No Highway (9 page)

He stared at the back of the seat in front of him, a worn, tired little man wiping his glasses.

Behind him the door closed; the chief steward passed by him on his way to the flight deck, a sheaf of papers in his hand and carrying a black briefcase. The forward door closed behind him and the engines started one by one, deep, reassuring rumbles faintly heard as though from a great distance. Presently the cabin stirred beneath him. Mr. Honey looked out of the window and saw the lights of the airport buildings pass him by as the aircraft moved down the ring road to the runway’s end.

He never felt the machine leave the ground. At the runway’s end she turned across the wind and cleared engines one by one; then before Mr. Honey realised what was happening the runway lights were sliding past his window in acceleration and presently they fell away below. It was the first time he had ever travelled in an aeroplane with modern soundproofing and it took him by surprise, because he had expected to be warned for the take-off by a great burst of noise. But there was no such roar, and before he realised quite what was happening the airport was below and behind. Then there was nothing to be seen out of his window but a blackness that reflected his own face and everything in the brightly lit cabin.

He leaned back in his seat and relaxed, savouring the comfort. Presently the stewardess who was attending to the passengers at his end of the cabin came up the aisle, stopping by each passenger and saying a few words, helping to tuck away the safety belt, taking orders for meals upon a little pad. She came to Mr. Honey presently, and said, “I’m sure you’d like a little supper before settling down, sir. What can I get you?” She told him what he could have.

He ordered a cup of coffee and a plate of sandwiches; she noted it. And then he said, “I say, is that Monica Teasdale sitting over there?”

The girl nodded. “That’s right. She came over about a fortnight ago. Quite a number of film actors and actresses
travel with us—American as well as British. She always travels this way.”

He said in wonder, “She looks just like she does in her pictures, doesn’t she?”

“I know. But she looks old when you see her close up, in the early morning.” The stewardess laughed, and Mr. Honey laughed with her. “But she’s ever so nice.”

“One more thing,” Mr. Honey asked. “What sort of aeroplane is this?”

The girl said, “This is one of the latest, sir—-what they call the Reindeer type. That isn’t what we call them on the Une, of course; this one is called ‘Redgauntlet.’ But it’s the Reindeer type, made by the Rutland Aircraft Company. It’s the very latest thing—we’ve only had them in service for a few weeks.” She broke off, smiling. “I was forgetting, sir. You must know all about them.”

He said, “Oh, this is a Reindeer, is it?” He was not in the least perturbed, because he had complete confidence in the check that I was keeping on the flying time that all the Reindeers had done, but he looked about him with new interest. “I must say it’s very comfortable,” he said.

The stewardess said, “I think it’s lovely. I’ve only just come on to Reindeers; this is my first trip in one. I was working in Eagles up till last week. They’re very nice, of course, but this is the most modern plane there is. You really must come down and see the galley later on, sir—it’s a perfect dream. We’ve got everything we want, and a telephone to the flight deck. And plenty of room to work.”

She went away, and presently she came back with his coffee and sandwiches. Later she came and took away the tray, and asked him if he wanted to sleep. Although he had had a long and tiring day, Mr. Honey was not ready for sleep; she adjusted the little reading-light for him and showed him the switch. “We shall be turning off the main lights in a minute,” she said. “If you feel sleepy, here’s the switch for this one.”

He asked, “What time do we land?”

“About seven o’clock of our time, at Gander. That’s before dawn, on account of the change of time.”

The lights went down, and Mr. Honey sat on, reading his magazine in a little pool of light. He looked round once or twice at Monica Teasdale but she had soon stopped reading and turned out her light, and now she lay resting or sleeping in her reclining chair, in the half darkness. Mr. Honey never read a magazine in normal times, but these times were not
normal; the novelty of his experiences had taken him out of his mental groove, and he found novelty in the little love stories and in the advertisements about unpleasant breath.

At about two o’clock in the morning the second pilot, a cheerful young man called Dobson, came down into the cabin and walked aft in the dim light, and went to the galley, where he stood drinking coffee and chatting to the stewardesses for ten minutes. Then he said:

“Which is the boffin?”

They laughed. “What’s a boffin?”

