by Nevil Shute
He shook his head. “I’d only be guessing. But several hundred, I should think, because they did a whole lot of proving flights over the route before they put it into regular operation. They always do a lot of time on new machines before they go on service. They’re pretty good, you know.”
I stared out over the aerodrome. “That’s the machine that flew into the hill in Labrador, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” he said. “Somewhere between Goose and Montreal.”
I went back to the office with a terrible idea half formed in the back of my mind. I rang up Group-Captain Fisher of the Accidents Branch; I had had a good bit to do with him at Boscombe Down on various occasions that had not been great fun.
I said, “You remember that Reindeer that flew into the hill in Labrador? Tell me, sir—could you let me know how many hours it had done before the crash?”
He said he’d look into the matter and let me know.
He came back on the telephone twenty minutes later. “That figure that you asked about,” he remarked. “The aircraft had done thirteen hundred and eighty-three hours, twenty minutes, up to the time of the take-off from Heath Row.”
I said quietly, “Add about nine hours for the Atlantic crossing?”
“About that, I should think.”
“And say another hour from Goose on to the scene of the accident?”
“I should think so.”
“Making 1,393 hours in all?”
“That’s about right.”
I put down the telephone, feeling rather sick. It was my job to stop that sort of thing from happening.
2
THAT AFTERNOON THE Director was in a conference; I was not able to get in to see him until six o’clock in the evening. He was tidying up his papers to go home, and I don’t think he was very glad to see me at that time. “Well, Scott, what is it?” he inquired.
“It’s that Reindeer tail,” I said. “Rather a disconcerting fact came to light this afternoon.”
“What’s that?”
“You remember the prototype, the one that flew into the hill in Labrador or somewhere?” He nodded. “Well, it had done 1,393 hours up to the moment of the crash.”
“Oh.… Mr. Honey’s figure for tail failure was 1,440 hours, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right, sir.” I hesitated. “The figures seem so close I thought you ought to know at once.”
“Quite right,” he said. “But, Scott, in fact that machine did come to grief by flying into a hill, didn’t it?”
I hesitated again. “Well—that’s what we’re told, sir, and that’s what everybody seems to have accepted. The story as I’ve heard it is that it hit the top of a mountain and fell down into a forest. Nobody saw it happen and everyone in it was killed. So there’s no direct evidence about what happened to it.”
“Marks on the ground, to show where it hit first,” he said.
“Oh yes,” I said. “I’ve no doubt that there was that sort of evidence. But if the tail came off at twenty thousand feet it would have to fall somewhere.”
“Is that what you think?”
I was silent for a moment. “I don’t know,” I said at last. “I only know that this figure of 1,393 hours, the time that this machine did till it crashed—that figure’s within three per cent of Mr. Honey’s estimate of the time to failure of the tail. I can’t check that estimate and Sir Phillip Dolbear won’t.” I paused in bitter thought, and then I said, “And that three per cent is on the wrong side. It would be.”
“It certainly is a coincidence,” he said. “Rather a disturbing one.” We stood in silence for a minute. “Well,” he said, “clearly the best thing is to establish what actually did happen to that aircraft. If it was a tailplane failure, then there must be some evidence of it in the wreckage. I should make a careful check of that upon the basis of Honey’s theory. After all, a fatigue fracture is quite easily recognisable.”
I nodded. “I was thinking on those lines, sir. I think the first thing is to get hold of the accident report and talk to the people who prepared it. If you agree I’d like to go to London in the morning and see Ferguson, and go with him to see Group-Captain Fisher in the Accidents Branch.”
“Will you take Honey with you?”
“Not unless you want me to particularly,” I replied. “He isn’t very good in conference, and I’d really rather that he stayed down here and got on with the job of verifying his theory. What I’d like to do would be to see him this evening and tell him that you’ve authorised the trial upon the Reindeer tail to go ahead by day and night from now on. I really think we ought to run a night shift on it, sir.”
“I think we should, Scott. Can you provide the staff?”
“I’ll take young Simmons away from Mallory and put him to work with Honey,” I said. “Simmons can watch the thing at night for the time being. He can have a camp bed in the office and an alarm clock. That’ll do for a week or so; I’ll have Dines to put on it when he comes back from leave.”
“All right, Scott. You can tell Honey that I’ll see about the night shift in the morning.”
I was greatly relieved to have got that settled: at any rate we were now doing all we could upon the technical side. “He’ll have plenty to do tomorrow, sir, getting all that cracking. I’d rather he was down here doing that than coming up with me to London.”
It was nearly half-past six by the time I left the Director. I went back to my office and rang Honey’s office, but there was no reply: he had probably gone home. I asked the exchange to give me his home number, and they said he hadn’t got one. I packed up my work and went down to the balloon shed on my way out, to see if by any chance he was still there working late. But his office was locked and deserted. Outside, the great span of the tailplane stood upon its testing rig beneath the loading gantries, still and silent. It was not a happy thought that there were Reindeers in the air at that moment, putting up the hours towards the point when Mr. Honey said their tails would break.
It was nearly half-past seven by the time that I got home. Shirley had had dinner waiting for me for half an hour, and she was not too pleased about it. “You might have rung me up,” she said.
