Authors: Pierre Boulle
Ruth finished fastening her luggage within the time they had planned and they set off on board
Icarus
on a sunny morning, which boded well for an enjoyable holiday.
They shook hands with the mechanics and several friends who had come to see them off, and then they got into the aircraft. Nicolas settled himself at the controls. He had not piloted his airplane for several months. Just the day before he had driven it round the runway to get used to handling it again. It was easy: guiding this tourist aircraft was child’s play for a former test pilot. But
Icarus
was equipped with very modern equipment, which allowed constant contact with the ground and blind landing.
Nicolas’ first concern before taking off was to make contact with various staging posts. At his request they confirmed that all was in order and that the weather was fine everywhere on his route. Then he smiled at Ruth, embraced her tenderly and guided the aircraft to the end of the runway, fired up the engines and took off.
The astronautical base from where they took off was situated in the Sahara, which experts had considered to be ideal for launching large rockets. Nicolas had been posted there since it was first developed, shortly after the establishment of the world government. Ruth had come to join him there two years after their engagement and they got married there. He had therefore been involved in both the birth and the growth of the centre, until it became one of the leading ones in the world, and he also witnessed at the same time with some curiosity the creation of the canals and lakes, fundamental changes which gradually changed the climate around him. He knew the region like the back of his hand, having often flown over it in an airplane or driven through it by car during his periods of leave.
The journey was due to start by crossing the former desert with a long stopover in Morocco, and after that the Atlantic, for which
Icarus
had been modified to give it sufficient range. Then, by short stages, they would travel the length of the American continent. A stop of a few days was planned to visit their parents, Fawell and Zarratoff, in the area around New York, where the government was situated at that time. After that they
would continue their journey to Canada, Asia and the European continent.
The first part of the flight passed without incident. This stage must have lasted about three hours. They admired the Sahara, which had now been transformed, with its large areas of green growth criss-crossed with small canals, and then they flew over a straight railway track, following a central canal which was larger than the others, cutting the plain with two parallel lines which met at the horizon. They had only to follow this landmark to reach a small town which had recently been built, their first stopover, where friends were waiting for them. Ruth found the flight delightful. She had not had the opportunity to make such a long journey for a long time.
For no apparent reason, she felt suddenly that the atmosphere in the airplane had changed. The weather was still glorious. The aircraft was gliding along in a cloudless sky, but her sense of peace had vanished. It took her a moment to realise that the unpleasant feeling that she was experiencing was caused by a change in her husband’s attitude. Oh, there was nothing all that abnormal about it. But at the beginning he spoke to her from time to time… and above all, every few moments he turned his head towards her and smiled. He had not done anything like this for… for probably several minutes, perhaps longer. It was this absence of contact which was worrying her.
She looked at him. The way he was sitting at the controls was normal… though not entirely so. Looking at him more closely, she thought she could make out an unusual stiffness… He was tense, that was it, though he usually enjoyed flying this airplane.
‘Darling, are you all right? You’re not tired?’
She had asked the question almost in spite of herself. He replied, but with a slight delay and without turning his head towards her. The tone of his voice betrayed the fact that he was strangely preoccupied.
‘No, no. Everything’s fine. Only… Excuse me.’
He interrupted himself to call a station that they were due to fly over without stopping. When contact was established, he asked a question and she could not help noticing the tone of anxiety in his voice.
‘Has your radar located me?’
‘Just a minute, Mr Zarratoff,’ said the voice, in a respectful tone.
He was well known in all aeronautical circles, both for his exploits as a cosmonaut and as the son-in-law of the President of the world.
‘…Yes, there you are. You must be over the railway, coming directly towards us.’
When the pilot asked him, the employee informed him of his approximate distance from the station and his speed, insofar as these could be calculated from the ground.
‘Could you give me more precise figures for the distance?’ Nicolas asked in an imperious tone.
‘Eleven kilometres, three hundred and fifty metres,’ the voice replied with a touch of surprise. ‘You must be almost directly above the stone bridge.’
‘Almost –!’ the cosmonaut began to say.
Ruth started. There was an angry tone in his voice, for which there was no justification. He calmed down just as suddenly, and said with obvious relief, ‘That’s right, that must be right. I’m flying over the stone bridge. I recognise it.’
‘I don’t think there’s any way you could miss it,’ the voice said, now with a touch of irony.
This bridge was in fact the only one of its kind in the whole of Africa. It had been constructed by an engineer who was somewhat mentally disturbed, and who had had an ancient European bridge, several centuries old, transported stone by stone. When the authorities noticed this fantastic thing, they decided at first to demolish it, but finally let it remain as a curiosity, contenting themselves with having another more modern and
sturdier bridge built some way away. Nobody could mistake its appearance.
‘Is there any other way we can be of service, Mr Zarratoff?’
‘Just a moment, I beg you… Don’t leave me alone!’
