Authors: Nevil Shute
“That poor woman,” she said softly. “I did like her. Was she very much cut up, Dennis?”
“I think she was,” I said. “It’s hard to tell with an American, especially an actress like that. You can’t tell if she’s putting on an act.”
She was silent for a minute. “I can’t help thinking about her,” she said at last. “She was awfully fond of him, you know. I think it was heroic of her, to go away like that. Do you think we’ll ever see her again, Dennis?”
“No,” I said, “I don’t think so. Only on the screen.” I rubbed my wrists and hands; they were itching again like fire.
Shirley said, “Dennis, come and let me put something on those bites. I’ve got some cream that will soothe them.” We went into the bedroom and she put it on for me, and then she said, “What about our holiday, Dennis? You really must take one this year; you’re looking awfully tired. The Reindeer must be just about cleaned up, isn’t it? Couldn’t we go away now, before anything else crops up?”
I grinned at her. “Too late,” I said. “It’s cropped.” And I told her about the Assegai.
“Oh, Dennis! Someone else must deal with that. You can’t go on for ever without a holiday.”
“I’ll have to hold the fort till Morrison gets back,” I said. “I don’t suppose that’ll be so long. I’m seeing the pilot in a day or two.” I stared out of the window of our little bedroom.
“I can’t make out why there should be a light,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
She laid her hand upon my arm. “Forget about it now,” she said gently.
I roused myself to talk of matters that were more up Shirley’s street. “How’s Marjorie Corder getting on with Honey?”
“Oh, she’s a dear. You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if they got married.”
“So they ruddy well ought to,” I replied. “From what you tell me they’ve been living in sin for the last week.”
She turned on me. “Oh, Dennis, they haven’t! Mr. Honey wouldn’t know how.”
“Don’t you be too sure about that,” I said. “Are they engaged?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Not yet. But her leave’s up at the end of the week. Perhaps they will be then.”
As a matter of fact, they got engaged that night. Mr. Honey went back to his little house that evening anxious to justify himself in Marjorie’s eyes. What she had said about his treatment of Elspeth had made a deep impression on him. He regarded her as a woman of the world and more knowledgeable than he: somebody who travelled repeatedly to Canada and the United States and liked it. He had a deep respect for her. Curiously, she seemed to have a deep respect for him, and in this she was unusual; most people treated him with very little respect. He did not want to lose her regard.
He went into the kitchen and beamed at her through his thick glasses. “Dr. Scott’s come back,” he said. “The message we sent got to him all right. Captain Samuelson flew over and dropped it.”
Her face lit up. “Oh Theo, I
am
glad. Was it any good?”
“Yes, it was. There’s a lake there called Dancing Bear and they found the tailplane just south of its foot.”
“Theo! So it was under the foot of the bear, after all?”
He nodded. “I knew it must be something like that. It was just the same with the aqueduct. You couldn’t understand the message till you’d thought about it for a bit. But in this case, of course, we hadn’t got the data. We didn’t know there was a lake called that.”
“It’s wonderful!” she exclaimed. There was a light of admiration in her eyes that he could not mistake.
He coloured a little. “Well,” he said diffidently, “it just comes of proceeding in the proper scientific manner. So many
people start off right, but then when they come up against something they don’t understand, they turn round and say the whole research was started on wrong lines. But I
am
glad this turned out to be useful, because of Elspeth.” He looked at her appealingly. “You don’t really think it did her any harm, do you?”
She laid her hand impulsively upon his arm. “Of course not, Theo—don’t worry about that. We must find her and tell her—she’ll be thrilled!”
He said, “Do you think that’s wise?”
She stared at him. “But don’t you want to tell her?”
He blinked at her through his glasses. “Well, what do you think, Marjorie? Won’t it impress it on her mind? I thought you wanted to forget all about that sort of thing.”
“Wouldn’t you tell her at all?” she said thoughtfully. “Just forget about it?”
“Well, yes—I think I would. After all, it’s not important any longer. Tell her in some years’ time, when she’s a bit older. She hasn’t talked about it again, has she?”
The girl shook her head. “That’s very sweet of you, Theo,” she said soberly. “You really are the kindest man I’ve ever met.”
