Nothing So Strange

by James Hilton

  He was still a pioneer, but now of a new species—the ancient airman, yarning of old times.

  I listened, and I could see him enjoying an audience; soon he was enumerating all the interesting spots one could fly over on the way to Giant’s Pass. There were rocks where the bandit Valdez had hidden for months from the state guard back in the eighties, and a cave where a German spy in World War One was supposed to have operated a secret wireless station, and another place where legend said were long-lost gold mines. All this seemed to cover such a wide territory of popular fiction that I thought Hollywood might have done far better to engage Mr. Murdoch’s services than mine. I liked him, though, and I had him in the end promising to telephone me some very early morning when the weather looked suitable for a trip.

  Then I drove back and told Brad. I said the call would come on the right sort of day, and if he really wanted to fly, that was fine, but if he didn’t we needn’t go, and even if we did go and he changed his mind, that would be all right too. I described the place and the plane and Mr. Murdoch, and with the map spread out on the library floor I tried to remember the spots he had said were worth flying over. We decided also to take sandwiches and coffee and make a picnic of it, provided it didn’t look like a picnic.

  “Not that I’ve any conscience,” I said. “You made one flight that wasn’t a picnic—you can use a little gas now for your own pleasure.”

  Physically, now, I would have called him almost well, but though there had been no more nightmares he was still moody and nervous. The look in his eyes, a haunted look, was sometimes as if it must tear through them; and during meals, when Dan was around, conversation was always difficult. At other times, after he had suspiciously made sure we were alone, he talked at random about his past, though only up to the time of his leaving Germany. I asked him once if he thought the false results he had given Framm would be repudiated by later investigation; and he said yes, he hoped so.

  “You hope so?”

  “Sure, if it hasn’t been done already.”

  “You think it may have been?”

  “On the whole I’d guess it hasn’t. Not because it couldn’t easily be, if anyone took the trouble, but because nobody was likely to waste time in a direction that Framm would appear to have given up as unpromising. Even with all the secrecy it would leak out that he’d taken a wrong turning. That’s what research is for—not only to find the truth, but to rope off the blind alleys. And you tend to take people’s word that they are blind, just as you take on trust the logarithm tables.” He smiled grimly and then ceased to smile. “After all, why not? If scientists can’t trust each other, whom can they trust? Nobody, perhaps, these days … and for that reason the world can’t even trust science.”

  “Maybe it can still trust God.”

  He said whimsically: “But He moves in such a mysterious way.”

  “I don’t know why anyone should mind that. It may make him hard to track down, but then, so was your Mr. Bitternut.”

  He looked puzzled till he remembered the name. I went on to tell him that recently I had got hold of a book about quantum mathematics. “From what I could gather, the universe is governed by statistical probability rather than logic. But that still makes it wonderful. If life is like throwing a six a hundred times in succession, we know that isn’t likely to happen oftener than once in so many centuries, but we also know it could happen in this room tonight without upsetting the cosmic applecart. That’s reassuring.”

  He said thoughtfully: “Is it? … What made you want to read about mathematics?”

  “You…. Of course it was only one of those popular books—the romantic smattering, as you once called it. I’m not arrogant enough to think I could ever climb into your mind.”

  “Be damned glad you can’t. And don’t say climb.”

  Our talks so often ended in this kind of bitter barrier that I said: “I don’t even want to. It’s what’s on your mind that still bothers me.”

  When he didn’t answer I thought I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, so I asked him outright: “What happened after you came back to America?”

  He replied, far too casually: “I just bummed around for a time.”

  “Various jobs?”

  “Er … yes.”

  “How did you manage about the draft?”

  “Oh, I was … er … deferred.”

  “War work?”

  “More or less….” He added, as if jumping with relief to firmer ground: “And then I got fed up and joined the Air Force.”

  “You mean you quit the war work voluntarily?”

  “Yes.”

  “You said just now you got fed up. What were you fed up with?”

  He answered, rather testily: “With not being in uniform … let’s settle for that.”

