Read No Highway for Free Online

be undertaken by the I.S.A.R.B., no doubt the representative of the Ministry would bring the matter up at the next meeting of the Board, when the priority to be allocated to the investigation could be determined.
    I could have wept. Sir Phillip Dolbear had seated himself firmly on the fence and had offered us no help at all. And the Reindeers were still flying the Atlantic.
    I said heavily, “Well, this doesn’t take us very much further, sir.”
    The Director raised his eyes from the other work that he was reading. “I thought that myself. I had hoped that we should get more out of him.”
    We discussed it glumly for a few minutes. “I should like to think it over for the rest of the day,” I said at last. “At the moment I can’t see anything for it but to go back to our old rule-of-thumb methods of guessing if the tail was dangerously flexible, and so on. May I think it over for today, and come in and see you tomorrow morning?”
    “By all means, Scott,” he said. “I’ll be thinking it over in the meantime myself. It’s certainly a difficult position, but fortunately we’ve got time for a little thought.”
    I picked up the report and turned to go. “In any case,” I said, “I think we must face up to the possibility of having to ground all those Reindeers after seven hundred hours. I don’tthink we should let them go for more than half the estimated time to failure.”
    “No,” he said slowly, “I don’t think that we should, although I wouldn’t put too much weight on Mr. Honey’s estimate after this. If we said seven hundred hours, how long does that give us?”
    “About three weeks from now,” I said. “I’ll find out definitely before tomorrow, sir.”
    I went back to my room and dumped the report, and then went down and out of the building, and walked down to the aerodrome, to the flight office. Squadron-Leader Pen worthy was there. I said, “I say, Penworthy. You did the flying on the prototype Reindeer, didn’t you?”
    “Most of it,” he said.
    I offered him a cigarette. “What was the tailplane like?” I asked. I explained myself. “I know it was quite safe, but was it very flexible? Did it have much movement of the tip in flight?”
    He said, “Well, yes—it did. It never gave us any trouble, but it’s got a very high aspect ratio, you know, so you’d expect a certain amount of waggle. On the ground you can push the tip up and down about six inches with your hand.”
    I nodded slowly. “Did it have much movement in the air?”
    He hesitated. “I don’t think it had any continuous movement—it wasn’t dithering all the time, or anything like that. You could see it flexing in a bump, from the aft windows of the cabin.”
    I turned this over in my mind. “Was that in very bumpy weather? What time of year was it?”
    He said, “We had it flying in all sorts of weather. It was here altogether for about three months.”
    “So long as that? How many hours did it do?”
    “Oh,” he said, “it did a lot. I did about two hundred hours on it myself. Before that there were the firm’s trials, of course.”
    A vague, black shadow was forming in my mind. “What happened to it after it left here?”
    “I flew it down to the C.A.T.O. experimental flight,” he said.
    I blew a long cloud of smoke, thoughtfully. “Any idea how many hours it did there, before they put it into service?”
    He shook his head. “I’d only be guessing. But several hundred, I should think, because they did a whole lot ofproving flights over the route before they put it into regular operation. They always do a lot of time on new machines before they go on service. They’re pretty good, you know.”
    I stared out over the aerodrome. “That’s the machine that flew into the hill in Labrador, isn’t it?”
    “That’s right,” he said. “Somewhere between Goose and Montreal.”
    I went back to the office with a terrible idea half formed in the back of my mind. I rang up Group-Captain Fisher of