by Nevil Shute
Mr. Honey said breathlessly, “I’m sorry I’m late, sir. I had some personal matters that kept me.”
The Director said, “This is Mr. Prendergast of the Rutland Aircraft Company, Honey. He has come down to look into this matter of the Reindeer tail.” Mr. Honey gazed at the great bulk of the designer apprehensively; Mr. Prendergast did not seem to be in a very good temper. “I have told him the outlines of what we have been doing here. I think, perhaps, if he went with you to your office and you went through the work in detail with him, and bring him back here after that, it would be best.”
Prendergast said, “Certainly. I shall be most interested to hear what Mr. Honey has to say about the Reindeer tail.”
That was about the last thing he said for the next hour, according to Honey. Whatever the little man showed him or explained, the designer did nothing but grunt. This was one of his more offensive techniques; he would stand in silence listening to a halting explanation, and then grunt, a grunt expressing an ill-tempered scepticism or plain disbelief. They stood under the great clattering bulk of the Reindeer tail while Honey nervously expounded the harmonics that were being imposed on it; they stood in the office while Honey, nearly in tears by that time, endeavoured to explain his hypothesis of nuclear strain to a designer who knew nothing of the atom and cared less, grunting in disbelief of this newfangled nonsense. He only spoke once, so far as Honey remembers; that was to say, “I understand, then, that there is no experimental evidence at all yet that confirms the truth of all this theory?”
Honey said unhappily, “It’s too early. You can’t rush basic research like everybody here is trying to do.”
The designer grunted.
When finally Mr. Honey took Prendergast back to the Director’s office he was in a state of acute nervous tension, noticed by the Director, who released him as soon as was polite. As the door closed behind him the designer relaxed, and smiled for the first time that afternoon. “Queer customer,” he said.
The Director said politely, “I hope he gave you all the information you need?”
Prendergast grunted. “He gave me plenty of information. Whether any of it’s any good is another matter.” However, when he came to go away he was quite cordial to the Director, almost benign.
The Director did not have time to speculate on that, because as the door closed behind Prendergast, his secretary brought in my cable in reply from Ivanhoe. This read,
Propose search for tailplane an area one square mile around crash intensively estimate this will take four days stop thereafter propose search from air by strip flying an area approximately 100 square miles this may take a fortnight stop am pessimistic of flight search yielding results owing to density of forest growth and recommend all possible pressure on the Russians to surrender parts removed. Scott.
The Director sent for Honey again, who appeared white and nervous and trembling a little in frustrated rage after his hour with Prendergast. The Director showed him this cable; Honey read it without properly taking it in.
“It’s no good putting pressure on me, sir,” he said, nearly weeping, handing it back. “I can’t make this test go any faster.”
The Director said, “I’m not putting pressure on you, Honey. But you’re in charge of the Reindeer tail investigation in Dr. Scott’s absence. I want you to realise the very difficult position that Dr. Scott is in, that’s all.”
Honey flushed angrily. “He’s not in a difficult position. I’m the one who’s in a difficult position, with everybody trying to extract ad hoc data from an incomplete piece of basic research. I can’t do my work if you keep on badgering me like this — I’ll have to give up and go somewhere else. First of all it was Sir Phillip Dolbear, and now Prendergast. I’ve got nothing to show to anybody yet, and every time I’m made to look a fool. And Dr. Scott’s as bad as any of them.” He was very much upset.
The Director said, “Mr. Honey, I don’t think you quite realise how much you owe to Dr. Scott. At last Thursday’s meeting with D.R.D. he expressed complete confidence in your estimate of this fatigue failure, in the face of the most damaging attacks, I may say, from both C.A.T.O. and the company. He staked his own reputation on your work. He told the meeting that he thought that you were right, and when he left this country he was confident that if he brought back the parts in question they would prove beyond all doubt that you were right in your diagnosis of the cause of this accident, and that he was right in standing up and putting his whole reputation on your side. Well, now he finds he can’t produce that evidence unless he finds this tailplane, and in that country that seems to be like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay.”
Honey stared at the cable through his thick glasses. “Oh,” he said, “is that what this means? It wasn’t very clear.”
“That’s exactly what that means,” the Director said shortly. “If you were as good a friend of Dr. Scott as he has been to you, you’d talk about him rather differently.”
Mr. Honey flushed crimson. “I’m sorry,” he said weakly. And then he waved the cable in his hand. “May I take this tonight and think about it?” he inquired. “I’ll let you have it back in the morning, sir.”
The Director shrugged his shoulders; he was tired of Mr. Honey. “If you like.”
Mr. Honey went back to his office distressed and confused. He was a sensitive little man and absurdly grateful to Shirley and to me for the little trivial things that we had done to help him; the Director had hurt him very deeply by what he had said. He stood for ten minutes in humiliated unhappiness in his office, re-reading my cable and re-orientating his ideas; then he went out and caught his bus back home, lost in deep thought.
