The shutter slammed, but a moment later the door opened and Geoffrey Ronson’s well-remembered voice called from the gloom: “Come in, you old bastard. Wipe your feet and leave your sabotage gear outside.”
They shook hands vigorously, grinning with mutual pleasure at meeting again. Then Geoff led Alan past the bulky radar receivers (how clumsy and old-fashioned they now looked!) and into his little office.
“Before we start nattering,” said Alan, “let me dump the stuff I’ve brought. You understand how it’s got to be handled?”
“Yes—it has to go back to Group with our own secret U/S stores.”
Alan winced. By general consent, the unit had dropped the standard RAF abbreviation “U/S” for “unserviceable”; it took too much explaining, and even when explained was liable to hurt sensitive American feelings. But there was no point in going into this with Geoff.
“That’s the idea,” he said. “As long as I get a receipt saying that I’ve handed everything over to you, I’m quite happy. Sorry to be a nuisance, but there are no proper channels for this sort of transaction over at our place. Coastal Command Stores can cope with ordinary secret equipment, but this is Most Secret.”
“I’m intrigued. What’s inside?”
“Sorry—I can’t tell you. Please sign the receipt like a good chap.”
“It isn’t that I don’t trust you, Bish.” Ronson grinned, looking at the packets piled on his desk. “But I want to see what I’m signing for. How do I know there’s anything in those boxes except bricks?”
“What a pity,” sighed Alan, “that I’m not allowed to let you open them.”
“And too bad I’m one of those stubborn types who won’t sign for a pig in a poke. It looks as if you’ve come all this way for nothing. Your MT officer will be annoyed; ours is very sticky about wasting petrol.”
“I’m supposed to defend these to the death,” mused Alan, “but I’m badly out of practice. I’ll probably only shoot you in the leg.”
“Fair enough,” said Geoffrey. “I could do with some leave.” He was already untying the string on the nearest parcel, and a moment later was examining the peculiar object it held.
Scarcely larger than the palm of his hand, it had the approximate shape of an old-fashioned pair of bellows. The flat, circular body was made of black-painted metal, and had cooling fins around its rim. The two “handles” were sealed glass tubes from which dangled flexible copper leads, and the “nozzle” on the opposite side of the round body was also made of glass. It looked simple enough, and was indeed far less complex than many tubes in an ordinary radio set. Yet it was the Allies’ greatest single secret—the weapon that was to win the war. For the waves that it alone could generate were to sweep the U-boats from the Atlantic, lead the bombers into the heart of Germany, and trace the final fading image of Hiroshima on the radar screens of the Enola Gay.
Geoffrey looked at the tube thoughtfully, hefting it in his hand.
“One resonant cavity magnetron,” he announced, like an auctioneer calling the next lot. “Slightly the worse for wear, but still capable of churning out a few kilowatts at ten centimeters.” He spoke the “ten” with heavy emphasis, challenging Alan to confirm or deny his guess at the wave length. But Alan was not being helpful.
“You wouldn’t get much out of that one,” he said. “The envelope’s sprung a leak.”
“So it has,” admitted Geoffrey. “Some careless clot must have bashed it with a hammer.”
“I hate to confess it, but that’s exactly what happened. We had a spot of bother when we were trying to install it in the transmitter.”
“Anyway, I’m disappointed. I’ve seen ten-centimeter maggies before. What else have you got?” Geoffrey put the tube back into its sponge-rubber nest, and opened another box. This time he gave a slight whistle of surprise.
“Hmm—this is more like it. My guess is—three centimeters? I’ve heard they’ve got down to that.”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not here.”
Geoffrey looked closely at the compact little magnetron, holding the matchbox-sized section of wave guide between thumb and forefinger.
“Cute,” he said. “What will they think of next? If I could get one of these across to old Adolf, I ought to get the Iron Cross with knobs on.”
