“Are you going back?” said Colonel Dodge.
“Don’t do it!” Spindem exclaimed. “I’ll get away sometime tomorrow, but don’t do a thing until I get there. Your sanity may depend on it.”
“Don’t worry,” said Montgomery. “I’m not sticking my head in that noose again for anybody.”
He went down to the beach in the afternoon sunshine and there he had the chattering shakes. He threw pebbles at the sea gulls wheeling over the rocks. He stomped up and down on the sand. But he couldn’t stop the trembling of his muscles.
So he wasn’t really an engineer! So he had always made like a big shot to cover it up! What difference did it make? The work he’d done had been useful.
But it was no good. He slumped down on a rock and let the shaking possess him. He’d kidded himself. That’s where the trouble lay. He’d kidded himself — and now he couldn’t kid himself any longer. Everything that had supported him was gone. Maybe it was flimsy and phony, but it wasn’t right to strip it away like this. Now that it was gone, however, he could never again walk into a conference and hold his head up as if he were the equal of the men on the other side of the table. He never had been their equal, but he had been able to function under the illusion he was their superior. Now, he could no longer function at all.
His hand grasped a weed stalk and drew idly in the sand. A wing section formed, a curiously irregular wing section that would have provoked laughter in any engineering group. But the laws of air flow and lift were not quite the same at eighty to a hundred thousand feet as they were at sea level. His section could have shortened the span of the Ninety-one by twenty per cent. He was sure of it. Why had he never tried to get it tested?
He didn’t quite know. He’d told himself it was a wild idea that had no merit. Could the truth be that he had been unwilling to face the possibility of ridicule for his unorthodox engineering venture?
He didn’t know the answer to that, either. He only knew that something had been taken from him that enabled him to function, and now he had to have it back, or he’d never be able to function again. He had to see Wolfe and the people at the Institute. It was a sudden obsession with him. They had taken it away; they could give it back.
It was late when he reached the Institute, but Don Wolfe was still in his office. “I rather expected you’d be back today,” he said. “You gave us quite a shock when we saw the taped record of your experience with the Mirror this morning. Your fear tolerance level is higher than any we’ve seen yet. You’ve got more guts to take an honest look at yourself than anybody who’s gone through here up to now. Usually, it takes a week or two to blast out as much as you got in an hour.”