23-The Finger in the Sky Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "Ten o'clock. The time we arranged to get here."

  "Well, that's very odd. We weren't late, so she couldn't have come and gone. When did you last see her, Illya?"

  "Last night, of course. We went for a little drive after you left. We had a look at Eze village. And then I drove her home."

  "Where did you leave her?"

  "Outside her flat, of course," the Russian said, coloring slightly. "In the Rue Masséna."

  "All right, all right," Solo said, smiling. "Don't get all Slavic on me. I just thought if you had happened to stay for breakfast, it would —"

  "There was nothing like that at all," Illya said stiffly—adding, with a (for him) rare flash of sarcasm: "You forget, Napoleon; I am not the chief enforcement officer!"

  "Touché!" The woman's voice drawled sleepily from the door as Solo burst into laughter. Helga Grossbreitner was standing there, leaning against the doorpost. She was wearing a white linen suit with a huge-brimmed hat in lacy black straw—and she looked cool, and infinitely attractive. "Sorry I'm a few minutes late," she added, "but I came on in as the door was open...to hear my virtue—at least by implication—being impugned!"

  "Come on in," Solo grinned. "Don't mind my friend: he's just a little jealous."

  "Good morning, Helga," Illya said. "Do forgive me. Really, I did not in any way mean —"

  "Oh, for heaven's sake!" the girl interrupted. "Don't give it a thought; we're all grown up here. If I don't mind the night porter at a man's hotel seeing me come in without luggage at one A.M., why should I object to good-humored remarks from his friend?" She paused and looked across at Solo speculatively, adding in her throatiest voice: "When are you going to ask me to dinner again, Solo?"

  "Tonight," the agent replied promptly. "We're agreed that we should follow up the social life of your employees, and there's a party of them going up to Haut-des-Cagnes. I think we could do worse than tag along. We'll make up a foursome...you do know Sherry Rogers?"

  "But of course. Very well. She was already on the staff at the airport when I was working here."

  "Good. Which brings me to another point—the one we had been discussing when you came in: Sherry was due here at ten o'clock and now it's twenty-five to eleven. You haven't seen her?"

  "I'm afraid not. I shouldn't worry though. She works in Liaison now, doesn't she? There may easily have been some panic at the aéroport."

  "I suppose so. There must be plenty of alarms and excursions in your game, apart from crashes—late arrivals, reroutings, diversions and so on..."

  "You're telling me!" the girl said. "Can I help in any way?"

  "You can try, if you would. All we wanted to ask Sherry was to keep an eye open for anything in this apartment that she thought might throw a light—however faint—on the crash Andrea Bergen was injured in."

  "But of course. Have you found anything at all yet?"

  Solo and Illya admitted that they hadn't. Nor, despite the able and willing assistance of Helga, were they able to discover a single thing out of the ordinary in the apartment. Clothes, cosmetics and shoes were all neatly in place; the small kitchen held a collection of canned goods in a refrigerator, as befitted the home of a girl whose business took her away several days a week; household bills and bank statements were neatly docketed in a bureau; a bundle of unexceptional letters from a Second Officer in Swissair lived under the sachets in a handkerchief drawer. By twelve thirty, they had to confess that the apartment would yield nothing.

  "I shall leave you, then," Helga said, approaching close to Solo and picking a small piece of thread from his lapel with a gloved hand. "Tonight we meet at what time?"

  "Let's say seven thirty, okay?"

  "Fine," Illya said. "Unless something's happened that makes it too early for Sherry. I'll have to check her apartment and the T.C.A. office to find out what's happened. I can't think what's become of her..."

  But the apartment on the Rue Masséna was empty and the T.C.A. bureau at the airport had heard nothing from Sherry Rogers since she went off duty at six thirty P.M. the previous day.

  "She's not due on again till tomorrow morning at eight," the pretty, plump girl Illya had spoken too when first he came to the airport volunteered. " I shouldn't worry if I were you. She may have gone off for the day, you know."

  "She may, certainly," Illya said to Solo afterwards. "And admittedly I don't know her well—but such behaviour would seem unlike what I have come to expect from her, you know. She definitely said she would see me at Bergen's place today."

