CHAPTER XIVDANGER 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.