“Well, don’t keep me in suspense,” he heard himself saying.

“I think you’re secretly pleased the electronics lab isn’t able to build autopilots. If we’re going to fly that distance we want to fly it. We want to be able to tell people we did it with our hands.”

Garamond nodded. With our hands, he thought. One of the group standing at the plane was wearing a coolie hat and when its owner turned to greet him Garamond was startled to see the sweat-beaded features of Troy Litman, the senior production executive. Litman was a short pudgy man who had always compensated for the natural untidiness of his physique by paying strict attention to his uniform and off-duty dress, and he was one of the last Garamond would have expected to favour a badly-woven grass hat. Garamond began to doubt his earlier conviction that the design of the grass headgear was symbolic rather than utilitarian.

“The ship looks good,” Garamond said. “Is she ready to fly?”

“As near as she’ll ever be.”

Like the hat, the answer was not what Garamond would have expected of Litman. “How near is that?”

“Relax, Vance.” Litman grinned within the column of shadow projected by the brim of his hat. “That ship will take you as far as you want to go.”

“I’m ready to take her up now, sir,” Braunek said opportunely, from the opposite side of the group.

“You’re happy enough about it?”

“If the computer’s happy I’m happy, sir. Anyway I did a few fast taxis yesterday and she felt fine.”

“Go ahead, then.” Garamond watched the young man climb into the plane’s glasshouse and strap himself into his seat. A few seconds later the propellers started to turn, silently driven by the magnetic resonance engines, and the control surfaces flicked in anticipation. As the propeller revolutions built up the group moved out of the backwash and a similar scattering took place among the work gangs at the far end of the runway. The plane began to move and several excited shouts went up, signifying that, despite the computer predictions and tape-controlled machines, there had remained some areas of human participation.

In its unloaded condition the aircraft used very little of the runway before lifting cleanly into the air. It continued in a straight line for about a kilometre, rising steadily, shadow flitting over the grass directly below, then banked into a lazy turn and circled the encampment. The soundless flight seemed effortless, like that of a gull riding on a fresh breeze, but on the third pass Garamond thought he saw a small object detach itself from the aircraft and go fluttering to the ground.

“What was that?” Napier said, screening his eyes. “I saw something fall.”

“Nothing fell,” Litman asserted very quickly.

“I saw something too,” Garamond put in. “You’d better get a medic on to the truck, just in case.”

“It wouldn’t do any good — we had to pull the transmission out.”

“What?” Garamond stared in disbelief at Litman’s uneasy but defiant face. “One of the first basic procedures we agreed was that the truck would be kept at readiness during flight testing.”

“I guess I forgot.”

Garamond flicked a hand upwards, sending Litman’s hat tumbling behind him. “You are not a peasant,” he said harshly. “You are not a coolie. You are a Starflight executive officer and I’m going to see that you…”

“Braunek’s coming back,” someone said and Garamond returned his attention to the aircraft. The pilot had not tried, or had been unable, to line up on the runway but was coming in parallel to it, his ship rising and sinking noticeably as it breasted the wind. Garamond estimated the touchdown point and relaxed slightly as he saw it would be well to the north of the buildings and tents which were clustered around the hulk of the Bissendorf. The plane continued its descent, side-slipping a little but holding fairly well to its course.

“I told you there was nothing to worry about,” Litman said in a reproachful voice.

“You’d better be right.” Garamond kept his eyes on Braunek’s ship. The side-slipping was more noticeable now, but each skid brought the plane a little closer to the centreline of the cleared strip and Garamond hoped that Braunek was good enough at his trade to be doing it on purpose. He knew, however, that there had to come a moment, a precise moment, in every air crash when the spectator on the ground was forced to accept that the pilot had lost his struggle against the law of aerial physics, that a disaster had to occur. For Garamond, the moment came when he saw that the starboard propeller was ceasing to spin. The plane pulled to the right, as though the wing on that side had hit an invisible pylon, and it staggered down the perilous sky towards the hillside. Towards, Garamond suddenly realized, the black rectangle of the delton detector. He was unable to breathe during the final few seconds of flight as the doomed ship, see-sawing its wings, became silhouetted against land instead of sky and then flailed its way through the delton screen. And it was not until the sound of the crash reached him that he was freed from his stasis and began to run.

Braunek’s life was saved by the fact that the lightweight frames of the detector screens served as efficient absorbers of kinetic energy. They had accepted the impact, folding almost gently around the ship, stretching and twisting, and then trailing out behind it like vines. By the time Garamond reached the location of the crash Braunek had been helped out of the wreckage and was sitting on the grass. He was surrounded by technicians who had been working in and had run out of the small hut linked to the screens, and one of them was spraying tissue sealant over a gash on his leg.

“I’m glad you made it,” Garamond said, feeling inadequate. “How do you feel?”

Braunek shook his head. “I’m all right, but everything else is screwed up.” He tried to raise himself from the ground.

Garamond pushed him back. “Don’t move. I want the medics to have a proper look at you. What happened anyway?”

“Starboard wing centre panel dropped off.”

“It just dropped off?”

Braunek nodded. “It took the engine control runs with it, otherwise I could have brought the ship in okay.”

Garamond jumped to his feet “Litman! Find that panel and bring it here. Fast!”

Litman, who was just arriving on the scene, looked exasperated but he turned without a word and ran back down the hillside. Garamond stayed talking with Braunek until a medic arrived to check him over, then he surveyed the ruins of the delton screen. Somewhere in the middle of the wreckage a damaged aircraft engine was still releasing gyromagnetic impulses which sent harmless flickers of detuned energy racing over the metalwork like St Elmo’s fire. Where accidental resonances occurred a feeble motive force was conjured up and the broken struts of the framework twitched like the legs of a dying insect. The destruction looked final to Garamond but he checked with O’Hagan and confirmed that the screen had been rendered useless except as a source of raw materials.

“How long till you have another one operational?”

“A week perhaps,” O’Hagan said. “We’ll go for modular construction this time. That means we could have small areas operational in a couple of days, and we could build up to a useful size before your airplanes are ready to take off.”

“Do that.” Garamond left his Chief Science Officer staring gloomily into the wreckage and went down the hillside to meet the group which had retrieved the lost wing section. The men set the plastic panel down in front of him and stood back without speaking. Garamond ran his gaze over it and saw at once that the two longitudinal edges which should have been ridged with welding overlays were square and clean except for small positioning welds which had broken.