The Red Book Magazine/Volume 20/Number 1/The Sleeping Ship

by Edwin Balmer

 

The Sleeping Ship

A New Wireless Story

by EDWIN BALMER

Co-Author of “The Surakarta,” and Author of “Via Wireless,” etc.

IT was eleven o'clock at night, ship's time, on the second night out from Gibraltar; and as the new twin-turbined Danube—fourteen thousand tons—bored into the black North Atlantic swell northwest by west on the “great circle” for New York, the sea-splash, when the bow dipped, flew the length of the promenade deck. The canvas shelter-strips, lashed to the rail during dinner so that the passengers might stay for a while longer in their steamer-chairs, had become useless hours before. Besides myself, only two men remained above.

Drawing together against the gale, we three lay in our chairs forward of the funnels—the taller man, with tanned, peculiarly strong face, with bushy head bare, but with two thicknesses of rugs wrapped about him, was in the chair second beyond mine; his stockier, plaid-capped and ulstered friend with firm, spiritual features, in the chair next to me. For an hour this one had been addressing to me his terse, nervous trivialities; for the bareheaded man dozed, unconcernedly, stirring at intervals only to shake the brine from his cheeks as the larger waves drenched us, and immediately falling to sleep again.

The man talking to me seemed always leading his trivialities along a brink of conversation over which he hesitated to push them.

“What do you think of—apprehensions of danger?” he asked me more directly at last.

“Indigestion!” the rugged-wrapped one, suddenly starting up, announced. He sat up, shedding his rugs, and glanced down the deck. It was dark now, except for the single electric lights left burning over the door to the cabin corridors. There were only four of them for the whole length of the cabins—glowing weakly yellow and dimmer each moment as the mist of the flying salt-rime settled about them. “Come to bed!” The tall man stood up, laughing as he was soaked through while examining his watch. “It's almost one.”

“You're keeping Gibraltar time,” the other protested. “I'm staying up a while yet.”

“Apprehending—what?” the bushy haired one waited with a smile.

“Oh, I don't know,” the plaid-capped one evaded, uneasily.

“All right! G'night!” the thin one yawned at me. “Stay as long as you feel foreboding, Austin.” He touched his mate's shoulder with clumsy affection. “Vou can't wake me coming in.” He slid skillfully down the slippery boards to the light over the last door, and disappeared.

“What're you waiting up for?” Austin demanded suddenly of me.

“Oh, I rather like the sea getting up.”

“Not any—feelings, then?”

“What sort of feelings?”

“Oh—” He went to the rail where it was even wetter, without answering. I, being ulstered too, followed. “The sort of feelings he wont have anything of.” Austin jerked his head after his friend. “His job is science, you know, earthquakes, volcanoes and such trifles. He knows how gravity, electricity, radio-activity—one of a dozen other natural causes he can name, but I can't—is at the bottom of everything. He's Kerffers, you see.”

“Kerffers, the physicist? You mean—”

“'Natural Causes' Kerffers; yes.”

“Then you're Austin, the—”

“Evangelist. Correct. But it's a bromide to comment on the strangeness of the combination. However, you can see that, if it's in his business to find natural causes, it's in mine to believe that there's a good deal else—sometimes at least—besides natural causes that can do things. I'll agree that more people feel foreboding from indigestion than from any other reason; but still there are other reasons.”

“To-night, for instance?”

“Oh, I'm not feeling there'll be trouble for us; but—” He gazed out over the black water, unsatisfied.

We edged slowly forward along the rail, facing the spray and splash which now was flying steadily. It was getting very cold, and the rain seemed to have ceased. The masthead light, high above the mist from the waves, was clear. We were forward of the bridge; as the officers there communicated with the look- out in the crow's nest by telephone, we could not hear their voices; but the extra look-out, perched somewhere ahead in the dark drench at the bow, shouted back at regular intervals and they seemed to signal to him from the bridge, somehow, that they heard.

“Where's the 'wireless' cabin? Oh, where's the 'wireless' operator?' A woman's cry startled us about.

