by Nevil Shute
“I always stop ’n take a lil’ drink of something, middle of the morning,” Eddie had said, drinking his milk. “I see they’ve given you the lousiest old machine in the office. Nobody else wouldn’t have it.” After that, things had gone better.
She had worked in that office for two and a half years. Her evenings gradually became a whirl of dances, movies, and walks with various young men, though she found it better to cut out the walks as time went on. In all that time she never went out with Eddie Stillson. He never asked her to the movies; if he had done so she would have regarded it as a disaster, and would have told her friends about it, laughing. All she ever talked to him about was carbon papers, and the weather, and how many bits they owed the office boy for milk. Yet when opportunity came to her with a minor contract in Hollywood and she went round the office saying good-bye in a whirl of excitement and congratulations, the only leave-taking that left the smallest pang was that with Eddie Stillson, though it only took two minutes. In later years she knew he would have married her if she had so much as lifted her finger. She had sometimes thought that she would have had a very happy life if he had.
This man Honey was just such another one as Eddie Stillson, shy, insignificant, brave and kind. With her experience of married life behind her, she now knew that such men made good husbands, though girls seldom realised it. There was security in them. She wondered what kind of girl his wife had been.
In the rear of the cabin Marjorie Corder sat with the other stewardess, Miss Peggy Ryan, by the galley. She had told Peggy all about Mr. Honey’s apprehensions, and they had agreed facilely that they were bunk. Now she sat silent, recalling her crash drill. Although in conversation she was prepared to write off Mr. Honey as a nervous crank, she was not in the least prepared to do so deep in her own mind. If things started to go wrong with the aircraft she had certain duties to perform; she sat quietly, conning her drill over. Safety belts had to be fastened; she must go up and down her end of the cabin, not hurrying, smiling reassuringly, but seeing that the passengers did fasten them, helping those who were agitated. The upholstery rip cords must be pulled, disclosing the escape hatches, but on no account must the hatches be opened till the differential pressure indicator showed zero. She must be ready to jettison the cabin doors by pulling the hinge-pins. She must be ready with her first-aid box. She must be ready at the telephone to the flight deck for taking any orders that might come by it, and all the time she must be cheerful and composed and charming. Only by the sheerest chance would she be free to fling herself down on the deck in the Men’s Toilet when the crash was imminent; in any case it would be wrong for her, the stewardess, to take the only place of safety in the aircraft. She could hardly do that.
Her home was in Ealing, a suburb to the west of London; her father was a vegetable merchant in Covent Garden. She had gone to the London Hospital as a probationer early in the war, and then she had exchanged into the R.A.F. Nursing Service; she had given up nursing eighteen months before for the more varied life of an airline stewardess. She had been engaged during the war to an Ealing boy who had died in a Lancaster over Dortmund a month before her marriage; that had happened five years before, but she had not ventured into love again. She was rather older than the general run of stewardesses and had already exceeded the average length of service.
She sat quiet, thinking of the threat of death held by the Reindeer tail. It would be queer if it happened to her as it had to Donald, though his tail had been removed from the machine by A.A. fire. She still had his photograph upon the mantelpiece of her bedroom; she still heard from his mother at Christmas and on her birthday. If it had to happen to her now, it was a pity; she would go without the experience of marriage, motherhood, and children; she would go incomplete. She thought of Mr. Honey and the queer thing he had said an hour or so ago—“If you get through this and we don’t, get yourself married and bring up a family. I think you’d be good at that.” Funny.
Mr. Honey, she thought, was a very clever little man. He could see farther through a brick wall than most; he had penetrated her secret. She would be good at that, she knew. She knew that she would be able to be patient with a crying baby, loving with a fractious child. She knew that, but that Mr. Honey should have known it too was a very queer thing. Of course, he must be terribly clever to be a research scientist at a place like Farnborough, and with that there came to her the certainty that he was right about the Reindeer tail. A man who had the perspicacity to be right in one thing was very likely to be right in another, and he had been very right about her.
Captain Samuelson sat in the first pilot’s seat staring at the instruments in front of him, at the silvery cloud floor ahead and below them, at the bright stars above. It was very quiet and peaceful on a fine night at that altitude; he had time for thought. Although he flew continually from continent to continent he was a very ordinary man; his interests were essentially suburban. Nothing that he had ever seen in all his travels pleased him so much as his small home in Wimbledon, chosen for its proximity to the bowls club, of which he was vice-captain. He had three children, a son of nineteen in the R.A.F. and a boy and a girl who were still at school. He did not believe that anything was going to happen to the Reindeer tail before they got to Gander; he thought that Mr. Honey was a nervous crank, exaggerating the importance of his own work. At the same time, Bill Ward stood in the background of his mind. Something had killed Bill Ward, and it was not coming down through cloud to check up his position and so flying into the hill.
