To the Wild Sky

by Ivan Southall

  Colin stirred again, lifting his head from Carol’s shoulder. She had put his head there. Quite the little mother, now that she had stopped her snivelling, Bruce thought. But she was very tense. Her back was very straight. Bruce knew that Carol was scared stiff but he was too shy to reach over and hold her hand to reassure her, or anything like that. Now that Carol was more herself again she wasn’t to be trifled with, not in thought or in deed. Bruce was always a bit wary of Carol; he felt she was out of his class. But it would have been nice to have had her to speak to. It was awful, this being cut off from everybody. They were all in solitary confinement, every one of them. And they’d had five hours of it, with a dead man on the floor.

  Now Colin seemed to have pulled himself together. He was sitting up, looking around, looking at the evening light. More than a little concerned, Colin seemed to be. But Colin was like that. His normally serious demeanour gave to really serious events a very grave tone indeed. Colin had an accountant’s face; that was what Bruce’s father said. It was the finely chiselled sort of face that one day would probably wear spectacles without rims, and regard with polite concern but acute perception from behind a broad desk (marked C. J. Martin, Manager) the wiles of hopeful clients seeking to increase their bank overdrafts. Yes, that was what Bruce’s father said. Bruce himself had been left a bit vague as to his meaning.

  But Colin was sitting up now, in a careful sort of way, looking at the evening light. Just looking. At the purples and the leaden greys and the icy blues and the dying flush in the ocean of cloud. So seriously.

  Then it broke through to Bruce.

  Night was coming. It truly was. There was a star in the sky.

  But the sun had gone scarcely a quarter of an hour! It shouldn’t be getting dark yet. It couldn’t possibly happen. It must be the atmosphere; the cloud or something. Or the height. It must be a mistake.

  Mark woke with a start, sat bolt upright, and yelled, ‘What’s up?’

  And Jan was obviously awake. She made no pretence of feigning sleep any longer – or else the fading light had compelled her to face up to a reality that she had tried to hide from.

  Gerald knew, too. He knew it in a way that the others did not. He knew that when light went, their lives went with it.

  Why should night come so soon, so quickly? There were a hundred stars in the sky, the moon was brilliant, and gloom was coming up out of the east and north like a storm. He couldn’t get to the ground, even if he tried. There wasn’t time.

  And there wasn’t a break in the cloud, either. It was endless. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t giving him a chance. Had he tried so hard, only to be beaten by an accident of Nature like this?

  8.

  The Wings are Clipped

  At six-thirty-five it was dark and the cloud was like a plain of pale silver in the moonlight.

  Gerald still had a visible horizon to guide him, the line between cloud and sky, but the instruments distracted him. They were green and luminous, their pointers moving eerily to the variations of his flight. Maintaining a steady course was the hardest. He steered a wavering line that varied from side to side by as much as twenty degrees. Height was tricky, too. He would have been happier to have switched on the cabin lights, but the reflections on the windscreen would have cut him off from the faint horizon that he needed so much. He had tried it and almost instantly had lost his touch. He had felt giddy, unattached, as though pitched in mid-air from a fairground wheel. So he had to fly in darkness and his passengers had to sit in darkness, aware of each other as moon shadows, aware of Gerald as a dimly seen statue in the pilot’s seat.

  How much longer could it go on? Gerald knew; the others didn’t. Unless his fuel consumption had varied greatly from the usual ten gallons an hour, he could stay up for ninety minutes more. Another ninety minutes, another 200 miles. Surely, surely it should be time enough and far enough for the cloud to break. By all the laws and averages it should have broken up long ago. Then the engine would splutter and race and cough and splutter again. And then it would stop.

  And then?

  Gerald tried not to think about it, tried to shut it out, but he couldn’t.

  Down through cloud and blackness without an engine to hold him, down the long path of a glide that could not be stopped . . .

