by Bob Shaw
u8722?6} with the smaller T.6 wing, which is just inside military necessity standards and a whole order below civil standards. But now we are proposing to produce the twenty-metre wing, which will have a reliability about half that of the T.6 wing, not for the military but for the civil market! It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
Dermott looked impatient. ‘But this is nothing new, Tony. All those figures have been thoroughly discussed. Gedge and the rest of the reliability team are confident that …’
“If they are very lucky,” Garnett interrupted, ‘they might make military standard in five years, civil standard in ten. By that time the R&D costs would be astronomical and we would still have to sell the first unit. The public won’t take to an invisible wing that vanishes if there’s a power failure.”
Dermott’s face suddenly smoothed into a look of relief. “So that’s it,” he said softly. “You haven’t recovered from the accident! You had me really worried. Tony, the prototype that dropped on to your car was proving a special power system—you remember the new lightweight alternator from Schuylers—and, needless to say, that is one bought-out component which we won’t …’
“What is this?” Garnett shouted incredulously, feeling his temper break. “Are you telling me that the accident has affected my mind? This decision has nothing to do with my personal experience.”
“Look at it this way, Tony. Before the accident you were one of the prime movers in the twenty-metre wing project. You over-ruled every objection. You let some of our best engineers resign because they argued against it. Now, after the accident, you want to drop the whole thing like a hot rivet. What other conclusion … ?”
“Ian!” With an effort Garnett held his voice level. “I am speaking to you now as owner of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company. Right now, right this minute, you must issue those stop-work orders or give me your resignation. Which is it to be?”
“I’m damned if I’ll take this from …’ Dermott stopped talking and his face seemed to ripple in the depths of the tiny television screen. He paused for a long moment and when he resumed speaking his voice was dulled. “I’m sorry, Tony. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that. I’ve been under somewhat of a strain. You’re quite right, of course—these decisions are yours to make and it was unforgivable of me to … I’ll issue the stop-work orders immediately.”
Garnett’s anger had gathered too much emotional momentum for him to match the other man’s abrupt change of manner. “See that you do!” He broke the televu connection, dropped the instrument on to the bedside table, then realised he was trembling and covered with perspiration. He lay back and stared at the shifting, green-toned light reflected on the ceiling from the trees outside his open window. The faint sound of children laughing was carried in on the warm air across what seemed to him like interplanetary distance. There’s a gulf, he thought irrelevantly, between those who go to work and those who go to school.
Another gulf had opened up between things as they were before the accident and things as they were now. The conversation with Ian Dermott had been little short of fantastic, but the man had made one good point. Garnett knew he was absolutely right in dropping the twenty-metre generated wing but there was no disputing the fact that once, and not so long ago, he had believed in the project whole-heartedly.
Perhaps a long serious illness always made things seem strange, but there was much to explain. The violent reaction of the normally phlegmatic Dermott, the fact that Garnett seemed to be developing a Don Quixote complex over an unhappy girl when he knew perfectly well he could not spare the time, and there was always—he realised he was falling asleep—that voice. He had never heard of anyone called Xoanon. There was a thing called a xoanon. The odd, back-of-the-dictionary word meant a primitive statue, supposed to have fallen from heaven.
As exhaustion claimed him, and the room tilted ponderously away, Garnett managed to smile. Aircraft might occasionally fall from the sky, but that was all.
3
It was simply a question of scale.
The photograph gleaming on his desk was a routine publicity shot. It had been taken by a staff cameraman and showed a newly elected works beauty queen posed against a background of the production line, in which were ranged the great incomplete machines, brooding sullenly over their inability to fly. Garnett stared down at the picture, aware that his heart had begun the swift, striding beats of excitement. This was the answer if only he could believe it.
It had taken him over a month to begin suspecting there was anything wrong with the Pryce-Garnett organisation. Another month had passed while he tried unsuccessfully to put his finger on the source of his unease, but there was almost nothing to go on.
The feeling was so faint Garnett could compare it only with the subliminal impulse of recognition he felt when being introduced to a person from his home town of Portsmouth. He had always explained the phenomenon by assuming that in living for many years in one area one was bound to glimpse practically all its inhabitants, and that their faces were filed away in the deeper reaches of memory. His suspicions about the organisation were equally vague, based on similar instinctive reactions.
He sat back in his chair, lit his pipe and stared at the opposite wall of his office through a screen of aromatic smoke. Large but infrequent drops of warm August rain struck across the windows. It was four months since the morning of the accident in which he so nearly lost his life. Afterwards he had learned that the fuselage itself had cleared the top of his car but the starboard tailplane had raked through the roof, spinning the heavy vehicle out of its way like a matchbox. Although he had lost a piece of his skull and broken both arms and one leg, everyone assured Garnett he was lucky to have come out of it alive. He agreed with them, but during the weeks of convalescence which followed his abrupt cancellation of the twenty-metre wing project he had been impatient to get back to work. As soon as it had been possible to wrest reluctant agreement from the doctors he had returned, walking at first with the aid of a stick although, when he had realised that using it made him appear a good inch shorter, he quickly managed to get around unaided.