His ruminations were rudely interrupted at his own front gate, and he was jerked into another world. Elspeth had been watching for him, and she came rushing down the path to meet him, flushed and excited in her new frock. “Daddy,” she cried, “the water-heater’s come! The men came with it just after you went, and they worked all the time and made a new pipe and fixed it on the wall over the sink, and it’s making hot water! They’re coming in to paint the pipe tomorrow!”
She dragged him by the arm to show him this wonder in the kitchen. In the front door Marjorie Corder came forward to meet him, with Shirley behind her. “I came back,” she said simply. “They didn’t want me for another week at the airport, so I came back.”
She did not tell him that she had put in for a week’s leave, and got it, after some argument.
Mr. Honey said, “Oh, I am glad,” and Shirley standing close behind the girl saw the radiance on his frog-like features, and understood why Marjorie had bothered to come back. And then they all went into the kitchen and admired the hot-water-heater, and gave it its first job to do by doing the lunch wash-up.
He pressed Shirley to stay to supper, and as she was alone in our flat she was glad to do so, so they set to and made a shepherd’s pie and put it in the oven to cook. And while that was doing they all had a game of Monopoly with Elspeth, which Mr. Honey played unusually badly even for him, so that he was ruined in ten minutes. His mind was so obviously remote from the game that when they were dishing up the supper, Marjorie asked him quietly in a corner by the gas-stove, “Is anything wrong, Theo?”
“Nothing much,” he said heavily. “It’s been rather a bad day. I had the designer of the Reindeer on my hands most of the afternoon, a Mr. Prendergast. He was very difficult.”
Shirley overheard this. “Everyone says he’s difficult. I thought he was such a nice man at the lecture. I hope you told him where he got off.”
Honey smiled weakly. “He’s not a very easy man to tell that to. And there were other things, too ...” He hesitated, and then decided to unburden himself to them. “We’ve had a lot of cables from Dr. Scott over the week-end,” he said. “He can’t find the fractured pieces of the tail.”
Shirley said sharply, “But they must be there!” and Marjorie said, “Oh, Theo!” Both girls were very well acquainted with the issues that were involved,
but none of them had even considered before what it would mean if I failed to find a fatigue fracture in the first Reindeer crash. They pressed Honey for more details of what had happened, and he told them a stumbling and confused narrative, and showed them the crumpled copy of my last cable that he had brought from the Director’s office. A sense of disaster descended on them and spoilt their party; they talked through supper in depressed tones with long pauses between each remark. Elspeth, who did not understand what it was all about, asked, “What’s the matter with Dr. Scott in Labrador, Daddy?”
Marjorie, to relieve him, said, “He’s lost something, and he can’t find it. Something very important.”
“What can’t he find, Daddy?”
Honey said, “A piece of an aeroplane.”
“Is it a very important piece?”
“Very important,” Honey said. “He’s in dreadful trouble.” Shirley, watching him, was interested to see that he had suddenly lost his air of impotent worry. He looked, she said, like a dog just coming on the scent. A funny sort of simile, but that’s how she described him.
Elspeth said, “Oh, poor Dr. Scott.”
“Poor Dr. Scott,” Honey repeated with deep, emphatic sympathy. “He’s in terrible trouble. And he’s been so kind to us, hasn’t he? Would you like to try and find it for him with the little trolley?” The two girls stared uncomprehending at them across the cooling food upon the table.
Elspeth nodded vigorously. “Mm.”
Honey got up from the table, his entire attention fixed upon his little white-faced daughter. “All right, let’s go into the other room and get the little trolley.”
He got up from the table and took Elspeth by the hand, entirely oblivious of the two girls. They moved to the door; Marjorie half rose from her seat. “Where are you going?” she asked.
Honey turned in the doorway. “Please,” he said sternly, and there was a confidence of command about him that was new to both of them. “You may come with us if you sit very quiet at the back of the room, but you mustn’t speak at all, or interrupt in any way. If you feel you can’t control yourselves, you must stay here.”
He went out into the front room; the girls glanced at each other in mystification, and then followed him. They found him pinning a fresh sheet of paper down upon the drawing-board and laying it horizontal on the table at a comfortable height for Elspeth sitting in a chair before it. Then he pulled the heavy curtains to shut out the daylight, and switched on a powerful desk reading-lamp upon the table. Next he went to the cupboard and got out two instruments. The first was a small affair of rotating black and white segments, worked by a small air turbine from a rubber bulb held in the palm of his hand; by pressing the bulb he could make the black and white segments alternate at varying speeds. The second instrument was a planchette, a little flat triangular trolley of three-ply wood about nine inches wide, supported on two tiny castoring wheels, and a pencil at the third corner. He put this down upon the drawing-board and Elspeth laid the tips of her fingers upon it; Marjorie noted with a shock that she was evidently well accustomed to this routine.
Then he arranged the powerful light to focus only on the rotating black and white segments immediately in front of his little daughter; the rest of the room was in darkness.
“Is that light too strong?” he asked quietly.
“No, Daddy, it’s all right,” she said. It was the first time they had spoken.
“All right,” he said. “Just look at the whizzer.” The segments started to turn white and black in turn before her eyes in the bright light.