She had come up behind us—a young woman of gentle bearing, without covering for her head, her hair in a thick, loose braid from which the wind was blowing it. She wore, apparently, only a heavy cloak drawn over her night-dress. The gale, whipping about her ankles, showed them bare above her shoes, which had been drawn on hurriedly and left unlaced.

We brought her quickly back from the rail and wrapped about her the driest rugs from our chairs. ”What's wrong?” the evangelist asked, quietingly.

“I don't know! Something—that's all I know! It's with my husband! Where's the 'wireless' operator?”

“You mean the doctor?”

“The 'wireless' operator! My husband's not here! He's on the Assyria!”

“On the Assyria?”

“Yes; he was called down to Rome without me; then home. We'd been on our wedding-trip. I came down to Gibraltar to catch him on the Assyria, but missed it. He had to go on without me.” She was speaking coherently, staring ahead.

The Assyria, which had left Gibraltar eighteen hours before us, was there—some three hundred miles ahead of us, I remembered, when we last heard from her by “wireless.” It was a message of mere weather reports and polite trivialities to put upon our bulletin board. Everything was all right aboard her then. She was fifteen thousand tons—larger than our ship. The gale should trouble her as little as it did us. As it was impossible for this girl to have heard since the “wireless” cabin closed two hours before, there could have been no grounds for this sudden fear. But as I glanced at the evangelist, he evidently did not agree with me.

“Your husband—he was not sick when you heard last?”

“No! He was very well! I know I have no reason, but—but I know something is wrong now! I can at least send a message to him. Where's the 'wireless' cabin? Take me to it!”

“It's shut. We've only one operator. He's not required to work at night except in emergencies or dangerous weather. He's asleep.”

“Then I shall wake him! Take me to him!” the girl commanded Austin.

I stayed on deck while they went in. He evidently had persuaded her, under pledge to return with the operator, to go to her own cabin and dress more warmly. She was better clothed, if little less disheveled, when she returned to the deck with the evangelist. The operator, in trousers, sweater and coat, came with them, regarding both suspiciously. As the “wireless” cabin was back of the bridge and but little below it, a second officer came to the door after the operator had entered and turned on the light.

“The lady thinks there's trouble on the Assyria,” the man explained, as one explains the humoring of a child. “This gentleman woke me up for her. Her husband's on the Assyria.” He cut in his key, irascibly—regulated the receiving apparatus, adjusting the telephone-receiver sounders to his ears. The dynamos in the engine room were supplying current.

The second officer looked at me and I returned his smile, separating myself from the two waiting tensely as the operator listened. But the operator's expression was changed from one of forced humoring. His jaw was tightened, his hands twitched and his eyes were fixed, serious.

“What is it?” The woman seized his shoulder.

“It's S. O. S., sir!” he reported to the officer.

“S. O. S.!" the girl cried. “The signal of distress?”

The officer moved swiftly. “From what ship, Craig?”

“You'd better take her out, sir!” the operator motioned.

“You mean it's from the Assyria.” The girl fought them.

“Look out!” Craig warned us back; and the flash of the blinding blue spark, the deafening “'cra-ash! crash! cra-ash!” of the mighty electric charge leaping across the spark gap, sent its answer out to the sea.

The evangelist got the girl out of the cabin, somehow, before the sending was done. “Reached 'em?” the second officer muttered in the suspense after the spark was quiet

The operator shook his head for silence. The gust that rattled the door passed.

“The Assyria's on fire, sir!” the operator whispered raucously, straining to keep his own voice from dimming the almost inaudible rasps in the telephone-receivers strapped over his ears. “They found fire in the hold two hours ago! Something exploded and scattered fire through the cargo. They're burning almost everywhere below decks. They're fighting it; but it's beyond control. They don't hope to last three hours!”

“Three hours! Where are they?”

The operator, listening, scrawled the figures for the position upon his pad. The officer, reading them, swore hoarsely.

“Three hours! And they're three hundred and thirty miles ahead of us! If we could do our best twenty knots and they could make eighteen, and were headed for us now, we couldn't meet them in eight hours! And their boats can't live long, loaded with women, in this sea to-night! What's the use of their telling us that?”

