No Highway (2 page)

“Did Mr. Honey tell her that—about the Bible.”

“I suppose he must have done. She didn’t learn it at the school.”

I went to the department next day resolved to give a good part of my time to checking up on Mr. Honey and the progress of his research. I had not bothered him a great deal up till then, because it seemed to me that the work he was
engaged on was of real importance to the modern aircraft, which was more than could be said for some of the other stuff that I had found going on in the place. Because the work was of importance to the aviation world it was imperative that it should be properly conducted, and although Mr. Honey’s religious beliefs were no concern of mine a man who is eccentric in one sphere of his interests may well be eccentric in another.

As I have said, Mr. Honey was working on fatigue in aircraft structures. Fatigue may be described as a disease of metal. When metals are subjected to an alternating load, after a great many reversals the whole character of the metal may alter, and this change can happen very suddenly. An aluminium alloy which has stood up quite well to many thousands of hours in flight may suddenly become crystalline and break under quite small forces, with most unpleasant consequences to the aeroplane. That is the general story of the effect that we call fatigue in aircraft structures, and we don’t know a great deal about it. Mr. Honey’s duty was to try and find out more.

I went down to his stamping ground to see what he was doing. The Farnborough buildings at that time were a mixture of the old and the new, and Mr. Honey occupied a shabby little room of glass and beaverboard in the annexe to the old balloon shed. Here he sat all day and covered sheet after sheet of foolscap paper with the records of his research, or pored over the work of scientists in many languages; he could read both French and German fluently. Outside his office an area of the ground floor of the balloon shed had been allocated to his work, and here he had quite a major experiment in progress.

The Rutland Reindeer was the current Transatlantic airliner at that time, and still is, of course; the Mark I model, which went into production first, had radial engines, though now they all have jets. Two years before I came upon the scene the strength tests of the tailplane had been carried out in my department, and for this two tailplanes had been provided by the Company for test to destruction. They were quite big units, fifty-five feet in span, as big as a twin-engined bomber’s wing. It had only been necessary to break one of these expensive tailplanes for the strength tests for the airworthiness of the machine, and the other one remained upon our hands until eighteen months later Mr. Honey put in a plea for it, and got it.

He had set it up in the balloon shed, horizontally as it would be in flight. He had designed a considerable structure of steel girders to support it at the centre section as it would be held in the aircraft, and this structure was pivoted in such a way that it could be vibrated, or jiggeted, by a whacking great electric motor driving a whole battery of cams to simulate the various harmonics that occur in flight. He had chosen a loading for the tailplane that would reproduce the normal cruising flight conditions, and he had started up the motor a couple of months before and sat back to wait for something to happen.

All that was going on as I was settling in to my new job and as my predecessor had authorised it I had to let it take its course, though I was not too happy about it. I had a feeling that a competent researcher could have got his data from a less expensive test, and apart from that the thing was a considerable nuisance for the noise it made. It may be possible to make mechanical vibrations without making noise, but it’s not often done, and this thing could be heard all over the Establishment. And apparently it was going to go on for ever, because nobody but Mr. Honey thought that tail would ever break by reason of what he was doing to it. It looked much too strong.

Honey got up as I went into his office. He was a smaller man than I am, with black hair turning grey; he was dressed in a very shabby suit that had been cheap to start with. He always looked a bit dirty and down at heels, and his appearance did not help him, because he was one of the ugliest men I have ever met. He had a sallow face with the features of a frog, and rather a tired and discontented frog at that. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles with very thick glasses, and he was as blind as a bat without them. Looking at him, my wife’s description of his daughter came into my mind, the dark-haired, white-faced, ugly little girl. Of course, she would be like that.

I said, “Morning, Mr. Honey. I’ve just come down to have a look at your tailplane. Anything happening to it yet?”

