DANGER AHEAD
A new feeling permeated the ship. She was on her own now, headed for the
great North. Only a few miles separated her from the city of Adron, but
it might as well have been ten thousand leagues, so definitely was the
voyage on.
After so much confusion of last visitors aboard, supplies being stored,
a hundred things underfoot, the crew had to get down to the business of
making affairs ship-shape. Some donned overalls, some stripped to the
waist. Men moved swiftly along the catwalk, up and down connecting
ladders.
Up in the keel corridors of the hull men were happily busy. Down in the
navigating section men were happily busy. In the heat of the engine
gondolas, slung four to each side of the hull, half-naked fellows, with
sweat dripping down their bodies, tuned the six hundred horsepower
gasoline motors for power, and more power. Ninety, ninety-five, a
hundred miles an hour--speed was coming up! They were on the way,
hurrah!
This huge floating bubble of gas prisoned in fabric was to be men's home
for many months. So the expedition settled down to making itself feel at
home.
Bob Tucker, the expedition's photographer, and three assistants, set to
work checking up on the complicated mechanism of the aerial cameras and
the million feet of film that was to be aimed at the Arctic topography.
Theirs would be the task of getting a picture record of the lay of the
land in the mineral section, so as to help the geologists in their
scientific deductions.
Up in the keel storage room, Arctic scouts went through the assortment
of skis and snowshoes, preparatory to the foot-excursions in the land of
snow. Slim up-curved sticks of the skis, broad, thong-latticed spread of
the snowshoes--methods of snow-locomotion that have come down from man's
dim, primitive past! These seemed incongruous aboard this modern sky
ship. But Captain Jan Bartlot was combining the best of many ages in
this exploration.
A little, short-haired dog walked sedately out from the crew's quarters,
navigated a ladder-like stair adroitly, and then curled up beside one of
the big observation windows. This was Yiggy, Olaf Valchen's pet. Yiggy
was an old-timer in the ways of the Arctic, having made many trips
across the snow barrens with Valchen in his mining supply transport, a
big-winged aeroplane. Out of some bits of fur, Olaf was already making
Yiggy a new set of boots for polar walking--since Yiggy, being a
temperate zone dog, had not been born with foot-pad protection like the
shaggy canines of the land of snow and ice.
Here, there and everywhere over his craft went Captain Bartlot, seeing
that all things were in proper shape. Before this start for the Arctic
could be made, weary months of closest application to detail had already
been spent by Bartlot. Equipping an expedition was a huge business.
There was the ship itself that had had to be refitted from stem to stern
in preparation for bucking Arctic storm and the terrors of the "great
cold." There had been waterproof cloth and fur and machinery and radios
and tons of food to be bought. Where they were going, there was no
grocery up the block to run to. There was no mechanician's shop around
the corner, either. So to make a ship of the air safe for getting them
there and bringing them back, and safe for landing on frozen polar
fields, one had to go prepared with hundreds of extra machine parts. One
little missing screw could mean a calamity.
A captain must think of dessicated vegetables and canned sunshine for
his crew's health. And just suppose they had forgotten to pack the snow
moss! They hadn't. It was there in its container, along with reindeer
skin boots and the down-lined gloves.
On even so slight a thing as a bundle of snow moss does the success of
an Arctic trip hang. For without this specially prepared moss to line
boots and absorb dampness, the feet of men tramping the blizzard-swept
snow barrens would freeze.
Just such details as these, and a thousand others, great and small, had
to be attended to by Captain Jan and the men who worked with him.
A trip into the frozen north was no holiday of leisure; it meant hard
work for all concerned.
The busiest place aboard the Nardak was the radio-room, with its every
space--walls, ceiling, desk--crowded with modern equipment. Here was the
powerful short-wave sending and receiving set, an intermediate wave set
for communication with near-by cities and other ships of both air and
sea, and a radio direction finder. Within this room, a group of mining
scouts was carefully taking apart and putting back together one of the
Renaud portables, under the watchful eye of Lee. These men must know
their radio mechanism. For when the great dirigible dropped these men
for scouting in various parts of the Arctic waste, radio would be their
only means of communication with the rest of the party.
