Authors: Nevil Shute
His ruminations were rudely interrupted at his own front gate, and he was jerked into another world. Elspeth had been watching for him, and she came rushing down the path to meet him, flushed and excited in her new frock. “Daddy,” she cried, “the water heater’s come! The men came with it just after you went, and they worked all the time and made a new pipe and fixed it on the wall over the sink, and it’s
making hot water! They’re coming in to paint the pipe tomorrow!”
She dragged him by the arm to show him this wonder in the kitchen. In the front door Marjorie Corder came forward to meet him, with Shirley behind her. “I came back,” she said simply. “They didn’t want me for another week at the airport, so I came back.”
She did not tell him that she had put in for a week’s leave, and got it, after some argument.
Mr. Honey said, “Oh, I
am
glad,” and Shirley standing close behind the girl saw the radiance on his frog-like features, and understood why Marjorie had bothered to come back. And then they all went into the kitchen and admired the hot-water heater, and gave it its first job to do by doing the lunch wash-up.
He pressed Shirley to stay to supper, and as she was alone in our flat she was glad to do so, so they set to and made a shepherd’s pie and put it in the oven to cook. And while that was doing they all had a game of Monopoly with Elspeth, which Mr. Honey played unusually badly even for him, so that he was ruined in ten minutes. His mind was so obviously remote from the game that when they were dishing up the supper, Marjorie asked him quietly in a corner by the gas-stove, “Is anything wrong, Theo?”
“Nothing much,” he said heavily. “It’s been rather a bad day. I had the designer of the Reindeer on my hands most of the afternoon, a Mr. Prendergast. He was very difficult.”
Shirley overheard this. “Everyone says he’s difficult. I thought he was such a nice man at the lecture. I hope you told him where he got off.”
Honey smiled weakly. “He’s not a very easy man to tell that to. And there were other things, too.…” He hesitated, and then decided to unburden himself to them. “We’ve had a lot of cables from Dr. Scott over the week-end,” he said. “He can’t find the fractured pieces of the tail.”
Shirley said sharply, “But they
must
be there!” and Marjorie said, “Oh, Theo!” Both girls were very well acquainted with the issues that were involved, but none of them had even considered before what it would mean if I failed to find a fatigue fracture in the first Reindeer crash. They pressed Honey for more details of what had happened, and he told them a stumbling and confused narrative, and showed them the crumpled copy of my last cable that he had brought from the Director’s office. A sense of disaster
descended on them and spoilt their party; they talked through supper in depressed tones with long pauses between each remark. Elspeth, who did not understand what it was all about, asked, “What’s the matter with Dr. Scott in Labrador, Daddy?”
Marjorie, to relieve him, said, “He’s lost something, and he can’t find it. Something very important.”
“What can’t he find, Daddy?”
Honey said, “A piece of an aeroplane.”
“Is it a very important piece?”
“Very important,” Honey said. “He’s in dreadful trouble.” Shirley, watching him, was interested to see that he had suddenly lost his air of impotent worry. He looked, she said, like a dog just coming on the scent. A funny sort of simile, but that’s how she described him.
Elspeth said, “Oh, poor Dr. Scott.”
“Poor Dr. Scott,” Honey repeated with deep, emphatic sympathy. “He’s in terrible trouble. And he’s been so kind to us, hasn’t he? Would you like to try and find it for him with the little trolley?” The two girls stared uncomprehending at them across the: cooling food upon the table.
Elspeth nodded vigorously. “Mm.”
Honey got up from the table, his entire attention fixed upon his little white-faced daughter. “All right, let’s go into the other room and get the little trolley.”
He got up from the table and took Elspeth by the hand, entirely oblivious of the two girls. They moved to the door; Marjorie half rose from her seat. “Where are you going?” she asked.
Honey turned in the doorway. “Please,” he said sternly, and there was a confidence of command about him that was new to both of them. “You may come with us if you sit very quiet at the back of the room, but you mustn’t speak at all or interrupt in any way. If you feel you can’t control yourselves, you must stay here.”
