The Higher They Fly

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  But this was something different. He had been placed, by rare circumstances, in the position of an unwilling chairman who possessed a casting vote in the matter of how the captain of a stricken airliner should be advised. All of the three other men with him in the room were qualified in a different way to express their views.

  There was Gregg, head of the manufacturing company. He was endowed with a wide experience in aviation, and possessed a vividly strong personality which none the less could not be allowed to sway the issue. He had considerable experience as a pilot and a proven understanding of men. His reputation in all fields was unimpeachable.

  There was Dawlish, a director of the airline whose aircraft was the one in trouble. Scrivens, who did not regard himself as a quick judge of character, felt this man was more out of his element than perhaps he realised, and it was a point against him that he clung to social pretensions which were entirely out of context. He appeared to be an insensitive type of person who would be poor pilot material because of his very inflexible views. Scrivens had been a radar controller from the early days; he knew what qualities to expect in a voice and a manner because for countless hours over a number of years he had sat with a pair of headphones jammed over his head, through which came the voices of pilots—sometimes anxious, usually relaxed, but always responsive to a given situation. Dawlish was not, and in that sense could never be, responsive. His personality was far too rigid. He should not, therefore, be allowed to distort the situation by misleading his own captain on the radio through failure to keep abreast of the position.

  And then there was Fleming.

  Scrivens looked pointedly at the clock. ‘Captain Crooke has made it clear,’ he said, ‘that he must make his final decision not later than half an hour from now. We must make up our minds about Captain Fleming’s plan—one way or the other—before that time. So let’s get on with it.’

  Chapter Twelve

  Dulcie Rogers seemed very thoughtful when she returned to her seat beside Hubb. He watched her overtly, until she turned toward him and exchanged a frank stare. ‘I didn’t know you were a doctor,’ he said, feeling rather fatuous as he spoke.

  She smiled slightly. ‘I don’t remember your asking,’ she said, ‘and anyway it isn’t the sort of question you think of asking a woman. Is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry. You must think me a bit of a creep.’

  ‘Well, I’ve no idea what a “creep” is. Let’s just leave it that you’re rather predictable.’

  ‘Is that bad?’ He asked the question half-smiling, not quite sure whether he was pumping her or vice versa.

  ‘No. It just means you fall into a very normal pattern.’

  ‘I’m not sure whether that’s flattering or not! What about your patient?—the first officer? Does he fit into “a normal pattern”?’

  ‘Doctors don’t answer questions about patients.’

  He persisted. ‘Not even on airplanes that don’t fit normal patterns either?’ He offered a cigarette. She used the time he took lighting it, then his own, to decide whether or not this made any difference.

  She decided it did, for a particular reason. ‘He fits a particular pattern that is very far from being normal.’

  ‘Poor guy.’

  ‘Yes . . . poor guy, as you say.’ She fell silent for a while.

  He said: ‘One wonders how a man like that winds up as an airline pilot. Tell me as a doctor: how did he get through his medical?’

  She answered him with a question. ‘When we took off, Mr Hubb, did you suspect that there was anything wrong with this aeroplane?’

  He nodded. ‘I see what you mean. Some things take time before they show. It’s an unpleasant thought. Maybe in a few years’ time I won’t be quite the regular guy you think I am now.’

  ‘On the contrary, Mr Hubb. You’re an open book. You’ll settle down and marry and rear children until you’re blue in the face.’

  ‘That puts us right back where we started, doesn’t it? If you know that about me—and it’s a pretty darn depressing forecast!—why didn’t they know about him?’

  ‘As I said, you’re predictable. Others are not.’

  He accused her. ‘I think you employ feminine intuition to arrive at your diagnosis. That’s not fair. I’ll bet you would have been on to him long before your male counterparts were.’

  ‘It’s not quite as simple as that! There are many brands of immaturity. You have to know which kinds are curable and which are not. I dare say that Mr Truman might have struck me as immature if I’d examined him at his last medical. But then so do you!’

