CHAPTER X
THE AIR TERROR
DR. LESLIE had scarcely left us when the door to the laboratory was flung open and Burke dashed in with a telegram which he spread open before Kennedy, adding—
“Can you go?”
It was from Sinclair, who had returned to Westport, and was evidently written in haste and without regard for tolls.
Come out immediately. Having trouble with machine I was to deliver to Government. Bring Kennedy.
“H-m,” mused Kennedy. “I wonder what it is now?”
“Can’t say,” answered Burke. “The train service is rotten in the middle of the day, though. We can’t get anything until noon. Can you go?”
“I shall have to go, I imagine,” replied Craig, deliberately cleaning up his laboratory-table.
I folded up the message and handed it back to Burke.
“How about the mechanicians he employs?” I asked, voicing a thought which I had had before, but had not expressed.
“There’s only one,” answered Burke. “I’ve watched him, and I’m convinced that he’s as honest as gold. That was why I said nothing about him when we were out there before. No, this Sinclair affair was an outside job, all right, though what could have happened now is more than I can guess.”
“Is there anything more about Morelos?” asked Kennedy.
“Nothing yet. We landed the goods and a lot of the men last night, after you left, but so far no Morelos. By the way, before I got that message from Sinclair I thought I’d nose around that Mexican cabaret. The waiter up there tells me it is pretty deserted. That’s another reason why I am anxious to go to Westport. It’s barely possible that some of your friends, Ruiz and the rest, may be out there.”
Kennedy had finished his clean-up and together we left the laboratory, much to Burke’s relief, and made our way to the station.
We were all in a state of impatience by the time we reached Westport, and fortunately Sinclair had taken care of expediting matters by having his car meet us at the depot. The quick spin through the country restored our equanimity and by the time we reached Sinclair’s we were ready to plunge into work again.
“What’s the matter?” asked Craig as we pulled up and the inventor came rapidly across the lawn to meet us.
“Matter enough,” he returned. “Everything seems to be going wrong, and I’m hanged if I can see any reason for it. Just as if I didn’t have troubles enough already, the aeroplane won’t work properly. Let me show you what I mean.”
He led the way over to the hangar where on a runway or slide rested the air-ship.
“I have been all over the thing,” he explained. “There isn’t a part of the machine I haven’t gone over. I can’t seem to find anything wrong—and yet—it doesn’t work right.”
Sinclair finished the examination of the machine which he had been engaged in when we arrived, then led the way to the little kiosk from which he controlled it.
“Now—just a moment—I’ll show you what I mean,” he said as he tested out his apparatus for wireless control.
The engine of the aeroplane had already been started. He depressed the right key. She rose and sailed away gracefully. So far, I could see nothing wrong.
“It’s all right at the start,” he remarked, peering out anxiously at the machine. “It’s only after it has flown a while that things begin to go wrong.”
Sinclair was depressing lever after lever and the machine was obeying his will as accurately as if he himself had been sitting in it at the wheel.
Suddenly, I could see that something was wrong. The look on his face changed.
“There it is,” he cried, rising excitedly.
“What?” asked Burke, gazing at the machine. “Everything looks all right to me.”
“Everything looks all right,” Sinclair repeated. “Yes indeed—it looks fine to me —when I depress the key to make a turn to the right and the machine deliberately rises and not content with that volplanes down almost to the water. Yes—it may look all right, but it is not all right.”
“I didn’t know,” apologized Burke. “I thought you did it.”
“Not a bit of it. I might just as well have no control over it at all now. It’s a wonder to me how I ever got the thing back here the last time. Only a lucky chance, I guess.”
I don’t think I ever felt more sorry for any one in my life than I did for Sinclair just then. Here was the work of years, the child of his brain, as it were, going wrong. I glanced at his tense face; it was tragic.
He ran over the keys.
“Even the signals she repeats back are wrong,” he added in despair. “The thing is absolutely out of my control.”
The air-ship was mounting higher and higher.
She swerved, her nose pointed toward a spit of sand down at the harbor’s mouth.
Before any of us could speak there came a sudden swoop of the machine. Down, down, down she dropped rapidly.
Sinclair was vainly endeavoring to manipulate the keys that ought to have controlled her. But it was no use. Down she planed, gathering momentum.
“Confound it!” he muttered, turning to Kennedy in despair. “What can be the matter? You saw her work the other day.”
Kennedy was looking from the machine to a wireless detector in the kiosk.
We had all sprung to our feet.
The gyroscope-aeroplane had swooped down to the sand-spit and in a cloud of sand had buried her nose deeply into the beach.
There she lay, a mile or two distant, a mass of tangled wreckage.
“You can thank heaven for telautomatics, at least,” muttered Sinclair blankly. “At any rate, no one was in the machine.”
