'Well played, sport. I'm proud of you,' he said. 'Sorry about this weekend, but I'll make it up to you." And although the expression of regret was sincere, Shasa felt a buoyancy of his spirits as he drove out to the airfield at Y0ungsfield. Dicky, his erk, had the aircraft out of the hangar and ready for him on the hardstand.
Shasa climbed out of the Jaguar and stood with his hands in his pockets and the cigarette in the corner of his mouth, staring at the sleek machine with rapture.
It was a DH 98 Mosquito fighter bomber. Shasa had bought it at one of the RAF disposal sales at Biggin Hill and had it completely stripped and overhauled by D Havilland trained riggers. He had even had them re-glue the sandwich construction of the wooden bodywork with the new Araldite wonder glue. The original Rodux adhesives had proves unreliable under tropical conditions. Stripped of all armaments and military fittings, the Mosquito's already formidable performance had been considerably enhanced. Not even Courtney Mining could afford one of the new civilian jet-engined aircraft, but this was the next best thing.
The beautiful machine crouched on the hardstand like a falcon at hate, the twin Rolls Royce Merlin engines ready to roar into life and hurtle her into the blue. Blue was her colour, sky blue and silver; she shone in the bright Cape sunlight and on her fuselage where once the RAF roundel had been was now emblazoned the Courtney Company logo, a stylized silver diamond, its facets entwined with the Company's initials.
'How is the port number two magneto?" Shasa demanded of Dicky as he sauntered across in his oily overalls. The little man bridled.
'Ticking over like a sewing machine,' he answered. He loved the machine even more than Shasa did, and any imperfection, no matter how minor, wounded him deeply. When Shasa reported one, he took it very badly. He helped Shasa load his briefcase, overnight bag and guncase into the bomb bay which had been converted into a luggage compartment.
'All tanks are full,' he said, and stood aside looking superior as Shasa insisted on checking them visually, and then made a fuss of his walk-around inspection.
'She'll do,' Shasa agreed at last and could not resist stroking the wing, as though it were the limb of a lovely woman.
Shasa switched to oxygen at eleven thousand feet and levelled out at Angels twenty, grinning into his oxygen mask at the old airforce slang. He tuned her for cruise, carefully watching the exhaust gas temperatures and engine revs and then settled back to enjoy it.
Enjoy was too mild a term for it. Flying was an exultation of spirit and a fever in his blood. The immense lion-tawny continent drifted by beneath him, washed by a million suns and burned by the ..... hot. her. b-.see.nted- K-a-rooMnds ira-aeicvi'e-hide.-riven-a&-wrinkid and scarred with donga and canyon and dried riverbed. Only up here, high above it, did Shasa truly realize how much he was a part of it, how deep was his love for it. Yet it was a hard land and cruel, and it bred hard men, black and white, and he knew that he was one of them. There is no place for weaklings here, he thought, only the strong can flourish.
Perhaps it was the pure oxygen he breathed, enhanced by the ecstasy of flight, but his mind seemed clearer up here. Issues that had been obscure became lucid, uncertainties resolved, and the hours sped away as swiftly as the lovely machine streaked across the blue so that when he landed at Johannesburg's civilian airport, he knew with certainty what had to be done. David Abrahams was waiting for him, lanky and skinny as ever, but he was balding a little and he had taken to wearing gold-rimmed spectacles which gave him a perpetually startled expression. Shasa jumped down off the wing of the Mosquito and they embraced happily. They were closer than brothers. Then David patted the aircraft's wing.
'When do I get to fly her again?" he asked wistfully. David had got a DFC in the western desert and a bar to it in Italy. He had been credited with nine kills and ended the war as a wing commander, while Shasa had been a mere squadron leader when he had lost hi eye in Abyssinia and been invalided home.
'She's too good for you,' Shasa told him and slung his luggag( into the back seat of David's Cadillac.
As David drove out through the airfield gates they exchanger family news. David was married to Mathilda Janine, Tara Courtney': younger sister, so David and Shasa were brothers-in-law. Shas boasted about Sean and Isabella without mentioning his other twt sons and then they went on to the real objects of their meeting.
These, in order of importance, were, first, the decision whether o not to exercise the option on the new Silver River mining'prospect ir the Orange Free State. Then there was the trouble with the company's chemical factory on the Natal coast. A local pressure group was kicking up a rumpus about poisoning the sea bed and reefs in the area where the factory was discharging effluent into the sea. And finally, there was David's crazy fixation, from which Shasa was finding it difficult to dislodge him, that they should spend some.
thing over a quarter of a million pounds on one of those new elephant ine electric calculators.
'The Yanks did all the calculations for the atomic bomb with one of them,' David argued. 'And they call them computers, not calculators,' he corrected Shasa.
'Come on, Davie, what are we going to blow up?" Shasa protested.
'I'm not designing an A-bomb." 'Anglo-American have one. It's the wave of the future, Shasa.
We'd better be on it." 'It's a quarter-million-pound wave, old son,' Shasa pointed out.
'Just when we need every penny for Silver River." 'If we'd had one of these computers to analyse the geological drilling reports from Silver River, we'd have already saved ourselves almost the entire cost of the thing, and we'd be a lot more certain of our final decision than we are how." 'How can a machine be better than a human brain?" 'Just come and have a_look at it,' David pleaded. 'The university has just installed an IBM 701. I have arranged a demonstration r you this afternoon." 'Okay, Davie,' Shasa capitulated. 'I'll look, but that doesn't mean I'm buying." The IBM supervisor in the basement of the engineering faculty building was no more than twenty-six years of age.
'They're all kids,' David explained. 'It's a young people's science." The supervisor shook hands with Shasa, and then removed her horn-rimmed spectacles. Suddenly Shasa's interest in electronic computers burgeoned. Her eyes were clear bright green and her hair was the colour of wild honey made from mimosa blossom. She wore a green sweater of tight-fitting angora wool, and a tartan skirt which left her smooth tanned calves bare. It was immediately obvious that she was an expert, and she answered all Shasa's questions without hesitation in a tantalizing southern drawl.
'Marylee has a master's in electrical engineering from MIT,' David murmured, and Shasa's initial attraction was spiced with respect.
'It's so damned big,' he protested. 'It fills the entire basement. The ruddy thing is the size of a four-bedroomed house." 'Cooling,' Marylee explained. 'The heat build-up is enormous.
'Most of the bulk is oil cooling baffles." 'What are you processing at the moment?" 'Professor Dart's archaeological material from the Sterkfontein caves. We are correlating about two hundred thousand observations of his against over a million from the sites in East Africa." 'How long will that take you?" 'We started the run twenty minutes ago, we'll finish it before we shut down at five o'clock." 'That's in fifteen minutes,' Shasa chuckled. 'You're having me on!" 'I wouldn't mind,' she murmured speculatively, and when she smiled her mouth was wide and moist and kissable.
'You say you shut down at five?" he asked. 'When do you start up again?" 'Eight tomorrow morning." 'And the machine stands idle overnight?" Marylee glanced down the length of the basement. David was at the other end watching the print-out and the hum of the computer covered their voices.
'That's right. It will stand idle all tonight. Just like me." Clearly she was a lady who knew exactly what she wanted, and how to get it. She looked at him directly, challengingly.