Disbelievingly he saw the huge silver shaft beginning to rise and buckle
in its bed, the bearing tearing loose from its mountings.
Shut down! he screamed. For God's sake, shut down! but his voice was
lost in the shriek and scream of tortured metal and machinery that was
tearing itself to pieces in a suicidal frenzy.
The main bearing exploded, and the shaft slammed it into the bulkhead,
tearing steel plate like paper.
The shaft itself began to snake and whip. The Chief cowered back,
pressing his back to the bulkhead and covering his ears to protect them
from the unbearable volume of noise.
A sliver of heated steel flew from the bearing and struck him in the
face, laying open his upper lip to the bone, crushing his nose and
snapping off his front teeth at the level of his gums.
He toppled forward, and the whipping, kicking shaft seized him like a
mindless predator and tore his body to pieces, pounding him and crushing
him in the shaft bed and splattering him against the pale metal walls.
The main shaft snapped like a rotten twig at the point where it had been
heated and weakened. The unbalanced weight of the revolving propeller
ripped the stump out
46o through the after seal, as though it were a tooth plucked from a
rotting jaw.
The sea rushed in through the opening, flooding the tunnel instantly
until it slammed into the watertight doors - and the huge glistening
bronze propeller, with the stump of the main shaft still attached, the
whole unit weighing one hundred and fifty tons, plummeted downwards
through four hundred fathoms to embed itself deeply in the soft mud of
the sea bottom.
Freed of the intolerable goad of her damaged shaft, Golden Dawn was
suddenly silent and her decks still and steady as she trundled on,
slowly losing way as the water dragged at her hull.
Samantha had one awful moment of sickening guilt. She saw clearly that
she was responsible for the deadly danger into which she had led these
people, and she stared out over the boat's side at the Golden Dawn.
The tanker was coming on without any check in her speed; perhaps she had
turned a few degrees, for her bows were no longer pointed directly at
them, but her speed was constant.
She was achingly aware of her inexperience, of her helplessness in this
alien situation. She tried to think, to force herself out of this
frozen despondency.
Life-jackets! she thought, and yelled to Sally-Anne out on the deck,
The life-jackets are in the lockers behind the wheelhouse. Their faces
turned to her, suddenly stricken. Up to this moment it had all been a
glorious romp, the old fun-game of challenging the money-grabbers,
prodding the establishment, but now suddenly it was mortal danger.
Move! Samantha shrieked at them, and there was a rush back along the
deck.
Think! Samantha shook her head, as though to clear it.
Think! she urged herself fiercely. She could hear the tanker now, the
silken rustling sound of the water under its hull, the sough of the bow
wave curling upon itself.
