Kingdom of Engines

HELIX (242 pp.)--David Loughlin--Harper ($2.50).

David Loughlin is a thoughtful young

(26) Texas-born marine engineer, who

served aboard freighters and troopships

during the war. Helix, his first novel,

has color, imagination and technical savvy,

plus a grandiose, elusive, Moby Dick-like

theme. Author Loughlin boldly chases

his whale (Man v. the Machine) across

the Atlantic in this story of the rusty

Cape Harting, a Maritime Commission-built C-1 freighter bound for West Africa in 1942.

The Cape Harting, with crated P-40s on her deck and a bellyfull of barreled aviation fuel, snaked through the Sandy Hook minefields one May morning. Rusty or not, she was good for 15 knots in a pinch, and sailed without convoy. Her chief engineer, an oldtime wrench-pusher named Seligman, knew just enough about high-pressure steam turbines to keep his nose out of the engine room. The men who ran the show down there were his assistants--notably Ed Greenewater, the first assistant, a sloppy, red-faced kid with an intuitive, possessive feel for engines, and Paul Jessup, the second, only half as adept mechanically but twice as inquisitive.

Jessup was the engine-room philosopher. He liked to puzzle out the "meaning" as well as the mechanics of the Cape Harting's boilers, pumps, ejectors, condensers, "the maze of teeth [on] the great twelve-foot bull gear . . . hobbed in spirals, or helices, across the gear wheel's rim." What, he wondered, was the net effect on man of such machines? Would the jittery 20th Century eventually learn to relax in a "kingdom of engines?" Ed Greenewater laughed and said, "Goddamn it, don't take it so hard, Second." The Chief grunted and went on reading Pip Magazine.

In due time the Cape Harting made her first port; Jessup went ashore to learn how Scotch whiskey tasted when served by a shuffling Fanti girl in a hot, dingy Gold Coast bar. Just when Jessup thought that he had licked the Machine, it literally blew up in his face. Novelist Loughlin's whale is still at large when his story ends, but readers will find stretches of remarkably brisk writing as well as murky theorizing, and large chunks of knowing merchant-marine chatter and engine-room lore.

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