A Transatlantic Tunnel, Hurrah! (6 page)

Further along the platform the station café was open, frequented apparently only by the press since the passengers appeared to be going directly aboard. Gus had a won-derfully cooling pint of bitter before he was recognized and collared by the gentlemen of the fourth estate. He talked with them easily and an-swered their questions about the tun-nel frankly. Everything was fine, just fine, on schedule and forging ahead. The tunnel would be built, have no fear. They honored his request not to be photographed with the glass in his hand, since teetotal money was among the funds subscribed for the tunnel, and they accepted with thanks his offer of a round for all of them. The voyage was having an auspicious start.

When he emerged into the sun-light again the gangplank was clear and the passengers all boarded. Gus in turn climbed to the foredeck and accepted the salute of the ship’s offi-cer waiting there, a salute that hesi-tated and stopped halfway up from the sharply creased uniform leg to the shining billed cap and turned suddenly into an outstretched hand ready to clasp his.

“Hawkeye Washington—that is you!”

The clock of time rolled back in that instant and Gus was once more in digs at Edinburgh, in class, facing the driving rain while walking up Prince’s Street. Hawkeye—legendary hero of a popular novel whose name was hung on most students from the American colonies. He smiled broadly and took the proffered hand and pressed it strongly.

“Alec, and that is you, isn’t it, hid-ing behind all that R.A.F.

moustache? Alec Durell.”

“None other, Hawkeye, none other. And it was earned the hard way I must say,” touching the great sweep of the thing with his knuckle as he spoke of it. “Donkey’s years in the RAF, then Fleet Air Arm, finally to Cunard when they swept the ser-vices for our best flying people.”

“Still shy I see?”

“As ever. Lovely to have you aboard. Look, come on to the bridge and meet the boys. I’m first engineer. They’re a good lot. All ex-services, only place the company could find the fliers to handle an ark like this. Not a real company man in the pack if you don’t count the purser and he isn’t allowed on the bridge.”

They went aft but bypassed the passenger entrance just below the high windows of the bridge and en-tered through a small doorway in the hull marked CREW ONLY. This led to an ample chamber, windowed to the sides and front and filled with in-struments and controls. The helms-man was seated the farthest forward, with the captain and the first officer to his right and left. To the rear were the open doors of the small cubicles of the radio operator and the navigator. The walls were teak paneled, the fascia for the instruments of walnut and chrome, while the floor was cov-ered wall to wall in a fine Wilton car-pet. All of the positions were vacant at the moment other than that of the helmsman on duty who sat, staring dutifully ahead, with his fingers resting lightly on the spokes of his steering wheel.

“Officers all below,” said Alec. “Chatting up the first class passengers as always. Praise be I have my engines to look after so I don’t have to join them. I say, let me show you around the engine room, I think, you’ll enjoy that. Just bung your case into nay’s tubby, all the room in the world in there.”

The navigator might not think so; the room was scarcely larger than a phone box and Gus had trouble finding a free corner for his case. Then Alec opened a hatch and led him down a spiral staircase to the forehold where longshoremen were putting aboard the last of the luggage, suitcases and great steamer trunks, lashing them into place with netting. A narrow walkway was left that they followed down the length of the vessel towards the stern.

“Passenger deck is one deck up but we can avoid them by going this way.” Voices could be heard dimly above them accompanied by the lively strains of a merrily playing band.

“It sounds like a ten-piece brass band up there—don’t tell me you ship all of them along, too?”

“Only in the ethereal sense, tape recordings you know. Have to watch the gross weight, the ruddy thing runs over one hundred tons before she gets airborne.”

“I seem to have noticed little con-cern for weight up until now.”

“You can say that again—or tell it to the Board of Governors if you will.

In the Cunard tradition, they in-sist. If we stripped off all the chrome and brass and teak we could get an-other hundred passengers aboard.”

“Though not in the same comfort. Perhaps they want quality not quan-tity?”

“There is that. Not my worry. Here we go, into this lift, a tight fit for two so try to think small.” It op-erated automatically; the door closed and they rose smoothly at the touch of the button. “Wing is right on top of the body and this saves a climb.”

They emerged inside a low-ceilinged passage that ran transverse to the length of the ship, with heavy doors sealing each end, knobs and indicator lights set into their frames. The engineer turned right and actuated the controls so the door there swung open to disclose a small room little bigger than the lift they had just quitted.

“Air lock,” he said as the door be-hind them closed and another before them opened. “No point in pressur-izing the engine rooms so we do this instead. Welcome to the portside en-gine room of the Queen Elizabeth where I rule supreme.”

This rule was instantly challenged by a rating in a soiled white boilersuit who saluted indifferently then shook his thumb gloomily over his shoulder.

“Still at it, sir, fueling, topping up the bunkers they say.”

“My orders were to have it done by ten.”

“And that I’ve told them, sir,” spo-ken with such an air of infinite sad-ness as though all the woes of the ages rode the man’s thin shoulders.

“Well, they’ll hear them again,” said the engineer and added a score of colorful oaths that indicated both his military as well as his nautical background. He stamped over to a large hinged plate in the floor, unlocked the handles that secured it and threw it open. The water was a good twenty feet below as he seized the edge of the opening and popped his head and half of his upper body down through it so he hung upside down. “Ahoy the barge,” he bel-lowed.

Gus knelt at the opposite side where he had a perfect view of the proceedings. A hulking barge with a pumping station at one end was tied up against the hull of the Queen Elizabeth. Great pipes snaked up from it to valves inset in the ship’s side, the last of which was even then being disconnected. As it came away a great burst of black coal dust sul-lied the side of the leviathan of the air and the first engineer’s comments entertained an even more colorful content. But as soon as all the pipes were away and the valves sealed, hoses were brought into play and within moments the hull was pristine again.

Alec pulled himself back inside with a victorious gleam in his eye—then sprang forward to the engine room telegraph as its bell rang twice and the brass indicator arm moved all around the face then returned to warm engines.

“Port, one,” Alec called out. “Bu-tane inlet valves.”

“Aye, aye,” the rating answered and the two men were instantly involved in the complex task.

Gus knew the theory of course, but he had never seen one of these giant engines in operation before. He was aware that each of the hulking turboprop engines, only a fraction of which protruded up through the bottom of the wing that was the floor here, produced 5,700 horsepower.

First butane was admit-ted as an electric motor started the great shaft spinning with a muffled roar. Now the burning gas spun the turbine blades, faster and faster, un-til the desired temperature and pressures had been reached.

Alec tapped a dial and seemed sat-isfied, 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 inter-ference?”

“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 in-sisted 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 pon-derous 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, in-creases our lift to triple that of an or-dinary 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 con-trols 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 Eliza-beth slipped forward over the water, faster and faster. The transition was so smooth that there was no dis-tinction between being waterborne and airborne. In fact the very pres-ence of this juggernaut of the air-ways 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 dimension-less 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 re-lief 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, ad-miring 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 lun-cheon 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 fel-low 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 an-tecedents. 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 be-tween 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 deter-mined to get as much rest as pos-sible. 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 sur-geon 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 con-sciousness.

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.