Glide Path

by Arthur C. Clarke

  The Station Medical Officer found them first, only two minutes after they had landed.

  “Glad to see you’ve saved me some trouble,” he said, jumping out of the ambulance. “But that’s a nasty gash you’ve got over your eye, Bishop.”

  “Have I?” said Alan, in great surprise. He put his hand to his forehead, and looked stupidly at the blood smeared over his fingers. “Blast,” he remarked. “I hope it doesn’t get on my uniform.”

  “Well, hop in the back, both of you. I’ll take you over to the hospital for a check.”

  “Lay off it, Doc!” protested Dennis. “I haven’t got a scratch. And look at my hands—steady as Gibraltar.”

  “Even rudimentary nervous systems like yours, Collins, can suffer from delayed shocks. So in you get.”

  They won a short reprieve when the rest of the convoy arrived. The Station Commander glanced at C Charlie and said: “Hmm, not too badly bent; she’ll be flying again in a week. Very good show, Collins—glad you’re OK. You, too, Bishop—though you’d better hurry up and get that cut fixed.”

  As they climbed into the back of the ambulance, Dennis exclaimed: “I say, Bish—we forgot to tell the Controller we’re down!”

  Now that it was all over, Alan felt suddenly very weary, and quite unable to bother about such trivial matters.

  “Don’t worry, Dennis,” he said with a tired smile. “That’s one thing he does know. He’ll find out the rest soon enough.”

  As the ambulance drove away through the thickening fog, using the edge of the runway as a guide. Squadron Leader Strickland watched it go. His business would have to wait until tomorrow.

  29

  When Strickland arrived at the hospital, soon after breakfast, he found Alan deeply engrossed in a textbook on applied mathematics. Being a somewhat cynical person, he wondered if this was meant to impress visitors; as it happened, it was not.

  “Sorry to bother you now,” said the Squadron Leader breezily, “but the sister said it was OK to see you. How are you feeling, by the way?”

  “Fine, thank you, sir,” answered Alan, not altogether truthfully. A slight reaction was beginning to set in, and he was no longer so indignant at being confined to bed for a few hours.

  “Cigarette?” asked Strickland, in the traditional opening gambit. He sometimes wondered how interrogations were conducted before the discovery of tobacco.

  “Thanks—I could do with one; I haven’t been able to scrounge any from the nurses.”

  “I suppose you know,” began the Squadron Leader a little awkwardly, “that I was the clot who knocked down that gadget of yours. I gather it could have been serious.”

  “That’s quite all right,” said Alan, full of generosity. “As a matter of fact, it was a good thing it happened. The only way we can improve the system is to find out what can go wrong. This has made us rethink the whole line-up problem, and already we’ve arrived at some better answers.”

  “I hope the FIDO boys have, too. They seemed to be giving you a rough time last night.”

  “Oh, they’re very happy—we taught them a lot. They say they can fix the burners so you don’t get the sudden updraft. But next time, I think I’ll let someone else have a go.”

  “Don’t say I blame you.”

  They puffed for a minute in contented silence. Then the Squadron Leader remarked: “Anyway, that wasn’t what I wanted to talk about.”

  “Oh?” said Alan, showing slight signs of alarm as he remembered his visitor’s job. His own conscience was perfectly clear; in any case, after last night almost anything would be too much of an anticlimax to take very seriously.

  “I won’t keep you in suspense,” said Strickland. “So tell me—how much do you know about Mrs.—ah—Buckingham?”

  It was several seconds before Alan could remember who Mrs. Buckingham was; he had practically forgotten Olga’s married name. (If it was her married name.)

  As the implications of the question went home, Alan felt an unpleasant sinking sensation. He also felt considerably embarrassed, and a slow flush spread across his face.

  Then he saw that the Security Officer was grinning and appeared completely relaxed; that was a good sign, anyway…

  “I hardly know anything about her,” said Alan cautiously. “What do you want to find out?”

  “Frankly, old man”—that “old man” was most reassuring—“there’s damn all you can tell me. But there’s quite a flap on about our friend Olga, and you can help me out.”