The operator raised his face, become almost haggard in his last moment of strained listening.

“Sir, they didn't know it was us. I didn't tell who was answering. They thought we were the Huron, just ahead of them, so they think they're safe.”

“The Huron?”

“Just ahead of them, west-bound, too, sir! I was talking with her man like I was with the Assyria's before I went to bed. She's not fifty miles ahead of them—perhaps not more than forty; but she's out of sight and bound the same way. They've been trying to call her for two hours; but they can't get her. They thought we were the Huron when I answered!”

“You mean the Huron's man must be asleep like you were?”

“Yes, sir; he said good-night before I turned in; I talked with the Assyria then, and we both went to bed.”

“Then ever since they found the fire they've been keeping on after the Huron, and now they think they've got her?”

The operator held his hand over the sending key.

“Shall I tell who they've got and to turn around and try to make us before they burn up?”

“With three hours? Tell them they haven't got the Huron, man! Tell them quick! Tell them to call it, call it, and keep on calling till they get it. It's their only chance! Tell them to think of nothing else! If they were steaming for us now we couldn't reach them in seven hours!”

“But you can't get a ship by 'wireless' if the man isn't at his key, sir! Or even if he was in the room without his receivers strapped to his ears! You can't rouse anybody—you can't call anyone to the key by 'wireless.' They've only the chance of the man going to his key and catching him there!”

“What other chance have they at all?” the officer retorted, and slid the door and disappeared into the wind as the spark behind me crashed out, hopelessly.

I went down to the deck, to be encountered by the evangelist and the girl he had in care. Others already were collecting about them—both men and women hastily bundled in thick clothes and hugging steamer rugs and great coats, understanding vaguely that the trouble was not upon our boat, that it was three hundred miles beyond the blackness ahead; but they pressed to the forward rail and fought for place to stand against it, staring blankly out over the bow.

“No one is reported hurt upon the Assyria,” was all I could say to the girl who first had stirred us. “It's fire—not wreck; and they're fighting it. They're all right just now. The Huron's only fifty miles ahead of them. They're calling it now. It can get every one safe.”

“Then why are we getting up speed after them?” some one asked.

There was no question but that we were increasing speed. From the comfortable sixteen and seventeen knots, which we had been steaming, the engines were driving us two, at least, perhaps three, knots faster. The rack and strain as we pushed into the waves, made it undeniable that we were raising “full speed ahead” quite to the forced limit of our engines. As the men in the stokehold spread fresh coal over their fires, red sparks flew from the funnels, burned and glowed an instant overhead and then suddenly were swallowed in the smelling, dense smoke from the hasty firing.

With the privilege of one who had been in at the first, I returned to the “wireless” cabin. The operator long had ceased his sending; he sat leaning forward, almost listlessly in his chair, his face set in a dull, sullen expression which did not change, his telephone receivers strapped over his ears, listening. The second officer, who had returned, leaned with one hand on the rail inside the cabin, watching him. He jerked, now and then, impatiently.

“Just three and three and three, over and over again,” the operator described the hopeless, unending succession of three dots, three dashes and three dots —the iterated and iterated again S. O. S., the international code call for help in the final extremity upon the sea. “Now they're giving the Huron's call—H, R, N; now it's three, three, and three again.”

“So they're keeping on after the Huron?” I asked the officer.

“If the fire's in their after hold, it must be hell in the engine-room,” the officer grated. “But they're after the Huron; she's their only chance.”

“There's no possible ship meeting them the other way?”

He studied again, perfunctorily, the Marconi communication chart upon the wall of the cabin, which gave the date and proper position of every ship carrying “wireless” upon the North Atlantic.

“The Theban's coming out, of course,” he muttered. “But she's too far south of us. She stops at the Azores east-bound. We've been working north for the great circle ever since leaving Gibraltar. There's no chance the Theban's even in the communication zone. It's the Huron for them—or us picking up what's left of their boats to-morrow.”

“There's no chance of their overtaking the Huron—I mean their getting where the Huron might see them.”

