Come Back

by George Erlynne

  "Ten miles to go, nearly on the red line!" Mary yelled.

  Ahead, the defile we were in was slowly widening, mountains to port receding into hazy height where snow was still scattered in spots of dazzling white. The climb was pushing us up to the aircar's operational limit, close on a thousand feet without ground effect where the fuel consumption was frightening.

  "Red line!" Mary screamed.

  We had two miles to go, the tangled remains of the Caledonian Canal almost past but pretty soon very nasty things were going to happen inside our starboard engine. Reaching over, I cut the power, watching the EPR and fuel status jump back. Immediately, the car shuddered and the stall warning lit up. Putting the nose down, I cursed this bastardised design that tried to be all things to all pilots. With only one engine we had to glide down but this thing glided like a brick. The ground began to approach at blood freezing speed because I had us in a steep dive to keep the airspeed above the stall. The silver reflection of water showed ahead and I hoped someone had calculated the stress on the wings of pulling out from a near vertical descent into a flat stall. The sharp intake of breath behind me was Melanee, restrained for once from telling me how to do things. Despite the power controls it took a strong heave to make the nose come up as bright warning signs sprang up on the flight panels.

  We were skimming over the ruffled surface of Loch Linnhe at a rate far above the recommended landing speed but our one engine was pushing out full power to the verticals as the hull kissed the water. The car bounced violently as I hastily slammed the throttle shut and clung on. Loud crashes from the underside plus a mass of spray washing over the windscreen drowned out the female comments on my piloting ability but after two more teeth rattling thuds the speed bled away and we surged to a halt with loud ticking noises coming from the engine mountings. Silence descended as I carefully shut down the power and wiped my forehead.

  "I hope we don't have to do that again." Was the mild comment from Mary.

  "There's something in that damned engine." I muttered. "Much more and we're going to lose one of the compressor fans."

  "And if that goes?" Mary enquired.

  "Yeah, if the container ring works we'll just have a mangled lump of metal but if it doesn't and the whole issue explodes we'll lose hydraulics and probably most of the flight systems."

  Mary brooded gloomily over this pronouncement while Melanee pestered me for explanations of turbine engine design which I couldn't answer. Meanwhile, we were floating uneasily on the narrow end of a long sea Loch and salt water was not recommended as a tonic for our one and only working engine. The day was fine with that hazy blue to the sky that proclaimed the summer high pressure was still with us, but for how long? Strong westerlies would sink this thing for sure.

  "We ought to go while the going's good." Mary informed me, evidently thinking along the same lines. The navigation computer, when interrogated, laid off a track for us, a circumspect slither through the Sound of Jura after zigzagging through the islands around Luing, eventually emerging into the Irish sea via the Mull of Kintyre.

  "There's going to be a swell there." I pointed out glumly.

  "Keep close to the coast line." She said.

  "Mm s-sixty knots, yes?" Melanee entered our technical talk with some certainty, causing Mary to stare at her. "Mm," she counted her fingers. "Five hours we get to...to..." She peered at the map display. "C-cardigan Bay? Yes? Stop there for night."

  "Should have sent her to Centauri." Mary said somewhat sourly, but she was getting more and more impressed by the daily leap that Melanee seemed to be taking in mental ability.

  "Well," I sighed. "It's not getting easier by thinking about it. Check on Mike, will you and then we'll see if this old tub likes Atlantic waves."

  Mary slid away but Melanee took her place in the co-pilot's seat, gazing out of the front screen in a dreamy sort of way. "We will come back." She said, her smile arriving to skewer me with love as it always did. "One day we will come back and tell the people here who they are."

  "They know who they are." I told her. "We need to tell them who we are. But first, we have to introduce you to members of our crew who definitely were not typical of the old people. You'll be the biggest surprise they ever had."

