Glide Path

by Arthur C. Clarke

  “Perhaps you English wouldn’t have SO many wars,” said Pat sweetly, “if you spent less time chasing foxes, and a little more keeping an eye on gangsters like Hitler.”

  That word “gangster,” Alan realized, left Pat wide open; but Dennis had used up his single flash of brilliance and missed the opportunity. Instead, he lost his temper.

  “We’ve done more to stop Hitler than anyone!” he retorted, truthfully enough. “As for keeping an eye on him, thank your lucky stars that we invented radar back in 1936. The only thing you contributed to it was the name.”

  This monumental injustice stung Pat to the quick.

  “Why,” he snorted, “we’ve got more physicists working at the Radiation Lab than you have in the whole of this lousy little island.”

  “Quite so,” drawled Dennis in his most infuriating manner. “You always confuse quantity with quality. If it’s big, or costs a lot, it must be good. That’s the American Way of Life.”

  “The trouble with you Limeys,” retorted Pat, “is that you’re jealous of—”

  How far this schoolboy quarrel would have gone, no one would ever know. For at that moment Professor Schuster, wearing his usual uniform of slacks, turtle-neck sweater, and flying jacket, emerged from his little room at the end of the long hut.

  It was the first time that Alan had seen him angry; indeed, it was the first time that anyone had seen him angry. He had even left his stick behind, and was supporting himself against the door with his right hand.

  At first he said nothing, but just looked, while silence fell abruptly upon the room. Then he said: “Come here, Pat,” and Pat went like a lamb.

  There was no one who outranked Dennis, so he was safe from reprimand, but he looked extremely uncomfortable, and for the next half hour was pointedly ignored by everybody.

  While Pat was receiving his rocket from the Professor, and Dennis was being sent to Coventry, Alan tackled Benny Schwartz, who was a mine of obscure and erudite information.

  “Benny,” he said, “who did invent radar? I always thought it was Watson-Watt.”

  Benny looked at him like a wise young owl.

  “It depends what you mean by invent,” he said. “You can thank Watson-Watt for the fact that England had the world’s most advanced radar at the beginning of the war. But a lot of people had described it long before then.”

  He thought for a moment, running through the card index in his well-ordered mind.

  “As far as I know,” he said, “the first accurate description of radar, complete with diagram, appeared in a dreadful but fascinating science-fiction novel called Ralph 124 C 41+; the pun in the title gives you a good idea of its literary quality. It was written by an American inventor named Hugo Gernsback, and you’ll never guess when.”

  “Well, when?” said Alan, as intended.

  “Nineteen-eleven, believe it or not,” answered Benny smugly, as if it settled the matter; and Alan was in no position to argue with him.

  Pat Connor was incarcerated with the Professor for no more than five minutes, but he emerged in a very subdued and thoughtful mood. It took him a full hour to return to his normal cheerful self, and the episode had taught everyone a lesson.

  Compared with the vivacious Dr. Wendt, who sometimes gave the impression of being everywhere at once, Schuster was so quiet and reserved that one could easily overlook him completely. He spent little time at the trucks; usually he was locked up, immersed in mysterious calculations, in the tiny cubicle at the end of the hut that served him both as bedroom and office.

  He emerged only for meals and crises; but there was no doubt at all who really ran the show.

  9

  Alan had been with the unit for almost a month before he had a chance of seeing the customer’s point of view. So far, he had managed to keep secret the fact that he had never been in the air, even on a five-bob joy-ride. Until now, he had had neither occasion nor opportunity to do so; like most of the Air Force, he was one of the humble penguins who helped to keep the flyers aloft.