“The man from Farnborough. Everybody calls them boffins. Didn’t you know?”

“No. Why are they called that?”

“I dunno. Because they behave like boffins, I suppose. Which of you is looking after him?”

“I am,” said Miss Corder. “His name is Mr. Honey.”

“The little half-pint size, with thick glasses?”

She nodded. “Sitting on the starboard side, near the front.”

“I knew it. I knew that was the boffin when I saw him. You can’t mistake them.”

“What about him?” asked Miss Corder. The joke was over, so far as she was concerned.

Dobson said, “The captain sent me down to offer to show him the upper deck. Is he awake?”

She glanced down the aisle. “I see his light’s on still. Will you take him now, if he wants to go?”

He nodded. “Get it over.”

“I’ll ask him.” She walked down the aisle softly, with Dobson following behind her. “Mr. Honey,” she said. “Captain Samuelson has asked if you would care to see the upper deck—the pilot’s cockpit and the navigation and so on. Mr. Dobson, here, could take you now, if you feel like it. Or would you rather go after Gander, on the run to Montreal?”

Mr. Honey thought for a moment. He had no real interest in flying, though in the course of his work at the R.A.E. he had picked up a fairly comprehensive knowledge of an aeroplane’s controls. If it had been that alone, he would not have bothered to leave his seat, unless from a sense of duty or politeness. He was, however, genuinely interested in the navigation. His investigations in connection with the Pyramid had led him to a study of chart projections, and he was glad of the opportunity to examine the charts prepared especially for navigation over the Atlantic. It was unlikely that the
charts used for the flight overland from Gander would show many novel features. “That’s very kind of the captain,” he said. “I think I’d rather go now.”

The stewardess introduced him to the first officer, and with Dobson he went forward through the door and up the narrow duralumin stair that led to the flight deck. He found himself standing in a fairly spacious area, well lit, with windows showing the black night outside. An engineer was seated at a desk garnished with levers, before an instrument board a yard square that was completely filled with black-faced dials. A wireless operator was seated at the instruments, to one side of him the green trace of radar showed upon its screen. Behind him was the navigator’s desk, and beyond that again the two pilots’ seats with the flying controls, and the windscreen that showed nothing but the black night. A man of about fifty, Captain Samuelson, sat in the port seat, but his hands were not on the controls, which made tiny movements now and then upon their own. It was very peaceful up on the flight deck.

Mr. Honey asked, “What altitude are we flying at?”

Dobson said, “About eighteen thousand feet.” He glanced at the sensitive altimeter above the navigating table. “Eighteen thousand five hundred. Of course, we’re pressurised, you know. The pressure in here corresponds to about seven thousand feet.”

The sense of solidity and security impressed Mr. Honey very much; nothing, it seemed, could ever go wrong in a thing like this. “This is a Reindeer, isn’t it?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“How do you like it?”

“Oh, it’s a lovely job. I’ve been in this one for about six months, and I never want to go back on to anything else. As a matter of fact, this is our first trip across the Atlantic—the North Atlantic, that is. We’ve been operating down to Buenos Aires on loan to Anglo-Brazil Air Services for a tryout, but this is our proper route.” He turned to the chart table. “This is about where we are now.” He indicated on the chart. “Matter of fact, I have to keep on looking at it myself—it’s extraordinary how one can get rusty. On the other route I hardly ever looked at the chart, we went backwards and forwards so often.”

Mr. Honey was not interested in that gossip; he was only interested in the navigation. His eyes were on the chart: not only was the projection a new one to him, but it was crossed
by a family of cycloidal lines each with a Greek letter to identify it, most intriguing. He began to ask a lot of questions about the methods of navigation; as celestial observations and radio beams and bearings were inextricably mixed up with the chart work, he had a grand time, and Dobson had to think very hard indeed to answer some of the questions Honey fired at him. The second pilot was not to know that Honey had gained much of his information upon chart projections as a by-product of his Pyramid research. At last they left the chart table and went to the cockpit, where the controls were explained to Mr. Honey. He was familiar with the basic aeroplane controls, of course, but the undercarriage and flap controls were new to him, and were explained to him in detail.