  ‘Ouch!’

  ‘You’ll get over it.’

  ‘I’m not quite sure I want to.’

  ‘Exactly!’ she said, laughing at him.

  He couldn’t feel snubbed by this. ‘The trouble with you is you seem to know exactly what I’m going to do next.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  She had said it in a way which startled him. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Do you own a car?’

  He still felt mystified. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you do when it goes wrong? Take it to a garage?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact I like to fix it myself. Why?’

  ‘You’re a bit of a mechanic, in fact?’

  ‘In a kind of a sort of a way, yes. It amuses my immature mind to play around with spanners and wrenches and things that go bump in the night.’ He stressed the word ‘immature’ in a way designed to amuse her.

  She smiled appropriately. ‘I suppose you have to learn quite a lot before you can do that.’

  ‘It’s more the practical experience that counts, doctor . . . I feel pretty silly calling you doctor! Do lady doctors have names?’

  ‘On special occasions, yes. My name’s Dulcie.’

  ‘That sounds far less frightening. Motor mechanics have names also. Mine is Jack.’

  ‘Tell me about this practical experience.’

  ‘It’s standard practice,’ explained Hubb, ‘for American adolescents to careen around in things called hot-rods.’

  ‘I do know about hot-rods.’

  ‘Well, that’s how it starts. You get fascinated by them and you soup them up by fitting twin carburettors and all the rest of it. Actually they make a lot more noise than their forward motion could possibly justify which is just as well, because they’re a lot easier to start than they are to stop. Anyway, you either lose interest after a spell of this and collect stamps of something, or you can’t make them go fast enough, or sound loud enough—in which case you graduate to something that really moves. Like for instance a Jaguar type “E”. Then, if you stay alive long enough you race them . . . only not on the highway.’

  ‘And that’s what you do?’

  ‘Yes. I went up to the Jaguar factory while I was in England, to find out how to soup up my latest. They taught me one hell of a lot and I just can’t wait to fit the special cylinder head which is crated down in the freight compartment of this airplane right now. There is little doubt,’ he added with a fiendish grin, ‘that once I’ve completed the operation on that little she-devil it will be, as they say, strictly Go.’ He watched her face. ‘How predictable is that?’

  She stubbed out her cigarette and spoke with surprising voracity. ‘It’s exactly what I hoped—only slightly better.’

  He caught her change of tone instantly. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I’m sorry, it was necessary to make sure. The captain may need a volunteer for a certain purpose. I said I thought you might be suitable . . . and perhaps you could call that intuition, though I could tell from your hands that you were used to mechanical work of some kind.’

  He looked at them. ‘I’ll get a manicure.’

  ‘You won’t need one for this. Will you help?’

  Dulcie was able to gauge something of what was going on in Jack Hubb’s mind, just then.

  Hubb had never really been confronted by anything real. She saw this in his superficiality, to which he h
ad been driven by the fact of wealth and a sense of futility.

  But the tautening expression she saw in his face now was the first recognition in him that to be harnessed to something useful was not only an obligation, it was a need. For longer than he had realised he had been seeking a niche; and he sought it because he was much too normally adjusted, beneath the playboy chromium, to float around at the mercy of his own whims. A sudden evidence of humility confirmed this.

  ‘You think they could really use me?’ he asked, and seemed to be holding his breath for the answer.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Fooling around with cars as an amateur is one thing, but . . .’

  She watched his fists. They lay clenched on his knees. She knew she had made the right choice. ‘Go and talk to the captain,’ she said. ‘He’s expecting you.’

  ‘You mean . . . now?’

  ‘Yes. Now.’

  He got up. ‘I won’t try to kid you. I’m scared.’

  ‘You’d be a bit of an idiot if you weren’t.’

  Dulcie smiled slightly as Hubb made his way along the gangway. He looked embarrassed rather than scared, and she knew why.

