The Higher They Fly

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  As he covered the last few feet he felt a sharp thong of icy air lashing his skin and little globules of ice formed as his eyes watered from sheer cold. He was beginning to revise his opinion. There had to be a hole somewhere to account for the funnel of wind that created vortices in and around the skeletal cross-membering through which he had to pick a route.

  He pushed the lamp into the systems bay and eased his way through behind it.

  What he saw was enough to freeze the heart of any pilot. And though he did not feel the full value of fear as the scene was photographed on his cortex, he felt a throbbing sensation inside his head which somehow made the situation hard to assess at face value.

  On the Jet-Four the wheels folded inwards when you retracted them into the aircraft’s shell. Each of the two legs carried four wheels arranged in bogie formation; and these bogies also pivoted through a right-angle as they were raised, so that when they were locked in the ‘up’ position the two bogies almost met, thereby forming two lines of four wheels, evenly spaced. The bay into which they folded in this neat manner was immediately below where Truman was standing just then.

  Normally the compartment in which the wheels were stowed was not visible. But part of it now was; and through the gash in the metal which revealed what had happened Truman lowered the lamp.

  One wheel was missing from the port-side bogie. But that was nothing. The smashed remains of the wheel rim had cut clean through the flooring and had taken with them an assembly which controlled the gear. Bits of tyre tread had been flung around the upper compartment where Truman was.

  He picked up a piece of the rubber garbage and gripped it tightly in his hand. He said ‘God, what a mess!’ and laughed outright. It was funny, somehow, that so carefully planned a piece of mechanism could go so utterly haywire. A sick joke.

  He made a more detailed study of the situation, feeling perfectly calm now. The initial shock of discovery had passed. We’ll get it down somehow, he thought.

  He burrowed back through the tunnel much faster, leaving the lamp behind. It cast long eerie shadows from where he had left it, swinging with the aircraft’s motion, in the systems bay. At one point in his journey back the aeroplane was caught in a downdraught and lurched, not violently, but enough to knock his face against the sharp edge of an electric cable duct. His face was numb from cold and he hardly felt it.

  Two minutes later he climbed through the floor hatch, closed it, and stumbled stiffly back into the cockpit. His legs seemed frozen almost rigid and it was difficult to operate his muscles.

  Crooke turned around and said: ‘How’s the war? You look as if you’ve had a rough time.’

  Someone handed him some coffee. He felt a little dazed by the cold, or at least by something which wasn’t definable. Crooke said: ‘Take your time.’

  Truman explained through lips half-frozen. ‘We lost a wheel, but that isn’t all. Part of the gear was thrown up through the floor of the systems bay. It’s made a hell of a mess. There wasn’t any drop in hydraulic pressure, was there, Geoff?’

  ‘No. But the gauge is upstream of the selector.’

  Crooke looked at Truman hard. They all felt the tension of that moment. ‘How much damage is there?’

  *

  Mr Valentine waited impatiently for his bell to be answered. He didn’t like the way he was being treated. Didn’t like it at all. What he liked even less, though, was the unnerving suspense. Why were people climbing in and out of that hatch? What did it mean? They should let the passengers know, and at once. He should have flown with Link Lines. He always had. Whatever had possessed him to fly with this company? Obviously they didn’t know what they were doing.

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  Valentine looked up, and saw a steward standing there with a tray. Sharply, he said: ‘Where are the stewardesses.?’

  ‘I think they’re busy, sir.’

  ‘I thought their job was to look after the passengers.’

  ‘That’s my job as well. If there’s anything I can get you I’d be glad to be of assistance.’

  Why were these people so damnably polite? They were just trying to cover themselves. Well, just wait till they slip up, that’s all . . .! ‘Get me a large whisky.’

  ‘Very well, sir.’

  The steward went up to the galley. Jill was in there. She said: ‘Hallo, Eddie—who are you going to murder?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  ‘Oh, Mr Valentine.’

