reading

Nevil Shute Norway was born on 17 January 1899 in Ealing, London. After attending the Dragon School and Shrewsbury School, he studied Engineering Science at Balliol College, Oxford. He worked as an aeronautical engineer and published his first novel, Marazan, in 1926. In 1931 he married Frances Mary Heaton and they went on to have two daughters. During the Second World War he joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve where he worked on developing secret weapons. After the war he continued to write and settled in Australia where he lived until his death on 12 January 1960. His most celebrated novels include Pied Piper (1942), No Highway (1948), A Town Like Alice (1950) and On the Beach (1957).

ALSO BY NEVIL SHUTE

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Vintage is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

Nevil Shute has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

… Therefore, go forth, companion: when you find

No highway more, no track, all being blind,

The way to go shall glimmer in the mind.

Though you have conquered Earth and charted Sea

And planned the courses of all Stars that be,

Adventure on, more wonders are in Thee.

Adventure on, for from the littlest clue

Has come whatever worth man ever knew;

The next to lighten all men may be you …

JOHN MASEFIELD

The three stanzas by John Masefield from The Wanderer are quoted by kind permission of Dr John Masefield, O.M., and The Society of Authors.

When I was put in charge of the Structural Department of the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough, I was thirty-four years old. That made a few small difficulties at first, because most of my research staff were a good deal older than I was, and most of them considered it a very odd appointment. Moreover, I wasn’t a Farnborough man; I started in a stress office in the aircraft industry and came to Farnborough from Boscombe Down, where I had been technical assistant to the Director of Experimental Flying for three years. I had often been to Farnborough, of course, and I knew some of the staff of my new department slightly; I had always regarded them as rather a queer lot. On closer acquaintance with them, I did not change my views.

In spite of my appointment from outside I found them quite co-operative, but they were all getting on in years and beginning to think more about their pensions than about promotion. When I got settled in I found that each of them had his own little niche and his own bit of research. Mr Morrison, for example, was our expert on the three-dimensional concentrations of stress around riveted plate joints and he was toying with a fourth dimension, the effect of time. What he didn’t know about polarised light wasn’t worth knowing. He had been studying this subject for eight and a half years, and he had a whole room full of little plate and plastic models broken upon test. Every two years or so he produced a paper which was published as an R. and M., full of the most complicated mathematics proving to the aeroplane designer what he already knew from his own experience.

Mr Fox-Marvin was another of them. I discovered to my amazement when I had been in the department for a week that Fox-Marvin had been working since 1935 on the torsional instability of struts, with Miss Bucklin aiding and abetting him for much of the time. They were no laggards at the paper work, for in that time they had produced typescript totalling well over a million words, if words are a correct measure of reading matter that was mostly mathematical. At the end of all those years they had got the unstabilised, eccentrically loaded strut of varying section just about buttoned up, regardless of the fact that unstabilised struts are very rare today in any aircraft structure.

I knew that I had been appointed from outside the Royal Aircraft Establishment as a new broom to clean up this department, and I had to do a bit of sweeping. I hope I did it with sympathy and understanding, because the problem of the ageing civil servant engaged in research is not an easy one. There comes a time when the research worker, disappointed in promotion and secure in his old age if he avoids blotting his copybook, becomes detached from all reality. He tends to lose interest in the practical application of his work to the design of aeroplanes and turns more and more to the ethereal realms of mathematical theory; as bodily weakness gradually puts an end to physical adventure, he turns readily to the adventure of the mind, to the purest realms of thought where in the nature of things no unpleasant consequences can follow if he makes a mistake.

It is easy to blackguard these ageing men and to deride their unproductive work, easy and unprofitable and unwise. Short-term ad hoc experiments to solve a particular problem in the design of aircraft were the main work of my department, but I was very well aware that basic research also has a place in such a set-up, the firm groundwork of pure knowledge upon which all useful short-term work must be erected. In the great mass of typescript chaff turned out by the Fox-Marvins and the Morrisons within the R.A.E. were hidden grains of truth. Callow young men entering the Establishment from the universities, avid for knowledge and enthusiastic in their early years, would read through all this guff and take it very seriously, and find and recognise the little grains of truth, and take them into their experience and use them as their tools for short-term work.

I had to steer a middle course, therefore, as every sensible new broom must do. Within the first year I had transferred two of the oldest of my scientific officers, and I had changed the line of three others. It was a busy year, because I got married soon after I went to Farnborough. Shirley was a local girl who had taught drawing and music in a little school in Farnham before the war; when the school evacuated she had become a tracer at the R.A.E. In the fourth year of the war she was sent to Boscombe Down to work in the drawing office; she had her desk and drawing board just outside my little glass cubicle, so that every time I looked up from my calculations I saw her auburn head bent over her tracing, which didn’t help the calculations. I stood it for a year, high-minded, thinking that one shouldn’t make passes at the girls in the office. Then we started to behave very badly, and got engaged.

