Glide Path

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Alan looked at the tray, and the last vestiges of romance evaporated from the evening. Lucille, he decided, was a very practical young lady, and she had certainly acquired some English customs.

  “Don’t get any crumbs in the bedclothes,” she ordered.

  He waited until Joan had retired; then, with an appetite that surprised him but not Lucille, he started on the Ovaltine and muffins.

  ***

  The last time Alan had entered this assembly hall, it had been for the screening of a gruesome and cautionary film which had kept the entire station continent for almost forty-eight hours. This occasion was slightly different, but the audience was the same. Every officer and airman not on essential duty was present, listening with various degrees of attention to the short, stout Squadron Leader on the platform.

  Alan had never envied the Station Security Officer his task. He had come into contact with S/Ldr. Strickland on not more than half a dozen occasions, when it was necessary to arrange an armed guard for the GCD trucks or to transmit secret documents to Group Headquarters. One meeting, however, had been considerably less formal. Alan had a vague memory of helping to hold the Squadron Leader down after an unusually rowdy Mess Dance, while some of his fellow officers snipped off his tie with a pair of scissors. They had collected quite a number of ties that evening, including the CO’s.

  “Men,” began the Security Officer, in a voice that boomed metallically through the speakers hanging from the bare girders. “In total war, one must be totally prepared. If Jerry drops a parachute brigade on this airfield, every one of us—clerks, cooks, aircrew, signals staff, fitters-must be prepared to fight. The RAF Regiment, of course, will do its job, but in the event of a major attack, you are needed.

  “The Air Officer Commanding has, therefore, given orders for a defense exercise, beginning 0001 hours tonight. For the next forty-eight hours, everyone will be confined to camp and the station will be in a state of alert.” (“A state of panic,” muttered an irreverent interrupter standing beside Alan. Glancing out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the cynic was a much-decorated bomber-navigator.)

  “You will all be given instructions as to the roles you have to play, and will be issued weapons from the Armory. Detailed defense plans have been drawn up, and your flight commanders will assign you to your posts in due course. That is all. Thank you.”

  A few hours later, the plan of operations was brought around to “D” Flight by an RAF Regiment Sergeant, who clearly had little use for effete radar personnel. The only person toward whom he showed any respect was Mac. Alan later discovered that they had once had a glorious fight that had half wrecked the Sergeants’ Mess. Mac had lost, but his opponent had had to work unusually hard for victory.

  Spreading out a large-scale map of the airfield, the visitor indicated the positions the defenders would occupy. The plan had one redeeming feature; the GCD personnel had been given a familiar section of the airfield, not far from the “D” Flight hut itself. Operating so close to home would give them a comfortable, if spurious, feeling of security.

  An attacking force would have to approach across open ground for several hundred yards before it came to the barbed-wire fence surrounding the airfield. This was not much of an obstacle; there were at least a dozen unofficial exits through it, which had been made by airmen—and airwomen—anxious to go on leave without passing the scrutiny of the Guardroom. These weak points were now being energetically dealt with by the RAF Regiment, but even when it had done its best, the wire could offer little more than token resistance. This was not surprising, since its main function was to keep the runways clear of stray cows, not determined Nazi paratroopers.

  “Surely,” said Alan, “the enemy wouldn’t attack from this direction? Real paratroops would land on the airfield, inside our defenses.”

  The RAF Regiment Sergeant, who knew that his job was hopeless but was bravely determined to make the best of it, looked Alan straight in the eye.

  “The airfield, sir, is—ah—presumed to be covered with pointed stakes at intervals of twenty feet. That will discourage the paratroops.”

  “It would certainly discourage me,” grumbled one of the pilots. “If you’ve got to do that sort of thing to an airfield to defend it, wouldn’t it be simpler to abandon it without a fight?”

  “I have a still better idea,” said Pat. “If you guys really were armed, you’d kill far more of each other than the enemy. So why not use passive resistance? Several thousand unco-operative prisoners would foul up an attack more thoroughly than anything else you could possibly do. Look what happened in India when Gandhi got organized.”

