Authors: Nevil Shute
“Dancing Bear Water,” Hennessey replied. “That’s the only Bear I know of round these parts. But it’s the heck of a long way from here.”
I stared at him. “Which way is it?”
He looked towards the sun. “Over that way,” he said, pointing. “East—east with a bit of north in it, maybe. Thirty—forty miles.”
Russell said quickly, “Back along the course to Goose, from here?”
“I dare say it would be,” he replied. “It’s right next to Piddling Dog.” He turned to me. “I guess these names sound kind of funny to you,” he explained. “This section of the country was mapped out first by an air survey, back in 1929. Nobody hadn’t ever been here, only a few Indians, maybe. When they got the survey all laid out in Ottawa they found they’d got the heck of a lot of lakes they didn’t know about, so they set down to give ’em all names from what they looked like on the map. I got a map down in the Norseman that shows Dancing Bear. Just like a bear it is, with a little island for the eye, ’n everything.”
And there, that afternoon, we found the port tailplane of the crashed Reindeer. We saw it first from about a thousand feet as we flew over; it was standing nearly vertical between the spruce trees, about a quarter of a mile due south of the sole of the foot of the Dancing Bear. It was about thirty-seven miles from the crash. We might have found it ultimately in our air survey if we had gone so far, but I think we might have stopped short of that.
We landed on the lake and taxied in to the shore, and beached the Norseman on a little bit of shingle. The going was fairly easy upon land and we reached the tailplane in about a quarter of an hour. And when we got to it, it was a clear case if ever I saw one; a fatigue fracture of the top front spar flange, the metal short and brittle and crystalline at the break. The rear spar had been twisted off after failure, and the metal there was good.
Bill Ward must have kept her in the air for five or six minutes after losing half his tail, before they hit the trees and they all died. One thing puzzled us a lot at first; how was it that they had not managed to get out a wireless signal in that time? Then we found the insulators of a wireless aerial on the tip of the tailplane, and that too was explained.
I GOT BACK
to England three days later, and I was very tired indeed. I had slept very little, because the itching of the bites that I had got in the woods was with me still when I got home; indeed, they took a fortnight to subside completely. Moreover, the strain and tension of the travelling and the research were having their effect, preventing sleep. I should have asked some doctor to prescribe for me, but I could not wait for that. I felt it urgent to get back to Farnborough without delay.
We landed at Heath Row from Montreal about midday. A car was there to meet me; I had a packing-case for luggage and we got it into the back seat with difficulty, and drove to Farnborough. I went straight to the main office block, to the Director’s office.
I got in to see him at once. “Good morning, sir,” I said. “You got my cable?”
He got up from his chair. “Yes, thanks.” He looked at me, and then said, “Rather a hard trip?”
“It was anxious for a time,” I said. “I thought at one time that we weren’t going to find it.”
“You brought some samples back with you?” he asked.
“Oh yes. They’re in a crate outside. I couldn’t transport the whole thing, of course, so I cut off all the bits that seemed to matter. I’ve told the Transport to take them to the Metallurgical. It’s absolutely clear, sir. It’s a straightforward fatigue fracture of the front spar, the top spar flange.” And I told him what it looked like.
“Really.…” He stood in silence for a moment. “Well, that’s very satisfactory from our point of view,” he said. “We come well out of it. That’s not what matters, though. It’s shocking bad for C.A.T.O. and bad for the country. This means that all those machines will have to come back for modification, and that means the end of the British Transatlantic service for the time being, I’m afraid. But there’s nothing for it, now.”
I made a small grimace. “It’s just one of those things. It’s a frightful shame. That Reindeer’s a delightful thing to travel in.”
“You crossed in one, did you?”
“Both ways. It’s a lovely job.”
“I know it is,” he said. “Still, I don’t know that I’d have fancied it myself, in the circumstances.”
I laughed. “You have to shut your mind to that,” I said. “Be like an ordinary passenger. Forget about the structure and take an interest in the stewardess.”
He glanced at me quizzically. “I understand that Mr. Honey has been doing some of that.” It’s extraordinary how the Director gets to know what’s going on.
“A very good thing, too,” I said.
