The Complete Short Stories (129 page)

She was working at an engineering bench in the hangar, welding together the sections of a fuel tank. As Melville approached she switched off the blowtorch and removed her mask, her intelligent face shielded by her hands.

'I see we're involved in a race to get away first,' she called out reassuringly to him when he paused in the entrance to the hangar. 'Dr Laing told me that you'd know how to strengthen these fuel tanks.'

For Melville, her nervous smile cloaked a complex sexual metaphor.

From the start Melville took it for granted that she would abandon her plan to fly to Cape Town, and instead embark on a round-the-world flight with himself as her co-pilot. He outlined his plans for their westward flight, calculating the reduced fuel load they would carry to compensate for his weight. He showed her his designs for the wing spars and braces that would support the auxiliary tanks.

'Melville, I'm flying to Cape Town,' she told him wearily. 'It's taken me years to arrange this - there's no question of setting out anywhere else. You're obsessed with this absurd island.'

'You'll understand when we get there,' Melville assured her. 'Don't worry about the aircraft. After Wake you'll be on your own. I'll strip off the tanks and cut all these braces away.'

'You intend to stay on Wake Island?' Helen Winthrop seemed unsure of Melville's seriousness, as if listening to an over-enthusiastic patient in her surgery chair outlining the elaborate dental treatment he had set his heart on.

'Stay there? Of course...' Melville prowled along the mantelpiece of the beach-house, slapping the line of photographs. 'Look at those runways, everything is there. A big airport like the Wake field is a zone of tremendous possibility - a place of beginnings, by the way, not ends.'

Helen Winthrop made no comment on this, watching Melville quietly. She no longer slept in the hangar at the airstrip, and during her weekend visits moved into Melville's beach-house. Needing his help to increase the Cessna's range, and so reduce the number of refuelling stops with their built-in delays, she put up with his restlessness and child-like excitement, only concerned by his growing dependence on her. As he worked on the Cessna she listened for hours to him describing the runways of the island. However, she was careful never to leave him alone with the ignition keys.

While she was away, working at her dental practice, Melville returned to the dunes, continuing to dig out the crashed bomber. The port and starboard wings were now free of the sand, soon followed by the upper section of the fuselage. The weekends he devoted to preparing the Cessna for its long westward flight. For all his excitability, the state of controlled euphoria which his soon-to-be-realized dream of flying to Wake Island had brought about, his navigation plans and structural modification to the Cessna's air-frame were carefully and professionally carried through.

Even the intense migraines that began to disturb Melville's sleep did little to dent his good humour. He assumed that these fragments of the past had been brought to the surface of his mind by the strains of his involvement with this over-serious aviatrix, but later he knew that these elements of an unforgotten nightmare had been cued in by the aircraft emerging around him on all sides - Helen Winthrop's Cessna, the Fortress he was exposing to light, the blackened Messerschmitt which the advertising man was lifting from the sea-bed.

After a storm had disturbed the sand-flats, he stood on the balcony of the beach-house inhaling the carbonated air, trying to free himself from the uneasy dreams that had filled the night, a system of demented metaphors. In front of him the surface of the sand-flats was covered with dozens of pieces of rusting metal, aircraft parts shaken loose by the storm. As Helen Winthrop watched from the bedroom window he stepped on to the beach and walked across the ruffled sand, counting the fragments of carburettor and exhaust manifold, trim-tab and tailwheel that lay around him as if left here by the receding tide of his dreams.

Already other memories were massing around him, fragments that he was certain belonged to another man's life, details from the case-history of an imaginary patient whose role he had been tricked into playing. As he worked on the Fortress high among the dunes, brushing the sand away from the cylinder vanes of the radial engines, he remembered other aircraft he had been involved with, vehicles without wings.

The bomber was completely exposed now. Knowing that his work was almost over, Melville opened the ventral crew hatch behind the chin turret. Ever since he had first revealed the cockpit of the plane he had been tempted to climb through the broken starboard windshield and take his seat at the controls, but the experience of the Messerschmitt cautioned him. With Helen Winthrop, however, he would be safe.

