News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  Another scream and torrent of expletives.

  In fact so much of what had been in the Yuneec cockpit only moments before that point had completely disappeared.

  I was wearing the same clothes, but when I glanced down and saw my feet I almost jumped out of the cockpit door. I was wearing orange and blue boots that looked like no shoes I’d ever seen and I knew I hadn’t been wearing them moments before.

  Before what?

  Something had happened while I was in the weird cloud but I had no clue as to what. My iPad was charged to 100 per cent, I was in a totally different plane that was incredibly powerful and I was wearing blue and orange boots I’d never seen before.

  I checked the satnav again and I was already over Compton – I was travelling at a previously impossible speed.

  My hands started searching for my comms headphones. I needed to contact air traffic control, I needed help.

  No comms headphones, as my eyes darted around the cockpit. There was no air-to-ground radio, no nothing. This time the panic was palpable, my whole body was shaking uncontrollably.

  This was worse than any nightmare I’d ever had. I was in some bizarre machine that I didn’t understand and yet moments earlier I’d been flying it as if it was second nature.

  Phone.

  If I got low enough I could get a signal and call someone.

  I craned my head around looking for somewhere relatively safe to fly low. I reduced speed as much as I dared and descended over a busy road. By this stage I had no idea where I was and cared even less about it. I needed help and fast.

  My hand scrabbled around in the wooden box and finally found my phone. It was charged up and searching for a signal.

  Ping. Five bars! Excellent.

  With one hand I scrolled through my enormous address book. I needed Ed.

  I pressed call and waited, switched to speakerphone and heard it ringing.

  ‘Yay, Gav, wassaaaaaap!’

  Ed had generally annoyed me since I’d met him two years earlier, but his jolly response made me almost scream with joy.

  ‘Ed, really need your help, mate,’ I said.

  ‘Name it, old chap,’ he replied, his speech just slightly slurred.

  ‘I’m flying the Yuneec, except it isn’t the Yuneec. Something very fucking bizarre has just happened. I can’t explain. Where are you?’

  ‘I’m in the Falkland Arms, mate, having a lunchtime pint. You should drop in.’

  ‘I can’t,’ I shouted. ‘I’m not sure I can land.’

  ‘Where are you?’ he asked, his tone finally changed to something resembling concern.

  ‘Just south of Didcot, I don’t know, I’ve got no air-to-ground. I’m stuffed. I need you to guide me back to Enstone.’

  ‘Wait, you’re calling me from your plane? You’re in the air!’

  ‘Only just in the air,’ I shouted. I dropped the phone into my lap at that point as I had to gain altitude rather rapidly as I was approaching some power lines.

  Once I was over them I picked up the phone. ‘I’m flying at about 50 feet at the moment so I get a signal, there’s no time to explain. Get in that bloody kite of yours and head south, keep your phone on you.’

  ‘What?’ said Kevin. ‘But I’m—’

  ‘Kev, this is life or death, mate, I’ll make it up to you.’

  The line went dead. I don’t know if Kevin hung up or I lost signal. I checked the phone and knew it was the latter.

  I climbed and turned hard, heading north as fast as I could. That action gave me a bit of a shock. The Yuneec was anything but a performance plane. Whatever it was I was sitting in pulled a tighter turn and accelerated at such a powerful rate I almost blacked out. Within a breath I was travelling at over 400 miles an hour, in an electric plane, at a thousand feet.

  I backed off, sliding my thumb down the control pad on the flight controls, too fast, too high and I didn’t know where I was going.

  I knew I was breaking all kinds of regulations by flying without being in contact with any ground control stations. I had no choice but I kept low, never going above 2,000 feet. I decided that was too high, there may be other planes at that height trying to contact me and my failure to respond might cause alarm. I dropped down as low as I dared to 200 feet.

  Flying at that altitude requires a lot of concentration. Pylons, power lines, communications towers, buildings, even trees on hilltops all start to look alarmingly close.

  I glanced down and saw that I was already travelling over the red rooftops of Abingdon, although I was in a state of profound confusion mixed with terror. Something happened as I looked down and saw green open space surrounded by trees and houses.

  I knew it was probably just the playing field of a school, but I felt I recognised it. Maybe not the actual place, but something about the open space surrounded by buildings made me feel peculiar.

  I ignored the feeling, I had plenty of things to feel peculiar about. My shoes for one thing. Where the hell had they come from?

  I wriggled my toes inside them just to make sure I still had toes. I did have toes, but that didn’t give me much relief.

  Something caught my eye on my left-hand side. An airfield. Of course! Abingdon airfield. Maybe I could land there. I knew it was used as a test track for cars and you could go there on weekends and have a track day experience for a few hundred quid.

  I banked over to have a closer look. It would be so easy to land, a great big World War II runway with no trees or power lines anywhere near it. But what would I do when I landed? I wouldn’t know how to explain myself, I wouldn’t have permission.

  I circled the airfield a couple of times, all the while scanning the sky for other light aircraft. At this height I needed to keep a constant eye out for gliders, light planes and microlights.

  I levelled out and continued heading north. I decided to skirt around Oxford to the west, I didn’t want to attract attention by flying low over heavily built-up areas.

