‘Pasta.’
‘What kind of pasta?’
‘The kind I’m making.’
‘Yeah, okay.’
Halo talked quietly on the phone to Vee while Tom made pasta. It was all he was really good at. Well, adequate. It was hard to go wrong with pasta – although not impossible, in his experience.
Halo got off the phone and came to lean against the kitchen door. ‘Told her I got in an accident. A small one. Thought it’d cover the nose and the mirror.’
Tom handed him a bowl of pasta and a fork, then stretched out on the couch with his bowl on his chest.
Halo took the easy chair next to the TV and looked around at the sparsely furnished condo. One couch, one chair, a TV on a crate, a stereo with cables trailing across the floor. Not even a coffee-table or rug. ‘You get robbed?’
Tom gave him a puzzled look and Halo waved his pasta-filled fork briefly at the furnishings. ‘Empty.’
It was empty. Ella had sent for her stuff and Tom had been surprised to find that he was left with pretty much just what he’d moved in with two years before. He’d thought he’d been making progress but it had turned out that Ella had been progressing just fine without any help from him. ‘I like it like this,’ he said. ‘Don’t bleed on my chair.’
Halo touched his nose but the bleeding had stopped. ‘So what happened to you?’
‘Some angry loser at the Honolulu.’
‘Just random?’
Tom sucked spaghetti into his mouth and shot Halo an impatient glance. ‘Nah. All the time he was hitting me he kept yelling, “Pride of Maine! Pride of Maine!”’
Halo eyed his food for a moment. ‘You think I’m paranoid.’
Tom’s silence spoke louder than words.
Halo sighed, and gestured at Tom’s face. ‘How does the other guy look?’
Tom prodded his pasta and gave a mean little smile. ‘Sincerely regretful.’
11
PAM MASHAMAETE CALLED two days later. Just hearing her voice put Tom in that hot, dusty place with ostriches flapping, or whatever ostriches did. He didn’t want to ask Pam what her surroundings were really like: he enjoyed the image in his head too much.
‘I’ve emailed you some pictures.’
God, he loved the way other countries dealt with confidentiality issues.
Twenty minutes later Tom called her back. ‘You got scoring on the disc flange!’
Pam laughed, a rich, joyous sound as if she really was enjoying her joke. ‘I know!’
Tom’s mind ticked like a Geiger counter on Bikini Atoll. The fan blades were attached to the fan disc, a ring of intricately tooled titanium alloy, which in turn was bolted to the flat face of the drive shaft via perfectly matched flanges. The integrity of the bond between the two flanges was crucial. There was no margin for error when two surfaces were required to maintain synchronicity at 5,500 r.p.m. ‘How the hell did that happen?’
Pam made a long musical hum of ‘Who knows?’ ‘We’re thinking it may be nothing to do with the crash at all. That maybe it was scratched during maintenance or something.’
Tom heard the subtle inflection in her voice. ‘We’re thinking?’
‘The team.’
‘But not you?’
A long pause from Ostrich World. ‘We-ell … the team thinks it can’t be relevant, that if the scoring was caused during operation, it would have been picked up before … this.’
Tom nodded. Movement between the fan disc and the shaft would certainly have been picked up by the airborne-vibration monitoring system and gauged on a small black-faced dial on the cockpit’s central pedestal. The dial was calibrated up to five units. Any vibration over two was reportable by the crew on landing, although it wasn’t a fail-safe system. Change the crew, change the defect – the long-suffering engineers’ mantra was cynical but true: what one crew refused to fly with, another cheerfully ignored. And even if a 1.9 reading had been noted and reported, small random vibrations were notoriously difficult to replicate in tests. ‘Transient’, they were called. Sometimes they were there; sometimes they just went away.
And sometimes they came back.
‘You got the shaft?’ Matching score marks on it would indicate the damage had been caused during operation.
‘No,’ she said, ‘not yet.’
‘You find the black box?’
She must have known he was going to ask about vibration readings. ‘The VDM showed a vibration of just under two units.’
‘But then it stopped working.’
‘That’s when everything stopped working.’
They paused for a moment, respecting the euphemism.
Two units of vibration weren’t enough to make the scoring the cause of the crash. But something about it had obviously kept niggling away at Pam, and now it was bothering Tom, too. He itched to see the fan disc; burned to run his fingers over the faces of the two connecting flanges.
