The Higher They Fly

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Dulcie watched the one called Jill—the one who had been flirting with the blond-haired male model with two rings on his sleeve. Jill’s actions had been speeded up, like a movie running slightly fast. The other girl seemed preferable, the one called Susan. She did not try to imbue her chaste uniform with studied sex-appeal; and her reaction to the repressed crisis was altogether more skilful. The girl was evidently sufficiently mature to realise she should show as small a change from her former attitude as possible.

  A woman a few seats away from Dulcie asked Susan if it would be safe for her to go to the lavatory. She evidently didn’t like the idea of being caught in embarrassing circumstances by inquisitive sharks that might swim into the sinking fuselage and report her predicament to the rest of the shoal.

  Forward, in the first class, Jane Tyne, an actress, looked up for a few moments from a typescript and observed the actions around her. Being quite unused to air travel, Miss Tyne didn’t really know quite what to expect. It didn’t strike her as alarming that they were descending to ten thousand feet. Having no criteria to go by, she didn’t know whether this was unusual or not. But she didn’t like the look of the thick-necked tycoon sitting two rows in front of her. She disliked his attitude to the stewardesses, and thought also that the man was getting too drunk too soon. She looked thoughtfully at the back of his neck and returned her attentions to the script.

  Actually, Mr Valentine was thinking how unfair it was that the more expensive accommodation was attached to the cheap part of the aeroplane. There should be some way of jettisoning the tourist passengers should the heed arise, so as to make travel safer for those who had paid considerably more. What was the point of writing a dud cheque for a first-class ticket when there would be no difference in the relative chances of survival?

  He had paid little attention to Susan’s demonstration of the life jacket. Exactly what did you do to inflate it? He looked around for the emergency exit. At least that was reasonably close-by. Mr Valentine decided he was going to be the first to get there; then suddenly realised that this was an appalling admission of a possible need which had no right to arise.

  All the same, he found his eyes riveted on the sign which might, at any moment, signal a stomach-twisting command to fasten seat belts and stop smoking. Mr Valentine made sure that his straps were readily available. Now all he could do was to sit it out.

  He consoled himself with the thought that the last airliner to ditch in the Atlantic had done so without loss of life. ‘One chance in a million,’ Mr Valentine had said at the time. Now, he tried to find a basis for shortening the odds.

  Dulcie called Susan over. ‘I have finished Life Magazine,’ she announced. ‘Can you bring something else?’

  ‘Certainly. What would you like?’

  An amused look passed between them. What they both would have liked would have been some definite information regarding the next few hours. It could mean their lives.

  Dulcie said: ‘I’m not fussy.’

  Susan wished the rest of her charges shared the same point of view.

  ‘I’ll see what there is,’ she said.

  Chapter Four

  Julie came into the room and Fleming scarcely reacted but said: ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘As a matter of fact Ken Woodford phoned me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She wandered around the room and paused by an empty map-board.

  Julie wasn’t beautiful in the accepted sense. A woman would have called her beautiful. Among men, she was either regarded as profoundly irritating or compulsively attractive—few steered the middle course. She surprised you by being keenly intelligent within situations which might reasonably have been regarded as beyond her, yet annoyingly immature in those contingencies well within her grasp.

  She was slight, yet did not give the impression of being small because she did not have a bony structure. Her face could vary in expression from pertness to hatred, from extreme elation to despair. She moved as a continental moves—there was no more a slackness in her body than there was in the clothes which clung to it. Yet for all her freedom of movement she was a restless animal encaged.

  Now, she lingered by the map-board and thumbed drawing pins hard into the woodwork. ‘Ken asked me to see what was going on. Who is this man Scrivens?’

  ‘He’s the chief Air Traffic Control bod on duty here.’

  ‘Ken thinks he’s being a fool.’

  ‘He isn’t. There’s no time for sick people in an emergency like this.’

