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So it was apparent that Inspector Date had not much opinion of tramp-steamer skippers. However, as the day wore on to night, nothing was heard of Braddock or Cockatoo or the mummy, and when night came the village was filled with local reporters and with London journalists asking questions.
In the city, newspaper vendors shrilly hawked denunciations of the American ships because of the danger that their atom bombs might explode. Well outside the harbor, a Navy crew of experts worked to make quite impossible the detonation of atomic bombs in a stubby tramp-steamer which had plausibly, at least been sent to make those same newspapers' prophecies of disaster come true.
We know of no reason why this entire fleet could not have been disabled as effectively as the tramp-steamer offshore. You know about that ship?" Coburn nodded. The Greek general had told him. The Secretary went on painfully: "Now, the phenomena we have to ascribe to Invaders fall into two categories.
The anonymous tramp-steamer had been headed for the harbor of Naples, whose newspapers at least those of a certain political party had been screaming of the danger of an atomic explosion while American warships were anchored there. It was not likely that two atom bombs and a shipload of valuable secondary atomic explosive had been put on a carefully nameless ship just to be taken for a ride.
The rest fled inland, and I never saw them again, but lay abandoned for months as they had anchored me, between the ruined huts and a sandy spit alive with mosquitoes until somehow a British tramp-steamer heard of me at one of the trading stations up the coast. She brought down a crew to man and work me home.
Nineteen years later every sailing-ship had disappeared from the Hooghly, and in their place were rows of unsightly, rusty-sided iron tanks, with squat polemasts and ugly funnels vomiting black smoke. A tramp-steamer has its uses, no doubt, but it is hardly a thing of beauty. Ichabod! Ichabod! Calcutta is fortunate in having so fine a lung as the great stretch of the Maidan.
And when he looked at it, hard, with his eyes open, why the tramp-steamer to China sailed out of school-boy theatrical clouds and showed herself for the shabby, sordid little substitute for a real life she would have been to him. He'd have liked to have that too, of course. You'd like to have everything! But you can't.
It was headed straight toward a distant, stubby, draggled tramp-steamer which plodded toward the Bay of Naples. It rose a little as it flew. And then it checked, in mid-air. It hung above the dumpy freighter, and there were salvoes of all the guns in the fleet. But at the flashes it shot skyward. When the shells arrived and burst, it was gone.
On ship he matched sovereigns only. Occasionally the "Majestic" passed in sight of some other ship, or "tramp-steamer," and by signal exchanged names and location. Rarely do the great passenger steamers meet on the Atlantic, as the course outward is quite to the north to avoid collisions.
If it meant tramp-steamers, why it had to be tramp-steamers. Something could be managed for Marise and the children. This was what he had asked. And what answer had he got? Why, of course, he hankered for the double-jointed, lawless freedom that the tramp-steamer stood for. He guessed everybody wanted that, more or less. But he wanted Marise and the children a damn sight more.
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