“I’ve had such a splendid wind behind me! The weather is quite perfect. How good it feels to be out once again, Claude!”
“Yes, dear,” I answered, as we strolled together over towards the hangars, whence one of the school-buses had just begun to flap. “I should like to go up but, as you know, they are busy putting in my second engine for night-flying, and to drive the dynamo. I fear it won’t be ready for quite another fortnight yet.”
“What speed do you really expect to develop?” she asked, much interested.
“In order to overtake a Zeppelin I must, at least, be able to fly eighty miles an hour,” was my reply. “And I must also be able to fly as slowly as thirty-five in order to economise fuel and to render the aim accurate as well as to make night-landing possible.”
“Are you certain that you will be able to do it?” she asked, a little dubiously I thought. She knew that, as far as our apparatus for the direction of the intense electric current was concerned, it was practically perfect. Yet she had, more than once, expressed her doubt as to whether my monoplane, with its improvements of my own design, would be able to perform what I so confidently expected of it.
“Of course one can be certain of nothing in this world, dear,” was my reply. “But by all the laws of aerodynamics it should, when complete, be able to do what I require. I must be able to carry fuel for twelve hours cruising at low speed, so as to enable me to chase an airship to the coast, if necessary. Further, I must, in order to be successful, be able to climb to ten thousand feet in not more than twenty minutes. You see,” I explained, “I am trying to have the engines silenced, and I am fitting up control-gear for two pilots, so as to allow one to relieve the other, and, further, I have designed the alterations whereby either Teddy or myself can have equal facilities to work the searchlight as well as the deadly current.”
“I do hope it will be a success. You have had so many failures, dear,” she said, as we stood together, watching Teddy make a descent, for he was up testing his engine.
“Yes, that first magnetic wave idea proved a failure,” I said regretfully. “And why, I can’t yet discover. My first idea was to create an intensified magnetic wave which would have the effect of ‘seizing’ the working parts of the Zeppelin engines, and putting them out of action. For instance, from your aeroplane you would direct this wave against the Zeppelin and bring its engines gradually into a state of immobility. The natural act of the Zeppelin engineer, on finding that his engine was slowing down, would be to admit more fuel for a few moments. On the sudden release of the arresting medium the engine would ‘pick-up’ violently and blow the heads out of the cylinders, thereby causing the explosion which we desire to create.”
“Your experiments were all in secret,” Roseye remarked. “The theory seems sound enough. Curious that it did not work!”
“Yes. Even now I can’t, for the life of me, discover the reason,” I replied. “Yet we have, happily, tested this new apparatus of ours, and we know it is feasible as soon as ever we can get its weight further reduced, and the ray intensified.”