by Jerry
Shortly after this it was considered necessary to establish a centre for advanced research into the very real and increasingly serious problem of man’s limitations in flight.
The finest medical intellects were focused upon this project, and Doc Lestrange became one of the carefully selected and screened inmates of the squat, heavily-guarded compound adjoining Airfield Eight.
I knew little, at that time, of the problems facing these scientists, but I supposed that they would investigate and attempt to overcome the causes of black-out, red-out, bends, toxic effects, high-altitude fever, speed hypnosis, oxygen saturation and anything else experienced by those who choose to fly high-speed missiles for a living. I imagined that they would minimise the effectiveness of these obstacles to man’s conquest of space by more careful aircrew selection, dieting, training, hypnosis, improved methods of assisted respiration, advances in pressure suit design, complete adoption of the prone position in flight, perfection of cabin pressurization and the use of drugs.
As I walked down Superior Hill I could see the aerodrome before me. The main runway swept across the field, clean and white, from a position almost directly below the spot where I now halted. I could feel again the thrill of coming in to land; remember again the virtually obsolete Vampires upon which I trained, and the obsolescent Hunters I flew until the war. I finally joined a Super-Sabre squadron in Kent, spending my brief leaves away from London, where one was constantly depressed by the sight and stench of bombbatchy and deformed civilians foraging for scraps of putrid and decomposing food among the rubble. They stumbled in their thousands, with ever-weakening steps, until insanity again fired their despair-dulled eyes and radio-activity burnt them out from the inside.
Ferro-concrete columns sprawled across powdered brick and splintered glass, and gobs of human meat littered Oxford Circus and Sauchiehall Street, and the now barren site of the Tower Ballroom.
Jet engines, designed to run on refined paraffin, were boosted to 30,000 revolutions a minute on liquid oxygen, water injection and hydrogen-peroxide mixtures. If a pilot completed three operational sorties before his engine disintegrated—to smear him across the instrument panel like so much jelly—he was one of the chosen few.
Of the sixteen pilots who greeted me when I joined the squadron, only three were alive two weeks later. I was one of them and wished to stay that way.
Scared? I should say I was scared. But I loved flying. Have you ever sat up there, above a stretch of white and rose-tinted cloud, beneath a blue dome as limitless as time and vast as infinity itself? Right above the dirt and squallor, the rain and stench and avarice; above the East and the West and money—right way up above Wall Street, Purchase Tax and Parkhurst? Have you ever sat up there, proudly controlling your movement in three dimensions at twelve hundred miles an hour, and then reached the end of the cloud bank—to see a whole continent spread before you like a contour-topograph of itself? Have you sat high in the troposphere, listening to the thousand-mile-an-hour whistle of air streaming thinly over, the plastiglass canopy, and seen a silver-grey speck grow out of the distance until, within the space of seconds, it has become a magical, slender and beautifully streamlined ship glinting in the clear sunshine of outer atmosphere, at formation station three feet from your own wingtip?
And when it is there, floating as though in suspended levitation, you marvel at its complexity and at the power beneath its deceptively slim nacelles. A flying machine capable of speeds limited only by the friction barrier; a recording instrument capable of computing a hundred items of meteorological knowledge—from barometric pressure to the ratio of oxygen to nitrogen in the area through which it is passing—and of transforming them into mechanical energy capable of applying instant compensation without the pilot having to lift a finger; a machine capable of sustained flight in any weather or in total darkness; a flying searchlight, a broadcasting and receiving station, and a flying gun platform all in one—that is what you see trembling at your wingtip as pockets slip over its control surfaces. Its pilot never takes his eyes from your wingtip, except for briefly snatched glances at his instrument panel—until you signal the break. Then he lifts a gauntlet-clad hand and grins. His booster apertures belch shimmering heat. The nose lifts and the machine hurtles away with blue-white pinpoints of flame spearing the air behind it. With your own velocimeter showing nine hundred, still it streaks away from you. Diminishing in a matter of seconds to first a speck and then an unbelievable dream.
With sudden pride you realise that his machine and your own are the same, and that he is not a god, but a man—like yourself. You are both members of the same breed; the soft, pulpy, ill-equipped predecessors of what? Who raised themselves from the slime and became lords of earth—and who are still evolving; but oh, how slowly . . .
