Page:Beyond Fantasy Fiction Volume 1 Issue 1 (1953-07).djvu/118

 By JEROME BIXBY and JOE E. DEAN


 * Casting bread upon the water is fine

— as long as you're not the bread!

HEY spread-eagled themselves in the lifeboat, bracing hands and feet against the gunwales.

Above them, the pitted and barnacled stern of the S. S. Luciano, two days out of Palermo and now headed for hell, reared up hugely into the overcast of oily black smoke that boiled from ports and superstructure. Craig had time to note that the screws were still slowly turning, and that a woman was screaming from the crazily-tilted afterdeck. Then the smoke intervened—a dark pall that lowered about the lifeboat as the wind shifted, blotting out the sky, the ship.

Fire met water. One roared; the other hissed. Gouts of blazing gasoline flared through the smoke like flame demons dancing on the waves.

Groaning, shuddering, complaining with extreme bitterness, the ship plunged.

Sky and smoke became a 116