Glide Path (Arthur C. Clarke Collection) Page 8

  10

  It was one of those mornings when everything seemed to be running smoothly. The radar signals were coming in at full strength, the aircraft were co-operating nicely, and the talk-downs were taking place with monotonous regularity. There was nothing that Alan could do to help matters; in the event of technical trouble, Mac and Howard were on the spot. He had work back at the hut—unfinished notes, unanswered mail—so he climbed on his bike and started to cycle home across the airfield.

  This was a complicated maneuver, because he could not take a short cut along the runway in use; the great concrete ribbon was out of bounds to cyclists, for at any moment someone might want to land on it. So though there was a magnificent road only fifty yards away, Alan had to push his bike across several hundred feet of soggy grass before he came to one of the other runways. At night, or in heavy fog, it was easy to get lost on the airfield and to cycle around and around its vast concrete maze, unable to find a way out.

  The temporary hut, which despite all the promises of the Station Adjutant had now become the unit’s permanent living quarters, was empty when Alan reached it. This suited him very well, for privacy was a rare and valued gift, to be made the most of whenever it came one’s way. Alan could do with it now; he could not put off answering Miss Hadley any longer. She wrote at least twice a month, and her last letter had brought disturbing news.

  Would things have been different, Alan thought wistfully, if the Channel Queen had come safely back from Dunkirk? So many of his own boyhood memories were bound up with her that he could understand the Captain’s feelings; he had known her much longer, and much more intimately.

  The Channel Queen had been a small ship—1,565 tons, to be exact—and had passed a quiet, uneventful life until those last flaming moments when she had met her destiny. Every summer she had plodded from pier to pier with her cargo of happy (and sometimes not so happy) trippers. Cardiff, Weston-super-Mare, Minehead, Lynmouth were her main ports of call; to Alan, these names had once been as romantic as Bombay, Valparaiso, Buenos Aires, Mandalay… on occasion, greatly daring, she would venture as far afield as Lundy Island, where the Bristol Channel ended and the awesome Atlantic began. In the thirty years since she had first kissed the muddy waters of the Clyde, she had brought pleasure to at least a million people; and in the three days before she died she had carried ten thousand men to freedom.

  The Captain had cursed her often enough, but she was part of his life, and his share in her ownership was most of his worldly wealth. Now she lay—what was left of her—a rusting hulk off the hostile shores of France, and there were times when Alan had a superstitious feeling that when she was at last scattered in meaningless fragments over the seabed, that would be the end for her skipper as well.

  Yet the trouble had begun long before Dunkirk; now that Alan looked back, he realized that the Captain had never been a very temperate man. There were times, he remembered, when his behavior on the bridge had been distinctly odd—and there was that mysterious affair of the collision with the Pride of Barry. For several weeks thereafter the Captain had been very subdued, while every few days hard-faced men came to see him and made copious notes. Even if it had all started when Mother died, there must have been a fundamental weakness somewhere; other men had lost their wives or their ships without taking to drink. And now—

  “I am sorry to tell you, Alan,” said Miss Hadley’s prim copper-plate, “that your father has been causing us a good deal of anxiety during this last month. Doctor Rogers has given him another severe warning, but it seems to make no difference. I hope that you can come home soon, as I know that will cheer him up and stop him brooding. We all send our love and look forward so much to seeing you again.”

  It was difficult to answer such a letter; indeed, it was difficult to write anything. There was not a word that Alan could say about the work he was doing; even if security had not been involved, he was moving now in a world that would be totally incomprehensible to the Captain and to the stubborn old lady who had taken charge of him.

  Who had, indeed, taken charge of them both. Without her early influence on him, Alan knew, he would never have obtained his commission. She had supervised his studies, and given him the additional coaching that the local grammar school could not provide. She had also given him some degree of poise and self-confidence—though he would never have as much as those who were born to the purple, like Dennis Collins.

