‘You can search him. I’d rather die a hero.’
Hubb said: ‘Sorry. I felt faint.’
‘You were telling me about a girl called Susan. Where did you meet her?’
‘She’s an air hostess.’
‘Nice?’
‘Very.’
‘How long have you known her?’
‘Five hours.’
‘Fast worker! I take it she’s on board?’
‘Right.’
‘Then let’s get back to work. Feel better?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, mark off the panel to be cut on the port side. Only get the right frame-number this time . . .’
*
Truman hadn’t been aware of what was going on around him. He had a vague idea that he had been at the controls of an aircraft. Was he still on the same one? If so, why was he sitting here, feeling his body didn’t belong to him?
‘It’s never belonged to me,’ said a voice. He recognised it as his. It sounded so fascinating, such an original concept, that he repeated it. ‘My body has never belonged to me,’ he stated.
And the man sitting near at hand looked at him with interest.
‘Feeling better?’ asked the man.
‘Who are you?’
‘My name’s Valentine. I’m a passenger.’
‘A passenger?’ Truman repeated the word dully. He couldn’t think particularly what a passenger was. ‘Where are we?’
Valentine spoke gently. ‘We’re on an aeroplane.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Truman, as if it were a point of abstract interest. ‘Flight Forty-Six. I’m the First Officer, as a matter of fact. I can’t think what I’m doing sitting here, though. I ought to get back to the flight deck.’ He tried to get up, but lurched and fell back into the seat again. ‘Rough air,’ he explained, and made another attempt.
‘Wait a minute!’ said Valentine, as if he’d just had an idea. ‘Are you sure you want to go back in there?’
Truman looked at him. His face was extraordinarily blank. There was no expression on it of any kind. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, do you like the crew?’
It dawned, and Truman’s face broke into a grateful smile. ‘No. You know I don’t like the crew. I never liked any crew. They think they’re men! They wear suits and they think they’re men!’
Valentine modulated his voice carefully. ‘What are they really?’
Truman became very confidential. ‘They’re victims,’ he explained. ‘They all have ugly bodies, and they can’t do anything about it.’ His hand wavered shakily up to his face, which suddenly registered fury, like a child’s. ‘So they tried to destroy mine. They made it so that my face was cut, so that my body was as ugly as theirs are!’ He became hideously amused, like a mis-shapen child who had learned some fiendish trick that would forever escape the notice of its parents. ‘What they don’t know,’ he confided, ‘is that my body doesn’t belong to me anyway. How about that?’
‘Doesn’t belong to you?’
‘No. It belongs in Sparta, long, long ago. Then I found it, and I liked it. Yes, I liked it very much indeed. So it became mine. And of course, they in there——’ he gestured toward the cockpit—‘they can’t find a body like mine. So they have to put up with what they have. And the bodies they have will grow old. Old!’
‘Yours will stay young?’
‘If I can think of a way!’ said Truman eagerly.
Valentine looked at him for a long time. Then he said: ‘I think I know a way.’
Chapter Seventeen
Jane Tyne was not paying quite so much attention to the typescript she held in her hand as appearances proclaimed. Ever since, in fact, the moment when Mr Valentine had moved back and sat beside her, only to start an elephantine and rather drunken conversation, she had taken an increasing interest in the segment of the stage occupied by the tiny alcove bar, the entrance to the forward galley, the hatch through which the crazy young man had disappeared with an axe and a tool box, and the front two rows of the first-class accommodation.
Jane Tyne was not what Eddie would have described as a film star. To Eddie, a film star had to be remote and impersonal; an exotic creature completely removed from recognised society and only found, in the flesh, on airliners. The rest of the time they simply belonged on the screen, in Technicolor or monochrome, according to the degree of reality their personalities conveyed.
