Tomorrow Is Too Far (7 page)

‘Close the throttle. That’s it. Brake ... ’

They rolled on to the tarmac and came almost to a stop before Carson pressed hard against the rudder bar. G-ARTZ swung round and he straightened the nose-wheel, opened the throttle and began wobbling along the taxiway at the required fast walking pace. It was slightly easier to control the thing on a paved surface than it had been on grass--very slightly easier, and ‘control’ was hardly the word.

His shirt was sticking to his back, his tie was strangling him and the cockpit felt like a Turkish bath.

‘.. . Try to keep in the centre of the taxiway, Mr Carson,’ said the voice in his right ear, ‘and remember that your wings project nearly fifteen feet on each side. Don’t pass too close to that fuel bowser. That’s good. You concentrate on the aircraft and I’ll handle the radio this time ...’

Pebbles unclipped the mike, brought it to within half an inch of his lips and said something which was lost in the noise of the engines. From the back of the cabin an over-amplified voice rattled,
‘You are dear to the holding point on runway Zero Nine, Tango Zulu. Acknowledge please.’

Pebbles’s lips moved again, then he racked the mike and said, ‘The holding point is that white line about fifty yards ahead. As you come up to it, close the throttle, brake and swing the aircraft until it is pointing downwind at an angle of forty-five degrees to the runway, then lock the brakes. You will then be in a position to see if the runway is clear and that there are no aircraft making their final approach. If there is an aircraft on finals your attitude will tell him that you are waiting for him to land ... ‘

‘That’s good. Now
lock
the brakes, Mr Carson. We perform our pre-take-off checks at this point. There is a simple mnemonic which will help you remember the sequence, but this time just do it with me. Trim, set. Throttle, set to fast tick-over and friction nut not too tight. Mixture, rich. Carburettor, cold ...’

He can do multiplication and division
, Carson thought crazily
, and joined-up handwriting and
... But there was no time to think about that. He could not remember a time in his whole life when he had felt so harassed and frightened and excited. Pebbles was a blithering idiot to expect ...

But then Pebbles was supposed to be an idiot, so simple-minded that he might very well think that six years in an aircraft factory had given Carson a greater understanding of aeroplanes than Pebbles had gained in three. It was possible that Pebbles’s mind worked like that.

The sweat running from Carson’s pores changed from hot to cold.

‘Tango Zulu,’
roared the voice from the back,
‘you are clear for take-off.’
Pebbles added, ‘Release the brake, Mr Carson, open the throttle and move into the centre of the runway. Line up the nose with that clump of trees on the skyline--that’s a useful landmark during take-offs from zero nine, especially if there is a cross-wind trying to blow you off course. No, we are not quite centred, but it wasn’t bad for a first try ... ‘

Carson blinked sweat out of his eyes and croaked something which was unintelligible even to himself.

‘I’ll handle the take-off if you don’t mind. But keep your feet lightly on the rudder pedals, your right hand on the control column and your left on the throttle--I want you to get the feel of things for next time. Right? I have control

‘The words have not been invented,’ said Carson fervently, ‘properly to express my relief.’

Pebbles nodded seriously and opened the duplicate throttle. The engine roared and they surged forward, picking up speed by the second. Under his feet the pedals made small, almost unnoticeable movements keeping them centred on the runway, and Pebbles was talking about watching the ASI for the unstick speed. The control column moved back a fraction of an inch, the undercarriage stopped rumbling against the ground and they were airborne. The runway dropped away, the club-house and the diminutive control tower slid under the edge of the port wing. The heads of the people standing outside it were exactly the same size as the wing rivets.

There were things he was supposed to do and remember at three hundred feet and six hundred feet and a thousand feet and Pebbles was telling him about them in detail, but Carson was watching the cars on the main road and Tango Zulu’s shadow flickering across them.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I was enjoying the view.’

