No Highway by Nevil Shute Read Free Book Online

into the front room, which would normally have been the parlour. It was furnished with a long table pushed against the wall, and with an enormous drawing-board in the bay window; on this was pinned a large-scale map of Europe and the Mediterranean Sea, but drawn to some curious projection with which I was not familiar. The other walls were lined with rather dirty, unpainted deal cupboards and bookshelves. Books and papers were everywhere, and overflowed in piles upon the floor. I noted some of the titles of the books upon the table—
Numerics of the Bible, The Gate of Remembrance, Hysteresis in Non-Ferrous Materials, The Apocrypha in Modern Life
, and
A Critical Examination of the Pyramid
. The room was unswept and rather dirty, with cigarette ends stubbed out on the bare boards of the floor. There were two small upright wooden chairs; he pulled one forward for me.
    “I’m afraid it’s not very comfortable in here,” he said apologetically.
    I smiled. “It looks as if you do a bit of work, now and again.” I turned to the matter in hand. “What I came about was this. You know that prototype Reindeer, the one that crashed in Labrador? The one that we all thought had flown into a hill?”
    He said vaguely, “I think I do remember something about it. It was in the papers, wasn’t it?”
    “That’s right. It crashed and everyone was killed, so no one knows exactly what did happen to it. Well, I checked up on the hours that it had flown before the crash. It had done 1,393 hours.”
    He stared at me. “Had it? There’d be nothing to say that the crash wasn’t due to tailplane failure?”
    “That’s just the point. I think the tail might possibly have failed. The crash wasn’t seen by anyone, of course. It happened in the middle of Labrador.”
    A slow smile spread over his face. “Well, that’s a real bit of luck,” he said.
    I was staggered. “Luck?”
    He beamed at me. “It’s just what we wanted—it will shorten down our work enormously.” He explained himself. “I mean, if this tail that we’re testing now also fails at about1,400 hours we shall have two trials, one confirming the other. We really shall feel that we’re getting somewhere then.”
    I said weakly, “Well—that’s one way of looking at it.”
    From one of the rooms upstairs Elspeth called out, “Daddy, Dad-dee!” She sounded impatient.
    Honey turned to me, and said nervously, “Would you mind excusing me for just a minute? I didn’t pull her blind down.”
    There was no point in playing the high executive, the little tin god; I had nothing else to do that evening. “Not a bit,” I said. “Can I come up with you?”
    “She’d be very thrilled if you came up to say good night to her,” he said. “It would be kind of you.”
    He took me up into a little bare bedroom at the back of the house; rather to my surprise it was all reasonably clean, though most unfeminine. Elspeth was lying on her back in bed, mathematically in the centre, with the sheet tucked smooth and unruffled across below her chin. Her eyes watched me as I paused in the doorway.
    “Hullo,” I said. “I’ve come to say good night.” And then I noticed that in bed with her, with its white-tasselled head beside her dark one on the pillow, was one of those little cotton mops that you use for washing up.
    She saw me looking at it. “Is that your dolly?” I asked, trying to be pleasant.
    “No,” she said scornfully. “That’s a mop.”
    Honey was busy at the window. I sat down for a moment on the end of her bed. “Is it your best thing?” I asked. “Is that why you’ve got it in bed with you?”
    She nodded vigorously.
    “I should use it for washing up,” I remarked. “Then you won’t have to put your hands in.”
    She said, “We’ve got another one for washing up. We went to Woolworth’s and Daddy got two, and he said I could have this one to take to bed till we have to use it if the other one wears out. The other one’s downstairs in the