“Oh, very.” He turned the conversation back to business. “I’ll wait until those parts are ready for me to see and we’ve all seen them,” he said. “Then I’ll ring up D.R.D. and I expect he’ll want to call another meeting.”
“Had we better let Prendergast know, unofficially?” I suggested. “He had a bit of a drip last time because we kept him in the dark.”
He nodded. “Yes, we’d better do that. Will you get in touch with him, Scott?”
We stood talking over details for a few minutes. Then I said, “There’s just one more thing, sir. I got a note in Ottawa from Captain Samuelson, the pilot of the Reindeer, asking me not to broadcast the fact that he’d dropped that note from Honey to us. It seems that he went a long way out of his course without telling the Organisation anything about it, and he’d rather like to keep it dark.” I grinned. “If Sir David Moon had seen him assing about down among the tree-tops in the middle of Labrador, he’d have had twins.”
“I see.…”
“I spoke to Russell and Group-Captain Porter,” I said. “They won’t let it out from Ottawa.”
The Director said slowly, “I think it might be rather a good thing to gloss over all the automatic writing side of this business.” I smiled. “After all, you went out to find and to examine this wreckage, and you found it and you examined it. That’s all that matters to anybody. I’m quite sure the Foreign Office would very much object to any publicity about the Russian element.”
“And we should very much object to any publicity about planchette,” I said.
“Exactly,” he replied. “Until that type of research becomes one of the regular activities of this Establishment, which I hope won’t be in my time, the less said about it the better.”
I nodded. “I should think so, sir.” I turned towards the door. “Everything has been all right in my party while I’ve been away, I hope?”
He said, “So far as I know.” He glanced down at his desk. “There’s a new job coming on. They’re having trouble with the Assegai.”
“They were bound to do that,” I said. The Assegai was one of the jet interceptor fighters coming into squadron use. For rapid climb it had the new Boreas engine; in level flight at over thirty thousand feet it was probably capable of exceeding the speed of sound. Because the forces on the structure were still very much a matter of guesswork in the trans-sonic range, its speed in level flight was supposed to be limited to Mach .90. People who knew the fighter pilots said from the start that those young men would never pay attention to that sort of restriction, and they hadn’t.
“They lost one of them about a month ago,” the Director said, “and then they lost another one last week. All with structural failure of the wing. Then the day before yesterday they lost a third, but this time the pilot got out safely with his parachute. Apparently he was looking out along the wing and saw the whole thing happen. He says he saw a line of light along the leading edge before it broke.”
I stared at him. “A line of light?”
“That’s what he says he saw. It seems he’s very positive about it.”
I was dumbfounded. “But what could cause that?”
He smiled. “I don’t know, Scott. That’s what we’ve got to find out.”
I said ruefully, “Well, that’s a new one.”
“I said that it had better wait till you came back,” the Director said. “They’ll send the pilot here to see you and tell you the whole story in his own words, as soon as you like. Who would you put on it?”
“Morrison,” I said. “It’s right up his street.”
He nodded. “I think so. The only thing is, Morrison is having trouble—oh, that’s since you went away. His wife has got T.B.; she’s got to go into a sanatorium. I think that you may have some difficulty in getting any useful work out of him for a month or so.”
“I’m very sorry to hear about Mrs. Morrison,” I said. “I’ll have a talk with him. He’s certainly the man who ought to handle anything like this.”
I went back to my office. My desk was piled high with
dockets and papers that had come in during my absence, waiting for my attention. I told Miss Learoyd to put them all on the side table, and I rang down for Mr. Honey and asked him if he would come up and see me. When he came I told him all about it, the success of his fatigue estimate and the success of his automatic writing. He did not seem very greatly interested in either, except technically; success did not thrill him in the least. He regarded a success merely as a convenient platform from which to plan a further advance.
He was, however, viciously pleased at the effect the news would have on Prendergast. “These ignorant fools in the design offices,” he said angrily, “they don’t know what they’re doing, half the time. They come down here and strut about and treat you like so much dirt. If only they’d pay some attention to the people who know something about the job, they wouldn’t have these accidents.”
