Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [134]
Hale determined to make at least a try for the girl’s life and his own. Action followed hard on that decision.
“Stand right here,” he commanded. “Don’t move. So long as you keep your feet braced on this metal beam, with your shoulders to the deck, you’re all right. I’m going to leave you for a minute.”
“Leave me? What for?” She stammered, aroused by his words.
“Life-preservers. See there?” He pointed where they hung, dangling ten feet away, alongside the now vertical wall that had formed the deck-roof.
“How — can you?” She gasped, staring at the life-belts, dimly visible in the heavy shadows now shrouding all the under portion’ of the ship.
“How? Along this stanchion, of course.”
“You — you can’t!”
For all answer he merely commanded: “Stay where you are. Don’t move.” Carefully gauging the distance, he threw off his furs and dropped them into the gulf, then boldly walked forward along the aluminum girder.
This girder had a breadth of no more than four inches. It lay horizontal, or almost so. Beneath it, nothing but the sheer vacancy of a mile and a half drop to the Pacific. On either hand, nothing to grasp. The distance to the belts was only a few feet, but those few feet held appalling possibilities.
Hale did not hesitate. Steadily; he advanced along the beam, step by step; both arms: extended sideways, swaying as he balanced. He reached the life-preservers — each a combination of anti-gravity apparatus and vacuum-belt, with water-distiller, signal light, and, concentrated food — unhooked two with considerable difficulty, and, turning, faced the girl.
She, shivering and blanched to a dull waxen pallor, stared at him as though hardly comprehending. Far above, from the upper side of the doomed liner; confused cries and screams still drifted down to them; but these had now grown fewer and fainter. The burst of flames along that upper side had swiftly thinned the multitude of trapped wretches.
Now all at once a greenish glare began to flame around the stem of the vast fabric. Its widely-spreading brilliance cast leaping lights and shadows all along the up-tilted deck, swept bare of life.
Back toward the girl started Norford. Burdened now by the cumbersome apparatus; he found the return harder by far. But step by step he still advanced, now hesitating as he swung with the drunken yaw of the ship, now again creeping forward. And still in muted horror the girl watched him as he came that perilous way above the gulf. Her face showed ghastly as his own, in the weird virescence of the blazing aero-liner.
A thunderous explosion, aft, echoed the-hissing rush of a tremendous, searing-geyser of flame.
Hale, nearly overbalanced by the shock, leaped and caught the agonized hand she reached to him. Shaking and mute; they clung to each other.
“Off with your furs — and into one of these-quick!” He panted.
She struggled out of her coat, and dropped it, grotesquely flapping as it spun away through the clouds. Then she tried to adjust the life-preserver, but in vain. Numbed with, terror, her hands quivering violently and her-whole body shaking, she could-neither put on the belt nor adjust the straps. Gasping, she tried to speak. Dry tongue and quivering lips refused their office. Her teeth began to chatter violently with the cold.
“Here; your arm through this — now, so — now the-other!” Hale directed, in a shaking voice. He clung there, precariously, to his footing; he helped her at imminent risk of being himself precipitated into the depths.
The liner meanwhile, her whole stern now roaring into white-hot, gaseous flame, had become a monstrous torch against the sky, spiraling down ever down toward the clouds, with accelerating speed. Her huge prow rose, swaying helplessly and drunkenly toward the impassive moon. In the black of the night-sky she whipped her streaming hair of fire weirdly and terribly aloft.
She had now assumed almost a vertical position.