Desperate Games

‘And what if he is ordered to descend at a specific angle?’

‘We’ve tried. It won’t work. He had no sooner started to make the manoeuvre than he abandoned it, saying that he’d lost confidence and adding that he wanted a no visibility landing. Well, visibility is excellent…’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Betty interrupted impatiently, ‘they must make him do it.’

‘They thought of that… As I told you, they tried everything. That doesn’t work either.’

‘Why not? He gave a reason for it. I’d like to know the exact words he uttered, even if they seem to be incoherent. It’s very important. Have them repeated to you,’ Betty continued, pressing her point.

‘Consider that an order from the President,’ Fawell interrupted, seeming to be hanging on his colleague’s every word.

There was a silence, and then came the reply: ‘They could only make out the following: “I can’t, I can’t… It’s the view of the runway… I tell you I can see the runway…” Then there are just incomprehensible mumblings.’

‘Does he still have fuel?’

‘Yes, lots. His aircraft has an extensive range, and he filled up before leaving.’

‘Stay on the line,’ Betty said. ‘Give me a couple of minutes. I’ll think about it.’

She put her head in her hands while Fawell watched her anxiously in silence, not wanting to disturb her meditation. After a moment she stood up.

‘I have an idea, Fawell. He is at a station at the edge of the Sahara, isn’t he? Tell me quickly. It can’t be far from the first chains of the Atlas Mountains in Morocco?’

‘Scarcely more than two hundred kilometres,’ Yranne interrupted. ‘I know that area.’

‘And close to these mountains, there must occasionally be some mists, fogs?’

Yranne looked her straight in the eye for a moment, then uttered an exclamation. His sharp mind had grasped what she was thinking.

‘And if there isn’t, we can create it when we need it,’ he exclaimed. ‘We have a meteorological station there, where some conclusive tests were carried out recently… Fawell, let me give the order. There’s not a second to lose.’

Without waiting for the President’s reply, he rushed to a second telephone, and alerted other services, issuing feverish instructions.

‘What’s the name of your station? Is there an airfield nearby? Can you give me the precise coordinates?’ Betty asked.

Yranne replied in the affirmative and showed her the data while he was waiting for a reply from the station. Betty picked up the first telephone again. Fawell was too overcome to do anything himself, and made a sign to indicate that he gave them a free hand.

‘This is what you’re to do,’ she said.

While Yranne was ordering the relevant services to induce the largest possible concentration of dense clouds and to launch storms over the area, Betty sent urgent instructions to Hudson.

After these measures had been taken, Nicolas was given a precise course, which he followed obediently, and it led him into thick fog in less than hour. There the station could take charge of the situation by radio control and guide him over the airfield, where the visibility was nil due to a storm which had been induced.

Following the mobilisation of the various services, all communications, including the conversations between the airplane and the ground, were retransmitted via the President’s office, so he and his two friends were able to follow the drama’s happy ending in real time.

Thus they were able to observe, with great relief, a quite remarkable fact, which did not seem to surprise the psychologist. The cosmonaut’s voice became more confident and more distinct as soon as he went into the fog. When he was in complete darkness and only being directed via the radio waves, he regained his usual calm and reacted with his customary skill to the directives issued to him by the automatic equipment.

‘Congratulations, Betty,’ Yranne said. ‘That was a great idea of yours.’

Fawell was happy just to embrace her without saying a word. He had also understood.

The no visibility landing was accomplished without any difficulty in the thickest of pea souper fogs. When Nicolas and a tearful Ruth were greeted by the station officials on the ground, he could give no explanation for his strange behaviour. His only reply to all the questions was:

‘I don’t know what came over me.’

6.

Other cases of this strange illness were reported and initially so many cosmonauts were affected that for some time it was believed that the illness was peculiar to spacemen. The signs could take very varied forms, from the benign to the occasional delirious frenzy. One such person for example, sitting dumbstruck at the driving wheel of his car, was seen to stop suddenly, when he had got himself into a position to park between two vehicles, and to stay there motionless, holding up the traffic. Then he alerted passers-by with his angry cries, imploring someone to telephone the WAO, to have someone show him the sequence of maneouvres necessary. He had become incapable of doing it by himself.