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"I haven't had a fever-chart like this to show up in five years," he says ruefully. A postal packet's dip-dial records every yard of every run. The tapes then go to the A. B. C., which collates and makes composite photographs of them for the instruction of captains. Tim studies his irrevocable past, shaking his head. "Hello! Here's a fifteen-hundred-foot drop at fifty-five degrees!
I discuss this with Tim, sipping mate on the c. p. while George fans her along over the white blur of the Banks in beautiful upward curves of fifty miles each. The dip-dial translates them on the tape in flowing freehand. Tim gathers up a skein of it and surveys the last few feet, which record "162's" path through the volt-flurry.
Captain Purnall prefers an overlifted to an underlifted ship; but no two captains trim ship alike. "When I take the bridge," says Captain Hodgson, "you'll see me shunt forty per cent of the lift out of the gas and run her on the upper rudder. With a swoop upward instead of a swoop downward, as you say. Either way will do. It's only habit. Watch our dip-dial!
Our dip-dial shows that we, keeping abreast the tramp, have dropped five hundred feet the last few minutes. Captain Purnall presses a switch and our signal beam begins to swing through the night, twizzling spokes of light across infinity. "That'll fetch something," he says, while Captain Hodgson watches the General Communicator.
The gale will have us over the North Sea in half-an-hour, but Captain Purnall lets her go composedly nosing to every point of the compass as she rises. "Five thousand-six, six thousand eight hundred" the dip-dial reads ere we find the easterly drift, heralded by a flurry of snow at the thousand fathom level. Captain Purnall rings up the engines and keys down the governor on the switch before him.
Tim fetches her down once every thirty knots as regularly as breathing." So is it shown on the dip-dial. For five or six minutes the arrow creeps from 6700 to 7300. There is the faint "szgee" of the rudder, and back slides the arrow to 6000 on a falling slant of ten or fifteen knots.
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