by Paul Gallico
The Captain tried to run in from the end of the bridge wing, but it was already going uphill. He heard the clang of the engine-room telegraph as the executive reached the levers and the order. 'Right full rudder! All engines full astern!' the almost automatic reaction to an obstacle dead ahead.
And so when the S.S. Poseidon met the gigantic, upcurling, seismic wave created by the rock slip, she was more than three-quarters broadside, heeling farther from the turn. Top heavy and out of trim, she did not even hang for an instant at the point of no return, but was rolled over, bottom up, as swiftly and easily as an eight-hundred ton trawler in a North Atlantic storm.
The first intimation the scattering of passengers in the dining-saloon had of impending catastrophe was the sudden drop of the thick carpeted floor from beneath their feet. Chairs and tables tilted them forward or sideways, revealing a dizzying abyss before they were catapulted downwards into it.
Simultaneously the ship screamed.
The scream, long-drawn-out and high-pitched, was compounded of the agony of humans in mortal fear and pain, the shattering of glass and breaking crockery, the clashing, cymbal sound of metal trays and pots and pans mingled with the crashing of dishes, cups, knives, forks and spoons hurled, some with deadly missile eftect, from the dining-room tables.
The scream mounted to a crescendo as every object in the ship not fastened was carried away in that sickening whip that laid her over on her side.
Service doors from the kitchens and pantries swung open and the metallic protest of copper cauldrons, steamers, Dutch ovens and cooking utensils bounding and rebounding down the canting floor, added to the deafening chaos of sound through which penetrated one high, animal cry of anguish which preceded a cook's dying from scalding.
The Beamer and his girl came tumbling down the 118-foot width of the two-storey dining-saloon, turning over and over in slow motion like clowns in a contortionist act, breaking their descent clutching at chairs and tables that had suddenly assumed the vertical. They fell from starboard down to port and then, as the ship completed its revolution, slid another twenty feet, the height of the room, to land dazed, bruised but uninjured in a tangle of arms and legs with the Rosens, Muller, and Mike and Linda Rogo.
It was that first drop varying from fifty to over a hundred feet, the full breadth of the ship, that either crippled or killed those passengers and serving stewards who had the misfortune to be near the centre or the far starboard side of the ship as she careened over to port.
The more fortunate ones were those at the side tables to port. Muller, Belle and Manny Rosen were simply spilled out of their chairs. The Shelbys and the occupants of the grab-bag table had not much farther to go and were able to break their descent by holding on for a moment to their seats. Manny Rosen landed upon the rectangle of the window with nothing between him and the green sea but the thick glass.
But so swift and continuous was the capsizing, that before the pressure of the water could fracture it, the Poseidon's entire superstructure came thundering down, burying itself in the sea. The port windows, now starboard, were raised up and cleared themselves. Manny, clutching wildly at Belle, found himself sliding head-first along with the Rogos, the Shelbys and the others, down the slanting side of the vessel to land on the glass-covered ceiling amidst a mass of broken china, trays, cutlery and food. The topmost branches of the Christmas tree which had come tumbling out of its tub, the ornamental star affixed to its peak unbroken, fell upon them.
The moment of sealed-in quiet that followed the death cry of the ship contained more of horror and menace than the nerve-shattering clamour, for it uncovered the small, helpless noises of the injured and dying: murmurs, moans, pleadings, the occasional tinkling drop of some errant utensil that had lagged behind and the rolling about in the pantries of pots that had not yet managed to come to rest.
During the instant, just as it appeared that the ship was about to blow herself apart before the final plunge, Mike Rogo was heard to say, 'Jesus Christ! Someone get off my leg, will you?'
Thereupon there occurred an appalling explosion initiating a series of detonations as three of her boilers blew up.
If the first outcry of the stricken vessel had been a shriek, her second following the explosions was a shattering, ear-rending roar as her innards broke away.
The remaining boilers came loose first. Their pathway to the sea lay through two of the three giant stacks of the liner and they went down with the noise of a thousand men hammering upon sheet iron.
The engine room came apart more slowly, as the heavy turbines, dynamos, generators and pumps hanging downwards, imposed an intolerable strain upon the steel that clamped them to the floor. With the grinding outcry ot tortured metal, they began to crash down the ship-high rectangular shaft over the engine room and through the glass roof to join the boilers at the bottom of the sea.
Some of these, instead of dislodging completely, fractured to slide sideways and tangle with yet other break-away parts to jam together in a mass of tangled steel, torn piping and uncovered armatures. The S.S. Poseidon seemed to be retching up her bowels in mortal agony.
She did this to such an awful continuity of sounds: splintering wood, a whine of tearing metal, thunderclaps, surgings, hissings, great boomings accompanied by suckings and bubblings that the survivors still crumpled in heaps upon the ceiling-floor, could descend no further down the paths of terror.
They could only lie there stunned and deafened by the grinding, rumbling and thunderous poom-boom as of some great war drum, clangour of metal striking upon metal and the shouting of steam loosed as though from the anteroom of hell.
