The instrument house at the edge of the runway was crowded with the high brass and top-drawer engineering staff of Firestone Aviation Corporation. They peered over one another’s shoulders and jockeyed politely for better views of the three-foot television screen at one end of the room. It showed the interior of the pilots’ compartment of the XB-91 now flying somewhere above them at an altitude of fifty thousand feet.
In the front row of observers Major Eugene Montgomery watched with a feeling of elation inside him. The Ninety-one seemed almost as much a personal triumph for him as it was for the engineers who built it. He had witnessed its building from scratch and some part of him was up there flying with it.
The Ninety-one was the first genuine battleship of the air. It was a city-smasher, capable of going to any spot on the globe and doing its work. Its armament assured a better than ninety per cent chance of destroying all opposition and returning safely.
The instrument panel occupied most of the picture. Now and then there was a glimpse of the side of test pilot Parker’s face. Out of sight, on the other side, was co-pilot Marble.
Parker’s voice came over the speaker. “Turning now to retrace course. Altitude fifty-two thousand, air speed eighteen seventy-five, temperature minus forty-eight point seven —” He spoke in a professional monotone that failed, however, to hide his enthusiasm for the ship, too.
A score of small sounds filled the room. The whir of cameras recording the picture and voice from the plane, the background whine of the ship’s jets, the click of telemetering relays. Abruptly, Montgomery turned to find his close friend and the man most responsible for the success of the Ninety-one. He spotted Soren Gunderson at the very back of the group.
The chief engineer of Firestone Aviation wasn’t even looking at the screen. He couldn’t, Montgomery saw as he came up. There were too many heads in front of him.
Gunderson sat on the edge of a desk drawing hard on a pipe cupped in his right hand.
“It looks like you’ve really got it made,” said Montgomery. “This is better than anything we dared hope for!” Gunderson nodded without expression. Parker’s voice came on again. “Entering course — autopilot on — throttles maximum —”
The faint beep of the electronic timer signaled the passage of the XB-91 through the first of the radar marker beams. Seconds later, another beep sounded the completion of the ten-mile run. The men in the room waited in silent attention as the timer operator checked his instruments — all except Soren Gunderson. He seemed scarcely interested in what was going on in the room as he sucked meditatively on the pipe.
“Twenty-three eighty-five point seven eight two,” the timer technician announced.
A restrained murmur arose from the executives, engineers, and Air Force men as they turned to each other with pleased smiles. Jacobs, President of Firestone, came back to Gunderson and shook his hand. “It’s a wonderful ship, Soren,” he said. “I’m sure that now we can forget about that other little matter —”
“On the contrary,” said Gunderson. “This is the time. Make my resignation effective as of the moment the Ninety-one is accepted.”
Jacobs’ face clouded. “I hope you don’t mean that. Come up to my office after lunch and we’ll see if we can’t thresh out something.”
“Sure,” said Gunderson. “I’ll come up.”
The group cleared rapidly from the room to watch the landing of the plane. Gunderson and Montgomery remained alone.
“What’s this talk about a resignation?” the major asked. “You’re leaving Firestone and going somewhere else?”
Gunderson stood up and nodded. “Yes, I’m going — somewhere else.”
“I can imagine you’ve had plenty of offers, but I would have thought Jacobs would top any of them to keep you on, especially after the success of the Ninety-one.”
Gunderson grunted and looked through the window to the runways. The plane was not yet in sight, but the group of engineers and brass were standing immobile, awaiting it. Gunderson smiled faintly. The plane makers didn’t often allow themselves to be awed by their own creations, but this was one time they could not help it.
The engineer turned back to Montgomery. “Two hundred and eighty-five tons, sixteen engines, three quarters of a mile per second — and it’ll do even better when they check it out at seventy thousand, where it belongs. The biggest and the fastest — all in one ship. The Air Age makes progress, Monty!”
Montgomery’s eyes narrowed at the bitter smile on Gunderson’s face. He was used to his friend’s sudden inversions, but this was more unexpected than usual. “What’s wrong, Soren?” he said. “Is there something about the Ninety-one you haven’t told us?”
Gunderson was a rather small man of forty-eight. His hair was beginning to gray on the sides. As he sat hunched on the stool now, drawing on his pipe, he looked almost wizened.
“There’s only one thing wrong with the Ninety-one,” he said at last. “It’s a failure.”
“Failure —!” Montgomery’s face went white as he thought of his own position among the Air Force experts preparing to accept the ship. “What are you talking about? It’s —”
Gunderson’s head nodded rhythmically. “The biggest, the fastest, the heaviest, the most monstrous — It’s the final spawning of a long line of monsters. And, unless we’ve lost our senses completely, it’ll be the monstrosity to end all monstrosities.”
Montgomery relaxed. With the tension of the work now safely past him, Gunderson was feeling free to ride one of his hobbies again. The major wasn’t sure just what this would turn out to be, but he prepared to listen sympathetically.
Gunderson saw the change in his face and understood what he was thinking. “You’re going to believe every word the picture magazines say about our beautiful Ninety-one, aren’t you?” he said.