  "Well, we'll see what happens when it's time for her to show for her next duty," Solo said reasonably. "If she's not here then, you can really start to worry...in the meantime, let's just go over what we know about these automatic landing systems, okay?"

  T.C.A.'s Technical Director for France saw them in his office—a small room overlooking the apron from one of the long, low buildings enclosing the company's maintenance unit at Nice. He was a slight man, with smooth dark hair and a clipped moustache, beneath which a long-stemmed pipe with a silver mouthpiece projected. For the whole time they were there, the pipe never left his mouth: it seemed jammed between his teeth, hardly moving except to wag up and down when the exigencies of the language required these to shift their position. Unlike Waverly, however, the owner of this pipe was an active smoker—obscured for much of the time that he spoke by dense clouds of tobacco fumes and surrounded by small ashtrays on which the piles of burned matches gradually mounted.

  "Well, chaps," he began, "you both know the general drift now. What's the program for today? Want me to fill you in on the M-S gear?"

  "Yes—if you could recap briefly, that would be a help," Solo said. "Then perhaps a few words on the implications vis-à-vis the crashes."

  "Wilco," the Technical Director said. He knocked out the pipe, refilled it, sucked noisily on the mouthpiece and applied a match to the bowl. "Well, I daresay you know the R.A.E. at Bedford—the Royal Aircraft Establishment, you know—began experimenting with automatic landings soon after the war," he continued. "In 'fifty-five, the Blind Landing Unit had worked out a system for the V-bombers of the R.A.F...that's —"

  "Okay, okay, the Royal Air Force," Solo interrupted with a smile. "We do know that one."

  "Roger and out!...Sorry, chaps. As I say, they worked out a system for the V-bombers, which of course had to be able to fly in any weather. And the bombers duly used it. But unfortunately it wasn't good enough for the civil airlines."

  "Good grief, why not?"

  "Margins of error, old boy. The R.A.F.'s prepared to accept a very small calculated risk—any operational war force must be, obviously. The particular figure determining things in this case was one fatality in one hundred thousand landings where the system was in full use."

  "And this small percentage of calculated error was not good enough for civil planes?" Illya asked.

  "Not by a long chalk. The Air Registration Board wouldn't certify full use of any equipment until it had proved a safety standard of one fatality per ten million landings...Nevertheless B.E.A. started using Smith's equipment on their Tridents in 1964. This controlled the aircraft's height until the moment of touchdown. Then B.O.A.C. equipped V.C. 10's with similar gear developed by Elliott-Bendix."

  "Was this used on all landings?"

  "No. Mainly for fog. A limited use in fact. They were waiting for the International Civil Aviation Organization to give the final go ahead on world-wide adoption of the system in principle."

  "And the principle is?"

  "Plances carry the equipment in a square box housed in the cockpit. As they approach the airport, the box fixes them on a localizer beam which brings them in line with the runway to be used for the landing. Then another ground transmitter broadcasts an electronic beam down which the plane rides, as it were, to establish the correct glide path."

  "And the gear in the box causes the plane's controls to adjust themselves so as to maintain the correct altitude and inclination for touchdown?"

&n
bsp; "Dead on target, old chap. Hole in one. The pilot still has to control the sideways aspect, the roll of his wings, himself—but the height's always the most difficult part of it, after all. And even in good weather this limited use of the stuff increases the safety factor no end."

  "Aren't they developing an—er—extension to the system so that the roll factor will be taken care of too?"

  "They are. Have, in fact. Supposed to be installed later this year. In the meantime, our own gear—the Murchison-Spears, you know—already takes care of this."

  "Is it based on the same principles?" Illya asked.

  The Technical Director struck a match and sucked the flame noisily into the sodden bowl of his pipe. "Partly," he replied. "Fact is, the gear that fixes the plane on the localizer beam is a dead crib—so far as that's possible within the copyright infringement laws. But the part that adjusts the height and inclination is quite different. Instead of relying on a ground-to-air electronic beam and riding down it, the Murchison-Spears equipment works on a system more like ordinary radar."