  ‘I know his type,’ said Eddie, reaching for the order. ‘He’s liable to cause us a packet of trouble . . . as if we don’t have enough troubles already.’

  ‘Don’t let him get you down.’

  ‘No,’ said Eddie, and stared at her. ‘And talking of getting down . . .?’

  Jill said: ‘Jimmy Truman has just gone up to the flight deck. He’s been down there.’ She pointed to the hatch.

  ‘Fancy him spoiling his uniform,’ said Eddie. ‘Oh, I’m sorry . . . you’re keen on him, aren’t you?’

  ‘It so happens,’ said Jill, indignantly. ‘Why did you say that?’

  ‘Oh, you know how I say things,’ said the steward and left the galley, pleased with his exit line.

  *

  Crooke pulled at his beard good and hard. He had been listening to Truman’s assessment of the damage. The news displeased him. ‘Which means,’ he said, as if annoyed with his opponent during a game of chess, ‘that we’re probably committed to a belly landing or ditching her. How lovely.’

  Geoff looked across at young Perkins and thought suddenly of his own adopted boy, who one day would probably number among an aircrew such as this one and might suddenly betray the same signs of disciplined fear as Perkins showed in eyes too honest to conceal anything. A smile passed between them. It was a pact. Perkins was not going to show his feelings because Geoff Simmonds knew. There were some fifteen years between them—sufficient for the game of father and son until their fate be known.

  Crooke glanced up at Truman and ordered: ‘Go and get your face fixed up by one of the girls. You look a bloody awful mess.’

  ‘My face?’

  ‘Mug, physog, or fortune—call it what you will—it’s covered in blood. Have it patched up and get back quickly. We’ve got some thinking to do.’ Crooke forgot about Truman’s face and turned to answer the radio.

  Truman didn’t move for a second or two. The feeling was just beginning to come back to the skin of his face and he felt a warm dampness there. He put a hand up to his left cheek; then studied the hand which the blood had wetted.

  He stared at his hand for a moment, then walked rather slowly aft to the forward galley. He found both the girls in there. Jill said: ‘Hey, you’ve cut yourself about a bit!’

  Susan said: ‘Want me to fix it?’

  ‘No, it’s all right,’ said Jill quickly, ‘I’ll do it.’

  Susan smiled.

  Jill said to Truman: ‘We’d better go to work in the toilet.’ She took a first-aid box from the rack and led the way in. ‘How did you do it, darling?’

  They reached the toilet and were both able to see themselves and each other in the mirror.

  Truman first looked at Jill’s reflection and saw the warmth in her eyes. She was unashamedly aroused by him, because she had a chance to do something for him. Just a small thing; for it was merely a long, shallow cut that ran down his face from just below the left eye to the chin. Truman saw in her eyes that indefinable film which meant possessiveness and something more.

  Then he shifted his glance to take in his own image. And as he looked at it, and saw the blood and the jagged abrasion and the slowly changing expression in his own face, Jill watched and she also saw the change.

  At first she didn’t understand. It was not easy. The scar was neither serious nor dishonourably acquired. In a few days it would go.

  Only Truman saw in his mirrored face something else. He saw that his beauty would not be permanent. He saw that he would grow older, as all men must do. He saw the slow, inev
itable processes of chemistry which would gradually deprive him of a perfect body.

  He saw the fable of the Greek god resolved into the unarguable fact of mortal deterioration. He saw that the duration of his life would be limited, and that the span of his love-life would be foreshortened because of his dependence, not on the two rings on his sleeve, but the five rings of the Olympiad.

  The glaze which had softened Jill’s eyes disseminated. Truman’s gaze darted from his own bloodstained reproduction to the young, zestful picture of a girl alive. He watched, fascinated and tormented, as the understanding born—ironically enough—of his own lust, transmitted to her a full and sudden knowledge that had all the while been latent. Her own zest would survive the revelation; but at this moment it drained away from her body and was replaced by a limpness, due to a fear she only began to understand in these few seconds.

