The Higher They Fly

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  If this contained a hint of a question she didn’t take it up. ‘Why is everybody odd?’ she said. ‘There must be someone who isn’t.’

  ‘It’s a matter of degree, Julie. You always look for too much.’

  ‘I don’t look for less than I need.’ She sauntered back to the door. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?’

  He grinned at her. ‘You’ve already done it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve never known you fail to make an impression yet. It does have a certain reviving effect.’

  She tossed away her reply, but there was a sadness in it. ‘I’m glad I’m able to do something for somebody,’ she said with a hint of a smile.

  When she left the room it was somehow in the manner of a child in disgrace.

  Fleming’s smile persisted long after Julie left. Something had passed between them which he had never noticed before. He tried to define it.

  And then he thought he saw.

  Julie, despite everything—despite her cruelty and selfishness and utter indifference to anything or anyone except on those occasions when it suited her—was the only woman he had ever known who had never permitted him the catastrophe of self-pity.

  And with the coffee she had also brought something else—the one piece of news he really needed to know . . .

  I hear Jimmy Truman has cracked up.

  . . . The other end of the see-saw had gone down. And Julie had told him—consciously or otherwise—on purpose.

  *

  You could almost feel the angle changing. You could almost feel yourself rising with the momentum gained from the desire to survive; upward on the see-saw of which Julie was the pivot on which the principles depended.

  You felt yourself climbing steadily into the sky, so the horizon changed and with it the perspective. You looked down and noted the shift of emphasis in things . . . the grass receding and the significance of thoughts swung through an angle until what had meant one thing on the ground meant another in the air . . .

  *

  You look across at Truman. He seems at ease now, as always at the start of a test flight. The times you have seen him falter have been high up at cruising altitudes, when he felt too far removed from the scene of his maximum influence upon other people, and upon their women. Do you detect, in him, any acknowledgement of the fact that you had faltered yourself, only to recover when the engines started?

  You hand over control to him, and observe his reactions carefully. He flies perfectly, and his voice as he talks on the RT to the Tower is, as it always is, level and to the point. Occasionally he looks at you. Is he puzzled? If so, he doesn’t show it. He smiles and points upward as a big American bomber refuels from another aircraft in mid-air. It is a beautifully timed operation. The thirsty drinker flies behind the heavily laden cow aircraft, but just below her. The suckling connects with the fuel pipe, and just as they sweep across to your starboard beam, the cow indicates her permission by means of a flashing green light. Then mother and daughter swing off in perspective, until they are two small smudges on a horizon of alto-stratus.

  On the previous flight you have called Truman’s attention to the engine temperature gauges, which he can see easily by just glancing round at the flight engineer’s panel. During recent flights you have not carried an engineer. But you noted on two occasions that the inboard engines were running a little hot in the climb. On reporting this, you had been told that an alteration would be made to the intakes and fairings. Today, before take-off, you have been told all this has been done. But you are still alert to the overheating problem. A modification can have unforeseen consequences.

  You remind Truman, now, to keep an eye on those gauges and he smiles and looks around at them and gives thumbs up. Then . . . then . . .

  *

  The memory blanked out again. It was as if someone had turned back the corner of a dust sheet to reveal what was underneath, only to replace it again before a mental picture could assemble itself fully and register what was there.

  Fleming found himself standing by the naked map-board, as he tried to recall the rest of it. The map-board whose red-studded drawing pins still remained where Julie had pressed them in, four hours ago. It seemed a very long time back.

  While he looked at it, he again heard that disturbing cadence in his ears; the musical sequence that wouldn’t resolve itself but just kept on torturing him with the first chord of the Amen.

  Why was the organist unable to plant his hands on the keys which would finalise the progression and so break the tension?

  There seemed no solution, at first. Fleming felt a deplorable degree of tension mounting inside his head, as if someone had screwed the lid tight on to a pressure-cooker whose valve had stuck. The steam built up inside, threatening to blow the lid.

  The demented chord grew louder . . .

  Hands shaking from the strain, Fleming tried to light a cigarette. His lighter wouldn’t work. He tried again and again, flicking the flint-wheel but getting no spark.

  He hunted around for a box of matches, and finding them, struck a match and observed the flame, till it had burned down almost to his finger tips. Then he lit the cigarette, walked to the window and stood perfectly still.

  He looked down, and it was as if he expected to see the pedestrian-crossing, in broad daylight, and two people and a dog holding up the traffic . . .

  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.

  Truman? You blame him for it?

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

  Fleming pulled at his cigarette, and remembered how the people on the crossing had ambled across so slowly, and the sun had been flashed from the roofs of cars whose drivers’ waited with unusual patience . . .

  I’m interested to know where you think Truman’s vulnerable point lies.

  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?

  Whose idea was that? . . . I just hope it wasn’t for my benefit.

  You can take it that it was not.

  Fleming knocked some ash off the cigarette and found his hand was now trembling violently, so that the debris missed the ashtray and fell to the floor.

  And, most of all, he remembered Gregg’s face as he had said:

  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 . . .

  That was the sentence! It sounded wrong, yet in another sense it rang true!

