No Highway (43 page)

All good designers are difficult men or they could not be good designers; I think everybody at the table was more or less aware of that. We set ourselves to mollify the great man, and I say that with sincerity. A great man he was, a great designer and a superlative engineer. But not an easy man to deal with. No.

In the end Sir David Moon said, “This represents a different picture altogether, Mr. Chairman. If the company can do the
necessary modifications in so short a time, there will be no need to interrupt our present schedule of services at all.” Prendergast nodded. “We can allocate the machines off service one by one for this work to be done. The general public need not know anything at all about it.”

D.R.D. said, “I think that’s very desirable. It never does any good to have a garbled version of these troubles in the newspapers.”

The Director leaned across to me. “They’d only print half the story, anyway,” he remarked. “They wouldn’t believe the other half.”

The meeting broke up. I said to him, “I had a chat with that Assegai pilot, sir. It was at the speed of sound, of course; it stuck for several seconds in the region of high drag. He said he’d been through to the supersonic zone several times. He was quite positive about that incandescent line along the leading edge. He’s coming down tomorrow to sketch it on the wing.”

He nodded. “Morrison back yet?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I think he’s coming in tomorrow. I hope he sees more daylight in this matter than I do.”

He smiled gently. “It’ll come,” he said.

Honey got married to Marjorie Corder about a month later, and on the third day of his honeymoon the test tail broke, at 1,296 hours only, which gave him something to think about. Flight-Lieutenant Wintringham said it was a wedding present for him. He came hurrying back from Bournemouth, where they were staying, to view the body, and I sent him back to his honeymoon with a flea in his ear. But I don’t know what kind of a honeymoon they had after that, because he came back to the office with a considerable extension to his nuclear theory of fatigue, expressed in twenty-six pages of pure mathematics.

That autumn I was restless after office hours. I had nothing much to work at in the evenings and I was very worried about the Assegai. I tried reading Shirley’s novels, but I can’t take any interest in those things; real life always seems to me to be so much more stimulating. I tried listening to the wireless and got fed up with that. And it was much too soon to write another paper for the Society.

One evening Shirley laid her sewing down. “Dennis, I wish you or somebody would write up some of these things that happen, like the Reindeer tail. I mean, write literally all about it, not just the scientific part. All about Monica Teasdale,
and Elspeth, and planchette, and the Director going to Kew Gardens—all the bits that made it fun. We shall forget what really happened in a few years’ time and we’ll have lost something worth having. I’d like to try and save some of the fun we’re having now, to look at when we’re old.”

I stared at her thoughtfully. “That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “It’ld be better than sitting worrying about the Assegai.”

THIS BOOK
is a work of fiction. None of the characters are drawn from real persons. The Reindeer aircraft in my story is not based on any particular commercial aircraft, nor do the troubles from which it suffered refer to any actual events.

In this story I have: postulated an inefficient Inspector of Accidents, with a fictitious name and a fictitious character. Only one man can hold this post at a time, and I tender such apologies as may be necessary to the distinguished and efficient officer who holds it now. I would add this. The scrupulous and painstaking investigation of accidents is the key to all safety in the air, and demands the services of men of the very highest quality. If my story underlines this point, it will have served a useful purpose.

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