In sudden respect and affection you run your hand over the smooth belinium surface of the control column and open the taps. The burble from behind becomes a vibrant hum and you feel yourself pressed against the back of the seat as she surges forwards and upwards. Scared? Of course we were scared, sometimes, but how can you ever forget flying?
More pilots came, more were killed, and we knew the fear that dries up your mouth like blotting paper, that makes your hands run ahead of your brain, and that opens every sweat-producing pore of your body. They issued narcotics, spirits, rubber bottles. Still we climbed up and vanished, sometimes for ever, behind tumbling cumulous cloud.
Finally, I bought it too. I ejected myself from a blazing Vituper with disintegrated impellors and bursting hydrogen all about me. The separator-gear failed to operate, and instead of leaving the ejector seat I went hurtling down with it. Our arrival made a noticeable impression on the surface of the earth—and I never flew again.
Later I left the Service. I sold cans of oil, worked in a factory, drove a lorry. People were starving and I was “people.” I was not in very good shape, and when I bumped into Doc Lestrange, and told him how bad things were and how much I flying, he glanced me over.
To my great surprise the Doc pronounced me fit and sent me along to E.R.H.L.F. “Tell Doctor Kersch that I sent you,” he reminded me, “and that I regard you as fit and eminently suitable for advanced flying.”
So there I was, walking down Superior Hill with hope in my heart, my heart in my mouth, and nothing in my stomach, feeling again the trembly thrill of bringing a high-speed fighting machine in to land. I stopped, hearing suddenly the high-pitched whine of a Superjet winding up. Then I saw the glint of light on its cowling as it topped the ramp from its underground hangar. It slid smoothly out of the flat mouth and gained strip level, accelerated rapidly towards takeoff point. Belly hugging the ground, light glinting on plastiglass, and undergear telescoping as its nose dipped with the brakes, it looked a typical Superjet. Shrilly the boosters fired. It shot forward at twenty, fifty, two hundred, seven hundred miles per hour; shrieking, hurtling, boring skyward almost vertically, directed now straight at heaven and already a mere point of light.
For a moment I was too thrilled to move, then a cold finger of doubt traced a path through my unconscious to my conscious mind. Could the human frame stand such violent acceleration—even at E.R.H.L.F.? Was it a pilot I had seen beneath the plastiglass canopy, or was it a robot? And if a robot, why have a canopy instead of a simple telelens in the nose? I pondered this. Then, shrugging the question aside, I carried on down the hill until I could no longer see the strip for buildings, and ahead of me the scene was entirely dominated by a row of squat and windowless huts surrounding the research centre terminal block.
I was stopped at the entrance gates, questioned, told to wait. For ten minutes I tried not to chew my nails, while messages were passed back and forth by telephone from the guardhouse. Then I was taken through these outer gates and given a seat in the guardhouse while the inner gates were opened. A uniformed guard approached, nodded for me to follow. I did so and we made our way to the terminal block.
In there, Doctor Kersch’s office was soon reached.
As I stood outside, waiting, I moistened my lips and tried to work up an interest in a row of multi-dimensional photographs mounted behind plastic sheeting on the walls. The building was old, the plastic sheet—obviously synthetic resin—had scarred and misted over, and the phenolic resin frames had faded and become distorted as a result of moisture absorption. But there was nothing old about Kersch’s office.
The door slid back so quietly that I felt suddenly naked. I saw Kersch looking at me, and felt my enthusiasm fade. Then he smiled. I experienced a sudden upsurge of relieved emotion; trust, hope, admiration. Kersch motioned me in, permitted the smile to remain on his lips for a brief moment. I saw before me a scientist too preoccupied to bother about the platitudes of formal introduction. He was placid in his disregard for the conventional smile or the blatent manifestations of trained courtesy.
“Your documents,” he said, quietly. He tapped a pile of papers with his forefinger. “Forty-three hundred hours air experience as a pilot. Mostly on fighter aircraft. Flown Vampires Mark Three and Five, Venoms and Vitupers. Meteors Mark Four, Seven, Eight and Fifteen. Hunter. H.1091. Sabre and Supersabre . . .” He nodded with apparent satisfaction.