Throwing down his spade, he clambered across the sand to the beach-house.

'Helen! Come up here!' He pointed with pride to the exposed aircraft on the ridge, poised on its belly as if at the end of a take-off ramp. While Helen Winthrop tried to calm him, he steered her up the shifting slopes, hand over hand along the rope-line.

As they climbed through the crew hatch he looked back for the last time across the sand-flats, littered with their rusting aircraft parts. Inside the fuselage they searched their way around the barbette of the roof-turret, stepping through the debris of old RIT gear, lifejackets and ammunition boxes. After all his efforts, the interior of the fuselage seemed to Melville like a magical arbour, the grotto-like cavern within some archaic machine.

Sitting beside Helen in the cockpit, happy that she was with him as she would be on their flight across the Pacific, he took her through the controls, moving the throttles and trim wheels.

'Right, now. Mixture rich, carb heat cold, pitch full fine, flaps down for take-off..

As she held his shoulders, trying to pull him away from the controls, Melville could hear the engines of the Fortress starting up within his head.

As if watching a film, he remembered his years as a military test-pilot, and his single abortive mission as an astronaut. By some grotesque turn of fate, he had become the first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space. His nightmare ramblings had disturbed millions of television viewers around the world, as if the terrifying image of a man going mad in space had triggered off some long-buried innate releasing mechanism.

Later that evening, Melville lay by the window in his bedroom, watching the calm sea that covered the sand-flats. He remembered Helen Winthrop leaving him in the cockpit, and running away along the beach to find Dr Laing. Careful though he was, the physician was no more successful at dealing with Melville than the doctors at the institute of aviation medicine, who had tried to free him from his obsession that he had seen a fourth figure on board the three-man craft. This mysterious figure, either man or bird, he was convinced he had killed. Had he, also, committed the first murder in space? After his release he resolved to make his world-wide journey, externally to Wake Island, and internally across the planets of his mind.

As the summer ended and the time of their departure drew nearer, Melville was forced to renew his efforts at digging out the crashed Fortress. In the cooler weather the night winds moved the sand across the ridge, once again covering the fuselage of the aircraft.

Dr Laing visited him more frequently. Worried by Melville's deteriorating condition, he watched him struggle with the tons of sliding sand.

'Melville, you're exhausting yourself.' Laing took the spade from him and began to shovel away. Melville sat down on the wing. He was careful now never to enter the cockpit. Across the sand-flats Tennant and his team were leaving for the winter, the broken-backed Me 109 carried away on two trucks. Conserving his strength, he waited for the day when he and Helen Winthrop would leave this abandoned resort and take off into the western sky.

'All the radio aids are ready,' he told her on the weekend before they were due to leave. 'All you need to do now is file your flight plan.'

Helen Winthrop watched him sympathetically as he stood by the mantelpiece. Unable to stand his nervous vomiting, she had moved back to the hangar. Despite, or perhaps because of, their brief sexual involvement their relationship now was almost matter-of-factly neutral, but she tried to reassure him.

'How much luggage have you got? You've packed nothing.'

'I'm taking nothing - only the photographs.'

'You won't need them once you get to Wake Island.'

'Perhaps - they're more real for me now than the island could ever be.'

When Helen Winthrop left without him Melville was surprised, but not disappointed. He was working up on the dunes as the heavily laden Cessna, fitted with the wing tanks he had installed, took off from the airstrip. He knew immediately from the pitch of the engine that this was not a trial flight. Sitting on the roof turret of the Fortress, he watched her climb away across the sand-flats, make a steady right-hand turn towards the sea and set off downwind across the Channel.

Long before she was out of sight Melville had forgotten her. He would make his own way to the Pacific. During the following weeks he spent much of his time sheltering under the aircraft, watching the wind blow the sand back across the fuselage. With the departure of Helen Winthrop and the advertising executive with his Messerschmitt he found that his dreams grew calmer, shutting away his memories of the space flights. At times he was certain that his entire memory of having trained as an astronaut was a fantasy, part of some complex delusional system, an extreme metaphor of his real ambition. This conviction brought about a marked improvement in his health and selfconfidence.