He went out into the front room; the girls glanced at each other in mystification, and then followed him. They found him pinning a fresh sheet of paper down upon the drawing-board and laying it horizontal on the table at a comfortable height for Elspeth sitting in a chair before it. Then he pulled the heavy curtains to shut out the daylight and switched on a powerful desk reading-lamp upon the table. Next he went to the cupboard and got out two instruments. The first was a small affair of rotating black and white segments, worked by
a small air turbine from a rubber bulb held in the palm of his hand; by pressing the bulb he could make the black and white segments alternate at varying speeds. The second instrument was a planchette, a little flat triangular trolley of three-ply wood about nine inches wide, supported on two tiny castoring wheels and a pencil at the third corner. He put this down upon the drawing-board and Elspeth laid the tips of her fingers upon it; Marjorie noted with a shock that she was evidently well accustomed to this routine.
Then he arranged the powerful light to focus only on the rotating black and white segments immediately in front of his little daughter; the rest of the room was in darkness.
“Is that light too strong?” he asked quietly.
“No, Daddy, it’s all right,” she said. It was the first time they had spoken.
“All right,” he said. “Just look at the whizzer.” The segments started to turn white and black in turn before her eyes in the bright light.
He said softly, “Poor Dr. Scott, he’s in such terrible trouble. He wiped up the mess you made when you were sick, didn’t he?” The black and white segments were changing places more quickly now.
Her eyes fixed upon them, Elspeth whispered, “Yes.”
“He’s been so kind,” he said quietly. “He showed us how to get the hot-water heater so that we’ll have hot water all the time now.”
She repeated, “He’s so kind.” Her eyes were fixed upon the changing segments in the brilliant light.
“He showed us how to use the washing-up mop, so that we don’t have to use the rag,” Honey said in an even tone.
The little girl said drowsily, “We don’t have to use the rag now.”
In the darkness at the back of the room the two young women sat motionless, tense. In Marjorie there was a great tumult of feelings. She was deeply shocked at what was going on; every fibre in her being revolted at the use that Honey was making of his child. At the same time, she could not interrupt; there was a power and a competence about him in this matter that she dared not cross. She must stay quiet now and see it out, but never, never, never should this happen again.
Honey said quietly, “Poor Dr. Scott, he’s been so kind to us, and now he’s in such terrible trouble, because he can’t find what he’s looking for. He’s so unhappy. It’s lost in the
forest, all among the trees, in the wild land where no people have ever been.” The black and white segments were changing places quickly now; the white-faced little girl was sitting with glazed eyes, motionless. “Try and help poor Dr. Scott find what he’s looking for. Try and help him. He’s been so kind to us. It’s in the forest, lying somewhere in the trees, where nobody has ever been. It’s a big metal piece, nearly as big as this house.”
The faint whirring of the segments was the only sound in the room. The blackness was oppressive, intense, around the girls. Shirley found later that her palms were bleeding from the unconscious pressure of her finger-nails, so great was the tension.
“Poor Dr. Scott,” Honey repeated monotonously, “he’s so unhappy, in the forest, looking for it, and he can’t find it. Try and help him find it. Try and help him. Try now. Try.”
Beneath the child’s fingers the planchette began to stir, and crept across the paper in uneven, jerky spasms.
MR. HONEY WENT
to the Director’s office in the morning with the greatest reluctance. He did not like contact with any of his superior officers, ever, on any subject. He regarded technical executives as mean creatures who had abandoned scientific work for the fleshpots, for the luxuries of life that could be bought with a high salary. He had no opinion of any of us, judged as men; for this reason he preferred his own company or the company of earnest young men fresh from college who were not yet tainted with commercialism. He went cynically on this occasion, already embittered by the anticipation of disbelief. It had always been so when he had put forward new ideas; he had not got the happy knack of making people credit him from the start.
He had to wait some time in the outer office, because the Director was engaged. When finally Mr. Honey got in to see him he was rather short of time and rather overwhelmed by the pressure of other work; later that morning he would have to entertain and show round a commission of French scientists on a visit to our aeronautical research establishments. He said, “Well, Honey, what is it?”
Mr. Honey said, “Is it possible to get in touch with Dr. Scott, sir?”