I told her I was sorry. “I’ve got to go out afterwards and dig up Honey,” I said. “There’s a bit of drama on.”
“What’s the trouble?”
“It’s that Reindeer tail,” I said.
“The one that Mr. Honey says will come to bits in 1,440 hours?”
I nodded. “Do you remember seeing in the paper that a Reindeer flew into a hill in Labrador a month or so ago? With the Russian Ambassador on board it?”
“I remember the Russians kicking up a stink,” she said. “Was that a Reindeer?”
“That was the prototype Reindeer,” I replied. “We heard this afternoon that it had done just on fourteen hundred hours when it came to grief.”
She had not worked at Boscombe Down all those years for nothing, and she knew quite a bit about aeroplanes. “Oh, Dennis! Do you think it was the tail?”
“I just don’t know,” I said unhappily. “If it was, I suppose the bloody Russians will say we knew that it was going to happen, and we did it on purpose.”
She smiled. “They couldn’t say that, surely. Nobody suspected there was anything wrong with the tail when that one crashed.”
“Mr. Honey did,” I said. There was no end to the trouble that might come out of this thing. But the first thing to do was to make darned sure that it could never happen again.
We had dinner, and washed up; then I went out and got into the car again, and drove round to Mr. Honey’s little house in Copse Road. It was about a quarter-past eight when I got there; the door was locked. It was one of those suburban doors with a window in the top part; through this window I could see past the stairs down the narrow hall into the kitchen at the back. I pressed the bell; it rang, but there was no sign of life. Then as I waited there was a stir upstairs and footsteps coming down, and Honey appeared in the hall and o
pened the door for me.
He said, “Oh, Dr. Scott—I didn’t expect to see you. Come in. I was just putting Elspeth to bed.”
I went into the hall with him. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Honey,” I said. “But something came up about the Reindeer tail this afternoon that I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve been with the Director this evening, and I’ve got to go to London in the morning. If you can spare a minute I’d like to have a talk about it now.”
He led the way into the front room, which would normally have been the parlour. It was furnished with a long table pushed against the wall, and with an enormous drawing-board in the bay window; on this was pinned a large-scale map of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, but drawn to some curious projection with which I was not familiar. The other walls were lined with rather dirty, unpainted deal cupboards and bookshelves. Books and papers were everywhere, and overflowed in piles upon the floor. I noted some of the titles of the books upon the table—Numerics of the Bible, The Gate of Remembrance, Hysteresis in Non-Ferrous Materials, The Apocrypha in Modern Life, and A Critical Examination of the Pyramid. The room was unswept and rather dirty, with cigarette ends stubbed out on the bare boards of the floor. There were two small upright wooden chairs; he pulled one forward for me.
“I’m afraid it’s not very comfortable in here,” he said apologetically.
I smiled. “It looks as if you do a bit of work, now and again.” I turned to the matter in hand. “What I came about was this. You know that prototype Reindeer, the one that crashed in Labrador? The one that we all thought had flown into a hill?”
He said vaguely, “I think I do remember something about it. It was in the papers, wasn’t it?”
“That’s right. It crashed and everyone was killed, so no one knows exactly what did happen to it. Well, I checked up on the hours that it had flown before the crash. It had done 1,393 hours.”
He stared at me. “Had it? There’d be nothing to say that the crash wasn’t due to tailplane failure?”
“That’s just the point. I think the tail might possibly have failed. The crash wasn’t seen by anyone, of course. It happened in the middle of Labrador.”
A slow smile spread over his face. “Well, that’s a real bit of luck,” he said.
I was staggered. “Luck?”
He beamed at me. “It’s just what we wanted—it will shorten down our work enormously.” He explained himself. “I mean, if this tail that we’re testing now also fails at about 1,400 hours we shall have two trials, one confirming the other. We really shall feel that we’re getting somewhere then.”
I said weakly, “Well—that’s one way of looking at it.”
From one of the rooms upstairs Elspeth called out, “Daddy, Dad-dee!” She sounded impatient.
Honey turned to me, and said nervously, “Would you mind excusing me for just a minute? I didn’t pull her blind down.”
There was no point in playing the high executive, the little tin god; I had nothing else to do that evening. “Not a bit,” I said. “Can I come up with you?”
“She’d be very thrilled if you came up to say good night to her,” he said. “It would be kind of you.”
He took me up into a little bare bedroom at the back of the house; rather to my surprise it was all reasonably clean, though most unfeminine. Elspeth was lying on her back in bed, mathematically in the centre, with the sheet tucked smooth and unruffled across below her chin. Her eyes watched me as I paused in the doorway.
“Hullo,” I said. “I’ve come to say good night.” And then I noticed that in bed with her, with its white-tasselled head beside her dark one on the pillow, was one of those little cotton mops that you use for washing up.
She saw me looking at it. “Is that your dolly?” I asked, trying to be pleasant.
“No,” she said scornfully. “That’s a mop.”
Honey was busy at the window. I sat down for a moment on the end of her bed. “Is it your best thing?” I asked. “Is that why you’ve got it in bed with you?”
She nodded vigorously.