He had returned too soon, Garnett acknowledged to himself as he drew on the sweet smoke, but in a way the past two months had been invaluable. Had he been fit enough to plunge back into the demanding complexities of his job the subtle, the very subtle, impressions of wrongness would have been swamped. As it was, he had been forced to spend his days in comparative inactivity during which, for the first time, he had been able to take a long impartial look at his own business.
He had begun by arranging with McIntyre, the head of the printing department, that a copy of everything which went through the machines would be sent to his office. The consequent flow of commercial and technical brochures, handbooks, reports and minutes had provided him with several hours of solid reading every day. Although he owned the company in its entirety Garnett had always considered himself an airframe specialist, which he had been when Pryce took him on, and had never had time to read more than a fraction of the organisation’s internal publications. The sheer quantity was astonishing—reports from the medical officer, the safety officer, the sales teams, the various project designers, the publicity officer, the production planning departments, the purchasing officer, the production centres, the personnel department. Experimental, flight test, security, wind tunnel, canteen, fire service. Wages, drawing offices, photographic, spares, transport, maintenance. Stress office, stores, analytical, reliability, tool room …
Garnett began to realise that a large number of his department heads actually enjoyed writing reports and broadcasting them, while others tended to be terse and uninformative. Also, some departments tended to function more crisply and efficiently than others. Strangely, these characteristics of individuals and groups did not remain constant—over-articulate heads might suddenly fall quiet, efficient teams appear to become sloppy, or vice versa. From the welter of paper a picture had begun to emerge, but it was like a television
picture in which the lines had been shuffled into a random sequence. Much information was given or implied but he lacked the key which would enable him to systemise it. All he had to go on was a vague feeling, so formless that he dare not mention it to anyone. The only near-concrete fact was that overall company efficiency seemed to have deteriorated, but this could have been explained as a temporary fluctuation, or simply the effect of his own absence—until he had seen the photograph.
A frozen instant of time was trapped under the glossy surface of the picture, and in that unique instant half a dozen aircraft fitters had passed behind the smiling girl at whom the camera had been aimed. They were all perfectly normal men, but one was carrying a wing unit mounting plate which was too big for him. He was a small man but that was not the reason the plate appeared too large. It would have been outsize even on a tall person—it was, in fact, a plate which could only have been used on the cancelled twenty-metre wing!
The implications were so vast that Garnett refused even to consider them before making; one or two elementary checks.
“I’ll be in the Number Three drawing office,” he said as he burst through the outer office. Miss Fleet, his secretary, and her two assistants glanced up in surprise as he passed. He took the lift to the third floor of the Technical Block and went in to the co-ordinating section which occupied the rear of Number Three. The grey-coated clerks who ran the section were flustered at seeing him and stood back respectfully and yet challengingly as he hauled out master assembly drawings and register books. But Garnett knew the complex system and it took him only several minutes to establish the part number of the mounting plate and to trace its history. The plate had been schemed, stress approved and detailed early in the year, but the stop-work order had been issued before the drawings reached the shops. As far as Pryce-Garnett was concerned the mounting plate existed on paper only.
Garnett left the drawing office and walked down the stairs thoughtfully. One approach would have been to find the foreman in charge of the production centre where the component had been made and ask him what the hell he thought he was doing. This was Garnett’s first impulse, then he began to think about what was involved. There was the baffling question of motive—the company as a whole had only a distant and very faint possibility of profit from the twenty-metre wing project, so there was no point at all in individuals tinkering with it under cover. Security angle? There might have been at one time, but shortly before he died Clifford Pryce had insisted on publishing full details of his system. Pryce-Garnett had a comfortable head-start, of course, but every country in the world which had sufficiently advanced aircraft and electronics industries was travelling at full speed along the same technological highway. In any case, spies did not work in this way.
The rain had stopped by the time Garnett left the Technical Block and the air was heavy with the smell of moistened dust. He began to walk towards the main shops. There was also the question of how many individuals were involved and who they were. It was not comparable with a case of two or three shop floor personnel getting together to make and smuggle out, say, a component for a broken washing machine. The fitter who had been carrying the mounting plate would only be one link in what must be a very long chain. There would be his immediate foreman and the shop supervisor above him; someone in Supplies must have ordered in the expensive, ultra high tensile steel; someone in Stores must have received and issued it; at least two men in the jig and tool drawing office must have been involved in preparing the tooling drawings and instructions, which in turn brought in the Tool Room superintendent; someone in Accounts must have covered up as much as possible from that end, but it would be impossible to conceal it from the management for very long …
Ian Dermott!
