Nightminster shook the electric umbilical of his suit and gestured. Donald gave the thumbs up. The heated suit was like a warm bath, except that his ears and fingers stung with cold. Ice crystals grew across the panels of the windscreen. Dregs of coffee froze into brown coins. The temperature gauge showed fifty-two degrees of Celsius below zero—and they were still climbing. From time to time Nightminster switched control to an astonishing little sheet metal box he had made himself, which flew the aircraft while he was busy or taking a nap. It added to the assurance in Donald’s mind he was in the company of brilliance. He reflected on his own prescribed ascent to the pinnacle of respectability. Had he done anything more than pass a series of tests? Nightminster had drawn visions with his mind’s eye and wrenched them into life by sheer intellectual vigour. That was the greater achievement, as poetry is a greater feat than chanting a catechism.
Such a night flight as this required a rare gall. Probably they were alone above the North Sea. Any ships down on that void would be shut down for the night, adrift and blacked out, on guard for pirates. Even the Neptune stopped at dusk for blackout in coastal waters and resumed only at dawn. Nightminster tapped the altimeter with his index finger. They had reached 36,000 feet—higher than Mount Everest. They might be the highest human beings in the whole world. They shared grins—only the creasing around their eyes showing over the oxygen masks—and Donald flipped a double thumbs-up. He was enjoying this. It beat the pompous deference of court hands-down.
Donald must have dozed off as a woke from a dig in the ribs. They were flying at 38,000 feet, so high that in the frozen-clear air they could see across Yorkshire to the Atlantic Coast 120 miles away, a straggle of faint blotches. Those were the ports of Morecambe and Heysham. Further to port spread a more extensive nebula with a knot of stars at its centre. That was Liverpool and its modest central enclave.
Donald twitched, blinking. He thought he saw flashes below and to port. He saw them again—white flashes. They seemed closer. Nightminster rapped the conversation pad between them, lit by a tiny red bulb, on which he had just scribbled one word: “Naclaski!”
*
Nightminster pushed the four throttle levers all the way forward. The drone of propellers hardened, the airframe shivered. Held in a shallow dive, the machine’s speed built up to 240 knots. Nightminster kept a dead straight course, inciting in Donald an outrage that they were asking to be hit. After the flight, Nightminster explained in his languid way that weaving about increased risk by slowing them down. The risk of being hit was random, since the batteries were firing on the rough guidance of listening horns. Therefore, the essential variable was time of exposure. It could be proved mathematically, if he wished.
But Donald only learned that afterwards.
To begin with the white sparks were far below them, reassuring Donald that Nightminster’s confidence in this beautiful flying boat was justified. It even became fun, trying to guess where the next cluster of sparks would flash. It all happened in a kind of silent racket, as the propellers and engines drowned all further sound.
Then a twinge of concern crept in. He realised there were a lot of sparks. It was easy to miss just how many. Two clusters burst ahead, to port and starboard, exactly on their level. A couple of seconds later a smell like sparking flint seeped into the cockpit. That was when it sank in—this was a casino of death. Two seconds. He heard a sharp rattling, as if they had flown through a shower of pebbles. Nightminster wrote on the conversation pad: “Shrapnel”. The worst of it was, Donald could do nothing but sit and think about the dice rattling across the table over and over again, thirty or forty times every minute. He was fixated on the memory of the shrapnel fragment that had gashed the top of his thigh—six inches back and it would have de-manned him. In an agony of suspense he groaned in his seat, waiting for the searing agony as a red streak castrated him. Let it happen to Nightminster! It was all his idea…
The white flashes were getting harder to spot. This scared him, provoking much craning behind lest the flashes were closing in from astern. He scanned all around. Far below, the moonlight shone on a plate of cloud extending ahead into eternity. Nightminster tapped his shoulder and wrote: “They have given up. Ammo is gold!” Donald sagged with relief. They exchanged the smiles of comrades and shook hands. The thought occurred to Donald that he had lost one brother and gained another.
The conversation pad got busy. Donald asked whether it was the first time Nightminster had taunted Naclaski: “Fuck no! I love it. My machine is the champion! I am notorious!”
Time sped by in this intimacy. Out over the sea again, Nightminster glided the machine down to only two thousand feet of altitude and eased back the speed to 120 knots to reduce fuel consumption and let their bodies warm up. After this, he kept his mind to the flying and Donald merely watched the crosses of their fixes pace up the chart. Nightminster also leaned to one side every few minutes to press his face to a shrouded viewer of some sort. It was yet another one of his magic gadgets. He explained it was a radar system he had built using archives from the Second World War. A sweeping display showed any coastlines around them out to a distance of about ten miles. This greatly assisted the navigation. What especially pleased him was that its radiations drove the Naclaski scanners crazy. There was nothing they could do about it provided he kept
