“Is that how you look when you’re terrified?”
Tesh said seriously: “I used to fly the old Wellington Bomber. Wasn’t this developed from it?”
“That’s right.”
“Does she handle about the same?”
“You’d better try it…” To the First Officer: “Mike, ask them to switch off the I.L.S. beam.”
“Won’t they want to know why?”
“Say we have a passenger who comes out in a rash when it’s on…or something.”
“I’ll say ‘or something’,” said the First Officer, and took time out on the radio.
Duquay to me: “You’d better be right. If we can’t lose this firework display, it’s back to London we go. Doesn’t it shake you?”
I said: “I’ve seen it before. Very worrying.”
“Too right. You should feel my pulse.”
*
I’ve undergone some shirt-drenching experiences in my time, but for sheer output of chicken-sweat the rest of that flight took all prizes.
I freely admit that had it not been for Flaske — the way he suddenly leapt into life as if the whole thing had been staged for his own personal entertainment — I would have strapped myself down in one of those blue-tinted seats back there and quietly prayed. But this was not to be; Flaske, having proclaimed so recently that aeroplanes were not for him, now manifested the broad beam of a veteran stuntman. I couldn’t just quit on my own; so I had to stand in the entrance to the flight deck and watch the whole crazy performance from start to finish — ‘finish’ being the word that kept leaping to mind.
So there we were…and the only other individual who looked at all upset was the First Officer, who sat in the jump seat with his arms folded so they wouldn’t twitch. He would have been all right had he had something to do with those hands.
But at least I had contributed something: the luminous dials of the instruments had returned to normal; and that grotesque greeny-blue floodlighting, so unbelievable that none of us had really managed to react to it, no longer impeded what visibility there was. ‘Reason’ was definitely taking a breather.
The sun was still low in the sky and most of the cloud lay in long cotton-wool swabs below us. You could see, as we approached the richly-coloured hills, that the swabs had found their way unfalteringly into the valley we were forced to select if we were to make the airfield at the end of it.
I saw Tesh and the Captain sharing a glance at the map and nodding over something. Tesh turned briefly: “Ullswater on your right.”
The lake looked all it was cracked up to be and took my breath away for its beauty. The magic lay in its shape; for it somehow contrived to hold the entire landscape together as a cohesive, complete entity…a landscape of thick, luxuriant forest and chalk-rock steeps and great green fields knit together by those timeless low walls built of loose stone. On the lake itself were painted a few yachts with coloured sails; and you could see the long, curled trails of wash made by launches which weaved, towing early-bird water-skiers, in and out of bays and then straight across the open water, like dry-fly bait on the end of a line.
Ahead of us, though, were groups of towering, jagged hills that failed to inspire any idyllic reveries.
We began the descent toward them.
Cloud does not have the same tender quality when you’re ripping through it at one hundred and fifty knots as it does when seen from a distance. Ullswater was suddenly cut off rudely by the tearing-white sheets of condensed water and the solid rock ahead lay in wait behind the blanket as we approached.
“My compliments to the Sperry Corporation,” said Tesh, “and may this gyro-compass be hairline-accurate.”
“Amen,” we all said.
And watched the uncommunicative white-nonchalance of a totally blank windscreen.
As we stood, I said irritably to the grinning professor at my elbow: “Does nothing shake you, professor?”
“Oh…don’t they do this all the time?”
I never found out whether he was joking or not.
Duquay to Tesh: “Maintain rate of descent of one hundred and fifty feet per minute airspeed one-oh-five knots heading one-seven-one magnetic. I’ve put down thirty-degrees flap. You have control.”
“Thanks for nothing!” He added, doing the thing properly: “I have control. Shall I keep the engine r.p.m. at twenty-four hundred?”
Duquay: “Yes. You can turn on sixpence that way. Don’t trouble to prove it!”
I knew, though, that Tesh found this act of faith supremely flattering.