  “Go on,” said Alan, still somewhat worried. The only problem he could imagine involving Olga was so serious that the Station Security Officer would certainly not be grinning like this.

  “Well, Olga’s got a maid called Joan Curnow—”

  “She had,” interjected Alan. “Joan’s left. I don’t know why.”

  “I do. Joan’s boy friend took a poor view of the setup, and you can hardly blame him.”

  “Oh,” said Alan, a slow light beginning to dawn.

  “Now that wouldn’t have mattered much, in the ordinary course of events. But Joan’s boy friend is a smart young fellow—and he happens to be the local police constable.

  “So he decides,” continued the Squadron Leader, obviously warming to his theme, “to do something about Olga’s ménage, if only to protect his innocent ladylove. I suppose she is innocent?”

  “Don’t ask me,” said Alan. “I shouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Anyway, young Sherlock starts thinking. Not only does he disapprove of these goings on, but he begins to wonder if there is more to Olga’s than meets the eye. Mata Hari and all that, you know.”

  Alan understood that very well. He had wondered, too.

  “Presumably it never occurs to him that an establishment like Olga’s, which you must admit is a little out of place in wild and woolly Cornwall, will have been investigated by about six sets of intelligence teams. The French, the Americans, and the British have all been through Olga’s at one time or another; if there had been the slightest suspicion, she’d have been politely asked to move.”

  Alan felt very much relieved. He had always assumed that someone had taken care of this matter, yet at the same time there had been the nagging feeling that he shouldn’t take it for granted. As was often the case in the past, he had taken the line of least resistance, and done nothing.

  “So P. C. Sherlock starts investigating, with a little reluctant help from Joan. He keeps track of the visitors and compiles quite a dossier. Because he wants to get all the credit, he doesn’t even tell his Sergeant. And then one night, without benefit of search warrant—for all’s fair in love and war—he has a look round the inside of the house.”

  “And what does he find?” Alan asked anxiously.

  “Not exactly what he was looking for, but enough to get Olga into serious trouble. I have the list here.”

  The Squadron Leader started to read, and for a moment Alan wondered which of them had gone crazy.

  “Butter, 125 pounds; margarine, 46 pounds; lard, 44 pounds; sugar, 112 pounds; five-pound tins Spam, 20; one-pound tins corned beef, 58… It goes on for quite a while. And most of it, I might add, from U.S.A.F. or Air Force stores.”

  Oh dear, thought Alan. Now the fat’s in the fire—several hundred pounds of it. But what the devil has this got to do with me?

  “This means, of course, that Olga can be sent to jail for black-market offenses, or at least heavily fined. We could probably get her for receiving stolen goods, as well.”

  “I suppose you could,” said Alan gloomily. He could see his happy evenings coming to a sudden end. Somehow, it was hard to imagine Olga in prison, though it was not so difficult to picture her as a successful food hoarder.

  He recalled, with some discomfort, various small black-market items he had given to the girls. And he had occasionally delivered packages from Mac and others, without inquiring as to the contents. At this memory, he began to get apprehensive again.

  “Olga’s been a naughty girl,” continu
ed the Squadron Leader, “but we’ll be able to straighten things out. The main reason why I wanted to see you was this. You’re acting CO of the GCD Flight, and it’s up to you to have a word with your chaps. I don’t care how you put it; tell ’em they can give the girls their cigarettes and sweet rations, but if they’re caught pinching any more stuff from the cookhouses or messes, they’re in for it. Understand?”

  “Yessir,” said Alan. “I’ll tell them.” He wasn’t sure how, but it would be done—probably at a top-secret briefing.

  “But there’s one thing I don’t understand—” he added.

  “Why I’m obstructing the course of justice, to put it bluntly?”

  “Er—yes.”

  “Because Olga asked me to, if you want to know.”

  There was nothing much that Alan could say to this; so he waited patiently.