We got a flat in Farnham with some difficulty and got married into it soon after I took up my new job. It was a very small flat, with just one bedroom and a sitting-room and a bathroom, and a kitchen that we had our meals in. It was big enough for all we wanted, and we were very happy. There wasn’t much for Shirley to do, since I was away all day, and we didn’t plan to start a family for a year or so. So she went back to teaching music and drawing in the school that she had taught in before, and one of the girls she taught was Elspeth Honey.

She told me about Elspeth one evening when we were sitting after the nine-o’clock news. Shirley was sewing a slip or something, and I was working at the first paper that I had been asked to read before the Royal Aeronautical Society, which I called ‘Performance Analysis of Aircraft Flying at High Mach Numbers’. It was something of a distinction that I had been asked to read this thing, and I was very busy working on it in the evenings.

Shirley told me about Elspeth as we sat there; she was teaching her to play the piano at that time. ‘She’s such a funny little thing,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘I can’t make out if she’s immensely clever or just plain bats.’

I looked up, laughing. ‘I’ve been wondering that about her father ever since I took over the department.’ Because Mr Theodore Honey was another of the old gang of budding Einsteins that I had inherited. So far I had left him alone, feeling that the work that he was doing on fatigue in light alloy structures was probably useful. But I must admit that there were moments when I had my doubts, when I wondered if Mr Honey was not sliding quietly into an inoffensive form of technical mania.

Shirley bent over her sewing. ‘She looks so odd,’ she said presently, ‘with her straight black hair and her white little face, and those ugly frocks she wears. She never seems to play with the other children. And she does say the queerest things sometimes.’

‘What sort of things?’ I asked. I was not quite happy in my mind about her father; subconsciously I was interested in anything to do with the Honey family.

She mocked me. ‘Call yourself a scientist, and you don’t know pyramidology! Even Elspeth knows that.’

‘It’s all about the Great Pyramid, in Egypt. Prophecies and all that sort of thing.’

I grinned. ‘That’s not the sort of science that I learned at college. Is that what they teach at your school?’

She bent to her work again, and said quietly, ‘No, it’s just Elspeth. She came and asked me if she could do her practising in break on the school piano, and I asked her why she couldn’t do it at home. She said there wasn’t time now, because she was helping her Daddy with his pyramidology. I asked her what that was, and she told me all about it. It seems that there’s a sort of directional bearing from two points in the Great Pyramid which is lined up on Iceland, just like a radar beam, and that’s where Our Lord will come down to earth at the end of the world, and that’s going to be quite soon. But Elspeth says her Daddy found a mistake in the calculations and he’s working it all out again, and she’s been helping him with the sums. She says it’s all terribly exciting because her Daddy thinks it will turn out that the ray goes through Glastonbury, because Jesus Christ came to live in Glastonbury when he was a young man and so He’ll probably want to go back when He comes again. But Elspeth hopes that the ray will go through Farnborough, because that’s the most important place in the world and, besides, it’s where her Daddy works.’

Shirley said all this without a smile, concentrated on her sewing. I stared at her incredulously. ‘Does Mr Honey believe all this?’

She looked up at me. ‘He must do, mustn’t he. Or he wouldn’t have told Elspeth. It’s such a pity that she hasn’t got a mother. It’s rather unnatural for a kid of twelve to go on like that, don’t you think?’

‘What happened to her mother?’ Anything about Honey was of interest to me now.

‘I think she died during the war. Elspeth and her father live in one of those little houses in Copse Road.’

‘I don’t think anybody does. I believe they’ve got a charwoman who comes in now and then. But Mr Honey does the cooking for them both. I know that, because Elspeth told me that she cooks the breakfast on Sundays, but next year she’s going to be allowed to do it every day.’

‘Just twelve—her birthday was last month. But she’s small for her age. You wouldn’t think to look at her that she was more than ten.’

I sat deep in thought. I was visualising my Mr Honey going home each evening to his little house to cook a high tea for his little girl, and then spend an hour telling her about the tangled prophecies connected with the Great Pyramid, and then putting her to bed. Did he hear her say her prayers, and if so, were they all about the Pyramid? And after that, alone in his small villa, what did he do? Did he go out to the cinema? I did not think that he was one to spend the evening in a pub—or was he. Did he spend the evenings pondering the energy absorption factor of light alloy structures, or checking the position of the stars in the year 2141 B.C., the datum year of the Great Pyramid. I wanted to know all I could about his background, because I had not then made up my mind if he was a useful research scientist or not. What Shirley had told me was not very reassuring.

