But Hitler paused. The North Sea was his boundary, he said; he wanted no conflict with his ‘Anglo-Saxon cousins’, who stood united against him.
Churchill was all for rejecting Hitler’s overtures and fighting on. But Lord Halifax, the foreign secretary, argued that Hitler’s terms were acceptable. While Churchill retired fuming to the backbenches, the ‘scarecrow in a derby hat’ was Prime Minister within the week, and had agreed an armistice within the month.
Hitler was able to turn his full energies east, and by Christmas 1941 had taken Moscow.
All this happened, you see, because the Japanese had not been able to pose a threat to the Americans. If not for the impassibility of the Pacific, America’s attentions might have been drawn to the west, not the east. And without the powerful support we enjoyed from America, if Hitler hadn’t been moved to offer such a generous peace in 1940 – if Hitler had dared attack Britain – the Germans would eventually have found themselves fighting on two fronts, west and east. Could Russia have survived a lesser Nazi assault? Is it even conceivable that Russia and Britain and America could have worked as allies against the Nazis, even against the Japanese? Would the war against the Nazis eventually have been won?
All this speculation is guff, of course, best left to blokes in pubs. But you can see that if the Pacific had been navigable the whole outcome of the war with the Germans would have been different, one way or another. And that is why the Goering, a plane designed to challenge the ocean’s impregnability, is indeed a weapon of strategic significance.
This is what we argue about over lunch and dinner. Lost in the vast inhuman arena of this ocean, we are comforted by the familiarity of our petty human squabbles.
Day 10. Perhaps I should record distances travelled, rather than times.
It is three days since we left behind the eastern coast of Asia. Over sea, unimpeded by resupplying or bomb-dropping, we make a steady airspeed of two hundred and twenty knots. In the last forty-eight hours alone we should have covered twelve thousand miles.
We should already have crossed the ocean. We should already be flying over the Americas. When I take astronomical sightings, it is as if we have simply flown around a perfectly behaved spherical Earth from which America has been deleted. The geometry of the sky doesn’t fit the geometry of the Earth.
Somehow I hadn’t expected the mystery to come upon us so quickly. Only ten days into the flight, we are still jostling for position at the dinner table. And yet we have sailed into a mystery so strange that we may as well have been projected to the moon.
I still haven’t met the Captain, whose name, I am told, is Fassbender. Even lost as we are in the middle of unfathomable nothingness, the social barriers between us are as rigid as the steel bulkheads of the Beast.
Day 15. Today, a jaunt in a chariot. What fun!
We passed over yet another group of islands, this one larger than most, dark basaltic cones blanketed by greenery and lapped by the pale blue of coral reefs. Observers in the blisters, armed with binoculars and telescopes, claimed to see movement at the fringes of these scattered fragments of jungle. So the Captain ordered the chariots to go down and take a shuftie.
There were four of us in our chariot, myself, Jack, Ciliax, and a crewman who piloted us, a squat young chap called ‘Klaus’ whom I rather like. Both the Germans wore sidearms; Jack and I did not. The chariot is a stubby-winged seaplane, well equipped to land on the back of the Beast; a tough little bugger.
We skimmed low over clearings where lions ran and immense bears growled. Things like elephants, covered in brown hair and with long curling tusks, lifted their trunks as we passed, as if in protest at our engines’ clatter. ‘Christ,’ Jack said. ‘What I wouldn’t give to be down among ‘em with a shotgun.’ Ciliax and I took photographs and cine-films and made notes and spoke commentaries into tape-recorders.
And we thought we saw signs of people: threads of smoke rose from the beaches.
‘Extraordinary,’ Ciliax said. ‘Cave bears. What looked like sabre-tooth cats. Mammoths. This is a fauna that has not been seen in Europe or America since the ice retreated.’
Jack asked, ‘What happened to ‘em?’
‘We hunted them to death,’ I said. ‘Probably.’
‘What with, machine guns?’
I shrugged. ‘Stone axes and flint arrowheads are enough, given time.’
‘So,’ Jack asked practically, ‘how did they get here?’
‘Sea levels fall and rise,’ Ciliax said. ‘When the ice comes, it locks up the world’s water. Perhaps that is true even of this monstrous world ocean. Perhaps the lower waters expose dry land now submerged, or archipelagos along which one can raft.’
‘So in the Ice Age,’ I said, ‘we hunted the mammoths and the giant sloths until we drove them off the continents. But they kept running, and a few of them made it to one island or another, and now they just continue fleeing, heading ever east.’ And in this immense ocean, I thought, there was room to keep running and running and running. Nothing need ever go extinct.
‘But there are people here,’ Jack pointed out. ‘We saw fires.’
We buzzed along the beach. We dipped low over a kind of camp-site, a mean sort of affair centred on a scrappy hearth. The people, naked, came running out of the forest at our noise – and when they saw us, most of them went running back again. But we got a good look at them, and fired off photographs.
They were people, of a sort. They had fat squat bodies, and big chests, and brows like bags of walnuts. I think it was obvious to us all what they were, even to Jack.
‘Neanderthals.’ Ciliax said it first; it is a German name. ‘Another species of – well, animal – which we humans chased out of Africa and Europe and Asia.’
Jack said, ‘They don’t seem to be smart enough to wipe out the mammoths as we did.’
‘Or maybe they’re too smart,’ I murmured.
Ciliax said, ‘What a remarkable discovery: relics of the evolutionary past, even while the evolutionary future of mankind is being decided in the heart of Asia!’
Standing orders forbid landings. The chariot lifted us back to the steel safety of the Beast, and that was that.
It is now eight days since we crossed the coast of China. We have come thirty-five thousand miles since. Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising to find such strange beasts below, mammoths and cave bears and low-browed savages.
And still we go on. What next? How thrilling it all is!
Day 23. Today, a monstrous electrical storm.
We flew under the worst of it, our banks of engines thrumming, as lightning crackled around the W/T masts. Perhaps in this unending ocean there are unending storms – nobody knows, our meteorologists cannot calculate it.
But we came out of it. Bold technicians crawled out to the wing roots to check over the Beast, to replace a mast or two, and to tend to the chariots. I wanted to check my Spitfire, but predictably was not allowed by Ciliax. Still, Klaus kindly looked over the old bird for me and assures me she is A-OK.
Last night both Ciliax and Jack Bovell made passes at me, the one with a steely resolve, the other rather desperately.
Day 25. A rather momentous day.
Our nominal food and water store is intended to last fifty days. Today, therefore, Day 25, is the turn-back point. And yet we are no nearer finding land, no nearer penetrating the great mysteries of the Pacific.