CHAPTER XIITHE NARDAK
As Lee Renaud, burdened with two heavy leather cases, stepped off the train in Adron, Ohio, and made his way toward the station exit, a big bronzed man rushed forward to meet him.
“Good for you, Lee!” and Captain Bartlot reached a hand for one of the cases. “You did what I was counting on—came in time to superintend the copying of that portable of yours for the field radio use. Say, want to go to the hotel first or straight out to the Nardak’s hangar?”
“On to the Nardak!” said Lee. “I couldn’t rest till I saw it, anyway.”
Radio certainly was getting Renaud “somewhere.” Like a magic jinnee of old, it had picked him up by the scruff of the neck, swished him out of a dreamy Gulf Coast village, and landed him in this hustling midwestern city that was famed for its rubber factories and its airship hangar. If radio, to be exact, hadn’t bodily brought him here to Adron, at least it had been the motive power that had gained for him this trip.
“Renaud of the Radio, do you want to go to the Arctic?”
That had been the beginning of it all. A puzzling communication, that, to drop in on a fellow out of mid-air. Later had come another message in explanation. Both were from his friend, Captain Jan Bartlot. He was planning a “mush” into the Arctic by airship, to prospect for gold and other valuables. He had sold his jewel collection for a vast sum, and now the call of adventure was taking him back into a life of exploration. Captain Jan was the type of man whom danger lures as a honey-pot lures bees. A great new gold rush was stirring the Western Hemisphere—a flying rush into Canada’s frozen Arctic on the hunt for that precious metal. A fur-clad adventurer’s discovery of gold-bearing rock in the northern wilds of the Mackenzie Delta had sent men trekking into that frozen land by canoe, by foot, by dog-sled. On his other explorations, Jan Bartlot had followed land trails and sea trails. But now he proposed to follow the air trail up into the Arctic, to take a huge dirigible into that land of storms and snows. It was an expedition fraught with danger, yet one of marvellous practicability——if handled right. Instead of pushing north for many months on a long trek by canoe and sled, prospectors, geologists, mining engineers, mining-syndicate scouts, all the personnel of a vast mining operation could be transported into the north in record time.
For this mammoth gold hunt, the modern surveyor’s implement was to be the camera, and the connecting link between the various scout parties was to be the “voice of radio.”
On a dangerous journey like this, radio operators had to have something besides a nimble brain and mechanical ability; they must needs possess courage, stamina. It was remembrance of the way one Lee Renaud had stood by an injured man aboard a sinking, derelict roof in the Sargon flood that had caused Bartlot to offer the young fellow a chance to go on this wild, wonderful expedition.
In his long explanatory message sent to Renaud at King’s Cove, Bartlot had stated that he wanted to try out the boy’s portable radio model as a connecting link between various mining explorations in the field of operation—was offering five thousand dollars for the right to copy this model and test it, provided Renaud went on the trip. A dangerous test he was offering the young inventor, but if it succeeded—well, it meant world advertising, and the Renaud Portable going over the top, big.
Would Renaud go?
The answer was Lee Renaud himself. After making the necessary arrangements for the care of his Great-uncle Gem, Lee had caught the first train north.
As they taxied across Adron, the busy rush of trucks and cars, the clang and clatter of this factory metropolis, and the loom of skyscrapers furnished a thrill for the visitor—but it was as nothing to the thrill of his first sight of a dirigible.
Captain Bartlot had wirelessed Renaud that an airship, the dirigible Nardak, was to be their mode of travel. But Renaud had not dreamed how immense this ship would be. Even before he saw the monster of the air, the unique building that housed it loomed before his eyes like some magic growth.
There it stood—a master structure in dun-colored steel, semi-paraboloid in shape, like a mastodonic egg cut in half lengthwise. A one-story structure eleven hundred feet long, and tall enough to take a twenty-two story skyscraper under its roof, with room to spare!
While their taxi was still some miles from the airport, its enormous bulk dominated its surroundings.
Men in impressive uniforms patrolling outside the building seemed like minute toys in comparison. Small wonder, when the doors behind them weighed six hundred tons each and stood two hundred feet high.
As the two got out of the taxi and came up the paved way, Bartlot motioned to a couple of officials. “Commander Millard, Chief Engineer Goode,” he called out, “here’s another of our staff, second in command at the radio—my friend Renaud.”
“Glad to meet you! Ah—a word with you, Captain?” and Millard, briefly acknowledging the introduction, went aside with Bartlot.
A heated argument ensued. Voices, lowered at first, rose now and then. “A mistake—too young, country bumpkin—risk to expedition.”
Lee had the uncomfortable feeling that he was the subject of discussion.
Then Captain Bartlot came striding back, his jaw set, his bronzed face tinged an angry red.
At his command, a couple of stationary engines, housed on either side of the building, were set to generating. Under their power the huge curved doors began to roll back, each door moving on twenty steel wheels on a curved track that carried it back along the side of the building. As he stepped forward and took a view down that vast vault, Lee Renaud felt reduced to smallness—of a truth! As he looked upward, there was a sense of surrounding immensity that left him weak in the legs. Two hundred feet up, under the ridge of the roof, toy workmen labored on a duralumin framework that had been lifted up by cranes. Not a sound came from them, they were too far away.
Lee Renaud caught his breath. Within this mountain of steel and glass, six football games, a chariot race and a circus could be staged simultaneously.
“The largest building in the world without internal supports or columns of any kind,” said Jan Bartlot, “and er-r, the only building in the world that has its own peculiar brand of weather. Ah—ca-chu-ah!” the Captain ended in a wild sneeze as a heavy shower rained down upon them.
Lee looked about in puzzlement. The sun was shining brightly outside.
“Condensation,” explained Bartlot. “All sorts of temperatures meet in here, form a fog, and occasionally roll down in rain.”
“But the Nardak? I thought it was housed in here?” Lee cast his gaze over the vast emptiness.
“She’s coming in now. Don’t you hear the buzzer?”
“Bz-z-z!” A radio within the building had picked up the signal from the approaching ship. Men rushed forward from all sides and took their stands at stated intervals along the length of the building.
From the magazine illustrations he had seen of dirigibles, Lee Renaud pictured to himself how the Nardak would come—an elongated balloon drifting through the air, casting off thousand-foot lengths of rope for men to seize and drag her down to earth.
But the huge Nardak swept into her dock in a very different manner.