We gazed at each other aghast. There was one great unanswered question in all our minds. Whence had come the impulse that had sent the air-ship to her fate?
“Could it have been the gyroscope?” I asked.
Sinclair did not reply. As for Kennedy, he was still looking at the wireless detector. I knew enough to understand that tremendous impulses of wireless energy had in some way been let loose in the air. Still, Kennedy said nothing.
The sand-spit was on the same side of the bay as oursleves, in fact was the point of land that rounded off the miniature cape on which Sinclair lived between the bay and the Sound.
Already Sinclair, followed by Kennedy and oursleves, had started down toward the wrecked aeroplane.
Scarcely a word was spoken as we went.
IT WAS a pathetic sight to see the graceful mechanical bird lying there in the sand, her wings broken, a mass of scrap.
What it was that had caused the catastrophe none of us knew. Had it been some part of the machine itself that had been tampered with?
Craig was turning over the wreckage carefully. To me it seemed a hopeless quest even to try to read the cause of the disaster in such an apparently hopeless mess. Yet, as Kennedy looked it over, I began to fancy that to him it merely presented new problems for his highly deductive and scientific mind.
“The gyroscope is out of business for good,” he remarked, as he examined the dented and battered aluminum case. “But there doesn’t seem to be anything wrong with it except what would naturally happen in such an accident as this.”
He continued to examine the machine, aided by Sinclair, more nonplussed than ever.
“The engine is a mass of junk now,” continued Kennedy with great interest. “See how the cylinders are bent and twisted. The gasoline-tank is intact but dented out of shape. No, there was no explosion there.”
Craig bent down again. There was something at least that interested him.
“Look at this little dynamo that ran the gyroscope,” he exclaimed.
“Why,” cried Sinclair, looking also, “the wires in it are actually fused together. The insulation has been completely burned off. What do you suppose could have caused that?”
Kennedy shook his head and continued to regard the tangled mass thoughtfully for some time.
Then he turned to Sinclair as we began slowly to retrace our steps to the house and said—
“I wish you’d have that little dynamo preserved.”
Sinclair nodded, speechless, scarcely able to realize that his life-work had been so completely destroyed at a time when he was convinced that he had succeeded.
None of us spoke until we neared the workshop again for, indeed, there was nothing that we could say.
Once Kennedy dropped back with Burke and spoke a few words, but it was not about the air-ship, for a moment later he caught up with Sinclair and myself who were plodding along in silence.
“I believe I’ll take a run about the harbor this afternoon,” he remarked. “I’d like to have a look at the Seaville House.”
“You can take my new runabout the Streamline,” replied Sinclair mechanically.
THE Streamline was a three-stepped boat, as fast as an automobile would have been on land. Sinclair had had her built more for pleasure than for racing, and she was a beautiful craft, managed much like a racing-car.
He drove the boat himself, and it seemed that in his chagrin at the untoward accident of his aeroplane he took pleasure in letting the Streamline out just to show what he could do. As she started, the purring drone of her eight cylinders sent her feathering over the water like a skipping stone. She sank back into the upturned waves of her own making, her bow leaping upward, a cloud of spray in her wake, curling out like a waterspout on either side.
Even if we had not had the excitement of the day to key us up it would have been exhilarating to shoot down the bay in this buzzing, throbbing shape of mahogany and brass, with her exhausts sticking out like funnels and booming like a pipe-organ.
“Do you want to stop at the hotel?” asked Sinclair after what seemed could hardly be more than a few seconds.
“No,” shouted back Kennedy. “Not yet.”
He was seated back of Sinclair, busily engaged with Burke in comparing notes and taking in just how things were situated at Seaville.
“There is the cottage where Ruiz stays,” pointed out the detective, indicating a pretty little place on the side of the hill, just above the hotel and cut off from it by a clump of trees which had been cleared in front of the cottage and did not obstruct the splendid view down the harbor.
Kennedy surveyed the cottage through a glass, as Sinclair rounded the turn at the head of the harbor and started back.
He handed the glass to me.
I followed his directions.
Among the first things that had caught his eye was what looked very much like the primitive inverted V aerial of a wireless telegraph on the gabled roof.
“Is there a wireless-station near by?” asked Kennedy, leaning forward to speak to Sinclair.
“Yes,” he called back. “There is the Seaville station. You can see it in a moment when we round this bend in the shoreline.”
The Streamline covered space, it seemed to me, almost as rapidly as one could talk, for it was but a moment when we could see, a few miles distant, facing the Sound, the powerful Seaville station, with its tall steel masts of the latest inverted L type. Beneath we could distinguish a cluster of little houses, including the plant and the living-quarters of the operators.
