Music Welcome to snoozecast. The podcast is designed to help you fall asleep. Find us at snoozecast.com and if you enjoy our show, please share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by the Universal stillness. Tonight we'll read the opening too, with the night mail, an early sci-fi novella set in the year 2000 written by Rudyard Kipling and published in 1905. This story describes an airship postal worker making a routine night run from London to Quebec. In this universe, the aerial board of control or ABC, a fictional, supernatural organization dedicated to the control and aid of airship, also known as dirigible, traffic across the entire planet. In our age of commonplace intercontinental air travel, one needs to bear in mind that Kipling wrote this story at a time when the first successful powered flight, which lasted a total of 12 seconds, took place only two years prior. An airship is a type of lighter than air aircraft that can navigate through the air flying under its own power. They use buoyancy from a lifting gas that is less dense than the surrounding air to achieve the lift needed to stay airborne. In early dirigables the lifting gas used was hydrogen due to its high lifting capacity and ready availability. But the inherent flammability led to hydrogen airships being rendered obsolete. The alternative lifting gas, helium gas, is not flammable, but is rare and relatively expensive. Significant amounts were first discovered in the United States, and for a while, helium was only available for airship usage in North America. Airships were the first aircraft capable of controlled powered flight and were most commonly used before the 1940s. Their use decreased as their capabilities were surpassed by those of airplanes. From the 1960s, helium airships have been used where the ability to hover for a long time outweighs the need for speed

and maneuverability, such as advertising, tourism, camera platforms, geological surveys,

and aerial observation.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. At nine o'clock of Auguste winter night, I stood on the lower stages of one of the GPO outward male towers. My purpose was a run to Quebec, in postal packet 162 or such other as may be appointed, and the postmaster general himself counter-signed the order. This talisman opened all doors, even those in the despatching case at the foot of the tower, where they were delivering the sorted continental mail. bags lay packed close as herrings in the long gray under bodies, which our GPO still calls coaches. Five such coaches were filled as I watched and were shot up the guides to be locked onto their waiting packets 300 feet near the stars. From the desparching case on, I was conducted by a courteous and wonderfully learned official Mr. L. L. Gary, second dispatcher of the western route to the captain's room. wakes and echo of old romance, where the male captains come on for their turn of duty. He introduces me to the captain of 162, captain pernall, and his relief, captain Hodson. The one is small and dark, the other large and red, but each has the brooding sheathed glance,

characteristic of eagles and aeronauts.

You can see it in the pictures of our racing professionals.

That fathomless abstraction of eyes

habitually turned through naked space. On the notice board in the captain's room, the pulsing arrows of some 20 indicators register, degree by geographical degree. The progress of as many homeward bound packets. The word cape rises across the face of a dial. A gong strikes. The South African midweekly mail is in at the high gate receiving towers. That is all. It reminds one comically of the traitorous little bell, which in pigeon fancier's lofts notifies the return of a homer. Time for us to be on the move, says Captain Bernal, and we are shot up by the passenger lift to the top of the despatched towers. Our coach will lock on when it is filled and the clerks are bored. Number 162 waits for us and slip e of the topmost stage. The great curve of our back shines frostily under the lights, and some minute alteration of trim makes her rock a little in her holding down slips. Captain Pernole frowns and dives inside, hissing softly, 162 comes to rest as level as a rule. From her North Atlantic winter nose cap, worn bright as diamond with boring through uncounted leagues of hail, snow, and ice. the inset of her three built out propeller shafts is some 240 feet. Her extreme diameter carried well forward is 37. Contrast this with the 900 by 95 of any crackliner and you will realize the power that must drive a hull through all weather at more than the emergency speed of the cyclonic. The eye detects no joint in her skin plating, save the sweeping hair crack of the bow rudder. Magniacs rudder that assured us the dominion of the unstable air and left its inventor penniless and half blind. It is calculated to Castelli's go-wing curve. Raise a few feet of that all but invisible plate three-eighths of an an inch and she will y'all 5 miles to port or starboard air she is under control again. Give her full helm and she returns on her track like a whiplash. the whole forward. A touch on the wheel will suffice and she sweeps at your good direction up or down. Open the complete circle and she presents to the air a mushroom head that will bring her all standing within a half mile.