  Chapter 22

  SEA PASSAGE

  Mary had the right idea, we should depart before this anachronistic machine had a mechanical heart attack, but I was having a quiet cardiac seizure myself at the prospect while she fussed over Mike in the back. Melanee gazed calmly at me but said nothing, knowing full well what my beads of sweat were all about. The underbody lines on our one and only hope of survival were designed to allow for the hovercraft effect, the verticals blowing air out in a cunning way, but I had never driven one over the sea and was well aware that any wave more than three feet high would swamp the engine air intakes and that would be that. If this was a proper aircraft we could get the thing up on two engines and cut the unhappy one before it blew, thereafter coasting along on one, but the damned thing was a bastard mixture of hovercraft, jump jet and glider and half the time we didn't know which bit was which.

  "Well?" Mary peered calmly over my shoulder.

  Pushing the live engine to the stops, we shuddered and advanced in a shower of spray, slowly gathering speed until the ungainly bulk rode over the air cushion, wallowing uncomfortably because the sea, although calm enough, was not like the mirror flat surface of the Loch. Steadily the pace increased until I gingerly let the flight computer take over. We had reached our optimum which according to the display was sixty-two knots. The engine roared, a kind of screaming whine that became muted as the computer juggled with power curves. The blue sea passed under us, glinting in the light of a summer sun. Faint haze covered the surface bringing visibility down to a couple of miles but the forward scanner told us where we were. Hesitantly, I leaned back, hands ready to flash over the controls if the gremlins hit us.

  "Fuel not so good." Mary muttered.

  "No." I agreed, staring at the engine panel. That engine was having to work harder than we bargained for. "I don't think there's enough to get us to bloody Portsmouth."

  Melanee gazed at the screens, then at Mary. "Take short cut." She suggested brightly.

  Mary repressed a highly coloured comment and sweetly laid out the map. "You see, my dear, there are no short cuts unless you want to argue with rocks." She smiled glacially at Melanee who simply frowned over the inconvenient geography of Southern England. The problem was that long detour around Cornwall, we all knew that and but for some Scottish seaweed stuck up our starboard engine we could have been in the Channel hours ago.

  "Thirty miles." I muttered, measuring things.

  "What's thirty miles?" Mary demanded, being interrupted by a groan from the back where Mike had woken up. With great care, he raised himself to a sitting position, passed his hands over his face and began to investigate his fine collection of wounds. "Christ." He said thickly, looking at us. "Where the hell are we?"

  I daren't leave the pilot's seat so the women swarmed round him, telling him the latest in staccato sentences while they wiped off dried blood from his face and dabbed what I hoped was working antiseptic on his interesting torso. The stab wounds on his chest had knitted, granulations forming nicely but the girls wound yards of white bandage around him until he looked like a mummy with problems. Breathing heavily, he lifted his leg to let them peer at the deep cut on his thigh. The bleeding had stopped but it looked bad, angry and inflamed. Mary compressed her lips, dusting it with sulphur powder and antibiotics, scolding him all the time for moving it.

  "Buggeration!" He yelled. Melanee looked thoughtful at the new word and opened her mouth, I am sure, for a translation but he swivelled round and glared at me. "Get a diagnosis read out for the bad engine." He grunted. "The computer should know exactly what's wrong with the bloody thing now that you've run it."

  Of course, he was right, and I kicked myself for not thinking of it earlier. Whatever was causing the indigestio
n would have been analysed and identified like lightning when the engine was under power. Mary watched me reproachfully as I punched up the program and Melanee, ever inquisitive, put her nose against the scrolling figures. Finally, that is to say after about three seconds, the printout arrived which I handed back for the physics brain to sort out. Do him good to shift up a gear and forget that leg.

  The sea became slowly a deeper blue as the mist closed down, but the speed kept steady as we whined past the Mull of Galloway well to port. It was all very soothing but if the damned engine stopped it was a twenty-mile swim.

  "Hm." Mike grunted. "Overspeed. It's not the turbines or the compressors, it's the electronics. See?" He waved the printout but no one took it. "It's the auto throttle system." He explained to blank looks. "The low power compressor RPM runs it but something has buggered up the tachometer." He gazed at us with the air of a professor instructing a dim class.

  "Plain English please." I asked mildly, making allowances for his delicate state.

  "When you put full power on, the turbines will overspeed and bang themselves to bits. It will set up high vibration and the blades will eventually part company."

  "Why didn't it do it when we ran it before?" Mary asked.