  This suggestion, equally insulting to the Royal Air Force and the British Empire, was received with the frigid silence it merited. But not so the proposal put forward a few hours later by Benny Schwartz.

  “Why,” said Benny, “should we sit out there all night in the cold and wet when we can use the precision system to do our watching for us? It’s an ideal setup—open ground with no obstacles to confuse the radar picture. We should be able to spot anything moving across it.”

  “Do you mean to say,” asked one of the pilots a little incredulously, “that radar can detect human beings? I thought it only worked on metal.”

  “Phooey. In the right circumstances, it can pick up almost anything. Besides, the targets we’re after will be loaded with guns and tin helmets.”

  “It’s worth trying,” said Alan. “We could do a test this afternoon, when the day’s program is finished.” He looked at Deveraux for approval, but the Flight Lieutenant appeared to be wrestling with his conscience.

  “I’m not sure that it would be playing the game,” he objected. “After all, the whole purpose of the exercise is to test our defenses.”

  “Well? If we show that GCD can be made part of the defense system, won’t that be a valuable contribution to the station’s security?”

  Deveraux thought it over. It hardly seemed cricket, but it would be a most interesting experiment…

  “Oh, very well,” he said at last. “But not a word to anyone outside the unit. If it doesn’t work, we’ll look fools—and if it does, we’ll get a rocket from the Security Officer for messing up his plans.”

  “We may get worse than that from the Regiment,” said Sergeant McGregor thoughtfully, “if they hear what we’re up to.” He flexed his biceps, and a slow smile spread across his face. “Maybe,” he added hopefully, “we’ll see some real fighting, after all.”

  20

  The test was carried out at four in the afternoon, during the last hours of daylight. The operators had finished their training schedule and the aircraft had landed, but there was still enough light to see what was happening around the airfield.

  With some difficulty, the GCD trucks were maneuvered into their unorthodox positions, with the scanners aimed down the gentle slope up which the expected attack would come. As Benny had forecast, the picture on the precision screens was a clear and simple one. There in the foreground, only a few hundred feet away, was a brilliant line of glowing blobs that marked the barbed-wire fence. Beyond that, there was nothing for almost a mile.

  The next step was to send out men carrying rifles and wearing steel helmets. The results were encouraging; the echoes that crawled slowly across the face of the radar screen were somewhat anemic, but they could be easily seen. Benny’s plan was vindicated; sitting here in warmth and comfort, sustained by occasional cups of cocoa, the defenders could pass the night in complete confidence that nothing could penetrate their radar picket without detection. It was still advisable to have men out in the forward foxholes equipped with field telephones, but their task would be enormously simplified. They would no longer warn the rear when the enemy approached—the rear would warn them.

  Meanwhile, life went on, though with annoying interruptions. All officers were issued with service pistols (though not, fortunately, with ammunition) and had to carry them day and night. Practice alerts were sounded at inconvenient momen
ts, resulting in frantic rushing back and forth by the station personnel, while umpires stood around with stop watches, calculating how long it took for the defenders to locate and occupy their positions. Several small battles developed between rival groups trying to take over the same slit trench or pillbox, but casualties were light.

  The biggest problem about the whole operation was getting sufficient sleep. In such a small group as the GCD unit, it was not easy to arrange a twenty-four-hour roster; there were simply not enough people to go around. The final result was that the officers and senior NCOs got what sleep they could by cat-napping on temporary bunks. Catering and sanitary arrangements were primitive, but these hardships could be endured for a couple of days.

  Alan was dreaming as peacefully as the scratchy blankets permitted when a rough hand shook him awake. For a moment he could not imagine where he was; then it all came back to him and he heaved himself wearily out of the bunk “What time is it?” he yawned. The earlier it was, the better chance he would have of getting back to bed again.

  “Three thirty,” answered Sergeant McGregor, dashing his hopes. “We think there’s something happening out there. Come and have a look before we wake up everyone else.”