  I kept glancing at the incredible display the Yuneec had suddenly developed; there were so many indicators glowing at me but I didn’t know what they meant. I was looking for something that might give me an indication of the state of charge left in the batteries. I know I hadn’t been worried about it when I went into the cloud, but I couldn’t remember exactly what it was. One thing was certain, this sudden and dramatic increase in the capacity of the motor must be draining the hell out of them.

  I needed Ed and I needed him fast. I picked up my phone. Thirty-five minutes had passed since I spoke to him. I tried to calculate how long it would take him to get from the Falkland Arms in Great Tew to Enstone Airfield, take the wraps off his microlight, get in the air and head toward me.

  The answer was simple: longer than 35 minutes.

  34

  I was flying very low over water that I knew from previous flights to be the collection of old flooded gravel pits between Stanton Harcourt and Standlake, just west of the city of Oxford.

  Finally my phone buzzed. It was a text from Ed.

  ‘Just north of oxfd. Wher U?’

  I knew this was the first text I’d ever received from a man flying a microlight, but I still don’t know how he managed to send it.

  I started to scan around the fields and lakes below. I had to put the Yuneec down somewhere we could both land.

  I gained altitude with alarming speed and circled around above the village of Standlake. I knew the area vaguely as I’d been to a pub called the Rose Revived that was on the river at Newbridge. Something about seeing the river meander through the fields seemed bizarrely familiar but I couldn’t work out why.

  Of course it was familiar, it was England. I’d flown over this area a dozen times before, but this felt different. My eyes went a bit fuzzy and I rubbed them with the back of my hand.
I couldn’t understand why I felt so tired.

  Alongside the river a little way upstream of Newbridge was a flat area of pasture; short grass, no power lines and it looked fairly smooth and solid.

  I dropped down and flew low overhead.

  There was a string of high-voltage power lines running across the fields and lakes in the distance, but if you approached the field from the south-east they weren’t a problem.

  The other advantage was the lack of houses, farms or people anywhere near the field.

  One more circuit and I slowed right down and brought the Yuneec in to land.

  It was very easy, the land was flat and there were no cows in the field. The reason I suspected there normally were cows was the preponderance of cowpats that I splatted through as I came to a halt.

  I pulled the thumb slide power controller all the way down and as the propeller span down I got yet another eye-popping shock.

  The propellers weren’t solid. The last few turns revealed that they were made of something floppy. As the rotation slowed they looked a bit like wet towels. They eventually flopped down and simply hung from the central hub.

  ‘Jesus Lord Almighty,’ I think I said.

  My mouth hung open as I sat motionless. I had just been in the air, travelling at previously unimagined speed, being pulled along by floppy blades.

  I rested my head back and stared in disbelief at the rather nice padding on the roof of the cockpit. That looked different too but by this time I was losing my mind.

  I felt incredibly tired all of a sudden. I shook myself, got out of the Yuneec and looked at it from a distance. Other than the splats of cow poo thrown up by the landing wheels it looked pretty much the same. I checked my phone, I had one bar of signal left so I sent a text back to Ed with a description of my position complete with some map coordinates I got off my iPad.

  ‘Field, near Thames, South of Standlake 51 degrees 42’38.7 North, 1 degree 26’31.7 West.’

  I stood motionless in the field. I could hear a sheep baa-ing, I could hear birds and in the distance traffic rumbling along the a415. Everything seemed normal and yet I was totally confused. I’d been flying to a meeting in Basingstoke and now I was standing in a field by the Thames in Oxfordshire.

  I walked back to the Yuneec after a few moments and leant into the cockpit to get a look inside the box that had somehow appeared while I was flying in the cloud.

  It was carefully strapped into the passenger seat – someone had strapped it in, and I was bloody sure it wasn’t me.

  It contained some weird-looking rags. I pulled them up to see it was a ridiculously lightweight kind of body stocking. I’d never seen anything like it in my life. I could see it but it had no weight, it felt as if I was holding up light, there was nothing to it and yet I could see it.

  Next I extracted a pair of very cool goggles and a weird backpack that contained a large old-fashioned leather-bound book.

  I pulled the book out of the bag and opened it. It was crammed full of really small and neat handwriting. My handwriting.

  As my eyes stared at the densely filled pages, I felt my legs give way and I was suddenly sitting on the grass next to a cowpat feeling decidedly worse for wear.

  How had this book appeared and where had it appeared from? And when, for goodness’ sake, had I written it?

  I don’t know how much time had passed, I can’t really remember, but something pulled me out of my shock-induced stupor. I remembered the damn meeting in Basingstoke and my whole body shook as if I’d just heard a gun go off close by. I checked my phone again. I was already late, there was no way I could get there in time.

  I sent a text to Mike Rogers at Tempus Engineering who was hosting the get-together.

  ‘Very sorry, Mike, severe technical difficulties have made my arrival impossible. Will call soonest. Apologies to all.’

  As soon as I’d sent the text the phone buzzed.

  ‘I C U.’

