by Anthology
"That," said the lieutenant, knocking the ashes out of his second pipe, "is the last that I heard at first hand of the pirate with the red flag, for the day after Charlie told me the story, I was ordered out to the West Coast. That was nearly nine months ago, and, from the accounts we saw in the Australian papers, which you will be able to read at your leisure, he is still at large, looting a liner every now and then, as the fancy takes him, and laughing at every attempt to catch him."
"Then, if no one else can catch him, we will!" said Mr. Austen, almost passionately, rising from his chair with a flush of anger on his thin cheeks. "It is an outrage on humanity and civilisation that such things should be! I'm afraid we must give him three months' more licence, but, after that, we'll hunt him down and sink him, if we have to chase him round the world to do it! Renault, we must have the Nautilus afloat in three weeks!"
CHAPTER V.
ANARCHY AFTER DINNER.
A BRIEF and somewhat uncomfortable silence followed Mr. Austen's outburst of righteous indignation. Adams looked at him with an expression of surprise not unmingled with regret, and a dark flush and a most unmistakable scowl passed over Renault's swarthy features. Only for an instant, however, did he suffer his feelings to betray themselves. Even before Mr, Austen had time to notice it, the scowl had passed, and he turned to him and said in a tone that seemed intended to convey more meaning than the words he used-
"Three weeks? I'm afraid it will hardly be possible to have the Nautilus ready for sea by that time, and, of course, you can't refer to anything but her."
"Oh, no, of course not," replied Mr. Austen hastily, and, as Wyndham thought, rather confusedly. "Of course I referred to her, and," he continued, turning to Adams, as if for corroboration of what he said, "I certainly should have thought that she was sufficiently far advanced for us to have had her ready for sea within a month from now, and then, allowing two months for the voyage and the search for this miscreant, we surely ought to be able to run him down within three months."
"I really don't see why we shouldn't, Renault," said Adams in reply to this. "And I don't see why I shouldn't tell you gentlemen," he went on, turning to Sir Harry and Wyndham, "now that Mr. Austen has partly let the cat out of the bag, that the naval experiment which was mentioned down at the dockyard is a new type of sea-going warship which we are constructing, not, I can assure you, for offensive purposes, but purely for defence, should it ever be necessary, and for swift transit in the meantime.
"She is a sort of combined submarine ram and torpedo-boat, designed and engined on a new principle by our friend Max here. She is not submarine in the sense that she will be able to plunge entirely under the water, but if she turns out a success, and ever goes into action, there will be nothing of her to be seen but a small oval platform carrying her machine guns and the conning-tower.
"Everything else will be from ten to twenty feet under water, and therefore beyond the reach of shot, and even if the platform got knocked to pieces, she could still get away, for the engineers and crew will not be dependent on ventilation for fresh air, and she can be steered by compass, though, of course, not by sight, from the interior of the hull ten feet below the surface of the water. But when I say that we expect her speed to be quite forty knots an hour, you will see that there will not be very much chance of her getting knocked about."
"Forty knots an hour?" exclaimed Wyndham, sitting bolt upright in his chair and bringing his hand down on his knee with a sounding slap. "Why, if I only had command of any boat that really would do forty knots an hour, I'd stake my life on running the Destroyer and her red flag off the sea within ten days of the time I got fairly on to the Atlantic; and, with a cruiser such as you have just described, I'd fight the fleets of the world, and sink them ship by ship, if there was any necessity for me to do so. Thank Heaven, she doesn't belong to any of the possible enemies of England!"
"There's no telling," said Max, laughing, but not, it struck Wyndham, in a very pleasant fashion. "You know, although we have not published any declaration of independence or any theatricals of that sort, we Utopians owe no allegiance to any of the Governments of the world, and I suppose we should resent interference from the British Foreign Office just as readily and as forcibly as if it came from any other quarter."
"Very possible," retorted Wyndham, a trifle nettled, more at the tone than the words; "but that, if you will pardon my saying so, is hardly the question at present. Of course, I have not the slightest right even to suggest, much less to dictate in any way, to you gentlemen who have given us hospitality and are helping us out of a very considerable hole. But if you will allow me to express my candid opinion, as a man whose business it is to know something about such things as these, I should like to say that, granted that this wonderful cruiser of yours does what you expect her to do, you alone of all the people of the earth will have in your hands the means of tackling this enemy of Society - part of whose story I have been able to tell you - on equal terms, or even at some advantage; and if that is so, surely it will be your duty to Society"-
"Stop there for a moment, please," interrupted Adams a trifle warmly. "To Humanity perhaps - to Society, as you call it, no. We owe no duty to Society, and we will pay none. Society made use of us and our labour as it suited its convenience, caring less for us personally than it did for its horses, and when it had no further use for us, would have left us to starve in the gutter or the garret as the Fates Might have willed it.
"That is why we are here; that is why Utopia exists. If the Brotherhood of Man which is preached about in your churches and prattled about in your parliaments were a fact instead of the mockery that it is, we should never have come out here to the ends of the world to seek the possibility of living a healthy human life without the necessity of being somebody's slave or somebody's tyrant."
