‘Right. Signals from the rocket have stopped. Art Clementi’s boys are getting a blank record.’
‘How long did you expect to go on getting a signal before the rocket got too far away from the Earth?’
‘Oh, for several weeks more. The natural interpretation is that a small meteorite has hit something in the electronics. It was a rush job so we couldn’t take every precaution we would have liked to have done. Yet it’s queer to find the signals stopping only a few minutes before the war was announced.’
Several officers and the pilot came to talk to John during the flight. It struck me as odd how much status depends on the social situation. War had reduced us to persons of no account. The present situation, with all its weird implications, taking one as far as the shifting frontiers of science or even beyond that, made John a commanding figure. He was the most distinguished scientist available for consultation. On his coat tails, almost literally, I managed to get into the cockpit as the plane approached the American mainland.
There were a lot of us jammed in there. Yet I could see a great deal more than was possible from an ordinary passenger seat. I gathered it was the Los Angeles basin ahead. The air was completely clear. There was nothing of the banks of brown smog I had seen when we came in from New York two weeks ago. Was it only two weeks ago? It needed no more than the most casual glance to see there was no city here.
‘Take a look along the Sierra Madre. Look for the Observatory.’
We were coming lower now, to an altitude of about ten thousand feet I guessed. There were mountains below us, heavily wooded. I noticed there were no fire-rides. We flew immediately above their crests, sharp and jagged. The trees covered the very topmost point. If this was Mount Wilson, there was no observatory here. We left the mountains and came back to the flatter land by the coast, dropping down still further, to only a few thousand feet. It was then we caught brief glimpses of habitation in the woods. The woods were now covering places where only two weeks before there had been great sprawling boulevards, streaming with traffic, swarming with humanity.
But there were signs of life below us and this lifted our spirits to an astonishing degree. The trouble was we couldn’t land the plane. An enormous runway was needed for that and no such thing as a runway was to be seen in the wilderness below us. We came low enough to notice a few cultivated patches of land and this was all. Whoever was down there was keeping out of sight.
The itch to get to the ground was overwhelming, I think, to everybody on the plane. Since we had plenty of fuel we did the obvious thing of heading east, into the American mainland. Sooner or later we all felt it must be possible to find an airstrip. Two weeks ago every town of any appreciable size had its airport, with runways extended for the new jets. The day was so clear that even after we climbed back to forty thousand feet we could still see the ground below quite well.
As we flew on we all kept a sharp lookout for towns and roads. We saw neither in the usual sense. There was an occasional rough track through the mountains. Now and again we thought there were further signs of primitive inhabitations. Whether or not there were houses we couldn’t say. Further east, and ever further, we went. The search for a place to land was becoming fruitless. We tried Phoenix, or what used to be Phoenix, then Albuquerque, then at last we were over the central plains. We came down very low over Denver. It wasn’t entirely easy to be sure we had located the correct place. There were no radio beacons to guide us. All navigation had to be done with the compasses, and even by the old-fashioned method of simply looking down on to the ground. Denver was a good place to look for. The big sudden rise of the Rockies lies only thirty miles or so to the west. That landmark was quite unmistakable, so all we had to do was to fly on a north-south line until the crew felt convinced they had found the right place. Once again we came low, to a thousand feet or so. Below us there were open grasslands. There were no signs of growing crops. Manifestly, the vegetation was in a natural state, a natural ecology.
With the present light load the plane was expected to have a range of between eight and nine thousand miles. So far, we had done about three thousand. Perhaps it would have been wise to have turned back. Yet the desire to find a landing spot was so strong in all of us that we felt impelled to make one more try, in the direction of Chicago. We wouldn’t have a great deal to spare in the matter of range, but by taking a more direct route back to Hawaii the pilot thought he would be all right.
We picked up a powerful tail wind. Quite strong radio signals were coming in now from the east, probably of European origin. We found nothing at Chicago, except endless lakes and woods. Then came the critical discussion, to go on or to go back. The big advantage of going back was we knew exactly where we were going. The disadvantage was that we didn’t have a great deal in hand in the way of range. We would have to fight the head wind, although this wouldn’t matter too much as long as we found a reasonably direct route. The advantage of going on was that radio-guidance systems seemed to be working more or less normally somewhere to the east. And we still had the tail wind so range would be no problem that way. Besides it was manifestly desirable to establish actual physical communication with whatever it was that lay to the east.
Truth to tell, I think everybody wanted to take a look at New York. It was much the same story as we flew over the Appalachians in the fading light. But there were far more signs of life here, far more primitive shacks, it seemed. It all looked as America might have looked around the year 1800. Darkness came on. We saw little more, except twice there were flickering lights below us, fairly obviously camp fires. Then we were out over the Atlantic.
By now we were back in our seats. The stewardess served us with a meal. There wasn’t much conversation, and what there was of it was pretty terse. John and I sat silently, each immersed deeply in his own thoughts. The irrational feeling swept over me that somehow the plane had become a world closed in on itself, that it would go on and on flying for ever. We had frequent reports from the pilot, however, to say that radio communication ahead was entirely normal. But perhaps this was just another monstrous deception? Emotionally, I felt we must go on and on until at last we came to our starting point, back in Hawaii; that we would find everything wiped clean even on the islands, just as it was on the American mainland.
I saw John looking repeatedly at his watch. Like me, like all of us, he was finding the passage of time excruciatingly slow. We had still three hours more to go before the next stage in the drama would unfold itself.
In retrospect I am not sure whether the innocence of my mind was an advantage or not. To build any rational explanation of what had happened, of what I had seen, was utterly beyond me. So I was left only with monstrous images and grotesque explanations.
After an age, in which every ten minutes seemed stretched to an hour, as it does in childhood, the little speakers above our heads crackled. The pilot’s voice came over to say we had just passed the west coast of Ireland, that we would be landing at London airport in about three-quarters of an hour. Even the harshness of the speakers failed to conceal the relief, the emotional tones, in his voice.
All the evidence was that London airport was working normally. From the tilt of the fuselage you could see we were coming down now. The moon was shining on banks of clouds below us. Then we were down to the clouds and into them. These were the clouds that hang so frequently over the British Isles, blotting out the sun, giving the grey skies I knew so well. The clouds were astonishingly thin, the layer couldn’t have been thicker than a few hundred feet. We broke suddenly below it. There on the ground was a multitude of lights. The sheer normality of it, the roads we could now pick out, set up a sharp reaction. I returned quickly to my seat and lay back feeling I might be sick. It wasn’t airsickness, rather that of faintness. Then I saw we were going down to the ground at last. The landing wasn’t a good one, there was a big bump as the wheels hit, but at least we were down. Within a few seconds I felt all right again.