PATH OF GLORY

A. Bertram Chandler

Illustrated by James White

When he got off the train at the Pierhead Station Lanning checked his watch with the platform clock. It seemed to be a good half hour fast. It was very strange-but it explained the early morning feeling he had known since bolting his breakfast and mak ing a dash for the Seaforth bus. He would have to get the radio fixed, he reflected. When every watch and clock in the place suddenly went haywire something would have to be done about it.

He thought of dropping in somewhere for a cup of coffee, and then decided against it. His stomach, after his hasty meal, was far from happy. Besides, there was a pile of work waiting for him, and Captain Beardmore had been loudly wondering for the las t two days when WAITEMATA's papers would be ready.

Turning up his raincoat collar against the thin, chill drizzle he waited his chance. There was a lull in the traffic and he ran across Water Street, almost slipping on the greasy cobblestones. Once inside Atlantic Building he made straight for the aut omatic lifts. One had a large placard, OUT OF ORDER, hung on its door; the other was unengaged. He entered and pressed the starting button for the Sixth Floor. His stomach protested at the acceleration and for a few moments he thought he was going to be s ick. The lift stopped. He stepped out, turned sharp right along the corridor that would bring him to the office. Suddenly, he stopped. There was something unfamiliar about that all too familiar short walk.

Foe weeks the office between the lift shafts and the Company's premises had been vacant. It seemed suddenly to have found a tenant. There was lettering on the frosted glass of the door, lettering that had not been there on Saturday. Had it merely been the name and title of some firm of brokers or merchants or ship chandlers Lanning would have passed on, have given it no further thought. But the words, for all their black, businesslike neatness, were so outrageous in this temple of the drab gods of com merce that he could but stop and stare. J. SMITH, read the sign, CONSULTING FORTUNETELLER. And then, in staring characters, WHAT COULD YOU HAVE BEEN...IF?

Mr. Smith, thought Lanning, should have his fortune told if he thinks he's going to make his fortune by setting up shop here. The other tenants will take a very dim view of this. Especially Beardmore. He does all the fortune telling in this nec k of the woods. Then-I shouldn't like to be in Captain Keene's shoes when he reports in today.

He made to pass on, then hesitated. There was a light behind the frosted glass, and he saw a shadow briefly flicker across it. He looked at his watch. At least twenty minutes before the Big White Chief was due. He would see what this bird Smith was li ke. It would be a tale with which to amuse the others after eleven o'clock tea.

Lanning tried the door. It opened easily. He poked in his head around the edge, saw a little man seated behind a big desk. "Excuse me," he said, "are you-er-open? I was just passing and-"

"I am always ready to receive seekers after the truth," replied the other. For one so small his voice had a surprising volume. "Will you come in, my friend?"

And now Lanning felt a peculiar sensation compounded of reluctance and an eager desire to learn more of this J. Smith. He wanted, badly, to retreat to the drably familiar world of the company's office-but he opened the door still further, and stepped inside. With a gentleness that surprised him he shut it after him.

"Won't you sit down?" asked the little man, indicating a chair facing the desk. Lanning felt suddenly weak, sank into it gratefully. His eyes roamed with frank curiosity about the room. It was sparsely furnished, seemed to contain only the b ig desk and the two chairs. Save for one thing, the desk boasted only the normal office accessories. The abnormality was a large crystal on a squat ebony pedestal. It was vaguely disappointing. Lanning had expected something less cheaply obvious.

And yet he never gained a clear impression of J. Smith. The little man seemed always slightly out of focus, his outlines shifting and uncertain. Only his voice seemed real. And apart from its deep richness it was almost too commonplace.

"And now, tell me about yourself..." It was more of an order than a request.

Lanning felt a rush of disappointment. Why, the fellow was no more than a cheap charlatan-and not even as subtle in his methods as most.

"Me tell you?" he demanded scornfully. "But..."

Then he stopped. He sensed rather than saw the little smile that flickered over the obscurity of the other's face. And he felt-although he would have died rather than admit it--a very real power inhibiting his speech. He tried to continue, but could o nly stammer wordlessly.

"I am not a fortune teller," said J. Smith. "At least not as you understand the word. I make no pretence of either foretelling the future, or of delving into the past. But I can show you what you might have been had you taken the altern ate path at any of the crucial points of your life. Now...?"

