13 - Desertion

Captain Lincoln deserted the army that night. I learned of it the next morning. I had arrived early and called Cowper. I took a raincheck on his unsanctioned espionage mission behind enemy lines, and promised to catch up with him soon. I stopped short of a complete withdrawal from his workload, but I committed to nothing more than ongoing moral support. I wanted to tell him about my conversation with Colonel Watson, but decided to leave that topic until I understood it. All in all, he took my cowardly half-rebuttal very well.

For a while I sat with Magath and discussed developments arising from our various conversations the previous evening, while he dressed painstakingly. Our night out had been at the port, drinking wine and looking at the sky with two of our most important suppliers. I had been drinking the wine, Magath had the sky covered. Shuttles overflew us regularly on one of their alternative flight paths. One came in too high and too fast. There was no question it was going to overshoot the runway. A few minutes later the eastern sky flickered with the reflected evidence of what could only have been pilot error. The engines had sounded hearty enough and the trajectory true. Our hosts knew just as well what we had all witnessed, but nothing was said. The wine arrived at the table a little quicker for a while.

Alone in The Bunker, Magath and I disregarded the incident. It told us nothing that we didn’t already know. Such errors were an inevitable consequence of the situation as it stood, and our work would eliminate them. Instead, we joked about Scharf’s latest wheeze, which involved the bare-faced theft of technical data on the next generation shuttles and their loading thresholds. We had been trying to obtain the data for some days. It directly impacted the aerodynamic profile of the shuttle and it had become clear that without it we stood no chance of modelling a realistic path through the superchilled timelock.

I had come to the conclusion, some time previously, that the data didn’t exist.

‘It has to exist,’ Scharf raged. ‘I’ve seen one of these shuttles. I’ve seen it blow itself to smithereens on the launch pad. But never mind that – it means they’re real. Somebody has built it. Six times, at the very least. That means that the data is there somewhere.’

‘Then why won’t they give it to us?’ I asked him.

‘They’re terrified of it getting into the right hands,’ he explained.

‘The right hands?’

‘The people who actually need it and can interpret it, yes.’

‘People like us?’

‘Exactly,’ Scharf said. ‘Not people like that idiot thermomechanic. You remember him?’ I nodded. ‘They’ve got no qualms about filling him in on anything he likes. But if Magath or I go asking…..’

‘What are they afraid of?’ I asked.

‘If we know what we’re dealing with, we can get on with our side of the solution. That would be terrible news for those guys, because all of a sudden everyone’s waiting for them, once we finish and they still haven’t got it right. But if they keep it to themselves, we’ll always be behind them. You’ll notice the way it works: it makes no difference by how much they overshoot, it’s the last project to complete that takes all the flak.’

‘I get that,’ I said. ‘But how can they refuse to give us the data? They’re on our side, aren’t they?’

‘Don’t you believe it,’ he chuckled unconvincingly. ‘They’ll do anything to avoid handing it over. They can’t refuse point blank. That’s frowned upon. But they’ll work their way through the repertoire. They start by hiding behind trumped-up data security regulations, then once you’ve exposed that as a sham they’ll smokescreen everything in some arcane process or another. They’re masters at escalating and descending requests ad nauseum. Learned it from the ancients, the days when offshoring was all the rage. You know most of these guys are descended from the old offshore colonies? Been steeped in those tricks since before they could talk. I’m used to them now, so I can progress quicker than most, but that’s when you get into the real chess game. They’ll drip feed, and they know what to leave until last. Or they’ll give deliberate misinformation, or conflicting data based on different operating conditions. Normally not conditions you’re ever going to see, anyway. Even for an old hand like me, it’s an exhausting and uncertain game. And if you do somehow finally piece together everything you need, it won’t be recognisable, and it takes even more effort to turn it into something usable.’