Even when Dr Laing climbed the dunes and told him that Helen Winthrop had died two weeks after crashing her Cessna at Nairobi airport, Melville had recovered sufficiently to feel several days of true grief. He drove to the airfield and wandered around the empty hangar. Traces of her over-hurried departure, a suitcase of clothes and a spare set of rescue flares, lay among the empty oil-drums.

Returning to the dunes, he continued to dig the crashed bomber from the sand, careful not to expose too much of it to the air. Although often exhausted in the damp winter air, he felt increasingly calm, sustained by the huge bulk of the Fortress, whose cockpit he never entered, and by his dream of flying to Wake Island.

1974

The news that the world's largest airliner had crashed into the sea near Acapulco with a thousand passengers on board reached me while I was attending the annual film festival at the resort. When the first radio reports were relayed over the conference loudspeakers I and my fellow journalists abandoned our seats in the auditorium and hurried out into the street. Together we stared silently at the sunlit ocean, almost expecting to see an immense cascade of water rising from the distant waves.

Like everyone else, I realised that this was the greatest disaster in the history of world aviation, and a tragedy equal to the annihilation of a substantial town. I had lost all interest in the film festival, and was glad when the manager of my television station in Mexico City ordered me to drive to the scene of the accident, some thirty miles to the south.

As I set off in my car I remembered when these huge airliners had come into service. Although they represented no significant advance in aviation technology - in effect they were double-decker versions of an earlier airliner - there was something about the figure 1000 that touched the imagination, setting off all kinds of forebodings that no amount of advertising could dispel.

A thousand passengers... I mentally counted them off - businessmen, elderly nuns, children returning to their parents, eloping lovers, diplomats, even a would-be hijacker. It was this almost perfect cross-section of humanity, like the census sample of an opinion pollster, that brought the disaster home. I found myself glancing compulsively at the sea, expecting to see the first handbags and life-jackets washed ashore on the empty beaches.

The sooner I could photograph a piece of floating debris and return to Acapulco - even to the triviality of the film festival the happier I would feel. Unfortunately, the road was jammed with southbound traffic. Clearly every other journalist, both foreign and Mexican, present at the festival had been ordered to the scene of the disaster. Television camera-vans, police vehicles and the cars of over-eager sightseers were soon bumper to bumper. Annoyed by their ghoulish interest in the tragedy, I found myself hoping that there would be no trace of the aircraft when we arrived and stepped onto the beach.

In fact, as I listened to the radio bulletins, there was almost no information about the crash. The commentators already on the site, cruising the choppy waters of the Pacific in rented motor-boats, reported that there were no signs of any oil or wreckage.

Sadly, however, there was little doubt that the aircraft had crashed somewhere. The flight-crew of another airliner had seen the huge jet explode in mid-air, probably the victim of sabotage. Eerily, the one piece of hard information, constantly played and replayed over the radio, was the last transmission from the pilot of the huge aeroplane, reporting a fire in his cargo hold.

So the aircraft had come down - but where, exactly? For all the lack of information, the traffic continued to press southwards. Behind me, an impatient American newsreel team decide to overtake the line of crawling vehicles on the pedestrian verge, and the first altercations soon broke out. Police stood at the major crossroads, and with their usual flair managed to slow down any progress. After an hour of this, my car's engine began to boil, and I was forced to turn the lame vehicle into a roadside garage.

Sitting irritably in the forecourt, and well aware that I was unlikely to reach the crash site until the late afternoon, I looked away from the almost stationary traffic to the mountains a few miles inland. The foothills of the coastal range, they rose sharply into a hard and cloudless sky, their steep peaks lit by the sun. It occurred to me then that no one had actually witnessed the descent of the stricken airliner into the sea. Somewhere above the mountains the explosion had taken place, and the likely trajectory would have carried the unhappy machine into the Pacific. On the other hand, an observational error of a few miles, the miscalculation of a few seconds by the flight-crew who had seen the explosion, would make possible an impact point well inland.

