Free The Sleeping Partner by Winston Graham Page A

such an unexpectedly hot day that one could almost picture oneself out in the Sudan.
    Thurston and Steel were there to meet us, and another man, Rhodes, who was to be the pilot.
    It took the rest of the day fitting the thing up, and dusk was not far away by the time it was ready. We didn’t fly with it that night but tried it out on the ground. As soon as it was switched on, the rate-meter started putting up spurious counts of its own; but after a few minutes we found that one of the luminous dials on the plane hadn’t been scraped clear. When this was fixed the whole thing behaved in a very gentlemanly fashion.
    Stella went to bed at eleven but I stayed up talking with Thurston until after one. I had thought he intended going abroad with the survey unit; but he said he could not, so it looked as if it was going to have to stand up to our claim to be operable by non-technical personnel.
    On Saturday Rhodes and Thurston took the plane up, and then I went up with Rhodes. The detector response was very good indeed, but after a while I noticed that the power input had dropped very sharply, and I switched off and told him to fly back.
    It took us a time to find out that the fault lay in the arrangement to draw power at six volts through a carbon pile regulator off a section of the aircraft’s battery. It just wasn’t going to work, and it meant our introducing a small additional six-volt accumulator, float-charging from the main supply.
    We were being put up at the hostel which was part of the old aerodrome, and it was all fairly stark and wartime-emergency style. There were eight of us altogether, and Stella was the only woman. Somehow it wasn’t until you got her away from her own surroundings that you realised how attractive she was. Her dress was plain and innocent enough, but she drew the eye. Even Thurston – but, then, I remembered Thurston before. One could never tell with scientists.
    Sunday morning there was fog but it cleared soon after nine, and at eleven Rhodes and Thurston took off. They were going to fly a grid pattern for two hours over picked ground. Several 88mc. radium sources had been placed in various degrees of availability, but neither Rhodes nor Thurston knew where the plants had been made.
    After the little plane had droned out of sight the rest of us walked back towards the hostel.
    I said: ‘If this first full test makes sense I shall go home tonight.’
    Stella didn’t say anything but Frank Dawson screwed up his sardonic face. ‘ That’ll cause a riot.’
    â€˜No, I’ve been talking with Thurston. We can be in telephone contact, and it’s only five hours to get here again.’
    Frank said: ‘Anyway we can’t let the factory go to pot even for this job. And it soon would with Read in charge.’
    Stella transferred her eyes to me. There was a look of companionable understanding in their depths.
    I said: ‘Well, he’s only had a day and a half of working time to ruin the place.’
    Frank had a sense of humour over most things, but not over Read. He said: ‘Well, hell, he’s like a little Czar; you ought to be there, then you could talk,’ and went off hunching his shoulders.
    I said: ‘Frank Dawson’s being very difficult these days. He might owe me a personal grudge.’
    â€˜Has he been with you a long time?’ Stella asked.
    â€˜Well, yes. In fact he could have been my partner if he’d been willing to carry some of the weight.’
    â€˜I don’t think he would have done as a partner for you.’
    It was odd, the sense of having nothing to do for two hours. The weight lifted off your head. ‘He’s a very practical bloke.’
    â€˜Oh, yes, in his own work. But don’t you differ altogether in your attitude towards the factory? He wants it to prosper as a factory, but it doesn’t awfully matter to him what it’s making – logarithmic rate-meters or brass