Monster

In his dreams, Dr. Thomas C. Poulter, Polar explorer, saw a 37-ton Jules Verne monster sidling over ice crevasses, carrying an airplane pickaback, and accommodating in its insides everything four explorers would need for a twelve-month tour of the Antarctic.

Last month, curious Chicagoans saw this dream monster in broad daylight. Fathered by the Armour Institute of Technology, of which Dr. Poulter is a scientific director, whelped by the Pullman works and christened Penguin I, it bumbled through the streets on a test run, got stuck under a viaduct. Extricated, it waddled off two days later for Boston at a speed of 10 m.p.h., sometimes less, paused to nose a truck in Columbia City, Ind., slithered off the highway into Mrs. Cleo Watkin's cow pasture near Gomer, Ohio, and came to rest with its nose in a drainage ditch (TIME, Nov. 6).

After 70 hours, while farmers profited by selling parking space to onlookers, Dr. Poulter and the crew managed to get Penguin back on the road. Meanwhile, Rear Admiral Richard Evelyn Byrd's third South Pole expedition, all set to sail, impatiently awaited the monster in Boston. The little motorship North Star, loaded with sled dogs and supplies, was due to shove off for Philadelphia, where she was to take aboard airplanes, proceed to a New Year's Day rendezvous in Little America with the expedition's flagship, Bear.

In Pavilion, N. Y., one of Penguin's, inner gear cases broke. In Troy, Dr. Poulter had to stop to pick up some instruments. While Penguin labored along the hairpin turns and precipitous slopes of the Berkshires, it caused the greatest traffic jam New England had ever honked at.

At last, long overdue, Penguin rumbled up to North Star's, Boston dock. There was still one ticklish job left--getting Penguin aboard. Since the monster was too big for its berth, ten feet of its tail had to be amputated with acetylene torches. Then, when the tide lifted the motorship's foredeck level with the dock, the cumbersome creature was rolled aboard on a specially built platform, lashed down.

At week's end, as North Star churned southward, with four feet of Penguin's, bobbed tail still hanging over the rail, Dr. Poulter was pleased with his monster's performance. Whether or not it would negotiate Antarctic ice better than it had U. S. roads, it had pulled in more publicity for an Admiral Byrd expedition than the publicity-wise Admiral himself.

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