Lanning's memory flashed back to two years before the war. The RAF had invited applications for short service commissions and, among others, many ship's officers had welcomed the opportunity for leading a fuller, more adventurous life. He had been amo ng them. While his ship was in London he had attended Adastral House for an interview, had met with the approval of the high officers before whom he had appeared, had been given the date, time and place for his medical. And then Audrey had kicked. He was in a good job, in the service of a first class liner company. His prospects were good, even though promotion was painfully slow. He was married. Why throw up everything and risk his neck in aeroplanes? Lanning had been able to produce several answers to t hat question-but none was right in the eyes of his wife. And so he had cancelled everything and continued in the service of the Company. Under the artificial conditions of wartime he had gone ahead fast. And when he was Second Officer of one of the big sh ips he had been put ashore with gastric ulcers and for weeks his life was despaired of. On recovery he was told that he most never go to sea again. And so the Company, out of the kindness of their collective heart, had found him a berth in their Liverpool office where, to all intents and purposes, he was no more than an office boy for Captain Beardmore, the unpopular Marine Superintendent. And as both he and Audrey were incurable Londoners they loathed Liverpool with a deep and dreadful loathing. He would never admit it, Audrey would never admit it, but they both wished with all their souls that he was back at sea again.

All this and more he told J. Smith. The little man listened intently, his hands clasped before him and that half-seen smile-mockery or compassion?--flickering now and again across his vague, indeterminate features. He waited until Lanning finished the n...

"Look," he said simply.

The crystal on his desk had come alive, was shining with an uncanny life of its own. Within its cloudy depths vague forms, dim colours swirled and shifted. It compelled attention. J. Smith was no longer there, his office and its simple furnishings wer e gone. And Lanning was no longer there. He was inside the crystal, living the life of the image of himself that he had glimpsed, as though through the wrong end of a telescope, within its doubtful mystery.

He lived the life of this other Lanning through all its moments of doubt and triumph, and yet there was that which stood outside and told him that this was but a dream, that the long hours and days and years were, in some other time, but the veriest f ractions of seconds. But in the world of the crystal they were as real-more real- than anything he had ever known.

As Flying Officer Lanning he started the war, as Air Commodore Lanning he finished it. And in the interim he knew the feel of a plane under him, saw the fantastic snowy caves and pinnacles as he sped into the overcast, felt the almost detached fear, o f the intellect rather than the emotions, as he watched the pretty, harmless-seeming streams of tracer climb with deceptive slowness towards his cockpit. Telling himself that the last flights of mankind were the best, he participated in the great aerial b attles over Germany, when the sky was alive with tracer and bursting shells, whilst the war rockets wove their fiery patterns through the flying fleets and burning ships plummeted earthwards like fallen archangels.

As Air Commodore Lanning he finished the war, and as Air Commodore he went to the Palace, where the man whose crown he wore on badge and buttons tapped his shoulder and dubbed him Knight.

"Sir Richard Lanning..." said Audrey. "I can't get used to it. Sir Richard..."

"...and Lady Lanning," he finished. "You wouldn't have got this, my dear, if I'd stayed with the Company. I've kept in touch, and the furthest that any of the blokes with the same seniority have got is Second Mate-with the doubtful pros pect of their K.B. when they're full of years and honour and have stayed the course long enough to become Commodore Captain. I wonder...Suppose I had listened to you, dear...What then? Where should I be?"

"Who knows?" Her voice was very far away, and her eyes seemed to be looking past him into another space, another time. "Who knows? Oh, Dick, I'm frightened. This is all too good to last...You've had a charmed life during the war. And yo u've gone ahead fast, too fast. You've had luck, you must admit, the kind of luck that makes one wonder what kind of dirty trick Fate has up her sleeve. And if you'd stayed at sea..."

"I should be either a Second Mate or shrimp fodder. But I see what you mean. Better to be a live dog than a dead lion. But I'm not dead..."

"What was that other?" asked Audrey. "You know. The one we used to say together whenever we thought our luck was too good to last...Man goeth like something..."

Man goeth up like a royal tops'l..." prompted Lanning. "Man goeth up like a royal tops'l," they said together, like two solemn children, "and cometh down like a flying jib!"