  "You mean it emits a signal and deduces information from the way that signal is echoed back—then causes the aircraft to act upon this?"

  "Broadly speaking, yes. Murchison designed the altitude-and-aspect end of it—that's simple in theory but extremely sophisticated in design. And Spears—he's the hydraulics wizard—handled the part that deals with the roll factor. Basically, this is just a sensitizer at each wing-tip and something very like the old-fashioned balance-pipe between them. But again—the means he used to achieve this are electronically most advanced. The sensitizers—which both transmit and receive pulses, after all—are extraordinarily compact and ingenious."

  "How do you yourself account for the three T.C.A. crashes here?"

  The man with the pipe lit another match. For some moments he puffed away behind his private smokescreenm, then he rose to his feet and crossed the room to the window. "Very difficult question to answer," he said at last, with his back to them. "Mind, I haven't had time to go over the bits—the actual pieces of wreckage of the latest one. They're being assembled on the floor in a hangar nearby, as nearly as possible in their original relationship to one another. And that's a hell of a job when you've got perhaps several tens of thousands of segments—buckled, torn, melted, twisted, distorted and what-not."

  "I can imagine."

  "Nevertheless, my chaps and I have formed certain opinions—and they are only opinions, based on interpretation of the information supplied by other bods, and not deductions from data observed by ourselves. That'll come later."

  "Any opinion, any suggestion, any hint will be valuable, sir."

  "Yes. Well—for what it's worth, all my chaps underwrite what the accident investigation johnnies said: that there was no human error in any of the three prangs. And that there was nothing wrong with any of the planes. Or with their normal controls, for that matter."

  "You're saying, in effect, that there was something wrong with the Murchison-Spears equipment?"

  "No, old boy. That's exactly what I'm not saying. I'm saying there was nothing wrong with anything else. You can draw what deductions you want to from that. In view of the fact that the M-S gear was proved to be in perfect condition after each crash, I simply cannot say that, ergo, it must have been the gear that was at fault. Until our own investigations have been completed, I must say nothing: my mind must remain open..."

  "If the gear had been at fault, what would you say—unofficially, of course—would have been the—er—likeliest thing to have happened to it? That could have left it in perfect condition afterwards, that is."

  "Seems obvious to me, old chap. In such a case—if one existed!—one would have to look for a set of conditions causing false readings on the equipment. Something that caused the box to direct the aircraft as though the ground wasn't where it really was...if you get my meaning!"

  "You mean the box could have acted as though the runway was higher or lower than it really is, for example?"

  "I mean," the Director said carefully, "I'd be inclined to look for a situation in which such a thing could happen."

  "And if such a set of conditions existed—which part of the gear would you be inclined to suspect of being affected?"

  "Look—the box divides itself pretty definitely into three separate complexes, doesn't it? The bit getting it in line with the runway to start with...and after that the altitude-and-aspect gear, and finally the wing-tip equipment that controls the roll. Right?"

  "We're with you."

  "Right. Now it would seem unlikely that the first is in any way affected: all three crashes actually occurred on the runway, so the planes must have been accurately lined up, eh?...And again, no eyewitnesses have mentioned anything like a sideslip or a wingtip digging in or anything of that sort. Admittedly the last one did cartwheel—but that was apparently only after the under-carriage had been wrecked on the first impact. So it seems—shall we say?—unlikely that the wingtip gubbins caused the crashes."

  "Which leaves the altitude and glide-angle equipment?"

  "Exactly. You examine all the witnesses' statements. Seventy per cent of 'em say something like 'the plane seemed to fly straight into the ground'. And the survivor of the last one was trying to say something to the nurse in the ambulance. Unfortunately, she didn't speak English—but we gather he was spouting something about height, or too high, or something. All of which seems to me to suggest either wrong altimeter readings or wrong glide angles."

  "Or wrong interpretation by the gear to give the effect of this?"

  The dark man with the moustache shrugged. For the first time, he removed the pipe from his mouth. "You must appreciate my position," he said, jetting a small cloud of smoke into the air. "We make the gear, after all. As there's no evidence of faultiness after the crash, we feel it's not up to us to ferret out reasons why it might have been at fault—though of course we should accept any conclusive evidence found by someone else."

