Читать книгу The Radio Boys with the Iceberg Patrol; Or, Making safe the ocean lanes - Chapman Allen - Страница 6

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An interested stir ran through the group of Radio Boys at the announcement that it was Captain Springer at the front door.

“I suppose he’s started calling around to see our folks, as he said he would,” remarked Bob. “They’ll be calling us down in a minute.”

Sure enough, a short time later, a call came from the foot of the stairs.

“Come down, Bob, and bring your friends with you,” came the voice of Mr. Layton. “There’s a friend of yours here who wants to see you.”

The boys hurried down and went into the living room, where they saw Captain Springer in animated conversation with Mr. and Mrs. Layton.

The captain rose to his feet and greeted each of the boys with a warm grasp of the hand.

“I’m in luck to find you all together,” he said genially, as he resumed his seat. “Though I’m going to call personally at each of your homes,” he added. “I’ve just been telling Mr. and Mrs. Layton something of what happened this afternoon. Of course I know you’ve already told them about it, but I know how modest you are, and I wanted them to know not only the truth but the whole truth.”

The boys blushed, and the captain laughed. “You’d have blushed still more if you had heard all I said,” he observed. “But at that I didn’t say enough. Your parents ought to be proud of you.”

“Here are two parents that are,” observed Mrs. Layton, and her husband smiled assent.

“I was talking with an old friend of mine some weeks ago,” remarked the captain, “and we were discussing whether American boys were what they used to be in the older and rougher days, when even the younger members of the family had to be trained to hold off an attack by Indians. He held that there was still as much good stuff in them as there ever was, and to prove it he told me about a group of boys that were with him in Spruce Mountain not long ago. And if what he told me was true—and I never knew him to say anything that wasn’t—he proved his point.”

“Tell us about it,” urged Mr. Layton, exchanging a meaning glance with his wife, while the boys looked at each other with an unspoken question in their eyes.

“I don’t remember that he mentioned names,” went on the captain. “Simply said that they were interested in radio and that at his invitation they’d come to spend a few weeks in the mountains. He’s a Forest Ranger and uses radio a lot in his work, and I suppose that’s what got him in touch with the boys. They went there just for a lark, but while they were there a big fire broke out—one of the toughest fires to fight he’d ever seen. Well, Mr. Layton, he told me that those boys—none of them over sixteen and some scarcely that—behaved like veterans. They fought the fire with all their strength, were here, there and everywhere, and did as good work as any of the rangers who had been accustomed to fighting fires all their lives. And when they were finally trapped by the flames they made a raft, got out on a lake, and by rigging up some kind of radio contrivance, fought off some bears that tried to climb on the raft. Bentley got quite worked up while he talked to me about them. Couldn’t say enough in praise of them.”

“Did you say his name was Bentley?” asked Mr. Layton.

“Yes, Paul Bentley,” replied the captain. “Why, do you know him?” he asked quickly.

“I know him very well,” replied Mr. Layton, with a quiet smile. “In fact he’s one of the best friends I have.”

“And do you know the boys he was speaking of?” asked the captain.

“I certainly do,” was the amused reply. “Here they are, the whole bunch—count them—four of them, the very boys you’ve been talking about.” For once the captain lost his calm repose of manner.

“Well, well, that’s one on me!” he exclaimed. “To think I’ve been telling you about something you know far better than I do! I’ll have to write Bentley and tell him about the coincidence. He’ll be pleased to know of this fresh proof of his good judgment.”

“If he thinks as much of us as we do of him, it’s plenty,” said Bob. “Mr. Bentley is one of the finest men we ever came across.”

“He surely is,” assented the captain warmly. “I’ve known him for years, and he’s my ideal of what a man should be. He chose the land for his life work and I chose the water for mine, but every once in a while we find ourselves together and have a chat about old times.”

“You are an officer in the navy, I understand,” remarked Mr. Layton.

“Yes,” replied the captain. “I’ve been captain of a destroyer for some years. Saw service in European waters during the war. But I’m contemplating a change just now. This limitation treaty has tied up a lot of our ships and is going to tie up more, and I’ve no fancy for shore duty. So I’ve applied for a transfer to the Iceberg Patrol, and I’ve received assurances that my application would probably be granted.”

“The Iceberg Patrol!” exclaimed Bob. “I remember Doctor Dale telling us about that once. That’s the Government service that aims to warn steamships in the ocean lanes against icebergs, isn’t it?”

“That’s it,” assented the captain. “But it isn’t only our Government that does that. Fourteen other nations have combined to do the same thing, and we do our part along with the rest. That helps to make it interesting. There’s a friendly rivalry between all the nations to prove which fleet is the most efficient.”

“It must be wonderfully interesting and exciting,” said Joe, to whom the frozen North had always made a strong appeal.

“It’s all of that,” replied the captain. “That’s why I’m seeking the appointment. It was rather exciting work over on the other side when we didn’t know what moment we’d strike a mine or be torpedoed by a submarine. Now in these piping times of peace, I feel that I’m getting rusty and I want the stir and danger all over again, and I look for plenty of it up there.”

“The Iceberg Patrol is a comparatively recent development in the naval service, isn’t it?” inquired Mr. Layton.

“Yes,” was the reply. “The thing that really stirred our own and other governments to action was the terrible disaster to the Titanic in nineteen hundred and twelve. The world rang with the horror of that. You, Mr. Layton, remember that an underwater spur of an iceberg ripped through her side as she turned in an effort to escape and sank her with the loss of hundreds of lives. The determination not to permit a thing of that kind to happen again caused the nations to get together and establish the Iceberg Patrol.”

