The old hut was taken over by the pupils who were now arriving in increasing numbers. More controllers, more operators, more radar mechanics—more of everything was on the way. The process of empire-building had begun, and with it the process of myth-making. From now on, all those involved in GCD could be divided into two groups—the old-timers, who remembered the pioneering days and were always talking about them, and the newcomers, who took it all with a grain of salt.
Reinforcements had also appeared for Alan and Deveraux, in, the shape of a new radar officer. To Alan’s surprise and pleasure, this turned out to be his first Gatesbury instructor, Sergeant—now Flying Officer—Lebrun, RCAF. Having to teach his old teacher gave Alan considerable satisfaction.
Lebrun was to take over the synthetic trainers, which would soon make life much easier and would multiply the rate of instruction. They would enable several crews to practice at once, without the use of the Mark I itself. Each trainer had an exact replica of the controller’s panel, with its meters reporting the approaching aircraft’s deviation from the glide path. But there would be no real aircraft flying expensively around the sky—only black boxes, full of electronic equipment, that would feed the appropriate signals to the meters. And so fledgling controllers could practice without using the Mark I or risking “D” Flight’s aircraft—not to mention its pilots.
As for the Mark I itself, it, too, seemed to have settled down to the new routine; the mechanics were now so skilled at spotting incipient faults even before they appeared that there was very little time off the air. The equipment had reached a kind of serviceability plateau, and would probably remain there until some final and catastrophic breakdown developed. In human terms—and such terms were only too often applied to it—the Mark I had now attained a healthy maturity. But no one knew whether the senile decay of old age was months, or only weeks, ahead.
Meanwhile, the war went on—so far beyond the horizon that it might have been on another world. Every evening at nine most of the officers would gather around the radio in the anteroom, listening to the names that were passing into history—Stalingrad, El Alamein, Anzio… Sometimes, as he listened to the reports from these distant battlefields, Alan would feel a vague sense of dissatisfaction at his own peaceful war record, and this had been underlined when he went through his father’s effects. There were souvenirs of 1914—18 that he had never known about—faded medal ribbons, still more faded photographs of antiquated ships and uncomfortably posed groups of sailors in old-fashioned uniforms. And, still bright and new, was the George Medal the Captain had won at Dunkirk.
He had been proud of that medal, small compensation though it was for his ship. It had been pinned up inside his battered roll-’top desk, where it would be before his eyes every day. Just beneath it was a photo of the Channel Queen; to Alan, the juxtaposition was almost heartbreaking.
When he had been taking down that photo, to put it in his picture album, Miss Hadley had made a curious remark.
“You know, Alan,” she said, “that was the trouble with the Captain. He was more fond of things than of people.”
“But you can lose people,” Alan countered, “just as easily as you can lose things.”
“No—that’s not true. When material possessions are gone, there’s nothing left—there’s just a vacuum. People are different. You never really lose those you once loved, no matter what happens. They’re always part of your mind, waiting to be called up whenever they’re needed. Even if they’ve died or become strangers.”
It was an odd thing to say, and one of the first times that Miss Hadley had ever revealed her deeper emotions. She must have had a cheerless life, thought Alan, though it was typical of that led by generations of lady’s companions and governesses, trapped in the genteel limbo between domestic service and “society,” But at least she would have no material worries in future; the house was Alan’s (surprisingly, it was not heavily mortgaged), and now that fewer rooms were needed, they had been able to let the ground floor for a satisfactory rent. Miss Hadley would be an efficient concierge and, with the tiny income she drew from some investments, she would be quite comfortable. That was another problem settled—unless he married and brought home a wife.
He did not think of this possibility very often, but before he had met Lucille he had not thought of it at all. With her he had achieved domesticity without responsibility, and there was a good deal to be said for that, especially in time of war. But one day, surely, he would need something more permanent.
The first time he had cycled to Olga’s by himself, after Howard had gone, he had felt a brief return of his old nervousness. Matters were not helped when Sergeant McGregor brazenly asked him to deliver a parcel to Olga, with apologies for his own absence. Their little game of hide-and-seek had quickly petered out, for this was not the kind of secret that could survive in such a close-knit world.
Alan was very anxious to give Lucille the first account of Flight Lieutenant Collins’s ignominious descent into the manure heap. It would, he calculated, take that overrated gentleman down a few pegs, and perhaps make Lucille a little less enthusiastic about him. (“Cute,” indeed! That adjective still rankled.)
His description of the event was not exactly untruthful, but it failed to mention such important matters as Collins’s skillful handling of the aircraft. It also gave the impression that it was Dennis, not S Sugar, that “D” Flight had spent several days scraping down; in reality, Dennis had sacrificed nothing more than a pair of shoes, and had reported to the Mess half an hour later in a perfectly acceptable condition—though that, of course, had not stopped everyone from going through ostentatious checks of wind direction when he appeared.
One would not have gathered any of this from Alan’s distinctly biased report, and when he had finished he did not feel quite as pleased with himself as he had expected. Lucille had sat and watched him with her big blue eyes, making no comment and not appearing to be particularly interested, though he knew perfectly well that she was. After a while, he was glad to change the subject, and bring up his other big piece of news.
