“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?”