A thin, high whine began to fill the air as the ship soared overhead, still high, maneuvering for an approach to the other end of the field.
“They’ll give it a two-page spread,” Gunderson went on. “The Ninety-one in the middle — around it little pictures showing it generates as much power as thirty railroad engines, enough heat to warm a town of fifteen hundred people, has enough wiring to take care of the town’s power and telephone system, more radio tubes than —”
“And the citizens will lean back and sigh: Progress!”
The whine grew to a thundering roar that drowned their voices. The mammoth landing gear smashed against the earth as Parker eased the bomber down. It rolled at a crazy speed, fighting the drag of wing flaps and brakes. Its thunder shook the walls of the instrument house and the hangars and the distant plant.
Then it was still. Parker was smiling broadly and shaking hands with himself behind the windshield. The red tractor began rolling out on the field.
There seemed to be pain on Gunderson’s face. “You ugly devil!” he murmured to the gleaming ship. He swung around to Montgomery. “Let’s get out of here!”
Major Montgomery was Liaison Officer between the Research and Development Command of the Air Force and the Firestone Aviation Corporation. He thought he had come to know Soren Gunderson as well as he knew the XB-91, but the chief engineer’s reaction to the successful test flights of the ship certainly made him feel more than a little uncomfortable.
They drove a half mile from the plant and settled behind a secluded table in George's Spaghetti House, where a good many past conferences between them had ironed out discrepancies between hard engineering fact and the specifications of the Air Force. Montgomery watched his friend out of the corner of his eye and decided to keep his mouth pretty much shut — except for such prodding as might be necessary to find out what was eating Gunderson.
George took their orders and went away. Montgomery laced his fingers back and forth and smiled. “Everyone knows that modern combat requirements have put the size and cost of aircraft almost completely out of hand,” he said carefully. “But it looks to me like pretty substantial progress that we have been able to meet those requirements at all. Even five years ago the Ninety-one wasn’t considered an actual possibility. Your new wing section is the only thing —”
“A monster with a gutful of electronic equipment,” said Gunderson, “duplicated and re-duplicated to make sure a ten-cent resistor doesn’t bring the downfall of a hundred million dollar airplane.”
He brought his gaze back to Montgomery’s face and smiled, “I’m sorry, Monty. I guess you’ve never heard me go on quite like that, have you? I usually do it alone — in the middle of the night.
“But you know I’m right. Every competent engineer in the aircraft industry knows it. Our manufacturing methods just aren’t good enough — and can’t be made good enough — to eliminate the duplication of components. Our design should be capable of creating a plane to perform the military function of the Ninety-one in a tenth its size and weight — and cost.
“What price tag will the production model have? We can guess at eighteen to twenty million. It’s economically disasterous to put that much into a single piece of equipment as vulnerable as a plane — even one with the dubious importance of being designed as carrier for the H and cobalt bombs. As a solution to an engineering problem, it’s a bust.”
“Why didn’t you build the Ninety-one a tenth its present size, then?” said Montgomery cautiously.
George appeared with their orders. Gunderson unfolded the napkin and tapped the side of his head. “Here —,” he said. “We haven’t got what it takes up here.”
“You have no right to blame yourself! With your accomplishments —”
“Not just me,” said Gunderson. “All of us. Your R&D outfit, NACA, the universities, the airplane plants. Look how we operate: We spend a couple million for a new computer, six million for a wind tunnel, our reports cover miles of microfilm. R&D farms out a million or so projects all over the country.
“But do you remember the story about how the Wrights learned to warp a wing? Just the two of them, watching the shape of a little cardboard box Wilbur twisted about as they talked — and there it was.
“How many of your people are capable of catching such a tiny clue? Not the R&D supervisor who’s wondering how to jack up his GS rating from 12 to 13, or the wind tunnel chief, or the computerman. Something’s wrong with the way we’re going about it. We’ve built giant data-collecting organizations under the fond delusion that this was research. We build oceans of little ingenious gadgets, thinking this is invention. And we look in vain in all this mass of data and gadgetry for the new, basic idea. It isn’t there. So we build another flying monster and pat ourselves on the back.”
Montgomery contemplated the long string of spaghetti dangling from his fork. “I’ve heard some of that kind of talk before,” he said. “I always thought it was just the product of a bad week when everything had gone wrong. If it’s actually true, what can be done about it? What are you going to do about it?”
“That’s the question I’ve been asking myself since we started the Ninety-one on paper, a dozen years ago. I’ve been asking it all my life in one form or another. I don’t have any answer, right now, but I’ll never build another airplane unless I find it.”
“But what are you going to do?” Montgomery insisted.
“I’ve saved my money,” said Gunderson. “I’ll do a little fishing, maybe quite a lot. And I think I may go to school.”
Montgomery’s hand seemed to remain suspended in midair for a small fraction of time. His eyes shot a glance of startled amazement toward Gunderson, and then he bent over the plate of spaghetti. “For a minute I thought you said you were going back to school,” he said with a laugh.
“There’s no law against a man getting some more education.”