  ‘It depends how sick you are, Robert. You’ve probably talked yourself into it. You’d be sick indeed to refuse to help if it’s in your power.’

  He shrugged. ‘They won’t let me.’

  ‘Can I have a cigarette?’

  He gave her one and lit a fresh one himself. There was a long silence. Then she said: ‘What are their chances?’

  ‘Not good. He might get away with a belly landing; but his undercart is useless and he mustn’t lower it.’

  ‘They said he might try a ditching.’

  ‘He might try anything. He’s got eight hours to think it out.’

  ‘God, eight hours. What they must be going through!’ She looked at him and wondered why she had ever loved him, or if she really had. ‘You don’t care, do you? You only think of what’s going on in that weird mind of yours.’

  ‘Julie, you’re out of your depth. If you came over here with the idea of straightening me out, forget it. I know exactly what your real motive was in coming. You don’t give a rap about people in the abstract, and you haven’t the imagination to understand how I must feel. So don’t play it so innocent.’

  She looked at him blankly. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘Am I supposed to believe that you would come here to hold my hand, just to see me through a crisis that didn’t concern you . . . directly?’

  ‘God, you must hate me!’

  ‘Then why don’t you leave?’ Even now, even after the affair was all over, he prayed that she wouldn’t. He couldn’t help saying these things, and often wondered why he said them. He tried to retract without losing face. ‘Unless you have some specific object in talking to me.’ He fixed her eyes at this and couldn’t help betraying the accusation.

  ‘I just want to find out what this latest slant is. I told Ken I wouldn’t be able to do anything with you, but I thought it might be worth trying. I accept defeat; only I want to know what I’m being accused of.’ Her eyes seemed to grow larger, and almost hypnotic to him. As on many other occasions, he realised the extent to which he was still in her power.

  He said: ‘I wouldn’t have regarded it as phoney if you’d been honest about your real motive in the first place. Only I just can’t stand hypocrisy—especially from you.’ Fleming studied her and then seemed struck with a sudden doubt. ‘My God, you do know, don’t you?’

  She took her head, but he could see the change of mood was genuine. The alarm in her eyes transferred to his own. Already something inside her mind had grasped the implications of what this could mean.

  Fleming walked over to the bare table and sat down. ‘You’d better get Scrivens to tell you. I think you’d rather not have it from me.’

  She became almost a child. ‘Robert, please tell me!’

  ‘The aircraft in trouble is Statelines Flight Forty-Six. The co-pilot is Jimmy, Truman.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ she said flatly.

  ‘I can see you didn’t. I wish I hadn’t said all those things now.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  He said: ‘I thought it would have struck you at once. You seemed so anxious on the phone and I thought you were thinking about it then.’

  She stared at him, her eyes enlarged by anger, and every steady. ‘You don’t mean to tell me you knew, when you phoned?’

  He stammered: ‘I knew he was flying tonight. I didn’t know it was his aircraft that was in trouble. It’s still not absolutely certain, as a matter of fact. Why?’
>
  ‘Nothing.’ She seemed very remote. ‘I supposed I must have sensed it all the time.’ She switched on that glare again. ‘You probably did too. If so, you’re very sick indeed.’

  He looked blank.

  ‘You don’t understand, do you?’

  ‘How about explaining?’

  She went slowly toward the door. ‘I’ll leave you to work it out. It’s quite simple really.’ She opened the door, and spoke without looking back. ‘You know the only thing you’re really good at, in your present twisted state?’

  He felt unbearably tense, but couldn’t speak.

  She turned back for a moment, and saw the question in his eyes. She felt no pity for him. She never had. ‘Hating!’ she said, and left.

  *

  As the door clicked shut there came the tidal wave. Fleming was submerged in the terror of its submarine grip, and found his breath was caught. Then, the flotsam of disintegrated memory rose upon the crests of brainwaves in a wild sea of torment too long contained. And, after the writhing summit of snarling surf, the gaping trough below.