  He was trying not to regard himself as the subject of a sudden religious conversion; and it occurred to her that he was a lot more sensitive than he made out.

  *

  ‘Your deadline,’ said Perkins, ‘is exactly fifteen minutes from now.’

  Crooke said: ‘Right.’ He glanced behind him for a moment, to where Geoff and the young fellow Hubb were discussing engineering details. He did not interrupt them. After a short interview with this volunteer passenger he had become convinced that Hubb was a sound choice in the circumstances. It had been unlucky that the passenger list had not included any airmen on a busman’s holiday; but Hubb could interpret a mechanical drawing, had a responsive mind and was keen to prove his own value. Such a person was—if not ideally qualified—at least emotionally and physically suitable for what would be required of him should Fleming’s plan be the one chosen.

  They were now flying an elongated oval route back and forth along an airspace that had been cleared of all other aircraft. Crooke had requested this, as he did not consider it a good idea to remain in a holding stack at Watford or Epsom for hours at a time. You cannot hold in a tight pattern without recourse to manual control, and Crooke wanted his hands left free. The sky now allotted him was thirty minutes long in either direction; he had only the turns at the ends of the oval to worry about. The rest of the time the Jet-Four would fly herself.

  Below them, England was cut off by two separate layers of cloud, and only Perkins’ navigation equipment informed the crew that the Atlantic had long since been left behind. For here, at cruising altitude, you could expect to see nothing five miles below you, land or sea. Later, when it was time to let-down to an altitude more suitable for depressurising, an occasional star-form that marked a city might glow up at them fleetingly between clouds. Then the vaporous blanket would again be drawn across, dividing the two halves of the drama—that in Flight Forty-Six, and the increasing cyclorama that spread below, where more and more people became alert to the rising mercury of crisis.

  There were links between air and ground.

  Stretching like elastic, as Flight Forty-Six ploughed its four parallel furrows of engine gas northward and away from London, radio signals bridged the increasing gap and were precipitated out of the colloid of voices in the sky. Forty-Six, allotted an exclusive frequency now, enjoyed priority radio-telephone service and many ears were by this time listening for Crooke’s every move. His was no longer a private chess game; and each word spoken by him or an opposite number on the ground was being taped by two machines instead of one. In the event of accident the recordings would be impounded and played over many times thereafter by the accident investigators.

  Other links tracked the Jet-Four’s progress by radar, and others still guided a pen close to Perkins’ position in the aircraft itself. This was the Decca Navigator, which displayed on a map the track followed by the aeroplane in relation to the ground. As if all this were not enough, radio beacons and VORs marked fixed points on the ground against which the other means of navigation could be checked. Flying over England with the aids available made navigation a simple task for Perkins.

  His mind was therefore free to think of the men around him; and he worked out a formula to fit them: ‘The mood which prevails in the cockpit of an aircraft is the sum total of the personalities of its occupants, and the effect of their interaction upon one another. A new ingredient changes the recipe.’

  The new ingredient was Jack Hubb, and in this he had already made his mark. It is a unique event for a passenger to become, without the smallest ritual of indoctrination, an operational member of the crew. The steel barrier which usually exists between professional and amateur—and there is no greater bore than the passenger who visits the flight deck in order to show off a fragment of knowledge—had been lifted by unspoken consent. There were no alien comments or questioning glances between Perkins and Geoff behind Hubb’s back. He was immediately accepted as a man who could have been talking and laughing with them in the crew-room a few minutes before take-off. In point of fact Hubb’s entrance restored confidence because it helped erase the disturbing effect of being one man short in the team.

