Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 76: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

76 DAVID BEATY Felicity gave little warning. Weather-ship Easy, stationed near the middle of the 2,000 miles separating Bermuda from the Azores, started to pitch and roll in a sudden swell. Before the meteorolo- gists on board could work out the cause, the morning sky darkened, and the north-west corner of the storm was upon them. Now, Easy Zebra, a Marlborough aircraft, G-AHEZ, of British , Empire Airways, was well in the grey mass of Felicity’s enormous web. For such a frail-looking cockleshell, she was showing an almost impudent unconcern. The storm had the punch of more than four atom bombs, attenuated maybe by the wide area of its structure, but still powerful and still dangerous. Great unseen hands seemed to clutch out of the grey blankness in a grab for the aircraft. But each time, Easy Zebra just shivered in all her thin eighth-of-an-inch plates, soared up or plunged down, squirming out of the storm’s gap. Although, outside, an icy wind roared at over 90 miles an hour, within the aircraft’s fuselage there was no other sound but the accustomed steady humming of her motors, and the clatter of the rain on her metal skin. Inside, certainly, it was impossible to walk. ‘The lunch the steward had been about to serve was indefinitely postponed. Most of the sixteen passengers on board felt illk A Mr. Parkinson, a Very Important Person, a member of numerous political boards— the Captain, Mark Kelston, had had a note from the Company requesting him to see that Mr. Parkinson “‘ had a comfortable trip ”’ —strapped and imprisoned in his seat, had been sick in a most undignified way all over himself. But these were minor things. Slowed down considerably by the winds against her, Easy Zebra still managed to slip through the storm at over 160 miles an hour. | Down in the Atlantic, a little farther to the east, a Portuguese tramp steamer called the Santa Lucinda was not so fortunate. Her plates were many times as strong as Easy Zebra’s. Her weight Was 2,000 tons compared with the aircraft’s 40. But she moved the way the storm pushed her, her engine-room flooded by the endless sea. Felicity had, after all, caught something in its web. Something far more substantial than an outsize tin fly. In his position behind the pilots, Radio Officer Draper was moving up against his straps every time a bounce lifted him off his seat. Asa result, his log for the last half-hour was an appalling scrawl, in contrast to the neat clerical hand of the first part of the trip. ‘The earphones were jammed over his head, and he was listening hard. A sad little rhythm of dots and dashes, not unlike a wood-pigeon’s call in the evening, was making a badly matched fight against the crackling static of the storm. He turned to Kelston. ‘“‘ Some poor bastard’s sending an SOS, Skipper.” The Captain had appeared to be concentrating entirely on the instruments that guided the safe keeping of Easy Zebra. Now he allowed his mind to take in what Draper had told him, while his hands and his eyes, experienced and _ well-disciplined, comiclooks.comn