“I’m going away for—oh, several weeks,” he said, with all the tragic emphasis he could put into it. “I won’t be able to come and see you for quite a while.”
Lucille seemed to be bearing up under the shock remarkably well.
“You’re not being posted?”
“Oh, no, nothing like that; I’ll be coming back again. It’s a trip right round the country—and what’s more, they’re giving me an aircraft of my own.”
“Will you be flying it yourself?” asked Lucille.
She knew a lot better than that, and Alan looked at her sharply. But if she was pulling his leg, she gave no sign of it.
“No; I’ll have a pilot and navigator.”
“Dennis, perhaps?”
Alan swallowed hard. There was in fact some danger of this, and the idea of a month with Dennis did not appeal. On the other hand, it would be one way of keeping him away from Lucille…
“No,” he said firmly. “Not Dennis. And I’m sorry—I can’t tell you any more.”
Perhaps he had said too much already; there were times when he had wondered about Olga and her nieces. Their establishment was almost too much like a textbook example of the best way to coax information from young and inexperienced officers. Often he had joked with Howard about this, and their private nickname for Olga was “the beautiful spy.”
Was it possible that the matter was more than a joke? The thought occasionally passed through Alan’s mind, causing him momentary discomfort. Then he reassured himself with the reflection that at least he had given no secrets away. Even if Olga was up to no good from the security point of view, she’d got nothing out of him. He was the one who had derived all the benefit at a very modest cost (so far, about ten pounds on black-market petrol, chocolates, and cigarettes, as well as sundry liquors and nylons for which Howard refused to accept any payment). Olga and the girls seemed to have plenty of money and no in
terest in acquiring more, which was a little odd. But when Alan had diffidently raised the subject, Lucille had answered, “You’re helping us to get home. This is our war effort.” She had sounded perfectly sincere; it was one of the few times that Alan had known her to be completely serious.
Anyway, there was one thing that settled the matter. No one with a name like Olga could possibly be a spy in real life…
The argument, unfortunately, was not quite as convincing as Alan hoped.
23
Alan’s airborne Grand Tour of the British Isles was the bright idea of someone at Group Headquarters—probably of Wing Commander Stevens, who had selected him for this job at that crucial interview so many lifetimes ago. He was to visit a dozen airfields, strategically placed through the United Kingdom, and draw up the necessary plans for installing GCD.
His pilot was not Dennis Collins, he was relieved to discover, but an amiable young New Zealand Flying Officer. For navigator, he had an intense Scots sergeant, who was loaded down with tables, maps, and calculating instruments. They seemed a competent pair, not likely to land him in Germany by accident.
The trip lasted a month, and took them the length and breadth of the British Isles. At each airfield, Alan would report to the Commanding Officer, give him a pep talk on GCD, and then go into a huddle with the Senior Flying Control Officer over a set of airfield maps. From these he could tell, very roughly, where a GCD unit might best be sited; then it was a matter of getting into a car and looking at the actual locations, to see if there were any unexpected snags.
The work became easier as he grew more experienced, and toward the end of the tour he needed only a day to complete his report on an airfield’s suitability. Inevitably, after a while one RAF station merged into another, and sometimes he had to think twice to remember where he was. But there were a few episodes in his circumnavigation of Britain that he would never forget.
There was the airfield that had a railway line crossing the main runway, and operated through a kind of nonaggression pact between the Flying Control Tower and the nearest stationmaster. When a train was scheduled to go through, no aircraft were allowed to interfere, and vice versa. It was a hell of a way to run a railroad—or an airfield—but it seemed to work. And it was of course, in Ireland. Alan wished he could have told Pat Connor about it.
It was here that he had his first glimpse, for longer than he could easily remember, of a country not at war. Just over the road was the Irish Free State, and if he had brought his civilian clothes with him, he could have walked across into that unknown country. It was hard to believe that only a hundred miles away the Swastika was flying above the German Embassy in Dublin, while British sailors were dying to keep the republic supplied with essential foods. Alan felt that he should be indignant about this, but like most Englishmen he found it impossible either to dislike the Irish or to take them quite seriously.
Back in England, he caught up with the war when he spent his second night in the control tower of a Bomber Command station, and watched the Lancasters disappear with their deadly loads toward the heart of Germany. Once again he listened while, from some distant holocaust, the radio brought its meaningless code messages, whether of triumph or disaster he could not tell. Then the real waiting began. That night, out of the twenty-five bombers that had left, only nineteen returned.
These hours beneath the operations board had an unsettling effect upon Alan, and destroyed some of the satisfaction he had derived from his tour. They reawakened his slumbering self-doubts; when he sat among the bomber crews in the anteroom, he felt almost ashamed of himself. This was real bravery—to go out night after night into the hostile darkness, knowing that sooner or later the odds would turn against you, and to be reminded always of that fact by the empty seat, the absent friend.
It was not that he had any romantic ideas about war—no one but a fool had, in this age—or that he had any grave doubts about his courage. But it had never been put to the test, and no man knows himself until he has faced death. That was not a thought that Alan had ever consciously formulated, but deep down in his soul he was dimly aware of it.