  “Olga doesn’t talk much—I mean about herself. One day, I hope someone can persuade her to tell her story. Her place in Paris was part of the Underground for months after the Germans came in. I don’t know how many of our chaps she smuggled out—but a lot of them were bloody sorry to leave. Then Jerry got wise to her, and for a while she was in a concentration camp—which helps to explain the food hoarding. Don’t ask me how she got to England, but here she is and we’re going to look after her—not that she needs much help, usually.

  “So now you know; but keep it under your hat. Olga wouldn’t like to know that I’ve been shooting a line for her.”

  Alan lay back among the pillows, thinking this over. He was astonished, and also humbled. Life still had much to teach him, it seemed. Struck by a sudden wild surmise, he glanced at the medal ribbons below the Squadron Leader’s wings. There, beside the DFC, was a tiny Croix de Lorraine, as well as other foreign ribbons that Alan did not recognize. Had Strickland passed through Olga’s after the fall of France? “A lot of them were bloody sorry to leave” had a ring of personal experience about it. But this was a question to which he could hardly expect an answer; security officers were good at keeping secrets—especially their own.

  30

  When Alan’s promotion came through the next week, it was not exactly a surprise; indeed, since he had been in charge of the unit for a month, he considered it somewhat overdue. Nevertheless, it was with a great feeling of satisfaction that he took his uniforms along to the camp tailor, and had the second band stitched on the sleeves. Aircraftsman Class II Alan Bishop had certainly not imagined, as he marched back and forth on the parade grounds of Southbridge and Gatesbury, that he would ever become Flight Lieutenant Bishop. He was also quite proud of the little oak leaf on his breast; though he would never acquire any of the more glamorous ribbons, at least he had been “mentioned in dispatches.” True, some cynics maintained that MDs were dished out by a man at the Air Ministry sticking pins in the Air Force List—but Alan knew that he had earned his.

  He was still earning it, for with the collapse of the Mark I’s turning gear the entire training program had had to be revised. With no operational unit, there could be no more circuits and approaches. “D” Flight was out of a job.

  This was no longer the disaster that it would have been a few months ago. They had already trained a substantial number of operators and controllers, who could keep in practice on the synthetic devices that were springing up in ever-increasing numbers. F/O Lebrun now had quite an empire under his command; some of his gadgets were almost as good as the real thing. Two large huts were stuffed with replicas of GCD displays and control panels, on which the novices could be safely broken in. The unit even possessed a couple of Link trainers, ingeniously coupled to the cathode-ray tubes and meter panels. A pilot could fly these minute, captive aircraft without getting more than a foot from the ground, while the directors and controllers could steer him around an imaginary sky and head him in for an approach. All his movements would be reproduced on a chart by a slowly crawling metal crab, and at the end of a run all concerned could look at the inked record and see how successful they had been.

  And there was one very effective device that involved no technical resources at all. It was simply a matchbox, crunched at the psychological moment behind the ear of a controller who had made a particularly disastrous talk-down…

  But though the synthetic trainers could do a great deal, they were only a beginning; they could not take the operators and controllers beyond the early stages of their instruction. To do that, one had to have real aircraft, buffeted by the unpredictable winds of the real sky—and a real radar system to follow them down to earth.

  Flight Sergeant (as he now was) McGregor still thought he could rebuild the Mark I turning gear, and Alan had let him go ahead. But he did not think it was really worth it—for the first Mark II would soon be on its way.

  They could thank Ted Hatton for that. He had wafted the Mark I across the Atlantic when no one in the United States except its inventors was particularly interested in it, and now he had performed a much more difficult conjuring trick. No doubt his many influential friends in the Allied scientific army had pulled strings for him, but even so it was a remarkable feat. He had managed to divert the very first production model from the U.S. Air Force to the RAF, on the grounds that the RAF already had a training school going full blast and was, therefore, in the best position to utilize it. The U.S. generals who had plaintively asked “When can we use it?” were told that they could send their first teams to be trained at Norton Wold.