  "I understand," Solo said. "And you can't think of any device—or set of conditions, to use your phrase—under which the part of the gear affecting height readings or glide angle could be momentarily distorted, and yet return to normal afterwards?"

  The Technical Director jammed the pipe back into his mouth. "Oh, have a heart, old chap," he said. "Have a heart."

  Later, Solo and Illya spent some time studying the technical drawings of the Murchison-Spears equipment—with particular emphasis on those parts of it affecting the height of the aircraft and the automatic control of this.

  "I can see the principle," Solo said. "But I'm afraid the detail is a bit too..."

  "No, no, Napoleon," Illya said. "It is relatively simple. Look...after the scanner tube has...Look!...Here...This is where, if it was just giving a reading, the electronic pulse would be turned into a visual indication, on a dial. See?"

  "Ye-e-es. I'm with you so far. Just."

  "Well, since it's not just giving a reading—but causing the plane to react as a pilot would after digesting that reading—the electronic information feeds in...here. In this small memory storage unit."

  "Something like a computer?"

  "On a far less complicated scale, yes...And then these selectors...here...and here...and here...See, the contact is made by this core of toridium. As you know, it's a metal whose coefficient of expansion is —"

  "No, Illya, no!" Solo said firmly. "This is way beyond me. Let me leave the technical stuff to you. When you have an idea, tell me—and we'll act on it. Until then, you're on your own, boy!"

  "Just as you like, Napoleon. I think I might have the glimmering of an idea how someone might—just might—begin to make...what did the man say?"

  "A set of conditions?"

  "That's it! A set of conditions! A set of conditions in which this equipment might be made to react falsely without permanently damaging it...but I'd like to brood on it before I commit myself."

  "You do that. In the meantime, we'll start on the social side, as we
said..."

  * * *

  At seven thirty, they met Helga for a drink in the airport lounge. Sheridan Rogers had still not returned to her apartment, nor had she left any message at the T.C.A. office or in the bureau at the terminal building. They gave her a half hour and left at eight o'clock—calling once again at the empty apartment on the way to Haut-des-Cagnes.

  Illya, customarily a reserved companion, was abnormally quiet and worried during the short journey. Solo and Helga, torn between the extremes of failing to cheer him up and appearing too flippant in the face of his obvious distress, struck a kind of subdued bantering note in their exchanges as the car sped along the motor road to Cros-des-Cagnes and then turned inland towards the medieval village perched so picturesquely above it. From the coast, Haut-des-Cagnes presents a symmetrical aspect—a pyramid of rough, red-tiled Proven�al roofs crowned by a 14th century Grimaldi castle, beneath whose floodlit and crenellated keep the place clusters at night. But the visitor who ventures along either of the valleys running inland to each side of it soon sees the village in a different perspective. It is built—for a start—at the end of a spur and not on a hillock...so that a moving viewpoint presents constantly shifting profiles. At one moment, the emphasis seems to be rectangular—a line of picture-postcard houses serrating the sky at the top of a squared-up bluff; the next minute, the picture is all zig-zags—a series of slopes linked by hairpin bends, the whole complex rising to stone ramparts and punctuated by clusters of cottages clinging to the wall as tenaciously as the bougainvillea which covers them. And yet on the far side of the valley, a little higher up, an onlooker would characterize the place as a series of stepped terraces, rectangular plots and parcels of land related vertically by the swooping walls of villas and the trailing profusion of flowers hanging from their balustrades.

  Illya drove about a kilometer along the road leading inland to Vence and then made a steep, climbing turn back to the right, approaching the old village from the north.

  The center of social life in Haut-des-Cagnes is the place at the very summit of the pyramid—a small square dominated by the battlemented turret of the keep. Here a handful of expensive and chi-chi boutiques and souvenir shops vie with the three cabaret-restaurants in the laudable task of parting the tourist painlessly and as elegantly as possible from his money. And here in the summer—especially in August—an absurd and ludicrous number of cars attempt to park.