Ruth became panic-stricken. He had almost shouted, and his voice betrayed real anxiety. She had never heard him speak like that.
‘Is there something wrong on board?’ asked air-traffic control in surprise.
‘No, everything’s fine. I just want to check… Can you give me my exact altitude?’
‘Is your altimeter broken?’
‘I don’t know… and also this type of equipment lacks precision. I have more confidence in your radar.’
‘Two thousand, three hundred metres.’
It was the figure indicated by the instrument on board. Once again the pilot seemed to be relieved. But it seemed to Ruth that he continued to speak in the same way, as if he could not resign himself to cutting off communication.
‘Can you give me my exact course?’
When this was done, he asked a question which was very strange in the circumstances.
‘Could you take over by radio control?’
This time the man’s voice sounded astonished. He asked for the phrase to be repeated, which Nicolas did with another burst of impatience.
‘Listen, Mr Zarratoff, you are asking us to take over by radio control? Correct? Of course it’s possible. But you are flying at an altitude of more than two thousand metres. And I can confirm that the weather is gorgeous, and visibility excellent. There’s no cloud as far as your stopover point and your route is indicated straight ahead by the railway line and the canal.’
‘It’s true,’ murmured Nicolas, ‘it’s true, there’s the railway line and the canal.’
He had almost mumbled these last few words. The other person asked again:
‘Are you sure that everything is all right on board?’
‘Everything’s all right. Everything’s all right, with both the airplane and the pilot.’
‘And you still want us to take over by radio control?’
‘No. You’re right. I just have to follow the railway.’
‘Okay, goodbye then, Mr Zarratoff, and have a good trip.’
‘Goodbye.’
He put down the telephone and smiled more calmly at Ruth, who had not uttered a single word during the whole exchange.
‘Why these questions, darling?’ she ventured to ask after a period of silence. ‘There’s no risk of our getting lost in weather like this. I recognise the countryside below us. There’s the old village with the motorway passing close by. We came here by car just after our marriage. There’s the hotel where we slept, with its swimming pool.’
It was true, and Nicolas knew the area even better than she did.
‘You can never take enough precautions,’ he said gravely.
He was not himself any more. At that moment she also remembered the hesitations of the medical unit and asked herself whether he wasn’t seriously ill. Without revealing her anxiety, she adopted a lighter tone when she said: ‘We will be arriving in twenty minutes. I’m sure the Hudsons will already be waiting for us.’
They were the friends in whose home they were going to spend the evening and who would put them up for the night. Hudson was the director of the airfield.
He did not reply. For a few moments he had been trying to make contact with this airfield, and, not being able to do it, he started to show signs of nervousness again.
‘It’s insane to let an airplane get lost in the sky without permanent contact,’ he murmured. ‘I’m going to make a complaint about it.’
The airplane was still flying in a clear sky. She dared not make any comment, and they remained silent for a long while. It seemed however that he was becoming more and more anxious as they approached their goal.
‘We must be quite close,’ she said finally.
He did not reply. He was staring fixedly straight in front of him, without ever glancing even once towards the ground. He had maintained the same altitude, and that was another thing which surprised her. She was no novice when it came to aviation and knew very well that he should already have commenced the descent some time ago. She was about to point this out to him when he finally made contact with the station. He immediately asked a series of crazy questions: how far away were they? At what altitude were they? Could he start his descent? And at what angle? There was some delay before there was any response, and it was his friend Hudson himself who spoke:
‘It’s fine! I’m sure you recognised my voice. If it had been anyone else, he would have taken you for a right idiot.’
‘I’m not joking,’ said Nicolas, ‘can I make the descent?’
The other man could tell by his voice that he was truly not joking.
‘Of course you can. At least, if you want to have dinner with us tonight. But you’ll have to complete several circles before landing. I can see you clearly. You’re right above us.’
‘Right above?’
‘Can’t you see the runways?’
‘Right above, right above,’ Nicolas repeated like an automaton.
It was true. Ruth could clearly make out all the details of the airfield, the runways, the control tower and the hangars. But her husband had still not glanced at the ground even once. He seemed to be distracted.
‘Fine, I’m going to descend,’ he murmured in a hesitant voice.
But as the other man remained silent, he immediately became furious.
‘So what are you waiting for, for Heaven’s sake? Give me the coordinates, the angle, the course, the altitude, every second, every second, d’you hear me? Can’t you take over by radio control?’
‘If it weren’t you,’ the other man said, ‘I would think that the pilot was dead drunk. The sun’s lighting up the runway.’
‘The sun… the sun.’
Hudson finally realised that an extremely serious incident was taking place.
‘Nicolas, are you ill? Tell me!’
But the latter was now in no fit state to do so. His only reaction was to look at his wife and murmur, ‘Darling, they’re abandoning us. I don’t know what to do any more.’
