The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [154]
“Right. Okay. 'Phone me, when you know. But if it's some piece of rubbish held together by chewing gum and baling wire, you can take it yourself. I'm going to go find me some lunch.”
He stalked out, putting his empty glass on a polished table as he went by. I watched him leave.
“Can he fly, with that hand?” I asked my companion.
“He flies with his will, not his flesh. He will get you there.”
With a final glance at the doorway the American had gone through, I thought it a pity that we could not take Lofte with us. A man that experienced at conjuring transportation from thin air might be useful if we ran out of fuel halfway over the Cairngorms.
Place (1): As celestial bodies work their influence, so do
historical bodies shape one another Britain is the sum of
its peoples: the ancients; the Romans; the Angles and
Saxons; the North Peoples; the Norman French.
All built their roads, raised their children, and left their
names, their Gods, and their Powers.
Testimony, IV:6
I REACHED HENDON AIR FIELD JUST BEFORE DAWN on Wednesday. The aeroplanes that greeted my eyes were reassuringly solid, gleaming new, proud, broad-chested harbingers of the muscular future of flight.
Unfortunately, they were not the aeroplane we had been given.
Mycroft's car drove me farther into the field, where I saw Lofte and Javitz hanging from the wing of a machine that even in the half-light appeared worn. The two men wielded spanners, and a third man stood on the ground with an electric torch. They had been at the field for hours, judging by the state of their clothing and the greasy handprints that covered the fuselage from propeller to rudder.
Mycroft's assistant, a fifty-year-old Cockney by the name of Carver, would have driven off once I was out of the car, but I stopped him.
“These men need coffee and something to eat. You have twenty minutes.”
“Twenty—do you know what time it is?”
“I do. Consider this one of Mr Holmes'… requests.”
Carver threw up his hands and drove away with a squeal of tyres. I went over to the men, who had their back ends pointed at me and were arguing.
“Is there a problem?” I asked loudly.
“No,” Lofte said.
At the same instant, Javitz answered, “Not if you are wanting to fall out of the sky.”
“There is no problem,” Lofte repeated. “My friend is merely scrupulous about his machinery.”
“‘Scrupulous’ is a good thing to be,” I said encouragingly.
The machine was reassuringly large, with nearly forty feet of wing, towering over me at a height of ten feet. Lofte came to stand next to me and told me rather more about it than I needed to know: made by the Bristol company four years before, cruising speed of eighty-five miles per hour, a 230 horsepower Siddeley Puma engine, 405 square feet of wing surface. I nodded my head at the right places, and wondered who owned the thing, and why he might be letting us remove it.
“The best thing about it, from your point of view,” he said, “is that it has a range of five hundred miles.”
“You mean we can fly to Orkney with only one stop?” I asked in astonishment.
“Well,” he said, “theoretically, perhaps. In practice it's not the best idea to push matters. He'll put down in York first, just to look things over.”
There was something ominous about the way he suggested that. “What sorts of things?”
“It's an unfamiliar machine, he'll be … conservative.”
“There's something you're not telling me.”
“Nothing important. Well, just, the last time she was up, she came down a little hard. He's now making certain that—”
“This machine crashed?”
“Not so much crashed as … well, I suppose yes, it crashed.”
Javitz finally spoke up; I rather wished he hadn't. “It's a piece of crap machine that's been driven into the ground, literally. If I had three days to pull it apart I'd be happier. But I'll get you there, in one piece, if it's the last thing I do.”
“That's not exactly encouraging, Mr—”
“Joke,” he said, baring his teeth at me in a grin. “She'll be fine.”
It was surely not too late to