He said softly, “Poor Dr. Scott, he’s in such terrible trouble. He wiped up the mess you made when you were sick, didn’t he?” The black and white segments were changing places more quickly now.
Her eyes fixed upon them, Elspeth whispered, “Yes.”
“He’s been so kind,” he said quietly. “He showed us how to get the hot-water-heater so that we’ll have hot water all the time now.”
She repeated, “He’s so kind.” Her eyes were fixed upon the changing segments in the brilliant light.
“He showed us how to use the washing-up mop, so that we don’t have to use the rag,” Honey said in an even tone.
The little girl said drowsily, “We don’t have to use the rag now.”
In the darkness at the back of the room the two young women sat motionless, tense. In Marjorie there was a great tumult of feelings. She was deeply shocked at what was going on; every fibre in her being revolted at the use that Honey was making of his child. At the same time, she could not interrupt; there was a power and a competence about him in this matter that she dared not cross. She must stay quiet now and see it out, but never, never, never should this happen again.
Honey said quietly, “Poor Dr. Scott, he’s been so kind to us, and now he’s in such terrible trouble, because he can’t find what he’s looking for. He’s so unhappy. It’s lost in the forest, all among the trees, in the wild land where no people have ever been.” The black and white segments were changing places quickly now; the white-faced little girl was sitting with glazed eyes, motionless. “Try and help poor Dr. Scott find what he’s looking for. Try and help him. He’s been so kind to us. It’s in the forest, lying somewhere in the trees, where nobody has ever been. It’s a big metal piece, nearly as big as this house.”
The faint whirring of the segments was the only sound in the room. The blackness was oppressive, intense, around the girls. Shirley found later that her palms were bleeding from the unconscious pressure of her finger-nails, so great was the tension.
“Poor Dr. Scott,” Honey repeated monotonously, “he’s so unhappy, in the forest, looking for it, and he can’t find it. Try and help him find it. Try and help him. Try now. Try.”
Beneath the child’s fingers the planchette began to stir, and crept across the paper in uneven, jerky spasms.
11
MR. HONEY WENT to the Director’s office in the morning with the greatest reluctance. He did not like contact with any of his superior officers, ever, on any subject. He regarded technical executives as mean creatures who had abandoned scientific work for the fleshpots, for the luxuries of life that could be bought with a high salary. He had no opinion of any of us, judged as men; for this reason he preferred his own company or the company of earnest young men fresh from college who were not yet tainted with commercialism. He went cynically on this occasion, already embittered by the anticipation of disbelief. It had always been so when he had put forward new ideas; he had not got the happy knack of making people credit him from the start.
He had to wait some time in the outer office, because the Director was engaged. When finally Mr. Honey got in to see him he was rather short of time and rather overwhelmed by the pressure of other work; later that morning he would have to entertain and show round a commission of French scientists on a visit to our aeronautical research establishments. He said, “Well, Honey, what is it?”
Mr. Honey said, “Is it possible to get in touch with Dr. Scott, sir?”
“We can send cables to him. There is a routine in force by which Ottawa can get in contact with the radio in his aeroplane once a day.” The procedure was that a cable from the R.A.E. was telephoned to Ferguson at the Ministry of Supply. It was then radioed to the Department of Civil Aviation in Ottawa who relayed it to the Royal Canadian Air Force post at Rimouski on the lower St. Lawrence. We could reach Rimouski on the two-way radio in the Norseman, and made contact with them each day at six in the evening to receive or transmit any message of urgency.
Mr. Honey hesitated. “I should like to send him a cable, sir. I’ve got a message here that might be helpful to him.”
“What sort of message, Honey?”
“It’s about this tail unit that he’s trying to find, sir. I think I’ve got something that might help.”
The Director stared at him. “What sort of thing?”
“Automatic writing,” Mr. Honey said reluctantly. “I’ve had a great deal of experience wit
h that — not in office time, of course. It gives really remarkable results in certain cases.”
The Director wrinkled his brows. “Automatic writing? You mean produced by someone in a mental trance?”
Mr. Honey said eagerly, “That’s right, sir. I got it through my daughter, Elspeth, last night. She’s only twelve, but she’s really got a remarkable gift. Of course, children do produce the most amazing results sometimes. They don’t often retain their powers in later life, though.”
The Director was too busy to allow Mr. Honey much latitude to discourse on his researches in that field. “What is it that you’ve got?”
Mr. Honey produced a small roll of drawing paper, cut from the large sheet he had pinned down on the drawing-board the night before. “Well, this is what was actually produced,” he said. He unrolled it on the desk.
It was covered all over with pencil jabs, squiggles, and irregular traces. Some of these appeared to form themselves into letters, and some into half words; thus in one part of the paper the letters ING were fairly clear, and in another there was a very definite capital R. Mr. Honey turned the paper round. “This is what I mean, sir.”
Across one corner the squiggles ran consecutively in a fairly straight line. They were certainly writing, jerky and uneven though the letters were; it was not too difficult to decipher the message. It read, UNDER THE FOOT OF THE BEAR.