From the cockpit they went to the wireless and the radar, from the radar to the engine panel. The engineer explained his intricacies, and then went on to answer a few questions about the engines. “Oh, they’re very good,” he said. “We never get much trouble with engines nowadays, you know.” Honey asked how often they did a top overhaul. “Never do top overhauls,” the man said. “Not in the nacelles, that is. Take ’em out and change them every six hundred hours. Six hundred hours they run—then they get taken out and overhauled in the shop. Complete overhaul, that is. This is the third lot of engines, the ones in her now. We did the change last month. Didn’t take long—about three days. They should be able to do it in less time than that.”

Mr. Honey stared at him through his thick glasses; something within his body seemed to have turned over. “Do you mean you’ve already had two sets of engines and they’ve each done six hundred hours?”

“That’s right,” the man said. “Six hundred hours, they do. Then they get a complete overhaul—put another set in.”

He licked his lips, aghast. “How many hours has the airframe done, then?”

“Airframe? Fourteen or fifteen hundred, I suppose.”

Mr. Honey blinked at him dumbly. “Let you know exactly if you’re interested.” He reached for a pile of blue-jacketed log-books in a rack and picked out one, and turned the pages. “Here we are. 1,422 hours, up to the time when we took off this evening.”

“Oh.…”

For a minute Mr. Honey stood confused. Environment has its effect on everybody, and for a time it had a numbing effect
on him, preventing him from thinking clearly. He was moving in two worlds. Here in the aircraft everything was firm and steady and secure; the even tremor of the engines, the faintly heard rush of air over the outer skin, these bred confidence; there was nothing insecure about their passage. It needed a strong mental effort to force his mind back to the old balloon shed at Farnborough and to his untidy little office where one calculated over months or even years to estimate when something would break, where one set up a test to break it and confirm his calculations, where one actually saw it crumple and sag down towards the concrete floor. It needed mental effort to recall that at this moment the test upon the Reindeer tail was going on, that he had estimated that that tail upon the testing gantry would collapse about the time that this machine had flown. It needed mental effort to identify the photographs that he had seen of the first Reindeer, split asunder and burned out beneath that cliff in Labrador, with this firm, lovely thing that he was standing in.

He turned to Dobson. “Please,” he said, “would you come over here a minute?”

He drew him over to the navigating table and made him bend over it so that their conversation was private. “What is it?” Dobson asked.

Mr. Honey moistened his lips, and said, “I don’t know how to put this to you, but this aircraft is in a very dangerous condition. It’s got a very serious fatigue trouble in the tailplane. You must turn back to England at once.” He repeated earnestly, with a rising inflection in his voice, “At once.”

The second pilot stared at him. “Fatigue trouble? What’s that? We can’t go back to England, you know.”

“But you must.” His voice rose to a little nervous squeak. “I tell you, this is very serious indeed. This aeroplane should not be flying at all. The tail is liable to fail at any moment—the front spar may fail. You’ve got a positive download on the tail in this condition. You’ll go into a dive quite suddenly, and there’ll be no control to get you out. I tell you, you must turn back at once. Turn back and land at the first aerodrome in Ireland.” The young man stared at him in growing tolerance and amusement. “If you stop the inboard engines and reduce the revolutions on the middle ones right down to a minimum, there’s just a chance that we may get back safely.”

“Take it easy,” Mr. Dobson said. “Whatever are you talking about? You must have heard of an airworthiness
certificate, surely? This aircraft’s all okay. I’ll show you the daily inspection note, if you like.”

“This is something quite new,” said Mr. Honey. “No Reindeer is allowed to fly more than seven hundred hours until this question of the tail has been cleared up. And this one has flown double that, and that’s right on the estimated time for failure. I assure you, something can happen any moment now. You really must turn back.”

“What’s all this about a Reindeer not being allowed to do more than seven hundred hours?”

“It’s true. They’ve all got to be grounded when they reach that time.”

Dobson stared at him; impatience and hostility were beginning to appear. “First I’ve heard of it.” He beckoned to the engineer, who left his seat and came to them. “Cousins, have you heard anything about Reindeers being grounded after seven hundred hours?”