  Perkins, who had been shaken by Truman’s disintegration, found himself more alert than before to the more private personalities of his companions. It occurred to him now that he had hitherto existed in rather a selfish vacuum. When he stepped into an aircraft he did not habitually check the minds and manners of other men. He made straight for the navigation table as if he were a separate entity from the rest, a sort of back-seat driver who shouted out the street names for the benefit of the chauffeur. He allowed himself private and often sensual thoughts about Jeannie when he could have been contributing to ‘the sum total’. Poetic eruptions and jokes about bananas seemed unduly egocentric now. He alone knew of Crooke’s personal tragedy, yet he accepted his captain purely on face value and had never troubled to wonder how the man managed to maintain so cheerful a disposition which was so calculatingly extrovert. Crooke had never been known to refer, even obliquely, to his wife’s sickness. When he did talk about her it was a blustering brand of affection which only sounded slightly overcooked when you thought of what lay behind it.

  Perkins now saw Geoff Simmonds as Mr Steadfast; and not merely as a reliable—even dull—flight engineer who kept things running. Behind the phlegmatic face was a dedicated foster father; who for all his pride in Robin (and. there were few flights on which the boy was not discussed) wanted so desperately a child of his own that he could not have. His method of dealing with this deprivation was exactly opposite to Crooke’s way of coping with his own insoluble heartbreak. Whereas Crooke used ribaldry and bearded captainmanship as a cover, Geoff eased his burden by ventilating it. He saw no reason to conceal the fact that Robin was not the product of his own love-making but the result of an inadvertent error on the part of two lonely people to whom the permanence that a son implied was unacceptable. He knew that if he kept this information to himself he would try to make himself believe it . . . then suffer the saddening after-truth when next he and his wife looked in each other’s eyes and searched their hearts for the non-existent sin which had deprived them.

  So Perkins thought awhile and said to himself: ‘I hope I haven’t been too lucky.’

  *

  It was Job’s comfort to Mr Valentine that the eight other passengers who shared the thinly populated first class with him did not seem outwardly disturbed by a situation that was scaring him in a way which was becoming increasingly obvious to everyone. He hated them, in fact, for their courage; and he hated both the stewardesses because neither the smug girl called Susan nor that cheap little bitch Jill would have anything to do with him.

  The stewards were deathly polite, refusing to put a foot wrong in their dealings and leaving him no loop-hole whereby he could hit b
ack at those members of the human race currently available. They were even rationing him with his drink . . . not in a way you could put your finger on—Oh, no! They were much too cunning for that! But they were slow in answering the bell, slower still in bringing what he ordered; and he was quite sure they were giving him short measure.

  Feeling a desperate urge to talk to someone, he moved a couple of seats further back. A woman sat there alone—reading a script, if you please! Was she just trying to show him up, make him feel a fool?

  Most people would have deduced that the woman was alone because she wanted to be; but Mr Valentine could not afford to think of other people. He never had, and this was the wrong time to start.

  Susan had been keeping an eye on Jimmy Truman who still sat, inert, in the alcove bar just forward of the galley. But she shifted her attention now to Mr Valentine, and frowned when she observed his move to the seat next to Jane Tyne.

  While keeping Truman under observation Susan had been chatting to Eddie, who had seemed more nervous than she was herself. Then suddenly he had become all right again, and had disappeared down the gangway with a tray of drinks, whistling quite cheerfully. Susan knew that it wasn’t her feminine charm, in the case of the steward, which had revived him; he just needed to talk, the same as Mr Valentine needed to talk.

  But there was a distinct difference. Eddie had not, during his conversation with her, been seething with hatred or resentment or the desire to get his own back. And although Eddie, bless him, could hardly be described as a man of steel, he hadn’t been fashioned out of nitro-glycerine either.

  Susan, an experienced stewardess and a woman with her own particular brand of perception, knew what to look for in a problem passenger. It was she who had warned the stewards to try and reduce Mr Valentine’s rate of drinking and although she was empowered to make an issue of it she was reluctant to do so. This was not out of any consideration for the man’s feelings—he was not the sort whose personal feelings aroused sympathy—but he could become even more of a menace if oppressed by anything that had the hint of authority about it.