Free Night Flight by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Page B

heavily. “Still she is helping me to discover the thing I’m looking for.”
    He fingered absent-mindedly the messages from the northern airports. “We do not pray for immortality,” he thought, “but only not to see our acts and all things stripped suddenly of all their meaning; for then it is the utter emptiness of everything reveals itself.”
    His gaze fell on the telegrams.
    â€œThese are the paths death takes to enter here—messages that have lost their meaning.”
    He looked at Robineau. Meaningless, too, this fellow who served no purpose now. Rivière addressed him almost gruffly.
    â€œHave I got to tell you what your duties are?”
    Then he pushed open the door that led into the Business Office and saw how Fabien’s disappearance was recorded there in signs his wife could not have noticed. The slip marked
R.B.903,
Fabien’s machine, was already inserted in the wall index of Unavailable Plant. The clerks preparing the papers for the Europe mail were working slackly, knowing it would be delayed. The airport was ringing up for orders respecting the staff on night duty whose presence was no longer necessary. The functions of life were slowing down. That is death! thought Rivière. His work was like a sailing ship becalmed upon the sea.
    He heard Robineau speaking. “Sir, they had only been married six weeks.”
    â€œGet on with your work!”
    Rivière, watching the clerks, seemed to see beyond them the workmen, mechanics, pilots, all
who had helped him in his task, with the faith of men who build. He thought of those little cities of old time where men had murmured of the “Indies,” built a ship and freighted it with hopes. That men might see their hope outspread its wings across the sea. All of them magnified, lifted above themselves and saved—by a ship! He thought: The goal, perhaps, means nothing, it is the thing done that delivers man from death. By their ship those men will live.
    Rivière, too, would be fighting against death when he restored to those telegrams their full meaning, to these men on night duty their unrest and to his pilots their tragic purpose; when life itself would make his work alive again, as winds restore to life a sailing ship upon the sea.

XX
    Commodoro Rivadavia could hear nothing now, but twenty seconds later, six hundred miles away, Bahia Blanca picked up a second message.
    â€œComing down. Entering the clouds....”
    Then two words of a blurred message were caught at Trelew.
    â€œ... see nothing...”
    Short waves are like that; here they can be caught, elsewhere is silence. Then, for no reason, all is changed. This crew, whose position was unknown, made itself heard by living ears, from somewhere out of space and out of time, and at the radio station phantom hands were tracing a word or two on this white paper.
    Had the fuel run out already or was the pilot, before catastrophe, playing his last card: to reach the earth again without a crash?
    Buenos Aires transmitted an order to Trelew.
    â€œAsk him.”
    The radio station looked like a laboratory with its nickel and its copper, manometers and sheaves of wires. The operators on duty in their white overalls seemed to be bending silently above some simple experiment. Delicately they touched their instruments, exploring the magnetic sky, dowsers in quest of hidden gold.
    â€œNo answer?”
    â€œNo answer.”
    Perhaps they yet might seize upon its way a sound that told of life. If the plane and its lights were soaring up to join the stars, it might be they would hear a sound—a singing star!
    The seconds flowed away, like ebbing blood. Were they still in flight? Each second killed a hope. The stream of time was wearing life away. As for twenty centuries it beats against a temple, seeping through the granite, and spreads the fane in ruin, so centuries of wear and tear were thronging in each second, menacing the airmen.
    Every second