‘I was talking to Sykie about Elspeth,’ she said quietly. ‘Of course, Sykie doesn’t really know much botany, only just enough to teach the children something elementary. Elspeth got her floored in class the other day by saying that a buttercup was pentamerous, and Sykie didn’t know if that was something rude or not. And so she made Elspeth tell them what she meant, and what she meant was that the buttercup has five of everything—five sepals in the calyx, five petals in the corolla, five carpels in the pistil, and so on. Sykie looked it up in the book afterwards, and she was quite right. But then she went on to say that the Bible was septamerous because it had seven of everything, and that’s why seven was a holy number. Sykie got out of that one by saying that it wasn’t botany.’

I went to the department next day resolved to give a good part of my time to checking up on Mr Honey and the progress of his research. I had not bothered him a great deal up till then, because it seemed to me that the work he was engaged on was of real importance to the modern aircraft, which was more than could be said for some of the other stuff that I had found going on in the place. Because the work was of importance to the aviation world it was imperative that it should be properly conducted, and although Mr Honey’s religious beliefs were no concern of mine a man who is eccentric in one sphere of his interests may well be eccentric in another.

As I have said, Mr Honey was working on fatigue in aircraft structures. Fatigue may be described as a disease of metal. When metals are subjected to an alternating load, after a great many reversals the whole character of the metal may alter, and this change can happen very suddenly. An aluminium alloy which has stood up quite well to many thousands of hours in flight may suddenly become crystalline and break under quite small forces, with most unpleasant consequences to the aeroplane. That is the general story of the effect that we call fatigue in aircraft structures, and we don’t know a great deal about it. Mr Honey’s duty was to try and find out more.

I went down to his stamping ground to see what he was doing. The Farnborough buildings at that time were a mixture of the old and the new, and Mr Honey occupied a shabby little room of glass and beaverboard in the annexe to the old balloon shed. Here he sat all day and covered sheet after sheet of foolscap paper with the records of his research, or pored over the work of scientists in many languages; he could read both French and German fluently. Outside his office an area of the ground floor of the balloon shed had been allocated to his work, and here he had quite a major experiment in progress.

The Rutland Reindeer was the current Transatlantic airliner at that time, and still is, of course; the Mark I model, which went into production first, had radial engines, though now they all have jets. Two years before I came upon the scene the strength tests of the tailplane had been carried out in my department, and for this two tailplanes had been provided by the Company for test to destruction. They were quite big units, fifty-five feet in span, as big as a twin-engined bomber’s wing. It had only been necessary to break one of these expensive tailplanes for the strength tests for the airworthiness of the machine, and the other one remained upon our hands until eighteen months later Mr Honey put in a plea for it, and got it.

He had set it up in the balloon shed, horizontally as it would be in flight. He had designed a considerable structure of steel girders to support it at the centre section as it would be held in the aircraft, and this structure was pivoted in such a way that it could be vibrated, or jiggeted, by a whacking great electric motor driving a whole battery of cams to simulate the various harmonics that occur in flight. He had chosen a loading for the tailplane that would reproduce the normal cruising flight conditions, and he had started up the motor a couple of months before and sat back to wait for something to happen.

All that was going on as I was settling in to my new job and as my predecessor had authorised it I had to let it take its course, though I was not too happy about it. I had a feeling that a competent researcher could have got his data from a less expensive test, and apart from that the thing was a considerable nuisance for the noise it made. It may be possible to make mechanical vibrations without making noise, but it’s not often done, and this thing could be heard all over the Establishment. And apparently it was going to go on for ever, because nobody but Mr Honey thought that tail would ever break by reason of what he was doing to it. It looked much too strong.

Honey got up as I went into his office. He was a smaller man than I am, with black hair turning grey; he was dressed in a very shabby suit that had been cheap to start with. He always looked a bit dirty and down at heels, and his appearance did not help him, because he was one of the ugliest men I have ever met. He had a sallow face with the features of a frog, and rather a tired and discontented frog at that. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles with very thick glasses, and he was as blind as a bat without them. Looking at him, my wife’s description of his daughter came into my mind, the dark-haired, white-faced, ugly little girl. Of course, she would be like that.

I said, ‘Morning, Mr Honey. I’ve just come down to have a look at your tailplane. Anything happening to it yet?’

He said, ‘Oh no—everything is going on quite normally, so far. We can’t expect much yet, you know.’ He had a few strain gauges mounted on various parts of the structure and he was reading them every three hours and graphing the readings. He showed me the curves illustrating the daily deformations of the structure as the test went on; after a few initial disturbances, due to the rivets bedding down, the curves flattened out and went along as a straight line. It was behaving just exactly as one would expect a safe structure to behave.