  Gliding speed? What was it? Ninety knots. The same as climbing speed. Landing speed; what was that? Probably the same as stalling. Forty knots. They were figures he had to remember. Particularly landing speed. If he got it back to forty knots too high above the ground he’d crash. If he flew it into the ground at a speed above forty knots he’d crash just the same. And how was he to see the ground? It would be black as pitch down there beneath the cloud. And how was he to work out which way the wind was blowing? Because if he landed down-wind or across the wind he’d crash, too.

  It couldn’t be done. There were too many things against him. The student pilot had to make dozens of landings before he was allowed to fly solo, and Gerald had never made a landing, not of any kind, not even a roaring, bumping, boisterous one in broad daylight.

  He had made a mistake. He should have headed for the ground like a bat out of hell as soon as he had seen that light was on the wane. Cloud or tempest, desert or forest, he should have got himself on to the ground. What did it matter if there were a few broken bones? Far better to crack a leg or an arm or even a skull than be smashed to pieces.

  There was no break in the cloud. It was a pool of pale silver reaching to the end of the world. The end of the summer drought; that’s what it was. The drought had broken; that was the story.

  Rain would be belting down at Coonabibba. Coonabibba would be a sea of mud. Coonabibba would be a house full of guests without Gerald or Carol or Colin or Bruce or Jan or Mark. Or Jim.

  It would be a house of fear. The telephone lines to the out-stations would be running hot. They’d be out on motor-bikes and horses and the blitz buggy. They’d be calling the flying doctor and other homesteads and towns and airports on the radio. And the rain would be thundering on the roof and his mother would be standing at the window looking into the night.

  And any minute now Bert would be listening to the seven o’clock news and there’d be a report of the missing Egret, and he would start thinking back over the nasty things he had said. And perhaps he’d be sorry.

  And tomorrow was Gerald’s birthday. He’d probably never see it. Probably never live to be fourteen. It wasn’t fair. And in a sort of way he would be dying by his own hand. That was really awful.

  Gliding speed was ninety knots. Landing speed was forty knots. He might need them at any time. If his fooling round with the engine had used more fuel than ten gallons an hour the tanks might be all but empty. The fuel gauge was way down but there were always a few gallons in reserve. He might be using the reserve now. The intricacies of the fuel system he did not understand. He had to be prepared for the symptoms of fuel starvation and engine failure. They could strike at him at any time from now on.

  He listened for the symptoms, waited for them, but the Egret droned on and on.

  Maybe he ought to pray for the cloud to break. It couldn’t do any harm. Or could it? If his prayer wasn’t answered he’d feel even more cut off, even more the victim of a monstrous fate. The others would be praying, anyway. They’d be praying their heads off. Jan, for one, would be calling on all the saints of Christendom. She was a bit that way inclined, was Jan. Maybe it was better in her hands than his. ‘Praying’s all right for parsons,’ his father sometimes said. ‘Speaking for myself I’d rather roll up my sleeves and rely on my own sweat.’ That was all right up to a point, but it didn’t seem to cover situations like this. Perhaps his father had never been in a situation like this.

  ‘A break in the cloud,’ said Gerald cautiously to the brightest star that he could see, ‘would be very handy. Not that I’m putting a firm request or anything like that. But it would be handy. You appreciate my point of view; that if you don’t bring along a break in the clouds, Jan h
ere, who’s probably praying for it like mad, will be awfully upset, because she’s always been a bit of a one for taking you seriously. And I’ll be upset, too, now that I’ve got round to asking you, when I didn’t mean to. It’s not that I come knocking on your door every time I’ve got a bellyache. I mean, it’s a bit hard for a fellow when his dad reckons it’s strictly for the birds. And it’s not as if I was asking only for myself; though I would like to be fourteen. I mean, if the cloud does break, it’ll give me a fighting chance. It shouldn’t be that hard for you. You must have ways . . .’

  But the Egret droned on and on and the cloud did not break.

  Perhaps he shouldn’t have been so familiar; perhaps he should have done it more like they did it in church. The trouble was, he wasn’t an authority on that sort of thing. He worried about it for a while and tried to say it in a more appropriate way, but got mixed up with the dosts and doests and shouldests and his mind fell silent, almost breathlessly, in a state of cold and lonely fear.

