CHAPTER XV

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."