Anti-Ice Page 9

  “Yes. I remember now. And that rum fellow Dever came out with apocalyptic warnings of the consequences were the stopcock closed.”

  “I fear that is precisely the chain of events which has occurred,” Holden said, his voice uncharacteristically hard.

  “Pocket!” Traveller continued to press at the jammed hatch. “In God’s name give me a hand here.” Pocket joined him and, cramped together at the top of the ladder, they heaved at the wheel which should have opened the hatch.

  I watched them absently. “Holden, many people must have been hurt.”

  He studied me for a moment, his round, pocked face filled with concern, and he reached to the wall and opened a seat. “Ned, sit down.”

  I let him guide me to the seat; its padding afforded a welcome relief from that odd and continuing vibration. “But how could such an accident occur? Surely the ship’s crew would be aware of such elementary hazards.”

  “This catastrophe was no accident, Ned.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “That the stopcock was left closed deliberately. And when the Captain raised steam and engaged his traction, at the precise stroke of noon, steam flooded into the dried and superheated pipe—with the devastating consequences we have witnessed.

  “Ned, I believe a saboteur is responsible for this wanton act.”

  I shook my head; I felt light-headed and numbed by the rapidly unfolding events. I could scarcely comprehend Holden’s words. “But why would any saboteur act in such a way?”

  “We must suspect the Prussians,” Holden said harshly, his mouth a tight little line. “They, after all, initiated the present war with France with their devious conniving over the Ems telegram. Perhaps this incident is an Ems telegram for our King, eh? Well, by God; if they think they can tweak the lion’s tail—”

  But I was scarcely listening, for some unused deductive bump was beginning to function. “Holden—”

  “No time! No time!” Traveller leapt down from his ladder and began pulling out the seats once more. “Sit, all of you! There are restraints beneath the seat cushions; Vicars, I will help you. Pocket, make that fat fellow sit down!”

  But Sir Josiah’s incomprehensible behavior—even his use of my correct name—went past me in a blur. “Holden, I cannot remember the geography of the ship.” I found I was shouting over a rising noise, a rushing like a waterfall from somewhere beneath our feet; Traveller hovered over me, frock coat flapping, as he pulled the patent restraints about my waist and chest. “Holden!” I cried. “Funnels ran through the Grand Saloon, did they not?”

  “They did, lad.”

  Now Traveller and Pocket took their own seats; soon the four of us sat strapped at the four points of the compass in the little Cabin, staring at each other wild-eyed. I called to Holden, “And the funnel which exploded—was it one of those running through that Saloon? It was, wasn’t it?”

  “Ned, there’s nothing you can do now.”

  The whole of the Phaeton rattled around me, but all I could see were those mirrored columns passing through the crowded Saloon. There must be hundreds dead.

  And—

  “I must go to her.” I tried to stand, slumped foolishly as the restraints hauled me back, and fumbled with the buckles at my waist and breastbone.

  “Vicars, I beg of you!” Traveller’s voice was a roar which drowned out even the supernatural clamor from beneath our feet. “Stay in your seat!”

  My straps released, I stood and reached for the ladder.

  The floor bucked beneath me again; I caught a glimpse of the Inferno through the nearest port—the Promenade Deck careering wildly, live steam fleeing across the metal, people running from the steam, screaming—and then came a brief sensation of falling, a muffled, thumplike explosion beneath the floor, another lurch sideways.

  I slammed into the floor. I felt blood under my face, and a steady pressure which pressed me through the rugs and into the metal beneath.

  As if from a great distance I heard the voice of Holden. “May God preserve us,” he cried. “The Phaeton is aloft!”

  With a great effort I lifted my head once more to the port. Now the landscape was curved over on itself, an inverted blue bowl; but still there was the noise, the vibration, the stink of my own blood—

  Darkness folded around me.

  5

  ABOVE THE AIR

  It was as if I lay in the softest feather-bed in the world. I drifted in silence, content to doze like a child.

  “…Ned? Ned, can you hear my voice?”

