The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [156]
“You're losing an opportunity,” he said, and went off to poke gingerly inside the hot engine. A short time later, a laconic individual motored up with tins of petrol in the back of his Model T, and Javitz topped up the tank. He came back before my legs had altogether regained their normal sensation.
“Ready?” he asked. “Next stop, Edinburgh—we should be there in no time at all.”
In fact, however, five hours later Javitz and I were barely twenty miles away, in a pasture heavy with cow droppings, working on the engine while two young cow-herds watched us from their perch atop a barred gate.
Half a mile away, train after train steamed imperturbably northwards.
We had come down briskly. One minute we were flying merrily northwards, the next, moving air was the loudest thing around us, and through the glass, I could hear Javitz cursing under his breath. Fortunately, it would seem that rebellious engines were commonplace to him, because after an alarmingly long time spent fiddling with the controls and slapping instruments, he stood up in his seat to peer around, found a likely field, and aimed us in that direction.
After one hour, he'd found a number of problems that it was not. I now had as much grease on me as Javitz did, since his scarred hand could not manage the more demanding manipulations of the tools. Under his direction, I pulled one piece after another out of the engine, waited as he debated its qualities, and saw him lay it to one side before turning to the extrication of the next one. After an hour and a half, one of the cow-herds had taken pity on us and fetched up a pot of tea.
After two hours, I wiped the perspiration from my forehead and said, “Mr Javitz, if we continue with the process of elimination, we'll soon reach the rudder.”
“It's hard to think with you wittering at me.”
I looked at the sturdy spanner in my hand, dropped it, and walked away.
Two fields over, a pair of huge mares were pulling a combine harvester, inexorably up and down. Had they been cart horses, I might have stolen one and pointed its nose towards the nearest train station, but between the entangling harness and their placid gait, it would be faster to walk.
Another train flew past, an express by the looks of it. Perhaps I could climb up the telegraph pole and fashion an impromptu Morse generator, asking Mycroft to work his magic over the trains. No doubt I could find tools in the repair kit. Or I could be more straightforward and just build a fire over the tracks, commandeering the thing by gunpoint when it stopped.
Walking back to our makeshift aerodrome, I saw Javitz in conversation with the two boys. They trotted away, chattering avidly. When I got back to the 'plane, I saw that he had restored a fair number of the parts to their places.
“Have you fixed it?”
“The problem's with the petrol. I was hoping to find garbage in the carburettor, or in the fuel line, but it's in the petrol itself. The filter's a mess.”
“Can you fix it?”
“Sure, just drain the petrol and replace it.”
We surveyed the countryside, which had a singular lack of petrol stations.
“You've sent the boys for petrol?”
“I've sent them for clean, empty containers. If I drain it through a chamois, it'll be fine.”
“How many containers are we talking about?”
“Lots,” he said.
The tank, it turned out, contained seventy gallons of petrol when full, which it had been when we left the York field. When the two boys returned, an hour later, they were loaded down with a mad variety of vessels, from chipped tea-pot to tin bath. My job was to check each container, rinsing it if necessary in petrol, before handing it to Javitz. He would then position his chamois rag under the stream of petrol dribbling from the tank, and let the bowl, or coffee-pot, or tin bath fill up.
We ran out of containers before the machine ran out of petrol, so the