Garnett recalled Dermott’s unexpected and completely uncharacteristic reaction on the day he had called him from the clinic to cancel the twenty-metre wing. His discovery provided an explanation for that, but it was of a sort that only necessitated further explanations. He realised he had stopped walking as his vaulting brain had robbed his body of blood, and he picked up his step again, feeling his heels stick to the warm tarmac. Beyond the saw-tooth roof of the main shop a T.6 screamed across the airfield on full boost, the red glow of recombining calcium ions trailing from its jet pipes.
Passing into the comparative darkness of the shop Garnett moved through the banks of tape-controlled sculpture milling machines which gnawed patiently into billets of gleaming alloy. Although there were eight thousand people in the company he had been able to half-identify the fitter carrying the plate in the photograph simply because he was one of the few men in the place who were not taller than Garnett. No amount of self-discipline had ever been able to prevent him being specially aware of others his own size, feeling that much in common with them and hating them for it.
He headed for the area indicated in his memory as the region in which he had previously seen the fitter, then realised he was going towards the experimental machine shop. Garnett nodded his approval of the conspirators’ choice—the experimental shop was a small and completely self-contained unit with a full range of modern tools. It was a place where unusual jobs were the order of the day and where it would be easy to conceal unauthorised work. As he neared the doors it occurred to Garnett that he ought to be more circumspect than to rush in and collar his man, but his initial astonishment was giving way to a reckless fury.
An electric truck burst its way through the heavy sheet rubber doors and Garnett walked in behind it, avoiding the noisy slap of the doors as they closed. He looked around, ignoring the curious glances of the machine operators, and recognised the small figure of the fitter seated at a wall bench with his back to the door. Garnett walked across to him and, hearing his footsteps, the fitter turned. His eyes widened as he saw Garnett and he froze on the stool, cigarette drooping from his lips.
A definite reaction, Garnett thought with satisfaction. “I want to have a word with you,” he said.
The other man’s oil-streaked face remained immobile, staring.
Garnett became impatient. “Let’s go into the office.”
Saliva gleamed at the corners of the fitter’s mouth. He rolled gently forward on to the tool-cluttered bench, mashing the burning cigarette against his face, then slipped sideways to the floor. Several of his workmates came running as Garnett caught the falling body and lowered it.
“Ring the medical department,” he ordered, ‘and carry him into the supervisor’s office.” The stocky, white-coated figure of Raine, the experimental shop super, appeared and directed the strangely difficult operation. Garnett was puzzled for a moment at the awkwardness of the grunting men doing the carrying, then he noticed the fitter’s body was still in the sitting attitude with rigid arms and legs. He stood by until a young doctor and two male nurses arrived with a stretcher. The doctor looked surprised at Garnett’s presence in the workshop but he cleared the office efficiently and began to examine the inert fitter.
Garnett felt a touch on his sleeve and looked round to see a worried-looking boy in the green overalls of a graduate apprentice. “Excuse me, sir. I’m Jack Elkin. That’s my uncle in there. Victor Elkin. Is he all right? I came round from Centre 83 when I heard he had collapsed.”
“I don’t know,” Garnett replied. “You’d better wait and speak to the doctor. He may want to question you about your uncle’s medical history.”
The boy hesitated. “Well, he isn’t an epileptic or anything like that, but he’s been working very long hours in the last couple of months—ever since the firm sent him down to Harlech on that special training course. He might be suffering from nervous exhaustion.”
Garnett frowned. “The firm sent him where?”
“Harlech, sir.”
“You mean in Wales?” Garnett felt slightly silly. “Where the Men come from?”
“Yes, sir. He never talked about it and I don’t even know the names of the others who went. I assumed it was on some kind of classified work, what with H
arlech being so close to the missile ranges at Aberporth and Ty Croes.”
“Quite right,” Garnett said with a knowing briskness he did not feel. He went back into the glass box of the office, noting that Elkin’s limbs had been straightened.
The doctor stood up. “I’ll have to get him to hospital. His pulse, respiration, temperature and blood pressure are near enough normal, but he’s far down in coma. It’s as though his brain had been switched off. Did you … ?”
“Come to my office later,” Garnett interrupted. “I must go.”
He walked quickly back to the Technical Block, feeling the now-familiar exhaustion begin to grow in him like a leaden core. Back in his office he rang for Miss Fleet and she came in with notebook and pen, exuding normalcy.
“Since I’ve been in hospital,” he said, ‘has the company established an office or booked any kind of accommodation for special courses in or near Harlech?”
“You mean, where the Men come from?”
He nodded.
“Of course not, Mr. Garnett.” She dismissed the subject as being ridiculous and got down to the business of the day. “I’ve left a list of people who rang while you were out, and Mr. Moller called in from Photographic for a second.”