I watched Tesh’s fingers on the wheel as Duquay released the duplicate control in front of him. I noted that Tesh only used his fingertips, using the trimmers all the time so that the aircraft was perfectly balanced on the course given, without, in fact, any pressure on wheel or rudder pedals at all.
Those fingertips were for lightning, evasive action.
At the same time when a rockface is ramming itself into a crumpling wing there isn’t a great deal you can do about it.
So Duquay kept his eye on the stopwatch he held against his knee and kept exactly to the figures he had worked out in advance.
At best, these could only be the wildest approximations.
Still only the perfect whiteness of a detergent commercial ahead.
Duquay: “Turn left-left on to one-six-nine degrees magnetic.”
Tesh: “One-six-nine it is.”
My spine sent wild messages telegraphing to the region of my bladder. The exchange of numbers meant we had theoretically met the neck of the valley and were turning slightly left so as to stay in the middle of the trough.
Tesh didn’t move his head or his eyes but said: “Don’t wet your nicks, anybody. They always find out about it during the accident investigation.”
But my God, when would we break cloud?
My admiration for those two men in front was profound. They had only to open the throttles wide and climb out of it to the safety overhead and no risks taken.
As it was, they outsweated me by a ratio I wouldn’t care to name. Because I have the embarrassment of remembering I was trying to will them into taking her up and out of it.
“Look out!”
It was the First Officer who shouted, and his voice soared to a pallid falsetto as he saw what I saw what we all saw.
My impressions were vague at the time; but I realized why Duquay had decided, on balance, to pace the aircraft comparatively fast.
For when the cliff-edge jutted from nowhere much too close on the port side and when Tesh and Duquay both threw their whole weight simultaneously on to the controls as if they’d flown together since they were so-high in a manoeuvre which threatened to break the wings off, the machine responded like a harpooned whale and threw every loose object hard across the fuselage. I had a fleeting view of a menacing overhang of rock and then with hard right bank and full power on, the left wing came up and obligingly obliterated a nerve-shattering closeup. We must have been one micron from a high-speed stall as we bent good metal in the turn.
At this crazy angle I got a great clear view of the rest of the valley coming from somewhere up in the sky as the mist cleared and we snatched greedily at any available air with fat wings and screaming propellers.
I thought we would hit. We didn’t. I still don’t understand why not. I’ll never get the hang of aerodynamics.
It was all over very suddenly and neither of those two men reacted at all. They couldn’t; there wasn’t time. They just sat immobile and rattled off some drill and pulled a few things and pushed a few things and then eased the throttles back and there we were inexplicably wallowing on to some bumpy tarmac with the flaps and the wheels down and a great air of having done nothing in the least unusual at all.
Even then, we just taxied to some holding point and even there no one said anything except some routine interchange of post-landing drill. The engines sighed silent and the valley was quiet.
The sun rose lazily another notch and glared at us
from the far end of the valley, telling us how insignificant we were.
Chapter Ten
I could have forgiven the Officer Commanding, at the little airfield, had he been sceptical — even incredulous — of the ‘difficulty’ (his word!) concerning the instruments, and it was refreshing that instead he took an attitude which was both sensible and tactful.
After we landed he at once ordered the ground crew to drape the cockpit windows of the aircraft, and arranged for the radio equipment normally used for landing to be switched alternately ON and OFF. He then carefully observed the dials of the cockpit instruments.
Although the phenomenon was not repeated, it was nevertheless obvious that the intensity of the luminous paint on the figures had been greatly reduced, so that even in darkness you could not read them. “Burned right out,” was his verdict. “How quite extraordinary!” And, practical to the last, he ordered that the aircraft should not be allowed to take off again without a special check of the emergency electrics system, in case a situation develop in flight in which power failure occurred in blind conditions during which scrutiny of the ‘blind flying panel’ might be a crucial factor in flying safety. An admirable fellow, the O.C., able to translate a dislocated physical process into practical action in his own sphere.