  It was a good day for the test—a dull, drizzly afternoon with thick clouds forming a leaden roof only a thousand feet above the ground. The twin-engined, low-wing Anson was being fueled up at the dispersal point when Alan followed Flight Lieutenant Collins up the ladder and into the cramped fuselage. The interior smelled of oil, rubber, and a dozen other odors that Alan could not identify, yet were somehow businesslike and reassuring. But abruptly, as his nose unraveled the symphony of scents, he noticed a faint but unmistakable smell which no amount of scrubbing and disinfectant had been able to eliminate. It brought back, all too vividly, memories of stormy trips aboard the Channel Queen.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Dennis as he paused in the entrance.

  “Nothing,” lied Alan, “nothing at all.” He reminded himself that he had never been seasick, even in the roughest weather. That should be a good indication that his stomach would behave in the air.

  He listened and watched carefully as Dennis showed him how to attach and operate the parachute harness, then settled down in the seat immediately behind the Canadian Warrant Officer who was acting as copilot. There were no other passengers; though the ground crews and GCD operators often went up on joy rides when they were not wanted for other duties, this was hardly a day that promised pleasure, and Alan had the rear of the plane all to himself.

  While the cockpit drill was in progress, he listened over the intercom and tried to interpret what was happening. He knew very little about the detailed mechanics of flight—it was not his business, and he had picked up no more about it than would be gathered by anyone who had a general interest in engineering and technology. As Dennis went through the preflight routine, talking of flaps and boosts and revs, like a magician intoning a spell, it made Alan realize how utterly incomprehensible his own technical jargon must be to an outsider. He reminded himself, with some satisfaction, that Dennis would be completely baffled to hear him talking glibly of sweeps, triggers, clamps, gates, pip generators, main bangs, and all the ether picturesque terms in the lively language of radar.

  Alan did not often stop to wonder why he disliked Dennis, but his antipathy had been steadily growing ever since the pilot had joined the unit. Resentment of someone from a better social background was only one of the elements involved. Another—perhaps slightly more excusable—was the jealousy of one male for a more successful rival.

  The advent of the WAAFs had set all sorts of emotional cross currents swirling back and forth in the little world of GCD. There were now six operators with the unit, most of them girls in their teens, though one corporal was an old crone of twenty-three. With few exceptions, they were intelligent and attractive girls, and there were times when Alan found it a considerable strain being in close proximity to such large amounts of nubile womanhood, especially in these dimly lit surroundings.

  He never got to know their full names; they were simply Anne or Daphne or Iris. Their well-being in the midst of all these brutal and licentious radar technicians was the concern of a diminutive but fierce little Flight Officer who visited them every day, listened to their tales of woe, and then raised several kinds of hell if she thought that her poor little girls were being ill-treated.

  They very seldom were; on the contrary, in fact. Several romances, Platonic and otherwise, were already in full blast. Pat and Howard (Alan was not sure about Benny, who was a little too deep for him) both had their steady girl friends; and so, it seemed, did most of the airmen.

  It was easy enough for the Americans, who did not have to bother with service regulations, but for officers to become too familiar with WAAF other ranks was “conduct prejudicial to good order and discipline.” This did not appear to worry F/Lt. Collins; he seemed to regard himself as God’s gift to the female sex, and flirted outrageously with all the operators. Alan suspected darkly that he did a good deal more than that, for he would frequently disappear from camp for the evening, and come back with a most annoyingly self-satisfied expression. />
  None of these things affected his efficiency, and Alan had no lack of confidence in his pilot, even when the long, broad strip of concrete stretched before him, its far end already lost in the haze. He felt himself pressed back into his seat as the straining, quivering aircraft built up speed, moving faster and faster in its attempt to reach its natural element. Before they had covered a thousand feet, Alan was already moving more swiftly than he had ever traveled in his life; how must it feel, he wondered, to take off in a redly high-powered aircraft, and not a humble trainer like this?

  He never noticed the exact moment they became airborne; they were already climbing as they swept past the GCD trucks and the vehicles clustered around them, fifty yards off to the left of the runway. There was someone waving down there—Mac, by the look of it—and he waved back without really expecting that he would be seen.