He coloured; it was a long time since anyone had said that sort of thing to him. “There’s another thing,” he said unsteadily. “It
was
a fatigue fracture.”
“Oh, Theo! So you were right in that, too?”
He blinked. “I thought it must have been. It’s really very satisfactory, because it adds another trial without wasting our time, if you understand. This trial that I’m doing at the R.A.E. becomes a confirmatory experiment—it means that we’re about six months further ahead than we thought we were. If this one confirms the results of the first, the Labrador accident, we really will be on a firm foundation, so that we can go ahead with confidence.”
She did not understand what all that meant, but it was evidently something very near his heart, and so she said, “How splendid!”
He beamed at her. “It’s really very satisfactory,” he repeated. “I think we’re on the way to getting something useful now.”
She thought for a minute, and then asked, “Theo, what’s going to happen to the Reindeer if it gets fatigue like this? Can they go on using it?”
“The Reindeer? Oh, you mean the machines they’re using
now. They’ve got to stop, I think. Dr. Scott said something about grounding them all. I think he said they could go on to 720 hours—that’s half the estimated time to failure.”
“Oh.…” With her knowledge of the Organisation she tried to visualise how the Montreal and New York services could be run without any Reindeers, and failed. “I suppose they aren’t safe any longer.”
“I should think they’d be all right up to 720 hours,” he said. “But after that they ought to stop. I think Dr. Scott’s quite right in that.”
She said slowly, “Then the one at Gander must have been very dangerous, Theo.”
He laughed, almost boyishly; his success and her approval had lifted years of care and grief and worry off his shoulders. “You know, I think it was. I’m rather surprised we got across all right, really I am. It did 1,430 hours, that one, without breaking. The only thing is, Dr. Scott says the Canadians are quite certain that fatigue fractures are governed by the temperature, that they come sooner when it’s cold. That’s one of the parameters I haven’t dealt with yet, that and the question of electrical conductivity. It might possibly explain why that one didn’t break, because it had been operating in the tropics, you see. There’s a whole field to explore,” he said enthusiastically. “All sorts of things.” He was like a little boy let loose in a toy shop, uncertain which of the attractive treasures to pick up first.
Marjorie said, “If you hadn’t pulled up its undercarriage, Theo, I should have gone on flying in it. And I should have been killed, like Betty Sherwood and Jean Davenport.”
He stared at her dumbly, blinking in distress at the idea.
She said thoughtfully, “I wonder how many lives you’ve saved, Theo? How many people are now living who would be dead by now, or just about to die, but for your courage and your genius?”
He blinked at her in silence. Much more important to him at that moment was the curve of her throat as it slid into her dress and a small curl of hair beside her ear.
“You’re a great man, Theo,” she said quietly. “This was all your doing. But for your work and your devotion other Reindeers would have crashed and other people would have been killed—hundreds, perhaps. Captain Samuelson would have been killed, as Captain Ward was killed. I should have died, as Betty and Jean died. I happen to know about it, so does Captain Samuelson. The passengers who would have
died but for your courage and your work, they’ll never know. But I can speak for them. Thank you, Theo, for all that you’ve done for them, and for their wives, and for their children.”
Mr. Honey was never a very articulate man. He just put his arm round her shoulders and kissed her. As Marjorie put it to Shirley, that kind of broke the ice. By the time Elspeth, who was reading Arthur Ransome lying on her bed upstairs, awoke to the fact that she was hungry and came down to see what was happening about tea, her father was engaged to Marjorie Corder. Elspeth, who had been expecting that to happen for some time, thought it was a very good idea.
Marjorie went round and saw Shirley alone at tea-time on the following afternoon. “I know it’s no good trying to kid you and Dr. Scott,” she said candidly. “You think I’ve worked for this, that it’s been all my doing. Well, up to a point, it has.”
Shirley smiled. “I don’t think anyone that Mr. Honey married could expect to be exactly passive in the matter,” she observed. “Any girl would have had to have done most of the work.”
Marjorie nodded. “I think that’s true. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t going to be terribly happy together.”
“My dear, I know you will,” said Shirley. “I can tell you one thing—he’s an awfully kind man.”
