We emerged into a vast chamber walled with bare iron. This was the engine room, our guide reluctantly explained; it was one of three—one to each of the craft’s axles—and it was as wide as the ship itself. A pair of iron beams the height of two men ran the width of the room, and on these beams rested oscillating-engines—piston-like affairs, now at rest, which leaked gleaming oil. The pistons inclined toward each other in pairs, like mechanical suitors, each pair supporting a huge, T-sectioned metal spindle. The axle itself crossed this stokehold from side to side, piercing through the spindles. Our guide, droning on, told us how these oscillating-engines were keyed to the drive by friction- belts, which could be disengaged on command (relayed by speaking-tube) from the bridge.
I peered up at this mighty metal shaft and envisioned the great wheels borne by the axle, just beyond the hull. In the presence of these idle giants I felt as if I had been reduced to the scale of a mouse. I tried to imagine how this monstrous room would appear when the Albert sailed forth. As its tracks chewed the turf of Europe, how these mighty metal limbs would strain and thrash! The room would be a bedlam of shouted orders, grease-covered torsos, running feet.
Holden leaned close to me, a sour amusement in his eyes. “This Dever fellow. Charming chap, eh, Ned?”
I frowned. “Well, perhaps the fellow’s busy, Holden. One must make allowances.”
“Really? The purpose of today’s event is to drum up funding for the operation of the vessel. We should be charmed, wined, welcomed, even here, in the stinking belly of the ship! I’m sure our Mr. Dever knows his stopcocks and bulkheads, but he is a diplomatic disaster. Do our companions look as if they are willing to make allowances for this oaf?”
I peeked at the French, but I disagreed with Holden’s gloomy diagnosis; the young continentals, looking like a handful of flowers thrown into the midst of the great machines, peered at the huge engines with every sign of excitement and anticipation. Perhaps the charm and novelty of the vessel itself were outside the scope of Holden’s cynical calculations.
I tried to make my way toward the fragrant Françoise, but would have succeeded only at the expense of discretion and good manners. Nevertheless I observed, to my surprise, that she showed no signs of discomfiture in the face of these leviathans of steel. Rather her face was a little flushed, as if she was exhilarated; and she pressed our reluctant guide with a series of baffling questions concerning crank- pins and air pumps.
As I stood admiring that china-delicate profile—oblivious to the competing charms of the greasy machines all around—Holden sidled closer to Françoise. “Rather attractive, all this brute power, mam’selle.”
She turned to him. “Quite so, sir.”
“Imagine those pistons pumping and thrusting,” said Holden in an oily voice, “and the axle gleaming like a sweating limb as it turns—”
Her eyebrows rose by no more than a fraction of an inch and, with the faintest of smiles, she moved away. Holden watched her go, a look of calculation on his round face.
I had not liked his rather obscene tone in this exchange, and as the party moved on through the engine gallery to the stokehold I took the opportunity to draw him to one side and say so.
He frowned and hitched his thumbs in his cummerbund. “I apologize for any offense I’ve dealt you, Ned,” he said, sounding quite insincere, “but I do at least have an object in mind.”
“Which is?” I inquired coolly.
“Think about it, lad,” Holden murmured. “I know you’re smitten with the delightful Miss Michelet, but you have to admit she’s a rum sort of society belle. How many girls her age would take a walk through the smelly heart of some machine? And how many would show such awareness of the ins and outs of the machinery… Not to mention the understanding she’s shown of the political and military situation? There is more to our Mademoiselle Françoise than meets the eye… and it would be nice to know more.”
I felt myself drawing away from Holden somewhat during this speech. He had proved an amusing and informative companion, these last few days, and his perceptiveness where people were concerned was clear; but his cynical detachment, his constant probing beneath the surface of events and people—not to mention the rather foreign streak of excessive patriotism which he revealed from time to time—were proving more than a little irritating.
Perhaps it was something to do with the journalistic profession.
I told him that I was not one of those who held that women are not capable of holding rational and informed thoughts in their heads; he laughed, apologized gracefully enough, and the matter was closed.
The stokehold was one of three aboard the Prince Albert; there was a stokehold to serve each axle, and each hold contained two boilers.
Each boiler was an iron box taller than two men and wider than three resting end to end; as we approached the nearer I saw how the boiler was encrusted with doors and inspection panels, and that a funnel two feet wide thrust from its upper surface and pierced the ceiling of this chamber, a good thirty feet above us. Yards of entrail-like copper and iron piping wrapped around each funnel and clothed the ceiling and upper walls of the hold, so that, if the contents of the engine room had reminded me of the limbs of gigantic athletes, then this was like being swallowed into the workings of those giants’ very bodies.
The heat of the place was remarkable; I felt my collar grow soft and hoped that my appearance would not deteriorate too rapidly. It was beyond me how anyone could work for long periods in such conditions. But, save for a little spilled oil, there was none of the filth and grime one would normally associate with a stokehold; the round bellies of the boilers gleamed with almost autumnal colors, and the polished pipes caught the light in an almost attractive way.
Dever climbed on to a battered wooden stool and opened an inspection hatch perhaps eight feet above the ground; one by one we perched on the stool and peered inside. When it was my turn I made out a nest of more pipes, brass and copper and iron. These pipes carried superheated steam from the boiler to the pistons. If this were an ocean-going craft the water would be supplied by feeds from the sea; but the Albert was forced to haul its own supply, in great million-gallon tanks. In fact much of the water was cycled through the ornamental pond on the Promenade Deck!
Dever told us with some relish that if we were to grasp one of the pipes more likely than not our flesh would stick and stay behind, broiled, allowing white bones to slip out like fingers from a glove…
Dismissing such revolting nonsense I stood by while Françoise took her turn on the stool. I glared at her companions—and even poor Holden—as if daring them to attempt to glimpse Mlle. Michelet’s ankles or lower calves.
When we were done with the pipes, Françoise pressed Dever. “The anti-ice,” she said, her voice deep with enthusiasm. “You must show us the anti-ice.”
Dever reached for an inspection door set at about head height in the boiler, and—in an uncharacteristic moment of showmanship—he hurled it wide, so that it clanged against the boiler’s iron hide, and watched our reactions with something resembling a grin.
As one we stepped back, startled. For, in the midst of the stokehold’s infernal heat, the chamber Dever opened was filled with the frost and ice of winter!
Françoise spoke softly in her native tongue and bent her pretty head to peer into the iced locker. She allowed Dever to murmur his incomprehensible nonsense into her delicate ear, and then she faced the rest of us. “At the heart of this boiler is a Dewar flask,” she said crisply. “As you surely know such a flask contains a layer of vacuum trapped between glass walls, and is silvered inside and out, the purpose being to eliminate the transfer of heat into its interior by the processes of conduction, convection and radiation. And the temperature within the flask is lowered to Arctic proportions by refrigerating coils wrapped around the flask.”