Samuelson was an experienced and a competent man. He had put the matter to his Flying Control in a radio signal and he had received no answer; the responsibility for the decision was left to him. He had decided to go on to Gander, anyway. When they got to Gander he would have to make another decision, whether to continue the flight normally to Dorval, the airport of Montreal, or whether to ground the aircraft and stay at Gander till he did receive instructions. The latter would be quite a serious step to take upon his own responsibility; it meant stranding passengers at Gander and delaying the mail. He could hardly stop at Gander without evidence that something really was the matter with the aircraft. Like every pilot in the world, he veered instinctively away from a policy of playing safe. If he grounded the machine at Gander and it turned out to be quite all right, people would say that he was windy, that he was getting old.…
Another point bulked largely in his mind. There were no facilities at Gander for a major modification to the Reindeer, but there were all the facilities required at Dorval. Unless the aircraft proved to be completely unsafe, it would have to be flown from Gander to Dorval, or else back across the Atlantic to England, before any work could be done on it; if then it had to fly from Gander he might just as well continue on his scheduled flight without delay. He thought that he would turn all his engineers on to make a thorough check of the tailplane while the aircraft was refuelled at Gander; if that was satisfactory, he would go on. He had no great confidence that instructions from his Flying Control would have reached him by the time he was ready to leave Gander. Work would only just be starting in England at that time in the morning, and to ground an aircraft on a technical suspicion such as this would need a good deal of conferring between the various technicians who were involved.
The shadow of Bill Ward stayed by his side, perturbing him. This man Honey had at any rate provided a lucid and a feasible explanation of what could have killed Bill Ward, of what could kill them all that very night, perhaps. He sighed a little, in perplexity. If only this man wasn’t such an obvious nervous crank.…
They passed the point of no return, and as a routine matter the navigator reported to him. He nodded, and handed over the control to Dobson, and got out of his seat, and went down into the saloon, and walked the length of it into the luggage bay to have another look at the tailplane structure through the little perspex window. He stood gloomily scrutinising the structure in the light of the rear fuselage lamp, flashing the beam of his powerful torch upon each poi
nt in turn. It all seemed perfectly all right, but that infernal little man had said it would, right up to the moment when it broke. He wondered if he ought to station one of the crew to stand by that perspex window looking through it all the time, a permanent watch. But what good would that do, anyway, if Mr. Honey should in fact be right? They would know at the controls as soon as something happened.
Presently he turned and went back into the main saloon. As he passed the toilets he raised his eyebrows; was everybody crackers in this ship? The film actress, Miss Monica Teasdale, was standing at the door of the Men’s Toilet, holding the door open, looking in.
He smiled brightly and said, “I’m afraid you’ve got that wrong, Miss Teasdale. The Ladies’ is on this side.”
She said, with cool irony, “Say, what do you know?” And then she said, “I was just kind of looking where I’d got to go in case we had an accident, Captain.”
It was true; everybody was crackers in this ship, or was it he himself? “There’s not the slightest prospect of an accident, Miss Teasdale,” he said, laughing brightly. “If ever there was anything of the sort, the stewardess would come and help you fasten your safety belt. That’s what the seats and belts are designed for, to hold you safely and to prevent injury in bumpy weather, or anything like that.”
She said, “You don’t say!”
He flushed a little, irritated. “I should go back to your seat,” he said. “There’s nothing to see in there.”
She laughed, and she was very beautiful in her laughter, so that he was mollified. “I believe you think that I’ve been playing ‘Peeping Tom’.”
In all his years of experience as an airline captain he had never had this one before. “Of course not,” he said weakly.
“Be your age,” the actress said. “Mr. Honey told me that was the place to go to in an accident, down on the floor and facing back, with your spine pressed flat against the partition. I’ve been taking a look around.”
He stared at her. “Honey said that? But why?” He opened the door and stood inside, looking at the partition.
“Something to do with the kitchen stove, he said.”
“The stove? Oh, I see what he means.” He hesitated; there was no denying that it was a very safe place, very safe indeed against deceleration. He came out into the passage, closing the door behind him. “I’m sorry Mr. Honey has been bothering you, Miss Teasdale,” he said. “I think he must have been overworking at Farnborough, and perhaps our altitude affects him too, if he’s not used to flying. There’s not the slightest foundation for thinking that there’s anything the matter with this aircraft, I can assure you. I’m very sorry that he’s troubled you with his ideas. I suppose he must have seen your pictures at some time.”
“You don’t believe in his ideas?” the actress asked.
The pilot laughed. “Of course not, Miss Teasdale. There’s not the slightest evidence that there’s anything the matter.”
Her eyes dropped to the torch he carried in his hand. “That’s why you’ve been taking a darned good look at our stabiliser, then.”
He smiled. “I should go back to your seat and try to get some sleep.”
“Are we going to be on time at Gander, Captain?”
“No,” he said. “We shall be about an hour and forty minutes late.”
“Is that because you’ve shut down on the inboard engines?”
He cursed Mr. Honey in his mind for a talkative busybody. “Partly,” he said. “I think Mr. Honey is a little bit unbalanced, between you and me. But I have given that much weight to his ideas, because he really does come from Farnborough; I’ve shut down the inboard engines at his request, although it’s going to make us very late.”
