“She’s got it all,” responded Alan, his eyes on the compass binnacle and his hands gripping the rudder wheel.
“Very good,” answered Ned as if in deep thought, “hold her to it.”
CHAPTER XVII
WHAT HAPPENED AT THREE FORTY-THREE P. M.
The pilot room of the Flyer contained no loose furniture. The only chair was that at the observer’s desk. When Buck appeared with a camp chair for Ned—one of those stored below for use in the state rooms on the return trip—Captain Napier laughed.
“I meant something that I can use at the wheel,” he explained. “I’ll be takin’ my trick at the wheel at six o’clock. See if you can’t fix me up a stool.”
Buck hurried away and Ned limped out into the gallery again. The responsibilities of commandership had at last begun to worry him. The Flyer was not making the speed he had planned. Something had gone wrong. And if the trial trips and calculations had not deceived him, it was something to be remedied at once or the great experiment was a failure before it was made. In its trials the monster airship had attained a speed of three miles a minute. Crawling to the door of the first stateroom Ned entered and seated himself on the cot. In his note book he turned to the pages of figures he had made, erased, added to and revised for a week.
From New York to Ipswich was 205 miles. From Ipswich to Fogo Island it was 787 more. Nothing was plainer than the total of the sailing courses from Fogo Island to Galway in Ireland, 1709.1 miles. Adding that and the three hundred and forty-nine miles between the Arran Island lights in Galway Bay and London there was a voyage of 3050.1 miles to be covered. Checking these figures again Ned shook his head.
“We’ll even have to beat three miles a minute by a fraction,” he said to himself, beginning a new calculation, “and we’re doing only two and one-half a minute. At that rate it’ll take us twenty-one hours and thirty minutes to sight Hyde Park. Add to that, five hours for corrected time goin’ east and we’ll eat up over twenty-seven hours. Let’s see,” he added, making an addition. “That means we’d land fifty-one minutes and a fraction after four o’clock to-morrow afternoon—practically five o’clock. A fine time for our paper to be issued. And that isn’t the worst. If we started back in an hour it’d take us as long to reach New York. Even subtracting the five hours in time we gain, we’d reach New York sixteen hours and thirty minutes later. That means, leavin’ London at six P. M., we’d get to New York at half past ten the next morning. We can’t loaf along at that rate. We’ve got to do one hundred and eighty miles an hour—and better!”
He jammed his book into his pocket and started painfully toward the pilot room. On the gallery he paused a moment to look over the Flyer—hurling itself like a comet toward the distant sea—and at the panorama beneath. So great was the nervous tension of all on board and so insistent were the duties of each that hardly a moment had been given to this picture. Ned saw it all but his mind was not on it. Even as he looked, his alert ears were strained for the rhythmic beating of the propellers and the low note of the vibration of the mammoth planes. But his thoughts were, “Three miles a minute or better; three miles a minute or better.”