By coincidence, two journalists in a nearby car were discussing exactly this possibility with the garage attendant filling their fuel tank. This young man was gesturing towards the mountains, where a rough road wound up a steep valley. He slapped his hands together, as if mimicking an explosion.

The journalists watched him sceptically, unimpressed by the story and put off by the young man's rough appearance and almost unintelligible local dialect. Paying him off, they turned their car onto the road and rejoined the slowly moving caravan to the south.

The attendant watched them go, his mind on other things. When he had filled my radiator, I asked him: 'You saw an explosion in the mountains?'

'I might have done - it's hard to say. It could have been lightning or a snow-slide.'

'You didn't see the aircraft?'

'No - I can't say that.'

He shrugged, only interested in going off duty. I waited while he handed over to his relief, climbed onto the back of a friend's motorcycle and set off along the coast with everyone else.

I looked up at the road into the valley. By luck, the farm track behind the garage joined it four hundred yards inland on the far side of a field.

Ten minutes later I was driving up the valley and away from the coastal plain. What made me follow this hunch that the aircraft had come down in the mountains? Self-interest, clearly, the hope of scooping all my colleagues and at last impressing my editor. Ahead of me was a small village, a run-down collection of houses grouped around two sides of a sloping square. Half a dozen farmers sat outside the tavern, little more than a window in a stone wall. Already the coast road was far below, part of another world. From this height someone would certainly have noticed the explosion if the aircraft had fallen here. I would question a few people; if they had seen nothing I would turn round and head south with everyone else.

As I entered the village I remembered how poverty-stricken this area of Mexico had always been, almost unchanged since the early 19th century. Most of the modest stone houses were still without electricity. There was a single television aerial, and a few elderly cars, wrecks on wheels, sat on the roadside among pieces of rusting agricultural equipment. The worn hillslopes stretched up the valley, and the dull soil had long since given up its meagre fertility.

However, the chance remained that these villagers had seen something, a flash, perhaps, or even a sight of the stricken airliner plummeting overhead towards the sea.

I stopped my car in the cobbled square and walked across to the farmers outside the tavern.

'I'm looking for the crashed aircraft,' I told them. 'It may have come down near here. Have any of you seen anything?'

They were staring at my car, clearly a far more glamorous machine than anything that might fall from the sky. They shook their heads, waving their hands in a peculiarly secretive way. I knew that I had wasted my time in setting out on this private expedition. The mountains rose around me on all sides, the valleys dividing like the entrances to an immense maze.

As I turned to go back to my car one of the older farmers touched my arm. He pointed casually to a narrow valley sheltering between two adjacent peaks high above us.

'The aircraft?' I repeated.

'It's up there.'

'What? Are you sure?' I tried to control my excitement for fear of giving anything away.

The old man nodded, his interest fading. 'Yes. At the end of that valley. It's a long way.'

Within moments I had set off again, restraining myself with difficulty from over-taxing the engine. The few vague words of this old man convinced me that I was on the right track and about to achieve the scoop I had yearned for throughout my professional career. However casually he had spoken he had meant what he said.

I pressed on up the narrow road, forcing the car in and out of the potholes and rain-gullies. At each turn of the road I halfexpected to see the tailplane of the aircraft poised on a distant crag, and the hundreds of bodies scattered down the mountain slopes like a fallen army. I started to run over in my mind the opening paragraphs of my dispatch, telephoned to my startled editor while my rivals were fifty miles away staring into the empty sea. It was vital to achieve the right marriage of sensation and compassion, that irresistible combination of ruthless realism and melancholy invocation. I would describe the first ominous discovery of a single aircraft seat on a hillside, a poignant trail of ruptured suitcases, a child's fluffs' toy and then - a valley floor covered with corpses.

For an hour I pressed on up the road, now and then having to stop and kick away the boulders that blocked my path. This remote infertile region was almost deserted. At intervals an isolated hovel clung to a hillside, a section of telegraph wire followed me overhead for half a mile before ending abruptly, as if the telephone company years beforehand had realised that there was no one here to make or receive a call.