  How could this be?

  The smell of burning bakelite . . .

  Fleming drew again at the cigarette, then exhaled and watched the smoke-column rise, swirling, to the ceiling.

  The taste was acrid. There was no mistaking that smell . . . He looked across at Truman. ‘Can you smell anything?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Smells like insulation. Check the electrics panel.’

  Truman twisted around and did so. ‘Everything seems normal. Are you sure about this?’

  Fleming breathed in and out slowly. ‘It must be my imagination. Engine temperatures okay?’

  ‘Right as rain.’

  ‘All right. I must have had burnt bacon for breakfast!’

  Truman smiled appropriately and looked toward the specks in the sky. It was still possible to make out that the fattest of the two blobs was the tanker. The aircraft drinking from it was slimmer and slightly underneath.

  ‘I wonder what it’s like,’ said Truman, ‘refuelling in mid-air?’

  ‘It takes some pretty accurate flying, especially making the initial contact with the tanker.’

  ‘Ever done any?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  Truman looked ag
ain in the direction the two aeroplanes had taken, but they were now invisible in the distant haze. He said: ‘Funny, isn’t it?—to depend on another aircraft for your very existence! Doesn’t it remind you of something?’

  ‘I suppose so. But it’s merely an obvious echo of an animal process. I expect it strikes a lot of people like that.’

  Truman persisted, and he spoke with such avidness that it made Fleming look at him hard. ‘I’d like to try it—just to see what it feels like!’

  Fleming laughed it off, feeling embarrassed. ‘Back to the womb, and all that. Bit late, isn’t it?’ As a rib he added: ‘You’re a big boy now!’

  Fleming felt a sudden jerk on the controls, and thought they’d caught an eddy from the other aircrafts’ wake. But a discreet look across at Truman made him think again. The man was gripping the control wheel till his knuckles were white from pressure.

  Fleming didn’t say anything, but followed Truman’s movements by feeling them on his own wheel. The tension in Jimmy’s hands was very evident. Fleming placed his feet on the rudder’s pedals. You could feel it there, too. Truman was using rudder against opposite aileron. The effect was to crab the aeroplane—only slightly, but enough to make the Jet-Four squirm, as if irritated by undeserved ham-handedness. She was in a climb, and she didn’t like this kind of thing.

  Fleming said quietly: ‘Jimmy, you’re crossing your controls.’

  Truman didn’t reply, but nevertheless let go of the rudder and levelled the wings. Eventually he said without looking round: ‘I suppose you’d give anything to get even with me.’

  ‘No. I’m so used to getting a very high standard of flying from you that I was surprised a little. That’s all.’

  Truman didn’t appear to take this in. ‘You’re one of those people,’ he continued, ‘who make a mess of your own life and then blame everyone else for it.’

  Flying or no, Fleming felt it best to have this out. Often men say things in flight that they would omit on the ground, and this was an interesting slant on Truman. It is impossible to fly usefully through a series of tests with a companion who is seething to let himself go and it was best, on the face of it, to let Truman do so.

  For one thing, there was some truth in what he was saying. Fleming recognised it; and even though this was hardly the time or the place for a co-pilot to raise personal issues they still had ten thousand feet to climb and plenty of fuel to burn. So Fleming said nothing, but kept his eyes on the turn-and-slip indicator for further signs of skewing.

  In a swept-wing aircraft this is something you particularly have to watch. As long as the lift in those big aerofoils is even, all is serene. But if one is endowed with more lift than the other, and the rudder is used to make up the difference in effect, the situation—if you are in a climb—is self-increasing. And if you let it develop long enough you’ll just go over; and nor will you be the first to have done so. No machine in the world is so unforgiving, so unwilling to offer a second chance, than a modern jetliner toward the pilot who is an aerodynamic buffoon. Fleming, well aware of this, kept his eyes glued to the turn-and-slip.

  It was a weird thing, but you could exactly gauge the degree of Truman’s tension, at any given moment, by observing the extent to which the two vital pointers on the dial disagreed.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ said Truman, ‘I think Julie is a little pig.’ He said this as though they had been discussing her all the time.

  Fleming felt little prickles of fury inoculating his cheeks. But he spoke calmly. ‘I wouldn’t say things like that, Jimmy, if I were you.’

  Turn to the left, skid to the right . . .

  Fleming applied the necessary pressures to bring the needles centre. Truman didn’t notice this, thinking the movements to be his own.

  ‘Pig!’ repeated Truman. Then, suggestively—‘Not that I mind of course . . .’

  With brittle self-control, Fleming managed. ‘I thought we were discussing ourselves. Leave her out of it.’

  ‘You don’t want to hear the truth about her, do you, Robert?’

  Fleming looked across, and met the man’s eyes. He found them seething. Fleming said: ‘And what’s the truth about you, my friend?’

  Turn to the right, slip to the right—a violent, dangerous misalignment of controls.

  Fleming corrected instantly, easing forward on the column a little too shallow the climb and pick up the speed. Still he made no comment about Truman’s flying. Still Truman noticed nothing.

  ‘Or how about you?’ said Truman.