So, in the end we had agreed that the only possible approach was to steal the data from under their noses. Scharf had started on the operation already, and was camping out at headquarters. We had no idea how long he might be absent from The Bunker. I was terrified that if he spent too much time visible in HQ, he would be stolen himself. His admirers were everywhere and I couldn’t control his communication channels unless I was with him.

Magath started to sympathise, but his attention was arrested by something behind me. I hoped it was Captain Lincoln in a bikini again. I turned to look.

Quite the opposite. Major Thompson stood in the entrance arch. The good news was that he was fully clothed, as was the man next to him.

‘Just the two of you?’ Thompson said. ‘Where’s Scharf?’ He looked as concerned about Scharf’s absence as I was myself.

‘On a special mission,’ Magath tapped his nose. ‘Data gathering.’

Thompson let it go completely. ‘This is Captain Norris. Colonel Watson asked me to bring him down and introduce him.’

The man stepped away from Thompson far enough to move out of his ample shadow. He didn’t give a good first impression. Smaller than Thompson, which he had in common with most land mammals, his shoulders were so rounded that they appeared to pull his neck forward and downward, shrinking his unimposing stature even further. As a result, the natural state for his eyes was to peer upward past raised lids. I automatically tried the same with my own, and it wasn’t comfortable in the slightest. He tilted his head slightly, I presumed to alleviate the discomfort. His right arm hung limply at his side. The hand appeared withered. His other hand raised a handkerchief to his craggy nose and he blew loudly into it before returning it to a shiny pocket. He gave off such an air of Victorian miser that I couldn’t help peering beyond the pair of them, half expecting to find Charles Dickens silently cackling into his enormous beard. But no author accompanied them.

‘Pleasure to meet you,’ Norris nodded in a servile manner as he greeted us. He spoke more healthily than his appearance would suggest, and his eyes had a worrying depth.

‘Likewise, Captain,’ I replied. ‘And what is your function here?’

‘I’m Captain Lincoln,’ he said. This time his eyes glinted malevolently. I hated him already. For a start, he quite clearly was not Captain Lincoln. I looked to Thompson for help.

‘Captain Lincoln has been called away,’ he told us. ‘Urgent business. Called me from the airport last night. I didn’t get the whole tale.’

‘So Colonel Watson has asked me to step in,’ Norris interrupted. He scanned the scene around him. ‘Looks complicated. Who’s going to run me through it?’

Thompson had already turned to go. It seemed unlikely that he would stop for a dip this time.

‘Sergeant Magath can run you through what we currently understand to be the solution,’ I told Norris as I jumped up. ‘You don’t mind, do you, Magath?’

‘It would be my pleasure,’ the unflappable Sergeant purred. He had completed his toilet and assumed his usual immaculate form. He placed an irrefutable arm around our new Captain’s hunched shoulders and dived into his spiel. I ran out and caught up with Major Thompson at the foot of the steps.

‘What’s going on, Major?’ I asked him. ‘What’s happened to Lincoln?’

‘I told you. She’s gone. Emigrated. Flown the coop. Run up the flagpole. Sodded off.’

‘Just like that? Where’s she gone?’

‘She got under your skin too, did she?’ he grinned. ‘You’re not alone. I don’t know where she’s gone. I couldn’t hear properly. She might have been at the airport or the spaceport. For all I know, she’s on a different planet by now. Although I’d be surprised if she got on a space transport, judging by the look on her face after a couple of hours running through the current portfolio with Small yesterday.’

‘And nobody tried to stop her?’

‘Nobody tried to stop her, no. That’s not how it works. There’s no restriction on movement in this world. You should understand that as well as anyone. We’re all free to wander wherever we want.’ We had reached the entrance foyer of the building.

He was right. I, myself, could have walked out into the street there and then, picked up the first transport that passed and found myself at the spaceport or the airport or the railway terminus, and from there, anywhere. There was nothing anybody could have done to stop me.

‘But for us, for now,’ he continued, ‘nothing changes. Except for physical appearance, of course. Shame, that. Our team remains the same strength. Norris will be up to speed, as much as he ever will be, in a few hours and you can continue.’

