20 - Major-General Pfister

I wasn’t late. I made it to the meeting in plenty of time for Pfister to destroy me. It had started relatively painlessly but steadily degenerated into a scene out of a dream, the usual sort, the sort in which I would proclaim my innocence at the top of my voice, only for the army of savages ripping me apart to drown out my lame protestations with their irresistible death cry.

The setting itself was familiar to me. It was, I could have sworn, the room in which I had originally met Colonel Brown and General Mann. How distant and benign their disapproving condescension seemed to me now. The long straight table of that day had been replaced by an enormous elliptical specimen, and the décor had been refreshed with a deeper colour, but the outlook over the sweating metropolis was surely identical, and the doors retained their disconcerting habit of disappearing whenever I looked for them.

Each place was set with a printed name, a touch to which I was unused. I found my designated spot, next to RSM O’Hara, who, as ever, was inspecting the ceiling. He paid me no mind as I took my seat. On the other side, my right, the chair was unoccupied. Sergeant Magath’s name was printed on the card. Next to Magath’s place sat Captain Small, Corporal Farbrace on the far side of her. I craned my neck the other way in an attempt to see past O’Hara. The first face was that of Colonel Watson. He was directly in the middle of the long edge of the ellipse, opposite the only man on the other side, who I took to be Pfister. Next to Watson I found two men who I had never seen before. The idea disconcerted me: that there might be people involved in this project unknown to me. Next came Norris, then Young and finally Blackburn. Everybody had on their best businesslike front.

I wondered where Magath was. He had left The Bunker before me but his place remained unoccupied. And, more than that, there was no sign of Major Thompson anywhere. I hissed at Captain Small. She glared at me.

‘Where’s Thompson?’ I whispered. ‘He ought to be here.’

‘Called away,’ she said, without moving her lips. ‘Got a message from him earlier.’

‘And what about Magath?’ I jerked a thumb at the empty chair.

‘With Thompson, last minute’ she squeezed the words out of the corner of her mouth as she turned back to face Pfister. She was enviably proficient at receding into the background, which she did once more now.

The clock ticked around to 9am, and Colonel Watson began to speak. He addressed Major-General Pfister directly. The dynamic matched the layout of the personnel perfectly. We were being judged. A whole array of professionals, ten of us I counted, helpless supplicants in the face of a deity in human form. I felt more ashamed than I had ever before.

Watson gave a brief introduction of each of us, although I remained none the wiser as to the functions of the two men beyond him, then he proceeded with a patronising, inaccurate and incomplete summary of the project as it stood. The only thing in his favour was that he was broadly complimentary of the team in general. Nobody on my side of the table appeared in the least uneasy with his butchery of our superhuman efforts. Their complacent faces remained impassive as if in some form of suspended animation. It was nothing short of a betrayal.

Desperate, I focussed on Pfister instead. Up until that point I had been more occupied with the familiar personalities on my side of the table, but now was a good opportunity to form some opinion of him before I had to do something about it. His eyes seemed softer than I expected from somebody of his reputation. They were water-blue and sat flat in the plane of his face. They hid nothing. His skin looked smooth and unlived in, too. There was a decent sized scar running along his left jawbone, but it looked as it if had been inflicted by accident. His hair was blond and cropped. His fingers played with a pencil or a letter opener or something. If anything, he looked slightly bored.

Colonel Watson’s disgraceful monologue came to some kind of a conclusion. RSM O’Hara, next to me, stood up. Two, three giant steps took him to a door, which he opened and through which he exited. Pfister did not bat an eyelid. The vacated space beside me took on a very significant dimension. I looked around for my friends in the room.

‘I suppose there was a very good reason why Colonel Watson had to say all that,’ Pfister began. He spoke with the hint of a lisp, probably a result of laziness rather than any physical condition. ‘But who’s going to tell me what’s really going on?’

I recognised my moment. This was my solution. Particularly in the absence of Magath, there was nobody more qualified to address the question. I composed myself and waited for the inevitable fall of all eyes onto me. Norris started to speak.

Once he had started, and had the attention of the room, he began to pour more and more of himself onto the elliptical table. What was he playing at? His commentary was, if it were possible, worse even than Watson’s. He missed the point of the timelock completely, and when he misrepresented the planned implementation method, I made to interrupt. Watson glared at me with actual red in his eyes. I froze at the unexpected sight.

Norris continued unmolested. He managed to leave out the majority of the relevant technical data regarding the landing strips. What he did mention he underplayed by around half. I glared back at Colonel Watson, pleading for some indication that I could intervene. I had no idea how much Pfister knew, but I figured if Norris kept getting things so spectacularly wrong it wouldn’t be long until he started to ask some difficult questions. Watson’s face remained stonewall blank in the face of my despair. I was being actively denied.