We stood and looked at it, and walked around it in the noise. Then we went back into his office, where the noise level was lower, and talked about it for a bit. I cannot say I was impressed with what I saw and heard. But for the expense of the set-up, I should have been very much tempted to call off the entire experiment.

‘What’s your prognostication, Mr Honey?’ I asked presently. ‘How long do you think it will go on for?’

He smiled nervously, as the pure researchers always do when you try to pin them down to something definite. ‘One has to make so many assumptions,’ he said. ‘The mass energy absorption factor, the factor that I call U_m in my papers—that varies somewhat with each type of structure, and one really has to do a preliminary experiment to establish that.’

That sounded like an old story to me, and I was not impressed. ‘You mean, with a tailplane like this you’ve got to break one first under a fatigue test, just like this, to establish the factor?’

‘And then,’ I said, rather naughtily, ‘having found out the factor you can calculate back and find out when it broke.’

He glanced at me, uncertain if I were laughing at him or not. ‘Of course, you can then apply that factor to other tails of similar design, vibrated on a different range of frequencies.’

I said doubtfully, ‘Yes, I suppose so, when you’ve built up a good deal of experience.’

I spent most of the rest of the morning going through his papers with him and getting acquainted with his theory. I knew the broad outline of his ideas already, and because I knew them I had avoided going into them in more detail until I really had to. Because, like all my other Einsteins, Mr Honey in his research upon fatigue had gone all nuclear.

When the fundamental theories about atomic fission became generally known to scientists in 1945, they came as a godsend to all middle-aged researchers. Here was a completely new field of pure thought to explore, whether it had anything to do with their immediate job or not. Each of them very soon convinced himself that in an application and extension of nuclear theory lay the solution to all his problems, whether they were concerned with the effect of sunlight on paint or the formation of sludge in engine-lubricating oil. It seemed at times that every scientist in the Establishment had made himself into an expert upon nuclear matters, all but me, who had come from the material and earthly pursuit of testing aeroplanes in flight, and so had started late in the race. I didn’t know much about the atom, and I was very sceptical if nuclear matters really affected my department at all.

However, Mr Honey was convinced they did, and he had built up an imposing structure of theory upon a nuclear basis. Quite simply, what he held was that when a structure like a tailplane is vibrated a tiny quantity of energy is absorbed into it, proportionate to the mass of the structure and the time that the treatment goes on for and a certain integral of strain. He had some evidence for this assertion, for he produced papers by Koestlinger of Basle University and by Schiltgrad of Upsala indicating that something of the sort does happen. Schiltgrad had made attempts to trace what happens to this lost energy, and had produced the negative result that it did not appear in any of the normal forms, as heat, electrical potential, or momentum. Mr Honey, sitting brooding over all this work, had convinced himself that this small energy flow produced a state of tension within the nucleus of aluminium of which the alloy is mainly composed, and that when this tension has built up to a certain degree one or more neutrons are released, resulting in an isotopic form of aluminium with crystalline affinities. This was the bare bones of his theory, and it was supported by about seventy pages of pure mathematics. It all seemed a bit like the Great Pyramid to me, and as difficult to criticise.

At the end of an hour or so with him I said, ‘What value have you assigned to this quantity U_m for that tailplane out there?’

He said, ‘Well—provisionally—just for getting a rough idea of how long the trial is likely to go on for, you see, I made a rough estimate—’ He fumbled with his papers, shuffled them, dropped one on the floor and scrabbled after it, picked it up, looked at it upside down, turned it right way up, and said, ‘Here it is. 2·863 × 10^-7. That’s in C.G.S. units, of course.’

I took the sheet from him and studied it. It was untidy work, half in pencil and half in ink, written in a vile hand, rather dirty. ‘Those are just the rough notes,’ he said nervously. ‘I shall write it all up properly later on.’

I nodded. One must not, must not ever, be influenced by gaucheries when dealing with these people. Untidiness may be a sign of slovenly thinking in an adult man, but it can also be a sign of an immensely quick intellect that gives no time for neat and patient writing. Mr Honey was obviously nervous of me, and he was showing at his worst.

‘This figure, 2·863,’ I said at last. ‘That’s a pretty exact figure, Mr Honey—four-figure accuracy. When that constant goes into your theory, the time to reach fatigue failure will be directly proportional to that, won’t it?’ I turned to one of the final sheets of mathematics that he had displayed before me.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘The time to nuclear separation is directly proportional to U_m.’

‘Well, I don’t call that a rough estimate,’ I said. ‘That’s a pretty detailed estimate, surely? I mean, that figure says that in a given case something may be going to happen in two thousand eight hundred and sixty-three hours. I should have said a rough estimate was one that said something would happen between two and three thousand hours.’ I glanced at him.