  ‘Go ahead. There are no eavesdroppers up here. Or does that spoil it for you?’

  Truman said: ‘Trying to taunt me won’t get you anywhere.’

  ‘Quite right. And since we’re now at our cleared altitude, I suggest we level off and start the scheduled tests.’

  Truman laughed outright. When he spoke he spewed out the words as if they were waste-products being flushed from a lavatory. The spite in his voice was commensurate with the degree of inner distortion which twisted the words out of a system suddenly working the way it was built.

  ‘You suggest! Is that the way a . . . captain gives his orders? Or is that the way you made love to Julie . . . “I suggest”——!’

  By a tremendous effort of will Fleming just managed to keep himself in check. ‘Right,’ he said, in a voice which sounded more controlled than he felt, ‘I’ll take control.’

  ‘That sounded almost like an order.’

  ‘It was.’

  ‘What will you do if I don’t carry it out?’ He kept his hands glued to the wheel and smiled thinly across the cockpit.

  ‘Come on, Jimmy. You heard.’

  Truman said: ‘I refuse.’

  It was the more startling because at that instant he sounded so like Julie.

  And it was also the moment when the smell of acrid smoke became an undeniable fact and something behind the instrument panel crackled and confirmed what Fleming had sensed a few minutes before.

  One thing Fleming had never been taught during his flying career was how to deal with madmen. But being challenged by this particular man, within the compressed triangle that recent events had constructed, came as a shock.

  He knew that it was through a weakness in his own personality that he had allowed a dangerous personal situation to develop in flight. Momentarily he was cowed by an overwhelming sense of guilt that this should have happened. But part of him recovered and he rapped:

  ‘Electrics fire! . . .’ He began to rattle off the drill.

  But it was not an electrics fire. The modification carried out to the inboard engines had had unforeseen consequences, as was discovered later. Fleming could not have known that the smell of fire, already torching in the fuel system, had been carried down to the cockpit via the air conditioning, from the compressor driven by number three engine.

  Fleming yelled: ‘Let go the controls!’

  Truman was looking dead ahead—petrified.

  ‘I . . . can’t!’

  Fleming realised in an instant that to fight the man would be disastrous. He hesitated for a moment, considering the possibility of cutting-in the automatic pilot. Then rejected this because if Truman fought that too he might do even greater damage.

  Fleming still couldn’t see where the smoke was coming from. He bawled ‘Hold her straight and level!’ and made to climb out of his seat.

  Truman took his hands off the yoke and flung himself on top of him. ‘Don’t move! Don’t move, for God’s sake!’

  ‘Don’t be a damn fool! I’m going to check the panel. Get back in your seat and set the auto-pilot. Fast!’

  Truman stared at Fleming, face to face. And everything seemed to have drained out of the man’s eyes, leaving them hollow and helpless and utterly dead. Two meaningless pinpricks surrounded by pale blue.

  All the strength had gone to his body, and he held Fleming pinned. Fleming couldn’t even reach the lever which would engage the auto-pilot; and the aircraft, mercifully stable up to now, would not
stay like that forever.

  Fear came to Fleming’s rescue. Fear, that commander of hidden answers, the voice that saves through despair of death and waste and destruction, told Fleming, in tones that would have outfrozen dry ice, how to reincarnate a frail myth. For only thus could he restore the mind of a pilot whose body trussed-down his own.

  Fleming said: ‘Truman, I’m finished. You’ve got to get us out of this!’ In a voice calculated to convey dilemma he added: ‘You see, I don’t know what to do!’

  Once more, the translucent eyes. The drinking in, the borrowing. Power ebbed into Jimmy Truman’s emptied soul; and slowly the eyes changed, as the psychotic lust of the vampire for supremacy recharged itself and was reborn. I’ve won, said the eyes.

  That was five seconds before number three engine encrusted itself in a wild blowtorch of flame.

  Truman was captain, from the right-hand seat. Alerted by the fire warning lights, he failed in no action. He gave the orders as Fleming awaited them, so that they were carried out as swiftly—or more so—as they would have been had Fleming overtly retained command instead of reversing it to suit the speaking slot-machine in the co-pilot’s seat.

  But during the descent, Fleming forgot. He forgot he was playing a part for the sake of their survival, and for the preservation of four million pounds’-worth of aeroplane.

  Obsessed by self-accusation, oppressed by the blueprint for fiasco which had begun to take shape on a hill in Wendover and culminated in an engine fire which should never have occurred, Fleming was deceived by his own device, and only remembered Truman’s supremacy.

  As they touched-down, perfectly, on three engines, the remaining one blackened by the fire they had quenched, Fleming felt sickened and disgraced. ‘I set out to fail,’ he thought to himself, as a judge pronouncing a sentence which had never been in doubt since the opening of the trial, ‘and I succeeded in my aim.’

  When he climbed out of the aircraft Fleming only knew that the airfield reeled around him. Merciful vertigo would help him forget. He let it embrace him fully.

  After all, it was a better excuse than the cowardice he thought he had to conceal . . .

  *

  Scrivens was looking at him. ‘Are you asleep?’ he asked.