The deceit continued for a time. Captain Norris told a story of our progress; a rambling tale of which only he could have been aware. It didn’t correspond with any reality I had witnessed, and I thought I knew no other than the only one. As the words spewed forth, Corporal Young nodded sagely. I would have severed his square head with cheesewire had I been confident that nobody would witness it.

Finally, Norris ran out of things to say. He had apparently satisfied himself. His liquid form ebbed slightly and retook its unassuming position in a pool on his chair. Pfister looked sleepily at Watson, turned his eyes directly onto me, where they remained for long enough to mean something, then back to the Colonel.

‘Are you absolutely sure you’ve got the right people involved in this project, Colonel?’ he asked. ‘This man,’ he tilted his head slightly toward Norris, ‘is quite clearly an idiot.’

I applauded the sentiment joyfully. It immediately became clear to me that the man’s reputation was totally justified.

‘It helps nobody to waste my time telling me what I already know,’ he continued. ‘Especially if you’re ignorant of the majority of it.’ He refused to meet Norris’ eye. ‘There is only one reasonable solution, in technology terms, to our problem. Almost anybody within the organisation could sketch it on a piece of paper, although I will admit that your particular representation of the outcome has some aesthetic merit, for what that’s worth,’ his eyes flitted toward me, I could have sworn. ‘But there’s the big problem to address, is there not? We all know this is the correct solution – Project van Diemen has already dug the foundations for you – and we all know where it’s going to fail.’ Most of the eyes in the room turned to me now. Did I even sense a hint of sympathy in some? Maybe the sort of sympathy that might lurk within a curious mob assembled at dawn to watch an execution. ‘Where and how,’ Pfister asked the room, ‘are you going to prove this totally theoretical design?’

Before I could respond, he carried on. ‘There is no question of using what testing environment we already have. That is unsuitable even for changes we make today. And even if there were some way of bringing it up to scratch, I fail to see how you can shoehorn your requirements into the current schedule of work. Everybody and everything is already over-allocated. Each month sees sixty to seventy-five million of investment just to keep the show on the road. The pipeline is inviolable. How do you find your way in?’

His face was a question rather than an exclamation mark. That made me confident that he genuinely believed there to be an answer and that the answer I was about to give would fit the bill. Scharf’s plan for testing was as watertight as you could get. I knew this meeting would not be the disaster the others had feared.

‘We have developed an effective front-to-back solution, one which bypasses the difficulties you’ve accurately outlined, General.’ I put my hand to my mouth. The lips weren’t moving. There was no vibration around the area of my throat, either. Come to think of it, the voice really didn’t sound like mine. And I considered the choice of words quite unlike me. There was only one solution: I was not talking. I was meant to be talking, but somebody else had taken my place. Pfister looked at nobody, so no clues there. I tried Watson. His attention was turned far to his left. Past the two unknown men, past Norris, I ended up at Corporal Young. Sure enough, he had burst into life.

‘Our strategy revolves around a specialist testing facility hosted by the supplier whose technology gives us the greatest cause for concern. It is a unique combination of expediency, risk mitigation and critical path compression. We can exercise the vast majority of the solution under the supervision of acknowledged experts, without the outlay of a single penny of capital and threaded in parallel with our ongoing development cycle. Any net new…..’

‘I heard a suggestion,’ Pfister said calmly, ‘that somebody had had the idea of conducting testing in Vaurania.’

Young paused, and looked at Colonel Watson before replying.

‘That’s correct, Sir. The superchiller testing facility in Vaurania. We get the benefit of their state-of-the-art facility while at the same time we enhance…..’

‘Cancel it,’ Pfister said, his eyelids half closed.

Young’s entire face looked empty. He had on his speaking head and the flow had been staunched, temporarily. That left very little.

‘I beg your pardon, Sir?’ he said, after a pause to regain his balance.

‘Don’t ask me to repeat myself, you fool. You heard very well what I said. The whole idea of testing in Vaurania is totally ridiculous. You won’t have access to representative timelocks or landing strips. Atmospheric and geo-physical conditions are so totally different that, even if you succeed in proving anything, which I doubt, it won’t hold when you return here. The only people who conduct tests there are those who have no tests to conduct. The facility is set up perfectly for them. You, on the other hand, have some very serious requirements.

‘What I can’t work out,’ he turned slightly, away from Norris and Young. I was more in his field of vision than I had been. ‘Is why you’re only as far along the road as you’re telling me. We’ve known the broad outline of the solution from day one. We’ve also known that it’s a solution nigh-on impossible to implement within this environment. It’s so far removed from anything we’ve done previously, and so bank-breakingly expensive, that even the smallest mistake would be fatal.

‘However, all is not lost. You have the requisite weapons to overcome the insurmountable. You have Sergeant Magath, you have Sergeant Scharf. Even Lieutenant Mortenson. More than that, you have Major Thompson. If they can’t find a way around the obstacles, then the country really is doomed.’

He looked directly at me. ‘You. You’re the Chief Architect here. Why are you not testing your solution yet? It’s your responsibility. You’re aware of that, I presume.’