  Only now, as he moved in wider circles, did he wonder if her influence had been wholly to the good. She had taught him an exaggerated respect for “Society,” for the Royal Family (any Royal Family), which he knew would amuse his American friends if he were ever foolish enough to reveal it.

  And, above all, there had been that time she had caught him with Elsie Evans. They had both been fifteen years old, and though they had not actually been doing anything when Miss Hadley returned to the house unexpectedly, it was quite obvious that they soon would have been…

  Alan’s face still burned at the recollection of that traumatic experience. Miss Hadley had said nothing; she had merely looked at Alan with a disappointed sadness that was more withering than anger. She had not looked at Elsie at all.

  When the Captain arrived next day, with the Channel Queen, he had spent rather more time than usual with his son, to the embarrassment of both. Alan was not likely to forget that interview; he could still see his father, sitting at his big roll-top desk, fidgeting with the papers stuffed in the pigeon holes. He was wearing his uniform (slightly frayed, overdue for pressing), and he needed a shave—he usually did.

  He must have been quite handsome in his youth; sometimes Alan could still glimpse the fading ghost of the man his mother must have loved thirty years ago. If he had paid a little attention to himself, he might still have been distinguished-save for one fatal flaw. The watery eyes would never look at Alan; they always seemed to focus at a point over his shoulder.

  They were even more evasive now, as the Captain said: “Alan-I don’t think you ought to—ah—see any more of Elsie Evans. She’s not—ah—a nice kind of girl for you to know.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  A long pause; then, “I don’t mean you shouldn’t have a girl friend. But it should be someone respectable. Like—ah—Miss Wilkins, for example.”

  “Rose Wilkins?” gasped Alan, in mingled disbelief and horror. Rose was a standing joke among all the local boys, who had christened her Miss Droopy Drawers—though there was no direct evidence that this nickname was well founded. She had a permanently supercilious expression, rather like a camel which had just noticed a bad smell, and seemed to dislike boys in whatever shape or size they came.

  There was, however, just one point in Rose’s favor; her father was manager of the largest local bank. Elsie’s father, on the other hand, ran a fish-and-chip shop down in the harbor…

  It was the Captain who was embarrassed now, and Alan who was angry. He saw, with pitiless clarity, the thoughts that were taking shape in his father’s mind. Understanding brought not only anger, but a deep and aching grief. Captain Bishop was not in the least interested in his son’s happiness (just imagine life with Rose!), still less in his morals. He was thinking of Alan only as a means of improving his own affairs.

  Alan turned away from these bitter memories, and painfully ground out his reply to Miss Hadley. It was a short note full of vague generalities, good wishes, and pious admonitions. When he had finished it he became aware of an all-too-familiar smell—the acrid odor of burning insulation. To the end of his days he would associate this smell with the Mark I, but he hardly expected to meet it here in the billet. Getting up from his chair, he quickly tracked it the length of the hut; it came, without question, from Professor Schuster’s room.

  “Is anyone there?” said Alan, knocking on the door. A cheerful voice answered at once.

  “Come on in,” said the Professor. Alan took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

  “I’m just fixing the radio,” explained Professo
r Schuster, waving a soldering iron with one hand. “I got fed up with all the wisecracks from the controllers.”

  “Good show, Professor,” said Alan. “It’s time somebody did it.” The fact that the hut radio had been out of action for almost a week had caused a good deal of sarcastic comment from the nontechnical personnel. They did not appreciate that men who spent long hours wrestling with multiplex radar circuits did not feel like starting all over again when they crawled, exhausted, back to rest. “But where’s the stink coming from?”

  “I hadn’t noticed it,” confessed Schuster. The remark did not particularly surprise Alan; he himself had sometimes been so intent on repair jobs that he was unaware of the fumes of charred ebonite and burning rubber that eddied around him.

