by Nevil Shute
The power of the honky-tonk! She could not explain to him; if he believed that her films were conceived with a high motive, let him go on in that faith. She said quietly, “I guess there’s different ways of looking at these things. You kind of see the smutty side of any job you’re working at, and maybe you forget about the rest.”
“I know. You’ve got to get away from a job and stand back, sometimes, and see what you’ve been doing in perspective.”
She turned to him. “This daughter of yours, Mr. Honey. Your little girl, Elspeth, what do you think that she’s going to see in September 1994? What’s going to happen then?”
It was quiet in the long saloon; the aircraft moved on steadily beneath the stars. The lights were dimmed for sleeping; it was a quiet place, a place fit for meditation before the end. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said quietly. “Nobody knows. You and I will live our lives out without knowing; we may know in half an hour. But I have thought about it; I have read about it; I have worked on it—a lot. If you like, I’ll tell you what I think may happen in September 1994.”
“Tell me,” she said.
He was silent for a moment. “I think the Principle of Goodness will appear and take away all sin and evil from the world,” he said. “I don’t know how it will come about, but I think this, that to everybody in the world, Buddhist or Mohammedan, Christian or Jew, there will come a revelation of the truth, at the same time. Every religion in the world is due for a clean-up; I think they’ll get it then. And when that is done, the Truth will be seen to be universal, and we shall all believe in the same things.”
She nodded slowly. “That could be.”
“I think the revelation will be graded to our understanding,” he said. “I think it will occur in terms that we can recognise. I shan’t see it, but I think my little girl, Elspeth, will see it in the form that Our Lord will come to Glastonbury, to the place of meditation that He lived in as a boy. I think that’s what the indicator sockets in the ascending passage of the Pyramid show, if you make allowance for the subsidence of the structure, as you must. I’ve done a great deal of work on this. I think something terrific is going to happen at Glastonbury, then.”
She stared at him; could he be nuts after all? “Say” she said, “where is this place Glastonbury?”
“It’s a little town in Somerset,” he said. “The legend is that Jesus Christ came there to live in meditation as a young man, before His Ministry. His great-uncle, Joseph of Arimathea, brought Him there; he used to trade in the tin business between Palestine and Cornwall. He brought Jesus there, because Glastonbury was the religious centre of the Druids, who practised the original pure form of the Hebrew religion. Jesus is supposed to have lived in Glastonbury in meditation for a long time as a young man. That’s the story, and there’s a good deal to support it. You can believe it or not, as you like. I think I do.”
She said in wonder, “I never heard that one.”
He went on to tell her all about it, talking with the quiet enthusiasm of a man with a hobby that he has worked at for years. She sat listening to him, her mind in the past. Eddie Stillson had been just such another one, but his hobby was monkeys. He had read a lot about the Origin of Man and he used to talk about the Missing Link, and one day he had produced from beneath his ledgers a book that had a lot of photographs of people’s skulls, thousands and thousands of years old, dug up all over the world. It had photographs of human skulls in it and monkey’s skulls too, and she had listened with a sort of horrified fascination while he expounded to her all the differences and similarities. Looking back over all those years, she felt that he had meant it as a compliment to her, that he had revealed his secret interests in that way. After three marriages and thirty years of adult life, she now felt that you never really knew a man until you knew his secret interests. Mr. Honey was extraordinarily like Eddie Stillson, the same insignificant appearance, the same warm, indefinable charm. It had taken her much of her life to realise it, but she had made a terrible mistake in losing touch with Eddie. When you were young and the world lay before you, you did that sort of thing. You met a man that you could really get to care about, and you thought there would be plenty of other ones, in Hollywood or wherever life took you to. It was only when you began to grow old that you realised they weren’t as plentiful as all that, that you would have done better to stick to Eddie Stillson.