  Nobody, not even the architects who had designed it, could have known the layout of the airfield better than Alan did by this time; he had spent so many hours poring over maps and plans when discussing siting problems with Deveraux. It was somewhat absurd, therefore, to feel a mild sense of surprise that everything was exactly where he expected it to be, and that he could identify almost at a glance the hangars and workshops and living quarters, the bomb dumps and dispersal sites, the camp cinema and Stores Section, the education officer’s little classroom, the Sergeants’ Mess—even the “D” Flight hut. The only thing he couldn’t label to his own satisfaction was in the area to the right of Runway 140, just beyond the perimeter track. There was a lot of construction work going on there, and no one was supposed to ask questions about it. The Air Ministry Works Department was up to something mysterious, and seemed to be getting more of a move on than usual. Large circular structures that looked as if they were the foundations of storage tanks had already been built. Weil, an airfield had to use a lot of gas; what was mysterious about that? Alan dismissed the problem, and a moment later St. Erryn was lost from sight as they entered the first layer of cloud.

  He could see no farther than the tips of the wings, and streaks of rain began to materialize from nowhere on the Perspex window beside him, moving straight backward owing to the speed of the aircraft. Clouds were more interesting from below than from close quarters, Alan decided. He remembered that there were other aircraft besides S Sugar stooging around inside this damp cotton wool; it was about time to see what the GCD Traffic Director was doing.

  The truck came in loud and clear on Channel B, and Alan was just in time to hear his own aircraft vectored onto the downwind leg. They were still climbing, though they were already at three thousand feet and were not supposed to go any higher. But presumably Dennis knew what he was doing, and Alan made no comment. He let his eyes wander over the instruments that crammed the cockpit, noting their readings and interpreting them as far as possible. It all looked very complicated at first sight, but he knew from his own experience how swiftly one learned to understand—if not to master—even the most elaborate pieces of technical equipment.

  The swift and total transformation took him completely by surprise. One moment they were plowing through the gloom and drizzle of a November fog; seconds later, with the briefest of warnings, they had broken through into blazing sunlight. Above was the clean and glorious blue of the unsullied heavens—below, a dazzling, rolling sea of snow, so brilliant that it hurt the eye. Was that the murky, cheerless pea soup through which they had just climbed? It was unbelievable; down there lay England—indeed, the whole northern hemisphere—already stiffening in the grip of winter. And here, scarcely a mile away, it was still summer. When Alan held his hands in the light streaming through the windows, he could feel the fierce kiss of the sun. It seemed years since he had last known its benediction.

  He let his eyes roam in grateful wonder over this blazing world, so firm and solid in appearance despite the fact that it was no more substantial than sunlight and water vapor. These hills and valleys, which changed their shapes even as he watched, were grander and more magnificent than any he had ever seen on the world below. Could even the Himalayas, he wondered, be more awe-inspiring than these mountains that marched across the English countryside? It was true that they endured for minutes only, before the winds dispersed and remolded them. Yet even the Himalayas had been born but yesterday, as the earth measured its life span; rock and cloud were equally ephemeral beneath the cold light of eternity.

  These thoughts were altogether untypical of Alan, who had no time for what he considered highbrow philosophy. But the first impact of this resplendent world above the clouds was so over-whelming that for a moment he found himself, both physically and spiritually, in wholly unfamiliar realms.

  The magic slowly died. The mind cannot dwell on the heights forever, and there is nothing that it will not at last accept as commonplace. Within minutes, Alan was sparing only brief glances to the glory around him; all his attention was devoted to the instructions coming over the radio, and the action that Collins was taking on them.

  The aircraft, losing height rapidly as Dennis brought it down to the correct level, was being turned into line with the still-distant runway. In little more than a minute, if pilot, Traffic Director, and equipment all did their jobs properly, S Sugar’s slowly moving echo would appear on the radar screens of the precision system, and the Approach Controller would take over.