“I should use it for washing up,” I remarked. “Then you won’t have to put your hands in.”
She said, “We’ve got another one for washing up. We went to Woolworth’s and Daddy got two, and he said I could have this one to take to bed till we have to use it if the other one wears out. The other one’s downstairs in the sink.”
Honey had finished at the window. He crossed to the bed, and bent down and kissed his daughter. “Go to sleep now,” he said. “Good night.”
I said, “Good night, Elspeth. Sleep well.”
“Good night, Daddy. Good night, Dr. Scott. Will you say good night to Mrs. Scott for me?”
“I’ll tell her. Good night from her.”
We went downstairs again to that dirty, littered room with the great drawing-board. “It’s all very well to think about the scientific value of that prototype crash,” I said, taking up from where we had left off. “But thirty or forty people must have lost their fives in it, and if it was the tail we’ve got to make darned sure that doesn’t happen again, Honey.”
“The important thing is to find out if the tailplane really was the cause of that accident,” he said. “You see, it may affect the programme for this tail that we are testing now. I’ve been thinking. A confirmatory experiment is valuable, of course, but it may not be making the best use of the material at our disposal. We might alter the frequency, for example. It’s not easy to do that in the middle of a trial, but I’d like to think around it.”
“That’s for the long-term programme,” I said patiently. “What I’m bothered about is—ought we to ground all the Reindeers that are in service now?”
“I suppose that is important, too,” he said.
“It’s the most important thing of all, Honey, because it’s got to be decided now, or very soon, at any rate.”
He said thoughtfully, “Of course, we don’t really know any more than we did yesterday. We don’t know that that tail failed in the air.”
“An examination of the wreckage will show that, though, won’t it?”
“Oh, yes. If there’s a fracture of the main spars of the tail, and if the structure of the metal at the fracture should be crystalline, that would be positive evidence of failure in fatigue.”
I stood for a moment deep in thought. Somebody would have to go and have another look at that tailplane; it really ought to be brought back to Farnborough for metallurgical examination. But it was a big unit to transport and it was urgent that the matter should be settled one way or the other. Where was the wreckage now? In Montreal? Or still in Labrador? I should have to find out that, and find out quick.
“I’m going up to London in the morning to see the Inspector of Accidents,” I said at last. “That’s why I came in tonight, Honey. I shan’t be in the office tomorrow. But I saw the Director this evening and told him about this, and he agreed to running your trial night and day from now on.”
“Did he? That’s very good news. I only wish he’d done it earlier, though. It’s a pity that you have to have an accident to impress on people the urgency of basic research.”
I disregarded that one, and went on to tell him about young Simmons and to discuss with him the detailed arrangements that he would have to make next day in my absence. Mr. Honey was quite wide awake and businesslike in any matter that concerned his trial, and having worked for so long in the R.A.E. he knew all the ropes. At the end of ten minutes I was satisfied that everything would go ahead all right in my absence, and I turned to go.
“Well, I’m sorry to have disturbed you, Honey,” I said. “I’ll be away all day tomorrow, but I’ll let you know what happens in London when I come in on Thursday.”
“It was good of you to come round,” he said. He came with me to the front door, and then he stopped me just as I was going out to the car. “There’s just one thing I wanted to ask you, if you could spare a minute …”
“Of course,” I said.
He
hesitated. “I wonder if you could tell me where you got that hot-water-heater? Are they very expensive things?”
“Why, no. They’re very cheap. I don’t know what they cost to buy outright, but you can hire them from the electricity company, you know. We hire ours. I forget what it costs—something quite small. Two bob a quarter, or something like that.”
“Really—so little as that? They’re very useful, aren’t they? I mean, with one of those you’ve got hot water all the time.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We couldn’t do without ours. You can get a big one for the bath, you know.”
“Can you!” He paused in thought. “I think I must see about getting one for the kitchen, anyway. It’s stupid to go on boiling up kettles to wash up with.”
“It makes everything much easier,” I said. “You know the electricity office in the High Street? Go in and tell them that you want to hire one. They’ll fix you up all right.”
“I’ll do that,” he said. “Thank you for telling me. It does seem to be a thing worth having.”
I got into my car and drove home, and put it in the garage at the back of the flats, deep in thought. It seemed long odds to me that the tailplane of the prototype Reindeer would be still lying where it fell, in some Labrador forest. It was most urgent to get hold of it for technical examination; we must have a report on it within a week at the very latest, unless we were prepared to ground the Reindeers upon Mr. Honey’s word alone. One thing I was resolved upon, that no Reindeer should go on flying after seven hundred hours unless this thing had been cleared up. But to achieve that end, to stop the whole British Transatlantic air service before another accident happened, I should have to show some better evidence than I had got up to date that Reindeers were unsafe.
Shirley was waiting for me in the flat, “Did Mr. Honey take it seriously?” she asked.
“And how!” I said, sinking down into my chair. “He was as pleased as Punch about it. He thought it was a wonderful thing to have happened.” And I told her all about it.
She heard me to the end. “He is a funny little man.” And then she said, “Tell me, Dennis—do you really think, yourself, that Honey’s right? Are the Reindeer tails dangerous?”