"Look here," said Sir Harry, "we've something a lot better to do than fire syllogisms at each other while we've got Utopia to explore and the Calypso to look after. Wouldn't it be more to the purpose if, instead of talking here, you were to place your professional skill and experience at the service of these gentlemen in getting the Nautilus ready for sea?"
"Of course it would, if they'll only accept them," replied the lieutenant, getting up with an air of relief, as though he had had quite enough of polemics. "I'm theirs to command if they think I can be of any use."
"Of course you will," said Adams, rising with the rest of the party. "Frankly, we didn't intend to tell you anything about the existence of the Nautilus, for fear our intentions might have been misunderstood; but what you have told us about this pirate and his doings makes it quite a different matter. We shall be glad of all the help we can get. Will you come down to the dockyard now and have a look at the Nautilus?"
Both the lieutenant and Sir Harry jumped at the invitation to see the mysterious craft from which such great things were hoped, but on the way down to the jetty, where the launch was waiting for them, Violet was captured by Dora Merton and another "Mermaid," and carried off, by no means unwillingly, to afternoon tea and to chat on more congenial subjects than ship-building and machinery.
When the male portion of the party once more landed at the dockyard, and had gained admission to the shed, which before had been closed to them, they found themselves alongside the hull of a vessel which Wyndham's practised eye saw at a glance formed a very considerable advance on the ideas in vogue in the naval arsenals of Europe and America. A long, narrow hull, shaped as nearly as possible on the model of a mackerel's body, carried, supported by a sharply oval structure on the back, a larger and still more elongated oval platform, with a low, heavily armoured conning-tower situated at the forward end.
Three four-bladed propellers projected from the stern and quarters, one in the line of the keel, and the others from the quarters, diverging slightly outwards from the middle line.
"Now," said Renault, after the two visitors bad taken a bird's-eye view of the whole exterior, "if you'll allow me, I'll act as showman and explain her points to
you. This hull is 250 feet long, 30 feet deep, and 25 feet wide in its largest dimensions, which you see are not amidships, but rather towards the head.
"It is made of mild steel throughout, with the exception of the ram, which is faced with Harveyised nickel steel hard enough to pierce or tear ordinary iron or steel plates as if they were no tougher than brown paper. When you get inside, you'll see that, in addition to her twenty-four water-tight compartments, she's very much strengthened towards the bow, so as to give her the greatest possible resisting power when she is striking her blow.
"These slides that you see cover the apertures for the underwater torpedo tubes. There are eight of them, two forward, two aft, and two in each broadside. The gun deck there is the only part of her that will be visible when she's in deep water fighting trim. It stands ten feet above the hull, so that when the bull is entirely submerged - as it will be - there will only be a freeboard of about seven feet; and as the deck itself is only forty feet long by fifteen in its greatest breadth, there won't be much to shoot at."
"No," said Wyndham; "she'll be a very ugly customer in anything like smooth water; but I don't see how you are going to fight your guns in anything like a sea, for the deck would be swept fore and aft by almost every wave."
"So it would," said Renault, "and we should let it be. The guns will all be mounted on disappearing carriages, and, as you will see when you get on deck, - where we may as well go right away now, - can be brought completely under cover, so that in heavy weather the craft would simply be a torpedo ram, with nothing to shoot at but the bare platform and the conning-tower."
So saying, he led the way up a ladder on to the deck, which Wyndham found already fitted ready for the reception of what when mounted would be a formidable armament of quick-firing cannon and machine guns, all of which, when in position, would, as Renault explained, be capable of being lowered out of sight and under shelter by means of the disappearing carriages working through sections of the deck, covered with steel slides.
"We haven't got our guns yet," said Adams, in reply to a query from Sir Harry. "They, and the torpedo armament, are being made at Elswick, but we expect them to be ready by the time we get the Nautilus home to receive them."
"Oh, then you are going to take her home?" said Wyndham.
"Yes," replied Adams, "I think so. We were intending to have them brought out in the steamer that you see lying on the opposite side of the basin," he continued, pointing to a trim-looking craft of about two thousand tons; "but in view of the urgency of this business, and the high speed that we hope the Nautilus will show, I think there will be a great saving, especially in time, if we take the ship to her guns, instead of bringing them out here to her. Don't you think so, Mr. Austen?"
"Oh, by all means! It'll mean a saving of quite two months, if not more, and we haven't a day to lose while that scoundrel is at large. As soon as ever we can get her into the water and put her through her paces, we must start for England, and get her to work as soon as possible."
"Bravo!" said Wyndham; "and when she goes, may I go with her, if I only go as cabin-boy or stoker's mate."
"You certainly won't go as the latter," said Renault, "simply because our engines don't want stoking."
"What!" exclaimed the lieutenant. "Then they are not steam engines? No, of course. What a fool I am! I ought to have seen that you have no funnels. What are they - gas, electric or what?"