In the flight deck Dobson, the first officer, took a star sight with his bubble sextant through the astrodome; the navigator took another one to check it, and they plotted the position lines upon the chart. They had about two and a half hours flight to go before landing at Gander. Their hands were dirty and soiled the chart as they drew in the position line, for they had had some trouble in the flight deck. One of the electrical circuits of the undercarriage-operating mechanism had become defective and was blowing fuses with monotonous regularity; they had worked for two hours with the engineers in an attempt to rectify the fault, only to discover that it lay in the safety circuit of the retracting undercarriage mechanism and could be reached only from the ground; it was not important, so they had isolated that circuit and put it out of action. Then navigational necessities had intervened before they could wash, and they had taken their star sights with dirty hands.
Dobson walked down the saloon to the toilets; he noted with surprise that Mr. Honey had got off with the actress, she was sitting by him, smiling at him, listening to what he said. He washed his hands and came out, and went into the galley, and said to Miss Corder, “I see the boffin’s got off.”
She put her head out and looked up the aisle. “She’s been sitting and talking with him for some time. How far off are we?”
“About two and a half hours. Had any more trouble with him?”
She shook her head. “Have you had any trouble with the tail?”
He laughed. “It’s still there, so far as I know. Be still there in ten years’ time, if you ask me.”
“It’s funny,” she said thoughtfully. “He was so positive that we were going to have an accident. But nothing’s happened yet.”
He grinned. “Nothing’s going to happen either,” he said. “He’s got a bee in his bonnet—all those Farnborough types are the same. They just don’t know what it’s all about. It really is the most fantastic place. We might get some decent aircraft if it wasn’t for them.”
He moved off up the aisle towards the flight deck.
The Reindeer flew on towards the last of the night, in rising moonlight. An hour later the navigator crossed to Samuelson sitting in the captain’s seat and spoke a word to him. The captain spoke to Cousins, the engineer, and knocked out the automatic pilot; the engineer drew back the throttle levers a little, watching the boost gauges. The note of the engines dropped, the nose tilted down a fraction, and the Reindeer started on a slow descent, losing height at about two hundred feet a minute. Gander lay ahead.
At ten thousand feet they started up the inboard engines at reduced power and went into the cloud layer. A quarter of an hour later they were below it in diffused moonlight. They made their landfall at a rocky, barren point of land that lay between two islands, seen dimly beneath them in the hazy, silvery light. At three thousand feet they flew for a quarter of an hour above fiords and inlets of the rocky coast, all full of ice. Then straight ahead of them appeared the twinkling runway lights and the cluster of lights round the airport buildings of Gander.
In the saloon the stewardesses were busy waking the passengers who were still asleep and making them do up their safety belts for the landing. Miss Corder, bending over Mr. Honey, said, “Well, we’ve got here all right.”
“I know,” he said. “We’re very lucky.”
Miss Teasdale had gone back to her own place. Mr. Honey sat looking out of his window as they circled the airport and went off over the spruce woods and the river to turn into the runway. They turned in to land and the note of the engines died; the nose dropped a little, and he saw the flaps come down. The gr
ound came closer and closer till the tops of the fir trees were near to the machine. Then there was the surface of the runway close beneath them; they sped over it, and suddenly a rumble and a forward tilt of the fuselage told him they were down.
Samuelson slowed the machine to a walking pace, and turned the Reindeer on to the taxiing track, towards the hangars and the airport buildings. He yawned. Cousins, the engineer, came forward to his elbow and said, “Watch the undercart switch, sir. The safety locks are out,” He nodded.
Dobson leaned across to him, grinning, and said, “Well, we’ve still got our tail.”
Samuelson nodded; he had not yet reached the point when he could joke about it. He still had to decide whether to go on normally to Montreal or to ground his aircraft at Gander, one of the most bleak and desolate airports in the world at which to strand a load of passengers, and one where there were few facilities for any serious repair. He sat gloomily considering this as they rolled up to the tarmac. He had heard nothing from his Flying Control in reply to his signal stating Mr. Honey’s bleat. Perhaps a signal would be waiting for him here to give him guidance and to take the onus of deciding what to do from him.