He shifted uneasily. ‘Well, naturally, I went into it as carefully as I could.’ He showed me what he had based his estimate upon. It was a pile about three feet high of the Proceedings of practically every engineering learned body in Europe and America. ‘I couldn’t find anything about light alloy structures in fatigue prior to the year 1927,’ he said dolefully. ‘I don’t know if there’s anything else I ought to have got hold of.’

I laughed. ‘I shouldn’t think so, Mr Honey. If you’ve gone back to 1927 you’ve probably got everything there is.’

I turned over the sheafs of papers that were his analysis of previous trials and from which he had deduced the value of 2·863 × 10^-7 for U_m, and I came to the conclusion that whatever bees he might have in his bonnet, he was at any rate a patient and an indefatigable worker, if rather an untidy one. At the end of ten minutes I said, ‘Well, if this is what you call a rough estimate, Mr Honey, I’d like to see a detailed one.’

I turned over the papers before me. ‘What does that mean to that tailplane out there?’ I indicated the Reindeer tail upon the framework outside, booming and droning, filling the whole building with its noise. ‘When do you expect something to happen?’

He said, ‘There should be some evidence of nuclear separation in about 1,440 hours—taking that value for U_m.’

He hesitated. ‘I rather think that the material could be expected to suffer some change about that time,’ he said, hedging. ‘Under the normal loads imposed upon it—yes, I think that failure would probably occur.’ He shifted uneasily and said, as if in self-defence, ‘The isotope is probably crystalline.’

‘I see.’ I stood for a moment looking at the test through his window. ‘How long has it been going on for now?’

‘About two months,’ he said. ‘We started on the twenty-sixth of May. Up till this morning it had run four hundred and twenty-three hours. It only runs in the daytime—the Director wouldn’t allow it to run on night shift. It’s basic research, you see.’

He said, ‘Well—yes, about that time. I was expecting to learn something from it before Christmas, anyway.’

I stood silent for a minute, deep in thought. ‘Well, that’s all very interesting, Mr Honey,’ I said at last. ‘May I take what you’ve re-written so far and glance it over in my office? It all takes a bit of absorbing, you know.’

He sorted out a bunch of papers and gave them to me, and I tucked them under my arm, and walked back to my office in a brown study. Mr Honey was experimenting on a Reindeer tail, and what Mr Honey had lost sight of altogether was that Reindeer aircraft had come into service on the Atlantic route that summer. They were flying the Atlantic daily with full loads of passengers, from Heathrow to Gander, from Gander to New York or Montreal.

Although he didn’t seem to realise it, Mr Honey had now said that the Reindeer tail was quite unsafe, that in his opinion it would break, suddenly and without warning, after 1,440 hours of flying.

It was the end of the morning. I left the paper in my office and walked up to the senior staff lunch-room. I found the Director there drinking a sherry; I waited for an opportunity when he was disengaged, and said, ‘Have you got a quarter of an hour free this afternoon, sir?’

‘It’s about Mr Honey and his fatigue test,’ I said. ‘I’d like you to be aware of what’s going on.’

‘Can’t help being aware of it,’ he answered. ‘You can hear the damn thing at the other end of the factory—it’s worse than the wind tunnels. When is it coming to an end?’

‘He says it’s going on till Christmas,’ I replied. ‘I think it ought to be accelerated. But if I can come along this afternoon I’ll tell you about it.’

I turned away to go in to have lunch, but he detained me. ‘Has Honey been all right recently?’

‘I’m glad to hear that.’ There was a momentary pause. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘there has been a little trouble in the past. He seems to hold very firm ideas on certain semi-religious subjects.’ I glanced at him in inquiry. ‘About the lost ten tribes of Israel and their identity with Britain, and that sort of thing.’

‘I hadn’t heard that one,’ I said. ‘What I heard was something to do with the Great Pyramid.’

He laughed. ‘Oh, that’s another part of it—that comes in as well.’ He spoke more seriously. ‘No, just before you came in there was a procession of these people in Woking, and it got broken up by a number of Jewish rowdies, and Honey was taken up and charged with creating a breach of the peace. He got bound over. I mention that because it’s one of the matters that one has to bear in mind, that he has rather odd ideas on certain subjects.’

‘Poor old Honey,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He’s a man I’m very sorry for. But if you should decide at any time that a change would be desirable, I wouldn’t oppose it.’

I went in to lunch aware that the Director didn’t think a lot of Mr Honey. Anderson was there, who looks after radar equipment and development for civil air lines. I sat down next to him and said, ‘I say, you can tell me. How many Reindeers are Central Air Transport Organisation operating now?’

He shook his head. ‘Not much, anyway. They only put them on the route last month, because they waited until four had been delivered. I shouldn’t think any of the machines had done more than two or three hundred hours yet.’