He displayed a characteristic reaction to the news that the entire British Transatlantic service would be suspended for an indefinite time by the grounding of the Reindeer fleet. He asked if we could get hold of the tailplanes of two of the grounded aircraft for further experiments. It seemed a golden opportunity to him. “If they can’t fly they won’t want their tailplanes,” he pointed out. “It really would be a great assistance if we could carry through a complete research on tailplanes of one type.”
He was deeply grateful to Shirley and to me for the little we had done for Elspeth. “I don’t know what to say to thank you,” he muttered. “If Mrs. Scott hadn’t come round that morning and found her, I—I don’t know what would have happened.”
“Forget about it,” I said gently. “You’d have done the same of us. But, Honey, if you don’t mind my saying so, you ought to make some arrangements that Elspeth isn’t left alone quite so much. It’s taking a bit of a risk.”
“I know it is,” he replied. “As a matter of fact …” and then he stopped. He began again. “I’ve got somebody staying with me now, for a little while. I do agree with you, it’s very bad for Elspeth so much alone.”
“It’s none of my business,” I said. “But it’s a bit hard on the kid.”
He said ingenuously, “I’m very hopeful that I’ll be able to do something before long.”
I thought of Marjorie Corder, and kept my face as straight as a judge. “That’s fine.”
They rang through from the Metallurgical Section a few minutes after that and said that my crate was there, and they were opening it. I rang the Director, and we all went down together to inspect the bits that I had brought back with me from Labrador. There was a little surface corrosion, as one might expect from parts that had been lying for some months in thawing snow, but there was general agreement that the evidence was absolutely clear. I went back to my office and rang up Prendergast.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Prendergast,” I said. “This is Scott speaking. Yes, this morning. Oh yes, thank you—not quite a holiday, you know, but very interesting, all the same. Look, Mr. Prendergast—I’m sorry to say that we found a very definite fatigue fracture. I brought the parts back with me—yes, I cut the spars beyond the fractures and brought the fractures back. They’re here now, if you’d like to come down and see them.” And I told him where the fractures were.
He said, “Really? How very, very interesting. I should very much like to see those pieces.” He spoke very pleasantly; I was amazed. He went on to discuss the repetitive stresses on the tail for a little; he was cordial, benign, and considerate. “I had a most interesting visit to your department while you were away,” he said. “Mr. Honey showed me the research that you have going on. I was very much impressed.”
So had Mr. Honey been, but I would not tell him that. I said, “I’m very sorry about the Reindeer, Mr. Prendergast. I’m afraid this is bound to mean that all those aircraft will be grounded now at seven hundred and twenty hours.”
He said genially, “Oh well, worse things happen at sea. I expect we shall get over it, one way or another.”
Well, that was one way of looking at it. I wondered if Sir David Moon would take it quite so philosophically when he was told that all his Reindeers were going to be grounded for an indefinite period, but that was none of my business. I talked to Prendergast for a few minutes more, and the extraordinary man was as smooth as silk when I had expected him to be as a raging demon. I put the telephone down, wondering if I should ever understand designers.
It was five o’clock, and I was very tired. I had to start something going on the Assegai before I could relax, and I rang through to Mr. Morrison. After some delay the girl answered the call. She said that Mr. Morrison wasn’t in the
office; he had not been in that day. His wife was very ill; he had taken her to the sanatorium at Bognor Regis. No, she didn’t know if he was coming in tomorrow.
The Assegai, it seemed, was going to be my baby.
I had a wife; I had not seen her for ten days and about nine thousand miles. I rang up Shirley at our flat and said, “Darling, I’m back.”
She said, “Oh, Dennis,
dear
. Where are you now? In the office?”
“That’s right. Will you come and fetch me with the car? I’ve done all that I’m going to do.”
She came, and we drove home together to the flat, and mixed a drink. Everything was strangely as I knew it; it was curious to think of all that I had seen and done since I had been home last. We had a vast amount to talk about; I had to tell her what had gone on in Canada and she had to tell me what had gone on in Mr. Honey’s little house in Copse Road. “I crossed over in the same machine as Monica Teasdale,” I said. “We had a long talk in the middle of the night.”