  Jan saw it before anyone else. At about seven-thirty, at about the time when everyone was waiting for the engine to stop. No one had talked about fuel; what was the use of talking, anyway? But they all knew, even the girls, that engines which run on fuel have to run out of fuel sometime, and that the Egret just couldn’t keep on going for ever. They seemed to have been sitting in this plane, imprisoned, for days, waiting to die. Once night had come – so strangely and so swiftly – they had known that there wasn’t much that Gerald could do any more. They didn’t blame him, but something was strange just the same. Gerald just flew on and on as though he wanted to fly away to another world, almost as though he didn’t want to go down, almost as though he didn’t know how to go down.

  They seemed to be flying away from everything they had ever known; school, home, mums and dads, friends, relations, and everything else that had added up to be their lives. It was the strangest feeling, as though they had shut a door behind them and stepped into emptiness. As though they had climbed into this aeroplane ages ago and had been in it ever since. As though, in some way, there had been a trick of time and they were its captives.

  Jan saw it on her side, way out near the moon, a sort of blackness, like a shadow cast from something far above them. She watched it for a while, mainly because it was something different to look at, and it drew the eye, anyway, like a great mouth hungering for people to fall into it. It had an attraction about it, that frightened her, that added to her already considerable fears and discomforts one more dark anxiety.

  Then she began to wonder, for it was a thing that seemed to possess a life of its own, that grew larger and larger, its growth not only keeping pace with the Egret, but outstripping it, racing ahead in a gigantic curve, as though endeavouring to cut across in front, as though possibly to encircle the Egret and swallow it up.

  She didn’t like to trouble Gerald, to worry him with the anxieties of a mere girl, because Gerald seemed so distant, so out of reach, but she had to tell him. Her hand went out and at that moment Gerald saw it for himself.

  His mouth dropped open. His heart leapt. He almost didn’t want to believe it just in case he was wrong. But he wasn’t wrong. It was real. The cloud was coming to an end, at least in that part of the sky where the moon was. He’d be able to see to the ground!

  Gerald started trembling and couldn’t stop, for immediately he knew it was a mixed blessing. He had a chance now, however frail, but the responsibility of taking advantage of it was suddenly a great weight upon him. If the cloud had not broken he would have been free of blame. To be carried on to the end, helplessly, was not all bad.

  Golly, what was he thinking? What was wrong with him?

  How far ahead was it? Only a mile or two. In a minute he would be in the open and the wide world would be spread out beneath; dust or forest or mountains or plains.

  ‘Oh my gosh,’ he said, and glanced back.

  He couldn’t see the others, not really, just a feeling that heads and shoulders were all craning to one side. They had all seen. Everyone knew. Probably they were cheering or something like that. Lucky dogs. It was easy for them. They didn’t know the half of it. They didn’t know what it was like to be so terribly tired. They didn’t know what it was like to long for the ground but to be so afraid of it. They would think the Egret was going down to safety. They’d never know what hit them, but he’d know. He’d see it coming.

  Suddenly the cloud was gone and there was a void, a pit; two vertical miles of nothing.

  Gerald pushed the nose down into the emptiness and was almost sick with disbelief. There was the world shining in the light of the moon.

  ‘It’s the sea,’ he cried.

  What sea?

  Or was it a lake?

  Oh, golly; had that course set on the compass, 250 degrees, been the right one?

  Was there a lake as large as this? Only salt lakes. Only dried-up salt lakes. There was none with water as large as this. There wasn’t a lake in all Australia as large as this. The moonbeam was endless. It stretched away into evermore.

  Oh, what a dirty trick. What a rotten, dirty trick. How could it be the sea? The wide open sea; wide open into the north, wide open into the east? What sea was it? The Tasman? The Coral Sea? The Arafura Sea? The Timor?

