14
There was something final about cleaning out his locker that depressed Nils. Number 121 in Kastrup airport, it had always been his, no one else’s. When they had enlarged this section and built the new lockers he, as Senior Danish Pilot, had of course had first pick. Now he was emptying it. No one had asked him to, but when he had stopped off to pick up the boiler suits he had stowed here, he had realized that he no longer had any right to the locker. In all fairness he should let someone else use it. As quickly as possible he stuffed all the accumulated odds and ends of the years into the flight bag and zipped it shut. The hell with it. He slammed the door shut and stamped out.
In the hallway he suddenly realized that someone was calling his name and he looked about.
“Inger!”
“None other, you big ape. You have been flying too much without me. Isn’t it time you hired a good hostess for your Moon trips?”
She strode toward him, long-legged, willowy. A good hostess indeed, a walking advertisement for SAS. Her skirt was short, her jacket round and tight-fitting, her little cap perched at a jaunty angle on her ash-blond hair. She was the tired traveler’s dream of a hostess, bigger than life size, almost as tall as Nils, a vision from a Swedish film. And almost incidentally, the best and-most experienced hostess the airline had. She took his hand in both of hers, standing very close.
“It’s not true, is it?” she asked. “That you’re through with flying?”
“I’m through with SAS, at least for now. Other things.”
“I know, big hush-hush stuff. This Daleth drive. The papers are full of it. But I can’t believe that we won’t ever fly together again!”
As she said it she leaned even closer and he could feel the tall warmth of her against his side, the roundness of her breasts pushing against his arm. Then she leaned back, knowing better than to show anything more in public.
“God, how I wish we could!” he said, and they both laughed aloud at the sudden hoarseness of his voice.
“The next time you are out of the country let me know.” She looked at her watch and dropped his hand. “I have to run. A flight out in an hour.”
She waved and was gone, and he went the other way. Walking with the memory of her. How many countries had it been? Sixteen, something like that. The very first time she had flown on his crew they had ended up in bed together by mutual and almost automatic decision. It had been New York City in the summer, an exhaust-fumed and sooty inferno just on the other side of the window. But the blinds on the hotel-room window had been closed and the air conditioner hummed coolly and they had explored each other with sweet abandon. There had been no guilt, just a pleasurable acceptance without past or future. He scarcely thought about her when she wasn’t present, and neither was jealous of the other. But when they did meet they had a single thought.
It was after a particularly enjoyable night on a singularly lumpy mattress in Karachi that they had first started to figure out how many cities they had made love in. They were exhausted, mostly with laughing, because Nils had bought her a book of photographs of erotic temple carvings. They had tried some of the more exotic postures—the ones that did not need three or four others to help—chortling too much to really accomplish anything. They had lain there afterward and had had a not too serious argument about just how many cities it really had been. After this they began to keep track. Nils then used his seniority to bid for different runs so they could be together, adding new cities to the lengthening list. But never Copenhagen, or even Scandinavia, never at home. There was an entire world out there that they shared. This was his home and it was something different. It was an unspoken rule that they knew about but never discussed. He pushed open the door to the main terminal and growled deep in his throat.
A girl’s voice on the public address system announced departing flights in a dozen languages. Danish and English for every flight, then the language of the country of destination: French for the Paris flight, Greek for the Athens plane, even Japanese for the Air Japan polar flight to Tokyo. Nils worked through the crowds to the nearest TV display of arrivals and departures. There was a shuttle flight leaving soon for Malmo, just across the Sound in Sweden, that would do fine. Skou was always finding new ways to elude any possible attempt to follow them, and this was his latest device. A good one too, Nils had to admit.
He waited in the main hall until just two minutes before departure time. Then he went through the administrative part of the building, where passengers were not allowed. This should have shaken any possible tails. A few people greeted him, and then he was out on the tarmac just as the final passengers were boarding the Malmo flight. He was the last one in, and they closed the door behind him. The hostess knew him—he didn’t even have to show her his pass—and he went up and sat on the navigator’s chair and talked shop with the pilots during the brief hop. When they landed, the hostess let him out first and he went directly to the parking lot. Skou was there, behind the wheel of a new Humber, reading a sports newspaper.
“What happened to that gamle raslekasse you always drive?” Nils asked, sliding in next to him.
“Old rattling tin can indeed! It has thousands of kilometers left in it. It happens to be in the garage for a little work…”
“Jacking up the steering wheel to build a new car underneath!”
Skou snorted through his nostrils and started the engine, easing out of the lot and heading north.
Once clear of the city, the coast road wound up and down between the villages, revealing quick glimpses of the Sound, on their left, seen through the trees. Skou concentrated on his driving, and Nils had little to say. He was thinking about Inger, erotic memories, one after another, something new for him. He normally lived the moments of existence as they came, planning only as far ahead as was necessary, forgetting the past as something long gone and unalterable. He missed flying, that was for certain, realizing now that this had been the biggest element of his life around which everything else turned. Yet he had not flown an airplane since… when? Before the Moon flight. It seemed that he had been buried in offices and that filthy shipyard for years. The short flight from Kastrup had only teased him. A passenger.
“Here,” he called out suddenly. “Let me drive a bit, Skou. You can’t have all the fun.”
“This is a government car!”
“And I’m a government slave. Let’s go. I’ll report you to your superiors for getting drunk on the job if you don’t let me.”
“I had one beer with lunch—and a flat Swedish beer at that I ought to report you for blackmail.” But Skou pulled up anyway and they changed seats. He said nothing when Nils put his foot flat on the floor and screamed the engine up through the gears.
There was hardly any traffic on the road and the visibility was good, with the setting sun trying to get through the clouds. The Humber cornered like a sports car, and Nils was an excellent driver, going fast but not taking chances. Machines were something he knew how to cope with.
It was almost dark when they reached Halsingborg and bumped over the railroad tracks to the ferry terminal. They began a new lane and were the first car aboard the next ferry, stopping right behind the folding gate at the bow of the ship. Skou got on line to buy a package of tax-free cigarettes during the brief crossing, but Nils stayed in the car. The drive, short as it was, had helped. He watched the lights of the castle and the Helsingor harbor come close and thought about the work that was nearing completion on Galathea.
The guard at the shipyard gate recognized Skou and waved them through.
“How is security?” Nils asked.
“Secrecy is the best security. So far the spies have not connected the much-publicized hovercraft with the highly secret Daleth project. So the guards stationed here—and there are enough of them—are not in evidence. You saw one of them, selling hot dogs from that cart across the street”