She nodded. “I don’t think he’s unbalanced,” she said. “I think he’s as sane as you or I. I’ve met a few unbalanced people in my time—fans, you know—and believe me, they don’t talk that way. If I were you, Captain, I’d put a good amount of weight on what he says.”
They stood for a moment, thoughtful. “I’ve not neglected it,” he said at last. “I’ve done everything that he suggested, except turning back to land in Ireland. In any case, now, it’s shorter to go on than to go back.”
“Okay, then,” said the actress. “I’ll just keep my fingers crossed.”
“Miss Teasdale, has Mr. Honey been talking to any of the other passengers?”
She shook her head. “He came across and spilled it all to me, but then the stewardess got after him for spreading alarm; she did everything but take him across her knee and spank him, so he won’t do that again. I don’t think anybody eke knows a thing about all this.”
He nodded. “I’d just as soon it didn’t go any further. There’s absolutely nothing in it.”
“Says you,” she said rudely. “Still, I don’t see that it’s going to help any to get the other passengers worked up. You needn’t worry. I’ll stay with him till we land at Gander, so that he won’t talk to anyone.”
“That’s really very good of you, Miss Teasdale. It’s very helpful.”
“Don’t thank me. I guess I kind of like the little man, and I’d not sleep now, anyway.” She turned to him. “If I do that for you, Captain, will you do something for me?”
He said, “If it’s anything that I can do. What do you want?”
“If our stabiliser starts flying on its own,” she said, “and things start going wrong, Mr. Honey says he’s going up to the flight deck. He’s been a long time in airplane research, and maybe he could help you. If he comes up, will you listen to him and not shout him down?”
He knew that if that happened he would have little time and little inclination to listen to anybody about anything, but he said, “Of course I will, Miss Teasdale.”
She said, “I’ll feel easier in my mind that way.”
They moved forward up the aisle past the gallery. He said, “Will you have a cup of coffee, or anything?”
She shook her head. “Guess I’ll go back and sit with Mr. Honey. This is the darnedest flying trip I ever made.” She left him and moved quietly up the aisle in the dim light.
She sat down beside Mr. Honey and began talking to him about other matters than the imminence of their disaster. They had said all that was to be said about that; now it remained only to wait and see if it happened. She asked him how it had happened that the aircraft had escaped our vigilance at Farnborough and in the Ministry—how it had managed to accumulate so many hours of flying unknown to any of us.
He told her what he had heard on the flight deck, about its loan to Anglo-Brazil Air Services for a trial. “It slipped past everyone by sheer stupidity,” he said quietly. “The Power of Evil in the world. It’ll be different in fifty years from now.”
She asked, “What’ll be different?”
“Evil,” he said. “This sort of thing won’t happen after 1994. I shan’t live to see that time, and you won’t, even if we get through tonight. But my daughter will, when she is an old lady.”
She asked, “What’s going to happen in 1994?”
“Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden in the year 4007 B.C.,” he said. “Sin, foolishness, and evil came into the world then and are to last six thousand years. That finishes in the year A.D. 1994 at the autumn equinox on the twenty-first of September. After that we get another chance again, I think.”
She stared at him. “Where did you get all that from?”
“You can work it all out from the prophetic calculations in the Talmud,” he said. “It’s confirmed by the measurements to the base of the Dead End passage in the Pyramid. That’s a totally different source, of course. There’s no doubt at all that something absolutely cataclysmic is going to happen in the autumn of 1994. It’s probably the end of this world, as we know it. The Talmud rather indicates that the millennium starts then, but that’s a bit vague.”
She was startled. “Say,” she said, “do you believe all this?”
He said, “Believe—that’s not a scientific way to lo
ok at it. You don’t believe in an hypothesis until it’s proved to be true, and then it’s a known fact, and doesn’t have to be believed in. You don’t believe in this seat you’re sitting in, because it’s there; you don’t have to show your trust in it. I don’t believe the end of the world is coming to us in 1994. But it’s a theory that has been put forward by a number of very competent investigators, and the only theory that I know which forecasts what is going to happen to us in the future. Until a better theory turns up, one has to base one’s life on that, because it’s the only one.”
She stared at him. “That kind of makes sense, when you look at it that way,” she said. “You say the world is coming to an end in 1994? It doesn’t mean a lot to you and me.”
“No,” he said. “We shall probably just miss it. It’s bad luck, after six thousand years, to miss it by ten years or so. But we prepare the people who will see it, and that’s something. That’s why we’ve got to work so hard and well, we people in the world today. We lay foundation stones.”
She thought of her work, of the endless, mean, commercial haggling on story points, of jealousies and irritations on the set, of the endless manœuvrings for star parts. “I guess I don’t lay many foundation stones,” she said bitterly.
He turned to her, astonished. “The whole world looks to you,” he said. “People are finer and better for seeing one of your films; you give them an example. Do you really think you don’t do any good? You can’t think that!”