“My age?” I asked. “Am I . . .?”
“Nonsense, nonsense. You’re good for years yet.” He walked round the desk and sat facing me. “If Doctor Lestrange recommended you, I am satisfied. Your medical history is good. Records rate your standard of moral courage as very high. Men of your experience are required. We have aircraft that ordinary men are incapable of flying.”
For a moment Kersch looked into my soul. “You are capable of flying such machines,” he told me. “You are old in experience but young in your reactions. You are capable of a great hatred for our enemies, and you love the element that only your breed has conquered. Would you like to see one of our crew rooms—and those who people it?”
I nodded with enthusiasm. Pilots in their crew room are pilots in their noisiest, rowdiest state of relaxation. Eagerly I anticipated a cheerful half hour of swapping lines with a companionable bunch of my own kind once again; a half hour among those sportsmen who were chosen for their own peculiar brand of temperament; a mixture of dash and judgement, impetuous bravery and caution, irresponsible blindness matched by superb coordination and intuition.
My mind flashed back over a hundred happy crew-room incidents; fire extinguishers “accidentally” set off, wall charts and pompous S.R.Os. “inadvertently” set alight, pyrotechnics exploded mysteriously beneath the chairs of “binders,” a book called “Teach Yourself to be a Pilot” placed in a conspicuous position on the Flight Commander’s desk. It would be good to see some of “the boys” again.
I smiled at Kersch and he looked back with a similar enthusiasm alight in the depths of his own eyes. We stepped into the elevator and sank rapidly. Compressed air hissed and light flickered through the air vents as floor after floor shot away from us. We must have been seven floors below ground level—to my surprise—when the cubicle slowed to an almost imperceptible halt. Another pneumatic whisper, and the doors slid silently open on curved runners. Ahead, there was a long, dimly illuminated passage lined on both sides with steel doors. It was deathly silent, and again I felt my enthusiasm chill and seep away from me.
I looked at Kersch. He was trembling slightly, as though the cold were too much for him, and his face looked strangely intense. Embarrassed by the absolute silence, I coughed. The sound echoed and re-echoed back and forth along the corridor, gaining a metallic ring as it aged. We walked. Our footsteps rang through the passage, making me feel out of step as the cadence multiplied and multiplied again, until it sounded as though an army of ghosts were behind us.
Suddenly Kersch stopped. He turned to a door on our right and I noticed an illuminated chart at its side. The door was marked “J8” and was heavily rivetted. I saw his eyes flicker over the chart. He said: “Number Seven is airborne. That would be the Superjet that took off as you arrived. He is due back in four minutes.”
I felt my mouth open. “That really was piloted by a man, then! But . . . but . . .”
“Number Seven would be gratified, indeed,” Kersh said. The muscles in his jaw twitched. “Let us go inside; you will be able to greet him on his return to the comforts of the crew room.” He pressed a button and the twin doors opened with rather more noise than had his office doors.
For a minute I was quite unable to accustom myself to the semi-darkness; so I closed my eyes and waited, hearing nothing but the rustle of air from the lift shaft and corridor as it entered the crew room. Silence. I blinked, adjusted my pupils and saw before me a long, steel-lined room, lighted by concealed strip giving off an unearthly greenish glow. As my eyes finally accustomed themselves, I saw before me, growing out of the foggy void, a scene of such unutterable horror that I whimpered in fear for my sanity.
“My dear fellow,” Kersch was murmuring, “there is really no cause for alarm. Calm yourself, please.”
Speechless, I stared at the hellish spectacle. Row upon row of polished alloy tubes ran the length of the steel cavern. Five or six feet from the floor, these tubes curved away to sliding doors at the far end. There were perhaps thirty, and of these only one was vacant. It was marked at this end by a faintly illuminated plate bearing the figure seven.
Suspended from the other rails, and swaying gently in the light rush of air from our door, were a score or so objects from a lunatic’s nightmare. Near-human, with stumps for legs, and each with only one arm, these devilishly mutilated creatures stared mindlessly out of drugged eyes set in scarred and blood-drained tissue. They were alive, even alert, but their seamed and twisted features showed little sign of emotion beyond that of . . . of what? Hatred, I decided later. Not the fundamental, emotional hatred of man, but the cold, deadly hatred of a snake, perhaps; a trained, hypno-induced hatred; a suspended emotion nurtured, sharpened, concentrated and then carefully turned in a required direction while held in boiling, simmering check. All hell’s fury waited there for release.