  The words stirred my awareness. At first I resisted their probing, but the voice persisted, and at last I felt myself bobbing like a cork to the surface of consciousness.

  I opened my eyes. The round face of Holden hovered over me, bearing every expression of concern; he had lost his cummerbund, his collar and tie were crumpled and pulled around through a right- angle, and his mussed hair appeared oddly to float around his face, like an oiled, black halo.

  “Holden.” I found my throat was dry, and the taste of blood lingered in my mouth.

  “Are you all right? Can you sit up?”

  I lay there for a moment, allowing the sensations of my body, my limbs, to run through my mind. “I certainly feel stiff, as if I have been worked over by a few toughs; and yet I feel remarkably comfortable.” I turned my head, half-expecting to find that I was lying on some form of bunk bed, but only a rug—bloodstained—lay beneath me. “How long have I been out?”

  Holden took my shoulder and lifted me to a sitting position; I seemed to bounce oddly on the Turkish rug and my stomach lurched briefly, as if I were falling. I dismissed this as dizziness. “Only a few minutes,” Holden said, “but—Ned, our situation has changed. I think you should prepare yourself for a shock.”

  “A shock?”

  I glanced around the craft. Holden himself was crouched on the rug, grasping its edge as if his life depended on it; poor Pocket remained strapped into his chair, his face as clammy as a plucked chicken.

  And Traveller?

  Sir Josiah stood before a porthole, his stovepipe screwed tightly to his head. In one hand he held a small notebook and pencil, and the other hand he held between his face and the window with fingers outstretched; blue-white light streamed in through the window, casting highlights from the polished platinum fixed to his face. (The other windows were darkened, I noticed, and the Cabin’s acetylene lamps had been lit.)

  Then I wondered if I were still dreaming.

  I have said that Traveller stood before his port, and such was indeed my impression on first glance; but as I studied him more closely I observed that his large shoes were some four inches above the oilskin. Indeed, a slight bend in Traveller’s knees allowed me to inspect the manufacturer’s name imprinted on the soles.

  Thus Sir Josiah floated in the air like some illusionist, apparently without support.

  I looked up into Holden’s face. His hand was on my shoulder. “Steady, now, Ned. Take it one item at a time—”

  A wave of panic swept over me. “Holden, am I losing my mind?” I pushed at the rug with my hands, intending to draw my legs under me and stand up. The rug drifted from beneath my fingers, and I sailed into the air as if drawn by an invisible string. I scrabbled at the rug, first with my hands, then with the tips of my boots, but to no avail; and soon I was stranded, adrift in the air, arms and legs outstretched like some flailing starfish.

  “Holden! What is happening to me?”

  Holden remained seated on the rug, his fingers wrapped around it. “Ned, come down from there.”

  “If you’ll tell me how, I will,” I shouted with feeling. Now, with a soft impact, my neck and shoulders collided with the upper, curving hull of the chamber. I reached behind my back with both hands, seeking a purchase, but my fingers slid over the frustratingly sheer leather of the walls, and I succeeded only in pushing myself forward so that I hung upside down in the air. It was as if Holden hung absurdly from the ceiling, and Pocket was susp
ended from the straps of his chair, while the Great Eastern model in its glass case dangled like some nautical chandelier.

  My stomach revolved.

  A strong hand shot out and grabbed my arm. “In God’s name, Wickers, keep your breakfast down; we’d never get the damn place cleaned up.”

  It was Traveller; with his bony ankles wrapped in chair straps like some frock-coated monkey’s he hauled me through a disconcerting 180 degrees and hurled me bodily toward the floor. I landed close to a chair; with relief I grabbed at it, pulled myself down and strapped in.

  In the exertion Traveller’s hat had become dislodged. Now it hung in the air, rotating like a dandelion seed; with grunts of irritation Traveller swatted at it until the hat sailed into his arms, and then he jammed it safely back on his head.

  With comparative normality restored—save for the disturbing propensity of my legs to hover in mid- air—I remarked to Holden, quite coolly in the circumstances, “I have no doubt this all has a rational explanation.”