‘You aren’t supposed to enjoy the view in the early lessons,’ said Pebbles. ‘If you’ll look at the airspeed indicator, altimeter, engine rev counter and the attitude of the aeroplane at the moment you will see that our speed is seventy knots and that we are climbing under full power. I want you to maintain this attitude by judging the position of the horizon in the windscreen and watching the ASI. If the needle falls below seventy it means we are climbing too steeply and may stall--there is an audible warning before this point is reached--unless the climb angle is reduced. Should the speed increase, this means the climbing angle has flattened and we are not gaining height at the optimum rate.

‘To decrease the angle of climb,’ he went on, ‘ease the control column very gently forward. To increase the climb, ease it back. If one wing drops, correct by moving the stick to the opposite side. Very small movements of the control column are sufficient. Do you understand, Mr Carson?’

Carson nodded.

‘When the altimeter shows fifteen hundred feet, ease the stick forward to level out,’ said Pebbles. ‘Then close the throttle until the engine rev counter shows 22,000 r.p.m. That is an economical cruising power for level flight. You have control.’

Carson began to perspire again, freely. The nose started to drop and he eased the stick back. Immediately Tango Zulu tried to stand on its tail and the stall warning beeped querulously. He pushed the stick slightly forward and they arced over into a dive. One wing went down and he compensated for that, then the other wing dropped and he over compensated for
that
. The horizon was sliding about all over the place and the aircraft seemed to be in a continuous three-dimensional skid that he had no hope of controlling ...

‘This is a very responsive aeroplane,’ said Pebbles as he put a steadying hand on the control column. ‘Relax, Mr Carson. Right? You have control.’

It was like trying to balance on a single stilt. Carson gritted his teeth and laboured furiously at not moving anything more than a fraction of an inch in any direction. When he levelled out at fifteen hundred feet, throttled back to cruising power and held the thing in fairly straight and more or less level flight, he thought he deserved more than five minutes watchful silence followed by directions for making a gentle turn to starboard ...

He made several gentle turns to port and starboard. He had the odd sensation of being motionless while pictures of the hazy blue sky, the horizon and the patchwork of roads and fields below were flat images projected on to the outside of the perspex canopy. To move the pictures in a way that would please Pebbles one had to be very neat and accurate in one’s movements. Carson tried very hard to do it neatly, the way he did most things, and gradually he began to think that his slipping and skidding all over the sky might not be quite as bad as when he started.

More and more often he looked at the ground below while he was banking, at the doll’s houses, doll’s villages and towns, at the roads like black shoe-laces and the microscopic cars and asking himself what the hell he was doing up here? But the question was rhetorical.

He was flying an aeroplane.

His body felt as if it was being boiled in its own sweat. His shoulders and neck ached with tension and his teeth were clenched so tightly his jaw hurt. But suddenly he wanted to laugh, and did.

Pebbles said, ‘Head for the airfield, Mr Carson. We don’t want to work you too hard on the first day....’

He had wanted to talk to Pebbles, but the instructor had to take up another pupil as soon as they landed. Carson was not too disappointed, however--his feet had not yet touched the ground and he doubted his ability to hold any sort of coherent conversation with anyone. When Jeff Donnelly met him later in the clubhouse, it was a good thing that the treasurer did all the talking.

‘How did you make out, Joe? Terrible, eh? All thumbs. One of the early fringe benefits of learning to fly is that you lose two pounds during every lesson. But don’t worry, it will come.

‘John works you hard, though,’ Jeff rattled on. ’But then if you want to sightsee you should be in the passenger seat, right? He’s a bit finickety about checks and inspections, too--treats Tango Zulu like a supersonic jet, or as if he’s married to it and they’re still on their honeymoon! I’m not criticising him, mind. If you learn to fly like John Pebbles you’ll certainly die in bed ...’

During the drive back Carson kept thinking how strange and pleasant it was to have a horizon which remained horizontal even when he came to a sharp bend. And later, when he was back at his flat, he found that he could not concentrate on a book, or listen to a record or do anything but sit watching the mental tele-recording which played itself over and over in his mind’s eye. When he went to bed it was even worse.

