Garnett blinked. “That’s quite a concept—are you a writer?”
“No. I just worry about dying. I’m not cut out for it, I guess.” She smiled and brushed a speck of ash from the white linen of her uniform.
Garnett felt a pang of concern. He was fairly sure the girl was being flippant, but there was something in her face. Perhaps she really had a problem of some kind and had been speaking to him on a level of honesty which most people rarely reach. He failed to see how anyone with her stake in life could be obsessed with death, but somehow the subject kept cropping up in her conversation, and he had no idea of how to react. In the silence he became aware of barriers clanging into place between them and was amazed to discover how strongly he wanted to break through.
“Janice,” he said uneasily, using her name for the first time. “I’m getting out of this place in a few days, and … I wonder if you would have dinner with me some evening?”
She glanced up at him, apparently pleased but hesitating.
“I’ll still be on sticks,” he said quickly, feeling gauche, ‘but my hair’s growing back again where they put the plate in my skull. I won’t always have this tonsure, you know.”
Janice smiled whitely, stood up and stubbed out her cigarette. “Thank you,” she said. “It sounds nice. Let’s discuss it later.” She went out, closing the door gently.
Garnett slumped back feeling both elated and aghast. He also had a suspicion she had left at that moment simply because her illicit cigarette was finished and if it had burned out sooner she would have gone that much earlier. What, he wondered, had made him do it? And what did he think he would be able to do for her? The latest pile of blue-covered, spiral-bound reports from the works occupied his attention for some time, and then Nurse McFee came to re-make his bed. She was a motherly woman, with bright red forearms and a faintly Scots accent.
“I was speaking to the dietician,” he said casually, “and I …”
“Oh, she’s begun visiting you, has she?” Nurse McFee grunted fiercely as she pulled back the bed clothes. “I wondered when she would get round to you.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you must be getting better.” Nurse McFee pounded his pillows into submissive fluffiness and refused to speak again. When she had gone Garnett settled down for his afternoon doze, acknowledging sleepily that he would probably be better off if he stopped the Janice Villiers thing right then and there. He slid peacefully into unconsciousness, and sometime during the drowsy afternoon his brain, which had hesitated so long, took the final decisive step out from under the canopy of the drugs.
He awoke in a panic.
A glance at the clock showed him it was several minutes before four. He pulled the televu off the bedside table on to his lap and punched out the works number. There was a delay, during which the little screen remained blank, then the face of the operator appeared, glowing in the grey depths like a submerged pearl.
“Mr. Garnett!” The tiny face assumed perfect miniature lineaments of surprise.
“Hello, Connie,” Garnett said brusquely. “Put me through to Mr. Dermott.” He waited impatiently while the connection was being made. Ian Dermott was his general manager and had been with the organisation since its early days back in the Sixties, handling the administrative and commercial side. He was directly and solely responsible to Garnett because the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company was a rarity in its field in that it was privately owned. When Clifford Pryce, inventor of the generated wing, had died in 1978 he had willed the company to Garnett, along with a complicated system of legal safeguards designed to prevent him from bringing in public money by the issue of even a single debenture. Not that there had been any likelihood of fresh capital being required—the Pryce-Garnett T.6 orbital interceptor had been on the boards of the Coventry design offices then and it was an obvious winner right from the start.
The T.6’s main engine was a hydrogen-burning jet with an advanced type of ion-augmented thrust, but the aircraft’s big selling point was the Pryce generated wing—the invisible, steel-hard force field which could fan out ten metres for low-speed flight and progressively reduce in size as speed increased. At Mach 8 the wing generators; were switched off altogether, allowing the hurtling, white-hot fuselage to sustain itself by body lift alone without the impending drag of even a vestigial wing. During the research and development stages there had been delays due to the fantastic precision called for by Pryce’s design for the wing electronics. In the end the bugs had been ironed out and, as a private venture financed by profits from military orders, the company was now developing a larger generated wing system capable of supporting a civil airliner.
Which was why Garnett was in a panic.
“Hello, Tony.” Dermott’s face appeared in the screen. “What’s all this then? Why aren’t you catching up on your sleep? You’ll need it when you get back you know.”
“Hello, Ian. Sorry to interrupt you, but this is important and I want you to issue the initial paperwork right away.”
Dermott adjusted his glasses, looking puzzled. “Of course, Tony. What is it?”
“I’m cancelling the twenty-metre wing project.”
Dermott lowered his head for a few seconds, apparently staring at his hands, then he looked up coldly. “I’m sorry, Tony. You can’t do that.”
The words shocked Garnett. He had expected the other man perhaps to show surprise or resentment, but not step so completely out of line, and out of character. “I’m doing it,” he said. “In fact, I’ve done it. From the moment I informed you I was cancelling, the project was dead.”
“Tony, are you sure you’re feeling all right? You just can’t do this, you know.”
Garnett took a deep breath. “Issue an immediate stop-work order to the design, production, test, purchasing and planning staff concerned.”
“For God’s sake, Tony! Why? Just tell me why.”
‘Because it will lose money. We won’t be able to sell it. Do you want a better reason? So far we’ve sunk the best part of a million pounds into that wing—money that I’ll have to write off against research and development costs of the T.6 wing.”
‘But we were in full agreement that the big wing is just what civil aviation is waiting for.”
“It is,” Garnett agreed grimly, ‘but not with our reliability figures. Our own Air Registration Board and the American F.A.A. have always regarded a fatal accident rate of one in every hundred million flights as being a reasonable objective, although in practice they treat one in ten million flights as an acceptable figure. In more convenient terms, this is an accident rate of 1 \u215? 10{\super
\u8722?7}. It has taken us four years to achieve .92 \u215? 10{\super
\u8722?6} with the smaller T.6 wing, which is just inside military necessity standards and a whole order below civil standards. But now we are proposing to produce the twenty-metre wing, which will have a reliability about half that of the T.6 wing, not for the military but for the civil market! It doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
Dermott looked impatient. ‘But this is nothing new, Tony. All those figures have been thoroughly discussed. Gedge and the rest of the reliability team are confident that …’
“If they are very lucky,” Garnett interrupted, ‘they might make military standard in five years, civil standard in ten. By that time the R&D costs would be astronomical and we would still have to sell the first unit. The public won’t take to an invisible wing that vanishes if there’s a power failure.”