  Still half asleep, Alan stumbled out into the night. It was completely dark; thick clouds hid the stars, and the only light was the feeble glow from the Sergeant’s shielded torch. The cinder path underfoot was a better guide, since it crunched beneath his feet, and the comforting, deep-throated roar of the transmitter truck’s diesel told him that he was heading in the right direction.

  The control van loomed up before them, a deeper darkness, except where a thin thread of light leaked out beneath an ill-fitting door. As Sergeant McGregor rapped sharply on the side, the sliver of light winked out and the door opened. The only illumination inside was the familiar green glow of the radar screens. It seemed surprisingly brilliant to Alan’s night-adapted eyes, but he knew that it would not carry very far when the blackout curtain swung aside.

  He was completely awake when he slid into the azimuth tracker’s seat and studied the mottled rectangle of light that the radar trace was perpetually repainting. No-man’s-land was no longer completely empty; it now held three brilliant blobs of light, marking the positions of the forward outposts with their field telephones. They had made themselves conspicuous in the radar void by hoisting corner reflectors—small metal pyramids, open at the base, which behaved in the radar beam exactly like cats’ eyes in the headlights of a car. Though only eighteen inches on a side, they gave as big an echo as that of a four-engine bomber, and were normally used to mark out the line of the runways on the radar screens.

  Not far from the outermost reflector was an altogether different kind of echo—a ghostly amoeba that shortened range with almost imperceptible slowness. It was pulsing as it moved; sometimes it faded out completely, then flashed up again with redoubled brilliance.

  Alan had seen this phenomenon before; he was watching not one echo, but a group of them, almost superimposed. At a guess, he would say that there were between five and ten men moving in a tight bunch—and they were not far from the luminous blob of Outpost Number Three.

  “Hello, Number Three,” said Alan softly into the field telephone. “Keep a good watch—they’re only about two hundred feet north of you.”

  “OK, sir,” said a faint and nervous voice which he recognized, with difficulty, as that of Corporal Hart, a competent but rather conceited young mech. Doubtless Sergeant McGregor was responsible for his present lonely eminence.

  “Any sign of them now?” asked Alan anxiously a few minutes later. The slowly moving echoes had now almost reached the reflector, and were beginning to merge into it.

  “No, sir,” came the answer. “Everything’s quiet.”

  Alan, who judged that the separation was now less than thirty feet, found this hard to believe.

  “They’re almost on top of you. Surely you can hear something… Corporal Hart!”

  “Glug—ouch—gulp,” said the field telephone. Then it went dead.

  “So,” remarked McGregor, with considerable satisfaction, “they got him.”

  “Looks as if they’ve got the marker, too,” said Alan, for the glowing blob of light had suddenly vanished. Equally abruptly, it returned.

  “I know what’s happening,” exclaimed McGregor. “The silly clots have grabbed it as a souvenir. Wonder what they think it is?”

  It was true; the brilliant echo was bobbing slowly across the screen—probably, Alan realized, carried with great willingness by a captive Corporal Hart. This made it really too easy; the attackers were like blind men marching into the beam of a searchlight—and, for good measure, waving a large mirror to make themselves more conspicuous.

  “They’ll be at the wire within ten minutes,” said Alan. “Time to alert Dev’s Daredevils.”

  Flight Lieutenant Deveraux, with a motley group of defenders armed with blank cartridges and thunder flashes, was now camped out for the night on the left flank, sheltered inside a bell tent that smelled as if it had not been aired since the Boer War. He was in a drowsy stupor midway between sleep and waking when the field telephone jarred him into complete alertness, and he received Alan’s news with much relief. It looked as if the unit was going to do something useful after all.

  “That’s fine,” he said enthusiastically. “I’ll alert my men and let them know what’s happening. You say the enemy will be here in ten minutes?”

  “That’s only an estimate. They may slow down, for they won’t know how many other outposts we have.”

  “Well, I’ll give them five. Let me know at once if you have any other information.”

  “Mac’s watching the screen,” said Alan. “He’ll keep feeding range to you.” That wouldn’t be difficult, he thought, with a target moving at about a hundredth of the normal speed.