He shook his head. “The Assyria's slower, They only hope they're holding the Huron even now. But—what is it?” he noted the change in the operator's attitude.

“Nothing—just they're giving me something to do!” The man sprang with relief to his key. “They think there's a chance their signals are skipping the Huron—Hertzian waves do that, sometimes. They want me to try!”

“Cras-ash!” The blinding flash and the detonation or discharge brought relief to us all. Three short crashes, three longer detonations of the current, three shorter: “S. O. S!” Then, “Huron! Huron! S. O. S!” he called.

I waited till we knew that the trouble was not that the signals from the burning Assyria had been skipping.

“He's asleep!” The operator ceased at last. 'The 'wireless' can't wake him up!”

The lights were all on upon the deck as I went down. The deck was crowded with passengers, more pouring from the cabin companion-ways. Stewards and stewardesses were up and about, too, attending to the passengers. For all ages and conditions were roused. Each new group, though told by everyone else that the trouble was upon the Assyria eighteen hours ahead, pushed forward first to stare over the bow, reckless of the wet wind and the flying spray; then they gathered in nervous, shivering parties, shifting and re-forming.

The alarm had aroused the second cabin section, too; as I passed aft, I saw the other smoking-room and the saloon alight and crowded. Kerffers, as I met him, told me that the news was spread even through steerage shut below decks. However it had been given out, the first cabin, at least, had it accurately.

“They've got to get the Huron?” the woman who first had stirred us clamored of me. “And the Huron's operator's not in the cabin!”

There was nothing to do but to admit it.

“And you say—you 'all say there's not any way for the 'wireless' to call anyone into the cabin! There's not any! There's no chance at all of making them hear ' unless one man—the operator—happens to get up and go into the cabin and strap his receivers over his ears! Even then it would be hard enough for him to hear!”

Again there was nothing for it but the assent of silence. Kerffers was standing beside me. His strong, good features winced as the woman turned to him, searching for some better hope. He ran his hand helplessly through his hair.

“There's no hope—no hope he might go to the cabin or they might call him?” She appealed direct to him.

He shook his head. “The officers on watch would wake him only when there was some emergency they know of, or if there was so great a storm they might; think there'd be trouble on some other boat with 'wireless.' The sea's not quite high enough for that now. There's nothing more than we're doing that anyone can do.”

“There's a great deal more; and we will do it!” Austin's voice, behind us, surprised us both. The evangelist's face, less strong in line than Kerffer's, but now in this extremity imbued with a power and will superior to his own, met us as we turned. ”There's something greater than dynamos and Hertzian waves to give power tonight!” He spoke, inspired. “If they on the Assyria could rouse you,”—he spoke directly to the woman—“without the help of the 'wireless' and make you rouse us, can't we in turn—the hundreds of us here—get the Huron's operator out of his bed as well?”

“What?” The girl caught at it, hysterically. ”What?”

Kerffers looked at him. “I'd like to be able to believe it. Austin,” he rebuked gently. “I'd like to be able to believe it.”

“How can we here do anything else,” the evangelist returned, ”when we've seen what we have already to-night?”

The scientist tried to prevent him. “The one co-incidence of a woman's fear with a justification for it—a co-incidence of the sort makes you forget the thousands of times they have no foundation at all. If they on the Assyria sent this impulse to this woman here, why couldn't they send another to the Huron? If we willing it all together can get the Huron's operator to go to his key now, why can't we or the people on the Assyria signal the Huron's captain direct?”

“It is necessary only to get the 'wireless' operator from his bed,” the evangelist rejoined. ”We can do that! All of us together can surely do that!”

“We can do it!” The hysterical girl caught it up. “We must!”

Women and some of the men about us heard and came closer. Austin turned to them and spoke with the magnetism and spreading inspiration by which he could always draw men's souls to him. The crowd around him grew and grew; all along the deck the new excitement spread.

Kerffers worked himself quietly away, I with him. We went up to the “wireless” cabin together. The officer who was still there with the operator recognized me and let us in, mechanically. The clock showed that more than half an hour had gone since I was there.