Once again, I began to have second thoughts. Had the old villager been playing me along? Surely if he had seen the aircraft come down he would have been more concerned?

The coastal plain and the sea were now miles behind me, visible only for brief moments as I followed the broken road up the valley. Looking back at the sunlit coast through the rear mirror, I carelessly rolled the car over some heavy rubble. After the collision underneath I could tell from the different note of the exhaust that I had damaged the exhaust.

Cursing myself for having embarked on this lunatic chase, I knew that I was about to strand myself up here in the mountains. Already the early afternoon light was beginning to fade. Fortunately I had ample fuel in the car, but on this narrow road it was impossible to turn the vehicle around.

Forced to go on, I approached a second village, a clutch of hovels built a century earlier around a now deconsecrated chapel. The only level place in which to turn a car was temporarily blocked by two peasants loading firewood onto a cart. As I waited for them to move away I realised how much poorer they were even than the people in the village below them. Their clothes were made partly from leather and partly from animal furs, and they carried shot-guns over their shoulders weapons, I could tell from the way they looked at me, which they might not hesitate to use if I remained here after dark.

They watched me as I carefully reversed the car, their eyes roving across this expensive sports saloon, the camera equipment on the seat beside me, and even my clothes, all of which must have seemed unbelievably exotic.

To explain my presence, and give myself some kind of official status that would deter them from emptying their shot-guns into my back as I drove off, I said: 'I've been ordered to look for the aircraft - it came down somewhere near here.'

I moved the gears, about to move off, when one of the men nodded in reply. He put one hand on my windshield, and with the other pointed to a narrow valley lying between twin mountain peaks a thousand feet above us.

As I drove up the mountain road, all my doubts had gone. This time, once and for all, I would prove my worth to a sceptical editor. Two separate witnesses had confirmed the presence of the crashed aircraft. Careful not to damage the car on this primitive track, I pressed on towards the valley high above me.

For the next two hours I moved steadily upwards, ever higher into these bleak mountains. By now all sight of the coastal plain and the sea had gone. Once I caught a brief glimpse of the first village I had passed, far below me like a small stain on a carpet. With luck, the road continued to carry me towards my goal. No more than an earth and stone track, it was barely wide enough to hold the car's wheels as I steered around the endless hairpin bends.

Twice more I stopped to question the few mountain people who watched me from the doors of their earth-floored hovels. However guardedly, they confirmed that the crashed aircraft lay above.

At four o'clock that afternoon, I finally reached the remote valley lying between two mountain peaks, and approached the last of the villages on this long trail. Here the road came to an end in a stony square surrounded by a cluster of dwellings. They looked as if they had been built two hundred years earlier and had spent the intervening time trying to sink back into the mountain.

Most of the village was unpopulated, but to my surprise a few people came out of their houses to look at me, gazing with awe at the dusty car. Immediately I was struck by the extremity of their poverty. These people had nothing. They were destitute, not merely of worldly goods, but of religion, hope, and any knowledge of the rest of mankind. As I stepped from my car and lit a cigarette, waiting as they gathered around me at a respectful distance, it struck me as cruelly ironic that the huge airliner, the culmination of almost a century of aviation technology, should have come to its end here among these primitive mountain-dwellers.

Looking at their unintelligent and passive faces, I felt I was surrounded by a rare group of subnormals, a village of mental defectives amiable enough to be left on their own, high in this remote valley. Perhaps there was some mineral in the soil that damaged their nervous systems and kept them at this simple animal level.

'The aircraft - have you seen the airliner?' I called out. Some ten of the men and women were standing around me, mesmerised by the car, by my cigarette lighter and gold-rimmed glasses, even by my plump flesh.

'Aircraft -? Here...' Simplifying my speech, I pointed to the rocky slopes and ravines above the village, but none of them seemed to understand me. Perhaps they were mute, or deaf. They were guileless enough, but it occurred to me that they might be concealing their knowledge of the crash. What riches they would reap from those thousand corpses, enough treasure to transform their lives for a century. I would have expected this small square to be piled high with aircraft seats, suitcases, bodies stacked like firewood.