k out for
laterals, Tim, she'll want some holding."

"I've got her," is the answer. "Come _up_, old woman."

She comes up nobly, but the laterals buffet her left and right like the
pinions of angry angels. She is jolted off her course in four ways at
once, and cuffed into place again, only to be swung aside and dropped
into a new chaos. We are never without a corposant grinning on our bows
or rolling head over heels from nose to midships, and to the crackle of
electricity around and within us is added once or twice the rattle of
hail--hail that will never fall on any sea. Slow we must or we may break
our back, pitch-poling.

"Air's a perfectly elastic fluid," roars George above the tumult. "About
as elastic as a head sea off the Fastnet, aint it?"

[Illustration: THE STORM]

He is less than just to the good element. If one intrudes on the
Heavens when they are balancing their volt-accounts; if one disturbs the
High Gods' market-rates by hurling steel hulls at ninety knots across
tremblingly adjusted electric tensions, one must not complain of any
rudeness in the reception. Tim met it with an unmoved countenance, one
corner of his under lip caught up on a tooth, his eyes fleeting into the
blackness twenty miles ahead, and the fierce sparks flying from his
knuckles at every turn of the hand. Now and again he shook his head to
clear the sweat trickling from his eyebrows, and it was then that
George, watching his chance, would slide down the life-rail and swab his
face quickly with a big red handkerchief. I never imagined that a human
being could so continuously labour and so collectedly think as did Tim
through that Hell's half hour when the flurry was at its worst. We were
dragged hither and yon by warm or frozen suctions, belched up on the
tops of wulli-was, spun down by vortices and clubbed aside by laterals
under a dizzying rush of stars in the company of a drunken moon. I heard
the rushing click of the midship-engine-lever sliding in and out, the
low growl of the lift-shunts, and, louder than the yelling winds
without, the scream of the bow-rudder gouging into any lull that
promised hold for an instant. At last we began to claw up on a cant,
bow-rudder and port-propeller together; only the nicest balancing of
tanks saved us from spinning like the rifle-bullet of the old days.

"We've got to hitch to windward of that Mark Boat somehow," George
cried.

"There's no windward," I protested feebly, where I swung sha