No Highway Read Free

had a sallow face with the features of a frog, and rather a tired and discontented frog at that. He wore steel-rimmed spectacles with very thick glasses, and he was as blind as a bat without them. Looking at him, my wife’s description of his daughter came into my mind, the dark-haired, white-faced, ugly little girl. Of course, she would be like that.
    I said, “Morning, Mr. Honey. I’ve just come down to have a look at your tailplane. Anything happening to it yet?”
    He said, “Oh no—everything is going on quite normally, so far. We can’t expect much yet, you know.” He had a few strain gauges mounted on various parts of the structure and he was reading them every three hours and graphing the readings. He showed me the curves illustrating the daily deformations of the structure as the test went on; after a few initial disturbances, due to the rivets bedding down, the carvesflattened out and went along as a straight line. It was behaving just exactly as one would expect a safe structure to behave.
    We stood and looked at it, and walked around it in the noise. Then we went back into his office, where the noise level was lower, and talked about it for a bit. I cannot say I was impressed with what I saw and heard. But for the expense of the set-up, I should have been very much tempted to call off the entire experiment.
    “What’s your prognostication, Mr. Honey?” I asked presently. “How long do you think it will go on for?”
    He smiled nervously, as the pure researchers always do when you try to pin them down to something definite. “One has to make so many assumptions,” he said. “The mass energy absorption factor, the factor that I call U m in my papers—that varies somewhat with each type of structure, and one really has to do a preliminary experiment to establish that.”
    That sounded like an old story to me, and I was not impressed. “You mean, with a tailplane like this you’ve got to break one first under a fatigue test, just like this, to establish the factor?”
    “Yes,” he said eagerly, “that’s right.”
    “And then,” I said, rather naughtily, “having found out the factor you can calculate back and find out when it broke.”
    He glanced at me, uncertain if I were laughing at him or not. “Of course, you can then apply that factor to other tails of similar design, vibrated on a different range of frequencies.”
    I said doubtfully, “Yes, I suppose so, when you’ve built up a good deal of experience.”
    I spent most of the rest of the morning going through his papers with him and getting acquainted with his theory. I knew the broad outline of his ideas already, and because I knew them I had avoided going into them in more detail until I really had to. Because, like all my other Einsteins, Mr. Honey in his research upon fatigue had gone all nuclear.
    When the fundamental theories about atomic fission became generally known to scientists in 1945, they came as a godsend to all middle-aged researchers. Here was a completely new field of pure thought to explore, whether it had anything to do with their immediate job or not. Each of them very soon convinced himself that in an application and extension of nuclear theory lay the solution to all his problems, whetherthey were concerned with the effect of sunlight on paint or the formation of sludge in engine-lubricating oil. It seemed at times that every scientist in the Establishment had made himself into an expert upon nuclear matters, all but me, who had come from the material and earthly pursuit of testing aeroplanes in flight, and so had started late in the race. I didn’t known much about the atom, and I was very sceptical if nuclear matters really affected my department at all.
    However, Mr. Honey was convinced they did, and he had built up an imposing structure of theory upon a nuclear basis. Quite simply, what he held was that when a structure like a tailplane is vibrated a tiny quantity of energy is absorbed into it,