When I heard them again, slightly off frequency, I listened as if a needle had pierced my eardrums. I turned up the volume in the hope of surprising a word before the static became equally loud. It couldn’t work, of course. But art is often artfulness. A distant voice sounded like a slobbering idiot in the corner of a bare room trying to sing something he had heard twenty years ago. No amount of fine-tuning could get him to remember it. You try everything, however.
I couldn’t delay informing Bennett of a mysterious harmonic or frequency echo from some far-off broadcasting station that had a twang of the radio-telephone in its tone. He left Wilcox at the controls, and stood near me. ‘How far away?’
‘Can’t tell, Skipper. A few hundred. Or a thousand.’
Electric waves travel at 186,000 miles a second, so what’s the odds? I thought.
‘More than a thousand?’
‘It could be.’
He gripped the receiver so tightly I thought he would yank it out of the fixture. ‘It must be near the islands.’
‘Might not be.’
‘Did you get a bearing?’
‘I tried. It’s all over the place. Could be behind us – along the reciprocal.’
Sweat ran down his face. ‘Why tell me, unless you’re sure?’
‘You asked me to notify you.’
He listened. The voices had gone. Pulling out a handkerchief to mop his forehead, a screw of paper drifted towards Rose’s table. ‘Keep at it. Next time, I want something definite.’ He went back to the controls.
Would I tell him as quickly? He wanted to know. So did I. Then he’d know. God knows why he wanted to. The air around the world was full of noises. Pitting himself against that kind of play would get him either into a dead-end or a million fragments. The same with me, but I had to try, detach myself from the flying boat, become disembodied, attain a state of equilibrium, power of manoeuvre, and discrimination so that I would appear as an enigma to any outsider who might be trying to fox me with his intermittent sending. The difficulty in achieving any kind of success enthused me. To attempt the near hopeless induced humour, which gave way to a spirit of beneficial calm.
I must not seem anxious to begin measures for our defence. Hurry would create suspicion. I had to separate the imagined from the real and, having decided what was real, assuming I was in a fit state to do so, try to make sense from what I heard. If I hurried to find out, by tapping my morse key and asking direct, I would have little chance of success, and play right into their hands. Success was a term by which nothing could be measured, at this stage.
After a sunshot, and working out his spherical triangle – Rose sometimes liked to do things the hard way – he stood up and stretched himself. By a quarter turn I noted his movements, for any twitch within eye-shot was a marked event in our progress. There was a naval tidiness about a flying boat and, seeing the paper that had fallen from Bennett’s pocket, Rose picked it up.
I measured time by my wrist watch set to Greenwich, other indications being the number of meridians crossed. Stations popped up from a quarter of the world but, being on radio silence, time ceased to exist as far as events were concerned. Locally, it was midday, but we were not due to sight Kerguelen till five in the morning. With a favourable wind we travelled south easterly at 120 knots air speed, the crackling ether so loud it sounded as if a giant saw was cutting the earth in two. No instructions tied me to my set, only a congenital burden of having to pass the time usefully, so when static threatened irreversible deafness (except when a message of ‘Z’ time landfall at Bombay was picked up from a Royal Mail ship) I went down to the galley for a stroll, where I expected to see Rose, because he was no longer at the chart table.
Armatage was putting the finishing touches to the mid-upper. Bull was completing installations in the front turret, and Nash was doing the same in the tail. Bennett and Wilcox were on the flight deck. Appleyard slept in his bunk, a copy of Lilliput fallen onto his chest. I flipped through to the nude, then put it back.
The galley was empty, and on touching the handle of the door to Bennett’s room I heard a noise. I acted like a somnambulist. My eyelids had two mattresses pressed on them, and sleep was my only wish, but as soon as the door began to open I awoke as if I had already dreamed of pushing it hard and had come out of the dream without knowing. Inside I saw Rose by the table holding a notebook and a sheet of paper. Both of us shivered as if stricken instantaneously with malaria. The good side of his face was as white as the paper, and I guessed he must have thought I was Bennett coming in.
He had only to say he had been sent to get something, and I would have retreated, for I was hardly inside. His shock was bigger, and a jolt underfoot made him lean on the table, and put the book back under the chart. But he kept the paper, and clutched my arm. His lips trembled, and he almost pushed me.
‘What are you up to?’
‘We’ve got to talk,’ he said.
I clambered over heaps of stores and followed him halfway to the rear turret. We crouched by a pile of sacks, boxes and mooring tackle. ‘What about?’
He waited, as if to get his breath after running half a mile, then he showed me the paper, on which the only thing written was a crew list. ‘You can hear, but you haven’t got eyes to see.’
I didn’t understand till he pointed to three names with crosses pencilled against them. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘This paper fell from Bennett’s pocket.’
‘I know. I saw it.’
He took the paper back, as if afraid I would eat it. ‘He’s put a cross against your name, mine and Wilcox’s.’
I lost patience. ‘The bloody flight crew. But so what?’
‘Not against his own.’
I still didn’t get it.
‘We’re the ones he’ll dispose of.’
Wireless operators face an occupational hazard of going off their heads for no known reason, but I had not so far seen anything similar happen to a navigator. ‘Too many sunsights have done for you. Kick somebody out of their bunk and take an hour’s snooze.’ I felt I was in a flying lunatic asylum. ‘He can’t do without us, and you know it.’
‘I thought so, too. But he’s also a navigator. In that notebook it says we fly north to Ceylon. He wants to get rid of us. Maybe the gunners as well – even Nash. With all of us out of the way, no one will be able to say where he got his gold. There won’t be any but him and Nash to share it with.’
I laughed. ‘He used that notebook to work out every hypothetical getaway route, and it doesn’t mean a thing. He’s not a Roman emperor. You forget those who financed this expedition. He can’t do them down – nor would he.’
He wondered, from his glare, what else you could expect from a Group Two Trade wireless operator. ‘He’ll give them the slip, as well.’
I was rocking. The scheme would make sense, if I could become sufficiently insane to believe in it. He said calmly: ‘It fits as neatly as a cocked hat – the whole scheme.’