Though the month was June, and the stupendous aero-liner Imperatrice had only half an hour before demagnetized its electromagnetic disks and cleared from the Pacific Transport towers at Honolulu, the thin, cold atmosphere of more than two miles aloft nipped keenly....
"The Plunge" (1916) by George Allan England ends the anthology Steampunk Prime on a spectacular note. None of the dying-fall pathos of "The Last Days of Earth," or the space-going Tsushima of "An Interplanetary Rupture."
"The Plunge" opens with a nighttime meet-cute between Jeanne Hargreaves and novelist Norford Hale on the Imperatrice. (A wag might say Imperatrice is an aero version of Titanic).
The world of Imperatrice and its passengers is a future Max Nordau would hate:
"....Now that China and India and Thibet are weekend excursions, on tourist schedules, what can be left to wonder at or be romantic about?" He stifled a yawn, with difficulty. "Not one uncivilized or semi-civilized place in the whole world — even the very Esquimaux and Patagonians sophisticated and selling postcards — bah! In these days of motive power drawn from the sun or from polar currents streaming to it, these days of synthetic foods, etheric energies, and all-embracing mechanism, what part is left for the personal equation?
"Civilization? Ugh! I detest it! I'd give a year of my life — five years — for a touch of the real, the raw, the primitive! Life has become as dull as men and women themselves. Are there any real women in the world to-day? "I've never met one. That's why I've never married — "
He gestured outward with his hand, despairingly. She smiled with certain bitterness.
"Real women?" The girl exclaimed. "Show me a real man first! Extinct! I've always thought so; but until tonight I've always been too polite to say so. Somehow, with you, politeness and subterfuge seem as stupidly unreal as all the rest of this super-civilization. I wonder, now — "
Never fear, though. "In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too."
A sudden flare of light, far outshining the moon, interrupted her speech. The brilliance flooded the whole sky, dazzled upon the spinning clouds below, and for a second glared with noonday radiance. Every minutest detail of the ship stood out in startling relief.
A wailing, screeching note cleft the high air, grew swiftly louder as the light brightened, then ended in a thunderous crash that shook the liner from lookout to extremest rudder-plane.
Then, instantly, the light glared below. The novelist, leaning over the rail as the staggered liner heeled sickeningly far to port, saw a swift streak of bluish flame — flame that roared, that coruscated — plunge like a rocket into the enveloping fleeciness of the clouds, and vanish.
A DULL concussion shuddered through the Imperatrice, then two more in quick succession. Flames gushed, aft. Confused cries, shouts, and tumult rose on the night. Everywhere echoed that most terrible of all sounds; the shrieking of women. Came the trampling of feet running along the decks, which already — as the stupendous aerocraft slowed, drunkenly swaying — had begun to slant at a perilous angle....
Imperatrice does not sink like a stone, but does turn over in mid-air as fire spreads and machinery fails. Passengers who cannot figure out how to work their anti-gravity life belts fall into the Pacific with other liner debris.
A gust of incandescent gases puffed from the liner's bow. The gigantic craft seemed to empty herself in a second. She staggered, rolled slowly over, and gathered momentum downward. In a vast and rushing spiral she plunged; roaring into white heat; shot swiftly off to the left, and — violently exploding — leaped into twisted wreckage.
A stupendous concussion rolled its echoes over the sea as the shattered, glowing skeleton of metal surged into the waves.
Up leaped a Vesuvius of steam, writhing in snowy belchings under the moonlight. Hissings of tortured waters drowned the seethes of the waves and the death-cries of the struggling wretches annihilated by the hulk.
Then, for a moment, silence, while Norford — cradled upward on the breasts of the sea — dimly perceived a boiling, spuming writhe of brine that marked the liner's grave.
A column of gaseous blue flame belched from the waves, writhed aloft and vanished.
Impassive, the sea covered all. The Imperatrice was dead.
Author England spends little time on the technology of aero-liners. Like Kipling's treatment in two magnificent tales, "With the Night Mail" and "As Easy as A.B.C.," he simply presents it and keeps going.
Jeanne Hargreaves and Norford Hale are popular magazine fiction characters, dissatisfied with the modernity of their world and its complacency. George England gives them the privilege of facing death close up, which concentrates their minds wonderfully.
Night wore on; and now the moon, dimming as the east began to glow, had dropped almost to the vague mists that pearled the horizon. The stars blanched and died; but, watching them, the man saw one star moving on the edge of the sea — a star that waxed, that mounted on the sky — a star that spoke of life.
"Look,'' cried Norford, pointing. "A kinetogram was sent, after all! See there — rescue!"
The girl, all disheveled, wet and shivering, raised her eyes to the swift-approaching searchlight of the aerocraft. For a moment she peered at it in silence; then she smiled.
"Can this be A.D. 2O16?" She asked wonderingly. "Things like this happen only in books — books of the old days — "
"Books of life!" Said Norford, with his arm about her. "Don't you see — this plunge has been a plunge back into life, real life, for us? Romney mine, a story like this can have only one ending! And was it you, Romney, was it you, who told me that Romance was dead?"
She bowed her head, yearning against his breast. His arms made home for her.
"I told you that," she faltered, "before I knew what a man could be — before either of us had drunk the wine of primitive emotion — before I owed you the life that's yours now, if you want it!"
He slid the eagle ring from his finger.
"Give me your left hand, Romney," he bade. "The air has made us one; the symbol of these wings shall always bind us!"
Her answer was to kiss the ring that he had put upon her finger. Kisses and tears, together, sanctified it.
"You would have died that I might live!" He whispered. "You are my woman, Romney girl!" He put her head back from his heart, turned up her face, and crushed her mouth to his. "Mine, mine!" Said he. "You are my woman now!"
Arguably a happier ending than drowning.
Jay
27 April 2021
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