‘Let’s get back on duty.’
I needed to think. A wireless operator listening to static can do so, but a navigator can’t, otherwise he makes mistakes, adding where he should subtract, or putting his pencil on the wrong column in the Book of Tables. He pushed me aside, and made his way through the plane.
In order to spare my brain the deadening drumfire of static I wondered if Bennett’s idea really was to get home with only one other member of the crew. If so, who was the lucky man? The slip of paper need not have given any indication. Perhaps the final duo would be Bennett and Rose, or Bennett and Wilcox, or even Bennett and me. Even the person he marked down to live would not finally survive. The golden hoard would be Bennett’s alone. If Bennett had chosen a gunner in taking over the flying boat, the obvious candidate was Nash, who could keep a secret better than any of the others.
The game might be carried a stage further. Should Bennett cease to exist, Wilcox could fly the plane. Rose also had the ability. Both could at least make some kind of pancake landing. But I doubted whether Rose or Wilcox had any notion of reducing the crew, sure that Bennett had wondered the same – if he had wondered anything at all. They were not that kind of people. Wilcox was ill, in spite of hectic optimism, and in no state to fly the plane for long. The others would not try to take the plane because they did not have the experience of command. They couldn’t care less. As a crew they kept their feelings close, and lacked the personality to forge such a plan. Neither would they be accomplices of Bennett’s.
Such a wonderful self-told tale kept me occupied while my ears flattened against the crackling emptiness of the ether. In no way was I distracted from listening. As a counterweight to deadness, the possibility sharpened the keenness of my ears. Once on civilized dry land, and the job finished, I would smile to recall such suspicions from inside and out, and laughingly remember it as if some tap-chatting card of the morse code fraternity had transmitted the latest joke about ice-cream vans at the South Pole.
My hand shook as it hovered over the key, knowing that an unnecessary contact might bring disaster. I was caught in the trap of being the only one able to open a window of our enclosed world and alter the turning wheel of fate. My suspicions were ludicrous, yet I couldn’t let go the idea that I must take note of my feelings. The warnings from both sides were as clear as if they had come in at strength five from some guardian wireless station deep in myself, whose existence I had not known till this moment. Whatever words I keyed out, no one else on board would know what they meant. They read morse, but not at the speed I could send. The language was mine alone, and the responsibility belonged only to me.
But the sending could not be done in secret. I was visible to Rose and Wilcox, and my relays might be heard clicking over the intercom. I had to keep silent, but what did that matter when such feverish and lunatic speculations meant that there was no reason to send anything at all?
11
We were in a sunspot: duration unknown, dimensions beyond the scope of mensuration, not even a far-off coast station on which to focus the old needle, a feeling of timeless loss which made it easy to wonder whether Rose was out of his mind, or Bennett quietly loco, or Wilcox dying of TB, or Armatage about to pop down the chute from too much booze – or whether I ought to have my brains tested for trying to decide how many of us were, in fact, beyond the blue horizon. The eternal sandpaper of static rubbed the eardrums with little variation. The doldrums were in the ether rather than half over the sea.
Wilcox’s cough was sawing through his windpipe. His eyes glittered, and a smile of confidence in God’s benignity when the hacking paused made him appear that he would be almost grateful to go when the time came. Armatage was often drunk and hearing voices. Bull tended to be surly and quarrelsome, while the normally stolid Nash had been reinforcing his spirit with benzedrine pills since installing the Brownings, so that at least he and Appleyard seemed sufficiently level-headed to be trustworthy in a crisis.
For myself, the messages I intercepted went in circles, a snake whose tail was in its mouth, saying that if what Rose surmised turned out to be true, our worries were as good as over. We would be dead when the circle broke. Yet there was many a step between imagination and reality, though how could you expect anyone with a persecution complex to know that? The question I put to myself lacked subtlety. Born of distrust rather than enquiry, answers were unrewarding. Would we be killed on shore at Kerguelen? Or would the flying boat take off and leave us to fend for ourselves? Again, who was Bennett’s accomplice besides Nash? More important, would I, Rose or Wilcox be the first to go?
Credence was not as firm as it ought to have been that Bennett would refrain from slaughtering his old crew on the last great flying boat journey for something so paltry as a bigger share in the profits. To ignore the evidence was stupidity or laziness, a way of hiding fear. Rose had passed his trepidations on to me, in whom continual static induced nightmares, and I wondered whether I should transfer them to Wilcox, and observe his reaction – supposing he wasn’t too ill to notice.
The flying boat slipped, lifted, fell into another of God’s pockets, then righted itself. I looked out of the port hole. Bennett descended through rain cloud to sea-level, overtaking the green and rolling combers to each crest and then down again. No wonder I couldn’t get much range on the wireless. My guts were turning, but after a few minutes of such flip about, he held us straight, while the altimeter was checked for zero, leaving nothing to chance for the landing. Then we gained height.
I could only smile at Rose’s fantasy that the best of flying boat skippers would put such a scheme in hand. But if Rose was mad, how far would we get with him in a straitjacket? All the way, if we worked hard. The paper had accidentally fallen from Bennett’s pocket. I thought he had done it deliberately. Rose disagreed, apt to regard his own mistakes, however trivial, as mental deterioration. Even if temporary, no one was exempt, but when you dropped a clanger there was always a subtle warning to tell you that you had, and with concentration you could find it out. He whispered as much to me when we were back at our stations. When the sunspot over Bennett’s consciousness cleared, and he discovered the loss of the paper, he would assume that one of us had picked it up.
We stood at the bottom of the ladder. ‘I couldn’t care less,’ I said.
‘That attitude will get you nowhere.’
‘It got me here.’
‘It’ll keep you here. Or under the bog with a penguin pecking at your liver. The French claim Kerguelen, and to go there and recover the treasure from under their noses is illegal, old boy.’
‘The mission’s difficult enough, without Bennett disposing of people he’ll need to get the plane to wherever he decides to head after his gold’s stowed aboard.’ I climbed up, and put on the earphones. I cared very much, not wanting to alarm Rose in case the others noticed his disturbance.
Static was less intense, and I swung the needle till a jazz band sounded like a juggernaut whose unoiled axles were squeaking and grinding over the stones. I got back onto my listening frequency, wondering if I should tell Bennett that we had his death list. He would think I was as much off my head as I considered Rose to be out of his. We would only know that the note had any significance if Bennett got up from his seat and carried out a square search for what he had lost.
We hadn’t long to wait. He came loud and clear over the intercom, speaking calmly, yet seeming a shade on the still side of breathlessness.