  "How long before it blows if we run it at full power?" I added forcefully.

  "Minutes." He said. "But," a slow grin appeared. "If you can get it up to operating height, then, my son, we can make the all-powerful brain on board limit the power to flight idle."

  "And it'll keep running?" Mary enquired, looking at him sharply.

  "If," he said carefully. "If you shut it down and then restart in flight. You see," he frowned over the printout. "You did that before and only just in time apparently but the black box in here will reset the power parameters. You won't have any surplus power, nothing to climb with, just enough to keep coasting along at optimum."

  "So." I muttered, thinking hard. "We take the thing up and damned quick, right? Then we shut down the starboard engine? Yes, as soon as we do that this old tub will fly like a brick."

  "Have to get the other one started before we hit the ground." Mary finished, looking thoughtful.

  "Start over sea." Melanee interjected, having been unnaturally silent during our technical argument. Everyone looked at her as if she was a gorilla suddenly spouting algebra.

  "She's got it." Mike muttered, looking weary.

  Pulling out the chart of the Southern Irish Sea and Cornwall, I found Melanee and Mary staring over my shoulder. "Cut across to Lyme Bay?" Mary murmured.

  "Height." I replied. "We need at least seven, eight hundred feet, those hills are high."

  The computer didn't like our fuel curves but brightened at the idea of running on two engines at optimum height with one at flight idle. Mike edged himself carefully forward until he could see the displays. "If we do it then we'd better think about it soon." He pointed to the fuel curves. "At this rate we're going to be walking from Wales."

  "Hm." I grunted. The track took us across the narrows at Bridgwater Bay, following the line of the river valleys until we went over the hills to emerge near Lyme Regis. If we got up to height using Mike's theory, then by the time we had the second engine running we were going to be down damned close to the sea. At maybe 135 knots, the wings would help us climb but hellish slowly with no power in that engine. We might, just might, get up to 150 knots if we started early enough and that speed might, just might be enough to let us skim over the Somerset Hills.

  "We don't do it we don't get there." Mary said bleakly.

  "OK." I said suddenly. "Dial in the first waypoint." I was going to let the computer do all the work, apart from the take-off. It could squeeze the ultimate out of the flying characteristics of this ill begotten tub, better than I could. It only remained to make sure we got the engine going before we all took a cold swim. Silence descended as the computer took us along the pre-ordained path, skimming past Milford Haven and down the Bristol Channel, aiming for Bridgwater Bay. Glances from Mary told me what I already knew; we now had insufficient fuel to get round Cornwall so if this didn't work we had a long winter ahead of us back in the Stone Age.

  "Another thirty miles." Mary stated, breaking a long silence, watching the flight panels. She brooded silently while I checked the figures, but the miles had been slipping by and we hadn't noticed. "I've altered the track to put us in the lee of the land for the take-off run." She added. "We have a slight North Easterly breeze and we'll have the flattest water around."

  In minutes the invisible start point approached, the shore of Wales dimly emerging from the mist. "Strap in." I ordered, setting the example. Mike subsided into Mary's attentions in the back but Melanee, curious to see everything, sat herself down beside me with riveting attention. Warning signs lit up the flight panel as the starboard engine started up with an abrupt wail. I sat back, tense and worried, but the computer knew what it was doing and the turbine spun up to maximum in seconds. Grasping the controls I put us in as steep a climb as I dared, the engines bellowing throatily behind us. No one spoke as the altimeter clicked up steadily. We were nearly at a thousand feet, as much as this awkward machine would get to, when the starboard engine cut out abruptly, the turbines whistling down. Suddenly, the wings seemed to lose lift as we pitched down, the stall warning sounding briefly before the nose went below the horizon as the forward speed built up. Various lights lit up in sequence over the engine control panels.

  "It's starting." Mary's tight tones came from over my shoulder. Indeed, the bad engine was being started up again, but we were now in a screaming dive, balancing forward speed against drag.

  "Four hundred." Melanee said shortly, gazing at the altimeter. Wondering if she knew what she was looking at, I nodded. "Three hundred." She added. "Two hundred." She had no emotion in her voice, just a flat tone.