He said, “Oh no—everything is going on quite normally, so far. We can’t expect much yet, you know.” He had a few strain gauges mounted on various parts of the structure and he was reading them every three hours and graphing the readings. He showed me the curves illustrating the daily deformations of the structure as the test went on; after a few initial disturbances, due to the rivets bedding down, the carves
flattened out and went along as a straight line. It was behaving just exactly as one would expect a safe structure to behave.

We stood and looked at it, and walked around it in the noise. Then we went back into his office, where the noise level was lower, and talked about it for a bit. I cannot say I was impressed with what I saw and heard. But for the expense of the set-up, I should have been very much tempted to call off the entire experiment.

“What’s your prognostication, Mr. Honey?” I asked presently. “How long do you think it will go on for?”

He smiled nervously, as the pure researchers always do when you try to pin them down to something definite. “One has to make so many assumptions,” he said. “The mass energy absorption factor, the factor that I call U
_m
in my papers—that varies somewhat with each type of structure, and one really has to do a preliminary experiment to establish that.”

That sounded like an old story to me, and I was not impressed. “You mean, with a tailplane like this you’ve got to break one first under a fatigue test, just like this, to establish the factor?”

“Yes,” he said eagerly, “that’s right.”

“And then,” I said, rather naughtily, “having found out the factor you can calculate back and find out when it broke.”

He glanced at me, uncertain if I were laughing at him or not. “Of course, you can then apply that factor to other tails of similar design, vibrated on a different range of frequencies.”

I said doubtfully, “Yes, I suppose so, when you’ve built up a good deal of experience.”

I spent most of the rest of the morning going through his papers with him and getting acquainted with his theory. I knew the broad outline of his ideas already, and because I knew them I had avoided going into them in more detail until I really had to. Because, like all my other Einsteins, Mr. Honey in his research upon fatigue had gone all nuclear.

When the fundamental theories about atomic fission became generally known to scientists in 1945, they came as a godsend to all middle-aged researchers. Here was a completely new field of pure thought to explore, whether it had anything to do with their immediate job or not. Each of them very soon convinced himself that in an application and extension of nuclear theory lay the solution to all his problems, whether
they were concerned with the effect of sunlight on paint or the formation of sludge in engine-lubricating oil. It seemed at times that every scientist in the Establishment had made himself into an expert upon nuclear matters, all but me, who had come from the material and earthly pursuit of testing aeroplanes in flight, and so had started late in the race. I didn’t known much about the atom, and I was very sceptical if nuclear matters really affected my department at all.

However, Mr. Honey was convinced they did, and he had built up an imposing structure of theory upon a nuclear basis. Quite simply, what he held was that when a structure like a tailplane is vibrated a tiny quantity of energy is absorbed into it, proportionate to the mass of the structure and the time that the treatment goes on for and a certain integral of strain. He had some evidence for this assertion, for he produced papers by Koestlinger of Basle University and by Schiltgrad of Upsala indicating that something of the sort does happen. Schiltgrad had made attempts to trace what happens to this lost energy, and had produced the negative result that it did not appear in any of the normal forms, as heat, electrical potential, or momentum. Mr. Honey, sitting brooding over all this work, had convinced himself that this small energy flow produced a state of tension within the nucleus of aluminium of which the alloy is mainly composed, and that when this tension has built up to a certain degree one or more neutrons are released, resulting in an isotopic form of aluminium with crystalline affinities. This was the bare bones of his theory, and it was supported by about seventy pages of pure mathematics. It all seemed a bit like the Great Pyramid to me, and as difficult to criticise.

At the end of an hour or so with him I said, “What value have you assigned to this quantity U
_m
for that tailplane out there?”

He said, “Well—provisionally—just for getting a rough idea of how long the trial is likely to go on for, you see, I made a rough estimate——” He fumbled with his papers, shuffled them, dropped one on the floor and scrabbled after it, picked it up, looked at it upside down, turned it right way up, and said, “Here it is. 2.863 × 10
⁻⁷
. That’s in C.G.S. units, of course.”

