There's weather ahead."
Captain Hodgson opens the underbody colloid, swings the heavy
pithing-iron out of its rack which in liners is generally cased
as a smoking-room settee, and at two hundred feet releases the
catch. We hear the whir of the crescent-shaped arms opening as
they descend. The derelict's forehead is punched in, starred
across, and rent diagonally. She falls stern first, our beam upon
her; slides like a lost soul down that pitiless ladder of light,
and the Atlantic takes her.
"A filthy business," says Hodgson. "I wonder what it must have
been like in the old days?"
The thought had crossed my mind, too. What if that wavering
carcass had been filled with the men of the old days, each one of
them taught (that is the horror of it!) that, after death he
would very possibly go for ever to unspeakable torment?
And scarcely a generation ago, we (one knows now that we are only
our fathers re-enlarged upon the earth), we, I say, ripped and
rammed and pithed to admiration.
Here Tim, from the Control Platform, shouts that we are to get
into our inflators and to bring him his at once.
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