  But she knew its roots. She knew why she had spoken, a few minutes back, to Susan in just that way . . . I don’t know what I mean.

  She was able to collect herself sufficiently to force a smile. For an important member of the crew to fall apart just then was unthinkable—she had to sustain him if she could. Brightly she said: ‘Let’s get the blood off first. It’s nothing much.’

  ‘I know.’

  His expression as he said this was naked. Jill tried to avoid his eyes as she bathed the cut. She knew this one would heal; but it was the inner contusion that she would never be able to reach. Nor did she want to; for she could feel no love for a man who only loved himself.

  *

  When Jimmy Truman returned to the flight deck he felt there was something unreal about it.

  Everything seemed so oddly calm and yet not as before. It was a detached calm, and detached from him.

  He stood in the entrance for half a minute. Nobody was talking. Crooke was apparently deep in thought, but continued to fly the aeroplane manually. The air was smoother now, though they had remained at ten thousand feet. Crooke had trimmed the plane accurately and contented himself with one hand only on the control yoke. In the other he held some sheets of data, which he was studying with severe eyes which were totally absorbed.

  Roger Perkins was watching the two needles on the dial of the direction finding equipment. He had a bearing on a weather ship and compared the angle subtended with another bearing. He was intent and dedicated. The remaining unpeeled banana lay on the ocean chart. It did not seem incongruous.

  Across the cockpit from him, hunched yet capable-looking in the crimson glow from the instrument lights, Geoff sat in front of his panel of iridescent dials. To a layman they would have meant little; to him they were as grand in their diagnostic scope as all the apparatus of a medical man used simultaneously to study the workings of an organic system.

  To Geoff, the Jet-Four was likewise a living thing; and its pulse, blood-pressure, reflexes and respiration were accurately signalled through the medium of electronics. Geoff was a general practitioner, looking for patterns. Things which might seem insignificant when considered individually meant something much more when viewed in conjunction with other symptoms. Thus a flight engineer can associate a change in the thirst of an over-greedy turbine with a shift in its running temperature, and interpret the combined facts so as to produce the correct answer. But that answer is provided by his brain, and seldom by a single instrument. A doctor does not glance at a thermometer and say: ‘Your temperature is a hundred and two. Therefore you have gastric enteritis.’

  The physiological changes that might take place in flight seldom go unnoticed for long; but the one apparatus lacking from a flight engineer’s panel is the radiologist’s means of observing bone-structure; Geoff’s equipment did not include an X-ray machine which could have told him of a compound fracture which did not affect the Jet-Four’s superb virtuosity in flight. Only instinct had told him that the indicator bearing on the state of the undercarriage had lied to the captain.

  Truman fingered the sticking plaster that had altered the feel of his face. As he moved forward to his seat beside Crooke he still had his hand to his cheek. It rested loosely there, the fingers contouring the overlay of plaster in an uneasy caress.

  Crooke said: ‘Okay now?’

  ‘Yes, thanks.’

  The captain’s eyes fleeted into their right hand corners of vision. Truman caught the look and increased the pressure of his hand against the dressing.

  Crooke frowned, and looked ahead again. What the devil was this? Was Jimmy Truman scared? Or what? There was something very odd about his behaviour which didn’t suggest he was simply in physical pain.

  The matter had intruded at the worst possible time. Crooke had a decision to take.

  It wouldn’t be a snap decision. Often flying demands an instant choice between two evils of different degree; and the trick was to decide the balance. In such a contingency you thought fast and you acted fast.

  This was different. There were a number of things to take into account and there was time to consider them in detail. A snap decision in such circumstances would be merely hysterical. Few captains who ever make four rings with a respectable airline have that embarrassing ingredient in their repertoire of reactions. Crooke had only once known true panic in his life; and any pilot is entitled to that, once in his lifetime. For Crooke it had been necessary. He had emerged from it as a young man; and it had been a truly painful emergence. But because it had been a necessity it had done the opposite from destroying; it had strengthened the main spar of his character and given it endurance. For that reason it did not matter to him now nor at any future time.

