Dermott’s face suddenly smoothed into a look of relief. “So that’s it,” he said softly. “You haven’t recovered from the accident! You had me really worried. Tony, the prototype that dropped on to your car was proving a special power system—you remember the new lightweight alternator from Schuylers—and, needless to say, that is one bought-out component which we won’t …”
“What is this?” Garnett shouted incredulously, feeling his temper break. “Are you telling me that the accident has affected my mind? This decision has nothing to do with my personal experience.”
“Look at it this way, Tony. Before the accident you were one of the prime movers in the twenty-metre wing project. You over-ruled every objection. You let some of our best engineers resign because they argued against it. Now, after the accident, you want to drop the whole thing like a hot rivet. What other conclusion … ?”
“Ian!” With an effort Garnett held his voice level. “I am speaking to you now as owner of the Pryce-Garnett Aircraft Company. Right now, right this minute, you must issue those stop-work orders or give me your resignation. Which is it to be?”
“I’m damned if I’ll take this from …’ Dermott stopped talking and his face seemed to ripple in the depths of the tiny television screen. He paused for a long moment and when he resumed speaking his voice was dulled. “I’m sorry, Tony. I shouldn’t have spoken to you like that. I’ve been under somewhat of a strain. You’re quite right, of course—these decisions are yours to make and it was unforgivable of me to … I’ll issue the stop-work orders immediately.”
Garnett’s anger had gathered too much emotional momentum for him to match the other man’s abrupt change of manner. “See that you do!” He broke the televu connection, dropped the instrument on to the bedside table, then realised he was trembling and covered with perspiration. He lay back and stared at the shifting, green-toned light reflected on the ceiling from the trees outside his open window. The faint sound of children laughing was carried in on the warm air across what seemed to him like interplanetary distance. There’s a gulf, he thought irrelevantly, between those who go to work and those who go to school.
Another gulf had opened up between things as they were before the accident and things as they were now. The conversation with Ian Dermott had been little short of fantastic, but the man had made one good point. Garnett knew he was absolutely right in dropping the twenty-metre generated wing but there was no disputing the fact that once, and not so long ago, he had believed in the project whole-heartedly.
Perhaps a long serious illness always made things seem strange, but there was much to explain. The violent reaction of the normally phlegmatic Dermott, the fact that Garnett seemed to be developing a Don Quixote complex over an unhappy girl when he knew perfectly well he could not spare the time, and there was always—he realised he was falling asleep—that voice. He had never heard of anyone called Xoanon. There was a thing called a xoanon. The odd, back-of-the-dictionary word meant a primitive statue, supposed to have fallen from heaven.
As exhaustion claimed him, and the room tilted ponderously away, Garnett managed to smile. Aircraft might occasionally fall from the sky, but that was all.
It was simply a question of scale.
The photograph gleaming on his desk was a routine publicity shot. It had been taken by a staff cameraman and showed a newly elected works beauty queen posed against a background of the production line, in which were ranged the great incomplete machines, brooding sullenly over their inability to fly. Garnett stared down at the picture, aware that his heart had begun the swift, striding beats of excitement. This was the answer if only he could believe it.
It had taken him over a month to begin suspecting there was anything wrong with the Pryce-Garnett organisation. Another month had passed while he tried unsuccessfully to put his finger on the source of his unease, but there was almost nothing to go on.
The feeling was so faint Garnett could compare it only with the subliminal impulse of recognition he felt when being introduced to a person from his home town of Portsmouth. He had always explained the phenomenon by assuming that in living for many years in one area one was bound to glimpse practically all its inhabitants, and that their faces were filed away in the deeper reaches of memory. His suspicions about the organisation were equally vague, based on similar instinctive reactions.
He sat back in his chair, lit his pipe and stared at the opposite wall of his office through a screen of aromatic smoke. Large but infrequent drops of warm August rain struck across the windows. It was four months since the morning of the accident in which he so nearly lost his life. Afterwards he had learned that the fuselage itself had cleared the top of his car but the starboard tailplane had raked through the roof, spinning the heavy vehicle out of its way like a matchbox. Although he had lost a piece of his skull and broken both arms and one leg, everyone assured Garnett he was lucky to have come out of it alive. He agreed with them, but during the weeks of convalescence which followed his abrupt cancellation of the twenty-metre wing project he had been impatient to get back to work. As soon as it had been possible to wrest reluctant agreement from the doctors he had returned, walking at first with the aid of a stick although, when he had realised that using it made him appear a good inch shorter, he quickly managed to get around unaided.
He had returned too soon, Garnett acknowledged to himself as he drew on the sweet smoke, but in a way the past two months had been invaluable. Had he been fit enough to plunge back into the demanding complexities of his job the subtle, the very subtle, impressions of wrongness would have been swamped. As it was, he had been forced to spend his days in comparative inactivity during which, for the first time, he had been able to take a long impartial look at his own business.
He had begun by arranging with McIntyre, the head of the printing department, that a copy of everything which went through the machines would be sent to his office. The consequent flow of commercial and technical brochures, handbooks, reports and minutes had provided him with several hours of solid reading every day. Although he owned the company in its entirety Garnett had always considered himself an airframe specialist, which he had been when Pryce took him on, and had never had time to read more than a fraction of the organisation’s internal publications. The sheer quantity was astonishing—reports from the medical officer, the safety officer, the sales teams, the various project designers, the publicity officer, the production planning departments, the purchasing officer, the production centres, the personnel department. Experimental, flight test, security, wind tunnel, canteen, fire service. Wages, drawing offices, photographic, spares, transport, maintenance. Stress office, stores, analytical, reliability, tool room …
Garnett began to realise that a large number of his department heads actually enjoyed writing reports and broadcasting them, while others tended to be terse and uninformative. Also, some departments tended to function more crisply and efficiently than others. Strangely, these characteristics of individuals and groups did not remain constant—over-articulate heads might suddenly fall quiet, efficient teams appear to become sloppy, or vice versa. From the welter of paper a picture had begun to emerge, but it was like a television picture in which the lines had been shuffled into a random sequence. Much information was given or implied but he lacked the key which would enable him to systemise it. All he had to go on was a vague feeling, so formless that he dare not mention it to anyone. The only near-concrete fact was that overall company efficiency seemed to have deteriorated, but this could have been explained as a temporary fluctuation, or simply the effect of his own absence—until he had seen the photograph.