by Nevil Shute
“I didn’t mean to do that, Mr. Honey,” I said. “I’m just trying to find out what we ought to do about these aircraft that are in service now.”
“Well, I can’t help you there,” he said. “I’ve told you all I can, and I’m not going to be bullied into saying any more. You’ve got your troubles, and I’ve got mine.” He did not say that most of his troubles were of my making, but he meant it.
He went away, and I rang up Ferguson in the Department of Experiment and Research at the Ministry, who serves as our London office. “Ferguson,” I said, “this is Scott speaking. Look, we’re getting a bit doubtful about the Reindeer tailplane; there’s a suggestion that fatigue might crop up at a fairly early stage. It’s got rather an exaggerated aspect ratio, you know. I believe I’m right in saying that C.A.T.O. are operating five or six of them on the Atlantic route. Could you get on to the Corporation or the A.R.B.—without alarming anyone unduly, because I think it may be a mare’s nest—and find out how many hours flying these machines have done?”
He said at once, “They can’t have done much. They’ve only been operational for about a month. What number of hours represents the danger point?”
“Mr. Honey’s estimate is 1,440 hours. But as I say, I think it’s a mare’s nest.”
He laughed over the telephone. “Oh, this is Honey, is it? In that case, I should think it might be. I’ll find out from the Corporation, and let you know.” He rang back later in the morning. The longest time that any of the machines had done was 305 hours, up to the evening before.
Next day at about tea-time Shirley rang me up in the office. She said, “Dennis, darling, I’m sorry to worry you. I’ve got Elspeth Honey here because she wanted to listen to the Pastoral Symphony on the wireless, and theirs is bust. I’m just going to give her tea. She wanted to let her father know where she is, because she won’t be home when he gets there. I was wondering if you’d like to bring him back with you to pick up Elspeth.”
“Okay, dear,” I said. “I’ll do that.”
I rang up Mr. Honey and told him, and suggested that he came back with me in my car instead of going by the bus, as he usually did. I was rather pleased to have the opportunity to do something for him, because the last time that we had spoken our relations had not been exactly cordial, and I didn’t like to feel that he was nursing a grievance against me. I was aware, too, that there was a good deal of reason on his side. He met me at the car at half-past five, and we drove out on the road to Farnham.
“It’s very kind of Mrs. Scott to invite Elspeth like this,” he said diffidently. “She mustn’t let her make herself a nuisance.”
“Not a bit,” I said. “She’s probably company for Shirley—for my wife. It gets a bit slow for her sometimes when I’m away all day.”
“That is the trouble, of course,” he replied. “I mean, with Elspeth. It’s all right in the term time, but in the holidays it’s sometimes very difficult.”
“I should think it is,” I said, thinking of his womanless menage. “What do you do with her in the holidays?”
He said, “There’s a clergyman who runs a holiday home for children down at Bournemouth, and she goes there sometimes, but it’s rather expensive. And he’s started to take mental defectives now—very backward children, you know—so it’s not quite so suitable as it used to be. But really, Elspeth’s so good at playing by herself that I don’t know that she isn’t just as happy at home.”
The thought of his little girl of twelve spending her holidays alone all day in the villa in Copse Road was not an attractive one. “It’s very difficult,” I said.
“It’s a great deal easier in term time,” he remarked. “Elspeth likes being at school, and she’s very fond of Mrs. Scott. She talks about her a great deal.”
I was not surprised to hear that Elspeth liked being at school if her holidays were spent alone in a deserted house. “You’ve met my wife, have you, Honey?” I asked. “Miss Mansfield, who used to be a tracer in the Aerodynamics? A girl with fair, sort of auburn hair?”
He did not think that he remembered her.