“I know,” the stewardess said softly. “You wouldn’t think it, but he’s brave too—and just terribly clever.” She turned to Shirley. “I’m not a very clever person,” she said, “and I don’t really understand very much about his work. But I do know this—it’s just about as important as a man’s work can be. I’ve only known him a short time, but in that time I’ve seen him save hundreds of lives—literally hundreds. When you think of what might have happened to the Reindeers if he hadn’t found out this about fatigue—”
“I know,” said Shirley. It was in her mind to say that I had had a bit to do with it as well, and so had Marjorie herself and Captain Samuelson, but she did not want to be ungracious or to spoil her pleasure.
“All my life,” the girl said, “ever since Donald got killed, I wanted to be in aviation. That’s why I manœuvred to get this job with the Organisation, to be a stewardess. I love being on aerodromes and seeing aeroplanes. It’s a sort of bug that gets in you, you know.”
Shirley nodded. “I’ve got it, too.”
The stewardess said, “Serving teas and drinks and asking
passengers to fasten safety belts and helping them to do it—that’s one way to work in aviation. It’s all right if you can’t do anything more important. But then when I met Theo, when he pulled the undercart up out at Gander, I started wondering if that was really the best thing I could do. He’s such a—such a
big
little man,” she said. “His work is so vastly more important than mine, and he does need someone’s help so very, very much.”
“My dear,” said Shirley softly.
Marjorie said, “I never went to college and I won’t be able to do much to help him in his work. I don’t think he’d want that, anyway. But I can help him for all that, in all the things he can’t do properly himself. And I can make him young again, I think, and make him enjoy things. If I can do that, he’s bound to do better work even than he does now. And I think that’s a better way to work in aviation than just serving teas and drinks and telling the passengers when to do up their safety belts.…”
* * * * *
D.R.D. called his second meeting on the Reindeer tail two days later, at 11.30 in the same room in the Ministry of Supply. I killed two birds with one stone, that day, by arranging for the pilot of the Assegai to meet me an hour previously in Ferguson’s room.
His name was Flying-Officer Harper. He was a dark-haired, fresh-faced boy of twenty-one or twenty-two, who adopted the pose that everything was a joke and nothing really mattered, whether being crossed in love or being killed in an Assegai. He came into the room warily, as if walking into a trap.
“Flying-Officer Harper?” I said. “Good morning. My name is Scott and I’m from Farnborough. We’ve got to start a special investigation into these accidents that you’ve been having with the Assegai, and I asked if you could meet me here to tell me just what happened.” I motioned him to a chair and gave him a cigarette. “Tell me, what happened first of all?”
“Well,” he said, “the wing came off.”
“I know. Any idea why it came off?”
“I suppose it just isn’t strong enough.”
“Tell me just what happened,” I said. “It’s my job to try and make it stronger. First of all, what height were you at?”
“About thirty-five thousand, I should think. Anyway, between thirty and forty thousand.”
“Were you alone or were there other machines about?”
“There were other machines up at the time, but nobody near me. Nobody else saw what happened.”
“What were you doing? Were you flying level or diving?”
“I was in a shallow dive, sir.”
“What speed were you going at?”
“I don’t know,” he said evasively. “The air-speed indicator goes all haywire—it was flipping about all over the scale.”
“What was the Machmeter showing?”
“I never look at that,” he said. “It’s no bloody good, that thing. Half the time its U/S.”
One has to be patient. I said, “Would you say that you were near the speed of sound?”
He said reluctantly, “I might have been. It’s rather difficult to tell.”
I smiled. “What about the restriction on the speed of the Assegai? The one about not doing more than .90 Mach?”
He laughed cynically. “That’s just a bit of bloody nonsense. Nobody pays any attention to that.”
“You mean, in combat practice you go faster than that in Assegais?”
“Of course. Everybody does. It’s just a lot of nonsense put out by the boffins, that.”
I grinned. “What’s the fastest you have ever been in an Assegai?”
He said proudly, “I got it up to 1.2 on that Machmeter thing. That was in about a thirty-degree dive. I believe you’d get her faster than that if you started at about fifty thousand.”