  “Oh, indeed.” He brushed a hand over his black hair, plastering it into comparative order. “Although I suspect you will not enjoy the answer.”

  Traveller floated once more before a blue-lit porthole (a different one, I noted, showing that the mysterious blue light had moved about the ship). I said loudly, “Sir Josiah, since you are responsible for our entrapment within this aerial brougham, I think you owe us some explanation of our condition.”

  Traveller stood—or rather floated—quite at ease in the air, one hand resting on the sill of the port. From a pocket he extracted his small humidor, opened it and drew out a cigarette and—leaving the humidor dangling in mid-air!—struck a match, and soon the air was filled with tendrils of acrid gas. Traveller then mercifully stowed away the acrobatic humidor. “What is it that makes young men so damnably pompous? Our situation is obvious,” he said briskly.

  I opened my mouth and would have replied intemperately, but Holden stepped in smoothly. “You must recall our unscientific vocations, sir; events are not always as self-explanatory to us as they are perhaps to you.”

  “For example,” I said frostily, “perhaps you would be good enough to supply an explanation of this damnable mid-air floating. Is it some phenomenon connected with flight above the ground?”

  Traveller rubbed the stub of human nose which remained between his eyes. “Good God, what do they teach in the schools these days? Is the work of Sir Isaac Newton a closed book?”

  Stubbornly I said, “Please describe how the eminent Sir Isaac is arranging for you to float about in the air like a human dust-mote.”

  “The Phaeton’s engines have been turned off,” Traveller said. “Perhaps you noticed a difference in the ambient noise.”

  I was startled; for, until Sir Josiah pointed it out, I had not noticed the silence of the Cabin.

  My heart leapt. “Then we are on the ground. But where?” I gazed out of the darkened windows—noting that the odd blue light had shifted once more, so that it shone through still another port. “It is night-time outside. Have we traveled to a region of darkness?” My mind raced; perhaps we were in North America or some other distant land—or what if we were stranded in some untrodden jungle? “But surely we have nothing to fear,” I said rapidly. “All we need do is climb down from the craft and seek out the nearest British Consul; no city on Earth is without representation, and comfort and aid will be provided—”

  “Ned.” Holden looked at me steadily, although I noticed that his plump hands, still wrapped around the carpet, were trembling. “You must be still and try to understand. We are rather further from any Consulate than you imagine.”

  Traveller spoke slowly and simply, as if to a child. “Let us take this one step at a time. The engines are still. But we are not on the ground. Surely that is obvious, even to a diplomat. Instead—without the rocket propulsion provided by the engines—the craft is falling freely. And we are falling within it; and so we float, as a marble would seem to float within a dropped box.” Sir Josiah continued with a long and complicated expansion of this concept, involving the lack of reaction forces between my backside and the chair I sat in…

  But I had grasped the essential concept. We were falling.

  A wave of panic swept over me and I grabbed at my restraints. “Then we are doomed, for we shall surely be dashed against the ground within moments!”

  Traveller groaned theatrically and slapped at his thigh; and Holden said, “Ned, you don’t see it yet. We are in no danger of falling to the ground.”

  I scratched my head. “Then I confess I am utterly at a loss, Holden.”

  Traveller said slowly, “At the moment of the Albert’s launch—and the sabotage—Phaeton’s engines ignited. The craft rose into the air—and rose still higher, accelerating—and continued to rise, leaving the Earth far behind.”

  I felt a chill course through my veins, and abruptly I felt faint, light-headed. “Then are we in the upper atmosphere?”

  Traveller extinguished his cigarette in a tray built into the nearest seat, and extended an arm to me. “Ned, I think you should join me. Do you think you can do that?”