“It was a frightful calamity,” remarked Mrs. Layton. “I suppose that the same thing has happened more than once, only on a smaller scale.”

“No doubt of it,” assented the captain. “The records of the sea are full of stories of vessels that have never reached port and of which no traces have ever been found. Many of these, no doubt, met the same fate as the Titanic, but as all on board were lost, the tale could never be told.

“You see,” he went on, as he settled himself deeper in his chair, “it used to be supposed that a captain could know of the presence of an iceberg in fog or at night by a sudden damp and vault-like chill that came into the air. But experiments have proved that this has very little basis in fact. It may have helped sometimes, but it is wholly unreliable.

“And if a ship ever strikes an iceberg, I suppose it’s good-night for the ship,” ventured Herb.

“It always is if it hits it full,” replied the captain. “The ship has no more chance than if it struck the Rock of Gibraltar. Why, do you know that some of those monster bergs are ten times the size of the Woolworth Building in New York City?”

“Gee!” exclaimed Jimmy. “The Woolworth Building is seven hundred and ninety-two feet high. Do you mean that the iceberg is ten times as high as that?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” rejoined Captain Springer, with a smile. “Not that all of that shows above the water. You know that seven-eighths of an iceberg is submerged, so that of its total height only one-eighth rises above the surface. But if you measured from the bottom to the top of the berg it would be many thousands of feet in height. So you can see what chance a ship would have if it struck one of those floating mountains. It would be crushed like an eggshell.”

His hearers involuntarily shuddered at the thought.

“I suppose radio is your chief reliance in giving warning to vessels of the presence of icebergs,” remarked Mr. Layton.

“Practically the only reliance,” replied the captain. “If the transmitting set of the vessel were put out of commission, she might as well be laid up in port for all the good she could do.”

“Trust old radio to do the work!” said Bob, with enthusiasm.

“I ought to tell you,” observed Mr. Layton, with a smile, “that when radio is mentioned among these boys, they all sit up and take notice. Every one of them is a radio fan.”

“Is that so?” asked the captain. “Then that’s another bond between us, for it’s my most fascinating study. I’ve studied it day and night, awake and asleep.”

At this last word, the boys looked at each other in surprise.

“Aren’t you joking when you say you learned it while asleep?” queried Mr. Layton.

“Not a bit of it,” replied the visitor. “One of the new developments at the naval stations has been a method of teaching students to send radio code messages more speedily by giving them data through their earpieces while they are asleep. I know that sounds suspiciously like a fish story, but it’s an actual fact.”

“How is it done?” asked Bob.

“What’s the idea?” queried Jimmy.

“It came about through the experience of a man who was in charge of a ground school of radio instruction at an air station,” explained Captain Springer. “While he himself was practicing receiving words at the rate of thirty-five a minute, he fell asleep, but the mechanical sender which he was using continued to send messages to him. When he awoke, he claimed that he was able to catch from ten to fifteen more words a minute than he had previously done. His theory was that while he was asleep, his subconscious mind had been trained to the higher speed.”

“Must have sounded like a pipe dream when he first told that story,” put in Jimmy.

“So it did,” agreed their visitor. “But he was so earnest about it that the naval authorities entered on a series of tests and found that he was right, and now it’s a regular part of the instruction. Before turning in at night the student adjusts on his head the receivers that are used in the ordinary class. A regular watch is stood through the night by expert operators on the sending key, and throughout the night they send at high speed—about ten words in excess of the student’s ordinary capacity of receiving. It has been found that in his conscious hours on the following day the student is able to receive messages at the rate they were sent to him while asleep.”

“By jinks!” exclaimed Herb, with more energy than he usually showed, “that hits me hard. I’m going to take a hack at it myself.”

“Herb thinks he won’t have to work so hard that way,” chaffed Joe, and there was a general laugh at the lazy boy’s expense.

“I suppose you have a pretty good set yourself, since you’re so interested in it,” said the captain, addressing himself to Bob.

“Fairly good,” answered Bob modestly. “I get Cuba without any trouble, and I’ve often picked up the signals from Nauen, Germany, and Eiffel Tower, Paris.”

“Then it must be more than fairly good,” returned the visitor. “I’d like to have a look at it, if you don’t mind.”

“Only too glad,” was the reply. “It’s in the room upstairs.”

Excusing himself to Mr. and Mrs. Layton, the captain accompanied the boys to Bob’s room.

He examined the set with the eye of an expert, and Bob was delighted with the keen appreciation the visitor showed of the high degree of perfection to which he had brought his set almost entirely by his own endeavors, except for what assistance he had secured from his comrades and Doctor Dale.

“Put on the ear pieces and see how perfectly you can hear anything that happens to be going on,” urged Bob.

“All right,” replied the captain, suiting the action to the word. “Though with this terrible storm that’s come up, old man static will be getting in his fine work.”

As a fact, the wind outside was whistling along at a rate of seventy miles an hour. A sudden storm had come up within the last two hours, and a gale was sweeping in from the Atlantic, accompanied by sheets of blinding rain.

For a minute or two the captain listened, adjusting the mechanism, but apparently unable to distinguish anything clearly. Then suddenly a look of interest, not unmingled with alarm, flashed into his face. The alarm deepened as he listened.

“What’s the matter?” asked Bob, quickly.

“Matter enough,” replied the captain. “The biggest dirigible of the United States Navy has been torn from her moorings and is adrift in the storm!”