TWO ROADS TO FAME
Next thing Hal knew, he felt land grating against him. A strong hand had
him by the collar dragging him out of the water, many voices beat into
his ears.
"Oh-h-h, by Jehoshaphat Jumping!" yelled Fuz McGinnis as he threw his
arms about Hal's dripping form. "We'd given up hope, never believed we'd
find you all in one piece!"
"It's a miracle." Colonel Wiljohn slid an arm around Hal's waist to help
him over to the waiting automobile. "That dashed faulty plane came down
in shreds, spars gone here, wings drifted yonder. I couldn't tell in
heaven's name where you were going to smash. I shot cars and stretchers
out in every direction. And now I find you floating on our lake, calm as
somebody on a bed of roses--"
"T-too bad I disappointed everybody by coming down all in one
p-p-piece!" chattered the dripping Hal.
"Hush, boy! No joking! Never have I suffered such agony. I'm a thousand
years older." Colonel Wiljohn yanked off his coat and wrapped it around
Hal. "Never, my young friend, never shall I let you or any of my
aviators test out such a machine as this again."
But Hal Dane did take up this same type of ship again. He did it at his
own risk, and at his urgent insistence. From his perilous performance in
mid-air he thought that he knew what were the faults of construction
that had caused the ship to shatter under strain. Previous work in his
department, the risk department, had taught him to learn something of
real value to flying from every accident. In this case, he asked for the
chance to prove what he had learned. So weeks later, he took up the very
same type of ship, greatly strengthened, and put her through the same
test. This time he and the ship went up and came down together, none the
worse for wear, and he could write O. K. on her examination sheet.
Testing other people's inventions did not fill all of Hal's time. At
nights, or whenever he could snatch a few hours to himself, he was
forever pottering with pieces of fabric and metal and wood. Table top,
dresser top, every available surface in his sleeping quarters seemed
cluttered with aviation trash. Only not all of it was trash. Mixed in
with wood shavings and screws and wire coils was a strange metal helmet,
something like a diver's helmet, yet different,--light, graceful, not
cumbersome in shape. A tube could be attached to the mouth-piece.
Elsewhere in the litter sat a miniature oxygen tank. In these was
expressed a forward thought for achievement in high flying. Little
models of engines rubbed noses with wing models in various stages of
incompleteness. Above a chifferobe was poised something that Hal Dane's
eyes sought every time he entered his room--a completed model of a
plane. It was a slim silver creation, all metal, and streamlined from
engine, through monoplane wing, back to tail. Slender, yet with strength
in every line! Smoke blown against this model did not eddy and swirl but
slipped straight across her nonresistant lines. With her length of wing,
she was built to ride the winds.
For a wonder, Hal Dane was not studying the beloved lines of his tiny,
silvered wind bird tonight. Instead, his fingers were fiddling with a
little flying toy manipulated by a couple of twisted rubber bands to
furnish motive power. If he twisted the rubber tight enough, the little
windmill fans of the toy shot it up to the ceiling. In the midst of one
of these flights, there came a sharp knock on the door, and while Hal
leaped to open it, the little wind toy drifted down from the ceiling
about as straight as it had gone up.
In the open doorway stood Colonel Wiljohn, his fingers gripping a folded
paper, his eyes shining with an eager light as he watched the wind toy
whirl down.
"You've got it--made a start on it anyway!" the Colonel slapped the
paper across his palm excitedly.
"Sir--I've got it--what?" Hal stammered in amazement.
"This thing," Colonel Wiljohn stooped to rescue the little wind toy from
where it had fluttered to the floor. "It seems like Fate that you should
be experimenting with such an idea just when I come to bring you a
certain piece of news."
The Colonel cleared a space on the cluttered table, and spread open the
paper he had brought. Its black headlines announced:
"The great Onheim prize offer--twenty-five thousand dollars for the best
safety device for airships."
"See," Colonel Wiljohn's finger emphasized the points, "twenty-five
thousand dollars--safety device. And already, without knowledge of the
money behind it, you were working on a safety device--helicopter
principle, is it not?"
"Not exactly helicopter--more of a gyroscope," Hal caught something of
the Colonel's fire. "It's been on my mind a long time that one of the
greatest dangers of aviation is the huge space 'most any ship needs to
come to earth on. I've looked death mighty straight in the eye some
several times when forced landings smacked me down in a tree top or on a
gully edge--when if I could have come down zup! straight like the drop
of a plummet, I could have landed with a safety margin in some small
clear spot--"
"A small space to rise from is sometimes as great a danger for a plane
as a forced landing, too," interrupted the Colonel. "Say you're forced
down on a mountain ledge, or a tiny island--the average plane is done
for then. Has to be deserted to its fate for the lack of a long, smooth
runway needed for the forward glide before the rise. Were you figuring
on the straight-up rise, as well as the straight-down drop, with this
heli--, I mean gyroscope business?"
