ng.
That is all! A 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 gaslocks 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 run to the turbine-valves and
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; there is language from the Control Platform.

"Tim's sparking badly about something," says the unruffled Captain
Hodgson. "Let's look."

Captain Purnall is not the suave man we left half an hour since, but
the embodied authority of the G.P.O. Ahead of us floats an ancient,
aluminum-patched, twin-screw tramp of the dingiest, with no more right
to the 5000-foot lane than has a horse-cart to a modern road. 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 sailor, sir? You ain't fit to
peddle toy balloons to an Esquimaux. Your name and number! Report and
get down, and be--!"

"I've been blown up once," the shock-headed man cries, hoarsely, as a
dog barking. "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 you towed stern first
to Disko and broke up.