restless and irresolute. Between the
two, three white-painted turbine-trunks, like eel-baskets laid on their
side, accentuate the empty perspectives. You can hear the trickle of
the liquefied gas flowing from the vacuum into the bilge-tanks and the
soft _gluck-glock_ of gas-locks closing as Captain Purnall brings "162"
down by the head. The hum of the turbines and the boom of the air on our
skin is no more than a cotton-wool wrapping to the universal stillness.
And we are running an eighteen-second mile.

I peer from the fore end of the engine-room over the hatch-coamings into
the coach. The mail-clerks are sorting the Winnipeg, Calgary, and
Medicine Hat bags: but there is a pack of cards ready on the table.

Suddenly a bell thrills; the engineers run to the turbine-valves and
stand by; but the spectacled slave of the Ray in the U-tube never lifts
his head. He must watch where he is. We are hard-braked and going
astern; there is language from the control-platform.

"Tim's sparking badly about something," says the unruffled Captain
Hodgson. "Let's look."

Captain Purnall is not the suave man we left half an hour since, but the
embodied authority of the G. P. O. Ahead of us floats an ancient,
aluminum-patched, twin-screw tramp of the dingiest, with no more right
to the 5,000 foot lane than has a horse-cart to a modern town. She
carries an obsolete "barbette" conning-tower--a six-foot affair with
railed platform forward--and our warning beam plays on the top of it as
a policeman's lantern flashes on the area sneak. Like a sneak-thief,
too, emerges a shock-headed navigator in his shirt-sleeves. Captain
Purnall wrenches open the colloid to talk with him man to man. There are
times when Science does not satisfy.

"What under the stars are you doing here, you sky-scraping
chimney-sweep?" he shouts as we two drift side by side. "Do you know
this is a Mail-lane? You call yourself a sailor, sir? You ain't fit to
peddle toy balloons to an Esquimaux. Your name and number! Report and
get down, and be----!"

"I've been blown up once," the shock-headed man cries, hoarsely, as a
dog barking. "I don't care two flips of a contact for anything _you_ can
do, Postey."

"Don't you, sir? But I'll make you care. I'll have you towed stern first
to Disko and broke up. You can't recover insurance if you're broke for
obstruction. Do you understand _that_?"

Then the stranger bellows: "Look at my propellers! There's been a
wulli-wa down u