‘What do you know about Captain Norris?’ I asked. Thompson was trying to leave the building, but I wanted more from him before he disappeared on me once more. ‘Is he more suitable for the part? To be honest, I wasn’t convinced about Captain Lincoln’s credentials.’

‘Be careful with him,’ he said.

‘Careful? How? Is he delicate? He looks like he might go an even more peculiar shape if you put him under too much pressure, but I didn’t get the impression he’d break easily.’

‘Not that sort of careful. It’s not him you need to worry about. He talks a lot. I never trust someone who talks more than he listens. Especially when he’s supposed to be listening to me. Watson knows him from somewhere. I can’t work out where. And I thought I knew everything about our benevolent Colonel. Need to do some digging.’

‘Oh yes, I forgot, I had my meeting with Colonel Watson yesterday.’

‘I know. I sent you there.’

‘It was peculiar,’ I went on. ‘I came out feeling a bit confused about our relationship. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt like that before. I’ve been trying to define it, but it’s not easy. I felt conflict, but a conflict that sat in amongst some quite serious patronage. It sat very awkwardly. I felt like an adopted child, which would have made him the parent. And yet, despite that, it was signally clear that he was capable of suffocating me until I was dead. Willing to, even. It seemed the most important thing that I understood that.’

Thompson looked at me seriously. He let his hand drop from the door for a second.

‘If you’re wise, and I think you are, you’ll consider very carefully everything that Colonel Watson says to you. Nothing is wasted, and each sentence has a meaning. A direct meaning relating to you. All the previous episodes, without fail, they’ve arisen directly from a lack of attention to what has been said. The clues are all there. Nobody can say he doesn’t give you a chance. I’m telling you this now, before it’s too late. But I can’t watch you all the time. It’s up to you.’

He went. I remained in the foyer for a minute or so, digging around for Watson’s specific words to me. I had been off-guard when talking to him. Stupid. Lazy.

I couldn’t face the grotesque Norris again right away, so I headed upstairs. Alex and Donnie were together at Donnie’s whiteboard, bickering over the exact nature of some copy for the launch of a competition. The government, in its wisdom, was trying to revive a number of extinct sports which they felt embodied the ideals most conspicuously absent from modern society. My old friends had successfully sold the idea of running a local competition for identification of gifted individuals to illustrate the innate beauty of the sports and spearhead the reintroduction programme. They had been rewarded with a cavernous brief and open-ended timescales and budgets. I had never seen them so contented.

Their two-man show kept me entertained for a while. There was no straight man in their partnership, and it was like watching Scharf and Magath on nitrous oxide. Finally they came to an agreement on one of the early sentences. I considered it a little bit too catchy, but it really wasn’t my area of expertise any more than it was theirs. Alex went to fetch us all tea.

‘What’s that face?’ Donnie asked me.

‘What face?’ I protested.

‘You look like your girlfriend’s dumped you and taken a pop at your favourite teddy bear on her way out.’

‘Not bad!’ I laughed. ‘Although it’s stretching it a bit far to describe Terry Thompson as a teddy bear. But there’s been a desertion.’

‘A what? A desertion? Surely not! What’s one of those?’ Donnie seemed less affected by this news than I had been.

‘It’s Captain Lincoln. She’s done a runner.’ He looked blank. ‘The hot one in the bikini,’ I added, to help him out.

‘Not another one. Did you freak her out?’

‘I doubt it. I only met her the once, and she was the one who got naked.’

‘So what’s the problem? It’s not as if you were an item, exactly.’

‘It’s nothing to do with that. You’ve got a one-track mind.’ I sipped at my tea. I had to drink it while it was still hot, unlike Donnie and Alex who let it sit for an age while it went cold. ‘It’s the matter-of-factness. They just accept it. There’s a replacement all lined up. Almost as if he’d been sitting there waiting for it to happen. Watson, Thompson, even Magath, none of them seem to be in the slightest bit put out. You wouldn’t have known anything had happened. They’re not even angry. She’s just run out on them without even giving a reason and they just brush her memory off their sleeves like it’s a flake of pastry. Next please! He’s down there already.’