"In a way," Hal answered as he began to fit together certain scattered
bits of miniature machinery, picking up the pieces out of the mixture on
the table. Under his hands grew a little short-wing airplane with a
motor and a propeller on the nose. Above it were set fans like a
windmill, only they lay horizontally a-top the wings.
"It's the position of balance that I've been working for," went on Hal,
setting the little plane on his open palm and spinning the miniature
gyroscope with a motion of his other hand.
So far as a stationary plane was concerned, the principle of the
gyroscope seemed to work out well. For no matter how Hal tilted his palm
to throw the plane off its balance, the whirl of the wings above it was
able to apply power to the controls to steady it back into upright
position.
Colonel Wiljohn took the model into his own hands, studied it eagerly,
turning it about to examine minutely its tiny mechanism. "This row of
slot-like holes--in the air tube here," the Colonel held the thing
closer to the light, "what's the idea in that?"
"You'll laugh when you know what put that idea in my head." Hal grinned
a little sheepishly as he thought about it. "I got it from watching
something that never was in any way intended to fly, something that no
one ever thought of in connection with flying at all--a player piano!"
"A player piano--huh!" The Colonel turned about so sharply that he
nearly spilled the plane model out of his grasp. "How in the deuce did
you ever extract an idea on aviation out of one of those contraptions?"
"The thing just came to me all of a sudden one day when I was watching
one of those mechanical pianos pounding out that ghostly sort of music
where the piano keys press up and down, and the music blares out, but no
human hand touches the keys. Through the glass front, I was watching the
paper roll in the piano, how it passed in front of a place where air was
applied. The air was blown through the little holes in the paper, thus
striking the keys and playing the piano. Right then the idea got me that
when the airplane gets off the horizontal or longitudinal axis, a stream
of air blowing through small holes in a gyroscopic instrument could
strike the controls with the strength of a powerful hand, thus bringing
the plane back to its normal position--"
"Right O, that's just what it does, too!" The Colonel thoughtfully spun
the wind wheels of the toy and watched how the thing righted itself, no
matter how he tilted it. "You've got the biggest thing of the age here,
boy, if it just works out right in real flying mechanisms! Bring your
plans out to the laboratories this week and let's work the thing out in
a real powered model."
For weeks to come, Hal Dane was up to the ears in work on his gyroscope.
And Colonel Wiljohn hung over him like a hen with one chick, as eager as
any boy over the outcome of this revolutionary scheme of applying
player-piano principles to airships.
At last a model was done, an all-metal miniature, perfect as any real
service-flight plane, even to the engine on its nose. But in many phases
it ignored the known rules for making the regulation type plane. It had
small, fixed wing surfaces, without even an attempt at ailerons. The
rear spread into an unknown fantasy of a biplaned tail. On a metal
framework above the body of the plane were affixed four limber metal
rotor blades that hung with a flimsy droop when the plane was still.
Colonel Wiljohn's countenance drooped somewhat when he saw the finished
product. This model, so much larger than the tiny creation he had
balanced on his palm that night in Hal's room, had an awkward, fearfully
flimsy look. Was this the thing he had pinned such faith to a few weeks
ago?
Then the motor of the big toy was warmed up. Flimsy blades, that a
moment ago had hung limp, now stiffened with the whirl of rotor force to
a firmness that would withstand a hundred horse power. Centrifugal force
did it! When the whir of its blades gathered power, the thing rose--not
with a glide, or a slanting run to take the air, not at all--it rose
straight up.
"Beautiful, beautiful!" shouted Colonel Wiljohn, his face tensing with
excitement. "I did not believe she could do it!"
Now the little plane was coming down. A mechanism cut the motor dead.
The thing stopped in its "tracks," so to speak, began to drift down in a
perfect vertical, the gentle whir of the rotor blades holding the body
balanced to every air-bump or current of wind that tended to shift the
axis.
"You've got it all there, boy--goes straight up, comes straight down,
it's a wonder--" Colonel Wiljohn's excited voice croaked to a dismayed
gasp.
She was coming down--but in pieces. So great was the power of the
gyroscopic whirl that the wings of the plane beneath them broke asunder
under the force of the air streams hurled down. The whole little model
crashed downward in a wrecked mass.