It was then shortly before dawn, about nine o’clock in the morning by British time. The stewardesses disembarked the passengers and took them to the restaurant for breakfast; the refuelling tank trucks drew up to the Reindeer and began pumping in their load. Captain Samuelson went to the Control and asked if there was any signal waiting for him; there was nothing. He tightened his lips; the responsibility for the decision lay on him.
He sent Dobson to find the local Air Registration Board Inspector. Very naturally, Mr. Symes was in bed, and he was not too pleased at being woken up at that hour in the morning to make a difficult decision. He was a man of fifty-seven and Gander was his last appointment before retirement. He had never risen very high in his profession because he had never shown initiative; in his view an inspector should stick closely to the rules as they were framed for him. That quality made him valuable enough at a place like Gander, where he was far from the control of his head office; his superiors could rest content that Mr. Symes would never put a foot wrong or deviate one hair’s breadth from the typescripts sent to him from time to time.
Dobson stayed with him while he pulled on his trousers, putting him au fait with the position. “This little squirt from Farnborough, he’s clean off his rocker, I believe. I don’t know what you’ll make of him, but that’s what we all think. Of course, if there is anything the matter with the tail, we’ll have to stop here, but Cousins hasn’t heard a thing about it, nor have any of us. Captain Samuelson wanted you to have a good look at the structure with us, and see if it’s all right.”
Mr. Symes grunted. “You get some funny sort of people coming from those places,” he said. “You remember Skues in the Airworthiness at Farnborough, back in 1928 or so? No—before your time. He always used to take his Siamese cat with him, in the offices, or into conferences—everywhere he went he took this blessed cat.…”
They walked together from the dormitory block where Mr. Symes stayed back to the Reindeer on the tarmac. Dawn was just showing in the darkness as a grey line to the east; there was a bitterly cold north-east wind and Mr. Symes had had no breakfast Samuelson met them on the tarmac with Cousins, the engineer. A tall, wheeled gantry gave them access to the tailplane twenty feet above the ground; they commenced a meticulous examination of everything externally visible, moving the gantry from time to time. The bitter wind whipped round them mercilessly; very soon they were so cold that even holding torches became difficult.
They could find nothing wrong at all externally. They came down and went into the rear fuselage, behind the pressure cabin; clambering about in there they could see the structure of the tailplane spars where they passed through the fuselage and intersected with the fin girders. They twisted their bodies in amongst this structure, flashing their electric torches upon channels, webs, and ribs, laying the straight edges of steel rules along duralumin angles to check for any distortion, peering carefully at scratches on the paint and anodising. At the end of an hour of the most thorough examination they had finished; they had found nothing whatsoever wrong with the machine.
It was too cold to hold a conference outside or in the hangar. They went up into the heated flight deck of the Reindeer, and sent for Mr. Honey from the restaurant. While they were waiting for him. Dobson and Cousins made an examination of the defective safety circuit of the undercarriage-retracting mechanism, climbing up the undercarriage legs from the ground into the engine nacelles. Mr. Honey, hurrying across the tarmac to the Reindeer, saw them go back into the fuselage ahead of him; when he reached the flight deck the engineer was making his report to Samuelson.
“Port switch is burnt out, sir,” he said. “We haven’t got a spare. I’ve got both circuits isolated now. If Mr. Symes agrees”—he indicated the inspector—“I’d suggest we go on like we are to Dorval. They’ve got spare switches in the stores at Dorval.”
The inspector said, “That means no safety locks are operating on the undercarriage.”
“That’s right,” the engineer replied. “It just means being careful not to trip the operating lever while you’re getting in or out of the seat, That’s while she’s on the ground, of course; it wouldn’t matter in the air.” Mr. Honey waited his turn patiently in the background, till they were ready to attend to him. The inspector and the engineer and Samuelson moved over to the control pedestal between the pilots’ seats. “This one,” the engineer said, fingering the undercarriage lever. “It’s just a matter of being careful not to put this up while the auxiliary engine’s running, like it is now.” It was running to provide the heat to keep the aircraft warm. “When the auxiliary’s stopped, of course, nothing could happen if you put this up, because there wouldn’t be any current.”