While this was going on, the aircraft, cockpit curtained off, stood in brilliant sunshine away from the mist which still clung to the neck of the valley to the south. In the shade of the starboard wing I spoke briefly to Dr Flaske, who had to be restrained — just in time — from lighting his pipe within inches of the fuel tank. Smiling, the O.C. told him: “You might get a somewhat bigger flame than you actually need. That’s the short way to infinity.”
Flaske and I watched Tesh and the two crew of the aircraft wander slowly across to the crew hut. The young First Officer seemed dazed and confused now, and Duquay was worried about him.
Flaske said: “You’re not coming with us to the K.L.K. place?” — A jeep had been laid on for them and waited, now, on the perimeter track.
I said: “I’m going elsewhere.”
He nodded. “The old Institute they shut down?”
“Yes.”
He squinted up at the sun, then redirected his gaze toward the misty part of the valley through which we had so precariously flown. “Be careful,” he said.
*
I was in the mood for a walk and in no hurry to check with Tesh and Flaske about the time of their return from the K.L.K. labs. Though Flaske hadn’t said much I knew he agreed with me that Tesh’s unplanned approach to the problem would do little to solve it. Of course, we didn’t know how much information Tesh might have which he could not reveal, but we would have preferred a thorough assessment of the total picture and a collating of all data on the entire sequence of events going right back to Los Alamos. As I trudged toward the southerly end of the valley I had some vague idea that I might learn something from checking over the Moorbridge Establishment that might cast perspective on what was happening now.
The laboratories occupied a dominating position at the top of the jagged hill on my left, and the approach road — a steep, zigzag of a pass that snaked its way perilously through the granite — had its root about a mile south of the airfield. The jeep — provided with a driver from the Air Ministry — was already on its way up. Flaske waved to me gravely from the back. Tesh was in front, and the sun caught for a moment on the lenses of his spectacles, flashing once, twice and again as the vehicle churned up dust and pendulumed left-right-left up the zigzag, till it slumped into a dip out of sight. I didn’t wait for it to emerge higher up, but continued down the valley toward the place where we’d so nearly hit the side.
Once the airfield, with its glistening highlights of metal prisming the sun’s rays and looking oddly out of context in the middle of such wild country…once the airfield was out of sight I was struck with the beauty of the valley. I could imagine wandering through it in search of a picnic site with Nicola; and almost giving up the struggle because there were so many places to choose from…places by the quiet little stream that ran all the way along the dip, places on the hillside which gave a commanding view of the whole rift for mile upon quiescent mile, places on high clusters of rock that looked like the natural remnant of the initial mountain-formation, and places by deserted barns or by trees gold-etched by the sun, or by the edge of the woods that ran almost the whole way down one side of the valley…The parents had been over-generous to the children, who couldn’t decide upon which toy to play with.
Then I cut over one of the loose-brick walls and turned a corner.
Immediately, the character of the valley was different. Palls of mist still hung disconsolately near the cliff face, creating instantly an impression of unreality, and I wondered whether this, in fact, was about the spot where we had so nearly met a violent death. Geographically it was about right; being where we had just turned a couple of degrees to the left, following the contour of the inlet…
I had no particular reaction when, after a few hundred yards, I came to a lane, then to an intersection with two other minor roads.
Nothing particularly clicked when I saw that the three narrow roads met at a grass triangle; and that two of the lanes were one way only, so that a complicated array of ‘no entry’ signs were clustered on the grass patch. It seemed perfectly natural; if they wanted to shove ‘no entry’ signs up everywhere why shouldn’t they? It was probably something to do with the military airfield.
I continued, at random, along one of the non-available roads.
That was when I came to a clearing, just visible in the thickening mist, where three hideous dead trees stood in sullen solitude.
