Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [133]
The man was afraid, horribly and agonizingly afraid, yet he retained his self-command. He knew, even, it was not death he feared. He had lived richly and fully. Death, as such, could not terrify him. Yet he too sensed the clutch of panic. Men can face the slavering sea that rolls to engulf them, and with some composure yield themselves to its embrace; but to feel an aircraft — a speeding aircraft that bears one through the emptiness of space-suddenly stricken helpless, to sense its reeling fall, to see the hungering abysses of the sky yawn black and void beneath — this thing no man can experience without physical nausea and a profound and agonizing torture of the soul.
Yet the man fought it back. He struggled to clear his brain and senses. Pale to the lips, with the sweat of anguish on him and with staring eyes, he still sheltered the hysterical girl. He still kept from wildness and mad, futile deeds; still forced himself to reason and to think. Swiftly he tried to plan what he must do to save Jeanne Hargreaves.
For the moment their peril was not deadly — barring, of course, any general explosion that would hurl the wreck into the sea, a mile and a half below. The Imperatrice, though punctured, might still survive a while. The swarming stampede, now rapidly thinning as some climbed up through doors and windows, and as dozens and scores of screeching maniacs slid and dropped away from the almost vertical decks, could not reach them in their vantage-corner. This constant lightening of the ship, too, might delay its plunge. The horrible jettison of human lives might help to save their own.
The Imperatrice had now heeled over almost directly on what, in the old days, would have been called its beam-ends. Lying on its side, the shattered hull staggered in drunken spirals vast and slow. Nearly all the passengers on its lower side had already been slid into the sea. Those on the upper side were still safe from this peril; but the flames now licking upward and along that higher side of the ship explained the agonizing screams that drifted from those decks out into the stillness of mid-heaven.
Quivering with horror, Norford tightened his grasp on the girl. As the ship had rolled over, he had adjusted his position, so as to remain upright, with Jeanne.
“Come, come!” He adjured her sharply. “Look alive, now! No time for hysterics here! Your foot, there, beside mine — so — now, then, lean back against the deck!”
Their feet now rested on a stanchion connecting the deck with the one that had been above it. The deck itself, now vertical, gave them support against which to brace themselves. Their position, fairly secure, was none the less terrifying.
Far below them now appeared nothing but the dazzling shine of the moonlit clouds — clouds ever drawing nearer — on which the ink-black shadow of the ship drifted idly before the wind. And through gaps in the cloud-floor, ever they beheld the waiting blackness of the sea.
IV
“LIFE-PRESERVERS! We’ll jump!”
The idea, oddly enough, now first occurred to Hale. None of the preservers seemed to have been used, on his deck. So swift had been the catastrophe and so sudden the heeling-over of the ship that few of the passengers there had even so much as tried to strap on one of the devices.
Decades of complete aerial safety had rendered even the idea of peril absolutely remote. For many