Another thing Eddie would have found wrong with her was that she was English. Nor did she attempt to disguise it. Eddie, who wasn’t quite sure what the Old Vic was, assumed that it had some long-haired flavour and, frankly, he thought Miss Tyne was altogether too friendly, too human, to be a star at all. When she ordered a drink, she smiled at him. She did not drop her eyelids and the lashes were not thickened with mascara sufficiently to warrant star status. Eddie, thus disillusioned, had rather lost interest and had left her to the attention of the stewardesses.
Not that Jane Tyne required much fussing. Her intention, on boarding the aircraft, had been to learn a part. The lines were becoming increasingly elusive; which was one reason why Mr Valentine’s decision, some two hours ago, to engage her in conversation had been such a nuisance. But only one reason.
The other was that Mr Valentine was startlingly like one of the characters in the play; and by the end of Act Two it was evident that this character was an unholy piece of work.
Miss Tyne had remained calm throughout. Knowing nothing about flying machines—nor any other machines—she could not assess the situation much beyond the words which the captain had broadcast over the speakers. And although she herself was an actress—and perhaps because of it—it did not occur to her that he might be acting himself. The uneasiness she felt now stemmed more from the curious alliance that seemed to be developing between Valentine and the First Officer.
She watched them as they talked in the alcove bar. Mr Valentine was smiling. It was not the kind of smile that went with the true character of the man. It was strangely in conflict with it. She wondered what Michael would have thought of this; and she herself smiled a little because Michael was funny and loving and—somehow—rather pathetic, because he used blustering language sometimes which didn’t go with the way he was at all.
She mentally put it into Michael-language: ‘I mean, there they were, the two of them . . . metaphorically the Ugly Sisters about to go to a ball. Now, I know exactly what you’re going to say, Jane. You’re going to say it’s just my imagination.’
‘I wasn’t going to say anything,’ she would have replied.
‘Just to annoy me! Anyway, why is it that I’m the one with the intuition? You’re supposed to provide that.’
‘I like to make sure, first.’
‘Why? Why? You’ve got to have the courage of your convictions, Jane, my girl.’
‘Don’t you ever look before you leap?’
‘Good heavens—why? Did I look before I leaped with you?—I mean, would you have wanted me to?’
‘Don’t boast, darling. You were most impressive—though I must admit it was slightly reminiscent of being run over by a fire engine.’
‘Beast! Anyway, the ugly sisters were obviously cooking up something . . .’
Jane Tyne did not arrive at things in this way. She thought everything out very carefully, as if solving an Agatha Christie. And it had been quite some time before these analytical processes had gone into action.
First, they had manifested themselves in the form of irritation—easily the worst part of the aircraft’s predicament, as seen by her, was that which entailed delay. It would cut a day and a half from the rehearsal time; and as she hadn’t played on Broadway before, she was far more nervous of the ordeal to come than she was of anything that could happen to the aeroplane.
But that which was happening to the people on it was a different matter. Being an actress she was also an observer—if not quite in Michael’s particular way—and her powers of observation gradually shifted her one stage up fr
om irritability into the realm of surmise.
She had never seen anyone in a condition remotely like the state Truman was in; and the contrast between the Truman of now and the Truman of a few hours back, when he had been the one to dive so athletically through the hatch after indulging a petting party with the pretty little girl Jill, was as puzzling a dramatic contrast as any actor could be asked to play. She found it difficult to conceive of a role depicting so great a change in a map between the opening lines of a drama and the end of the first act—which was the moment, as translated in her professional mind, when Truman became a totally different person. At first it had occurred to her to wonder whether such a play could be convincing. Then she had realised that it wasn’t the verisimilitude that was wrong—it was the timing. In a well-constructed play you don’t destroy one of your principal characters so early on. But maybe events in the sky did not follow the dramatist’s rules; you couldn’t expect the fortuitous entertainment aboard an aircraft to be ideal in form.
She had left it at that for a time; and returned to the task of trying to learn lines which refused to stick.