Having satisfied his curiosity, he repacked the tube and signed Alan’s receipt without bothering to check the contents of the other boxes. Though it was a close fit, he managed to get all the packets into his safe for temporary storage; then they left the office and started on a tour of Geoffrey’s empire.
It was an impressive one, for the four gigantic towers dominated the landscape for miles around. As they came to the foot of the transmitter towers, Alan did a swift mental calculation. The biggest antenna in the GCD truck was fourteen feet high, and had always seemed inconveniently large. But the array of aerials now floating above him soared three hundred feet into the sky…
It was suspended, like so much washing beneath a clothesline, from a cable slung between the two slim pencils of steel, each balanced on its point and held vertically by sets of guy wires. As Alan stared up at the fragile latticework, he marveled that any man could work on such a construction project, or climb out like a spider on the rigging to make adjustments to aerials and feeders. But someone had to do it; this fact seemed almost as wonderful as radar itself.
Geoffrey was following his gaze; and, with a horrid premonition, Alan knew exactly what he was going to suggest.
“Like to run up it?” he said. “It’ll only take about fifteen minutes, and the view is something to remember.”
“I’m sure of that,” said Alan, “but is it safe?”
“Perfectly. You’re inside the latticework almost all the way, so you can’t fall off. I do it once a week, just for the exercise. It’s developed a lot of muscles I never knew I had.”
“All right,” Alan answered, without enthusiasm. “But you go first.”
“Certainly, if that helps. But don’t look up at me—it may make you giddy. Concentrate on the rung in front of your eyes while you’re climbing, and forget everything else. Then you can’t go wrong.”
They scrambled onto the concrete plinth supporting the mast, which was a simple triangular girder, its lower end terminating in a huge ball-and-socket arrangement that allowed it to sway freely in the wind. It was a neat balancing act, but Alan did not permit his mind to dwell upon it in too much detail.
He waited until Geoffrey had got a good start, then began his slow climb up the plain steel ladder inside the mast. Fifty feet from the ground, he decided that there was nothing much to it; the metal latticework surrounding him, open though it was, gave a considerable sense of security. Ignoring his colleague’s advice, he glanced downward; he would have to go much farther yet before he felt uncomfortable.
A hundred feet up, they came to the triangular platform that ended one section of the mast, and were able to rest for a few minutes. Alan was not particularly short of breath, but he had noticed an unaccustomed aching in his arms. It had not occurred to him that they do an appreciable fraction of the work when one is climbing an absolutely vertical ladder.
At the end of the second lap his arms were aching quite badly, and he was glad to rest on the two-hundred-foot platform. For the last few minutes he had been following Geoffrey’s advice, and pretending that nothing existed except the metal framework immediately surrounding him.
The last lap was a distinct ordeal; his forearms were now hurting abominably-though this was largely his own fault, for he was clinging to the ladder with quite unnecessary devotion. It seemed a long time before the third and final platform appeared above him, and he knew that he was now three hundred feet above the ground. But—where was Geoffrey?
The shock of seeing no one on the little platform jolted him badly; the explanation was almost worse. Geoffrey had not bothered to mention one trifling fact; the final twenty feet of the ascent were on the outside of the mast…
His
friend’s voice, muffled through the steel above him, shamed Alan into continuing his journey. If Geoffrey could do it, so could he. With this thought to encourage him, he wriggled through the framework of the mast and began, very carefully, to climb the last section of the steel ladder. There was absolutely nothing between him and the ground, three hundred feet below; though metal hoops had been fixed around the ladder, they were about three feet apart, so there was plenty of room to slide through them if one slipped and fell backward.
Alan found Geoffrey standing, with perhaps unnecessary bravado, on the sloping roof of the squat pyramid that crowned the pylon. One arm was wrapped casually around the central lightning conductor, but that was his only concession to the force of gravity.