Yes, says Captain Hansen, answering my thought. Castelli thought he'd discovered the secret of controlling arrow planes when he'd only found out how to steer dirigible balloons. the act invented his rudder to help war boats ram each other.

And war went out of fashion. And Magniac, he went out of his mind because he said he couldn't serve his country anymore. I wonder if any of us ever know what we're really doing. If you want to see the coach locked, you better go aboard. It's due now," says Mr. Gary. I enter through the door of midships. There is nothing here for display. The inner skin of the gas tanks comes down to within a foot or two of my head and turns over just short of the turn of the bilges. Liners and yachts disguise their tanks with decoration, but the GPO serves them raw under a lick of gray official paint. The inner skin shuts off 50 feet of the bow and as much of the stern. But the bow bulkhead is recessed for the lift-shunting apparatus as the stern is pierced for the shaft tunnels. The engine room lies almost amid ships. Forward of it, extending to the turn of the bow tanks is an aperture, a bottomless hatch at present, into which our coach will be locked. One looks down over the comming's 300 feet to the despatching case on when his voice is boom upward. The light below is obscured to a sound of thunder as our coach rises on its guides. It enlarges rapidly from a postage stamp to a playing card, to a punt, and last, a pontoon. The two clerks, its crew, do not even look up as it comes into place. The Quebec letters fly under their fingers and leap into the docketed racks, while both captains and Mr. Gary satisfy themselves that the coach is locked home. A clerk passes the way bill over the hatch-coming. Captain Pernaul thumb marks and passes it to Mr. Gary. Receipt has been given and taken. Pleasant run says Mr. Gary and disappears through the door which a foot high pneumatic compressor locks after him. Aha! Size the compressor released. Our holding down clips part with a tank. We are clear. Captain Hodgson opens the great underbody porthole through which I watch million lighted London slide eastward as the gale gets hold of us. The first of the low winter clouds cuts off the well-known view and darken's middle sex. On the south edge of it, I can see a postal packet's light plowing through the white fleece. For an instant, she gleams like a star air she drops towards the high-gate receiving towers.