He had proved his moral courage, when he had landed that Meteor. But that was not enough; for the life he risked then had not been his own.
***
St. Erryn was not the same when Alan returned; something even more secret, and much more spectacular, than GCD had descended on the station. There had been rumors for weeks, and now the evidence was plain for all to see.
“Just look what they’ve done to our airfield,” lamented Sergeant McGregor as he and Alan stood at the intersection of Runways 320 and 270. “Who’d have thought even Works and Bricks could make a mess like this in such a short time?”
It was indeed an impressive shambles, and it was quite hard to believe that despite it all the airfield was still in full working order. Stretching the entire length of Runway 320, on each side of the broad concrete strip, were rows of pipes supported a foot from the ground. It looked as if the plumbing of an oil refinery had been laid along the runway. At regular intervals the piping doubled back on itself to form sections like giant trombones, and at other strategic spots were huge valves and control wheels. All that was needed to complete the picture were the derricks.
“So this is FIDO,” mused Alan. “How much gas does it burn?”
“A nice round hundred thousand gallons an hour, so they tell me. There’ll be riots if the motorists ever hear about it, with their basic ration of four gallons a month.”
“And does it really clear away the fog?”
“We don’t know yet,” McGregor answered skeptically. “I’ll believe that when I see it. But there’s a dummy run at 1500 hours this afternoon; that should be worth watching.”
He fell momentarily silent as C Charlie appeared over the end of the airfield and came roaring down the runway.
“You see some lousy approaches these days,” he grumbled. “These new controllers couldn’t talk a bike into a barn.”
“I thought,” said Alan, “that they’d all passed on synthetic trainers before they tried the real thing.”
“Sure they have. Otherwise I suppose they’d never hit the airfield.”
The criticism was hardly justified; the new boys were doing quite well, but as one of the original GCD team, Mac would never admit that anyone not trained by Wendt and Schuster could be any good.
At three o’clock Alan was standing on the roof of the transmitter truck—the same vantage point from which he had watched the rout of the RAF Regiment. Almost the whole of Runway 320 could be seen at a glance; the Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of, burners formed a double line on either side of it. All told, the total length of the installation was at least three miles.
A mile away, over by the fuel-storage tanks whose building Alan had watched with such unsatisfied curiosity during the past few months, a great gout of black smoke billowed up into the sky. Beneath it was a lurid yellow flame, which raced along the line of pipes faster than a man could run. Within seconds, a wall of fire had extended the whole length of the runway, while above it, rolling thunderheads of oily smoke drifted across the airfield. The nearest of the burners was more than a hundred feet away, but even at this distance the roar of the yard-high flames was impressive, and Alan could feel the heat against his face.
The smoke seemed to be getting worse, and it was coming closer. Presently he began to cough in the oleaginous clouds, which were rapidly reducing visibility to zero. Up here on top of the truck it was not merely unpleasant—it was becoming alarming. Fog dispersal, my foot! thought Alan, as he retreated down the ladder in search of breathable air.
Slowly, and none too soon, conditions improved; the FIDO experts were getting their voracious monster under control. The roar of the flames became still more deep-throated as the pumps increased their pressure. Now that the system had warmed up, the fuel was burning cleanly as vapor, not smokily as liquid. The whole operation reminded Alan of his attempts, in his scouting days,
to get balky Primus stoves working. The principle was exactly the same, but the scale was slightly larger.
And now, apart from a stubborn section over there on the far side of the airfield, the parallel walls of fire were almost smokeless—roaring jets like those from a gas burner, but taller than a man and thousands of feet in length. The entire landscape, on this winter afternoon, quivered with heat. Was it imagination, or were the clouds themselves being driven upward by the columns of rising air?
Before Alan could be certain, the test was concluded. The breath from the fiery furnace no longer beat upon his face; the fuel pumps slackened their efforts, and the quadruple walls of flame shrank swiftly to the ground. A few streamers of smoke drifted downwind as the burners gave their final coughs and gasps; then it was all over.
It had been, quite a show—as indeed it should be, at twenty thousand pounds an hour. And this was in the daytime, with the sun to provide competition. A night test, thought Alan, should be quite spectacular—but could it really disperse fog? Like Mac, he’d believe it when he saw it.
During his absence, his responsibilities had increased alarmingly. He would soon be in charge of the unit, for Deveraux was about to leave. It was universally agreed that his was the cushiest posting in the entire history of the Royal Air Force; for he was going, of all places, to Hollywood.
It was here that the Mark II production line was being set up, presumably among movie studios and orange groves. Reports of progress came from time to time, either on the official level through Group Headquarters, or in more guarded fashion through private correspondence. Several of the WAAFs, who received a good deal of American mail, seemed quite well-informed, and when Alan wanted news of his ex-colleagues, he could usually get it from them.
But no one could tell him anything about Professor Schuster. It was incredible, but he now appeared to have no connection with GCD, and Alan’s tentative queries all drew a blank. Then, right out of the blue, a large parcel arrived.