Learning to fly had been something he had wanted to do as a kid, and now it was, or should be, simply a means of getting closer to Pebbles for security reasons. But his normal, everyday thought processes seemed to have suffered multiple derailment. He found it impossible to think coherently about the shy, stupid, Hart-Ewing Pebbles, or the ultra-secret project or anything but the ground and sky as they had looked from fifteen hundred feet, tilting and wheeling around him because he told them to. It was like asking a man to think about routine office work on his honeymoon.

Carson had never been on a honeymoon, but he felt that it was a true analogy.

There had been a succession of fine weekends, so good that Carson had learned how to fly straight and level, climb, descend, perform gentle turns and survive the rather hectic lesson on stall recovery. On his third lesson he wobbled down the runway and staggered into the air with the stall warning hooting derisively all the way up to three hundred feet. It was possibly the worst take-off ever perpetrated, but it had been all his own work.

Subsequent take-offs improved and he moved on to circuits and landings. He would continue to do circuits and landings until he satisfied Pebbles and the CFI that he could take off
and
land safely. He had been sitting within a few inches of Pebbles for something like seven hours without being able to get really close to him.

‘Does he make you feel uncomfortable, Joe?’ said Jeff Donnelly when Carson brought up the subject during lunch. ‘You can change your instructor if you like. Have a word with the CFI.’

‘I’m not uncomfortable with him,’ said Carson, then added, ‘Well, perhaps a little, when he’s expecting me to land that thing and the runway won’t hold still. I don’t want to change instructors, but outside flying time he seems to avoid me--or is it just my inferiority complex showing...?’

‘No,’ said Jeff seriously. ‘He is a first-class pilot and instructor, but some people remember him as he used to be and talk about it to newcomers when they ought to know better. We like him and ... ‘

‘If you don’t let me in on this dark and desperate secret,’ said Carson, ‘I shall die of a curable disease, curiosity! ‘

‘That,’ said Donnelly, ‘is one of the sneakiest forms of blackmail I have ever encountered...’

According to Donnelly, Pebbles had been coming to the club for about three years--four or five months, in fact, before he had joined Hart-Ewing’s. He had come to their attention first as an odd, rather pathetic character who daily haunted the edge of the airfield in the morning and afternoon to watch the planes take off and land.

When he began wandering into the hangar for a closer look at the aircraft they had tried to shoo him away, but gently because he looked so desperately puzzled about everything they said to him and his clothes were always muddy and rumpled. Then one day he arrived looking as if he had fallen into a muddy ditch and somebody had taken him into the club-house to dry off. They discovered that he was not a tramp, that except for the fresh mud his clothes were clean and that he was not a nut--just retarded, childish.

So they found odd jobs for him to do. He could not talk very well and some of the mistakes he made in word and deed were very ... elementary. When he was not tidying the club-house or helping make sandwiches behind the bar, he could always be found standing beside a plane and looking into the cockpit, his face like that of a child trying to do a difficult problem in mental arithmetic.

On the weekend of the yearly international rally, when aircraft from all over had flown in to take part in the first day’s flying display, John Pebbles had turned up in a dark suit with only his shoes muddy and no tie. The CFI’s wife had insisted that Jeff Donnelly give him a club tie--he had learned how to clean his shoes by then--because he never took the money they tried to give him from time to time. He did not seem to understand money, nor was he capable of using public transport to get from where he lived to the airfield, hence the muddy shoes. Somehow he had become the club mascot, replacing the export reject cross-eyed idol somebody had brought back from India, and without being too forceful about it the members let it be known that this was one lame dog who was not to be kicked.

Two weeks after the rally Wayne Tillotson visited the club to get, as he was fond of putting it, the taste of flying supersonic computers out of his mouth. On impulse he had taken John Pebbles in the passenger seat and, being a cautious man, strapped him in very firmly in case their mascot got violent. But the precaution was unnecessary--Pebbles’s reaction, according to Tillotson, had been one of excitement approaching ecstasy. Again on impulse he had allowed Pebbles to take control.

They were gone for over two hours and when they returned Tillotson could not talk about the trip in detail. Pebbles had tried to say a lot but he did not at that time have the vocabulary and he was so excited that he stuttered like a machine-gun. Shortly afterwards Tillotson got him a job in Hart-Ewing’s.