“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.