"Flight engineer's panel?"
"Everything was reading normal and on the central panel. You can hear
Lowell—" It was Lowell, then, who had died in the seat on which Gant's hand rested as he remained squatting on his haunches. Bright-eyed and hero worshipping He had been cruel to Lowell often because the boy had loaded him with his old identity and asked him to relive it, day after day. What had initially flattered had rubbed like salt on raw flesh after a while.
"He and Hollis repeat all the read-outs after the port engine failed, and Paluzzi confirms every call. That's the most un spoilt part of the cockpit tape… There was nothing wrong," he ground out finally, his big hands clenching again and again, as if tearing at something or strangling it.
There was. They died."
'I know that-!"
The airplane killed them, Alan. Either the airframe you designed or the fuel management system you boasted about or the Pratt & Whitney engines you helped modify…" His eyes were glacial and he sensed Vance's anger and confidence quelled, momentarily.
"One way or another, Alan, you let Hollis down."
"He could have made a mistake! He could have un stabilised the ship—"
The instability isn't linked to the flame-out. Your words. You tested other engines on the ground?"
"Of course." The anger was snuffed out like a flickering candle. Gant and Vance faced each other like crouching animals within the crushed metal box of the flight deck. The desert breeze shouldered its way from the hangar doors into the confined, hot space. Vance shrugged his much bigger frame.
"We ran all the checks. Look, I know that engine, the fuel flow monitors, the computer…" He spread his large hands. The fingers were stained with oil. Leaning back against the seat in which Hollis had burned, he said: "Sol Zeissman over at Albuquerque Airways has grounded the two planes he's leasing from me. He'll be asking for a refund before the weekend-! They're libelling my ship in the newspapers, on TV, every day and night! Scare stories. No one is going to buy unless I can prove she's safe." The appeal became more evident as he burst out:
"You were around the early stages of development, Mitchell you know she's a good ship!"
Gant was forced to concede a brief nod. Then he looked away from Vance, from the ageing process of his bewilderment and profound, impotent frustration, through the starred windows of the flight deck.
Like a storyboard for some projected movie, huge blow-up photographs of a desert landscape and the stranded 494 formed a semicircle at one end of the hangar. They were the wall against which Vance's energy and remaining youth had spent itself. It would be a horror movie, about the destruction of dreams. The computers, the group of men, the pieces of the plane were the accoutrements of a funeral scene.
"No bird ingestion, no fuel line blockage, no fuel computer failure
…" he murmured to himself, as if reciting charms that would ward off what he sensed in Vance what the man really wanted from him. Vance shook his head at each item and instrument.
"Fuel starvation…?" Even with the economy forced on the adapted Pratt & Whitney engines to meet Vance's specifications, the calculations for the pre-delivery flight wouldn't have been wrong.
"Were the fuel calculations wrong?" he asked mechanically.
"No: Gant felt suddenly hot, despite the sensation of the breeze on his face and bare forearms. He knew now why Barbara had called, and he knew it had to have been at Vance's instruction. Vance didn't want his current expertise. He wanted the hero to make a comeback, the flyer.
"You're out of your skull, Alan."
"What—?" Gant turned to look at Vance and saw the admission plainly in Vance's face.
"I—"
"You got Barbara to call me, knowing I'd just love to come down here and make some cheap shots at your expense. Fool around with the team from Tucson, then ground the 494 for a while. You took that chance, just to—" Vance clenched his fists.
"I need you to fly that plane—"
"Other people said much the same, a long time ago. The priorities seemed bigger, back then."
"All that out there it could take weeks, even months. You know that. I don't have days and neither does Tim Burton, who has ordered six six.
He's run into his own brick wall. You have to help."
'I don't."
"Christ, Gant-!"
Vance stared at him in challenge, even hatred. He was trying to goad him into acting like a crazy man. Pretending there was no way out for Gant without losing face, running scared. He'd known he would come.
Now he thought he could force him to fly another 494, duplicate the flight plan Hollis had been flying, prove that the accident was a freak, a once-only. It would make the TV news on NEC, CBS, ABC, CNN.
National coverage of the hero giving Vance Aircraft his backing.
Giving the airlines and the public a guarantee of safety… Gant, formerly of the USAF and well connected with the CIA, now of the
National Transportation Safety Board what more could Vance ask or the public receive? It would be like a basketball player like Michael Jordan endorsing sports gear a surefire winner.
"You'll pay me millions for the endorsement, right?" he murmured.
"What—?"
He was expected to underwrite the plane's safety.
"It won't work out. If another airplane goes down, you'll never get out from under.
And I'll be dead "You can't refuse."
"Until we know what went wrong, it could happen again."
"We're not going to find out, down here."
"Not quickly, maybe, but we will find out."
They'll foreclose on me like I was a share-cropper. But maybe that's what you want." Gant shook his head, resting on his haunches, his eyes fixed on the empty eye sockets in the pilot's instrument display. The twisted control column was like a broken catapult.
"All right," Vance announced heavily, his breathing ragged and loud.
"I'm begging you. Isn't that what you want? Save my company. Save the airplane." Gant looked up at him. Alan's eyes remained flinty but his voice was uncertain and aged, that of a very old man waking in a strange and dark place. Yet he knew Gant's answer before he replied.
His features claimed, with utter certainty, that Gant would seize the opportunity to recapture something of his past, that he would risk his life to help a man who despised him, just for the sake of discovering a former self staring back at him from his shaving mirror. Vance knew that he would do anything just for one more fix, because his whole existence was continuous cold turkey and withdrawal symptoms.
The anonymity of his days stretched before him in an unending succession; and Vance, like the devil, now offered him his own version of the kingdoms of the earth his former identity, his sense of himself as the best, as unique.
Eventually, he said: "I can't ask the Tucson team to fly with me. I can't risk that."
"I — er, I can fly as engineer. You need a co-pilot?"
Gant shook his head.
"Kou'll fly?"
"See? You don't have any choice."
Gant rubbed his cheeks.
"Is the simulator available?"
"All set up."
"You're an asshole, Alan a real, made-in-America asshole."
"Sure. Just save my plane, uh? And my ass."
At first for perhaps as much as an hour he was unaware and then uncertain that he was himself under surveillance. Now he was sure of it. Sitting under the sodden, garish umbrella over his table outside the cafe, Michael Lloyd had gradually felt his confidence subside into a fidgety, bemused, unnerved sense of himself.
He thought there were two of them, one in a parked car whose wipers flicked occasionally to give the driver a clear glimpse of him, and a second man inside the cafe, at a steamy window seat, a face half-hidden in fog. There might be others, near him or around the Grand' Place, moving or still among the hurrying flocks of umbrellas and raincoats.