As the lights went green he gave a blast on his triple horns, pulled out to the right at the intersection, accelerated brutally and got by, shaking his head angrily at the driver of the saloon as he passed it.
In the middle of this harsh manoeuvre it was natural for Gala to allow herself to be thrown towards him. At the same time her left hand dived under the coat and her fingers touched, felt, and extracted the book in one flow of motion. Then the hand was back in the folds of the coat again and Drax, all his feeling in his feet and hands, was seeing nothing but the traffic ahead and the chances of getting across the zebra outside the Royal Star without hitting two women and a boy who were nearly halfway across it.
Now it was a question of facing Drax’s growl of rage as with a maidenly but urgent voice she asked if she could possibly stop for a moment to powder her nose.
A garage would be dangerous. He might decide to fill up with petrol. And perhaps he also carried his money in his hip-pocket. But was there an hotel? Yes, she remembered, the Thomas Wyatt just outside Maidstone. And it had no petrol pumps. She started to fidget slightly. She pulled the coat back on to her lap. She cleared her throat.
“Oh, excuse me, Sir Hugo,” she said in a strangled voice.
“Yes. .What is it?”
“I’m terribly sorry, Sir Hugo. But could you possibly stop for just a moment. I want, I mean, I’m terribly sorry but I’d like to powder my nose. It’s terribly stupid of me. I’m so sorry.”
“Christ,” said Drax. “Why the hell didn’t you… Oh, yes. Well, all right. Find a place.” He grumbled on into his moustache, but brought the big car down into the fifties.
“There’s a hotel just around this bend,” said Gala nervously. “Thank you so much, Sir Hugo. It was stupid of me. I won’t be a moment. Yes, here it is.”
The car swerved up to the front of the inn and stopped with a jerk. “Hurry up. Hurry up,” said Drax as Gala, leaving the door of the car open, sped obediently across the gravel, her coat with its precious secret held tightly in front of her body.
She locked the door of the lavatory and snatched open the notebook.
There they were, just as she had thought. On each page, under the date, the neat columns of figures, the atmospheric pressure, the wind velocity, the temperature, just as she had recorded them from the Air Ministry figures. And at the foot of each page the estimated settings for the gyro compasses.
Gala frowned. At a glance she could see that they were entirely different from hers. Drax’s figures simply bore no relation to hers whatsoever.
She turned to the last completed page containing the figures for that day. Why, she was wrong by nearly ninety degrees on the estimated course. If the rocket were fired on her flight plan it would land somewhere in France, She looked wildly at her face in the mirror over the washbasin. How could she have gone so monstrously wrong? And why hadn’t Drax ever told her? Why, she ran quickly through the book again, every day she had been ninety degrees out, firing the Moonraker at right angles to its true course. And yet she simply couldn’t have made such a mistake. Did the Ministry know these secret figures? And why should they be secret?
Suddenly her bewilderment turned to fright. She must somehow get safely, quietly to London and tell somebody. Even though she might be called a fool and a meddler.
Coldly she turned back several pages in the book, took her nail file out of the bag and, as neatly as she could, cut out a specimen page, rolled it up into a tight ball and stuffed it into the tip of a finger of one of her gloves.
She glanced at her face in the mirror. It was pale and she quickly rubbed her cheeks to bring back the colour. Then she put back the look of an apologetic secretary and hurried out and ran across the gravel to the car, clutching the notebook among the folds of her coat.