Week after week, Hal Dane pursued his patient experimenting. He tried
two rotors, one above the other and traveling in opposite directions,
with the idea of equalizing balance to the nth degree. It did not work;
it only complicated matters more. He made shorter, the already short,
fixed under-wings, and tipped up their ends. Still the strain was
unrelieved, still the mechanism tore to pieces under that whirling
force. At last Hal got at the root of the matter--it was too much power
hurled down by the gyroscope. By degrees, he learned to decrease the
size of the air slots in the gyroscopic instruments, learned to shoot
the air stream in a more gradual manner until he achieved just the
amount to power the controls, and yet not break them.
When Colonel Wiljohn watched Hal's final model make its beautiful
straight ascent, and settle down with an equally beautiful vertical
descent, this veteran of aviation manufacturing stood long, gazing out
with dreamy eyes. Finally he turned. "Hal Dane," he said, "I've been
seeing a dream picture in the sky; it's the dream city all our artists
have been painting ever since the Wrights flew their first plane off
Kill Devil Hill. In this pictured city-to-be, airplane terminals are
built right upon the roofs of high down-town buildings; every little
home has its private landing field upon its own rooftop; big planes,
little planes swoop straight up without ever a wasted acre of runway.
Until this minute, we have never been an inch nearer that marvelous goal
than we were twenty-seven years ago. Suddenly you open up a new world in
aviation. Come over to the office and let's talk business."
Behind his familiar desk with its papers strewn comfortably to hand,
Colonel Wiljohn took up the conversation again.
"This gyroscope idea is all your own, you have worked it out well in
model. To put it into a practical, working-sized plane will take money.
In fact you will need a great deal of money--which you haven't got. To a
degree, I am a man of wealth. But at present, my factories need a
stirring advertising campaign, something to turn the eyes of the world
towards us. The Bojer Works, and others that turn out planes inferior to
ours, are by their daring advertisements deflecting part of our natural
business to themselves." The Colonel's hands crumpled some papers in a
tense grasp. He paused a moment, as though to get a grip on himself,
then went on. "For our plant to build the plane that wins the great
Onheim Prize--ah, that would be unexcelled advertising for us! We will
put up the money and the factory experience to build your model into its
completed practical form. You will fly it and win the prize. Your model
must win--it's the biggest idea born in the last twenty years! The
Onheim twenty-five thousand dollars will be yours! The right to build
planes after your model will be ours, but with a per cent of the profits
coming to you. Do you agree?"
"I--yes--no--" Hal Dane was struggling with eagerness and hesitation.
"You are more than generous in your offer. Build the gyroscope plane and
I will fly it for you in the Onheim Contest--fly it to win for you. But
the Onheim Prize is not what I want--I, oh,--this is what I want--" Hal
pulled from his inner pocket a ragged clipping. The newspaper date that
headed it was three years old. "This is what I want to win, the Vallant
Prize for the first non-stop flight across the Pacific--"
"That," Colonel Wiljohn rose to his feet, his face hardening, "that
offer ought to be forced into a recall by the government of this
country. It is a feat, not only impractical, but impossible of
accomplishment. Already the Vallant twenty-five thousand has lured a
number of our best flyers to their deaths. There was young Orr, and Jim
Hancock, and--"
"It was lack of preparation that killed those flyers." Hal was on his
feet, too, defending his most cherished plan, his dream of a great
Western flight. "They tried to do it in a mere average land plane,
over-weighted with nonessentials, not enough space for extra fuel and
the like. They hadn't planned and dreamed an ocean-flight plane for
years and years. Wait, just a moment--" and Hal Dane slipped out of the
office.
When he came back, breathless from running, he bore in his hands the
little model of the long-winged silver ship that had hung in his room
where he could lay eyes on it the minute he opened his door.
"This is something like what I'd need." He laid the model in Colonel
Wiljohn's hands. "Body cut down to its slenderest, a greater stretch of
wing for speed, but part of the wing interior could be used for storage
purposes to carry emergency rations, a still to condense water, extra
fuel. I've got a lighter engine in mind too, and higher-powered fuel
than any of the rest used."
For the better part of the night, Hal Dane and Colonel Wiljohn clashed
verbal swords over the boy's proposed ocean flight.
No matter how well prepared for, it was a wild undertaking. The Colonel
pleaded for this young flyer whom he had come to love as his own kin to
stay on in America, to put his talents to work for aviation safety, not
for aviation madness of ocean flights.
But the call of the winds was in Hal Dane's blood. Even as his ancestors
in frail boats rode the currents of the sea to seek a far continent, so
was the Norse blood in his veins urging him on to ride the rivers of the
wind on some far exploration.
In the end, Colonel Wiljohn gave down before Hal Dane's adamant
decision.
"Boy," he said, "you win! Fly the safety model for me at the Onheim
Contest, and I'll build you the finest plane ever sent out on an ocean
flight--but I fear that ocean flight like death."