So this, Alan told himself without really believing it, was probably the most dangerous moment of his life. Introspection was not normally one of his vices; he could worry with the best, but did not waste time watching himself worrying, Yet now, as he roared across the night sky toward an unknown destiny, he found himself facing that bleak and ultimate question which so few men can answer to their satisfaction. What have I done with my life, he asked himself, that the world will be the poorer if I leave it now?
He had no sooner framed the thought than he rejected it as unfair. At twenty-three, no one could be expected to have made a mark on the world, or even to have decided what sort of mark he wished to make. Very well; the question could be reframed in more specific terms. How many people will be really sorry if I’m killed now?
There was no evading this. It struck too close to home, brought back too vivid a memory of the tearless gathering around his father’s grave.
He started the census reluctantly, knowing that it would not take long. Miss Hadley, of course, would be bitterly distressed, but Alan realized that her grief would not be wholly unselfish. She needed him as a focus for the complex yearnings of her spinstered soul; there were bonds here that must soon be gently disentangled, lest his own development be warped, his independence jeopardized. (Was it too late already?)
His thoughts continued to sweep around the circle of his acquaintances, as the now-stilled search system had once probed the sky. Lucille: what of her?
Yes, she might squeeze a tiny tear; he saw that with pitiless logic. And here was the ultimate irony—even this he would have to share with Dennis.
These unprofitable thoughts had occupied him for no more than a few seconds, yet it was hard to believe that minutes had not passed since their last word from the ground. Surely Dennis should call the Controller to find out what was happening! He turned to look at the man who now shared his fate, but he was merely a faint shadow in the darkness, for the only light in the little cabin was that spilling from the instrument panel. There was no way in which he could guess what Dennis was thinking, until he spoke again over the intercom. And even then, his voice would be subtly distorted, so that his real emotions would be disguised.
It is strange how the mind can leapfrog across the years, selecting from a million, million memories the one that is even faintly relevant, while rejecting all the others. With startling clarity Alan remembered a story from his undisciplined childhood reading; he had long ago forgotten the context, but the disquieting image remained.
The Fates, so the ancients had believed, were three old women with scissors, who determined the moment at which each man’s life thread should be snipped. Three women, sharing a single eye among them, which they passed from one to the other…
At this very moment, Alan’s fate was being decided by three girls—the trackers in the control van, straining for the first glimpse of C Charlie’s echo on their screens. It was as well that they had not one eye, but two—the elevation and azimuth screens, each showing its cross section of the lightless sky.
The three trackers in that darkened room half a mile below would have been surprised at the analogy; it would have scared them to think that they were arbiters of anyone’s fate. At this moment, however, they were utterly unconscious of their own personalities or feelings. For each one of them, nothing existed but the luminous rectangle of light upon which all her attention was concentrated.
Ten minutes ago, the elevation tracker had been plagued by an anxiety as old as humanity: was she going to have a baby? But now, all her world was contained in that faint pencil of electrons, scanning up and down the screen from sky to ground, ground to empty sky.
The azimuth screen was equally empty, its operator equally intent, having wholly forgotten sick mother, errant boy friend, and laddered stockings as she stared at the screen in front of her. She was looking at a completely blank map, ten miles long and only twenty degrees wide—that pathetically blinkered twenty degrees of vision now left to a radar system that had once swept the full circle of heaven.
A spark of light flickered for a moment at the edge of the picture. The questing radar beam moved away from that area of the sky; then, two seconds later, it returned. Now there was no doubt; an echo was moving onto the screen from the extreme right-hand edge. With each sweep of the scan it edged in toward the center of the display, and moved a little farther out in range.
“I’ve got him!” shrieked the azimuth tracker. “Five miles out, over on the right!”
The tension in the van relaxed in a great, silent wave of relief. C Charlie was back in the narrow funnel of vision, no longer lost in the open dome of the sky, beyond help or advice. Now something could be done.
With swift and automatic skill, the three trackers began a furious cranking of their handwheels. Range, azimuth, elevation—within seconds each operator had pinned her electronic pointer upon that luminous oval crawling over the face of the tubes. On the Controller’s panel, the lights flashed on. His meters, dark and lifeless until now, were feeding him information again, allowing him to trace every movement of C Charlie through the distant night.
He pressed his transmit key, and sent the message Alan had almost lost hope of receiving.
“Longstop calling C Charlie. We have you at six miles. Continue on present course.”
“Continue on present course!” thought Alan. “But we’re flying directly away from the airfield!”
Then he realized what the Controller was doing. Six miles was too close to home; if they were turned back on their course now, there might not be time to straighten them out and get them lined up on the runway before they were over the airfield once more. The Controller was giving himself room to maneuver; they still had four miles to go before they would disappear off his field of view, and there were a couple of minutes yet before he need swing them around.
“Now at seven miles,” said Ground Control, in a calm and almost lazy voice—though not one so lazy that it ceased to inspire confidence. “I shall be turning you round shortly. Are you receiving me? Over,”
“C Charlie calling Longstop. Receiving you loud and clear. Over,” acknowledged Dennis.