  Fleming clutched his hands to his head and tried not to scream. Yet there was a scream within him; a sudden snapping of cables whose tensile strength failed against the pressure of the bursting crate of cancerous cargo.

  He was aware of staggering around the room. He wanted to escape from that bare place, but suddenly there seemed to be no door.

  Memory matched this claustrophobic concept.

  Don’t move! Don’t move, for God’s sake!

  Jimmy Truman, the blond-haired womaniser, cocksure pilot who knew everything. Jimmy Truman trying to hold him down in the captain’s seat and shouting hysterically. Jimmy Truman, lover of Julie, betrayer of men.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  Fleming tried to heave himself out of the flying seat, but Truman had him pinned down, and the cockpit contracted as if it were trying to turn his brain inside out.

  And Jimmy’s enlarged face, distorted by fear and alarm, suddenly very close to his and then suddenly very far away.

  And the streaking fire which had caught in number three engine and smeared across the whole trailing edge of the starboard wing.

  And then, mingled with this, the memory of Gregg.

  Gregg sat at his desk and looked grim. He hated what he was having to say.

  He was a large man, who suffered both from asthma and arthritis. Most of the time he dismissed both these maladies with a sort of defiant contempt; but at this moment the asthma was audible in his voice, which, from the anxiety of having to hurt another man, had become a breathy croak. ‘It’s no good tormenting yourself about cowardice, Fleming. If it had been that we would have known a long time ago.’

  Fleming stood by the window, overwhelmed by unfaceable truth. Outside, the scene was so ordinary. The traffic continued to glide, unheard up here, along the Strand. A row of buses stopped at a pedestrian-crossing. Two people and a dog ambled across, while a blister of cars built up behind the buses, their roofs heliographing flashes of sunlight translated into the colours of the paintwork.

  Gregg stood up, rather slowly. He was indeed a giant of a man. He limped slowly across the room and put a hand on the windowsill in order to steady himself. He stood there silently until the pedestrian-crossing was clear and the car roofs jostled forward and the blister disseminated.

  Fleming said: ‘Don’t tell me I have a fine record, for God’s sake.’

  Gregg ignored this. ‘The thing that counts is the doctor’s report. You can’t possibly fly. You must see that.’

  Fleming glanced at him. ‘Does the doctor explain in his report exactly why I chose that moment to panic?’

  ‘Curiously enough, the doctor is much more concerned with how you reacted after you got down, than with how you reacted in the air.’

  ‘You mean after Truman got the plane down.’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Did he . . . explain what this meant?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then don’t you think I should know?’

  Gregg walked painfully to a cabinet where he kept the drinks. He poured two large scotches before replying. Then, handing a glass to Fleming, he said; ‘It would be bad for you to see that report.’

  Fleming grimaced satirically as he drank. ‘As bad as that?’

  ‘It would be out of context.’

  ‘But not sufficiently out of context to ground me on.’

  ‘I think the doctor would be willing to discuss it with you. In fact, to be blunt, he feels that you should see a psychiatrist . . .’

  ‘Out of the question.’

  ‘I know. And I’m not pressing it. I believe you can sort yourself out, given time. But don’t fool yourself about one thing, Fleming. You are quite unfit to fly and it would be dangerous and irresponsible to do so.’ Gregg looked at him directly. ‘Even if the Ministry doesn’t ground you officially.’

  ‘Are you firing me? That’s what it sounds like.’

  ‘No. You’re too valuable to the company. The work you did on Jet-Fours shows conclusively that you could be invaluable to us as a development engineer. I hired you as a two-thread man and in a way the other string to your bow is the most useful because it is the least usual . . . I mean, it isn’t every pilot who has an inventive engineering mind. It’s a useful combination when it comes to practical considerations of design.’

  ‘Thanks for the accolade.’