  I said okay, I’d settle for it, but he was already on his way out of the room. I followed after a moment and overtook him by the pool. “Oh Brad,” I said, “don’t be in a huff. I promise not to ask you anything else. Whatever secret you have and want to keep, I’ll try not to be curious about it. It’s only that … if you weren’t being bothered by myquestions … you’d be having to put up with Newby’s nonsense … or worse….”

  “Or worse? What do you mean?” His voice was angry, but he had seized on the one word that had slipped out. I answered vaguely: “I didn’t mean anything special…. Newby’s a fool, but there might be worse people put on you … that’s all I meant.”

  “No, you meant more than that. I want to know. What are they going to do to me? You know more than you’ll say!”

  I took his arm. “Honestly, I don’t. But that’s an odd remark, coming from you. Don’t you know more than you’ll say?”

  He let me walk him through the gardens till he was calmer. “They won’t leave me alone,” he kept saying. “They never did let me alone—even in the service. Mysterious teletypes all the time. ‘Bradley, I’ve had an inquiry about you from Washington….’ They wouldn’t send me overseas … you know that? They kept saying I’d be in the next outfit, and then somehow or other I wasn’t. And they tailed me when I was on leave in New York—I knew it—you can feel when you’re being watched. Even here sometimes … what do you know about the servants? What about Dan?… I suppose you just think I’m crazy for asking that….”

  It was on my tongue to say something, but at that moment Dan appeared, hurrying along the path from the house. The timing looked sinister, but could hardly have been anything but accidental, for he came to tell me I was wanted on the telephone.

  “I’ll stay here,” Brad said, so I walked back with Dan. I asked who it was and he said Mr. Small.

  When I saw the receiver lying on the blotter on the library table top I had an almost physical reluctance to touch it. I waited a moment before picking it up.

  A voice said rather curtly: “Miss Waring?… This is Small. I’d like to come up to your place tomorrow morning, if you don’t mind, for a discussion. I’m not satisfied with the situation as it is…. Don’t tell Bradley…. No, we can’t talk over the phone…. Tomorrow, then, about ten. Good-by.”

  I walked slowly back to Brad. It was after early dinner; dusk was falling; the beauty of the scene assembled itself almost excessively. Beauty to me is like that; up to a point it has the freshness of daffodils, but beyond that there can be too much, a tropical surfeit, foliage too rich and groves too dark, a place for fears to stalk. Or perhaps all this was only in my mind as I saw things then. I was relieved when Brad said he was tired and would go to bed.

  * * * * *

  I slept badly, thinking of Mr. Small and what reason he might have for not being satisfied. There had been something in his voice that worried me; or perhaps something in me was now prepared to worry. Already it seemed years, not merely days, since I had come to Vista Grande. I suddenly wished my mother were alive, because she had always known so easily how to deal with men. She, I felt sure, could have found out what was on Brad’s mind; and she could handle Mr. Small
, whatever mood he was in tomorrow. She would sweep them both into some realm of inconsequence and reign over it like an absent-minded queen.

  The telephone woke me. I saw by the clock it was 4 A.M. I didn’t recognize the voice at first and was too sleepy to ask. Somebody talking about the weather … perhaps a wrong number…. Then I caught Murdoch’s drawl. “Dawn looks fine from here. Might be a good day if you don’t mind it a bit hot. Sorry to waken you but that’s what you asked.”

  I was just about to tell him it was too bad I had an engagement that morning when an idea came that held me still listening. Presently I said: “Well, thanks, we’ll probably be along…. Oh, as soon as we can make it….”

  Then I went to Brad’s room and woke him. He yawned, looked indifferent, and replied, as if he were doing me a favor: “Okay. Give me ten minutes to dress.”

  I took less time than that. Afterwards I made coffee and sandwiches downstairs, and left a note for Dan. I told him to give Mr. Small my apologies and say we had gone away “for a few days.” I thought that would stop him from waiting around for our return.

  So we were on the road by four-thirty.

  * * * * *

  “Feel like going up?” I said. “You don’t have to. It’s a nice drive, anyhow.”