“No, of course not — except that you could walk into any engineering school in the country and make their aeronautic staff look like hicks. I don’t get it. Who could teach you anything about plane design?”
Montgomery allowed himself to watch Gunderson more closely now as the engineer replied somewhat absently. “This isn’t an ordinary school I’m talking about. I started hearing stories concerning it about six months ago. Norcross, from Lockheed, was the first to mention it. He wrote that he’d quit his job and was doing some advanced study at this place. I thought he was crazy. Then I began hearing from some of the others, all inviting me down to join them.”
“What are they doing? Who runs the school? I never heard of anything like that.”
“That’s the peculiar part. I’ve asked, but they act almost cagey about details of what they’re doing. Yet they’re all overwhelmingly enthusiastic about it. A couple of men named Nagle and Berkeley are operating it privately. You may remember they got quite a bit of publicity a year or so ago because of a large rumpus they stirred up in regard to the patent situation. It was enough to get a Congressional investigation and it looks like there’ll be changes in the Patent Law.”
“I remember,” said Montgomery. “R&D people didn’t think much of their antics.”
Gunderson smiled. “I don’t imagine they would!”
“I know Norcross,” said Montgomery. “He’s very good. I can’t imagine any kind of school that could teach him or you anything at all about aircraft engineering.”
“Neither can I. But I want to find out. I’ve reached a dead end. The whole industry has. The engineers know it and continue to whistle in the dark, hoping for some miracle to pull them out of the hole — atomic engines small enough to go in a fighter ship, at a price not more than twice that of a jet — some way to reduce the fantastic spread of components we have to jam in —
“There won’t be any miracle. There’ll have to be a change in the basic kind of thinking we’re doing. Less of the six million dollar wind tunnel brand, and more of the little cardboard box variety!”
Montgomery returned to the plant with Gunderson, in a state of excitement he tried not to show. But it was tinged with regret, too, because he and Gunderson had become very good friends during the time of building the mammoth bomber. He left the engineer at the entrance to the giant hangar where the Ninety-one had been pulled in for postflight checking. He hurried to his own office on the ground floor of the plant administration building and closed the door, locking it carefully.
Then he sat down at his desk and put in a call to his Washington superior, Colonel Dodge. It took twenty minutes to locate the colonel, but at last Montgomery heard his distant, rough voice.
“I have some information,” said Montgomery. “It would be best to scramble.”
“All right. Code twelve,” said Dodge.
Montgomery pressed a sequence of switches on the little box through which the phone wire ran. His voice thinned out as he spoke again. “It’s that matter you told me to be on the lookout for six months ago. It’s finally happened here. Soren Gunderson is resigning. He says he’s going back to school.”
“Not Gunderson, too!” said Dodge bitterly. “It’s an epidemic. To date, almost two hundred men have resigned from highest priority military projects — all giving the excuse of wanting to attend this mysterious school. It has bogged down over thirty big projects, because they weren’t just run-of-the-mill engineers. They were chief engineers and project engineers and top designers. The whole military program of the nation has been slowed measurably by this draining away of key personnel.
“I’m telling you this to emphasize the absolute necessity of finding out what is going on and putting a stop to it.”
“Do you want me to follow through on it?”
“Just a moment.” There was a click of circuit switching and the colonel’s voice came back. “I’ve put Dr. Spindem on the line. As head of the Psychological Service Section of R&D, he’s been consulted on this problem. I want him to talk to you.”
Montgomery frowned distastefully. He remembered Spindem as a big man with a bluff, jovial front which he forgot to change outside of office consultations.
“Hello?” said Spindem. “It’s good to talk with you again, major.”
“Yes,” said Montgomery.
“I understand you are personally well acquainted with this man, Gunderson.”
“We’ve been very close friends for almost four years.”
“Well, what we’re after now is to get one of our men into this so-called school. We’ve held off any action against them so far, hoping for a chance like this. You’re our first real opportunity. Do you suppose you could get an admission to the place through Gunderson?”
“I don’t know. Admission seems to be by very select invitation. It goes only to the very best men in the field, apparently. My own qualifications in this regard —”
“You’ll have to do whatever you can, major. This is important. Do your utmost to utilize Gunderson’s friendship to get you admitted to the school for a personal inspection. We’ve been able to find exactly nothing so far. It appears, on the surface, to be one of the most cleverly designed sabotage schemes ever encountered. It seems to have an unshakable hold on the minds of those attracted to it — and they are minds essential to the nation’s military preparedness.”
“Consider those your orders,” Colonel Dodge said. “We’ll have another man ready to move into Firestone when you leave. And I want a daily telephone report of your progress.”
Colonel Dodge heard the distant click of Montgomery’s phone, but not of Spindem’s. He breathed heavily in resignation. “Why couldn’t it have been anybody else besides that blockhead, Montgomery? We’ve been waiting six months to put a man there — and he turns out to be the first possibility.”
“It’s not very hopeful,” Dr. Spindem agreed. “But it may turn out better than you think. In the meantime, we’d better keep our eyes open for another chance.”