  Since there was nothing else that he could contribute to the impending battle, Alan decided that he might as well have a good view of it. The roof of the transmitter truck, almost ten feet from the ground, provided a fine vantage point—though a somewhat precarious one on a pitch-dark night when a single false step might take one over the unguarded edge.

  He braced himself against the plywood cylinder of the search antenna housing, and peered in the general direction of the expected attack. It was cold and windy up here, and the slats beneath his feet vibrated in sympathy with the roaring diesel immediately below. Lacking all visual references, he could easily imagine that he was no longer on dry land, but aboard the pitching deck of a ship fighting its way through a stormy night.

  Suddenly, it was night no longer. A blinding flare erupted above the sleeping landscape, revealing every detail with a harsh clarity that seemed fiercer than daylight. It was beautifully timed; the attackers were caught completely by surprise, exposed in the open about a hundred feet from the barbed wire.

  Within seconds, all hell broke loose as the defenders expended their ammunition at the maximum possible rate. The air was rent by concussions and curses, and the acrid smell of gunpowder came floating down the wind. It had been a long time since Alan had seen such a fireworks display, and childhood memories of forgotten Guy Fawkes nights came back to him across the years. He was fully awake now and thoroughly enjoying himself.

  But it was soon over. Authoritative shouts and torch-wavings slowly restored order, and the barrage of thunder flashes died reluctantly away to sporadic explosions, then to silence. By the time Alan had climbed down from the roof of the truck, the battle had ended. Annihilated a dozen times over, the attacking forces had made their peace and were trudging toward the Flight HQ, where the WAAF operators were already preparing extra mugs of cocoa for victors and vanquished alike.

  When Alan and Sergeant McGregor arrived, a three-cornered argument was in progress, involving Deveraux, the RAF Regiment Flying Officer who had led the attack, and a lieutenant from the local Army liaison group who had accompanied it as umpire. The latter two were very puzzled m
en, and Deveraux was not giving them much help. “We got all your scouts,” they complained. “How did you know where we were?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t discuss that,” Deveraux answered.

  “But I’ve got to write a report!” protested the umpire.

  “Well, you can say that the defense was effective and we weren’t taken by surprise. What more do you want?”

  “I believe,” said the patrol leader, as if the idea had only just occurred to him, “that you were using that gadget of yours.”

  “Indeed?” Deveraux replied politely. “I didn’t know it was against the rules. Have some more cocoa.”

  When Alan left, in the hope of making up some lost sleep, they were still at it. He had a good deal of sympathy for the frustrated soldiers, now that he understood their problems better and appreciated the risks they ran. Perhaps it had been unfair, but the whole operation was symbolic of modern war. Skill and courage and resolution were no longer enough; the time was fast approaching when only machines could fight machines.

  21

  I hope you make it this time,” said Deveraux, as Alan piled his luggage into the little Fordson truck.

  “So do I. If there’s another cancellation, I’ll get a persecution complex. Once I’m past the main gate, you won’t see me for smoke.”

  He was to remember that rash remark a few minutes later. They had barely checked out of the Guardroom, and the station entrance was still in sight, when one of the service policemen rushed out into the road and began to wave furiously at the truck.

  “Oh, no—not again!” Alan cried in silent anguish. Then he did something that would have been quite inconceivable a few months ago. He turned his back and hoped fervently that the driver would not spot the commotion in her rear-view mirror.

  He did not breathe easily until the train had pulled out of the station. Now he was safe; no one could catch him until he reached Lyncombe, so even if the worst came to the worst, he would be able to spend a few hours at home. This had suddenly become very important to him; after the upheavals—mental and physical—of the last few weeks, he needed to establish contact with some fixed reference point, even though he knew well enough that there would be problems waiting for him as soon as he set foot indoors. What was going to happen about Father? Miss Hadley could not cope with him much longer, and the rest of the family had shown little inclination to help, beyond giving good advice and expressing pious distress.