  He answered: “I’ll probably try. But alone—first of all.”

  “Oh no.”

  “So you think I need an instructor?”

  “Of course not, but just in case….”

  “Just in case. I like that. I’d have you know I had five hundred hours to my credit before the Air Force decided I was only fit for map reading.”

  So it still rankled. But I liked the mood he was working himself into. “All right. But in that case why bother to try it yourself first?”

  “Because I want to show off in front of you.”

  I doubted that. I think his real reason was twofold: he thought he might be scared, once he was in the air; and if he were, he didn’t want me to see it, and perhaps also he didn’t trust me to take over in such an event. I had noticed before his deep reluctance to discover me able to do anything but write.

  When I quit the argument he seemed almost disappointed. Throughout the drive he was alternately jaunty and fretful, peeved at the car radio because at that distance it wouldn’t yield the morning news bulletin. “We can get a paper somewhere,” I said, but he shrugged indifferently. The sun rose, showing first in saffron tints on the peaks of mountains. Soon I could point out the plume of smoke that was just a few miles beyond the airfield. “Desert towns,” he said, rememberingly. “You can spot them sometimes a hundred miles away—even if they don’t have any factory smoke. They show up like a kid’s breath on a windowpane … someone said.”

  “Who said? I like that.”

  “A friend … the only fellow I really got to know in the army. His name was Bill Manson. He said it once flying east from El Paso. Those little Texas towns, stuck in the middle of nothing…. Bill was a fine pilot, a cowboy before the war. Not well educated, but he thought things out and he saw things clear.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Died in a hospital, after a crash at sea. He was ten days drifting about. One of those raft stories. There were five on it, three died before they were picked up. Bill died after being brought home. A shark had mauled him. He was unconscious most of the time. The papers made a thing of it—about how the two survivors had prayed all night for rescue and then a ship had seen them at dawn. As the fifth man was the only one who could tell me what had really happened I got leave to see him. He told me. Before I left I asked if it was true they had prayed. He said—‘Well, I didn’t, but I guess Bill did, if you could call it a prayer. He kept calling out “For Christ’s sake, God, what are you trying to do to us?” Of course that was after the shark got him.’”

  Brad stirred uncomfortably. “I suppose that’s what some folks would call blasphemous, but to my mind it’s in the same key with other things Bill said, and I don’t call it a bad prayer … if you’re on a raft. And we’re all on a raft these days, if we only knew.”

  “Knew what?”

  “Knew we were on a raft … drifting.”

  I had purposely slowed down for him to say as much as he would, but I couldn’t spin it out any more; we were already at Lost Water and Mr. Murdoch was waving from one of the planes. There were three now; I wondered if business were looking up, but he said when he came over to us: “I got a better one for you this time, miss.”

  I had thought he would have respect for Brad as an Air Force man, but he didn’t show any. “Don’t let him get up to any tricks,” he warned me. “None of that acrobatics stuff.” I was tickled that he assumed I was to be in command. In point of fact I had no right to be; I hadn’t yet got my certificate and taking up a passenger was forbidden. But Murdoch had never asked about that. “He wants to go up alone first,” I told him.

  Murdoch looked even dubious, and I was beginning to reassure him when I noticed Brad’s face, moody and rather pale as he stood a little way off. “I don’t have to,” he interjected, coming over. And then rather superiorly: “No thrill to me.” I recognized that as an act put on for a stranger. Fine, if it helped him.

  While Murdoch was checking the gas I asked again: “Brad, are you sure you want to go up at all?”

  “Let’s get into the damn thing and see,” he snapped. “You take off….”

  A few minutes later we were high above the desert and Mr. Murdoch’s hut looked like a nutshell on a yellow carpet. The seats were back and front; Brad was behind me. I could feel the pressure of his hand on the dual stick and rudders; he was letting me fly, but doing so, I thought, with an effort. I turned to look at him once, but his face was clenched; I thought he was nervous. Then suddenly I felt no pressure from him at all; he had given up the back-seat driving. I looked round again; he was staring out of the side window. “All right?” I shouted.

