"
"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
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, ain't it?"
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.
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