“A wonderful place,” went on Sinclair, “one of the best equipped on the coast.”
“Marconi?” asked Craig.
Sinclair nodded.
“I should like to visit it,” went on Kennedy.
Sinclair headed the runabout toward the station, and in almost no time we were there.
We left the boat at a float and walked up the dock. Sinclair already was acquainted with those in charge of the station, and it needed only an introduction and a few minutes’ chat from Kennedy to place us on a most friendly footing.
A WIRELESS-PLANT is always interesting. There is something fascinating about this power of man to reach out into the air and to snatch down messages from the invisible.
The men at the station, too, had seen the accident to Sinclair’s gyrosocope air-ship and were eager to know just what happened. Kennedy and Sinclair managed to satisfy their curiosity without telling too much, however, and Craig gradually worked about to asking some questions of his own as soon as he could do so.
“This is a pretty powerful plant,” remarked Kennedy. “I don’t suppose you are troubled much by interference?”
“Not usually,” replied the operator. “But we have been during the past day or two.”
He glanced over his “log book” to refresh his memory.
“It’s been pretty bad sometimes,” he went on. “At first I thought it might be amateur operators, but it was too powerful for any mere amateur. Sometimes the impulses have been terrific.”
Kennedy said nothing. He had taken from his pocket a pencil and was writing on a blank form a message, now and then gazing out on the water as he tried to compress the words without sacrificing the clearness.
“I haven’t any time to waste,” he remarked, as he finished correcting the message. “Can you get this off right away to the city?”
The operator read it over carefully. It was a message to one of Kennedy’s students at the University, directing him to get out some apparatus at the laboratory which Craig described and send it off by the late afternoon train for Westport.
“Burke and I will meet the train, Mr. Sinclair, if you will let us take your car for an hour or so.”
“You may take anything,” acquiesced Sinclair, “if it will help in clearing up this case.”
“Just a moment and I will be ready to go back to the house with you,” said Kennedy, as he left us for a further talk with some of the men at the wireless-station.
He was gone much longer than a moment, and when he returned he had several pack ages which he had succeeded in borrowing from the station on the strength of Sinclair’s friendship.
“Now I’m ready,” he announced, “and the sooner we can get back the better.”
Sinclair let out his engine and we fairly flew over the water homeward.
Kennedy wasted no time on our return, but set to work stringing wires, using a windmill on the Sinclair place for the purpose.
“What are you doing?” asked Sinclair curiously.
“I’m improvising my own wireless,” replied Kennedy.
“Let me help you,” urged Sinclair.
Kennedy accepted his services, more I think to keep him busy and out of the way than anything else. Burke and I watched in silence, Burke especially impressed, for he had not seen as much of Kennedy as I had and seemed to think his every action savored of some black art of detection.
At last, the wires being strung, Kennedy unwrapped a package which he had brought over from the wireless-station and began testing it and setting it up in the little kiosk.
Some parts, I thought, looked very much like a very sensitive microphone, but there were other parts that reminded me of a phonograph, particularly one that looked like the cylinder record.
“Won’t there be any—interference?” I ventured, thinking of what I had heard so often in our talks with wireless-operators.
Kennedy smiled. “No,” he said, “for I am only going to listen. I am not going to send—at least not by this means,” he added, adjusting his apparatus.
“Wireless apparatus,” he continued, “consists, roughly speaking, of three parts. First as to the sending, there is the source of power, sometimes a battery, sometimes a dynamo. Then there is the making and sending of wireless-waves, the key, spark condenser and tuning-coil. Finally there is the receiving-apparatus—head-telephones, antennae, ground and detector. Just now all that I am planning to use is one side—the receiving.”
Kennedy had finished his work, and as for a few minutes he rested he gazed out contemplatively over the beautiful bay which the low-falling sun made more entrancing than ever.
“Is there a searchlight down at Seaville?” he asked, at length, turning to Sinclair, “for if there is not we shall have to get one.”
“There is one on the end of the dock of the Westport Yacht Club, about half a mile from the hotel,” he answered, pointing out the club with its long dock and float.
“You are a member, I see,” noted Kennedy with a glance at the club burgee flying from the Streamline.
Sinclair nodded.
“Excellent,” exclaimed Kennedy. “While Burke, Jameson and I go down to meet the train, I wish you would take the boat and run over to the club. I want to use the searchlight tonight, and by the time you have that arranged I think we shall be able to meet you there. That will be fine, just far enough from the Seaville House not to arouse suspicion, in case there is some one there who is watching us by this time.
“Come, Burke,” he added, rising suddenly as if at last a plan of action had shaped itself in his mind. “We had better be going. There are a lot of things that we must arrange—and I want to fix it so that you can be ready for quick action if anything happens tonight.”