‘What’s he like?’ Alex asked.

‘Don’t.’ My head shook limply under the weight of Norris’ remembered form. ‘Knowing my luck this one will stay until the bitter end. He’s a funny shape and I don’t like the way he looks at me. But he’s not the problem. Yet. It’s… I don’t know what it is. I think it’s the dispensability. I understand the idea that nobody ought to be irreplaceable, but this is taking things to the opposite extreme. Everyone is completely interchangeable. They’re even relaxed about the danger of the genuine irreplaceables being poached. And yet, the whole enterprise relies on the concept of patriotism. The only loser if we don’t do this right is the country itself. So where’s the sense of loyalty or fraternity? I keep looking for the catch, or even for the punchline, but so far all I’m seeing is pain. Thank God, we have these vast glorious interludes of intellectual discovery, but the rest of it is brutal. Sub-human. It makes no sense.’

‘Remind me again,’ Donnie said. ‘How did you get involved with this lot?’

I had no answer for him. It was a question I had stopped asking myself. Life before I met Thompson was rapidly fading from my memory. If it hadn’t been for Donnie and Alex and the others, it would surely have already been erased.

‘If she’s walked away, and they don’t seem to care,’ Alex said, blowing lightly on his tea, ‘then what’s to stop you doing the same?’

He had a knack of asking the embarrassingly obvious.

‘Desert, now?’

‘Why not?’

I could have. I could have just walked away. I knew that nobody would come after me. More, it would probably make no difference at all to the outcome of the initiative. I wouldn’t be the first. I probably wouldn’t be the last, either. My meeting with Colonel Watson the previous evening had put me on edge. There was something about him that I couldn’t define, but it wasn’t something friendly. And I was beginning to find it difficult to keep up with the changes in personnel happening around me. I understood my position and my role less and less every day. The prospect of the project finishing well was vague.

‘Thing is,’ I said to Alex. ‘When things are good, there’s nowhere better. I love being down in that bunker almost as if I was born there. I can’t imagine being anywhere else. It’s just like when we worked in the lift shaft up in town. You must know the feeling. Like there is nowhere else. Nothing else that matters. It was like that this morning. And last night even more.’

‘Last night…. Of course,’ Alex gave Donnie a look. ‘That explains why there’s no Bernard or Chas today. They were with you, were they?’

They had been. We were meeting our best contacts in the industry. Daniel Pine was one of the team who had mastered the timelock, and possibly one of the most important figures in the field of interplanetary travel. Tom Sleep was our man on the inside of the superchiller. Both of them had come a long way to be with us and wanted to see what the capital could offer. I was at a loss as to what to show them: the entire continent was one continuous uniform urban sprawl. Where they thought our capital might differ from anything else they had experienced was a mystery to me. It was the seat of government and the head office of central shared services, no more. I had mentioned the quandary to Bernard.

As soon I had done so, my problems were over. He insisted on taking charge. He contended that his port community was a unique social construction, and contained elements of lost culture that my guests could walk the entire length and breadth of the civilised part of the planet and still not encounter. He was probably spot on.

I was last to arrive, after my unexpected meeting with Watson. The whole party was well ensconced at Bernard’s latest favourite seafront establishment. They produced their own wine and the crab specials were becoming a local legend. Alex told me that Bernard had recently acquired a part-ownership. It was no surprise, and explained his encouragement of Daniel and Tom in the flexing of their expense accounts.

But nobody felt exploited, I didn’t imagine. When I arrived, Corporal Farbrace had attached himself to Scharf and was teasing story after story from the modest Sergeant. Magath and Mortenson discussed the relevance and the value of a purely anthropological approach to the science of security. Tom and Daniel kept the homegrown wine flowing and Captain Small laughed freely at their jokes. She glowed like a firefly in the darkening twilight.

