Endless Communication

The day the aeroplanes fell out of the sky, and for months afterwards, there was very little attention given to why it happened, the world was too wrapped in the human tragedy. Nowhere was spared, plummeting jet liners cut a fiery swath along the Heathrow flightpath from Kingston to Slough fanning out into sporadic dots of carnage in either direction like from a flick from Jackson Pollock's paintbrush. In every airport around the world the story was the same, millions died in their own homes with no more indication that something was wrong than the unusually loud whine of a jet moments before it hit, tens of thousands died screaming, strapped into suddenly useless metal tubes that fell, uselessly, out of the sky.

There were many suggestions as to why, some blamed terrorism of course, the Americans might have bombed somewhere if they could have persuaded their multimillion dollar fleet of bombers into the air, but no matter now fast they were hurtled down the tarmac they steadfastly refused to take off. One popular theory was that the universal gravitational constant had unexpectedly changed, despite many experiments verifying it was still the same. Many simply said it was an act of god, and for a long time there was no good reason to doubt them.

Mission was the first to work it out, scribbling the proof on the back of an envelope in a pub. He did not tell anyone though, and three days later a professor from North Carolina reached the same conclusion and immediately called a press conference. Mission watched him on the television in the same pub, the professor rubbed his eyes furiously behind his glasses, held up Orville Wright's original notebook and explained the very subtle mistake which, once corrected, proved beyond a doubt that powered flight was impossible.

There were books and documentaries, everyone with any mathematical ability tried to understand the secretive glitch in the mechanics of flight, most could not, so subtle and counter intuitive was Orville's mistake that engineers and scientists had been making it over and over again for more than a century. The same reason a bumblebee could fly, was the reason we could not. Science, it seemed, had found the answer, but when asked, as it was endlessly asked, if powered flight was impossible why had we been doing it successfully for years, the men in white coats could come up with no better answer than to shrug and say fluke.

Eminent physicists appeared on the television and tried to explain, the problem was not about wingspan, or power to weight ratios, but about quantum mechanics where probability was the key. It was unlikely, but sometimes, occasionally, you would fly. So why now, asked the presenters, looking serious and sceptical as if they understood. Wrong question, they were told, why not before. Yet neither question could be answered. There were conferences and symposiums, long running debates in respected periodicals, but in the end, the best explanation the best minds in the world could come up with was to shrug and say fluke. We just rolled straight sixes for a very long time.

Mission's own theory was far broader, it encompassed the strange totality of his failure with women and his inability to ride a bicycle. There was nothing wrong with Mission apart from lack of ambition and a stupid name. Yet, despite being charming and good looking he remained permanently single, and yet, despite having a perfectly adequate sense of balance, whenever his father removed the stabiliser wheels from his bike and shoved him away down the street Mission would, without fail, totter, weave, and fall off. Everyone falls off a bike occasionally, and every bar-room Romeo sometimes crashes and burns, when Mission was asked to explain his uninterrupted run of failures he could only shrug and say, fluke. Sometimes you have a run of sixes, if you tossed a coin from now to eternity and it only ever came up heads, that would be no more nor less likely than any other permutation of results.

Underlined three times in tiny writing at the very bottom of Mission's envelope was the inference that, with the failure of flight, he should try dating again. The majority of the worlds conversation still revolved around the same subject, and Mission, being one of only a few dozen people on the planet who fully understood the reason no plane would fly, and having once met the eye rubbing professor, found himself endlessly working through the problem on restaurant napkins for the benefit of a succession of delightful girls, all of whom stared at him in wide eyed admiration but still failed to invite him back for a coffee.

Before the planes fell out of the sky Mission had designed blenders for a living. He could name from memory the viscosity of a hundred fruits, from guava to mango, from kiwi to pineapple, none of which, without jet airliners, could be delivered fresh to the UK any more. A falling Airbus had wiped Mission's home into a smear of fire blackened bricks, and soon after, lost him his job.

He found work as an after dinner speaker, explaining over and over again to rooms of uncomprehending guests why it was that aeroplanes could not fly. Night after night Mission propped up bar after bar surrounded by starstruck women, all of whom, it seemed, had a big day tomorrow and had to get home early. Until, eventually, two years to the day since the law of gravity had reasserted itself with such devastating results, a busty secretary from Guildford led a compliant Mission out of a hotel dinning room and, without warning, hurriedly and forcibly jumped him in an otherwise deserted corridor, before politely excusing herself and disappearing.

The following day Mission bought himself a bicycle, he immediately fell off.