“We can send cables to him. There is a routine in force by which Ottawa can get in contact with the radio in his aeroplane once a day.” The procedure was that a cable from the R.A.E. was telephoned to Ferguson at the Ministry of Supply. It was then radioed to the Department of Civil Aviation in Ottawa, who relayed it to the Royal Canadian Air Force post at Rimouski on the lower St. Lawrence. We could reach Rimouski on the two-way radio in the Norseman, and made contact with them each day at six in the evening to receive or transmit any message of urgency.
Mr. Honey hesitated. “I should like to send him a cable, sir. I’ve got a message here that might be helpful to him.”
“What sort of message, Honey?”
“It’s about this tail unit that he’s trying to find, sir. I think I’ve got something that might help.”
The Director stared at him. “What sort of thing?”
“Automatic writing,” Mr. Honey said reluctantly. “I’ve had a great deal of experience with that—not in office time, of course. It gives really remarkable results in certain cases.”
The Director wrinkled his brows. “Automatic writing? You mean produced by someone in a mental trance?”
Mr. Honey said eagerly, “That’s right, sir. I got it through my daughter, Elspeth last night. She’s only twelve, but she’s really got a remarkable gift. Of course, children do produce the most amazing results sometimes. They don’t often retain their powers in later life, though.”
The Director was too busy to allow Mr. Honey much latitude to discourse on his researches in that field. “What is it that you’ve got?”
Mr. Honey produced a small roll of drawing paper, cut from the large sheet he had pinned down on the drawing-board the night before. “Well, this is what was actually produced,” he said. He unrolled it on the desk.
It was covered all over with pencil jabs, squiggles, and irregular traces. Some of these appeared to form themselves into letters, and some into half words, thus in one part of the paper the letters ING were fairly clear, and in another there was a very definite capital R. Mr. Honey turned the paper round. “This is what I mean, sir.”
Across one corner the squiggles ran consecutively in a fairly straight line. They were certainly writing, jerky and uneven though the letters were; it was not too difficult to decipher the message. It read,
UNDER THE FOOT OF THE BEAR
.
“I’m sure that means something,” Mr. Honey said. “I think we ought to cable it to Dr. Scott.”
The Director grunted, not unlike the grunts that Mr. Prendergast had dispensed the day before, and Honey winched. “We should have to cable some explanation of how the message was produced,” he said.
“Oh, yes, sir. We must let Dr. Scott have all the facts, of course.”
The Director suffered an instinctive feeling of revulsion, and I don’t blame him. He was in charge of a large Government research establishment of the most serious character. Honey was suggesting that he should send out, in the name of that establishment, a message which could only imply his own confidence in a spiritualistic message produced by a little girl of twelve, the daughter of an official who was believed by many to be mentally unbalanced. This message had to be
sent through the Ministry of Supply, who were his parent body, and through Canadian Government organisations. Inevitably its subject-matter would attract attention; it would become the subject of a tea-time joke up in the Ministry. People would start saying he was mentally unbalanced too if he sent out a thing like that.
He said slowly, “I don’t think we should bother Dr. Scott with this, Honey. It’s too unscientific for us to put forward as evidence.”
That touched Honey on the raw; he was the scientist and the Director a renegade who had deserted the pure field of science for the fleshpots of administration. “It’s not unscientific at all,” he said hotly. “It’s the product of a carefully controlled piece of research extending over a good number of years. The fact that aeronautical people don’t know much about research in that field doesn’t prove that it’s unscientific. They don’t know much about cancer research, either.”
The Director was very busy that morning, but he had a few moments to try and placate the angry little man before him. “I didn’t mean that in any derogatory sense, Honey,” he said. “But it’s not the sort of science that usually emanates from this Establishment, and not the sort that anybody here could possibly endorse.”
“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true,” Honey retorted.
The Director turned the paper over in his hands. “Before you can say if it’s true or not, you’ve got to decide what it means,” he observed. “U
NDER THE FOOT OF THE BEAR
. The Bear means Russia, I suppose. I told you yesterday that the Russians had refused to release these parts that they have taken from the wreck of the Reindeer in Labrador. Would it not be correct to say that those parts are, in fact, under the foot of the Bear?”