Finally, a direct question. One laced with accusation, but nevertheless one aimed squarely toward me. On the edge of my perception, I heard Colonel Watson straighten up and start to draw breath. I held up a perfunctory hand and began to speak before he could form any words of his own.

I told Pfister of our plan. How Scharf and Magath had finally broken down and out-manoeuvred the various sets of stonewalling colleagues. How we had taken care of every eventuality, and our uncommonly advanced model, impossible without the personnel he had named, which would enable us to dive straight into late-stage testing. How we had brought our key suppliers into the fold such that we now had the most qualified team possible given the pool of expertise on the planet. I blew every trumpet I thought we had.

‘Yes, yes, yes,’ he interrupted with some resignation. ‘But how long has it taken you to drag yourself into what I would consider to be this starting position? I believe General Mann clearly gave you six weeks, did he not?’

I was able to confirm his second rhetorical question, but that was as far as I could go. The passage of time had long been causing me problems. I had put it down both to the long periods of direct daylight deprivation in The Bunker and the inherent timebending of our subject matter. In order to understand how the timelock, for example, worked, it was necessary to develop one’s sphere of understanding both in the realms of physics and philosophy. That process of development was not exactly a one-way journey, but it was almost impossible to ever return to the point from where one had started.

In other words, I was far from sure how long we had spent on the project. It seemed so much longer than six weeks, but I couldn’t have sworn to that. I searched outside for any evidence of the season. The capital looked exactly as it had done whenever I had first seen it from this vantage point. The sun remained high in the sky and the scurrying masses in the streets continued to move with a pre-determined sense of purpose between nodes on their backdrop. There was a hint of self-satisfaction about their lack of uncertainty, but no apparent indication of creeping hunger, panic, or even any vague sense of the impending meltdown I had been promised by General Mann and Colonel Brown.

It was a long time since I had said anything, and I was getting nowhere with my outdoor research. I had to start speaking once more, but I had nothing to say. Norris or Young would have had techniques for such a situation, but I was less skilled in that field. My only recourse was to go into more detail.

The chaperoning model, or military escort, was finally agreed and accepted, I told Pfister. We had hit upon an innovative plan for the ground-based delivery of goods. I made no direct mention of Corporal Cowper, although I had no particular reason to deny him recognition for his vision. I took some time to highlight how we had taken and developed the Project van Diemen design for our more demanding purposes. Throughout, the point I was attempting to make was that every individual achievement, no matter how seemingly small and insignificant, required quite some technical and interpersonal skills, not to mention expense of time, before giving up its fruit. The subtext was of an uncontrolled, uncooperative and disengaged workforce, and that subtext edged further and further into the foreground with every example I raised. His patient silence drove me deeper and deeper into the detail, afraid to allow myself to stop. I felt defensive, like a child telling tales. Once again, I had talked too freely, given too much away.

He tapped the pencil deliberately on the table three or four times. Then he looked up.

‘I’ve not heard any mention yet of tasting stations.’ He stretched out the last two words just enough to give them the significance they needed. The colour drained from my face and landed in the pit of my stomach. What the hell did he mean? There was no way I could ask. Not there, not then. I had no idea what a tasting station was, in this context. All the things I did know were suddenly rendered totally irrelevant.

Around the table, the faces gave me no hope. I scanned them all, desperate to find one I might entice to jump in. Norris and Young remained stonily haughty. Blackburn looked at me with something approaching disgust. He would never have left out tasting stations. On the other side, Captain Small’s face betrayed an impressive depth of silence, matched by the atmosphere in the room. Corporal Farbrace was looking directly at her, the merest ghost of his usual grin on his lips.

All the shortcomings, all the stupidity, all the idiocy wrung from the stooges in the room by Pfister in the few sentences he had uttered, had been swirling around in the air ever since. I only noticed them now, sitting comfortably atop the profound intellectual inertia brought on by his knockout blow. And, one by one, they were dropping off the plateau in an orderly fashion and arranging themselves on my conscience, wherever they found room. In one fell swoop I had taken possession of everybody’s personal hell. Colonel Watson’s face glowed with the glory of checkmate.

Major-General Pfister gathered himself. He had been tapping his fingernails with the stick in his hand, which he now placed in front of him on the table. It was a stripped rat femur.

‘There is much to do,’ he summarised. ‘It seems I have become involved at the right time. Colonel Watson, arrange for everybody to be back here in two days’ time. We will meet at two-day intervals until such time as I decide there is no further need. Is that clear?’

It was clear. He rose and left the room. His suit was the colour of his eyes and his shoes were blood-red. They squeaked very slightly as he made his way through an invisible door in the far wall. My own inability to discern those doors meant that I had to wait for others to leave, then follow them. Nobody spoke to me on the way out of Headquarters, although Small and Farbrace followed me back to The Bunker at a distance.

[Coming Next: 21 - A Matter of Taste]