Only later did it occur to her that maybe the character of Truman had not been thrown away. This thought had struck her quite suddenly, though she couldn’t have said exactly when. But after it had done so a number of possibilities half-assembled themselves in her mind, whereby there might be a further—and vital—contribution to be made by the actor at a more appropriate point in the action. She became interested again . . . perhaps the play wasn’t so badly constructed after all.
Soon after she had begun to think along these lines, Valentine had chosen his moment to shift himself into the seat next to hers and bore her. When this had developed into a perfectly awful pass (all mixed up, it seemed, with his shortly-to-be-rescued fortunes on the stock-market) Miss Tyne had called Susan and had the man removed. Once again, Miss Tyne had been presented with the unprepossessing view of the back of Mr Valentine’s neck.
Activities aboard the plane thereafter had become so hectic that the eagle eye of one or other of the stewardesses, formerly noting the developments around the area of the alcove bar, had become deflected, and little attention seemed to have been paid to Valentine’s move up to the place beside the First Officer.
Yet this event, beyond the ones more heavily underlined by the dramatist and hectically executed by the uniformed players, seemed to Miss Tyne to be the playwright’s link between Act One and Act Three—the middle section being left, so far as Truman was concerned, in a mood of uneasy quiescence. For here, as the front-cloth scene began to develop before her eyes, was a faultless move on the part of the director to highlight, by understatement, the admixture of two evils.
It was as if these two men had been destined to meet all the time; and now that they had, something slipped neatly into place.
But what?
Miss Tyne searched her dramatic instincts for the answer. Why was Mr Valentine so interested in the shattered china which had once been a grown adult and was now miming conversation as if he were a retarded child? What would a playwright have done with this particular situation, at this particular point in the play?
She took stock of events concurrent with it. Her watch indicated that one and a half hours had passed since the young American had entered the hatch. Although the very fact of this part of the action continuing unseen would have been an effective dramatic device to build tension, it had now reached a level almost ideal, Jane thought, for an eruption.
Since it was clear that those actors involved in the constructive elements of the play had by this time been earmarked by the writer as the heroes and sub-heroes of the piece, it seemed to her that no action involving the spare players in the alcove could also be of a constructive nature. Moreover, the nature of their conflicting personalities strongly suggested a disruptive element that was deliberately out of tune with the rest of the third act.
At first, this dramatic survey had only served as an amusing digression. Jane Tyne was in the habit of equating life with the theatre, which was the obvious reciprocal of her profession. If you failed to do this, you could never convey realism to an audience. Miss Tyne, mercifully spared the cloying sense of fear that had built, in the tourist section, as a result of human minds inter-reacting on each other, had still been able to think in the abstract.
But there came, now, a growing awareness that there was a much closer link between the fictitious and the actual than she had first thought. What had begun as a personal game of deduction, a probing into the mind of an imaginary producer, had crossed the Rubicon which delineated the boundaries between the stage and the world outside it.
There came the moment, therefore, when she actively registered the thought that what she had been transcribing into her own terms of drama was much more closely represented by what was actually taking place.
The moment occurred upon what was really quite a small observation in itself. It only became significant when you had read and digested the first two acts of what was no longer a play.
The event which caused this sudden change of camera-angle in Miss Tyne’s brain was the sudden resurgence of apparent normalcy into the person of First Officer Truman. This came upon a nod from Mr Valentine.
Truman, with unexpected confidence and ease of posture, rose to his feet and started to amble toward the flight deck . . .
*
Hubb was speaking with difficulty over the radio. He felt he wanted to vomit, but didn’t know why; he was too occupied to be afraid. Those in the cabin above his head had more right than he to experience fear born of suspense and not knowing.
Nor was it obvious to him that both his speech and his actions were slowed down.
But the steel bar, with which he was trying to remove a large piece of tyre tread from the port undercarriage lock, was sapping more of his strength than it should have.
‘It’s no good, I can’t shift it!’
