Hellbound Machinery

Years ago I had a dream wherein I was driving a Volkswagen Bug toward Phoenix. It was night, and I became aware that the VW engine was overheating when I could see its orange glow on the guard rails and signs alongside the highway. For a while the dream revolved around how to shut off this obviously demon-possessed engine - no engine, VW or otherwise, can possibly glow white-hot and still run. And I couldn't shut it off by any conventional means, or even unconventional means (I remember pouring handfuls of pinto beans, of all things, into the tops of the carburetors).

But it didn't matter because right around then, Phoenix was nuked by principalities unknown and suddenly the overheating demon-possessed engine paled to nothing compared to the mushroom cloud boiling up over the hills to the south.

Now, brace yourself for the wrenching segue. I have been, for the last week or so, doing a bit of reading about pre-dreadnought battleships and the wars they were involved in, chiefly the Russo-Japanese War and the Spanish-American War (of You may put the steaks on the fire at any time, Gridley fame). Say, 1890 to roughly 1910, though clunky old pre-dreadnoughts remained in some inventories well into the 1940s.

The more I learn about these ships, the more I am utterly convinced that they were designed in Hell and manufactured in Hell's suburbs. There's the smoke factor, for one thing. They don't just put out a little smoke. They don't puff a bit like the Hogwarts Express. These things puke out thick opaque churning gouts of smoke that boil and churn and seem almost to be alive and malevolent. And that's just to get up to speeds of nine or ten knots! And the innards! What must that be like, four triple-expansion steam engines clattering and thumping away, tierods flying, connecting rods whooshing, governors and links and valves clattering, things spinning, steam jetting out of leaks, the whole place half-lost in a fog of steam and smoke and coal dust. And somewhere in that desolation toil men half-broken by toil and half-killed by coal dust inhalation...

I once saw a picture of a Russian pre-dreadnought battleship. It's at sea and it's making headway because it's turned up a bit of a bow wave, but not much of one. And from the funnels pour these hellish plumes of smoke, the kind of smoke that seems to blot out every finer human impulse, including probably the impulse to cook and eat bacon. "Sorry, no bacon for me, I've got pre-dreadnought battleship smoke in my soul and nothing pleases me." Anyway, barely visible in the open bridge ahead of these demonic smokestacks stands a single man in a white uniform, clutching the railing as though in terror of where this Mephistopholean nightmare is taking him. Certainly not to port, unless there are ports on the River Styx.

They're appalling. Maybe the most appalling things I've ever seen.

And somewhere therein, I'm quite sure, a novel resides.