‘Like the Reindeer? Oh, they’re very pleased with it. It’s a lovely job, you know—nice to fly in and nice to handle. I think it’s going to be a great success.’

I went back to my office after lunch and sat turning over Mr Honey’s papers, studying his Goodman diagrams, thinking out what I was going to say to the Director. Nuclear fission was quite outside my experience; I did not know enough about it even to read Mr Honey’s work intelligently, let alone criticise it or determine for myself the truth of his prognosis. And turning over his pages, disconsolate, I saw one or two sentences that made me wonder if Mr Honey knew much more than I did, for all his pages of mathematics.

I went down to the Director that afternoon and told him all about it. ‘On his estimates, he reckons that the Reindeer tail, the front spar, will fail by fatigue in 1,440 hours,’ I said. ‘I don’t much like the sound of that. The Reindeers are in service now.’

I told him all about the nuclear fission theory and the separation of the neutron that produced an isotopic form of aluminium within the alloy. ‘Quite frankly, sir,’ I said, ‘I don’t understand all this myself. I’m not capable of criticising it. If he’s correct it’s very serious indeed, and all those aircraft should be grounded. But knowing something about Mr Honey—well, he may not be correct.’

He thought for a moment. ‘The test will show. How long is that going on for?’

‘It’s only done four hundred and twenty-three hours,’ I replied. ‘He’s not expecting it to break before next Christmas.’ I paused, and then I said, ‘I should think the aeroplanes are piling up hours quicker than the test. After all, they fly day and night, but the test only runs in our normal working hours.’

‘I don’t know, sir. One of them flew into a hill the other day, in Labrador or somewhere. I asked Anderson at lunch how many hours the rest of them had done. He said they’d only done two or three hundred hours each.’

‘That gives us a little time,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know they’d lost one of them.’

‘It was in all the papers,’ I told him. ‘The Russian Ambassador to Ottawa was killed in it, Mr Oskonikoff or something. All the lot of them were killed.’

I nodded. ‘That was the prototype Reindeer, the one we had here for the trials. But that’s a clear case; it flew into the mountain. Hit just at the top of a precipice and fell about five hundred feet down into the forest, in flames. It always beats me how a pilot manages to get into that sort of position, with all the aids we give them.’

‘It’s the human factor,’ he said. ‘Still—I agree, you wouldn’t expect mistakes of that sort in a decent air line.’ He turned to the papers. ‘I don’t quite know what to say about all this, Scott. I’m like you—I can’t criticise this nuclear stuff, myself. It’s clearly a matter of urgency. I think we ought to put it up to I.S.A.R.B., on a high priority.’

The Inter-Services Atomic Research Board were certainly the proper people to advise us upon Mr Honey’s stuff, provided they would do it quick. ‘I’m very nervous about any delay,’ I said. ‘Could you send it personally, sir?’ I hesitated. ‘I’d really like to ground those Reindeers till we get the thing cleared up, but I suppose that isn’t practical.’

He stared out of the window. ‘That means, stop the entire operation of C.A.T.O.’s Atlantic service … I think we’ll have to get some supporting evidence for Mr Honey’s theories before we could do that. But I agree with you, Scott, this thing has to be taken seriously. I’ll send it to Sir Phillip Dolbear tonight, with a personal note.’

I went back to my office satisfied with this; I knew Dolbear to be acute and hardworking, a good chairman for the Atomic Board. I sent for Mr Honey and told him what was in the wind. I reminded him that he was playing with a real Reindeer tail, and that when he said blithely that his experiment would culminate at 1,440 hours, he really meant that real aeroplanes would crash after that flying time.

He blinked at me through his heavy glasses. ‘Of course, I know that,’ he said. ‘But till the research work is completed, everyone is guessing in the dark. You must realise that in all this kind of work one has to feel one’s way. I may be very much in error, very much indeed. There’s nothing definite about it yet.’

‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so. In fact, I’ve been preparing myself for a real disappointment about Christmas time. It could quite well go on till April, or even longer.’

He lived and thought in quite a different world from me if he could contemplate waiting a year for data on a thing like this. He was pure scientist all through, and I suppose I’m not. I told him that Sir Phillip Dolbear would probably want to have a talk with him in a day or two, and he went away.

At the end of the week Mr Honey went to London at the request of Sir Phillip. I sent for him next day and asked him how he had got on.

He looked uneasy and unhappy. ‘I don’t think he was really very much interested in the subject,’ he said.

‘What makes you think that?’ I asked quietly. It looked as if they had not agreed too well.

