our skin-friction may excite to unholy manifestations. Between the upper and the lower levels – 5,000 and 7,000 hints the Mark Boat – we may perhaps bolt through if…

  Our bow clothes itself in blue flame and falls like a sword. No human skill can keep pace with the changing tensions. A vortex has us by the beak, and we dive down a two-thousand foot slant at an angle (the dip-dial and my bouncing body record it) of thirty-five. Our turbines scream shrilly; the propellers cannot bite on the wild air; Tim shunts the lift out of five tanks at once, and by sheer weight drives her bulletwise through the maelstrom till she cushions with a jar of the brake three thousand feet below.

  ‘Now we’ve done it,’ says George in my ear. ‘Our skin-friction that last slide has played Old Harry with the tensions! Look out for laterals, Tim.’

  ‘I’ve got her,’ is the answer. ‘Come up,you crazy old kite!’

  She comes up nobly, but the laterals buffet her left and right like the pinions of angry angels. She is jolted off her chosen star twenty degrees port or starboard, and cuffed into place again, only to be swung away and dropped into a new blowout. We are never without a corposant grinning on our bows or rolling head over heels from nose to ’midships; and to the crackle of electricity round and within us is added
once or twice the rattle of hail – hail that will never fall on any sea. Slow we must, or we shall break out back, pitch-poling.

  ‘Air’s a perfectly elastic fluid!’ roars George above the tumult. ‘Elastic as a head sea off the Fastnet!’

  He is less than just to the good element. If one intrudes on the heavens when they are balancing their volt-accounts; if one disturbs the High Gods’ market-rates by hurling steel hulls at ninety knots across tremblingly adjusted tensions, one must not complain of any rudeness in the reception. Tim met it with an unmoved countenance, a corner of his underlip caught upon a tooth, his eyes fleeting into the blackness twenty miles ahead, and the fierce sparks flying from his knuckles at every play of the hand. Now and again he shook his head to clear the sweat trickling through his eyebrows, and it was then that George, watching his chance, would slide down the life-rail and swab his face quickly with a big red handkerchief. I never imagined that a human being could so continuously labour and so collectedly think, as did Tim through that Hell’s half-hour when the flurry was at its worst. We were dragged hither and yon by warm or frozen suctions, belched up on the tops of wullie-was, spun down by vortices, and clubbed aside by laterals under a dizzying rush of stars, in the company of a drunken moon. I heard the swishing click of the ’midships engine-lever sliding in and out, the low growl of the lift-shunts, and, louder than the yelling winds without, the scream of the bow-rudder gouging into any lull that promised hold even for an instant. At last we began to claw up on a cant, bow-rudder and port-propeller together; only the nicest balancing of our lift saved us from spinning like the rifle-bullet of the old days.

  ‘We’ve got to hitch to windward of the Mark Boat somehow,’ George cried.

  ‘There’s no windward,’ I protested feebly where I swung shackled to a stanchion. ‘How can there be?’

  He laughed – as we pitched into a thousand-foot blowout – that red man laughed under his inflated hood.