  But this stench was not coming from the radio, whose entrails were scattered over the table. Alan’s sensitive nose led him at once to a nearby wall plug, and what he discovered there wrenched a cry of anguished rage from his lips. Feeding power into the Professor’s soldering iron, and crackling and bulging with the heat it generated in the process, was a piece of Alan’s property—the adapter that allowed his 110-volt electric shaver to work on the British 230-volt mains.

  With a glare at the guilty scientist, Alan whipped the smoking resistor out of the socket, scorching his fingers as he did so. “Prof!” he cried, as much in utter disbelief as in anger. “How much power does that damned iron of yours take?”

  “Er-about a hundred watts.”

  Tossing the adapter from hand to hand like a hot potato, Alan stared in flabbergasted wrath at Schuster, who now closely resembled a schoolboy caught looking at dirty pictures. This was not the first time that the incompatibility between British mains and American equipment had caused trouble, but nothing quite as ludicrous as this had ever happened before. Now Alan understood Hatton’s remarks about the Professor’s practical ability, and could appreciate what Howard had meant when he had once remarked, “I can cope with the gremlins or the Prof, but not with both at once.”

  “Professor,” said Alan sadly, in the tone of voice one might adopt when speaking to a retarded child, “my shaver takes only twelve watts, and your blasted iron takes ten times as much. It’s a wonder the resistance didn’t burn out—you practically short-circuited it.”

  “I didn’t think the job would take so long,” said the Professor, rather lamely. “I thought I could get away with it. Don’t worry—I’ll fix you up with another.”

  Alan was blowing on the hot plastic, which still made crackling noises as it cooled. There was really nothing more to be said, and he had to admit that the situation gave him an enjoyable feeling of superiority. He had caught one of the electronics wizards of the Allied nations doing something that would have shamed any electrician’s mate who’d ever heard of Ohm’s law.

  Alan watched skeptically while the Professor stuffed the chassis of the radio back into its case, tightened a few screws, and switched it on. When, after a long pause, it was obvious that nothing was going to happen, he decided to take over. He guessed that he could fix an eight-valve superhet, even after it had been “repaired” by Professor Schuster, in about ten minutes.

  He had had plenty of practice at this sort of thing, both before and after he had joined the Air Force. Fixing a domestic radio was child’s play to anyone who had survived the Practical classes at Gatesbury, where the instructors would pull some vital part out of a radar set containing a couple of thousand components—and give you five minutes to find what was wrong.

  Almost at once, he spotted the loose connection from the speaker transformer, and crimped it tightly with a pair of pliers. While he waited, with complete confidence, for the set to warm up, he glanced at the papers on Schuster’s table, covered with a perfect maze of calculations. Immediately, his smugness evaporated; he would not forget about the soldering iron, but it was no longer quite so significant.

  Schuster caught the direction of his gaze.

  “I’m designing the Mark II,” he explained. “That is, if there’s ever going to be a Mark II.”

  “What’s wrong with the Mark I?” Alan asked, almost aggressively.

  “It’s far too complicated and clumsy, and now I have a lot of better ideas.” He paused and sighed. “But I don’t know yet if I’ll ever have a chance of trying them out.”

  “Surely by this time we’ve convinced everybody!” Alan exclaimed. “Why, we must have done five hundred approaches in the last month!”

  Schuster smiled, a little grimly.

  “I’m afraid, Alan, you underestimate the factors involved—and the inertia of the service mind. But we should get a decision very shortly. My spies tell me that there’s an air commodore coming down in a couple of days. If we can convince him, that should be the last hurdle.”

  At that moment, the radio burst into life and drowned all conversation until Alan could switch it off.

  “We’ll convince him,” said Alan confidently. He was quite sure of himself, for he could not believe that all this skill and devotion and effort could go for nothing.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” answered the Professor as Alan headed for the door with the radio under his arm. “I appreciate it.” Even before Alan had left the room, he was writing again, already unaware of his visitor—soaring away like an eagle into realms where few other men could go.