Fleming did not bully him at this juncture. Instead he contrived to get into his voice a tone designed to coax Hubb into revealing, in the minimum of words, the exact picture. ‘How long is the bar?’
‘I guess it’s . . . it’s about four feet.’
‘Are you using it as a lever?’
‘No. I’m using my weight and trying to thrust down the tyre tread back where it came from.’
‘Try levering it.’
‘I can’t seem to get a grip on it.’
Fleming was fighting for time. But he knew he had to be patient at this point. Hubb had met an unforeseen difficulty and it wouldn’t help if you just panicked him about the valuable minutes being lost.
Crooke, who had switched back to the radio and was listening to Hubb’s heavy breathing, knew they were now in serious trouble. Geoff had already indicated that according to his own estimate (and allowing for the change in order of events) they were already ten minutes behind if not more. That meant there would virtually be no fuel reserve, even if the rest of the job were to be completed in the allotted time.
Yet Hubb had already shown signs of severe altitude fatigue and was getting worse.
Geoff anticipated his captain’s thoughts by a few seconds. ‘It’s no good sending a man down to help him. There just isn’t room.’
‘I realise that. Can we starve those engines a bit more?’
Geoff shook his head. ‘If we fly any slower the drag will increase and we won’t gain anything.’
Crooke understood this, all right. The more slowly you fly, the steeper the angle of attack and the greater the resistance to the air. Lesson One. ‘Well, we could sling off some baggage; but it wouldn’t make enough difference to justify the commotion.’
Perkins, who had been silent for a long while, came up with a suggestion.
Crooke laughed appropriately. ‘I thought of that, too. But we can’t chuck even the nastiest of the passengers overboard.’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Idiot! They might fall on somebody.’
&
nbsp; ‘Yes of course. I should have thought of that. Steer five degrees left on to zero-seven-five.’
‘Zero-seven-five,’ repeated Crooke, ‘and jolly good luck.’ He returned his attention to the voices which energised his headphones.
Hubb was saying breathlessly: ‘The trouble is the rubber has wrapped itself around the lug into a tight flong. It looks as if it’s stuck there and if we lower the undercart like that it’ll prevent my getting the leg into a fully locked position.’
Fleming said: ‘Yes, you’re perfectly right. We’ll have to get it out somehow. You won’t do it with that bar. Is there a pair of tinkers’ claws in the toolbox?’
‘Yes. I have them.’
‘Are they long enough to reach down to the lock?’
‘I’ll see.’ There came a series of grunts. Then: ‘No. I can’t reach.’
‘There’s a strut that runs across the after end of the undercarriage doors. It’ll take your weight easily. Only don’t slip. Remember there’s hydraulic fluid all over the place. Climb down on to that. Then see if you can use the claws. Only for Pete’s sake be careful. We don’t want you trailing underneath the aircraft on the end of a piece of rope and those doors won’t stand your weight.’
‘I’ll be careful.’
‘Let me know when you get there.’
. . . What’s the matter with me? I keep feeling dizzy and I get these spots in front of my eyes. I’m given a man-sized job to do and I fall halfway apart in a couple of hours. Am I just scared, or something? Christ, the air would choose to get rough, at this moment! I’ve got to ease my way down and . . . where’s that tool? Easy, boy! You’re trying to rush things and that’s going to make it worse. Now wait a minute. The lamp cable has got caught around that strut—jury-strut . . . never heard that term before . . . That’s got it at last. Now let’s take a look. Hell, was anything ever as cold as it is down here?
Well, there’s the frame I’ve got to stand on. Boy, it’s a long way down! And if I miss . . .! Haven’t time to think about that, though. You’re a real big hero, you are! . . . We of the governors of Yale do solemnly find that Jack Stimson Hubb, graduate of this University, did fail while on active service while co-opted and enrolled as a member of the crew of a British airliner. We find that he has disgraced himself and is henceforth barred from all functions involving this University . . . hey, anyone would think I was drunk.
The Higher They Fly Page 21