George took their orders and went away. Montgomery laced his fingers back and forth and smiled. “Everyone knows that modern combat requirements have put the size and cost of aircraft almost completely out of hand,” he said carefully. “But it looks to me like pretty substantial progress that we have been able to meet those requirements at all. Even five years ago the Ninety-one wasn’t considered an actual possibility. Your new wing section is the only thing —”
“A monster with a gutful of electronic equipment,” said Gunderson, “duplicated and re-duplicated to make sure a ten-cent resistor doesn’t bring the downfall of a hundred million dollar airplane.”
He brought his gaze back to Montgomery’s face and smiled, “I’m sorry, Monty. I guess you’ve never heard me go on quite like that, have you? I usually do it alone — in the middle of the night.
“But you know I’m right. Every competent engineer in the aircraft industry knows it. Our manufacturing methods just aren’t good enough — and can’t be made good enough — to eliminate the duplication of components. Our design should be capable of creating a plane to perform the military function of the Ninety-one in a tenth its size and weight — and cost.
“What price tag will the production model have? We can guess at eighteen to twenty million. It’s economically disasterous to put that much into a single piece of equipment as vulnerable as a plane — even one with the dubious importance of being designed as carrier for the H and cobalt bombs. As a solution to an engineering problem, it’s a bust.”
“Why didn’t you build the Ninety-one a tenth its present size, then?” said Montgomery cautiously.
George appeared with their orders. Gunderson unfolded the napkin and tapped the side of his head. “Here —,” he said. “We haven’t got what it takes up here.”
“You have no right to blame yourself! With your accomplishments —”
“Not just me,” said Gunderson. “All of us. Your R&D outfit, NACA, the universities, the airplane plants. Look how we operate: We spend a couple million for a new computer, six million for a wind tunnel, our reports cover miles of microfilm. R&D farms out a million or so projects all over the country.
“But do you remember the story about how the Wrights learned to warp a wing? Just the two of them, watching the shape of a little cardboard box Wilbur twisted about as they talked — and there it was.
“How many of your people are capable of catching such a tiny clue? Not the R&D supervisor who’s wondering how to jack up his GS rating from 12 to 13, or the wind tunnel chief, or the computerman. Something’s wrong with the way we’re going about it. We’ve built giant data-collecting organizations under the fond delusion that this was research. We build oceans of little ingenious gadgets, thinking this is invention. And we look in vain in all this mass of data and gadgetry for the new, basic idea. It isn’t there. So we build another flying monster and pat ourselves on the back.”
Montgomery contemplated the long string of spaghetti dangling from his fork. “I’ve heard some of that kind of talk before,” he said. “I always thought it was just the product of a bad week when everything had gone wrong. If it’s actually true, what can be done about it? What are you going to do about it?”
“That’s the question I’ve been asking myself since we started the Ninety-one on paper, a dozen years ago. I’ve been asking it all my life in one form or another. I don’t have any answer, right now, but I’ll never build another airplane unless I find it.”
“But what are you going to do?” Montgomery insisted.
“I’ve saved my money,” said Gunderson. “I’ll do a little fishing, maybe quite a lot. And I think I may go to school.”
Montgomery’s hand seemed to remain suspended in midair for a small fraction of time. His eyes shot a glance of startled amazement toward Gunderson, and then he bent over the plate of spaghetti. “For a minute I thought you said you were going back to school,” he said with a laugh.
“There’s no law against a man getting some more education.”
“No, of course not — except that you could walk into any engineering school in the country and make their aeronautic staff look like hicks. I don’t get it. Who could teach you anything about plane design?”
Montgomery allowed himself to watch Gunderson more closely now as the engineer replied somewhat absently. “This isn’t an ordinary school I’m talking about. I started hearing stories concerning it about six months ago. Norcross, from Lockheed, was the first to mention it. He wrote that he’d quit his job and was doing some advanced study at this place. I thought he was crazy. Then I began hearing from some of the others, all inviting me down to join them.”
“What are they doing? Who runs the school? I never heard of anything like that.”
“That’s the peculiar part. I’ve asked, but they act almost cagey about details of what they’re doing. Yet they’re all overwhelmingly enthusiastic about it. A couple of men named Nagle and Berkeley are operating it privately. You may remember they got quite a bit of publicity a year or so ago because of a large rumpus they stirred up in regard to the patent situation. It was enough to get a Congressional investigation and it looks like there’ll be changes in the Patent Law.”
“I remember,” said Montgomery. “R&D people didn’t think much of their antics.”
Gunderson smiled. “I don’t imagine they would!”
“I know Norcross,” said Montgomery. “He’s very good. I can’t imagine any kind of school that could teach him or you anything at all about aircraft engineering.”
“Neither can I. But I want to find out. I’ve reached a dead end. The whole industry has. The engineers know it and continue to whistle in the dark, hoping for some miracle to pull them out of the hole — atomic engines small enough to go in a fighter ship, at a price not more than twice that of a jet — some way to reduce the fantastic spread of components we have to jam in —
“There won’t be any miracle. There’ll have to be a change in the basic kind of thinking we’re doing. Less of the six million dollar wind tunnel brand, and more of the little cardboard box variety!”
Montgomery returned to the plant with Gunderson, in a state of excitement he tried not to show. But it was tinged with regret, too, because he and Gunderson had become very good friends during the time of building the mammoth bomber. He left the engineer at the entrance to the giant hangar where the Ninety-one had been pulled in for postflight checking. He hurried to his own office on the ground floor of the plant administration building and closed the door, locking it carefully.
Then he sat down at his desk and put in a call to his Washington superior, Colonel Dodge. It took twenty minutes to locate the colonel, but at last Montgomery heard his distant, rough voice.
“I have some information,” said Montgomery. “It would be best to scramble.”
“All right. Code twelve,” said Dodge.
Montgomery pressed a sequence of switches on the little box through which the phone wire ran. His voice thinned out as he spoke again. “It’s that matter you told me to be on the lookout for six months ago. It’s finally happened here. Soren Gunderson is resigning. He says he’s going back to school.”
“Not Gunderson, too!” said Dodge bitterly. “It’s an epidemic. To date, almost two hundred men have resigned from highest priority military projects — all giving the excuse of wanting to attend this mysterious school. It has bogged down over thirty big projects, because they weren’t just run-of-the-mill engineers. They were chief engineers and project engineers and top designers. The whole military program of the nation has been slowed measurably by this draining away of key personnel.