  Yes, that was a good analogy; and Alan was not thinking of Schuster’s lameness only when he remembered that eagles are clumsy walkers when they come down to earth.

  11

  By the way, Bishop,” said Flight Lieutenant Deveraux as they left the Mess together after breakfast, “when did you last take a day off?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” replied Alan. “Not since I came here, I think.”

  “Well, I’ve a job that will give you a break. Two jobs, in fact. There’s an Air Commodore Burrows arriving at Launceston on the 4:30, and we’ve got to make a good impression on him.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Alan grimly.

  Deveraux looked surprised.

  “Your sources of information are better than mine,” he grumbled. “I only heard half an hour ago. Anyway, get the best car MT will let you have, and collect him from the station. On the way, call at Filey to drop off that secret equipment that’s got to go back to Stores—you know the procedure.”

  Alan looked forward to the trip; it would be a good thing to get away from the station for a few hours. No matter how enthusiastic one may be, working too long at the same task inevitably produces staleness. During the last few days, he had been aware of a certain loss of zest, not to mention a shortness of temper which had resulted in several minor explosions. He had even been foolish enough to quarrel with Sergeant McGregor over the best way of tuning the precision system, and had been utterly routed.

  There was yet another reason why he welcomed a trip to Filey, whose echoes he had often admired on the radar screens. Through the service grapevine he had discovered that one of his earliest RAF friends was Technical Officer there, and this was his first chance of bridging the trivial distance between them.

  The harassed Motor Transport Section produced a limousine suitable for air commodores, and a WAAF driver of unusual elegance, she was quite the prettiest and neatest that Alan had seen, and lacked the somewhat tatty, beat-up appearance characteristic of most airmen and airwomen from MT. Unfortunately, the spell was shattered as soon as she opened her mouth and addressed Alan in the purest Cockney; he decided to sit in the back where he could look at her but wouldn’t have to talk to her.

  They stopped at the Guardroom to collect a Webley pistol, for the equipment he was carrying was so secret that it had to travel under armed escort. That armed escort would be Alan, though he was not sure how long he could protect his wares if suddenly surrounded by German paratroopers.

  The SP Sergeant who issued the pistol, and carefully collected the receipt, was very particular about explaining how the safety catch worked; obviously he had grave doubts of this young
officer’s ability to use so complicated a piece of equipment. Alan felt like remarking casually that he had scored ninety-five out of a possible hundred at target shooting back in his training days. This was perfectly true—but he had done it only once.

  As the car drove out of the gates, collecting a snappy salute from the corporal on guard, Alan settled back on the upholstery with a sigh of contentment. It was strange to see the outer world again, after weeks of peering into radar tubes and mazes of wiring, The weather was not as good as he might have wished, but at least it wasn’t raining, and though there was ten tenths cloud at the moment, there seemed a fair chance that the sun would break through later in the day.

  He stared with interest at the narrow, winding roads, bordered by low walls built from uncemented stones, piled one upon the other. It seemed a bleak, hard countryside, a world away from the friendly, fertile fields that he had known for most of his life. Yet he was scarcely a hundred miles from home; the thought made him realize how much variety England encompassed in so small an area. No wonder the Americans found it fascinating—when they did not find it exasperating.

  Past rocky coves, every one of which looked as if it could tell its tale of wrecks and smugglers; past country cottages that still proclaimed Cream Teas, even though the Ministry of Food had banished cream years ago; past the artificial mountains reared to the sky by generations of clay miners; past sleepy fishing villages festooned with nets—so the car wove through the Cornish landscape. Ahead now reared the slender steel masts and the shorter, more massive wooden towers of Filey Chain Home Station, watching the distant skies above France.

  Alan presented his credentials at the heavily guarded fence, and was told that he would find F/O Ronson in the R Block. This turned out to resemble a large air-raid shelter, half buried in the ground. At his knock on the steel door, a shutter slid aside and a suspicious WAAF asked him the password.