  “Sure,” he shouted back.

  The plane was too noisy for conversation. I climbed to five thousand, then headed for Giant’s Pass. It was about a hundred and fifty miles, almost due north, and against a head wind. The air was bumpy over the scrubby hills. I watched the instruments, checked on the map, looked out for emergency landings— the routine I had learned. There were pans of dried-up lakes here and there. Soon I went off course to pass over the rocks where Valdez, whoever he was, had hidden. I pointed them out to Brad, but he seemed unconcerned, and so was I— they were just like any other rocks. But a mood of exaltation came over me as we flew on; I shouted back to him—“Like to take over?” I half let go of the controls and in a few seconds he was flying. Of course anyone could have, even a pupil having a first lesson; yet as I sat there, my hands and feet idle, I felt I was accomplishing something in what he was accomplishing. I unpacked the sandwiches and he took one, but the air was too bumpy for coffee. I thought that now he had settled down he would probably find the rest of the trip dull.

  Abruptly he swung the plane in a complete right-about turn, then throttled down. In the sudden near-silence the wind through the struts was like a fingernail on piano wires.

  “What’s the idea?” I asked.

  “Just to talk. I hate shouting.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “Fine.”

  “I guessed you wouldn’t be scared.”

  “I thought I would, but I’m not. Perhaps you give me confidence. You’re not bad. Maybe you’ll really know how to fly one of these days.”

  “Well thanks.” It was as much of a compliment as I could have hoped for. “Another sandwich?”

  “Not yet.” He began to sing “Auld Lang Syne” at the top of his voice, and I remembered the last time I had heard that was at the Hampstead house years before. “Sorry,” he said, after a few bars. “I guess that’s like wanting to skywrite.”

  “Go on,” I said. “Sing all you want.”

  “No—we’d best get back to the right direction. I’m turning, then she’s all yours agai
n.”

  “Don’t you want to keep on?”

  “No, I’m lazy. You do the work.”

  “Okay.”

  He throttled up, made the turn, and I took the controls. We flew for an hour and Giant’s Pass was still some thirty or forty miles ahead. The wind blew now in gusts and flurries; sometimes the plane seemed to stand still in the air, like a bird hovering. Once I watched the shadow of the wing as it passed a certain rock; I didn’t know how large the rock was, but I was sure that a car could have quickly overtaken us on the ground if there had been a road. I checked as well as I could from the map and confirmed this. Not that it mattered; we had all day. But suddenly Brad leaned over and shared the same misgiving—how were we for gas? I said, not wanting to alarm him: “Getting a bit low, but I think we’ll make it.”

  A few minutes later he shouted back: “We won’t. Better look out for a place to land.”

  I had already thought of that too.

  We covered a few more miles. This would be my first emergency landing, though I had often pointed out to instructors where I would make one if I had to, and had come down to within a hundred feet of some likely field. But that was not quite the same as actually doing the thing, and in any case, fields were different from the desert in a high wind.

  Brad touched my shoulder and pointed far ahead to a white patch gleaming in the sun. “Try for that,” he shouted. I changed course, and the white patch approached so slowly that the ground as well as the air seemed in battle for every inch. Even descending did not give much extra speed, because at the lower levels the wind was a hurricane. I had never flown, much less landed, against such odds, and had there been gas I would have turned back to Lost Water rather than try it. I glanced at Brad and saw his face a little set; I wanted to beg him to make the landing himself; but I couldn’t ask, because he had said he had confidence in me and if he were nervous that was all he was depending on. I flew down to a thousand feet and at one moment had trouble in keeping the plane right side up; I wondered what would happen if it did capsize; there were things you could do if you thought of them quickly enough. I tried to remember them. The white patch rose like a wall as the downdraft increased; I pulled back the stick and then felt a forward pressure as Brad checked the movement. I realized a few seconds later he had probably saved us from a stall. “Try again,” he shouted over my shoulder. “But with power this time.”