  How silly could a fellow get? It couldn’t be any of them. It must be a lake in flood. Lake Eyre, maybe. Could he have reached it? That’d be as big as this in flood. The drought had broken, hadn’t it? Maybe there’d been a foot of rain in the last six hours. That would turn Lake Eyre from a desert of salt into an inland sea of tremendous size; maybe only a few inches deep, but a fellow would never see that from this height.

  He heard the engine, suddenly becoming aware of it, winding up, over-riding the pitch. He was still going down, still diving, and the airspeed was up to 150 knots.

  Oh, glory. So many things to think of. So many things not to forget.

  He closed the throttle and edged the speed off and didn’t know what to do next. What could a fellow do, except fly on, except wait? Keep the Egret in the air until the engine stopped and she had to go down?

  Maybe it would be best to glide now, to conserve what fuel he had. From this height, with just a little power to keep the engine alive, he could glide for many miles. Perhaps that was the thing to do.

  He set it for the glide, got the speed back to ninety knots, and the engine to a quiet burble. There was the horizon still to aid his balance, the faint leaden line of water and sky. And there was something else; an awareness of eyes, of five pairs of eyes, of five minds centred on him. He couldn’t see them, couldn’t hear their thoughts, but the reality of their presence was nerve-racking. He felt as though he stood alone on trial with eyes and questions shooting at him like arrows. He felt he wanted to shake a fist at them. What right did they have to judge him? But for him they’d all be dead. Who did they think they were?

  Golly, a fellow was going round the bend. They wouldn’t be thinking like that. They’d been marvellous all along. Still, that was easy enough for them, wasn’t it? All they had to do was twiddle their thumbs, while he stared out in fear into a world of water. Though there was a line on it, on the starboard side. Something was there that didn’t look like water. What the dickins was it? Could it be the shore? An island maybe? Or the desert fringe to the lake?

  It was land. There was a line and a great shadow beyond it, a black, formless immensity.

  By golly. There was no doubt about it. It was land all right. It must have been the lake in flood. He was in the centre of the continent!

  For some reason or other he was immensely relieved. It seemed so much better to be here than anywhere else. If he had gone over the edge of the continent into the ocean he’d never have found land. He’d have vanished, never to be heard of again. And who would search there, who would search the ocean for a little aeroplane that had disappeared in a dust storm in the north-west of New South Wales?

  Lake Eyre. Oh, it was wonderful. For surely they would s
earch here. Once they had worked out the winds and everything else that could have influenced the course of the Egret, the search planes would fan out in a great arc and they’d count Lake Eyre in and they would see the Egret. They couldn’t miss her; a stark splash of colour in the unmarked desert, yellow and black and white. Sometimes he had thought the Egret looked horrible, that she stuck out like a sore thumb. And so she would. She’d be visible for miles. They’d find her.

  He flew in towards the land, directly towards it, turning in, and he was down to about 6,000 feet, the engine still burbling, the wind still rushing.

  It’d be easy to land on the desert. It’d be open and flat. He’d fly down until he could see the ground and gently reduce speed until he sank at just above forty knots. And then he’d sit there and wait and fly on and as soon as it touched switch off the engine. Then if anything went wrong, if he broke the undercarriage or turned over on his back, he wouldn’t burn. If the engine was switched off the aircraft couldn’t burn. Someone must have said that at some time. Even if he whacked down hard, even if they got bruised or broke a few limbs, they’d be all right, they wouldn’t get killed, for in the desert there was nothing to hit, no trees or hills or great big rocks or fences or power-lines. All he had to do was to get the Egret on to the ground somehow and let Lady Luck do the rest.

  He opened the engine to blow out the oil, the way his father did when he was gliding, then throttled back again, but gradually, in a vaguely uncomfortable way, found his attention riveting on the moonbeam, on that glimmering shaft of light lying across the water. It was curious. It wasn’t smooth, as he had thought the lake would be. There were shadows in it. There was movement across it; and he had more than a suspicion that the movement and the shadows were waves, big waves, the sort that belonged to the sea.

  Then he passed over the dark mass of the land and lost the moonbeam and began a wide, skidding turn to take him back across the water.