"You mean the box could have acted as though the runway was higher or lower than it really is, for example?"
"I mean," the Director said carefully, "I'd be inclined to look for a situation in which such a thing could happen."
"And if such a set of conditions existed—which part of the gear would you be inclined to suspect of being affected?"
"Look—the box divides itself pretty definitely into three separate complexes, doesn't it? The bit getting it in line with the runway to start with...and after that the altitude-and-aspect gear, and finally the wing-tip equipment that controls the roll. Right?"
"We're with you."
"Right. Now it would seem unlikely that the first is in any way affected: all three crashes actually occurred on the runway, so the planes must have been accurately lined up, eh?...And again, no eyewitnesses have mentioned anything like a sideslip or a wingtip digging in or anything of that sort. Admittedly the last one did cartwheel—but that was apparently only after the under-carriage had been wrecked on the first impact. So it seems—shall we say?—unlikely that the wingtip gubbins caused the crashes."
"Which leaves the altitude and glide-angle equipment?"
"Exactly. You examine all the witnesses' statements. Seventy per cent of 'em say something like 'the plane seemed to fly straight into the ground'. And the survivor of the last one was trying to say something to the nurse in the ambulance. Unfortunately, she didn't speak English—but we gather he was spouting something about height, or too high, or something. All of which seems to me to suggest either wrong altimeter readings or wrong glide angles."
"Or wrong interpretation by the gear to give the effect of this?"
The dark man with the moustache shrugged. For the first time, he removed the pipe from his mouth. "You must appreciate my position," he said, jetting a small cloud of smoke into the air. "We make the gear, after all. As there's no evidence of faultiness after the crash, we feel it's not up to us to ferret out reasons why it might have been at fault—though of course we should accept any conclusive evidence found by someone else."
"I understand," Solo said. "And you can't think of any device—or set of conditions, to use your phrase—under which the part of the gear affecting height readings or glide angle could be momentarily distorted, and yet return to normal afterwards?"
The Technical Director jammed the pipe back into his mouth. "Oh, have a heart, old chap," he said. "Have a heart."
Later, Solo and Illya spent some time studying the technical drawings of the Murchison-Spears equipment—with particular emphasis on those parts of it affecting the height of the aircraft and the automatic control of this.
"I can see the principle," Solo said. "But I'm afraid the detail is a bit too..."
"No, no, Napoleon," Illya said. "It is relatively simple. Look...after the scanner tube has...Look!...Here...This is where, if it was just giving a reading, the electronic pulse would be turned into a visual indication, on a dial. See?"
"Ye-e-es. I'm with you so far. Just."
"Well, since it's not just giving a reading—but causing the plane to react as a pilot would after digesting that reading—the electronic information feeds in...here. In this small memory storage unit."
"Something like a computer?"
"On a far less complicated scale, yes...And then these selectors...here...and here...and here...See, the contact is made by this core of toridium. As you know, it's a metal whose coefficient of expansion is —"
"No, Illya, no!" Solo said firmly. "This is way beyond me. Let me leave the technical stuff to you. When you have an idea, tell me—and we'll act on it. Until then, you're on your own, boy!"
"Just as you like, Napoleon. I think I might have the glimmering of an idea how someone might—just might—begin to make...what did the man say?"
"A set of conditions?"
"That's it! A set of conditions! A set of conditions in which this equipment might be made to react falsely without permanently damaging it...but I'd like to brood on it before I commit myself."
"You do that. In the meantime, we'll start on the social side, as we said..."
* * *
At seven thirty, they met Helga for a drink in the airport lounge. Sheridan Rogers had still not returned to her apartment, nor had she left any message at the T.C.A. office or in the bureau at the terminal building. They gave her a half hour and left at eight o'clock—calling once again at the empty apartment on the way to Haut-des-Cagnes.
Illya, customarily a reserved companion, was abnormally quiet and worried during the short journey. Solo and Helga, torn between the extremes of failing to cheer him up and appearing too flippant in the face of his obvious distress, struck a kind of subdued bantering note in their exchanges as the car sped along the motor road to Cros-des-Cagnes and then turned inland towards the medieval village perched so picturesquely above it. From the coast, Haut-des-Cagnes presents a symmetrical aspect—a pyramid of rough, red-tiled Proven�al roofs crowned by a 14th century Grimaldi castle, beneath whose floodlit and crenellated keep the place clusters at night. But the visitor who ventures along either of the valleys running inland to each side of it soon sees the village in a different perspective. It is built—for a start—at the end of a spur and not on a hillock...so that a moving viewpoint presents constantly shifting profiles. At one moment, the emphasis seems to be rectangular—a line of picture-postcard houses serrating the sky at the top of a squared-up bluff; the next minute, the picture is all zig-zags—a series of slopes linked by hairpin bends, the whole complex rising to stone ramparts and punctuated by clusters of cottages clinging to the wall as tenaciously as the bougainvillea which covers them. And yet on the far side of the valley, a little higher up, an onlooker would characterize the place as a series of stepped terraces, rectangular plots and parcels of land related vertically by the swooping walls of villas and the trailing profusion of flowers hanging from their balustrades.
Illya drove about a kilometer along the road leading inland to Vence and then made a steep, climbing turn back to the right, approaching the old village from the north.
The center of social life in Haut-des-Cagnes is the place at the very summit of the pyramid—a small square dominated by the battlemented turret of the keep. Here a handful of expensive and chi-chi boutiques and souvenir shops vie with the three cabaret-restaurants in the laudable task of parting the tourist painlessly and as elegantly as possible from his money. And here in the summer—especially in August—an absurd and ludicrous number of cars attempt to park.
As the 404 negotiated the narrow, steep streets leading by degrees to the place, it became increasingly necessary to stop and allow other vehicles room for manoeuver—despite the traffic lights which in a desultory way tried to regulate the traffic coming up and down. As always, the square was full, and people on their way to the boutiques or the cafés had left their cars absolutely anywhere: they lined the constricted roadway, projected across intersections, blocked the exits from drives and garages, balked those wishing to turn and sprawled across every available inch of space in the congested village. Illya was eventually forced to turn around at the top and drive down again to a square only halfway up the ramparts. After waiting a moment here, they slid into a space vacated by a departing Belgian and climbed back to the place at the top via a steep stone staircase.