  I was about to interfere and take the controls from our tin friend when the nose rose slightly. We had power, not much but enough to halt the dive. Slowly, the machine settled into level flight. I took a hasty glance at the altimeter, sharing it with Melanee. It said just over fifty feet. A bead of cold sweat ran down my face as we sat and watched the flight panels. The computer knew what to do but if we didn't rise above fifty feet soon then we would make painful acquaintance with Somerset.

  With agonising slowness, the altitude figures crept up, foot by foot. Airspeed was creeping up, now showing one hundred and thirty knots, enough to give us respectable lift from the wings. The breathing in the cabin was audible as we all stared at the horizon line where a rugged coastline was rapidly approaching.

  "There's trees on the cliff tops." Mary muttered, causing Melanee to look puzzled but I knew what Mary was thinking. Full blown, five-hundred-year-old forest would add another hundred feet maybe to the clearance altitude. The shore line was clear now, the white of breakers showing at the bottom of the cliffs as the Atlantic swell broke against that iron coast. Airspeed was rising at a snail's pace to one fifty knots, about as fast as this tin can would go with only one engine giving any beef and we were not getting the full benefit anyway because the asymmetric thrust made the computer keep slight left rudder on to compensate, resulting in more drag.

  "Stuck at one forty-five." Mary said tightly but I was staring apprehensively at the green carpet that was the tree canopy hurtling towards us.

  "We'll clear them." I said, hoping I sounded confident.

  The mass of trees looked like a green ocean that suddenly flashed under us, the topmost leaves so close I could have leaned out and picked up twigs. A sharp intake of breath told me that Melanee was well aware of our margins. The height rose to five hundred and fifty and there it stuck. Ahead was heavily contoured country, once rich farmland with rolling hills and I hoped the computer knew what it was doing because we were going to have to follow a zig zag course to avoid hills too big to argue with. Leaning out, I tried to recognise features of what, after all, was my home country, a landscape I had flown over many times. The navigation display told
us where we were to the inch but the ground whistling by under us was strange, almost alien. We followed the river valleys, whining over where the town of Chard once stood but there was nothing but trees, an endless, dark green rug of vegetation spreading to the horizon. Nervously, we gazed at the flight instruments, willing this ugly machine to keep going, listening to the protesting scream of the port engine working hard, hoping that it didn't get turbine indigestion.

  The ground rose and fell, once rearing alarmingly to a ridge that we passed over with ten feet to spare. "Lyme Bay, four minutes." Mary said evenly, wiping her face.

  "Another hundred miles after that to get to the Solent." I said, peering at the fuel flow gauges which told me we might do it, but we could find ourselves getting out to push the last ten miles.

  "Look!" Melanee's finger pointed to the bright blue sea which popped over the line of the cliffs and hills. Suddenly, the coast fell away and there was Lyme Bay looking much as the maps showed except no town, no nothing apart from a curving line of rock jutting out from the shore. Heavy breathing down my neck turned out to be Mike, standing unsteadily on one leg while Mary scolded him loudly. Gripping the back of the pilot's seat he peered down as we turned on course along the coast, aiming for Portland Bill in the dim distance.

  "It's the Cob." He said. "That line of rock. Well I'm damned. Ten thousand years. Looks a bit short but hell..." He stopped and stared at the scene, sharing with me the memories of a bustling town and picturesque little harbour where once happy kids had dug in the sand in the fleeting warmth of an English summer. "All gone. I wish...I wish we hadn't come back."

  Mary looked at him sharply, saying nothing as she made him retire to the back seat, but his comment rang in my ears. Coming back here was like being unable to wake from a bad dream, one of those nightmares where you knew you were dreaming but couldn't escape from whatever it was. France had been familiar yet the sense of being in a foreign country remained even if the land had altered out of recognition, but here, this was home, where my ancestors had lived and spread roots for more generations than I knew about. Despite the fir clad silence of Scotland, the sight of southern England blanketed under a primeval forest hit me hard. Under those countless trees were roads I had driven down, pubs I had gladly migrated to, towns I had visited, even lived in. All gone, disappeared as if they had never been.