IN THE GONDOLA
"Be a good sport, Scotty! Crank her up and give me a call in about three
minutes. That's all the time I'll need to get up to the
navigation-room." Lee Renaud, Ye Tireless Radio Hound, as his shipmates
had laughingly dubbed him, pushed a batch of wireless outfit into the
grasp of Scotty McGraw, assistant port-engine tender, with a plea for a
little help in testing a new radio device.
Lee began backing out of the narrow confines of the engine gondola, but
he never gained even the flimsy, swaying catwalk leading up into the
hull. For, with a roar of fury, a sudden Arctic gale struck the ship. It
seemed to leap up out of the nowhere to whirl and pound the huge
envelope at every point. Like so much meal in a sack, Renaud was flung
crashing back into the gondola.
From other parts of the dirigible came rendings and crashings. It was as
though the great ship were caught in a giant's hand and flung hither and
yon. The Arctic had lain bland and tractable for a space, while man in
his floating gas bubble had slipped into the frozen domain to rifle it
of its stone-sheathed treasures. In suddenly awakened fury, the Arctic
loosed its weapons of sub-zero, knife-edged gale, hail, sleet, and
hurricane swirl that sucked and battered and tore.
On through the storm-darkened air, the dirigible plunged, swoop and
check, swoop and check, now half capsized, now riding high, now riding
low. Mountains fell away into blackness; the white land was left behind.
They were over the frozen sea. All control of the ship was gone, all
sense of direction lost. It might be a hundred miles, a thousand miles
off its course.
Like a toy of the winds, the huge silver bubble was tossed high on the
mad currents of the ocean of air. In some upper stratum, a rushing,
swirling river of the winds caught the dirigible in its grasp and swept
the lost ship back into the north faster than any of its human load had
ever traveled before.
A hundred, two hundred, three hundred miles an hour--then the speed
indicators broke!
Every part of the ship seemed out of touch with every other part. So far
as any human connection was concerned, the engine gondolas, the hull,
the fore-car might have been so many separate planets hurtling through
space.
Lee Renaud, battered and banged almost to pulp, thought all feeling was
gone from him forever. Yet in one awful flash, he sensed what was
befalling them now. As though the river of air had reached the edge of
some unseen, mighty precipice, and flowed over in a deadly, rushing
torrent, the ship was sucked down and down over the invisible Niagara.
Through a stratum of sleet it tore and gathered an ice sheathing of
dangerous weight.
From an engine nacelle came a jerk of machinery striving to lift the
great bag. Out of the hull rained tanks and stores, as frantic hands
cast off ballast to try to save the ship. But it was impossible to halt
the down plunge of the huge ship. In another moment, the Nardak scraped
the ice of the polar sea, its port side grinding against the ice.
As the port gondola crashed, Renaud had a fleeting sense of being
violently projected into space, then smashing heavily into the snow.
Black mist swept through his brain, cleared. He lay, a mass of aches.
Then his eyelids flicked open. He tried to scream as he gazed upward.
The dirigible, freed of the weight of one engine cabin, had shot high in
the air again!
In that moment, Renaud saw Harrison, the meteorologist, and Captain
Bartlot standing at an observation opening and looking down in distress.
Their eyes, wide with apprehension, seemed fixed on him until the huge
balloon disappeared in the mist. From somewhere on high, a piece or two
more of ballast crashed down and fell far out on the ice. A little later
a thin streak of smoke showed up against the northern sky. Had the
dirigible caught fire, or was this merely a smoke signal?
More terrible than the bitter cold creeping into Renaud's body was the
desolation creeping into his heart.