I took the sheet from him and studied it. It was untidy work, half in pencil and half in ink, written in a vile hand, rather dirty. “Those are just the rough notes,” he said nervously. “I shall write it all up properly later on.”

I nodded. One must not, must not ever, be influenced by
gaucheries
when dealing with these people. Untidiness may be a sign of slovenly thinking in an adult man, but it can also be a sign of an immensely quick intellect that gives no time for neat and patient writing. Mr. Honey was obviously nervous of me, and he was showing at his worst.

“This figure, 2.863,” I said at last. “That’s a pretty exact figure, Mr. Honey—four-figure accuracy. When that constant goes into your theory, the time to reach fatigue failure will be directly proportional to that, won’t it?” I turned to one of the final sheets of mathematics that he had displayed before me.

“That’s right,” he said. “The time to nuclear separation is directly proportional to U
_m
.”

“Well, I don’t call that a rough estimate,” I said. “That’s a pretty detailed estimate, surely? I mean, that figure says that in a given case something may be going to happen in two thousand eight hundred and sixty-three hours. I should have said a rough estimate was one that said something would happen between two and three thousand hours.” I glanced at him.

He shifted uneasily. “Well, naturally, I went into it as carefully as I could.” He showed me what he had based his estimate upon. It was a pile about three feet high of the Proceedings of practically every engineering learned body in Europe and America. “I couldn’t find anything about light alloy structures in fatigue prior to the year 1927,” he said dolefully. “I don’t know if there’s anything else I ought to have got hold of.”

I laughed. “I shouldn’t think so, Mr. Honey. If you’ve gone back to 1927 you’ve probably got everything there is.”

“I hope I have,” he said.

I turned over the sheafs of papers that were his analysis of previous trials and from which he had deduced the value of 2.863 × 10
⁻⁷
for U
_m
, and I came to the conclusion that whatever bees he might have in his bonnet, he was at any rate a patient and an indefatigable worker, if rather an untidy one. At the end of ten minutes I said, “Well, if this is what you call a rough estimate, Mr. Honey, I’d like to see a detailed one.”

He flushed angrily, but did not speak. I had not meant to be offensive.

I turned over the papers before me. “What does that mean to that tailplane out there?” I indicated the Reindeer tail
upon the framework outside, booming and droning, filling the whole building with its noise. “When do you expect something to happen?”

He said, “There should be some evidence of nuclear separation in about 1,440 hours—taking that value for U
_m
.”

“That’s till it breaks? It ought to break in 1,440 hours?”

He hesitated. “I rather think that the material could be expected to suffer some change about that time,” he said, hedging. “Under the normal loads imposed upon it—yes, I think that failure would probably occur.” He shifted uneasily and said, as if in self-defence, “The isotope is probably crystalline.”

“I see.” I stood for a moment looking at the test through his window. “How long has it been going on for now?”

“About two months,” he said. “We started on the twenty-sixth of May. Up till this morning it had run four hundred and twenty-three hours. It only runs in the daytime—the Director wouldn’t allow it to run on night shift. It’s basic research, you see.”

I calculated in my head. “So it’s got another four or five months to go?”

He said, “Well—yes, about that time. I was expecting to learn something from it before Christmas, anyway.”

I stood silent for a minute, deep in thought. “Well, that’s all very interesting, Mr. Honey,” I said at last. “May I take what you’ve re-written so far and glance it over in my office? It all takes a bit of absorbing, you know.”

He sorted out a bunch of papers and gave them to me, and I tucked them under my arm, and walked back to my office in a brown study. Mr. Honey was experimenting on a Reindeer tail, and what Mr. Honey had lost sight of altogether was that Reindeer aircraft had come into service on the Atlantic route that summer. They were flying the Atlantic daily with full loads of passengers, from Heath Row to Gander, from Gander to New York or Montreal.

Although he didn’t seem to realise it, Mr. Honey had now said that the Reindeer tail was quite unsafe, that in his opinion it would break, suddenly and without warning, after 1,440 hours of flying.