“The Assyria's burning up! My God, their ship's burning up under them!” the officer whispered to me for vent. “They don't get the Huron.”

“Three, three, and three!” The operator, sitting strained, with muscles drawn, teeth clenched and eyes staring, continued his bitter counting of the call from the Assyria over and over again. “Three, three, and three! Now Huron; Huron! Now they're waiting for the answer again. But they don't get 'em! They don't get 'em He tore the receivers from his ears and, standing up, sprang upon his key.

“Wake up! Wake up! Damn you, wake up!” he shouted with the cras-ash, cra-ash of his spark as he sent. “Sir!” he cried his justification to his superior, “they're staying in the engine-room and in the stokehold of the Assyria with the decks burning above 'em! They're staying to keep up near the Huron! And the Huron's running away from them because we can't get 'em!” He quieted himself to snatch up his receivers again and listen vainly. “Good God, sir. I talked with that man on the Huron three hours ago. He told me what he had for supper! He told me he had a gooseberry tart! Now I can't get him!”

He collapsed into his chair, his receivers over his ears, dully listening. Without needing to ask, we knew he was hearing only the same repeated and repeated iteration of the three, three, and three call for help from the Assyria. A strange swell of sound from below surprised us—of at first a few score and then hundreds of voices singing. The words we could not make out; but the tune, even though torn by the wind, was familiar. It was the song sung the world over for the safety of those in danger at sea; and it was sung as only the evangelist could inspire people's souls to sing.

Eternal Father! strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bid'st the mighty ocean deep
It's own appointed limits keep:
Oh hear us when we cry to Thee
For those in peril on the sea!

It ceased, after one verse; silence followed, broken only at irregular intervals by a half-shouted unison.

“Austin's talking to them now.” Kerffers nodded to me. He glanced at the useless ”wireless” instruments. “I can hope, if I can't believe, he can do it.”

The operator, with a choke, sat up and began to write.

“What is it?” his superior demanded.

“Dispatches for relatives from the people on the Assyria, sir,” the operator rasped. “They're still calling the Huron and waiting for answer; but, you see, they've given it up.” He tore the page off the pad and pushed it toward us ready to write the next.

Kerffers looked to me. “They can't launch their boats half full to-night—if they had boats enough anyway.”

I motioned to the page torn off. “They know it!”

The operator ceased to write. “Are they trying for the Huron again?” the ship's officer asked.

“No; good-by to us now! His current's going. They can't live in the engine-room any more. But he thinks the ship can last a little longer and they can live forward of the fire awhile if—”

“You can get the Huron for him?”

The operator, biting his lips, leaped at his key for answer. “Cra-ash!” the whole power of the ship's great dynamos shattered out their demand. “Crash!” again and again the current detonated. It blinded us with its burning blue flashes, as the current tore almost ceaselessly across the spark-gap; it deafened us, shut up in there, so that the wind and the sound of the five hundred people singing which came with the wind again, could not be heard. But we knew that three hundred miles ahead, the greatest impulse that science could send through the air so far, could scarcely cause to tremble the most delicate diaphram in the telephone receivers lying upon the table in the Huron's “wireless” cabin—and that, cry as our operator might to our engine-room for current, he could send no louder alarm.

He listened, of course, after the sending, on the chance that at this last moment when the Huron might be turned back in time, the Huron had heard. But from within the receivers he heard nothing and from without, only the swell of hundreds of voices in unison:

O Trinity of love and power!
Our brethren shield in danger's hour;
from rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them wheresoe'er they go;
Thus evermore shall rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea!

The operator swore as he raised his head and the door from the deck opened.

“Don't swear, sir!” the evangelist bid. “But call the Huron again at this moment! Five hundred souls together summon that now there be some one at the Huron's key. So send, man, send! He may be only passing through the cabin. Call!” He pressed down the key himself in his exaltation. “Call!” he commanded as the operator pushed him away and himself pressed the key, and made the three short, the three long, and the three short signals cannonade us again.

“Now listen!” the exhorter ordered. “Listen!”