The staccato tap-tapping of radio telegraph seemed never to drop silent.
Either Simms or Renaud was always at the desk instrument. As the string
of Morse came in, they deciphered the code into plain English, and
passed on the slips of paper to Tornado Harrison, weather-getter of the
expedition. From Harrison's atmospheric deductions, the route of the
ship was plotted. There was constant communication between radio-room,
chartroom and navigating section.
This Morse code that tapped in so steadily was bringing reports from the
United States Weather Bureau at Washington. These reports were the chief
aids in navigating the great dirigible.
The ocean of air is just as real as any ocean of water; it has its
currents and tides and its air-falls, similar to waterfalls, where air
pours from a higher to a lower level. It is the lay of the land below
that causes the differences in the vast ocean of atmosphere. Mountains,
forests, valleys, all produce their own peculiar currents and cross
currents in the aerial expanse above. Over hills, the air currents are
deflected upwards. Over great flat tablelands, the air flows downward
over the edges in vast Niagaras of air.
Weatherman Harrison had his air map, America of the Air, all wavy lines
and curves and whorls.
From observation posts, on land and sea, all over the world, weather
news is continually radioed to the United States Weather Bureau. From
this mass of information, the Bureau continually computes and makes
deductions and predicts impending weather conditions--which it radios
back out into the ether for the safety of ships of both sea and air.
Thus a far-flung outpost wirelesses: "Storm sweeping southwest from
Labrador at hundred and fifty miles an hour."
Knowing its intensity, its area, and its initial speed, weather chiefs
can tell that the storm will reach Toronto in so many hours, and the
Mississippi Valley in so many more hours. Storm warnings tap through the
air, radio speeds the word in all directions. In consequence, a mail
plane for the West dips south in its itinerary to avoid nasty weather;
shipping on the Great Lakes goes into dock or heads for the safety of
open water; a mammoth dirigible changes its course to circle around a
hail-and-wind-tortured sector of the ocean of air.
Between his hours of standing watch at the radio, Lee turned with
delighted eyes to the mosaic of rivers, cities, forests and farms spread
beneath the ship. Radiograms, together with the great wall map, helped
him identify the cities and the scenic wonders over which they passed.
They swept above Toledo and the smokestacks of Detroit. In splendid
spectacle, the Great Lakes rippled their waters beneath them in the
gleaming sun.
"Well, well, Lee," Captain Jan came down from the hull-storage section
into the navigation car, bringing out for display one of the fur-lined
sleeping bags and a snow knife, "how's traveling? What do you think of
your first ride in a dirigible?"
"Fine!" said Lee. "Only I might as well be sitting out on the front
porch back in King's Cove, so far as any motion can be felt. I can't
tell I'm moving until I happen to look down and glimpse cities and lakes
swishing by at considerably over a mile a minute."
"Um--yes, this thing rides a pretty even keel. Not much dipping and
diving so far. And now take a look at these." Captain Jan spread out his
armful. "No matter whether it may seem cumbersome or not, a sleeping bag
and one of these snow knives for cutting a wind-break out of a drift, is
what every man must carry if he goes off from the ship any way at all
after we land in the ice country. It's a safety rule that I'm laying
down."
"Er--yes, sir." Lee's answer was entirely absent-minded, his whole
attention bent towards the radio instrument, as he leaned forward,
listening to every click.
"Danger ahead--danger!" White to the lips, Renaud swiftly decoded the
wild tap-tapping of wireless into understandable English. "Vast area of
storms and tornado-twisters sweeping down upon us, moving at immense
speed!"
"Orders for engine-rooms, quick! Switch to the gondola telegraphs,"
roared Captain Bartlot. "Tap in orders, boy! Minutes may mean lives!
Reverse flight! Turn the ship!"
Before a terror-twister of the skies, man can only flee down the wind.