The finding of those metal tubes wrought a vast change in Lee Renaud. His first thought, after regaining consciousness when he had crashed on the ice, had been to signal for help with radio. Then he had found his mechanism smashed, an utter wreck. That, most of all, had knocked the heart out of him. He had counted so on radio.
And now like a reprieve from the death sentence had come the finding of these tubes, still intact. A couple of tubes,—little enough, but a start anyway.
“It’s more than von Kleist had,” Lee half whispered to himself. “And three hundred years ago von Kleist had the sense to take a bottle, a nail and some salt water, and figure out a way to get an electric spark. It’s more than Hertz had, either, and he figured out a way to send electric power through the air, for a tiny distance anyway. I can at least rig up some wires and make a try at the thing.”
It was a large order Lee Renaud was giving himself—to try to piece up a radio sending machine, the most delicate and powerful of all mechanisms, out of some smashed junk on an Arctic ice floe.
Not for nothing had Lee Renaud grown up with radio. Not for nothing had he followed the work of those old inventors making their way forward, a step at a time. In his own old workshop in the Cove, Lee had copied those steps in real, working mechanisms that, however crude they might have been, had yet achieved results. A modern, up-to-date inventor would be used to a splendid laboratory, used to purchasing smooth, finished, machine-made products to help with the carrying out of his ideas. But Lee Renaud, like those oldtime pioneers in electricity, was used to seizing upon wood and wire, scrap metal and glass.
It was this crude, hard-bought training that now gave young Renaud courage to face some scraps of broken metal and still to hope to build a radio here on drift ice.
Again and again Lee went through every vestige of the wreckage they had salvaged, laying aside such objects as might possibly be of use. Some long strips of metal, a heavy base that had once been an engine support—here was a start on the antennae. He wired the strips to the base, then wired them together at the top to insure stability. To his antennae, Lee fastened a strip of torn flag that he had found in the wreck. A bit of Old Glory fluttering above some Arctic refugees! Lee could not know how often in the near future their eyes would be fixed on that bit of cloth, their minds desperately wondering if the country behind that flag would not make some attempt to save them.
Working material was of the meagerest. Wires had to be soldered—but with what? For a whole period between “two sleeps” (there was not yet any set day and night in this land of the midnight sun), Lee worked at two coins, a tin box, and a tiny fire of their precious wood splinters—and in the end achieved a rather creditable metal joining. The cut-glass shade, so very chic, now began a new duty as, combined with some tin, a wood stopper and a piece of wire, it served as a battery unit.
Lee Renaud hardly paused for eating or sleeping. Always his fingers were at it, adjusting wires, tubes, battery jars, wiring the parts. He would creep into his sleeping bag to rest, and in less than an hour, while the others were deep in slumber, out he would crawl, to take up his work again. A fever of labor burned within him. He could not lay this thing aside until he finished it, tested it, knew the best or the worst of the case.
For the hundredth time, Renaud looked up at the bit of flag floating on his Arctic aerial. The nation behind the Stars and Stripes would do something towards rescue if—if only America knew the fate of the greatest dirigible that had ever left its shores.