On he came, diving, stalling, slipping—flattening out at last in a long lightning quick swoop above the waves.
With nerves in a forced steadiness and hands like steel gripped to their task, Hal had checked the meteoric fall and had regained some measure of control over his craft. Now when he dared relax, he found himself, within his furred clothing, dripping wet in a horror sweat. In a brief ten minutes of life he seemed to have tasted every extreme, heat, cold, rising, speeding, falling.
In his fighting back to level out, he had dipped out of his course—his earth inductor compass told him just how far a dip he had made, and he traveled in a swing to the other side until the needle was again at zero.
Riding the normal airpath above the ocean at an average clip of round about a hundred and fifty miles the hour seemed safe and slow after that life-and-death race high up in that stratosphere layer above the earth.
As the afternoon wore on, Hal twice again mounted high into thin air and rode the winds for a brief space, each time coming down before exhaustion could quite claim him. Risky as these performances were, they were undertaken in no mere daredeviltry of spirit. Instead, it was for experiment’s sake that Hal Dane repeatedly dared the weird dangers of the stratosphere’s violence of wind and cold. He wanted to prove to himself that his newfound, splendidly dangerous river of the wind flowed always into the west. For already he was dreaming of a plane built to more efficiently take advantage of this great aerial current.
For all its careful designing, his present Wind Bird could not steadily ride this high, cold aerial river. There were certain necessary points of construction that needs must be considered in flying craft for the high, thin air strata. Hal Dane’s heart leaped to the thrill of what he was learning. Those great aerial currents had half battered the life out of his body, but from his terrible contact with them, he had wrested secrets to carry back to the builders of airplanes.
As Hal Dane skimmed the ocean surface at a steady, rhythmic gait, his mind leaped ahead to future aircraft building that should utilize the knowledge that he had gained by his stratosphere explorations. He had found that the human body, fashioned to thrive in an air pressure of something over fourteen pounds per square inch, could suffer intensely when lifted to a rarefied air pressure of merely two and a half pounds to the inch. But since man had been smart enough to lift himself on wings above the clouds, why, now man must be smart enough to lift his normal air pressure with him. This could be done, Hal believed, by making the plane’s cabin of metal, hermetically sealed, and equipped with oxygen tanks to maintain the same air pressure as at ordinary altitudes.
From long practice, Hal’s hands mechanically shifted gear in the speeding plane, to hold to an even flight, while his mind wrestled continually with the many problems that even his brief taste of stratosphere flying had opened up to him. On future “high flyers”, the sealed cabin would necessitate the working out of some method of absorbing the gases given out by the breath. Then, too, the ordinary systems of controls could not be used, as they would necessitate holes in the “sealed cabin.” Ah, he had it!—electric controls could be devised to govern rudder, elevators, ailerons. This great power could be used to fight the terrible high air cold, also, and electrical heating would keep the deathly dangerous ice sheath from coating wings and—
With a startled gasp, Hal Dane swung from dream planning back into reality, in bare time to hurl his ship upward out of a strange danger. Beneath him, the ocean surface rolled into a monstrous heaving, and a waterspout shot upward, barely missing his wing.