A Town like Alice

Roger? Over."
    Miss Bacon said, "That is Roger, sergeant. I'll tell Mr Barnes. If you have nothing more for me, I shall close down. Over."
    "Nothing more, Jackie. Goodnight. Out."
    "Goodnight, Sergeant. Out."
    Miss Bacon switched off her sets thankfully. There was no proper organization for a twenty-four hour listening watch at the Cairns Ambulance; in an emergency such as this everybody had to muscle in and lend a hand. She had been on duty the previous day from eight in the morning till midnight, and from eight o'clock that morning till then; Mr Barnes had taken the night watch and was preparing to do so again. She thought, ruefully, that she had missed Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall; the show would be half over. But there was still one more night, and with any luck this flap would be over and she could see it tomorrow. She went to telephone to Mr Barnes.
    Mr Barnes telephoned to Mr Smythe of Australian National Airways, and Mr Smythe telephoned to his reserve pilot, Captain Jimmie Cope. Mr Cope said, "Hell, I hope it's better in the morning than it was today. We'd never have got over the Tableland today. Better say take off at six, I suppose. I'll be along at the hangar then."
    When he got to the aerodrome at dawn the old Dragon, surely the best aircraft ever built for ambulance work in the outback, was running up both engines. The clouds hung low at about five hundred feet, shrouding the hill immediately behind the aerodrome; it was raining a little. Willstown lay about four hundred miles to the west-north-west; the first seventy miles of this course lay over the Atherton Tableland with mountains up to three thousand five hundred feet in height. With no radio navigational aids he would have to fly visually all the way, scraping along between the clouds and the treetops as best he could.
    He said a sour word or two to the control officer and took off down the runway with an ambulance orderly on board. Once in the air it was worse than ever. He flew at three hundred feet up the Barron River towards the mountains, hoping to find a break in the low cloud that would enable him to get up on to the Tableland through the Ruranda Gap. The grey vapour closed around him and the sides of the jungle-covered gorge drew very near his wings. There was no sign of a break ahead. He edged over to the starboard side and made a tight, dicey turn round in the gorge with about a hundred feet to spare, and headed back for the coast. He lifted his microphone and said, "Cairns Tower, this is Victor How Able Mike Baker. I can't make it by Kuranda. I'm going up to Cooktown by the coast, and try it from there. Tell Cooktown I'll be landing there in about an hour, and I'll want twenty gallons of seventy-three octane."
    He flew on up the tropical Queensland coast at about three hundred feet, and came to Cooktown an hour later. Cooktown is a pretty little town of about three hundred people, but it was grey and rainswept when he got there. He landed on the aerodrome and refuelled. "I'm going to try and make Willstown from here," he said. "There's not much high stuff on the way. If it gets too bad I shall come back. I'll be on a direct course from here to Willstown." He said that in case a search party should be necessary.
    He took off again immediately the refuelling was finished and flew inland on a compass course. In the whole of that flight he was never more than two hundred feet above the treetops. He scraped over the Great Dividing Range petering out up in this northern latitude, with about fifty feet to spare, always on the point of turning back, always seeing a faint break ahead that made it necessary to go on. Behind him the orderly sat gripping his seat, only too well aware of danger in the flight and impotent to do anything about it. For three hours they flew like that, and then as they neared the Gulf of Carpentaria the pilot started picking up the landmarks that he knew, a river bend, a burnt patch of the bush, a curving sandy waste like a banana. He came to Willstown and flew round the few houses at a hundred feet to tell them he was there, and landed on the airstrip. He taxied in to where the truck was standing waiting for him; he was strained and tired. It was still raining.
    He held a little conference with Sergeant Haines and Sister Douglas and Al Burns beside the truck. "I'll have a crack at flying him back here," he said. "If it's no better this afternoon he'll have to spend the night in hospital here. I can't fly him to