Алистер Маклин - Night Without End

I answered all of their questions as best I could but these answers were all to the same effect, that I didn’t really know anything more about it than they did.

‘But you said some time ago that you did, perhaps, know one thing more than we did.’ It was Corazzini who put the question, and he was looking at me shrewdly. ‘What was that, Dr Mason?’

‘What? Ah, yes, I remember now.’ I hadn’t forgotten, but the way things were shaping up in my mind I’d had second thoughts about mentioning it, and had time to think up a plausible alternative. ‘I need hardly tell you that it’s nothing that I actually know, Mr Corazzini – how could I, I wasn’t in the plane – just a reasonably informed guess in the absence of all other solutions. It’s based on the scientific observations made here and in other IGY stations in Greenland, some of them over the past eighteen months.

‘For over a year now, we have been experiencing a period of intense sun-spot activity – that’s one of the main interests of the IGY year – the most intense of this century. As you may know, sun-spots, or, rather, the emission of solar particles from these sun-spots, are directly responsible for the formation of the aurora borealis and magnetic storms, both of these being related to disturbances in the ionosphere. These disturbances can and, actually, almost invariably do interfere with radio transmission and reception, and when severe enough can completely disrupt all normal radio communications: and they can also produce temporary alterations of the earth’s magnetism which knock magnetic compasses completely out of kilter.’ All of which was true enough as far as it went. ‘It would, of course, require extreme conditions to produce these effects: but we have been experiencing these lately, and I’m pretty sure that that’s what happened with your plane. Where astral navigation – by the stars, that is – is impossible, as it was on a night like this, you are dependent on radio and compasses as your two main navigational aids: if these are knocked out, what have you left?’

A fresh hubbub of talk arose at this, and though it was quite obvious that most of them had only a vague idea what I was talking about, I could see that this idea was finding a fair degree of ready acceptance, satisfying them and fitting the facts as they knew them. I saw Joss gazing at me with an expressionless face, looked him in the eye for a couple of seconds, then turned away. As a radio operator, Joss knew even better than I that, though there was still some sun-spot activity, it had reached its maximum in the previous year: and as an ex-aircraft radio operator, he knew that airliners flew on gyrocompasses, which neither sun-spots nor magnetic storms could ever affect in the slightest.

‘We’ll have something to eat now.’ I cut through the buzz of conversation. ‘Any volunteers to give Jackstraw a hand?’

‘Certainly.’ Marie LeGarde, as I might have guessed, was first on her feet. ‘I’m by way of being what you might call a mean cook. Lead me to it, Mr Nielsen.’

‘Thanks, Joss, you might give me a hand to rig a screen.’ I nodded at the injured pilot. ‘We’ll see what we can do for this boy here.’ The stewardess, unbidden, moved forward to help me also. I was on the point of objecting – I knew that this wasn’t going to be nice – but I didn’t want trouble with her, not yet. I shrugged my shoulders and let her stay.

*

Half an hour later, I had done all I could. It indeed hadn’t been nice, but both the patient and the stewardess had stood it far better than I had expected. I was fixing and binding on a stiff leather helmet to protect the back of his head and Joss was strapping him down, inside the sleeping-bag, to the stretcher, so that he couldn’t toss around and hurt himself, when the stewardess touched my arm.

‘What – what do you think now, Dr Mason?’

‘It’s hard to be sure. I’m not a specialist in brain or head injuries, and even a specialist would hesitate to say. The damage may have penetrated deeper than we think. There may be haemorrhaging – it’s often delayed in these cases.’

‘But if there’s no haemorrhaging?’ she persisted. ‘If the damage is no worse than what you think, what you see?’

‘Fifty-fifty. I wouldn’t have said so a couple of hours ago, but he seems to have quite astonishing powers of resistance and recuperation. Better than an even chance, I would say – if he had the warmth, the food, the skilled nursing he would have in a first class hospital. As it is – well, let’s leave it at that, shall we?’

‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Thank you.’

I looked at her, looked at the washed-out face, the faint blue circles forming under her eyes, and almost felt touched with pity. Almost. She was exhausted, and shivering with cold.

‘Bed,’ I said. ‘You’re dying for sleep and warmth, Miss – I’m so sorry, I forgot to ask your name.’

‘Ross. Margaret Ross.’

‘Scots?’

‘Irish. Southern Irish.’

‘I won’t hold it against you,’ I smiled. There was no answering smile from her. ‘Tell me, Miss Ross, why was the plane so empty?’

‘We had an “X” flight – an extra or duplicate charter for an overflow of passengers – out from London yesterday. Day before yesterday it is now, I suppose. We just stayed the night in Idlewild and had to return after we’d slept. The office phoned up people who had booked out on the evening plane, giving the chance of an earlier flight: ten of them accepted.’

‘I see. By the way, isn’t it a bit unusual to have only one stewardess aboard? On a trans-Atlantic flight, I mean?’

‘I know. There’s usually two or three – a steward and two stewardesses – or two stewards and a stewardess. But not for ten people.’

‘Of course. Hardly worth stewarding, you might say. Still,’ I went on smoothly, ‘it at least gives you time for the odd forty winks on these long night-flights.’

‘That wasn’t fair!’ I hadn’t been as clever as I thought, and her white cheeks were stained with red. ‘That’s never happened to me before. Never!’

‘Sorry, Miss Ross – it wasn’t really meant as a dig. It doesn’t matter anyhow.’

‘It does so matter!’ Her extraordinary brown eyes were bright with unshed tears. ‘If I hadn’t been asleep I would have known what was going to happen. I could have warned the passengers. I could have moved Colonel Harrison to a front seat facing the rear–’

‘Colonel Harrison?’ I interrupted sharply.

‘Yes. The man in the back seat – the dead man.’

‘But he hadn’t a uniform on when–’

‘I don’t care. That was his name on the passenger list … If I’d known, he wouldn’t be dead now – and Miss Fleming wouldn’t have had her collar-bone broken.’

So that’s what has been worrying her, I thought. That accounts for her strange distraught behaviour. And then a moment later I realised that it didn’t account for it all – she had been behaving like that before ever she had known what had happened to any of the passengers. My slowly forming suspicions came back with renewed force: the lady would bear watching.

‘You’ve nothing to reproach yourself with, Miss Ross. The captain must have been flying blind in the storm – and we’re more than 8000 feet up here. Probably he’d no knowledge of what was going to happen until the actual moment of crashing.’ In my mind’s eye I saw again the doomed airliner, landing lights on, circling our cabin for at least ten minutes, but if Miss Ross had any such thing in her mind’s eye, it was impossible for me to detect it. She had no idea at all – or she was an extraordinarily good actress.

‘Probably,’ she murmured dully, ‘I don’t know.’