At the flat we found Shirley and Elspeth sitting over tea in the sitting-room listening to the wireless; we went in quietly, not to disturb them. I made a fresh pot of tea for Honey and myself, and we sat listening to the symphony with them till it was finished. It was the first time I had seen Elspeth Honey, and this pause gave me an opportunity to study her. As Shirley had said, she was an ugly child, but this ugliness seemed to me to be more associated with her unbecoming clothes and the way her hair was cut than with the child herself. She had rather sharp, pale features; she was thin; and she looked intelligent. She did not look to be a very happy child. She had fine, well-shaped hands, and when she moved she did not seem to be clumsy. If she had had a mother, I reflected, she might have been very different.
The symphony came to an end, and Shirley reached over and switched off the set. She turned to the child. “Like it?” she asked.
The little girl nodded vigorously with closed lips. “Mm.”
My wife got up and began to gather up the plates and put them on the trolley. “I thought you would. They’re going to do one every week. Would you like to come again?”
Honey said nervously, “You mustn’t let her be a nuisance, Mrs. Scott.”
“I won’t,” said Shirley. “I like listening to symphonies.”
Elspeth said, “I’d like that ever so. May I do the washing up?”
Shirley said, “Of course not. I was only going to pile these things together and take them out.”
“They’ve got to be washed up sometime, Mrs. Scott. I can do it—honestly, I can.”
Her father said, “Do let her help you, please. She’s very good at washing up.”
“I can do it,” the child repeated. “Daddy drops things, so I always do it at home.”
My wife said, “All right, we’ll do it together.”
They took the trolley out with them, and I sat talking with Honey as we smoked. I had only half my mind on our conversation and I forget what it was about to start with. I was furtively studying the man that I was talking to and trying to sum him up, the man who said the Reindeer tail would come to bits in 1,440 hours. The man who believed that, and who also believed in the Great Pyramid and in the descent of Our Lord to earth at Glastonbury or Farnborough in the very near future. The man who lived alone, and seemed quite unconscious that by doing so he was denying most of the simple joys of childhood to his little girl. The man who took umbrage in the office at small slights; the man who lived in an unreal, scientific dream. The man who walked in some queer semi-religious procession in Woking, and got had up by the police for some brawl that arose from it. The man who said the Reindeer tail would come to bits in 1,440 hours. The man whose judgment we had to accept or to discard.
And presently he added something to the picture I was building up. He was looking at the backs of my books in the bookcase, reading the titles, as one always does in a strange house. I woke up suddenly from my abstraction to hear him say, “I see you’ve got Rutherford’s book there.” And he indicated The Aryan Flow stuck in among the novels.
When I was at college I was interested for a very short time in the movements of the races of peoples about the world, and this volume was a relic of that passing enthusiasm. I had not opened it for at least ten years, but it was there still. I said idly, “I think it’s very good.”
He got up and picked the book out of the shelf, and turned the pages. “Sharon Turner covers much of the same ground,” he said. “But it’s Rutherford who identifies the ten tribes with the Scythians. And after all, that must have been the most difficult part, mustn’t it?”
I was a little at a loss. “I’ve really rather forgotten,” I said. “It’s a long time since I read it.”
“You ought to look it over again,” he said earnestly. “It was the most wonderful migration in the world.” He stared at me through his thick glasses. “The ten tribes, led away into captivit
y by Shalmaneser, King of Assyria—that’s all in the Second Book of Esdras. The Persians called them Sakae—our word Saxon, of course, and Rutherford proves their identity with the Scythians. And then, from his end, Sharon Turner traces back the Anglo-Saxons all through Europe to the Scythians. It’s fascinating.”
I was completely out of my depth. “Absolutely,” I said.
He went on, “It explains so much. The Druidic forms of worship, that were nothing but the old religion of Israel brought here in its entirety.” He paused and then said, “That’s what impressed Joseph of Arimathea so much when first he came to England on his tin business. That’s why he brought his nephew here when He was a little boy, because he saw the Child was something quite unusual, and he wanted Him to come in contact with the priests of England. That’s why Our Lord came back to Glastonbury as a young man and lived here for years before His ministry, because he had to live in the precepts of the old Israel which the Druid priests had kept here undebased. That’s why Joseph came back to Glastonbury with Martha and Mary and Lazarus after the death of Christ, because they wanted to settle down and found His church in the place that He had loved so well.”