  The thought of launching myself once more like some trampolinist filled me with dread; but I opened the buckles and pushed off the floating straps. I straightened up so that I floated in the air, and pushed with both hands against my seat. Like a log of wood I crossed the Cabin, fetching up at last against Traveller, whose strong hand propelled me to the porthole frame.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The blue illumination picked out his battered, predatory profile. “Now if you will consider the view…”

  I pulled my face close to the port. A globe hung suspended against a backdrop of stars, like some wonderful blue lantern; a third of it was in shadow, and lights twinkled in that darkness. On the bright side of the globe the familiar shapes of continents could be made out through a film of wispy cloud. A small, brilliant point of light came crawling around the globe’s far limb, evoking highlights from the ocean below.

  This was, of course, the Earth, and the minuscule companion traversing patiently through its ninety- minute month was the Little Moon.

  I felt Traveller’s hand on my shoulder. “Even the Empire seems diminutive from this distance, eh, Ned?”

  “Are we still in the atmosphere?”

  “I fear not. Beyond the hull of the Phaeton lies only the desert of space: airless, lightless—and some tens of degrees colder than hypothesized by Monsieur Fourier.”

  “And are we still traveling away from the world?”

  “We are.” Traveller extracted his notebook with some dexterity, using only the fingers of one hand, and checked calculations. “I have estimated our velocity by triangulating against known points on the globe below. My results are crude, of course, as I lack anything resembling the proper equipment—”

  “Nevertheless,” Holden prompted.

  “Nevertheless I have ascertained that we are falling away from the Earth at some five hundred miles per hour. And this is consistent with the time of some minutes during which the rockets thrust, driving us away from Earth at approximately twice the acceleration due to sea-level gravity.”

  There was a sobbing behind me; I turned from the image of Earth. Pocket, still strapped into his chair, had buried his face in his hands; his shoulders shook and his thin hair fell about his fingers.

  I explored my own feelings. So we were above the air. And it must be true after all that Traveller had journeyed this way before—not once, but many times. My mood of panic dissipated, to be replaced by a boyish sense of wonder.

  Earth’s image shifted to my right, and I deduced that the ship must be rotating slowly. Through some trick of perspective the planet looked like a vast bowl, constructed of the finest china, but it was a bowl which held all the cities and peoples who had ever lived; and who could have guessed at such bewildering beauty?

  I turned to Traveller and said, “I’ve no idea why, Sir Josiah, but I feel quite
calm at present, and will feel calmer still when you ignite the Phaeton’s engines once more and return us to the ground.”

  I could see kindliness and a mean impatience warring across Traveller’s scarred brow. “Ned, it was not I who launched the Phaeton in the first place.”

  “It wasn’t? Then how—”

  “The craft is directed from the Bridge. Do you not recall how I struggled to open the access hatch to the Bridge before the launch?”

  I noticed now that the hatch in the ceiling remained locked, although it bore the scars of Traveller’s efforts to prize it open.

  “Then who is responsible?”

  “How can we know?” Traveller said.

  “But we can speculate,” Holden said from the floor, a trace of anger emerging through his fear. “For this event and the wrecking of the Prince Albert are surely not unconnected.”

  Fear sank deep into my thoughts. “You infer that we are in the hands of a saboteur?”

  Holden said grimly, “I fear that a member of the same band of Prussians is at this moment at the controls of this craft.”

  The full horror of our predicament at last broke over me. “We are trapped in this box, hurtling ever further from the Earth, and at the mercy of a crazed Prussian… Then we must gain access to the Bridge at once!”

  I would have started for the hatch immediately, but Traveller laid a restraining hand on my arm. “I’ve spent some time trying that route, Ned. And even if access to the Bridge were somehow acquired, we would face many obstacles before a successful return to Earth.”

  Holden demanded, “What obstacles, Traveller?”

  Traveller smiled. “They will keep. And in the meantime, you are my guests on this craft. What do you say, Pocket?”

  The wretched manservant could do nothing but shake his head, his face still buried in his sodden hands.

  Traveller pulled at the crumpled lapel of my jacket. “You, for instance, are still encrusted with the blood you spilled during the launch. And what better than a hot bath to relieve the aches of your bruises, eh? Pocket, would you arrange that? And then perhaps we should take a little light supper—”