There was a tense silence; then:

“We got him! We got him! He's answering S. O. S. from the Huron!” the “wireless” operator cried. “From the Huron!”

He drowned his own voice and ours as he volleyed madly with his spark, detonating out over the three hundred and thirty miles of sea to the rescue ship, the situation and position reckoning of the burning Assyria, whose own installation was silent.

“Understand you!” The reply abbreviated itself in the receivers over the operator's ears. “Are headed for Assyria's position full speed!”

“The Assyria's position!” the evangelist echoed. “The Power that brought our warning to the Huron will surely have brought it in time so that they find the Assyria itself!' He burst from the cabin and returned to the throng waiting him upon the deck. We heard their hysterical shout as he gave them his news and his confidence.

“Tell to the Huron,” the officer beside us commanded, “that Assyria was keeping after them and would hold men in the engine-room to the last minute. They may have kept steam for the screw after the power for their current was gone. In any case the Assyria must have kept well within fifty miles!”

The operator, after he sent, bent over his instruments. The sound of singing came up to us again, no longer in the tones of invocation and imploring. It rose as a great, triumphant outpouring of voice.

From rock and tempest, fire and foe,
Protect them whevesoe'er they go;
Thus now shall ever rise to Thee
Glad hymns of praise from land and sea!

“The Huron is saying,” the operator read to us, “'Can already see toward position given for Assyria glow of flames. Believe we may now be within twenty miles!'”

“Twenty miles—with it burning above decks so they can see it from the Huron!” the officer repeated. “The Huron may make twenty knots the hour like us—but no less!”

“And already they're giving thanks down there.” Kerffers motioned to me. He and I stayed in the cabin.

“The Huron's sure it's the flames from the Assyria they've made out,” the operator read to us. “They're sending up rockets on the Huron on the chance they can see them coming from the Assyria.”

There was nothing more to do but wait. “At least Austin's keeping them occupied down there,” Kerffers commented to me. The evangelist's voice speaking in its greatest exaltation, came to us, as we opened the door; again it was succeeded by the triumphant singing.

“They plainly see the Assyria burning, from the Huron!” the operator said to us, “It's burning above decks in red and yellow flame all abaft the funnels! It's all a sheet of fire except one little part forward. They think from the position that the Assyria must have held steam after we ceased to get its signals; but it hasn't steam now. It's drifting; but the wind blowing it back seems to be keeping the space free at the bow where the people must be! The Huron's coming on at them full speed with every light going and firing rockets!”

“Our people are getting away from Austin down there,” Kerffers warned me, “or he's letting them go.”

The first of them already were upon the steps to the cabin. The stewards, under the direction of some officer, managed to keep the most of them back; but Austin himself, with the woman who had brought us the first alarm, forced his way up and in.

“We have saved them?” she clamored. ”We have saved them upon the Assyria?”

“The Huron is now alongside the Assyria!” the “wireless” operator cried. “The first boats from the Assyria are sending up the first passengers to the Huron's deck. They report everyone can be saved!”

“Everyone can be saved!”

“They're all forward of the fire! It's light as day between the ships! The Huron's boats are down and taking people off the Assyria safely too!”

 

“Then everyone is accounted for? Everyone is saved?”

“Everyone is saved!” The “wireless” operator repeated the wonder of it, as he listened. “All are accounted for—safe!”

The woman fell back, faint. The evangelist supported her and held her as his eyes in his final triumph met his friend's, Kerffers.

“All safe, of course!” he cried. “For our beings went forth over the waters when all that men call natural had failed to avail, and we wakened them upon the Huron so that they came in time!”

The scientist made no reply. The operator, staring at the evangelist's face, turned in awe and dispatched a message rapidly.

“What are you asking now?” the officer demanded.

“What woke him up? How he happened to come to his key again,” the operator replied.

“He says?” Kerffers asked.

“'Because I ate those gooseberry tarts at supper! It kept me awake. I couldn't sleep. I felt that I wanted to fix my spark. Fix it right away. Not wait till morning. I went up to the cabin, and—'”