He was silent for a minute. ‘He was just out to pick holes in it,’ he said at last. ‘You aren’t going to get a very good report. He’s the sort of man who wants everything docketed and proved, and each stage made secure and buttoned up before you go on to the next. Well, as I told you, there’s a great deal still to be confirmed in the entire basic theory. It will take years to do that. These experiments we are doing now are meant to confirm all the points that I have made assumptions on, one by one. I told him that. But he insisted on regarding the test we’re doing now as a test of the Reindeer tail. I told him it was nothing of the sort. It’s a test to find our errors in the theory.’

‘But Mr Honey,’ I said, ‘this test is, in fact, a fatigue test of the Reindeer tailplane. The Reindeer is out and flying, carrying passengers across the Atlantic, and what you say is that the tailplane will break up in 1,440 hours of flying. That’s a very serious thing to say. It means that all those aircraft should be grounded.’

He said unhappily, ‘I never said anything of the sort. I told you I was quite prepared for a disappointment. Theoretically, and if all the assumptions I have made should be exactly and precisely correct, a separation of the neutron should occur at 1,440 hours. The purpose of this test is to show where the assumptions are wrong and to correct the theory. You’re trying to turn a piece of basic research into an ad hoc experiment. Well, you can’t do that.’

‘I see your point,’ I said slowly. ‘But that doesn’t help us in deciding what to do about the Reindeers that are in service now.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ he retorted. ‘It certainly won’t help them to keep badgering me like this. Sir Phillip Dolbear didn’t believe a word I said, and he’s quite right. Nothing is proved yet, nothing is confirmed. You’re trying to make me run before I can walk, and the result is I just look a fool. Well, that’s not very helpful.’

‘I didn’t mean to do that, Mr Honey,’ I said. ‘I’m just trying to find out what we ought to do about these aircraft that are in service now.’

‘Well, I can’t help you there,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you all I can, and I’m not going to be bullied into saying any more. You’ve got your troubles, and I’ve got mine.’ He did not say that most of his troubles were of my making, but he meant it.

He went away, and I rang up Ferguson in the Department of Experiment and Research at the Ministry, who serves as our London office. ‘Ferguson,’ I said, ‘this is Scott speaking. Look, we’re getting a bit doubtful about the Reindeer tailplane; there’s a suggestion that fatigue might crop up at a fairly early stage. It’s got rather an exaggerated aspect ratio, you know. I believe I’m right in saying that C.A.T.O. are operating five or six of them on the Atlantic route. Could you get on to the Corporation or the A.R.B.—without alarming anyone unduly, because I think it may be a mare’s nest—and find out how many hours flying these machines have done?’

He said at once, ‘They can’t have done much. They’ve only been operational for about a month. What number of hours represents the danger point?’

‘Mr Honey’s estimate is 1,440 hours. But as I say, I think it’s a mare’s nest.’

He laughed over the telephone. ‘Oh, this is Honey, is it? In that case, I should think it might be. I’ll find out from the Corporation, and let you know.’ He rang back later in the morning. The longest time that any of the machines had done was 305 hours, up to the evening before.

Next day at about tea-time Shirley rang me up in the office. She said, ‘Dennis, darling, I’m sorry to worry you. I’ve got Elspeth Honey here because she wanted to listen to the Pastoral Symphony on the wireless, and theirs is bust. I’m just going to give her tea. She wanted to let her father know where she is, because she won’t be home when he gets there. I was wondering if you’d like to bring him back with you to pick up Elspeth.’

I rang up Mr Honey and told him, and suggested that he came back with me in my car instead of going by the bus, as he usually did. I was rather pleased to have the opportunity to do something for him, because the last time that we had spoken our relations had not been exactly cordial, and I didn’t like to feel that he was nursing a grievance against me. I was aware, too, that there was a good deal of reason on his side. He met me at the car at half-past five, and we drove out on the road to Farnham.

‘It’s very kind of Mrs Scott to invite Elspeth like this,’ he said diffidently. ‘She mustn’t let her make herself a nuisance.’

‘Not a bit,’ I said. ‘She’s probably company for Shirley—for my wife. It gets a bit slow for her sometimes when I’m away all day.’

‘That is the trouble, of course,’ he replied. ‘I mean, with Elspeth. It’s all right in the term time, but in the holidays it’s sometimes very difficult.’

‘I should think it is,’ I said, thinking of his womanless ménage. ‘What do you do with her in the holidays?’

He said, ‘There’s a clergyman who runs a holiday home for children down at Bournemouth, and she goes there sometimes, but it’s rather expensive. And he’s started to take mental defectives now—very backward children, you know—so it’s not quite so suitable as it used to be. But really, Elspeth’s so good at playing by herself that I don’t know that she isn’t just as happy at home.’

The thought of his little girl of twelve spending her holidays alone all day in the villa in Copse Road was not an attractive one. ‘It’s very difficult,’ I said.