The air of good-nature got inside me straight away. With my first glass I drowned the confusion I had taken out of Watson’s office. The atmosphere was one of truth, of frankness and easy brotherhood.

Both Daniel and Tom admitted they were unsure how exactly we were going to achieve what we had set out to do, but they were adamant they would stand by us while we found out. They were bullish. It wasn’t so very different from what they had already put into practice with other, smaller, countries. They knew it could work. Just not exactly how. Their attitude balanced the intractability of the problem. Just like the crisp chill of the wine complemented the warm waves of the night air coming off the muttering ocean, and the distant phosphorescence of the real fireflies drew life into the empty black sky. Just as I had felt any number of times in The Bunker, nothing seemed beyond our powers. Those powers multiplied with our togetherness. Small smiled at me a lot.

‘Tell me,’ I said to Tom. We had been left alone for a minute or two and I wanted to know. ‘How come you’re so confident about this? The most unknown element in this entire setup is your superchiller. Nobody has ever used it for anything this big before. If we have to put in a vast array of them, it probably makes the whole project unviable. And yet you appear completely unconcerned. This could be real egg on the face of your lot, couldn’t it?’

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘It could be almost as disastrous for me as it would be for you. We’ve got quite a lot to lose here. But there’s one important reason why I’m not worried.’

‘Which is?’

‘RSM O’Hara.’

That was not the reason I had expected.

‘O’Hara is the reason you’re not worried?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re going to have to explain,’ I said.

‘It’s simple,’ Tom told me. ‘You’ve seen him, have you?’

‘Yes, I’ve seen him.’

‘And would you describe him as concerned in any way?’

‘Well, I suppose I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘In fact, I was struck by how unconcerned he was.’

‘Exactly. And you can draw confidence from that. He knows. They all know, these Special Forces guys. Check out Sergeant Magath.’

Magath was at the piano. He was banging hard. Bernard and Small stood behind it and pounded out an old-time duet, one of Bernard’s favourites. It was rare that he didn’t find a partner with whom to perform it when we were there. This particular version was more breathless than usual, thanks to Magath’s rock ‘n’ roll accompaniment.

Tom carried on. ‘That’s why I love working with them. They don’t say an awful lot, any of them, but their actions speak as clearly as words ever did.’

‘You’ve worked with them before?’ I asked.

‘We only ever work with them. There might be only three of them left, but they’re everything to the establishment. Isn’t a single project that doesn’t involve each of them at some point. It’s like nothing can function without their say-so. Goes to show how insane it was to scrap the section in the first place.’

There it was again. Three of them left, he said.

‘So, were you around when Special Forces got canned? Do you know what happened?’ I prompted him gently.

‘Yes, of course. It was only a few years ago. Have you not heard the story?’

‘Not really,’ I exaggerated. ‘Not from someone who was actually there.’

‘Well, I don’t know if it’s their tale or somebody else’s entirely,’ Tom refilled his glass, then mine. ‘But it might make a few things clearer to you. I’ve no idea how much you’ve been told.’

He paused for a second, watching the back of Magath’s head tick-tocking like a metronome on top of heaving shoulders which rose and fell with his quicksilver hands. He smiled softly.

‘To the outsider, these guys might appear to be total mavericks,’ he began, ‘but the truth is very different indeed. They’re nothing more than puppets. You can’t see the strings most of the time, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.’

‘So who’s the puppetmaster?’ I asked.

‘Colonel Watson, of course. He’s got them. And there’s no way he’s ever going to let them go. It’s like owning the orange properties in Monopoly. You can’t lose. And, of course, there’s three of them. Works well, that.’

That did it. ‘Who is the third property?’ I interrupted. ‘I only know of Magath and O’Hara. Surely you’re not telling me that Norris is one of them?’

‘Who’s Norris?’

‘Never mind. Forget I mentioned him.’ I relaxed a little.