With a disquieting jolt I was back in that unwelcome world of the-way-things-weren’t…of inexplicable phrases snatched from a phonecall with Daphne at the other end, telling me of road signs and dead trees and…where were the boulders? — I just couldn’t see far enough in the mist but felt sure I had found the place I’d been looking for.
The place where something hadn’t happened yet.
I went up to one of those ghostly trees and examined it more closely. This could have been a charred remnant of vegetation left crumbling on the outskirts of Hiroshima. It filled me with a sudden revulsion and I wanted to vomit.
With all the filthy infiltration of pungent sulphur soiling the landscape, the mist rolled, fawning, across the land. It funnelled through the hollow of a disused sewer near-by, swirling into vortices and clinging, close to the orifice, like yellowed firedamp.
And then, revealed for a moment by obligingly cringing patches in the dirt-fog, there were the boulders…great and disgusting in shape, paired like sickened scrota in a twisted sculpt.
I had arrived, then. I was there. There for what?
What had brought me? Had we really — in the words of Dr Flaske — been ‘chasing the speed of light in an old hunk of tin’?
I had known that flight to be pointless all along and had said so. Yet — in a different sense — was it? Had I really found the place I was looking for?
Or had the place been looking for me? — using a fortuitous and unnecessary air trip as the means?
Did I not feel Time/Space shuddering, vibrating, exchanging elements of past and future just as particles are really waves and waves particles? The thought was terrorizing for its uncertainty, its removal from things ordinary. From the imposed calendar and the clockface and you and me.
The broken road took me between the boulders and led to rusty gates, clamped by padlocks. I shook the gates and the clanking echoed from decayed trees and pitted clandestine rocks once more secreted by oily mist.
But I had no difficulty in climbing over.
*
The foulness of the stench was reflected in the visual decay of what I now saw. For this was the ruin of a Research Establishment that had died only six years previously. It possessed the rot of timelessness — dinosaurs could have trampled the muddy ground here in the Jurassic Age.
That was some hundred and seventy million years ago. Moorbridge had been closed down for just six years — in nineteen fifty-nine. And although the physical decay around me did not suggest any great passage of time — the Coca Cola tins lying around here did not date from any petrified forest — I could not shake off the impression that there were elements of other aeons here…that time-essence wasn’t quite as simple at Moorbridge as it seemed to be away from it. I seemed to be crossing some barrier in which time folded back on itself. The thought made my skin pock with fear. Yet curiosity won out…and, upon first investigation, the first buildings that loomed up through the cloying mist as I walked were disarmingly conventional, even if there did seem to be something wrong with their decay-rate.
First, the small shack beyond the iron gates. This was, or had been, a sort of guard-room, with the usual boom-barrier outside of it. Beyond the barrier, I could see that the lane was more regularized; it had concrete pavements on either side; the road surface itself being prefabricated concrete slabs. Remnants of bullshit flowerbeds, overgrown with weeds, had been cut into the pavement with military — rather than aesthetic-precision.
The weeds were unfamiliar.
I couldn’t see very far…visibility was down to about twenty yards or less. But from here I could make out the outline of the first building, its roof of tin rattling from some loose foreskin of metal that curled around the edge. It flipped audibly, but very softly, in the slight breeze which was coiling the eddies of mist. Tink-tink…pause…tink-tink-tink…maddening for its irregularity of rhythm.
I entered the guard-room, my footsteps resounding on bare, dusty boards. My shoes clattered against something and I perspired instantaneously. Milk bottles, only! They rolled across the floorboards, clicked against each other like billiard balls, then fell down the single step into the lane, on down the gradient.
Sheets of paper with schedules on, yellow edges, dated April nineteen fifty-nine. Telephone (dead, of course). Note on a plastic board: ‘Private calls must be paid for weekly.’ Nothing very abstruse about that! Electric clock on the wall, with the hands showing just after half past four. An old pair of boots under the desk/bench. Two unwashed coffee cups. A filthy towel.
The Egg-Shaped Thing Page 13