The Bombay Mail says Captain Hodgson and looks at his watch. She's 40 minutes late. What's our level? I ask. Four thousand. Aren't you coming up on the bridge? The bridge? us ever bless the GPO as a repository of ancient tradition. Is represented by a view of Captain Hodgson's legs where he stands on the control platform that runs thwart ships overhead. The bow colloid is unshuttared, and Captain Pernol, one hand on the wheel, is feeling for a fair slant. The dial shows 4,300 feet. It's steep tonight, he mutters, as tier on tier of cloud drops under. We generally pick up an easterly draft below 3,000 at this time of the year. I hate slathering through fluff. So does Van Kutsum. Look at him hunting for a slant. Says Captain Hodgson. A fog light breaks cloud, a hundredathoms below. The ant-twerp nightmare makes her signal and rises between two racing clouds far to port. Her flinks blood red in the glare of sheerness double-light. The gale will have us over the North Sea in half an hour. But Captain Pernol lets her go compositely, nosing to every point of the compass as she rises. 5,000 6 6,800 The dip dial reads air we find the Easterly Draft, heralded by a flurry of snow at the thousand-fathom level. Captain Pernault rings up the engines and keys down the governor on the switch before him. There is no sense in urging machinery when Aeolus himself gives you good knots for nothing. We are away in earnest now. Our nose notched home on our chosen star. At this level, the lower clouds are laid out, all neatly combed by the dry fingers of the east. Below that again is the strong, westerly blow through which we rose. Overhead, a film of southerly drifting mist draws at theatrical gauze across the firmament. The moonlight turns the lower stradded to silver, without a stain except where our shadow underruns us. Bristol and Cardiff double lights, those statily inclined beams over Severnmouth, are dead ahead of us. For we keep the southern winter route, Coventry Central, the pivot of the English system, stabs upward once in ten seconds, its spear of diamond light to the north, and a pointer too, off our starboard bow, the leak, the great cloud breaker of St. David's head, swings its unmistakable green beam 25 degrees each way. There must be half a mile of fluff over it in this weather, but it does not affect the leak. Our planet's overlighted if anything says Captain Pernol at the wheel, as Cardiff Bristol slides under. I remember the old days of common white verticals that had showed two or three thousand feet up in a mist. If you knew where to look for them, in really fluffy weather they might as well have been under your hat. One could get lost coming home then, and have some fun. He points to the pillars of light, where the cloudbreakers bore through the cloud floor. We see nothing of England's outlines. Only a white pavement pierced in all directions by these manholes of variously colored fire. Holy islands white and red. St. B's interrupted white and so on as far as the eye can reach. Blessed be Sargent and the Duwab brothers who invented the cloudbreakers of the world whereby we travel in security. Are you going to lift for the shamrock? Asks Captain Hodson, cork-like, green, fixed, and larges as we rush for it. Captain Pernall nods, there's heavy traffic hereabouts. The cloud-bank beneath us isaked with running fishers of flame, where the Atlantic boats are hurrying, london word, just clear of the fluff. Male packets are supposed, under the conference rules, to have the 5,000 foot lanes to themselves. But the foreigner in a hurry is apt to take liberties with English air. one, two, to a long drawn whale of the breeze in the foreflange of the rudder, and we make Valencia white, green, white, at a safe 7,000 feet, dipping our beam to an incoming Washington back at. There is no cloud on the Atlantic, and faint streaks of cream around Dinkle Bay show where the driven seas hammer the coast. A big S-A-T-A liner is diving, and a lifting half a mile below us in search of some break in the solid west wind. Lower still lies a disabled dain. She is telling the liner all about it in international. Our general communication dial has caught her talk and begins to eavesdrop. Captain Hanshin makes a motion to shut it off, but checks himself. Perhaps you'd like to listen, he says. Our goal of St. Thomas, the Dane Wimperse, report owners three starboard shaft collar bearings fused can make florets as we are, but impossible further. Shall we buy spares at fail? The liner acknowledges and recommends inverting the bearings. The Argole answers that she has already done so without a fact, and begins to relieve her mind about cheap German enamels for collar bearings. The Frenchman assents cordially, cries, courage, monomy, and switches off. Their lights sink under the curve of the ocean. That's one of of lunt and bleemers boats,' says Captain Hodgson. Serves him right for putting German compost in their thrust blocks. She won't be in fail tonight.' By the way, wouldn't you like to look round the engine room? I have been waiting eagerly for this invitation, and I follow Captain Hodgson from the control platform, stooping low to avoid the bulge of the tanks. We know that Flurry's gas can lift anything, as the world famous trials of 89 showed. But it's almost indefinite powers of expansion necessitate vast tank room. Even in this thin air, the lift shunts are busy taking out one-third of its normal lift, and still, 162 must be checked by an occasional down draw of the rudder or our flight would become a climb to the stars. Captain Pernal prefers an overlifted to an underlifted ship, but no two captains trim ship alike. When I take the bridge, says Captain Hodgson, he'll see me shunt 40% off the lift out of the gas and run her on the upper rudder. With a swoop upwards, instead of a swoop downwards, as you say, either