The Reindeer tail, he said, would come to bits in 1,440 hours. “I’m not very well up in all this, I’m afraid,” I said.
He put the book back carefully upon the shelf. “It’s the most fascinating story in the world,” he said quietly. “It explains so much. That’s why Simon Zelotes, His apostle, came here as soon as he could. That’s why St. Paul came here.” He drew himself up, a short, earnest, spectacled figure, not unimpressive. “That’s why the English are the greatest people in the world and always will be, because in the beginning we were blessed by the advice and the example and the teaching of the greatest people who have ever lived.”
Elspeth came running into the room, and saved me from the necessity of commenting on that. Her father took off his thick glasses and wiped them, and said, “Finished the washing up?”
She nodded. “Daddy, Mrs. Scott washes up with a little mop so that you never have to put your hands into the water at all! Isn’t that a good idea? May we have a little mop like that?”
He blinked at her without his glasses. “Mop?”
She pulled him by the sleeve. “Daddy, come and see. And they’ve got hot water all the time, made by the electricity!” She drew him away into our little kitchenette to see these wonders for himself.
They went away soon after that, absurdly grateful for the trivial hospitality that we had shown to them. We closed the front door behind them and went back to the sitting-room. “I rather like your Mr. Honey,” Shirley said. “But he does look a mess.”
“That’s just what he is—a mess.” I turned to her. “Tell me, had he really never seen a mop for washing up? Or an electric water-heater?”
She laughed. “Honestly, I don’t think he had. I don’t know what his own kitchen can be like!”
I lit a cigarette and flopped down in a chair. “Tired?” she asked.
“A bit.” He said the Reindeer tail would come to bits in 1,440 hours, but he didn’t know what an electric water-heater looked like. Could that possibly make sense? Did he know enough about real life to speak with confidence on anything? Was his opinion of any value whatsoever? Could one trust his judgment? I did not know, and I sat there turning it over and over in my mind.
Shirley said, “Here you are.” I roused myself to what was going on, and the wonderful girl had been out to the kitchen and got a tumbler of whisky and soda, and she was offering it to me. I kissed the hand she gave it to me with, and said, “Like to go to the pictures tonight?”
“I’ll look and see what’s on.” She picked up the paper, turned the pages, and said, “I heard your Mr. Honey holding forth very earnestly about something or other while we were washing up. What was it all about?”
I blew a long cloud of smoke. “It was about the lost ten tribes of Israel, and the Druids, and about Jesus Christ coming to Glastonbury, and all sorts of stuff like that.” I looked up at her. “I wish to God I could make up my mind if he’s plain crackers or something different.”
“Is it important?” she asked.
“It is rather,” I told her. “You see, he says the Reindeer tail will come to bits in 1,440 hours. And I’m supposed to be able to check up on his work. And I can’t do it. I’m not good enough.…”
The next week was a torment of anxiety and uncertainty. I had to keep the matter to myself; I did not want to keep on badgering Mr. Honey or to go wailing to the Director. Every day, I knew, the Reindeers were flying over the Atlantic piling up the hours faster than Mr. Honey’s test, each machine probably doing the best part of a hundred hours a week towards the point when Mr. Honey said their tails would break. On the sixth day I couldn’t stand it any longer, and suggested to the Director that perhaps he might give Sir Phillip a jerk up on the telephone.
On the ninth day the report came in. The Director rang through to tell me he had got it, and I went down to him. He handed it to me, and I sat down in his office to read it through.