Horrible, more horrible even than the mass amputations and the deathly emptiness of those eyes were the twisted and broken necks. Exactly alike, each head grew forward from a deformed chest, and from the crown of each head there arose a raw and hairless thing; a filthy, loathsome growth of red-soaked flesh, terminating at the top in what appeared to be a neat, plastic screw-cap. Untended hair straggled over each short neck to a hunched back, and buried in the gristly pad of this warped hump there was a silver hook, providing a method of suspension for each fearful object from its rail.
“Our crew room,” Kersch murmured, conversationally. As he spoke the room brightened momentarily with the opening of a door at the far end. A faint rumbling disturbed the sudden hush, and through the green mist of the dispensers, through the semidarkness of this nightmare building, there came towards us a glistening, sweat-soaked object of deathly pallor and horrifying aspect. Tinted by the lighting to a ghoulish green, it advanced. Drawn by electro-magnets along its alloy rail, it settled, loosely swaying, with eyes closed and intense agony clearly expressed upon haggard flesh, beneath the plate marked seven.
“Would you care to watch them have their protein injections?” Kersch asked, suavely. “Or do you prefer to absorb a little nourishment yourself?”
Looking at him as he spoke casually of food, I began to feel physically sick. The room was swimming before me. I couldn’t keep my mind from the blazing hydrogen and the agony of my first weeks in hospital. I felt faint, sick, empty.
“Inhuman,” I managed to gasp at last. “I never knew . . . would never have believed . . . in England?”
With a casual movement of his meticulously manicured hand he silenced me. “My dear fellow, you allow emotion to overshadow logic. Think of it like this; in a month you lost how many Sabre pilots during the early part of the war? Twenty on your squadron? Thirty? More? And why did you lose them, eh? Not because our scientists lacked the technical knowledge required to produce unbeatable projectiles, but because
they ignored the weaknesses of man. We were beaten by ourselves. Machines advanced but man remained physically unchanged. If anything, man deteriorated. Physically he is inferior to his Neolithic forefathers. From the morphological viewpoint, the squat ape is infinitely better equipped to fly an aircraft than any man alive. The comparison shows man most unfavourably, I assure you, and tests have proved that the common housefly is capable of withstanding double the centrifugal stresses fatal to man. Man’s circulation is poor, the distance between heart and brain being too great. The respiratory system . . .” He snapped his fingers before my eyes, but I was too weakened by nausea and apathy even to blink. “. . . . quite hopeless.” He continued: “Totally inefficient. And still machines advance. Human flight limitations, having at last been recognised as a major problem, are given precedence over all else in high military circles, and for that reason this research centre exists.” Kersch stared at me, eyes alight with crazy enthusiasm. “The Mutilants you have just seen are merely the initial diffident step towards total conquest of space; the crude result of our earliest, blind gropings—but the experiment was a success. We have progressed far, my friend, since their metamorphoses.”
Looking with fear at his burning eyes, I recognised stark insanity. Get out of here, I told myself. Humour him, do whatever he asks, but get out of this slaughterhouse. Trying to sound unintelligently interested, I asked: “But how does it help to have cripples . .?”
“Cripples!” Kersch looked at me with an expression of scorn and impatience. “In terms of scientific usefulness, those Mutilants are infinitely superior to you or me. They are the simple result of a few surgical operations. Removed limbs improve circulation, and the weight reduction enables designers to reduce the lift area of an aircraft by several square feet. Limbs, you know, are quite heavy. Also the neck was broken and the head lowered until on a relatively mutual plane with the heart and lungs. This enabled the blood to feed both brain and yes under quite severe conditions of positive or negative acceleration, rapid change of direction and so on, and when later we fitted the blood reservoir—you will have noticed the protuberant object grafted on each Mutilant’s head—we found the blood pressure at the nerve centres to be improved to such an extent that most Mutilants remained conscious while thirty gs were imposed for sustained periods of time. An unmodified human would black out, and probably pass out, under the strain of fourteen gs imposed for only a few brief seconds.”