‘The ‘A’ team, they were. Did everything together. Trusted nobody. Nobody could touch them. Once they’d cracked the whole space agriculture and transportation problem, they put the sentinel system into place. Have you heard about it?’ I assured him that I had. ‘Amazing, that. Especially what Magath did with it. But their next project was even more ambitious. O’Hara was worried about the mesopause…’

‘Worried about it?’ I said. My knowledge of the atmosphere was rudimentary, especially in comparison to these experts, but I failed to see why somebody like O’Hara would be concerned about an integral part of it.

‘It’s a temperature thing,’ Tom continued. ‘You know, as well as I do, that the mesopause is the coldest place in the entire atmosphere. It sits in that valley, before things start to hot up again. And it’s that valley that kept getting in the way of O’Hara’s plans. Messed up his calculations, over-complicated things. It was highly inconvenient. He wanted to fill it in, flatten out the line. So they took it on. It’s exactly the sort of project that Special Forces loved. Nobody in their right minds would attempt to mess with anything so fundamental, but they believed they were born to that sort of challenge. Mesopause mollification, they called it.’

‘How would they go about something like that?’ I asked him.

‘Obfuscation,’ he said.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Simple concept, turned hideously complex by the environment in which they chose to work. Their goal was to make the changes in temperature less violent. It would have meant much more streamlined shuttles, and a more direct flight path, if they didn’t have to deal with opposite extremes of conditions. So they attempted to mix up the gases. Blur the edges of the strata. Mess with the strict order that nature had settled on, some said.’

‘That sounds serious,’ I said, trying to work through the mechanics of it in my own head.

‘You can’t imagine how right you are. It was horrendously complex and broke almost every guideline of extra-terrestrial travel. That was why O’Hara loved it. But then they had to test it out.’

‘How did they do that?’ I was keen to know how testing had been carried out in the past. It was a topic close to my heart.

‘The only way they could. They flew through it. The whole of Special Forces. That was their way. Thirty of them. Ten craft. Bloodbath.’

‘It didn’t work?’

‘You could say that. The agitation they effected in the area around the mesopause caused some serious problems. It sort of had the desired effect, in that the temperature in the coolest zones was considerably raised, but they also managed to cause lethal turbulence. Crucially, they shortened the length of the gravity waves so they couldn’t dissipate, and that turned the whole place into a kind of tumble dryer. Like rag dolls, those shuttles were. Major Thompson saw it coming before anyone else. He was the best pilot out of the lot of them and his quick work saved that one ship. He pulled them out before they got shaken to pieces. The others weren’t so lucky.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘Well, nobody ever saw hide nor hair of the others. A few bits of debris were discovered, but there wouldn’t have been much left after they fell through the lower layers of atmosphere. Don’t forget: these were much lighter, less robust shuttles. The idea was that they didn’t need to withstand the huge differences in temperature, so they were built accordingly. Thompson, O’Hara and Magath stayed in one piece and crash-landed out to the east. Normally that would have been the end for them, too. There’s no way a neighbouring power would have allowed them to survive if they’d got to them first.’

‘Why didn’t they get to them first?’ I wondered.

‘They had a guardian angel,’ he smiled. ‘A young officer who had been on the ground crew for the operation, Captain Watson, had spotted Thompson’s evasive manoeuvre and followed their path as far as he could. When it became apparent that nobody else was coming back, he figured out where they must have ended up. That was the pot of gold at the end of his rainbow. He pulled in any favours he could lay his hands on, exchanged all his credits, and convinced one of his contacts in the military over there to pick them up and ship them back to him. I’m not sure anybody else could have done it. Even as a junior officer he had a network of contacts most Generals would kill for, and still it was only just enough to get him what he wanted. Effectively, he professionally bankrupted himself just for those three men. But he was way ahead of anybody else. He knew how powerful they could make him.’

‘So, in other words, he became head of Special Forces?’ I surmised.