It seemed to Alan, when he had recovered most of his breath and some of his composure, that he was clinging to a tiny raft adrift in the sky. There was no way of ignoring the fact that it was swaying to and fro in leisurely undulations; best to accept it and file it quickly away as an interesting piece of local color. And an even more intriguing phenomenon, to be looked at firmly or not at all, was the behavior of the great steel cable fastened to the uppermost point of the mast.
Springing from immediately beneath their feet, it leaped out into the abyss, swooping down and away in a long, vertiginous catenary. For a hundred yards it descended in that hypnotic curve, drawing the eye after and luring the body to follow. Then it began to climb until it was back once more at the height from which it had started, and had merged into the distant summit of the other pylon. Its slow oscillations, taking minutes to complete, had the quality of movements seen in a dream. The fact that he could reach out and touch the cable, at the very point where it started its journey, Alan found peculiarly disturbing; it somehow linked him with empty space.
Yet, of course, it was not empty, for the curtain of the transmitter array hung suspended from the great cable, sharing its slow undulations. One below the other, like the rungs of a giant ladder, the massive copper tubes of the antennas hung in space, each hurling its quota of power toward Europe.
“It’s a pity the weather isn’t clearer,” said Geoffrey, raising his voice above the moaning of the wind through the girders and rigging. “On a really fine day you can see more than twenty miles, way past Land’s End.”
That was easy to believe; as it was, when Alan felt confident enough to run his eyes around the horizon, he discovered that there was sea both to the north and to the south. He could tell at a glance that he was on the last tapering tongue of England as it jutted out into the Atlantic, and somehow this added to his sense of instability.
“I’ve seen all I want to,” he said, and did not wait for Geoffrey to answer as he lowered himself gingerly over the edge of the platform. There was a horrible, sweat-triggering moment before his foot found the first rung; he did not really breathe again until he had wormed his way back into the interior of the mast and was surrounded by its reassuring steelwork.
The descent was harder than the climb, because he dared not look down and his already tired arms clutched the ladder with redoubled anxiety as his feet searched for the rungs beneath him. Each hundred-foot section seemed twice as long as the one before, but at last—and quite unexpectedly—Alan realized that the ladder had come to its end. He stared with disbelief at the ground only a yard away, then clambered through the base of the girder and jumped down onto the grass. It appeared to be rocking slowly to and fro, like the deck of a ship; he had to close his eyes for a few seconds before the world came to rest.
“That’s quite enough for one day,” he told Geoffrey, who joined him a moment later. “I’m glad that all my gear is a reasonable size, and that I don’t have to be a steeple jack to inspect it.”
“At any rate, it keeps me fit. Old Father Kruschen would approve.”
They both laughed at the shared memory of the days when they were still raw, untrained airmen. “Old Father Kruschen,” who might indeed have served as model for the energetic grandfather of the health-salts advertisement, was an elderly, gray-haired dynamo who came to the Thomas Coram Technical Institute twice a week and gave the boys their PT exercises. There he would stand, tying himself in knots or waving his limbs like a semaphore, while boys a third his age sagged and wilted all around him. If they could not duplicate his contortions, he would walk along the writhing ranks, and, with a well-placed push or tug, snap muscles and sinews into positions Nature never intended. It was agreeable to think that others were now going through the mill; but Alan had to admit that he had never felt healthier before or since.
Swapping reminiscences, they walked back to the Mess together; by the time they had finished lunch, they had recalled scores of faces, relived a dozen forgotten incidents. Once again they were trying to keep awake on lonely guard duties in the endless hours before the dawn; once more they fought old battles with warrant officers and flight sergeants, attended camp concerts and cinema shows, dodged church parades, anxiously awaited exam results, celebrated promotions with riotous parties in the NAAFI…
All these things they had shared; but as they talked together a strange sadness came over them. In the very act of recollection, they realized how much their lives had now diverged, and what little chance there was that they would ever again be part of so closely knit a team. There was something unique about the camaraderie of those early days, when the whole squad had been as intimate as a single family. They had all been carefree boys then; now he and Geoffrey were responsible men, guarding property worth millions, on which their country’s very existence depended.