“Longstop calling C Charlie. Message acknowledged and understood. Remain on receive and apply maximum rate of turn to left; I say again, maximum rate left onto course three two zero; repeat, course three two zero.”
Alan felt the floor press up against him. Before his eyes the compass card began to spin, and the rate-of-turn needle shot over to its maximum. They were making their second hairpin bend in the sky.
The pressure slackened; the compass slowed its spin. New they were flying straight again, headed back toward the airfield. C Charlie was coming home.
“I have you at six and a half miles,” said the Controller. “Change course fifteen degrees left; I say again, fifteen degrees left.”
The familiar, almost hypnotic patter had started again. How many times had Alan heard it before, either on the ground or in the air? He could not guess; it must be hundreds. But never before, he knew well enough, in circumstances such as these.
“Fife miles to go. Check wheels down….”
Five miles from safety and solidity, crawling down the lightless sky. Thank heavens there were no hills or mountains in this part of the world. My God, what about the radar towers at Filey?
They were not far from this line of approach, reaching up into the fog like the masts of some sunken ship. Alan had a hideously vivid memory of those thin steel girders, with the curtains of the antenna arrays spread out in a vast net between them. Against that net C Charlie could smash like a butterfly into a spider’s web.
Don’t be a fool, he told himself. We know all about Filey—the glide path doesn’t go within three miles of it. There’s no need to set into a flap—everything’s under control…
“Start descent at five hundred feet a minute. You are slightly to the left of the runway. Change course fife degrees right; I say again, fife degrees right. Three and
a half miles to go….”
In another two minutes it would all be over, one way or the other. Yet all that Alan felt was a great sense of calm. There was nothing he could do to affect the issue, and if the Fates snipped the thread now, he would probably never know; it would happen so quickly.
All the while a part of his brain had been acting as an impersonal monitor, analyzing the approach and noting how the aircraft responded to the Controller’s corrections. It was a perfectly straightforward descent, with no complications from cross winds. Indeed, for the last mile they had scarcely veered from the line of the runway, and the Controller had given only the most trifling changes of course. Dennis had nothing to do but to point the nose down and forge ahead.
That was just as well, for it gave him time to work out his plan of action. The approach was no problem; the fun would begin when they were over the runway, flying into the artificial gale of the FIDO burners. But now that he knew what to expect, Dennis believed he could handle the situation.
He had spared only the briefest of thoughts for his passenger. His opinion of Alan had gone up quite a few points, and he was rather sorry that he had got him into this mess. But it would do him good to see, once in a while, what pilots had to do to earn their pay.
“Two miles to go, Change course three degrees left; I say again, three degrees left. You are slightly below the glide path. Reduce rate of descent.”
To Alan’s surprise, Dennis ignored this last instruction. The rate-of-descent pointer remained stubbornly fixed at five hundred feet a minute. What was Dennis trying to do? Fly them into the ground?
Less than a minute to go. And now, for the first time on this approach, the Controller began to sound a little worried.
“You are nicely on course, C Charlie. But you are still too low—fifty feet below the glide path. Reduce rate of descent; I say again, reduce rate of descent. Half a mile to go.”
Almost grudgingly, Dennis pulled the stick back a fraction of a degree. It was too late now to climb back to the proper glide path, but the Controller could sweat that one out. I’m coming in low and fast, Dennis told himself—it’s my best chance of getting the old kite down on the deck before that ruddy gale takes her up into the sky again.
“One thousand feet to go,” said the Controller. “The runway is dead ahead of you. But you are still much too low.”
C Charlie had received that first warning, for the elevation needle had started to climb upward from its dangerous low point. But had the pilot reacted in time? In a few seconds they would know. The Controller had done his best; until the last mile, it had been a flawless approach.
The lights on the meter panel went dead; the girls in the back room could no longer track the aircraft—its echo had been lost in the maze of reflections from the ground. The Controller leaned back in his chair, suddenly drained of strength. All around him, the crowded van was not only silent, but utterly still. The three WAAF operators were frozen at their screens, their fingers motionless on the tracking handwheels. The NCO radar mechs and the forgotten U.S. Air Force generals, who had scarcely moved a muscle for the last ten minutes, still stood crowded against the wails as silent spectators.
No one knew what had happened to C Charlie; and no one knew that they had all just witnessed the very last approach that would ever be made on the Mark I.
28
Squadron Leader Strickland was a stubborn man; he was also a rather embarrassed one, for he feared that some apologies would be in order in due course. After he had telephoned his confession to Flying Control, he immediately set off once more toward the end of the runway. Having already got soaked to the skin and well daubed with mud, he was determined to see matters through to the end.
This time he did not get lost, and found his way to the end of Runway 320 without difficulty. The nearest of the FIDO burners was a hundred feet away, yet its heat caressed his face like the tropical sun. From time to time he could hear, above the roar of the flames, the voice of the GCD Controller echoing from the radio truck around which the Station Commander and his cohorts were standing. Beyond that, he knew, were the ambulance and fire wagon; but they were quite invisible in the blinding mist.