  It was from Ed. I scanned the horizon and couldn’t see anything, the sky was relatively clear although there was a low-lying haze. Then I heard the unmistakable sound of a Verner Scarlett mini 3, the engine on Ed’s microlight. Moments later I saw him teetering about in the sky. Microlights had never appealed to me, a bit too much like riding a bike. Okay on a sunny day if you’re not too high, freezing cold and wet at any other time.

  A minute later he landed at the far end of the field and taxied toward me, stopping just by the wing of the Yuneec.

  Once the engine stopped he climbed out and took off his helmet.

  His grin was enormous.

  ‘What the living fuck is going on?’ he asked. ‘This is mad. It was a bloody million-to-one chance I’d be around, I was meant to be in Mayfair today but everything was cancelled last night.’

  Ed was a consultant. I never knew what that meant, I certainly never saw him doing consulting. I’d seen him play the guitar, which he did quite well, but he never claimed to be a musician. I knew he was mates with Alex James, the man who makes cheese at a local farm who used to be in a band called Blur, but that was the full extent of my knowledge. I also knew he didn’t really need to work, not for money. Ed never needed money.

  ‘Okay, this is mad, right. Prepare for your brain to melt,’ I said as we walked toward the Yuneec.

  ‘Does it look any different to you?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Yuneec. It looks the same, right?’

  Ed didn’t say anything, he just looked a bit worried.

  ‘Check out the flight controls.’

  He looked into the cockpit, he stayed silent a moment longer then turned slowly to me.

  ‘What the living fuck has happened?’ he said eventually. ‘When did you do this?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything.’

  ‘What d’you mean? This is totally different, where are the dials, where’s, well, everything?’

  ‘I don’t know!’ I squealed.

  ‘It’s just flat glass, how the fuck d’you know where you are?’

  ‘Watch,’ I said. I put my hand on the flat black dash and immediately the whole thing lit up, coordinates, speed, altitude, pitch, yaw, engine speed, G reading, everything.

  Ed walked backwards away from the cockpit. He banged his head on the wing strut and stood rubbing it.

  ‘Get the fuck out of here, Gavin, what the fuck?’

  I walked toward Ed and stared right into his eyes. Even as I was doing it I knew I would have found this impossible before I’d flown into the cloud.

  ‘Listen, and listen really carefully,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s happened, I really want you to understand that this is as fucked up for me as it is for you. I take off this morning, I’m flying to Blackbushe, I see this weird cloud over Didcot, I start to skirt around it, I end up in it, I fly out of it a few seconds later facing the way I came. I didn’t turn, I didn’t do anything and the bloody Yuneec is totally changed, it flies like a Spitfire, it’s so fast I can barely control it, I look on the passenger seat and there’s a box full of weird stuff strapped next to me and I’m wearing freaky boots. You tell me.’

  Ed looked down at my feet.

  ‘The fuck,’ was all he could say.

  ‘Ed, listen, seriously, I don’t know what the hell is going on,’ I said. ‘All I know is I have no radio and I don’t want to get in to trouble with the CAA. I want to get back to Enstone, get this thing in a hangar, go home and lie down for about a month.’

  ‘The fuck,’ said Ed, almost to himself. ‘This is seriously fucked up.’

  ‘I know, but that really isn’t helping,’ I pleaded. ‘Will you fly with me back to Enstone, will you shadow me and explain to ground control?’

  Ed was just staring at me with bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Tell them my radio’s packed up. Y
ou’ll have to fly behind me and inform Enstone control that I’m coming into land. But don’t make too big a deal out of it or they’ll all come snooping.’

  Ed didn’t respond for a moment.

  ‘Ed, did you hear me?’ I asked quietly.

  He nodded, still looking at the Yuneec. ‘Yeah, yeah, have you seen the lump?’

  I followed his gaze and saw that indeed the underside of the Yuneec had changed shape. There was a perfectly smooth extra lump beneath the cockpit. It looked so much part of the plane and I’d been in such a state with the book discovery that I hadn’t noticed it.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘No idea. I don’t know what’s going on. I can’t find a battery gauge, it just flies.’ Then I remembered the floppy propeller blades.

  ‘I’ll tell you why I didn’t notice the lump, look at this.’

  I grabbed the shoulder of Ed’s flight jacket and pulled him to the front of the plane.

  Three strips of soft material hung down from the prop hub. I lifted one up, it was heavy but somehow I was expecting that. Once again I felt my vision fade and come back. I thought I was going to faint.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’

  ‘The fuck,’ said Ed.

  ‘They work, they work really well. The power this thing has is off the scale, Ed, seriously, it’s really powerful now.’

  ‘What are those?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know, I didn’t notice anything different about them until I killed the motor.’

  Ed reached forward and gingerly touched one of the dangling propellers. ‘What’s it made of?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Don’t know. The whole thing is a freakish mystery,’ I said. ‘That’s why I want to hide it at the back of your hangar at Enstone. Come on, let’s get in the air before some irate farmer arrives to see what’s going on.’

  Once again I grabbed Ed’s jacket and started pulling him toward his microlight.

  I encouraged him to climb into the pilot’s seat by pushing him. I handed him his helmet that was lying on the grass where he’d dropped it.

  ‘I’ll spin it over, ready?’ I asked.