Once a great muddy cascade of water shot into the dining-saloon as though expelled from a cannon. But it ceased as abruptly as it had come, ran off into the opening made by the top of the grand staircase and which now, upside-down, had become a watery pit.
Then all the lights went out.
CHAPTER III
Reprieve
Yet, by some mystery of buoyancy connected with air trapped in the spaces now emptied of cargo, boilers and heavy machinery, the Poseidon still remained afloat, with her new waterline lapping against the hull just below where the former ceiling of the dining-saloon had become the floor. The clouds overhead parted, letting through enough tropical night light to cast a faint glow through the reversed sidelights, now high above like clerestory windows in a chapel, upon the desolation of the saloon and the people therein waiting to die.
The convulsions of the ship diminished, except for isolated thuds, bumps and clankings, sudden roars that were stilled as quickly as they had commenced, the bursting of the hatch-covers, the rushing sound of water entering some compartment, until again there was that almost intolerable quiet through which now once more moans of pain and cries for help became audible.
Those on the bridge and topsides quarters died immediately. The Captain, his officers, helmsman, quartermaster and the watch were either slung into the port wing, or jammed up against the side of the enclosure, wedged and pinned there by centrifugal force, or crippled by the fall. None of them had been able even to get close or reach for emergency switches to close all watertight doors. They were drowning before they knew what was happening to them.
In the radio room, the Sparks on duty was thrown from his chair while transmitting and, striking his head upon a piece of equipment, lay momentarily stunned. When he tried to rise and reach for his radio key, he found himself confused and disorientated. It was not where it should have been. And thereafter it was too late. His two fellow officers in their cabins had been hurled into their bunks, unable to extricate themselves in time. Then the water crashed in and killed them.
Death visited every portion of the ship. The engine- and boiler-room crews were wiped out in a body: crushed, scalded, or obliterated pitilessly in those oily lakes where once the openings of funnels and skylights had been. The unfortunate passengers in the luxury cabins of Main, 'A' and 'B' decks died more slowly.
There we
re four decks above the first of the cabins -- promenade, boat, sun and sports -- now under sixty feet of water. Their doors and windows had never been built to withstand such pressure and were blown inwards to admit the sea which came rushing or seeping, rising, exploring into the accommodation deck to drown those who had kept to their cabins that night, or caught them in the flooded corridors trying to escape by stairs that had become unclimbable.
In the dining-saloon, lights flickered on again as the sets of batteries for main power failure, somehow undamaged, came into action on a separate local circuit, dimly illuminating one out of every six bulbs on low voltage.
These bulbs concealed in the glass of the ceiling now reversed, threw up pale illumination from beneath the new floor, reversing too the shadows of stunned or injured passengers who were beginning to move like wraiths in some underworld.
In the eerie emergency lighting that waxed and waned first at intervals, dimming and glowing as though connected to a pulse that might at any moment falter and stop, the inverted room presented a nightmare to the dazed and bewildered creatures grovelling on the ceiling surface slippery with water, blood and glass. The smell of food arose from the debris.
Tables and chairs now were suspended upside-down from above like giant fungi. Tablecloths still affixed by the clamps of the fiddles hung in ghostly tatters.
There had been some fifty-odd passengers in the saloon, of which a third were either dead, dying or seriously injured. Those who were able to were beginning to bestir themselves. They climbed to their feet, groped blindly and agonizingly, heads shaking as though with tic, fell down again, struggled to hands and knees, gaped about them unseeing, unable to grasp what had happened or where they were.
The ones that had been dashed the entire width of the ship, with the exception of The Beamer and his girl, were the worst off. Practically uninjured was the group that Manny Rosen had characterized as The Strong Stomach Club, whose fall had been the gentlest and the shortest: the Shelbys, Muller, the grab-bag table, the Rogos and the Rosens now began to extricate themselves.
Mike Rogo, tossed aside the slender top of the Christmas tree, its crowning star broken in half and with the effort gasped, 'Jesus Christ! What's happened?'
His wife Linda screamed over and over again, 'Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Jesus, Mary, come to our aid!'
It was Jane Shelby who called the roll for her family, 'Dick? Susan? Robin? Are you all right? Dick, what's happened?'
Shelby answered, 'I don't know, I think we've turned over. Stay by me all of you. Watch out for broken glass.'
Manny Rosen picked himself up to a tinkling of shards that had all but covered him and which now fell from his shoulders. He said, 'Are you all right, Mamma?'
Belle replied, 'Manny are you all right? You ain't hurt or anything, are you?'
Manny said, 'I'm asking you.'
His wife said, 'If I can ask you, I'm okay, ain't I?'
'Can you stand up?' He assisted her to her feet and they stood there, holding on to one another, two grotesque figures in the wrong-way lighting. He short and stocky; she taller than him, enormously obese, trembling in spite of her words.
