The Flight of the Phoenix by Trevor Elleston

Author:Trevor, Elleston
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2014-06-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

BELLAMY WAS LEFT SICKENED and shaking by what he had seen, but he told no one. Writing in his diary soon after dawn, he made no note of it.

The work of the night had gone well; they had worked like robots, mechanical men, slaves of the machine they nursed. Through the dark hours they became in a certain way obsessed, as Stringer was, by the need to overcome problems and invent and improvise and somehow build the airplane; and Bellamy had been chilled by a strange thought: that they had to finish the work before they died; that once it was finished they could die in peace. For a moment he had forgotten that they had any reason for building the airplane: it simply had to be built, before they died. .

He knew this was absurd; and he was therefore worried by it. There was no room for absurdities in this world of three elements: life, death, and the desert. We're going to pieces, Crow had said last night on the dunes. There was no comfort in the thought that the only one among them who would never go to pieces was Stringer--because he was already mad. The work obsessed him totally. You could believe that when the plane was finished and ready to fly he would stand back and look at it and say, Just as I predicted ... there was no problem. And he'd fall down dead, satisfied.

You could see it by the way he worked. He never stopped, never hurried, never paused-as the rest of them did-to look up at the stars, to lie for minutes on the freezing sand exhausted, to ease his aching body before going on again. The stars weren't there, didn't exist: a star wasn't an aircraft component. His body didn't ache.

Crow said so many true things. Stringer's not human.

Through the dark hours they had become in a certain way like Stringer: a gang of quiet madmen in the lost world of night, building their own lunatic tomb. The air whispered the mumbo-jumbo words of the ritual-still an inch this way, the lugs aren't mating ... wedge up the leading edge to correct the tilt ... Mostly Stringer talking, King Stringer, call him Lord or even God but never Stringy or he'll down tools and we'll never leave here alive.

In this way Bellamy lost contact with much of what he was doing; but his hands worked and he obeyed orders; and the others worked with him, like automata, inhuman, like the tinny-voiced kid with glasses who saw no problem. And so by dawn the mainplane was mounted, the bolts home and the nuts locked; and they stood back to look at the thing they had created; and Bellamy, still full of his dreadful imaginings, prayed that Stringer would not say, Just as I predicted, and fall down dead.

It was a long time before the first man spoke. Moran.

"She looks like an airplane."

The rising light defined the new shape that had been fashioned

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