Free No Highway by Nevil Shute Page A

ideas, are striving to modify the chief designer’s original conception. If the design is to appear in the end as a great artistic unity, the chief designer must be a man of immensely powerful will, capable of imposing his idea and his way of doing things on each of his hundred draughtsmen, so that each one of them is too terrified to insert any of his own ideas. If the chief designer has not got this personality and strength of will, his original conception will be distorted in the design office and will appear as just another, not-so-good aeroplane, He will not then be ranked as a good chief designer.
    All really first-class chief designers, for this reason, are both artists, engineers, and men of a powerful and an intolerant temper, quick to resist the least modification of their plans, energetic in fighting the least infringement upon what they regard as their own sphere of action. If they were not so, they could not produce good aeroplanes. For the Government official who detects an error in their work the path is not made easy, and of all men in the aircraft industry the most dangerous to cross was E. P. Prendergast. He was deeply religious in a narrow, Calvinistic way. He could be in turn a most courteous and charming host, a sympathetic and an understanding employer, and a hot-tempered fiend capable of making himself physically sick with his own passion, so that he would stalk out of a conference of bitter, angrywords, and retire to the toilet and vomit, and go home to bed, and return to his office three days later, white and shaken with the violence of his illness. He was about the greatest engineer in England at that time and he produced the most lovely and successful aeroplanes. But he was not an easy man to deal with, E. P. Prendergast.
    The Director sent for me again that evening. He had had Ferguson working all day on the matter; cables had been passing to and fro with Ottawa and the Treasury had been persuaded that it was necessary to spend the dollars. Priority had been allocated for the passage, and it looked as if Mr. Honey would get off on Sunday.
    After all that, I raised the matter of the Rutland Aircraft Company. I said, “At what stage do you think we ought to get the firm in on this thing, sir?” I paused, and then I added, “E. P. Prendergast …”
    He glanced at me. “Yes … Prendergast.” He was silent for a minute, and I knew what he was thinking. If anybody dared to say the Reindeer tail was not above suspicion and could not produce good evidence for that assertion, E. P. Prendergast would go up in a sheet of flame. He would complain to the Minister, as he had done before, that he could not carry on his work in an atmosphere of petty backbiting and vilification by minor civil servants. He would offer, in the most dignified way, to give up his post and go to America if it would assist the Minister in his direction of the Industry. But if it was the desire of the Minister that he should continue to design British aircraft, then he must be protected from the expression of the petty jealousies of petty Government officials. As I have said, we had had some of this before.
    The Director said, “I doubt if Mr. Prendergast would find Honey’s theoretical work very convincing.”
    “I’m damn sure he wouldn’t,” I said. “He’d chew him up and spit him out in no time.”
    “I don’t know that the time is quite ripe to inform the firm,” he said thoughtfully. “After all, there’s nothing they can do till it is proved that fatigue is actually taking place. We ought to have a cable from Honey in a few days which will indicate what really happened to that prototype machine. I think that would be the time when we should get the firm into the matter, when the question of some modification arises.”
    “I think so, too,” I said. “I think it’s a bit early yet to worry them.”
    I told Honey to make preparations for his passage on Sunday, and I put him into touch with Ferguson, who