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Its author, George Allan England (1877-1936), was one of the pioneers of science fiction in the pulps, a contemporary of Edgar Rice Burroughs who also sold fiction to Hugo Gernsback, the publisher of the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. He is best remembered for his trilogy which takes its name from the first book, Darkness and Dawn (1912), set a thousand years hence when civilisation has been all but wiped from the face of the Earth following some uncertain catastrophe. The two main protagonists have survived into the future through suspended animation but now they awaken to discover a world struggling to recover. Other novels of note include The Empire in the Air (1914), in which Earth is threatened by beings from another dimension and The Golden Blight (1912), in which a scientist holds the world to ransom in the hope of ending war.

Compared to the above the following is a rather more simple story of airships, near disaster and heroics. — M.A.

I

WITH A SIGH, the girl let both hands fall into her lap. The book she had been listlessly reading escaped from her gloved fingers — fur-gloved, even as she herself was wrapped in furs. Though the month was June, and the stupendous aero-liner Imperatrice had only half an hour before demagnetized its electromagnetic disks and cleared from the Pacific Transport towers at Honolulu, the thin, cold atmosphere of more than two miles aloft nipped keenly.

The girl leaned back in her deck-chair, with the glow of the auroral induction lamp above her, and gazed a trifle wistfully across the aft concourse, out beyond the rail through the clear blackness of the night. Far, very far astern a dull reddish gleam on the horizon — a gleam that faded even as she watched it — bespoke the fires of Mauna Loa smoldering against the sky.

Hungrily dark, below silvery cloud-masses on which the vivid whiteness of the full moon dazzled a mile beneath the liner as she roared on her appointed way, the Pacific rolled in terrible immensity. Across the deck, rhythmically swinging as the ship swayed and dipped along the Trades, sharply black shadows of the rail and of the stanchions supporting the upper deck cut the aluminum plates. The sky, a jetty void, sparkled with myriads of white spatters of flame. Lights and shadows contrasted with cold hardness on the passengers walking the decks or grouped along the rail. Through the perfect silence of the upper air, the gleaming Imperatrice, with suction-turbines shrilly whining, with hurricane-shields whistling in the empty dark, hurled herself at three hundred miles an hour toward Nagasaki, still nine hours’ run to nor’-west by west.

Tired and melancholy, the girl looked with indifferent eyes at the voyagers muffled in their furs, some strolling idly about, some leaning on the rail, some with night-glasses searching out the abyss or aimed at the splendor of the moon. The thought of Japan roused a slight, momentary interest in her world-wearied heart. Yes, the loom of the blue-pearly haze that marked its coasts at dawn, or the vertical shafts of radiance, by night, shooting to mid-heaven from the Nippon Republic’s aero-lighthouses, to guide the pilots peering from the hooded bull’s-eyes of the conning tower — these still possessed a certain lure for her. Yet only a little, for after so many trips afar what real novelty could anywhere remain?

“Dear, dear, what a tedious old world this has become!” She yawned behind her glove. “I ought to have been born in the days when things really happened — the old days of real life — the days when people didn’t have to content themselves with merely reading of adventure!”

She settled back still farther in her chair, listened to the zooning of the wind amid the wires and taut cables, and let her gaze wander over the many rows of life-preservers hanging under the deck roof, each a combination antigravity turbine and vacuum-belt. The glow, above, now more clearly lighted up her face. One could see that the girl was just a trifle