Hubie Muller helped Miss Kinsale to arise. The lapels of his dinner-jacket were soiled by some sauce that had come spurting out of a dish flying through the air. She was bleeding from a cut on her lip. He took out his pocket handkerchief and staunched it, saying in his soft and extraordinarily gentle voice, 'Are you all right? I think something awful has happened to us.'
She made no reply but went away from him, and wading through the ankle-deep debris knelt alongside the Reverend Scott and bowed her head. Blood from her mouth fell in diminishing drops on to her folded hands.
No one had been aware that the young Minister had untangled himself from all those at his table and near by who had been thrown into a heap, and climbing to his knees some little distance away from them, hands unclasped, arms spread wide apart, his gaze turned upwards to the monstrous aspect of the things hanging from the ceiling, he was addressing his God. The fighting glare was in his eyes.
He prayed, 'Lord, we are in deep trouble. You have seen fit to try us. We shall not fail you.'
Miss Kinsale sighed, 'Amen! Help us, Father!'
Scott did not so much as glance at her, but continued, 'Lord, we ask nothing but that we shall be strong to meet the challenge You have set us, and that we shall not be found wanting. We shall fight to live for You.'
Miss Kinsale added, 'Father, we will abide by Thy will.'
The Reverend Frank Buzz Scott said, 'We ask You, Lord, for nothing but what You have given us, the chance to prove ourselves. We will not fail. Trust in us.'
The Rosens, the Shelby family, the Rogos and Hubie Muller were drawn into an embarrassed group about the kneeling figure of Scott.
To Muller came the thought: What an extraordinary kind of prayer! And then an even more absurd one: My God, he's wearing his college colours and telling God he's going out to win the big game. Has he gone out of his mind?
He looked almost with relief upon the wispy person of Miss Kinsale kneeling next to him in her short, grey taffeta evening frock. The material at her shoulder was barely touching the cloth of the clergyman's outstretched sleeve. The simplicity of the words she was murmuring were almost a comforting counterpoint to the clergyman's strange perversions of the usual litany of prayers.
Still dazed and hardly aware of what Scott was saying, Shelby yet was ashamed of him somehow. He was used to the preacher clad in surplice in the pulpit with his big Bible open, talking down to him from his elevation and sometimes when he listened to him, even saying things which made him think a little. It was all right in its proper setting, which included stained-glass windows, organ music and the echoes of coughing rebounding from the church roof. it was ritual with which he was willing to put up every so often for the sake of standing in the community. But here there was something dreadfully embarrassing in this big man oblivious of all else, kneeling, arms upraised, conversing directly with God.
He did not know where to look. He stole a glance at his wife and saw that she was staring at Scott with fascination, but her lips were moving. She was one of those thin, fine-boned, American women who from sensational girlish beauty had developed into an even lovelier middle-age; ash blonde hair turned a shade darker, but the eyes still the same blue, lively and young and the faint lines appearing about the mouth recording the humour, the courage and the goodwill with which she had coped with the struggles of producing and raising a family, and keeping a husband.
He saw splinters of glass shining in her hair, reached over and plucked them Out. She smiled a little tremulously and said, 'I've prayed, too.' But in her mind she was wondering to whom Scott had been speaking -- one of those bearded figures of God on a billowing cloud from the Sistine Chapel, or the overcoated, slouch-hatted figure of the football coach pacing the sidelines?
Belle Rosen, clutching her husband's arm said, 'Manny, what's happened to us? Maybe we should say a prayer, like, ourselves.'
Manny answered, 'it's years since we've been to temple. Now we should be asking?' But automatically his hand reached inside his shirt-front for the mezuzah that should have been hanging from a chain about his neck, but wasn't. The Rosens were of a generation which had long since given up orthodoxy.
The weird, static moments continued. The capsized ship should long since have given a final lurch and plunged to the bottom. Instead she ceased all movement and seemed as solidly planted there in the still ocean as a rock, a long, dark whale-back beneath the emerging starlight.
The complete relaxation, the result of their alcoholism, had saved The Beamer and Pam, his girl, from nothing worse than a shaking up. It was she, with a strong arm, who lifted him up and held him to his feet, both now stone-cold sober. But though he knew he was no longer drunk, the horrors around him made him uncertain that he was not under hallucination; Scott and Miss Kinsale kneeling, lights going on and off up from the floor, the stink and
the noise frightened him badly. He said, 'Pam, am I all right?'
She held fast to him and whispered, 'Don't worry, I'm here. I'll look after you.'
James Martin, owner of The Elite Haberdashery Shop in Evanston, Illinois, got to his feet unaided and made for where the grand staircase had been, and then wished he had not. He was a dry little man with the smooth skin and thin lips of the Midwesterner. The eyes behind his gold-rimmed spectacles were alert but he would have been easy to lose in a crowd. He looked like no one and everyone who was in the business of selling. When he reached the area, it was no longer there, but instead at a depth of six feet below the new floor line, was a large pool of water and black oil. One of the emergency lights still functioning on the upside-down stairs gave the surface an iridescence of many colours.