"ArkCovenantPart3" - читать интересную книгу автора (MacClure Victor)

angle and flatten. The idea of perfecting a continuous stalling, in which the
machine got into neither tail nor nose dive, nor even into a spin, but simply
floated to earth as a feather might, seemed mad to him. The principle is now a
commonplace in aeronautics, and how Milliken and I arrived at it, very nearly at
the cost of our lives, has little to do with the story I have to tell. I mention
Milliken's apology to give just what sidelight it may on the man's character,
for he wants some explaining.
If I know anything about Milliken, he will never bother to read these pages,
even if he is told he comes into them--Shakespeare and real belles lettres are
more in his way than this sort of production--so I may say what I like about
him. In any case, I won't say anything that I wouldn't tell him to his own ugly
old face if the need arose.
I have never met a man with as great a passion so carefully hidden as Milliken
and his love for air machines, nor anybody with half his practical experience
and skill. He has the strongest hands and the gentlest. No fractious nut is too
firmly fixed for his spanner, and no adjustment too delicate for his fingers,
and I am open to bet that he has never stripped a screw in his life. He looks
about as broad as he is long--which, since he is little over five feet in
height, is perhaps not saying such a lot--and with the most equitable of tempers
the habitual expression of his face is one of untamed ferocity. If Milliken had
wanted to, he could have cleared the workshops in quick time, and I have seen
him rise under three big men, during a rag, and carry them off like so many
feather pillows. Like most good men of their hands, he can control his fists. I
take it he knows too well the power in them and behind them to use them
unworthily.
Milliken is the sort of mechanic who always has about him a lump of cotton
waste, and as we inspected the Merlin that day--I suppose for about the
thousandth time--he was rubbing the frosted aluminum of the fuselage and of the
shuttered wings, or was polishing up the glass of the portholes. It was as if he
could not get his darling clean enough, for he fussed about the machine like a
mother over a spoiled child.
I am not going to say that the Merlin did not deserve all his affection. From
the gleaming 1,000 h.p. radial engine, weighing just about half as many
kilograms, to her rudder, and from wing-tip to wing-tip, she was all frosted
aluminum, save only for a thin line of gentian blue that ran along her sides to
spread out and cover her rear plane. Through the portholes and windows of the
control cabin, a glimpse could be had of the sparrow's-egg blue that decorated
her interior, of the shining nickel of the dials and controls. She looked the
littlest thing. Yet at a pinch she could carry a dozen and a half fighting men.
She seemed the most innocent and peaceable of machines, but her speed and her
power of rapid manoeuvre made her just about the deadliest thing that ever took
the air.
We could take off the whole top of the cabin above the blue line and fit a
fighting top, and round the inside of the fusilage were set stanchions for
sixguns. Two of these guns, the fore and aft, were belt-guns firing
half-kiloshells, the forward one synchronized with and firing between the
propeller blades. Beneath were hatches for bomb-dropping and torpedo release.
Of course, at the moment I'm writing of, when Milliken and I were standing byher
on the jetty, all the fighting kit of the Merlin was unshipped. I had every
permit from the government, but as the law forbade any private machine to carry