Kenneth Bulmer: The Key to Irunium

He helped her with her coat and waited while she snuggled back again, wondering why she had elected to sit next to him. Across the aisle he could see another girl, blonde and quite pretty, with the same outre uniform of facial makeup as this girl. Beyond her sat a dark man in the inconspicuous gray suit of business efficiency, wearing thick hornrimmed glasses on his thin pinched nose. Prestin had never been one to burden himself with the appurtenances of the modern world in any shape or form if they did not suit him. The idea of loading down your face with a massive pair of thick glasses because the theory went that it made you look important and impressive, lifted you into the executive class, amused him with its infantile idiocy; Uniforms belonged to uniformed minds. He wore his own dark gray traveling suit because he liked it; it was comfortable. That minor flunky’s glasses were going to torture him in Rome.

The girl fidgeted with her bag, eventually producing a cigarette pack and a small jeweled lighter. She offered a cigarette to Prestin.

“No, thanks,” he said, a little offended. “I’ve given up.”

“So that explains it,” she said with a barbed smile.

“Explains what?”

“I thought you were an American—then I thought I was mistaken, and you were English. So—”

Amused again that the old ambiguity should come up, and so quickly, with this girl, Prestin said, “I’m both.”

“Well,” she said, flicking her lighter. “Lucky you.”

“Yes,” said Prestin, meaning it.

“I’m Fritzy Upjohn.” The way she said it made it a formal introduction, nothing more.

“Robert Prestin.” He matched her tone.

The Trident wheeled, the power from her triple engines cutting a clean course through the upper levels. The quiet comfort and luxury of the cabin afforded a futuristic comparison with the old propeller-piston engine planes that had had their day lording it in the skies. Prestin’s father had told him long ago, while showing him how to control-line fly a remarkable gas job they had built together: “Aviation grew up almost too fast for its own good, Bob. Luckily for everyone, there were a few long-sighted and level-headed people around, and we muddled through. There won’t be many more opportunities for muddling through in the future. A mistake then—and blooey!—that’s the third planet gone.”

Even then young Prestin had known he wouldn’t be someone to blind himself to realities, to act out a fantasy against unreason and fear. He’d met the R.A.F. refusal, and he’d faced up to it, squarely. But this girl now, Fritzy Upjohn with the long legs and the pretty face ruined by makeup—this girl represented an area of life which, to employ the old routine again, he had so far failed to face up to.

The journey unreeled and, in his own stiff and punctilious way, he talked to Fritzy. She said she was a model, and this assignment was alf and gone, fab and all the rest. Young—she could only have been almost twenty—she bubbled with the animal confidence and poise of a self-possessed and extraordinarily observant young girl. Prestin found an amused awe stealing over his thinking; she tended to curl his ideas at the edges.

She took no time at all to skewer through to his preoccupation; maybe the magazines clued her in there.

“I always say that three engines are better than two, and four are safer than three. But then, I’m only the fare-paying passenger and my views in a technical world don’t count.”

Prestin smiled. “I’m only a fare-paying passenger, too. Or, to be correct, I’m a passenger with my fare paid. I prefer more than one or two engines myself; but if the technical and scientific boys tell us that two giant engines are all right—we have to believe them.”

“It sends shivers up my backbone.” She shivered, a most interesting and rewarding experience for Prestin. “Just think,” she said, flinging one limp hand out dramatically. “Four or five hundred people all crammed in on seats like on top of a bus, and one of these damned great engines stops or something. Why, she—she’d—”

“Spin in?”

“She’d ker-rash! alf, and that wouldn’t be funny.”

“It would be far from funny. But they guarantee the engines.”

“Yeah, I’m sure they do. I don’t want to talk about airplanes any more. Let’s talk about you or me or nothing.” She lay back and closed her eyes, the lashes moving with a gentle lagging motion of their own. She looked too young and defenseless to be out of the nest, even though Prestin knew well enough that the claws were only temporarily sheathed.

Preston almost always enjoyed flying. When the stewardesses came around with the meal trays he prepared to eat the excellent meal with gusto, glad when Fritzy opened her eyes, sat up and accepted her own tray. He knew she really had been asleep but even if she hadn’t been, he would be reconciled to a woman’s stratagem for disposing of his own unwelcome company.

He ate without worrying about the food, being fully committed to the girl now, dizzied a little and yet exhilarated. She ate hungrily, he could see clearly, without having any idea of what he was thinking. Why should she have? On a luxury air flight, flying non-stop to Rome, eating and drinking well, looking forward to the adventures that lay ahead, she was fully committed to her own life. She would have no time for him yet. Not yet.

Perhaps after she’d been through Ciampino-West and experienced Rome, she might wish for a companion, to share in these new delights with her. Robert Infamy Prestin saw with sardonic amusement the way he was going and yet he was incapable of halting that fool’s progress by a single step.

Soon they would be circling to join the pattern over Ciampino-West and coming in for one of the Trident’s smooth and foolproof landings. Just how should he go about retaining in conversation a young girl that he didn’t even know existed until a few hours ago? Lack of this kind of vital practice daunted Prestin. He would have to figure something out that, like the Trident’s landing, would operate in automatic and infallible perfection. While he was thinking to himself, Fritzy had left her seat and gone to powder her nose. He chuckled to himself about that unpowdered nose and he waited for her to come back.

The blonde girl leaned a little into the aisle and looked back. She half-smiled at Prestin.

“I didn’t see Fritzy get up,” she said in a husky voice. “I heard you two talking”—this by way of explanation—“but we’ll be fastening seat belts soon, won’t we?”

“Don’t worry, Sibyl,” the thick-glassed specimen said tartly. “You know Fritzy, madder than a March Hare. The stewardess will straighten her out.”

“Yes, well, I hope so,” said Sibyl. She sank back into her chair and stretched out chubby legs that, with their mesh-nylon stockings and short skirt, made Prestin think in a kind of hilarious rib-tickler of Fritzy’s long and elegant legs. But this Sibyl seemed to be a nice kid and also fond of Fritzy; his theory that she was traveling alone, and all his plans, had been incidentally knocked for a loop.

He leaned forward and glanced across the aisle past Sibyl at the man in the next seat. He looked like an unpleasant—yes, that was the word—an unpleasant character. Sleazy. With a high forehead, fair hair and somehow indecent big nose—soft, like putty—he looked overly large, blown up. His skin was pitted with tiny black-shadowed holes, like orange skin. His face held an orange cast, too. It wasn’t that Prestin had ever worried about the color of a man’s skin, but this strange hue suggested aspirations that had not materialized; he found it difficult to articulate his instinctive dislike for the man.

Fritzy did not resume her seat.