At any second, C Charlie would be over the edge of the airfield; it was now only a thousand feet away—too low, the Controller had just said. By God, he was right—there came the roar of the twin Cheetahs, from a point that seemed scarcely higher than the perimeter fence. It moved swiftly closer—now it was past them—louder and deeper than one would expect from an aircraft making a landing. Almost certainly, Strickland decided, the pilot had changed his mind and was attempting to overshoot.
The Squadron Leader was wrong; Dennis Collins had a different plan, and he almost brought it off.
They hit the updraft from the burners and caught their first glimpse of the runway at the same instant. The fog parted before their eyes, so that suddenly they were looking along a glowing canyon walled with flame. There, directly beneath them, was the painted “320” of the compass course they had been following. Those huge, elongated figures, scuffed and worn by a thousand touchdowns, were so beautiful, so heart-warming that Alan almost wanted to kiss them.
But he was still separated from the runway by an infinite thirty feet and an appalling hundred and twenty miles an hour. The concrete slabs flickering backward beneath their wheels might have been a universe away.
In that eternal second, Alan made a surprising discovery. It was not true that men remembered their past lives when they thought they were going to die. At least, it was not true for him, perhaps because he had already scanned his past and found in it little cause for pride. He could think only of the future that now might never be.
There was so much he could have done. The skills he had acquired would have had many uses in the world to come. He had spent much time over those books that Schuster had sent him—as much as he could spare from his duties—and had mapped out the paths of knowledge that he would be able to follow. It was true that he could never be a real scientist, as he had sometimes hoped in moments of envious admiration.
Yet his was the kind of skill the scientists would need, to nurse the strange and complex machines that their brains would create—and which, quite often, their clumsy ringers might break. (Where was Schuster now? He would like to have met him again.) A great, impersonal sadness swept over him, a grief not for himself, but for all those he might have helped, or whose lives he might have made happier.
Now that rising gale was upon them, tearing at wings and fuselage, trying to spin them back into the sky like a child’s kite. But this time Dennis was expecting it; he opened the throttle, pouring on the power in an attempt to drag C Charlie through that wall of wind by brute force.
The runway accelerated beneath them, gaining speed instead of losing it. Then, as Dennis had hoped, the turbulent buffeting died away as they left the transition zone and passed into smoother air. But he was using up runway at a terrifying rate—the end of the luminous canyon was only a thousand feet away. Better smack the deck now, before it was too late.
He cut the engines a second before impact. All things considered, it was not too bad a landing. Aircraft tires, however, can stand only so much. C Charlie was still doing a good ninety miles an hour when there was a loud report on the starboard side, followed instantly by a violent lurch and a horrible squeal of metal on concrete. A stream of sparks trailed from the naked wheel hub as it ground itself against the runway, and like a lopsided drunkard, C Charlie veered ever more and more steeply toward the right.
It was losing speed fast, but not fast enough. As Alan stared through the Perspex with fascination, but not the slightest fear (for this all seemed to be happening to someone else), he saw the edge of the runway coming closer and closer, until he could make out every detail of the concrete slabs and the dark, sodden grass bordering them.
C Charlie was moving almost sideways when, with great reluctance, it left the firm safety of the concrete and slithered on to the soggy
, yielding earth. The starboard prop turned itself into a plow. There was a fantastic symphony of groaning metal and twanging control cables, and a final lurch as the aircraft tried to stand on its nose, failed, and flopped heavily back on a level keel.
For a moment there was silence in the cabin, save for tiny, unidentifiable cracklings and tinklings. It was utterly dark; someone must have switched off the FIDO burners, probably as a safety precaution, within seconds of C Charlie’s hitting the ground.
“Not one of my better efforts,” said Dennis. “Still, it’s a good landing if you can walk away from it. Let’s see if we can find our way out of here.”
They unfastened their seat belts and groped their way through the darkness. The cabin door had stuck and gave them some trouble, but presently they forced it open and lowered themselves gingerly to the invisible ground.
“I suppose we’d better wait here,” said Alan, “until someone comes to look for us.”
It was not a very intelligent remark, for they had no practical alternative, in a darkness that seemed almost palpable now that the glare of the FIDO burners was gone. Overhead a few misty stars were glimmering faintly, but they were already fading as the fog rolled down like a silent avalanche, to fill the valley that had been briefly blasted through it.
At a moment like this, there was nothing that could or need be said. Even the dripping darkness seemed friendly, now that the firm and wonderful earth was once more beneath their feet. They had shared an experience that they could never talk about, except jokingly, in the days to come. Yet each knew that from now on their relationship was wholly altered.
They would never really like each other, but they would never again be enemies. They were linked now in a comradeship as strong and deep as love itself, though springing from different roots. The proof of that was clear enough in each man’s mind, for both Alan and Dennis now knew that they would not grudge each other any share in Lucille’s favors.