Sir Phillip said that he had examined the work submitted to him in detail and had received certain explanations verbally from Mr. Honey. He accepted, with considerable reserve, the work of Koestlinger indicating that an energy loss occurred when a material was subjected to repeated reversals of stress and that this lost energy could not be accounted for by any balance of the normal forms. It was a wild assumption on the part of Mr. Honey, said Sir Phillip, that this lost energy became absorbed into the structure of the atom in the form of nuclear strain. He could only regard that as an interesting hypothesis which might perhaps be a fit subject for research at some date in the future. If ever it should be confirmed that something of the sort did happen, then he was very doubtful if the stress induced would, in fact, produce a separation of the neutron that Mr. Honey postulated. He said, a little caustically, that in his experience it was not so easy to split the atom as amateurs were apt to think. If such a separation should take place, he saw no present indication that the resulting new material would be the crystallamerous isotrope that Mr. Honey had observed in substances broken under a fatigue test. That, he seemed to think, was little more than wishful thinking on Mr. Honey’s part.
In spite of all this, he recommended that the trials of the Reindeer tail should be continued, as the subject was obviously important. If it was desired that research upon the problems of fatigue should be undertaken by the I.S.A.R.B., no doubt the representative of the Ministry would bring the matter up at the next meeting of the Board, when the priority to be allocated to the investigation could be determined.
I could have wept. Sir Phillip Dolbear had seated himself firmly on the fence and had offered us no help at all. And the Reindeers were still flying the Atlantic.
I said heavily, “Well, this doesn’t take us very much further, sir.”
The Director raised his eyes from the other work that he was reading. “I thought that myself. I had hoped that we should get more out of him.”
We discussed it glumly for a few minutes. “I should like to think it over for the rest of the day,” I said at last. “At the moment I can’t see anything for it but to go back to our old rule-of-thumb methods of guessing if the tail was dangerously flexible, and so on. May I think it over for today, and come in and see you tomorrow morning?”
“By all means, Scott,” he said. “I’ll be thinking it over in the meantime myself. It’s certainly a difficult position, but fortunately we’ve got time for a little thought.”
I picked up the report and turned to go. “In any case,” I said, “I think we must face up to the possibility of having to ground all those Reindeers after seven hundred hours. I don’t think we should let them go for more than half the estimated time to failure.”
“No,” he said slowly, “I don’t think that we should, although I wouldn’t put too much weight on Mr. Honey’s estimate after this. If we said seven hundred hours, how long does that give us?”
“About three weeks from now,” I said. “I’ll find out definitely before tomorrow, sir.”
I went back to my room and dumped the report, and then went down and out of the building, and walked down to the aerodrome, to the flight office. Squadron-Leader Pen worthy was there. I said, “I say, Penworthy. You did the flying on the prototype Reindeer, didn’t you?”
“Most of it,” he said.
I offered him a cigarette. “What was the tailplane like?” I asked. I explained myself. “I know it was quite safe, but was it very flexible? Did it have much movement of the tip in flight?”
He said, “Well, yes—it did. It never gave us any trouble, but it’s got a very high aspect ratio, you know, so you’d expect a certain amount of waggle. On the ground you can push the tip up and down about six inches with your hand.”
I nodded slowly. “Did it have much movement in the air?”
He hesitated. “I don’t think it had any continuous movement—it wasn’t dithering all the time, or anything like that. You could see it flexing in a bump, from the aft windows of the cabin.”
I turned this over in my mind. “Was that in very bumpy weather? What time of year was it?”
He said, “We had it flying in all sorts of weather. It was here altogether for about three months.”
“So long as that? How many hours did it do?”
“Oh,” he said, “it did a lot. I did about two hundred hours on it myself. Before that there were the firm’s trials, of course.”
A vague, black shadow was forming in my mind. “What happened to it after it left here?”
“I flew it down to the C.A.T.O. experimental flight,” he said.
I blew a long cloud of smoke, thoughtfully. “Any idea how many hours it did there, before they put it into service?”