  But if Truman chose this occasion to panic it would seriously affect their chances of making whatever type of landing should ultimately be decided upon. A team of four cannot stand a weak member at the optimum point of need.

  And if this was panic, what was the brand?

  Crooke knew the key to this problem did not lie in reassurance. Young Perkins, who was afraid but not in any sense uncontrolled, might respond to the gruffly disguised sympathy of a highly experienced flight engineer. But Perkins wasn’t at the controls, would be the least vital component in the assembly at the time of landing, and did not lie with his personality.

  The captain thought back on what had once been said to him by a colleague and felt the uneasy telegraph of intuition. If the unwelcome message was correct, a new element had crept in which added to the complexities of the task ahead. The depth of the problem had to be sounded and in good time.

  So Crooke said: ‘Jimmy, tune the VHF to one-two-six zero. If we turn back I shall want to talk to Shannon on VHF as soon as we’re in range.’ This was an unnecessary and premature instruction, but it had its purpose.

  Obediently but without verbal confirmation, Truman raised an arm and adjusted the switch on the roof. The indicator in front of Crooke clicked through a succession of digits and settled at a figure.

  ‘I said one-two-six zero,’ said Crooke sharply.

  ‘That’s what I selected.’

  ‘Take a look.’

  Truman did so, with a curiously insubordinate air. He made no move to correct the setting.

  Crooke said: ‘You should know the Shannon frequency by now. What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Damn you!’ exploded the man. ‘I made a mistake.’

  Crooke contained himself with calculated care. ‘Obviously I misheard you,’ he said. The inflection contained a warning but not a charge. What Truman said and did now was of the utmost importance.

  Both Perkins and Geoff had become aware of the tight drama that was playing itself out in front of them. Perkins had looked around; Geoff fixed his eyes on the cabin temperature gauge and stopped breathing.

  Truman corrupted himself in one sentence. ‘I do not like people who pick on me,’ he said, and turned to face Crooke directly.

  The look had been intended as a challenge. It failed, because Truman saw in a second that no captain could forgive categorical insolence. It failed, because there was nothing in T
ruman’s eyes which had the power of challenge; and it therefore failed most of all because he had to avert them.

  Crooke said nothing at all. He reached up over his head and selected the correct frequency. Truman sat tense, and out of the corner of his eye watched the numbers on the indicator click into place.

  Dimly, Truman wondered what had led him to tune the emergency frequency in error.

  The captain stared straight ahead, as if he were looking through the windscreen. Actually he was observing Truman, whose face was reflected in it. Truman would never have thought of contemplating a mirror now—even an inadvertent one—so he was quite unaware that his every facial expression was being observed.

  He sat, instead, writhing within himself and fighting off something very akin to a childish tantrum. He heard Perkins call out a change of heading, and was conscious of Crooke putting the aircraft in a gentle turn. But all this belonged to a different world.

  At the same time he began to think more usefully. Personal defeat was one thing—survival was another. He recognised that he had placed himself beyond trust. The duplicate set of controls before him were as immune from him as was Jill. In a sense they both meant the same thing; and he was deprived of two acts on one count . . . his crushed peacock feathers.

  Apart from Perkins’ navigational advisary, the embarrassed silence persisted in the cockpit. Truman finally broke it.

  ‘I . . . I want to apologise.’

  Crooke felt inwardly sick but said: ‘There isn’t time for that. You can do it on the ground.’

  ‘I wanted to suggest something.’

  ‘It won’t alter the contents of my report.’

  ‘I realise that.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘There’s a man called Fleming.’

  Crooke knew the story well enough. He turned his head and remarked: ‘I’d thought of that but I hardly expected the suggestion to come from you.’

  ‘He was at the airport when we took off.’

  Crooke raised his eyebrows. ‘That doesn’t mean he’ll be there now.’

  ‘He lives in Colnbrook. If he’s gone home they’d be able to get him back there in twenty minutes.’