way will do. It's only habit. Watch our dip dial. Tim fetches her down once every 30 knots as regularly as breathing. So it is shown on the dip dial for 5 or 6 minutes the arrow creeps from 6700 to 7300. There is the faint ski of the rudder and back slides the arrow to 6500 on a falling slant of 10 or 15 knots. In heavy weather you jockey her with the screws as well, says Captain Hanson. And unclipping the jointed bar which divides the engine room from the bar deck, he leads me to the floor. Here we find Flurry's paradox of the bulkheaded vacuum, which we now accept without thought, literally in full blast. The three engines are HT and T assisted vacuole flurry turbines running from 3,000 to the limit. That is to say, up to the point when the blades make the air bell. Cut out a vacuum for themselves precisely as over-driven marine propellers used to do. 162's limit is low on account of the small size of her nine screws, which though handier than the old, colloid, the Luzin's Bell sooner, the midship's engine generally used as a reinforce is not running. So the port and Starboard turbine vacuum chambers draw direct into the return mains. The turbines whistle reflectively. From the low arched expansion tanks on either side, the valves descend pillar-wise to the turbine chests. And thence, the obedient gas whirls through the spirals of blades with a force that would whip the teeth out of a power saw. Behind is its own pressure held in leash or spurred on by the lift shunts before it. The vacuum where flurries ray dances in violent green bands and whirl to billions of flame. The jointed YouTubes of the vacuum chamber are pressure tempered colloid. No glass would endure the strain for an instant. And a junior engineer with tinted spectacles watches the ray intently. It is the very heart of the machine. A mystery to this day. Even flurry who begadded. Unlike Magniac, died a multi-millionaire could not explain how the restless little imp shuttering in the YouTube can and the fractional fraction of a second strike the furious blast of gas into a chill grayish green liquid that drains. You can hear it trickle from the far end of the vacuum through the adduction pipes and the mains back to the bilgeus Here it returns to its gaseous one had almost written Seagacious state and climbs to work afresh upper tank dorsal tank expansion expansion chamber, vacuum, main return, as a liquid, and a bilge tank once more is the ordained cycle. Flurry's ray sees to that, and the engineer with the tinted spectacle sees to Flurry's ray, if the speck of oil, if even the natural grease of the human finger touch the hooded terminals of the ray, it will wink and disappear and must be laboriously built up again. This means half a day's work for all hands and an expense of 170 odd pounds to the GPO for radium salts and such trifles. Now, look at our thrust collars. You won't find much German compo there, full jeweled UC, says Captain Hodgson, as the engineer shunts open the top of a cap. Our shaft bearings are CMC. Ground with as much care as the lens of a telescope. They cost 37 pounds a piece. So far we have not arrived at their term of life. These bearings came from number 97, which took them over from the old dominion of light, which had them out of the wreck of the Perseus aeroplane in the years when men still flew linen kites over thorium engines. They are a shining reproof to all low-grade German Rubyy and amels, so-called Bort facings, and the dangerous and unsatisfactory compounds which please dividend hunting owners and turn skippers crazy. The rudder gear and the gas lift shunt, seated side by side under the engine room dials are the only machines in visible motion. The former size from time to time as the oil plunger rises and falls half an inch. the latter. Case- and guarded like the YouTube aft, exhibits another ray, but inverted, and more green than violet. Its function is to shunt the lift out of the gas, and this it will do without watching. That is all. a tiny, pump- rod wheezing and whining to itself beside a sputtering green lamp. A hundred and fifty feet afdown the flat top tunnel of the tanks. A violet light. Restless. An air resolute. Between the two three white painted turbine trunks, like eel baskets, laid on their side, accentuate the empty perspectives. You can hear the trickle of the liquefied gas, flowing from the vacuum into the billet tanks, and the soft, glock gook of gas locks closing as Captain Pernell brings 162 down by the head. The hum of the turbines, and the boom of the air on our skin, is no more than a cotton wool wrapping to the universal stillness. And we are running an 18 second mile. I peer from the forend of the engine room over the hatch comings into the coach. The male clerks are sorting the Winnipeg, Calgary, and medicine hat bags. But there is a pack of cards ready on the table. Suddenly, a bell thrills, the engineers run to the turbine valves and stand by. But the spectacle slave of the ray in the YouTube never lifts his head. He must watch where he is. We are heart-breaked and going a stern. There is language from the control platform. Tim's sparking badly about something says the unruffled Captain Hodgson. Let's look. Captain Pernole is not the swath man we laughed half an hour since, but the embodied authority of the GPO. Ahead of us floats an ancient aluminum patched, twin screw tramp of the dingiest, with no more right to the 5,000 foot lane than has a horse cart to a modern town. She carries an obsolete barbed-conning tower, a six foot affair, with railed platform forward. And our warning beam plays on the top of it, as a policeman's lantern flashes on the area sneak.

Like a sneak thief, too, emerges a shock-headed navigator in his shirt sleeves.

Captain Bernal wrenches open the hatch to talk with him man to man.

There are times when science does not satisfy.