It was a somber thought, and cast a shadow over them as they said good-by at the security fence. If one looked too long into the past, it seemed to Alan, the result was always sadness. But now it was time to look in the other direction; for what happened in the next few hours might determine not only his own future, but that of GCD.
12
Air Commodore Burrows did not seem to be in a very good mood; perhaps the fact that the train was an hour late had something to do with it. As the car drew out of town and started the climb toward Bodmin Moor, Alan did a little discreet angling to discover his attitude, if any, toward GCD.
He had extracted only a few monosyllables from his passenger when, on a desolate stretch of moor miles from anywhere, there was a sudden sharp explosion, and the car swerved violently to the side of the road. It came to rest almost in a ditch, but luckily still on an even keel—apart from the list due to the flattened tire.
They climbed out and inspected the damage. The Air Commodore said nothing, but he appeared to be thinking a good deal. Alan felt both embarrassed and annoyed. Though the accident was completely beyond his control, this was not the way to impress an important visitor. To make matters worse, he could hardly tear a strip off the driver; she looked as if she would burst into tears if he tried anything of the sort.
He walked around the, car kicking the three sound tires, to prove that he was in command of the situation. They seemed fully inflated, and the treads were good, which left him with no obvious grounds for criticism. “I’m terribly sorry about this, sir,” he said to the Air Commodore. “I’ll lodge a complaint with the MT Officer when we get back to the station. He promised me his best car because I explained how important your visit was.”
Having, he hoped, simultaneously flattered his passenger and dissociated himself from the debacle, Alan felt a little better. But this did not help them to get moving again, and he had never changed a flat tire in his life. Well, he’d better have a bash at it.
The Cockney vision, however, had other ideas. She was already throwing jacks and wrenches out of the trunk, and was wrestling competently with the spare wheel. Conscious of the Air Commodore’s coldly sarcastic eye, Alan hurried forward to give what help he could.
For a moment it looked as if the driver was going to refuse his assistance. Her hesitation had nothing to do with considerations of rank, but was due to an accurate estimate of Alan’s usefulness. However, before she could o
bject, he had heaved the spare wheel out on the grass (too bad about his uniform, but war was hell) and had taken charge of the proceedings.
On the whole, he did not delay the job by more than a few minutes. It would have taken an acute observer to notice that he was always one jump behind, and that the driver was really leading the way. Air Commodore Burrows was, unfortunately, an acute observer.
Twenty minutes later they were on the road again. Alan was covered with mud, but the little WAAF was still spick and span. If there was any light conversation during the rest of the journey, he did not remember it. When they arrived at the Mess, the Air Commodore would not trust Alan with his baggage, but insisted on lifting it out of the car himself. He did, however, unbend a trifle as they parted.
“Tell the MT Officer,” he said, “that his young lady did a good job.”
“Certainly, sir,” replied Alan, “and I’ll look forward to showing you round the unit in the morning.”
That was a thundering lie, and they both knew it.
***
“I sometimes wonder,” Alan remarked to Deveraux the next morning, “whether we’re supposed to be training crews or running a publicity campaign.”
Deveraux cracked a glacial smile.
“Both,” he said. “Unless we get the right sort of publicity, and in the right places, there’ll be no point in training anybody.”
“Have you learned anything about our visitor?”
“Enough to worry me. He’s the C-in-C’s right-hand man on landing aids, and what he says will have a lot of influence.”
Alan found it surprising that anyone should have much influence with the legendary head of Bomber Command, who had organized more destruction than Attila and Genghis Khan combined.
Deveraux glanced at his watch.
“I’ll be bringing the Air Commodore out in thirty minutes, so make sure that the trucks are properly lined up, then get ‘D’ Flight off the ground. By the way, what’s the Met forecast?”