  The shining roof of the world reared upward as the plane banked around the sky. Seconds later, it was as if it had never existed; the rain was pelting against the Perspex, the sunless gloom of winter was all around, and Alan’s infinite horizons had contracted to mere yards. Despite all that he knew about the skill and science controlling the movements of this aircraft, the sense of being lost was terrifying. The fact that nothing in the skies of the whole world had its position pinpointed so accurately as S Sugar did not help him in the least. That was theoretical knowledge; the reality was the wet and swirling fog beyond the windows.

  For heaven’s sake, Bish, he told himself angrily, stop giving yourself the willies. Everything’s under control, and you know it. Nevertheless, he felt a vast sense of relief when he pressed the channel-selector button of the receiver-transmitter set and heard a familiar voice say, “Controller calling S Sugar. I have you on the approach at eight miles. Maintain present height and change course fife degrees left; I say again, fife degrees left.”

  In his mind’s eye, Alan could see the needles creeping across the scales, following the movements of the invisible aircraft. He had become a split personality, his body up here among the clouds, his brain down on the ground in the distant GCD truck. The experience was invaluable; now he knew what the pilots had to cope with, and could understand why there were times when they did not react at once to the Controller’s instructions—when, indeed, they sometimes did just the opposite of what they were told.

  Five miles from the runway, S Sugar was ordered to begin the normal rate of descent. The pitch of the engines dropped as Dennis throttled them back, but apart from this it was impossible to tell whether the aircraft was moving up or down, right or left. The mist still hid all reference points, and this was not an environment for which man’s senses had been designed. No wonder that, in the days before reliable instruments were developed, so many planes and pilots had come to grief.

  Only three miles to go, said that calm and confident voice over the RT. (Easy enough to be calm and confident, thought Alan, when you were sitting comfortably on the ground in a warm, snug little room.) At any moment now they should break through the clouds, and the airfield would be dead ahead of them.

  Yet nothing was visible but the dirty gray mist flickering past the wings. Alan looked anxiously at the altimeter, and saw with some alarm that they were less than a thousand feet from the ground. The cloud base must have descended with unusual speed while they were disporting themselves in the sun; perhaps by now it had come all the way down to the deck, and they would have to land completely blind. This had been done often enough before, but Alan di
d not look forward to doing it himself.

  “Two miles to go,” said the Approach Controller. “You are nicely on track, but a little below the glide path. Reduce rate of descent slightly.”

  The featureless fog was breaking up around them. Chunks of alternating light and darkness were flashing past as S Sugar dropped down through the ragged foundations of the cloudscape. Misty fields and woods, uncomfortably close, appeared momentarily, then swept astern. A barrage of rain drummed fleetingly against fuselage and wings; then they were through, flying just beneath the raveled tendrils of cloud through which this aerial ocean was leaking its way back to earth.

  And there, exactly in line with S Sugar’s nose, was the long lane of the runway. As far as the unaided eye could tell, they were coming precisely down its center, neither to right nor to left.

  “Half a mile from touchdown,” said the Controller. “Go ahead and overshoot.”

  The huge identification number painted on the runway whipped beneath the wing as the concrete highway unreeled below. Dennis was still losing altitude as if he intended to land, and for a moment Alan wondered if he was going to attempt it. But when he came in line with the GCD trucks, he suddenly pulled back the stick, and the dim horizon dropped swiftly out of sight. Forced back into his seat by the unexpectedness rather than the violence of the acceleration, Alan caught only the briefest glimpse of his little electronic empire before it was snatched away.

  “Continue on present course and climb to three thousand feet,” said the Controller. “Switch to Channel A and acknowledge. Over.”

  He had relinquished them and was handing them back to the Traffic Director; in a few seconds he would be talking down F Fox, but Alan would no longer hear his voice. He would be climbing once more away from rain and cold, up the invisible highway that led to summer.