‘It’s a great deal easier in term time,’ he remarked. ‘Elspeth likes being at school, and she’s very fond of Mrs Scott. She talks about her a great deal.’

I was not surprised to hear that Elspeth liked being at school if her holidays were spent alone in a deserted house. ‘You’ve met my wife, have you, Honey?’ I asked. ‘Miss Mansfield, who used to be a tracer in the Aerodynamics? A girl with fair, sort of auburn hair?’

At the flat we found Shirley and Elspeth sitting over tea in the sitting-room listening to the wireless; we went in quietly, not to disturb them. I made a fresh pot of tea for Honey and myself, and we sat listening to the symphony with them till it was finished. It was the first time I had seen Elspeth Honey, and this pause gave me an opportunity to study her. As Shirley had said, she was an ugly child, but this ugliness seemed to me to be more associated with her unbecoming clothes and the way her hair was cut than with the child herself. She had rather sharp, pale features; she was thin; and she looked intelligent. She did not look to be a very happy child. She had fine, well-shaped hands, and when she moved she did not seem to be clumsy. If she had had a mother, I reflected, she might have been very different.

The symphony came to an end, and Shirley reached over and switched off the set. She turned to the child. ‘Like it?’ she asked.

My wife got up and began to gather up the plates and put them on the trolley. ‘I thought you would. They’re going to do one every week. Would you like to come again?’

Shirley said, ‘Of course not. I was only going to pile these things together and take them out.’

‘They’ve got to be washed up sometime, Mrs Scott. I can do it—honestly, I can.’

Her father said, ‘Do let her help you, please. She’s very good at washing up.’

‘I can do it,’ the child repeated. ‘Daddy drops things, so I always do it at home.’

They took the trolley out with them, and I sat talking with Honey as we smoked. I had only half my mind on our conversation and I forget what it was about to start with. I was furtively studying the man that I was talking to and trying to sum him up, the man who said the Reindeer tail would come to bits in 1,440 hours. The man who believed that, and who also believed in the Great Pyramid and in the descent of Our Lord to earth at Glastonbury or Farnborough in the very near future. The man who lived alone, and seemed quite unconscious that by doing so he was denying most of the simple joys of childhood to his little girl. The man who took umbrage in the office at small slights; the man who lived in an unreal, scientific dream. The man who walked in some queer semi-religious procession in Woking, and got had up by the police for some brawl that arose from it. The man who said the Reindeer tail would come to bits in 1,440 hours. The man whose judgment we had to accept or to discard.

And presently he added something to the picture I was building up. He was looking at the backs of my books in the bookcase, reading the titles, as one always does in a strange house. I woke up suddenly from my abstraction to hear him say, ‘I see you’ve got Rutherford’s book there.’ And he indicated The Aryan Flow stuck in among the novels.

When I was at college I was interested for a very short time in the movements of the races of peoples about the world, and this volume was a relic of that passing enthusiasm. I had not opened it for at least ten years, but it was there still. I said idly, ‘I think it’s very good.’

He got up and picked the book out of the shelf, and turned the pages. ‘Sharon Turner covers much of the same ground,’ he said. ‘But it’s Rutherford who identifies the ten tribes with the Scythians. And after all, that must have been the most difficult part, mustn’t it?’

I was a little at a loss. ‘I’ve really rather forgotten,’ I said. ‘It’s a long time since I read it.’

‘You ought to look it over again,’ he said earnestly. ‘It was the most wonderful migration in the world.’ He stared at me through his thick glasses. ‘The ten tribes, led away into captivity by Shalmaneser, King of Assyria—that’s all in the Second Book of Esdras. The Persians called them Sakae—our word Saxon, of course, and Rutherford proves their identity with the Scythians. And then, from his end, Sharon Turner traces back the Anglo-Saxons all through Europe to the Scythians. It’s fascinating.’

He went on, ‘It explains so much. The Druidic forms of worship, that were nothing but the old religion of Israel brought here in its entirety.’ He paused and then said, ‘That’s what impressed Joseph of Arimathea so much when first he came to England on his tin business. That’s why he brought his nephew here when He was a little boy, because he saw the Child was something quite unusual, and he wanted Him to come in contact with the priests of England. That’s why Our Lord came back to Glastonbury as a young man and lived here for years before His ministry, because he had to live in the precepts of the old Israel which the Druid priests had kept here undebased. That’s why Joseph came back to Glastonbury with Martha and Mary and Lazarus after the death of Christ, because they wanted to settle down and found His church in the place that He had loved so well.’

The Reindeer tail, he said, would come to bits in 1,440 hours. ‘I’m not very well up in all this, I’m afraid,’ I said.

Contents

About the Author

ALSO BY NEVIL SHUTE

1