"Neither," said Renault, moving towards an open slide, from which a companion-way led down into the interior of the vessel. "But come along, you shall see them for yourself."
CHAPTER VI.
A VISION IN THE SKY.
THE engine-room of the Nautilus was situated in the after-section of the hull, about halfway between the stern and the midships line of the vessel. It was a long, narrow compartment, forty feet long by fifteen broad, and divided into three longitudinal sections, each of which contained what looked to Wyndham like a vertical engine of the quadruple-expansion type. A second glance, however, convinced him that they must be something essentially different, for there were no steampipes and no indications of the presence of either boilers or furnaces. As far as could be seen, steam was not the motive power at all. To set this question at rest, the lieutenant turned to Max and said-
"This is certainly no steam-engine. But where do you generate your motive power?"
"The day of steam is already past for the engineer who stands at the high-water mark of his craft," replied Max, with just a suspicion of superiority in his tone. "This is a gas-motor, not worked by ignition of inflammable gas as in the old-fashioned engines, but by the deflagration of a solid salt by means of the electric spark.
"You see this steel box at the side of the high-pressure cylinder. That is the explosion chamber. From there the products of the explosion pass through the cylinders in turn, doing their maximum of work in each, and in that chamber at the end they are collected and condensed, and then, with the addition of other chemicals, they can be used to manufacture new supplies of what I may call our motor-fuel."
"Why, that's precious like the old idea of perpetual motion!" exclaimed Wyndham, looking almost incredulously at the engineer. "You get your energy from your chemical at one end of the engine, and at the other you collect it again and use it over and over almost indefinitely, I suppose."
"Not quite indefinitely," chimed in Mr. Austen. "You see, we can't use all the products of combustion for recombination, and we have to add new materials each time. Still, I think we effect a net saving of about fifty per cent.; that is, we can use our fuel one and a half times over, and as our engines give ninety-five per cent. of the explosive energy in actual work, you will understand that we shall be able to travel enormous distances with a very small expenditure of fuel- that is, of course, in comparison with a steamer's expenditure of coal or petroleum."
"Oh, quite so," said the lieutenant; "it will make a perfect revolution in marine engineering if it ever gets known, as I suppose it must do some day."
"Unless Max and I die with the secret of the explosive in our possession," replied Mr. Austen, with a meaning smile, which warned Wyndham not to ask the question that was on his lips. So, instead of doing that, he said-
"Of course, I have neither the right nor the desire to pry into secrets that don't concern me, and so I will just say that this motor-fuel of yours would be worth a good many pounds a ton for driving torpedo-boats and high-speed cruisers; but I suppose there is no harm in my asking the amount of horse-power you expect to get out of these three engines?"
"None at all," said Renault. "You see they are of rather peculiar construction, and the cylinders are a good deal stronger than the ordinary steam-cylinder. That is because they have to bear a very much greater pressure. Each of the engines is calculated to work up to a maximum efficiency of fifteen thousand horse-power."
"Fifteen thousand each!" exclaimed Wyndham. "Forty-five thousand gross! Why, it seems incredible that such a tremendous power should be locked up in such a small space as this."
"Nevertheless it is true," replied Renault. "You see that is the difference between waste and economy. I needn't tell you how much power you would get from the modern steam-engine if you could only make ninety-five per cent. of the thermo-dynamic energy of the coal effective."
"This is a very marvellous craft. of yours," said Sir Harry to the three Utopians generally; "but what I find more marvellous even than the vessel itself, is the fact of finding her here in Utopia, where one would naturally expect to find nothing but the arts of peace in vogue."
He spoke in a half joking tone, but Adams, who answered him, did so much more seriously.
"Yes," he said, "that is so; but it is just because we believe in the arts of peace, and mean them to flourish here, that we are creating the means of protecting ourselves."
"But, my dear sir," exclaimed Wyndham, looking at him with an incredulous smile, "what on earth have you got to protect yourselves against? Really, I can't see that you stand in much dan
ger of being attacked by anyone in an out-of-the-way part of the world like this."
"In the first place," replied Adams, "Utopia is beautiful, and will some day be very rich. You know, as well as I do, the fatal attraction that beauty and wealth have for those Powers which indulge in a mission for protecting just such out-of-the-way parts of the world as this. Then, again, now that the Panama Canal is at last completed, a few months will see the establishment of the Southampton and Panama route from England to New Zealand and Australia.
"Utopia is not known now, except to us and you, but then it will be almost in the track of the Panama and Auckland steamers, and will practically command the route. Now, when you have seen a little more of this island, you will agree with me that, with a very little trouble and expense, it could be converted into a perfect ocean fortress, absolutely impregnable to any assault from the sea, and, at the same time, containing accommodation enough to shelter, and even to refit, a very considerable fleet. In short, it might easily be made the Malta of the South Seas."
"So it might, of course, and a magnificent position it would be, too!" exclaimed Wyndham. "Why, it would command all the east to west routes to Australasia, and a strong squadron stationed here in time of war would practically command the South Pacific."