  ‘Don’t be bitter, Robert. It’s such a waste of time. Be practical . . . I discussed the whole matter with the Board this morning. If you stay—and of course I hope you will—you will only have to accept a small cut in salary.’

  ‘You are generous; but my position here is too compromised.’

  ‘Then you’re running away. I didn’t think you’d do that.’

  ‘All right—I’m running away.’

  ‘What do you plan to do, then?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’ll go abroad.’

  ‘You won’t help yourself that way . . . I must say, Ken Woodford will be very disappointed.’

  Fleming looked at him sharply. ‘Does Ken know about this?’

  ‘Not a thing. I deliberately manipulated things so that he wasn’t at the board meeting. I also asked my colleagues not to mention it to him.’

  ‘Thank you for that. Ken has followed my flying career all the way through. I wouldn’t like him to know . . . what happened up there. Though I’m afraid the story will be all over London.’

  ‘I’ll try and see it doesn’t circulate in Bresham, anyway.’

  Fleming finished his drink and laughed suddenly. ‘What a triumph for Jimmy Truman! He has proved me both a coward and an invalid. Invalids don’t fly. What more could he have?’

  Gregg walked stiffly back to his desk and lowered himself cautiously into the chair. But the pain on his face had nothing whatever to do with the protests registered by nerves which signalled the arthritic ache.

  ‘I see. And do you think I enjoy being an “invalid” myself? I haven’t been allowed to hold a licence for five years.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to sound like that. In any case it’s not the same thing. What happened to you wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘I don’t see why you have to be quite so brutal with yourself, Robert. You’re not the first pilot who has been betrayed by sheer nervous exhaustion.’

  ‘And by a fellow pilot.’

  Gregg’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Truman? You blame him for it?’

  ‘I read his report.’

  ‘Did you think it unfair or inaccurate?’

  ‘I can’t be sure. I don’t remember it all clearly enough.’

  Gregg’s honest eyes could not be evaded. ‘That isn’t why you hate Jimmy Truman. Is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure how much you know,’ said Fleming cautiously.

  Gregg sensed he wanted to unload. If this was to be permitted, Gregg had to make sure nothing be said that would afterwards pile on the self-humiliation. Here was a
man who had been stripped of most things . . . he could not be allowed to let go of his pride as well. Gregg proceeded on the yellow light. ‘What is your opinion of Truman as a pilot?’

  ‘First rate. But I think he has his cracking point too.’

  ‘Most people have. That’s what you’ve got to learn in assessing yourself. Unfortunately, none of us is superhuman. Still, I’m interested to know where you think Truman’s vulnerable point lies.’

  Fleming gestured. ‘If I told you that it would merely be a way of hitting back at him.’

  ‘What difference does it make? Didn’t you know that Truman has signed up as a line pilot?’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Statelines.’

  ‘I didn’t know. Whose idea was that?’

  Gregg smiled a fraction and looked out of the window. ‘We talked it over between us.’

  Fleming looked at him sharply and said: ‘I see . . . I just hope it wasn’t for my benefit.’

  ‘You can take it that it was not.’

  There came a silence. During this Fleming walked restlessly around the room, picking up things and putting them down again. When he spoke it was as if he were questioning a situation rather than reporting it. ‘Jimmy Truman is a womaniser. He doesn’t care whom he hurts and very soon he’s going to hurt Julie. He places all women on the same level which means really that he doesn’t like them—he only wants them. Flying with Jimmy was often tedious in the extreme because I had to hear all about his latest conquests.’

  ‘Natural enough for a young man.’

  ‘Yes, but that isn’t all. The man is weak. He doesn’t fly for the sake of flying. He sees himself as a Greek god; and flying is an act of vanity. In that sense he is narcissistic.’

  ‘You’re probably right. But that doesn’t make him an unreliable pilot. On the contrary; in order to maintain the role he must live up to it, How does it make him vulnerable?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I wouldn’t care to be flying with him if that image should suddenly be destroyed.’