  This station, somewhere in the Midlands, was to be the new home of GCD. Now they were to have an airfield all their own; no longer would they be a parasite—sometimes an annoying one—on a busy operational station. At Norton Wold they would not have to ask the control tower for permission to approach and overshoot on a runway. The control tower would belong to them.

  The move would be a major undertaking, and Alan did not look forward to organizing it. Quite apart from the administrative problems, it would mean breaking so many links with the past.

  There was Lucille, for example. Yet somehow, this thought did not upset him as much as he had expected. His possessive jealousy had been dissolved away, with much else, during those flame-girt moments above Runway 320. That secret inferiority no longer nagged at his self-pride; he could look at the pilots and navigators and gunners around him with respect, but without envy.

  And in return, he had earned their respect. That, perhaps, was more important.

  ***

  The station band, augmented with talent from Davistowe, had excelled itself tonight. So had the Mess Secretary, in arranging decorations and refreshments. By general agreement, it was the best dance of the season, and the fact that it was also a farewell party to the GCD unit cast only the faintest of gloom over the proceedings. The Commanding Officer had made a very nice valedictory speech, saying what a privilege it had been to have had such excellent fellows at St. Erryn, and the excellent fellows, all of them well-oiled by this time, had shouted “Hear, Hear.” Then the dance had begun, and both joy and drinks were unconfined.

  Alan’s dancing was more enthusiastic than skillful, but that hardly mattered in this crowd. He was quite conscious of the admiring, and occasionally quizzical, glances his guests were receiving. Probably by this time everyone knew who they were, and he couldn’t care less.

  He was fighting his way through the melee around the bar, in the interval between “The Lambeth Walk” and “The Beer Barrel Polka,” when he collided with Flight Lieutenant Collins. Dennis looked very handsome in his dress uniform, with all medals up. He was also more than a little drunk.

  “I say, Bish, old boy,” he murmured confidentially in Alan’s ear, “did you invite them?”

  “I certainly did.”

  “Wish I’d thought of it, but I’m not sure I’d have had the nerve. The Queen Bee doesn’t like it at all—look at her glaring at Strickey.”

  Alan glanced across the room. Yes, the WAAF Admin Officer was looking daggers at Squadron Leader Strickland and Olga, who were chatting animatedly t
ogether against the far wall. Olga looked stunning, overdressed by exactly the right amount and displaying those impressive rings, earrings, and chokers whose authenticity or otherwise was another of her little secrets. She was also a good deal thinner, and none the worse for it, now that “Wit’s End” had had to jettison its surplus calories.

  Thank goodness that had been settled, Alan told himself. But where was Lucille, so that he could give her the drink she’d asked for? The music had started up again, and there was no hope of reaching her. She was right there in the middle, more or less surrounded by Dennis, whose idea of dancing seemed to have much in common with all-in wrestling.

  Alan looked at them both with a benevolent smile; he was happy that they were enjoying themselves. He couldn’t see Elise, but he was quite sure that someone was taking care of her.

  And then, without any warning, and for no reason that he could understand, all this music and gaiety seemed suddenly unreal and utterly detached from him. He wanted no part of it, not even as a spectator. The fact that this was Ms last night at St. Erryn abruptly hit him like a blow in the solar plexus.

  He pushed his way out of the crowded anteroom. “Are you all right, sir?” asked the Mess Steward anxiously, as he headed for the exit.

  “I’m OK,” he said. “I just want some fresh air. If anyone starts looking for me, I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Without bothering to check if it was the right one, he grabbed a bike from the rack outside the Mess. It was very dark, but he knew the way with his eyes closed. The sound of music and revelry died behind him; he was alone in the night, as he wished to be.

  That ten minutes was optimistic, for he had to cycle halfway around the airfield—no trifling journey even when one took unauthorized short cuts along the runways. By the time he reached his destination, he was sweating despite the cold.

  He was in a cemetery of trucks and cars—a kind of knacker’s yard of derelict vehicles. If he had been wholly sober, he might have had difficulty in finding his way through this mechanical morgue, but now some instinct guided him unerringly.