Then came the dull, bleak morning when the first plane fitted with the Lanning Drive was to be tested. In the world of the crystal he understood it perfectly, as indeed he should have done, for it was his own invention. In that other durably unreal wo rld he remembered it imperfectly and briefly. It was not jet propulsion-quite. It was not rocket drive-quite. It adjusted itself-somehow-to the density of the stratum of the atmosphere in which the ship was flying. Its fuel...he could not remember.

The Air Commodore stood with a group of high officers in a small hut towards the edge of the windswept field. He was in flying kit. The others shivered in their greatcoats. Somebody had produced, by some wizardry, hot fragrant coffee. Lanning sipped h is, grateful for its warmth. He waved aside the proffered brandy flask. "No thank you, sir. I'd better not have mine straight. She's a bit tricky yet..."

"Damn it all, Lanning," exploded the other, "every young cub in the Service would sell his soul to take her up..." He waved his hand toward the window. "You're too important."

"I'm not." He followed the other's gesture, looked long and lovingly at the craft outside, a mere projectile with stubby wings. "And after all, she's not their child..."

"Lanning's luck" he heard somebody murmur. "He could take up anything and get away with it."

The words touched a chord in his memory. "Man goeth up like a royal tops'l, and cometh down like a flying jib..."

"What was that, Lanning?"

"Nothing sir."

He finished his coffee, and as he turned to place his cup on the rough table his eyes were caught and held by a calendar on the bare wall. Above the date was the picture of a naked girl, scarce worthy of being dignified with the name of art. Yet the u nknown artist had given his meretricious work something of the essence of all womankind, something that stood out in startling contradiction to the little artificial world of uniformed men, bare bleak fields, and ugly vicious machines that stood waiting a nd purring like monsters from some other planet.

To hide his interest in the nude Lanning made a pretense of noting the date. "Thirteenth of October 1947," he said softly. "But then thirteen always has been my lucky number..."

He walked to the door, out over the damp grass. And then he was in the pressure cabin of the plane. One of the mechanics shut the door. Abruptly, all sound from outside was cut off: he was conscious only of the muffled purring of his idling motor.

Through the thick ports he saw the others withdraw to a safe distance from the ship. Not far enough. He waved impatiently. There was a moment's hesitation, then the little group split up to coalesce again a hundred yards or so further from danger.

When Lanning pressed the starting button he felt as though the whole world had risen and dealt him a violent blow at the back of the head. Then his vision cleared, and he was able to look at his instrument panel. He whistled softly. He was high. Alrea dy he was high. He looked down-and the kindly earth was covered by a blanket of cloud through which he must have briefly flashed with the speed of a meteorite. Above-the sky was already black instead of blue.

But I'm not bound for the moon...yet, he thought as he levelled off. Now to put the old girl through her tricks...He became aware that the RT was making querulous sounds, barely audible above the brute roar of unleashed power.

"Yes, this is Lanning," he barked impatiently into his microphone. "Levelled off at thirty thousand, but she could do more...Yes, she's a sweet job..."

And then the world of Air Commodore Sir Richard Lanning became a mercifully brief hell as the flames from his screaming motor swept into the cabin. And that other Richard Lanning stood somewhere outside and watched.

"But he fell like an archangel," he was saying over and over again. "He fell like an archangel..."

And the crystal on the desk was just a transparent colourless ball, and behind the desk sat Mr. J. Smith, that enigmatic half smile still flickering briefly and faintly across his shadowed face. But it was none of these that Lanning saw first, it was the calendar. Just an ordinary office calendar showing the date of October the Thirteenth, 1947.

It was J. Smith who first broke the silence.

"You have seen," he said abruptly. In the words was, perhaps, compassion-but there was also dismissal. "You have seen."

"Yes," replied Lanning dully. "I have seen..." He fumbled in his breast pocket. "Is there...?"

The other waved his hand in a gesture that was both refusal and farewell.

"There is no charge," he said, "but there will be payment. Goodbye Air Commodore and Knight that could have been..."

Somehow Lanning found himself at the door. "Better to be a live dog than a dead lion," he was mumbling to himself. Then..."But he...I fell like an archangel...I fell like an archangel..."

Outside the empty office he turned sharp left, and left again for the Company's familiar doorway.

It was never established who it was who had left open the door of the shaft of the lift that was out of order. But employees of the firm responsible for repairs and maintenance swore innocence.

"And when they found Lanning he had been dead a long time.

Data entry and page scans provided by Judy Bemis

Updated September 26, 2003. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.