That day Fawell had sent for his vice-president, Yranne, to take stock of a situation that was upsetting him. He asked Betty to join them, as he was aware that psychological expertise was becoming increasingly necessary to cope with the setbacks they were encountering with world education.
Progress on this was only being made with a very small number of people. The vast majority showed only evidence of indifference, reluctance or even of irrelevant interests, which was the opposite of the scientific ideal.
‘We would be guilty of deluding ourselves,’ the President began in a solemn tone. ‘We are not following the right path. In spite of all our efforts the masses remain cut off from all basic knowledge. If this continues, it will bring about what we want to avoid. Humanity will tend to split into two different categories: one will be the class of scholars, the leaders, the privileged,
us in fact; and the other will consist of indifferent plebs, whom we shall have to keep busy with rough work, interchangeable individuals, happy in their way perhaps, but who will never know the pleasures of the mind and will be so much dead weight in the march towards progress. And the rift will become wider.’
‘If you will allow me to say something,’ Mrs Betty Han interrupted, ‘I’m even more pessimistic than you. If I’m analysing the present situation correctly, not only is there no sublimation of interest, but there is deviation, and it is a dangerous form of deviation, in that the masses risk becoming a powerful impediment which will be even worse than a dead weight.’
‘I’m very much aware of it,’ Fawell grumbled. ‘Do you think I haven’t noticed it?’
What Betty meant by this disturbing analysis was that although the people were not trying to enrich their minds by penetrating the secrets of science, they were becoming more and more interested in the material results of the discoveries made by science, to the point where they were demanding more important and more sophisticated practical findings all the time. These demands were growing daily and although they were sometimes crazy, they were becoming more and more insistent, so much so that they would distract the scientific government from its noble plans.
‘Eskimos are demanding larks these days!’ Yranne sighed.
Now that the problem of hunger was under control, people who had previously been decimated by dreadful famine were no longer satisfied with rations which been scientifically calculated to guarantee them a sufficiently calorific diet. They needed to have food which was more and more original, and the government did its utmost to satisfy their requests. In a world state with egalitarian ideals, it actually seemed unjust and illogical that rare and succulent fresh delicacies should be reserved for a few regions with fortunate climates, while the others had
to be satisfied with deep-frozen products. Exceptional efforts had been undertaken in this field, testing the knowledge of scholars specialising in the natural sciences. In the lakes of the former deserts of Asia and Africa they had acclimatised species of salmon and trout with exquisite flesh, and a varied population of pheasants and ortolans had been acclimatised in the new forests and in recently cultivated lands. After the patient work of selection, biologists had even managed to raise different species of sturgeon almost everywhere, in sufficient quantity to provide the world with the caviar it required. Somewhere else specialist institutes were training thousands of student chefs every month in the art of preparing delicate sauces, which in former times established the reputations of tiny elites.
Housing also gave rise to pressing recriminations. Slums, which had long disappeared, had been replaced by modern forms of accommodation, which were clean, practical and provided with what were once called modern conveniences. This was not enough for the former inhabitants of the slums, who demanded air conditioning everywhere, a telephone and television in every room, windows and automatically controlled blinds, which could be operated from the bed. As a rule they wanted more mechanical and electrical equipment, and an electronic network which was designed to avoid the need for any effort.
Every family wanted to have its own private house with a swimming pool. This thirst for luxuries, everyone’s desire to acquire the products of science and technology without understanding the spirit of them and without having participated in the intellectual effort to discover them, was not confined to forms of accommodation. To satisfy the people new towns had to be built, in which the streets and squares were heated in winter and cooled down in summer. These cities were to be connected by a communications network large enough to avoid all congestion, even at very busy times, and by a service of flying
machines which made it possible to go anywhere at any time of the day or night, with enough landing areas in the towns themselves to save time.
This involved an enormous industrial effort, and the creation of large factories, more productive power stations and the discovery of new sources of energy. This time it was the physicists who had had to set to work, for in this case too the government had yielded: if certain people had a high level of comfort, then it could not be denied to the others. Unfortunately this programme required the use of a sizeable part of the Earth’s material resources.
‘…And not a negligible degree of alienation of its spiritual resources,’ Betty insisted during a discussion between the three leaders.
It was true and this observation started to inspire a kind of terror in Fawell. Scholars, those valuable minds, had to interrupt or slow down their work on fundamental research, directed towards real progress, in order to dedicate themselves to worldly matters and to satisfy the world’s excessive desire for comfort, luxury and material refinements.
This was the point their discussion had reached when the telephone in the President’s own office rang. He was surprised and alarmed, having given instructions that he should not be disturbed, unless it was for an urgent and extremely important matter.
