The Key to Irunium
by Kenneth Bulmer
I
All his life he had been vaguely aware of the way things around him disappeared without any reason. At his christening, so he was told with hearty guffaws, the water had vanished from the font. “Dried up in the hot weather, old man!”—that had been the official explanation, but it remained odd, all the same.
At school, his teachers—a faceless bunch by now—could never understand why Prestin’s books, rulers, pencils and other unlikely objects should always be in short supply, or why his classrooms always seemed to be short of educational items. But as he spent half his time in the United States and the other half in England, his schooling tended to grow empirically rather than be guided by firm academic regularity.
Walking out to the waiting aircraft at London Airport, a grown man with a job now, he knew he had never bothered about that. He hadn’t cared. He knew from the first what he was going to do: he was going to be a flyer like his father.
Prestin, naturally, had been mercilessly twitted about his name, Robert Infamy Prestin. Yes, all of them, all the permutations you could dredge out of it, he’d had them all. The initials on his traveling cases (written inside!) were R. I. P. An aviator would make a mine out of it, but he hadn’t worried about that, either. His every waking thought took wings, carried him away to the open blue, cavorted with him through the ethereal realms of the sky. He didn’t bother too much about anything else. He’d never concerned himself, for example, with girls.
Therefore, when he saw the dark-haired girl with the short skirt and the long legs so completely unoverlookable boarding the plane with the other passengers, he—certainly the only man there to do so—took more interest in the Trident with its lean and powerful tail-driving elegance.
Inevitably and without any conscious thought about the waste of time, Prestin rechecked his hand luggage as he sat down. Again, without any surprise or lack of it, he found he had still everything with him: the portable, the briefcase, the tape recorder, the magazines. He might have mislaid a paper or two, but that was not of major importance. He looked forward with intense interest to the forthcoming exposition in Rome. Italy always warmed him—physically, mentally and, if he admitted it guardedly, spiritually, too.
As an aviation journalist he had found himself a niche in the flying world that the lack of adequate eyesight would otherwise have barred him from forever. He would never forget the blank horror of that first refusal. The R.A.F., he was told, gently but firmly, required young men with impeccable eyesight.
He had passed every other test with ease.
Now he pushed his rimless glasses up on his nose and shook out the papers, selecting Flying Review. He would look out shortly. Right now he was using the magazine as a cover to shield the reactions his body experienced as the jet came alive beneath him.
Someone sat down next to him and, without looking up, he automatically shifted, although it was quite unnecessary in the super-luxurious Trident accommodations.
Rome would be nice. Not too hot there yet, although he reveled in hot weather and would wear pullovers long after more up-to-date American friends had donned their summer lightweights for the rigors of New York’s sweltering heat waves. Conversely, he didn’t mind cold (although he preferred heat) and he would continue to wear a light raincoat long after his English friends had shifted into thick topcoats and modish British Warms.
But of course climate toleration hadn’t done him any good with the U.S.A.F., either. Like the R.A.F., they wanted men who could see where they were flying.
Prestin had gotten over that double-barreled refusal now, even the wicked one-two disappointment. He wrote good stuff about flying, and he flew as a passenger whenever he could. But apart from a few callow hops in a Tiger Moth, a few circuits and bumps, a solo and a flyer’s ticket, he hadn’t done any real flying. But anyway, flying the old Moth gave you an experience that no Lightning or Phantom could ever give—so they said. He was never likely to make the comparison.
One of his clustered magazines dropped to the soft carpeting. Bending to pick it up, he became vaguely aware of white mesh stockings, long legs that went on and on and up and up—he looked up suddenly, face flushed, to stare into dark hazel eyes and a round saucy face smiling down at him. He was acutely embarrassed and felt like a fumbling fool.
“That’s the trouble with these damned skirts,” she said, wriggling and tugging—without noticeable effect—letting her handbag slide down so Prestin had to grab that, too. “Oh—thanks. And hadn’t you better get up? You’ll get curvature of the spine hunched over like that.”
He straightened up like a marionette. Another magazine fell. He let it lie. He couldn’t face another salvo if he bent over again.
“I—ah—I’m sorry—” he began, not at all sure what to say.
“Skip it, alf, life’s too short for mumbling apologies.”
The Trident bellowed into inaudibility, rumbled for a few moments and then, lifting her nose, catapulted into the air. Everything in the luxurious cabin settled down to relaxation. Bob Prestin settled down to a wary contemplation of the girl sitting next to him. He had no idea at all of what she might be; hazy notions of models, secretaries, film stars and photographers’ assistants flickered haphazardly through his mind. She appeared to be alone. That was nice. He took his mind off the plane a little more. That he hadn’t bothered with girls did not mean that he didn’t know what they were for; they’d merely figured low on his life priority list.
Covertly studying this one, he decided that a little upgrading of priorities was in order. After all, a man born in 1941 did have certain privileges.
The Trident whistled her stately efficient way along the airlanes leaving London, routed out over the Channel and straight across Europe—first stop Rome.
What had she meant by calling him Alf ? Prestin asked himself.
He frequented the hip joints in London; he knew the patter and kept abreast of it; he dressed well, if a little more sedately than most of his friends; and he was with it, in a minor sort of key—but he hadn’t come across that one yet. Alf. Never hit the popularity of Fred. Never.
The stewardesses were anxious to be polite to him, but this phenomenon was not unusual. They often seemed to regard him with his six-foot-one of brawn and muscle as a lost little boy. They—he squirmed at the idea but knew it to be just—they wanted to mother him.
If this bird sitting next to him wanted to mother him, he might have to be firm about that.
“You’ve been to Rome before?” she was saying, glancing at him under violet artificial eyelashes that adhered quite well. Her face had been made up with extreme attention to detail in the fashion currently in vogue: heavily emphasized eyes, unpowdered nose, glisten-lipsticked lips that, at least to Prestin, looked gangrenous.
“Yes,” he said, jerking his eyes away from her face. Poor thing, he felt with some compassion, a stunner in looks, really, and she does that to her face. “Oh, yes. I’ve been to Rome before.”
“This is my first trip. I’m looking forward—oh, you can’t guess how I’m looking forward to it.”
“No?” he said politely, amused by her freshness and unselfconscious awareness of herself. Her voice pitched high and clear without a falter.
She wore a short leather coat of darkish maroon and now she began to wriggle around to take it off, revealing a scintillant dress, loosely girdled at the hips, fashioned in slinky green, silver, and a shimmery rose color. Prestin liked it.
He helped her with her coat and waited while she snuggled back again, wondering why she had elected to sit next to him. Across the aisle he could see another girl, blonde and quite pretty, with the same outre uniform of facial makeup as this girl. Beyond her sat a dark man in the inconspicuous gray suit of business efficiency, wearing thick hornrimmed glasses on his thin pinched nose. Prestin had never been one to burden himself with the appurtenances of the modern world in any shape or form if they did not suit him. The idea of loading down your face with a massive pair of thick glasses because the theory went that it made you look important and impressive, lifted you into the executive class, amused him with its infantile idiocy; Uniforms belonged to uniformed minds. He wore his own dark gray traveling suit because he liked it; it was comfortable. That minor flunky’s glasses were going to torture him in Rome.