They talked it over for a minute or two. “All right,” the inspector said at last to Samuelson. “You can go on like that. But have somebody standing by it all the time you’re taxiing, just to watch that nobody’s coat catches in it or anything.”
Samuelson nodded. “I’ll see to that.” He turned to Mr. Honey and introduced him to the inspector. “Look, Mr. Honey—we’ve made a very careful inspection of the tailplane, and there’s nothing wrong with it at all. I don’t know if you’d care to tell Mr. Symes here what you told us on the way across?”
Mr. Honey started wearily to tell his tale again. He had had no sleep and he was overtired, blinking more even than usual. He had not shaved and he had not been able to eat his breakfast, spoiled as it had been by his anxieties; he was feeling rather sick. He told his story badly, defeated before he started by the atmosphere of utter disbelief he sensed around him.
Mr. Symes gave him some little attention because he came from Farnborough, but his mind was already made up. He was a man who had never taken any action except on physical facts; it was not his business to assess the eccentric theories of wandering scientists and take a chance on them. There were no written instructions in his files that he should take any special precautions in regard to the Reindeer tail. On the suggestion that there was something wrong with it, he had made a thorough inspection and had found everything correct. That put him in the clear, and he had no intention of imperilling his pension by a rash display of individuality at that stage of his career.
They talked for a quarter of an hour. At last Samuelson said, “Well, if Mr. Symes agrees, I think the best thing we can do now is to go on to Dorval. I’m prepared to shut down the inboard engines after climbing up to operating height, as I did coming over, if you think that will ease things, Mr. Honey. At Dorval we can assess the matter properly.”
Mr. Honey, nearly in tears of weariness and frustration, said, “I assure you … I assure you that’s the wrong thing to do. It’s absolutely——” his voice cracked, and went up into a little nervous squeak—“it’s absolutely courting disaster to go on. You must ground this aircraft. Really you must.”
Samuelson glanced at Symes, and their eyes met in common agreement; this was not a normal, reasonable man. This was an eccentric plugging away at a fixed idea, a man whose mental balance was abnormal. “If you would rather stay here, Mr. Honey,” the captain said, “I can make arrangements for you to finish the journey in another aircraft, probably tomorrow. But I’m afraid I can’t listen to any more of this.”
The inspector nodded in agreement. This Reindeer would be off before long, and he could get back to bed and have a couple of hours more before breakfast. Then, in the course of the morning, he would write out a report upon the incident and send it in to his headquarters. Two copies would be sufficient, and one for his own file.
Honey said desperately, “Is that your final decision? You’re really going on?”
Samuelson turned aft, partly to hide a final irresolution “That’s right,” he said. “We’re going on.”
“I assure you …” Mr. Honey’s voice died in despair it was useless to go on trying to convince these men. He turned forward to the pilots’ seats. And then, quite nonchalantly, he put his hand upon the undercarriage lever and pulled it to UP.
He did it so quietly that it did not register with anybody for an instant; Symes was the only man who actually saw him do it, and it took a second or two for the inspector to appreciate what was happening. Then he cried, “Here—stop that!”
The note of the auxiliary motor changed as the load came on the dynamo. Samuelson turned, saw what Honey was doing, said, “For Christ’s sake!” and made a dive for the lever.
Mr. Honey flung his body up against the pedestal, covering the controls. He said, half weeping, “If you won’t ground this aircraft, I will.”
The motors of the retracting mechanism groaned, the solid floor beneath their feet sagged ominously. Cousins, with quick wit, leaped for the electrical control panel and threw out the main switch to cut the current from all circuits. He was a fraction of a second too late. The undercarriage of the Reindeer was just over the dead centre. She paused for a moment; for an instant Samuelson thought that Counsins had saved her, as he struggled to pull Honey from the pedestal. Then she sagged forward, and the undercarriage folded up with a sharp whistling noise from the hydraulics. A pipe burst and fluid sprayed the ground beneath her, and she sank down on her belly on the concrete apron, all the seventy-two tons of her. By the mercy of Providence nobody was standing underneath her at the time.