Thrown into a state of panic by the incoherence of Nicolas’ comments, which were now punctuated by Ruth’s pleas, Hudson had warned the highest authorities of the WAO, who saw a connection with the previous two accidents. The medical unit was immediately alerted. An exceptional telephone discussion was then undertaken all over the world between the various scholars, medical experts, physiologists and psychologists who had looked into the case of Jim Barley and that of the other
cosmonaut without being able to prescribe a remedy. Given the status of the passengers involved, the Head of the WAO took it upon himself to disturb the President.
From the very first words the expression on Fawell’s face changed.
‘A third case,’ he said in a low voice. ‘This time it’s Nicolas, and Ruth is with him.’
He pressed a button and the voice of the person he was speaking to echoed throughout the room. All three of them listened to the summary of what had happened. Fawell, incapable of any response, cast despairing glances at his two friends, as if imploring them for help. Yranne remained silent. Having studied the two previous cases in her professional capacity, the psychologist retained her composure, as she was so used to doing, and considered the matter.
‘What is he doing at the moment?’ she asked, as soon as the person speaking had stopped.
The head of the WAO recognised the voice of Mrs Betty Han and replied at once, ‘He’s doing circles round the airfield, and we can’t persuade him to land. Every five minutes he is directed to change his course, which causes him to circle round.’
‘And he carries out these instructions?’
‘To the letter, but it is all he is capable of doing.’
‘And what if he is ordered to descend at a specific angle?’
‘We’ve tried. It won’t work. He had no sooner started to make the manoeuvre than he abandoned it, saying that he’d lost confidence and adding that he wanted a no visibility landing. Well, visibility is excellent…’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Betty interrupted impatiently, ‘they must make him do it.’
‘They thought of that… As I told you, they tried everything. That doesn’t work either.’
‘Why not? He gave a reason for it. I’d like to know the exact words he uttered, even if they seem to be incoherent. It’s very
important. Have them repeated to you,’ Betty continued, pressing her point.
‘Consider that an order from the President,’ Fawell interrupted, seeming to be hanging on his colleague’s every word.
There was a silence, and then came the reply: ‘They could only make out the following: “I can’t, I can’t… It’s the view of the runway… I tell you I can see the runway…” Then there are just incomprehensible mumblings.’
‘Does he still have fuel?’
‘Yes, lots. His aircraft has an extensive range, and he filled up before leaving.’
‘Stay on the line,’ Betty said. ‘Give me a couple of minutes. I’ll think about it.’
She put her head in her hands while Fawell watched her anxiously in silence, not wanting to disturb her meditation. After a moment she stood up.
‘I have an idea, Fawell. He is at a station at the edge of the Sahara, isn’t he? Tell me quickly. It can’t be far from the first chains of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco?’
‘Scarcely more than two hundred kilometres,’ Yranne interrupted. ‘I know that area.’
‘And close to these mountains, there must occasionally be some mists, fogs?’
Yranne looked her straight in the eye for a moment, then uttered an exclamation. His sharp mind had grasped what she was thinking.
‘And if there isn’t, we can create it when we need it,’ he exclaimed. ‘We have a meteorological station there, where some conclusive tests were carried out recently… Fawell, let me give the order. There’s not a second to lose.’
Without waiting for the President’s reply, he rushed to a second telephone, and alerted other services, issuing feverish instructions.
‘What’s the name of your station? Is there an airfield nearby? Can you give me the precise coordinates?’ Betty asked.
Yranne replied in the affirmative and showed her the data while he was waiting for a reply from the station. Betty picked up the first telephone again. Fawell was too overcome to do anything himself, and made a sign to indicate that he gave them a free hand.
‘This is what you’re to do,’ she said.
While Yranne was ordering the relevant services to induce the largest possible concentration of dense clouds and to launch storms over the area, Betty sent urgent instructions to Hudson.
After these measures had been taken, Nicolas was given a precise course, which he followed obediently, and it led him into thick fog in less than hour. There the station could take charge of the situation by radio control and guide him over the airfield, where the visibility was nil due to a storm which had been induced.
Following the mobilisation of the various services, all communications, including the conversations between the airplane and the ground, were retransmitted via the President’s office, so he and his two friends were able to follow the drama’s happy ending in real time.
Thus they were able to observe, with great relief, a quite remarkable fact, which did not seem to surprise the psychologist. The cosmonaut’s voice became more confident and more distinct as soon as he went into the fog. When he was in complete darkness and only being directed via the radio waves, he regained his usual calm and reacted with his customary skill to the directives issued to him by the automatic equipment.
‘Congratulations, Betty,’ Yranne said. ‘That was a great idea of yours.’
Fawell was happy just to embrace her without saying a word. He had also understood.
The no visibility landing was accomplished without any difficulty in the thickest of pea souper fogs. When Nicolas and a tearful Ruth were greeted by the station officials on the ground, he could give no explanation for his strange behaviour. His only reply to all the questions was:
‘I don’t know what came over me.’