Alec tapped a dial and seemed satisfied, so he cut off the butane flow while at the same instant turned on the pump that blew the tiny particles of pulverized coal into the engine, where it burnt instantly and hotly. The great machine trembled and rumbled with restrained power as he adjusted the controls so it idled smoothly.
“I’ll be down here until well after we’re airborne, still have to fire up the starboard lot. Why don’t you go back to the bridge, I’ll phone through and tell them you are on the way up.”
“Surely that would be an interference?”
“Not a bit of it. For every question you ask about this airborne Moby Dick they’ll have a dozen about your transatlantic pipe. Get along now.”
The engineer was not far wrong for the captain himself, Wing Commander Mason, met Gus and insisted he remain. The bridge was quiet, commands were issued in a restrained manner and obeyed with alacrity, so it appeared that all the excitement was outside. The dockside crowd was waving and cheering, boat whistles blowing, until just on the stroke of midday the lines were cast off and the tugs nosed the ponderous airship away from the shore and out into the channel. Mason, who was young for a Cunard captain but who had grown a full beard to fit the accepted image, was proud of his charge.
“Waterline weight 198,000 pounds, Mr. Washington, 240 feet from stem to stern, 72 feet from the bottom of the step to the lookout’s position top of the central tail fin. An exercise in superlatives, and all of them truthful I must admit. We have a 2,000 horsepower turbine in the tail that does nothing more than pump air for the boundary layer control and deflected, slipstream, increases our lift to triple that of an ordinary wing. Why we’ll be airborne at 50 miles an hour and inside 400 feet. Spray-suppressor grooves on both sides of the hull keep down the flying scud and smooth the sea for us. Now, if you will excuse me.”
The tugs cast off, the helmsman spun the wheel to line the ship up for the takeoff, then disengaged his controls so the captain had command. Hooting police boats had cleared the harbor of small craft. Steadying the airborne tiller with his left hand the captain rang for full ahead with his right. A faint vibration in the deck could be felt as the turbines howled up to top speed and the Queen Elizabeth slipped forward over the water, faster and faster. The transition was so smooth that there was no distinction between being waterborne and airborne. In fact the very presence of this juggernaut of the airways was so solid and reassuring that it appeared as though instead of the ship rising the city outside had dropped away from them, shrinking at the same time to the size of a model, then tipping on its side as the ship began a slow turn to the west. Below them now the Isle of Wight slipped by, an unimportant green scrap of flotsam in the sparkling ocean, then they were out over the Channel with England contracting and vanishing under their starboard wing. Gus picked up his case and slipped below, happy to have shared this moment of triumph with these furrowers of a new and dimensionless sea.
A short corridor led aft to the Grand Saloon where the passengers were seeing and being seen. They sat at the tables, admired the view from the great circular ports, and gave the bar a brisk business. The room was not as spacious as its title indicated but the dark, curved ceiling gave an illusion of size with its twinkling stars and drifting clouds projected there by some hidden device.
Gus worked his way through the crowd until he caught the eye of a porter who led him to his cabin. It was tiny but complete and he dropped into the armchair with relief and rested, looking out of the porthole for a while. His bags that were labeled cabin were there and he knew that there were other papers in them that he should attend to. But for the moment he sat quietly, admiring the simplicity and beauty of the cabin’s construction—it was an original Picasso lithograph on the wall—and the way the chair and desk would fold and vanish at night so the bunk could be opened. Eventually he yawned, stretched, opened his collar, opened his case and set to work.
When the gong sounded for luncheon he ignored it but sent instead for a pint of draught Guinness and a plowman’s lunch of bread, cheese, and pickles. On this simple fare he labored well and by the time the gong sounded again, this time for dinner, he was more than willing to put his work away and join his fellow man. Even though it was a fellow woman who shared his table at the first seating, a lady of advanced years, very rich though of lowly antecedents. Both of these could be read easily into her jewelry and her vowels so that, eating swiftly, Gus returned to his cabin.
During his absence his bed had been opened and turned back, an electric hotwater bottle slipped between the sheets since the cabins were cooled to a refreshing sleeping temperature, and his pajamas lain across the pillow. Ten o’clock by his watch but—he spun it ahead five hours to New York time—they would be roused deucedly early. Three hundred miles an hour, a fifteen-hour flight—it might be a ten a.m. arrival local time but it would be five a.m. to his metabolism so he determined to get as much rest as possible. It was going to be a hectic day, week, month, year—hectic forever. Not that he minded. The tunnel was worth it, worth anything. He yawned, slipped between the covers and turned off the light. He left the portable curtains open so he could watch the stars moving by in stately splendor before he went to sleep.
The next sensation was one of struggling, drowning, not being able to breathe, dying, pinned down. He thrashed wildly, fighting against the unbreakable bands that bound him, trying to call out but finding his nose and mouth were covered.
It was not a dream. He had never smelled anything in a dream before, never had his nose assaulted in this manner, never had it been clogged with the cloying sweetness of ether.
In that instant he was wide awake, completely awake, and catching his breath, holding it, not breathing. In the Far West he had helped the surgeon many times, poured the ether into the cone on a wounded man’s face, and had learned to hold his breath against the escaping, dizzying fumes. He did that now, not knowing what was happening but knowing that if he breathed in as much as one breath more he would lose consciousness.
There was no light but as he struggled he became aware that at least two men were leaning their full weight on him, holding him down. Something cold was being fastened on his wrists while something else prisoned his ankles at the same time. Now the heavy figures simply held him while he writhed, keeping the ether rag to his face, waiting for him to subside.
It was torture. He fought on as long as he could before letting his struggles cease, went past the time where he wanted to breathe to the point where he needed to breathe to the excruciating, horrifying moment where he thought if he did not breathe he would die. With an almost self-destroying effort he passed this point as well and was sinking into a darker blackness when he felt the cloth being removed from his face at last.
First he breathed out the residual fouled air in his lungs, clearing his nostrils, and then, ever so slowly, despite the crying needs of his demanding body, he let a quiet trickle of air back into his lungs. Even as he did this he felt strong hands seize and lift him and carry him to the door which was opened a crack, then thrown wide so they could carry him through. There were dim night lights in the corridor and he slitted his eyes so they would appear closed and let his body remain completely limp despite the battering of the doorjamb as they rushed him through.
There was no one else in sight, no one to cry out to if that might have done any good. Just two men dressed completely in black with black gloves and black goggled masks over their faces that bulged out below. Two men, two rough strangers, hurrying him where?
To a waiting lift that streamed bright light when the door opened so that he closed his eyes at once. But he had recognized it, the lift from the hold up to the engine rooms that he had been in with the first engineer. What did this mean? He was jammed in, prevented from falling by the two assailants who pushed in with him so they rose silently in close, hoarse-breathing contact—while not a word was spoken. In a matter of less than a minute these two savage men had seized and bound him, theoretically rendered him unconscious and were now taking him some place with surely no good purpose.