‘Not at all,’ Tom corrected me. ‘Special Forces was scrapped. The whole episode was an unmitigated disaster! The fallout from their messing with the mesopause was felt all across this hemisphere. There was some serious grovelling and compensation your government was forced into. Thompson, O’Hara and Magath were lucky to survive even after they returned here. Watson promised they would only work under his supervision in future. He was always quite persuasive. From that point onwards he owned them.’

Tom’s story explained much, not least Major Thompson’s role within the bizarre world of which I had somehow become a part. Of course he was the third survivor of Special Forces. Who else could it have been? I had never been intimidated by his overwhelming intellect like I had with Magath or O’Hara, but his presence was undeniable.

Watson also fell firmly into perspective. With those chess pieces at his disposal, he must have held supreme power. His rank was purely nominal: he knew he stood ultimately at the controls of every military operation the country undertook. Was I the only one around our table who found that a chilling thought? I looked around and decided I probably was. I decided to take a leaf out of their collective book, and let myself enjoy the remainder of the evening.

I knew I couldn’t put off my return to The Bunker any longer, and I trudged back down. Scharf was back. He and Magath were talking over each other while Norris interrupted them both at regular intervals. I had never seen such untargeted chaos in our working environment. My arrival thankfully gave them a focus and brought a halt to the aimless din.

Sergeant Scharf gave me an update on his mission, which cheered me. He and Magath were confident that he could get his hands on the data we needed within just a few hours. It was sitting behind an old portal in whose design Scharf had been instrumental. His network of contacts still extended to within its management. Those people didn’t often say no to him.

Norris gave some balance, though. He was a problem. His ability to hit the ground running impressed me: an ordinary problem would take several days to announce itself in such a strident voice. We stood, at his request, by the pool, outside The Bunker, while Magath and Scharf pottered within.

‘Good couple of designers you’ve got there,’ he looked at me with one eye.

‘The best,’ I confirmed.

He turned the other eye to the Sergeants inside. ‘They work quietly. Are they always like that?’

‘Far from it!’ I laughed. ‘There are times when they’ve come close to tearing each other apart. But they’ve calmed quite a bit since we’ve got past the earliest stages. They’re working much more in harmony now. Still have their moments, though.’

‘I want to see more of that,’ he shone both eyes on me now. ‘I don’t promote this touchy-feely style. My teams feed on conflict. I want challenge. Response. Counter-challenge. I want mushroom clouds of productivity. I heard you all with Scharf’s report just now. A few hours, he said. Well, I want you to tear strips off him for that sort of thing. He says a few hours, I want you demanding twenty minutes. Don’t let him settle. Light some fires! Look at them now. They’re comfortable. Like a couple of apes picking fleas out of each other’s fur. No good ever came from that sort of pussyfooting.’

‘With respect, Captain, these men know full well how to challenge and inspire each other,’ I tried to keep my cool under his ridiculous attack. ‘They don’t need me to encourage that. There’s a time for grooming, and there’s a time for challenge. Leave them to their own devices and I can assure you that you’ll see eruptions of creativity. Not the word you choose, but productivity is the next step, and that’s my job.’

He curled his face into a kind of half-moon shape. It might have indicated some sort of perverted smile.

‘That’s good. Very good. You’re closer than I thought. Very defensive. But it’s not enough. Or maybe it’s too much. Depends on how you want to look at it. You must only defend yourself. These men don’t need your protection. They need to be fed. You are their leader. It’s you who must feed them. Feed their vitriol. Find out secrets about each of them and feed those secrets to the other. They must be in constant competition. I want them to despise each other. We need them to despise each other. Only then will we see the best from them. You must believe it. Conflict, antipathy, hatred. These are the nutrients we’re going to thrive upon from now forward.’

He glanced back at his team, non-confrontationally touching up models and clearing away debris of failed experiments, preparing the ground for the arrival of the data they craved. He shook his head slowly and rolled his diseased eyes back toward me.

‘I’m going to leave you now,’ he said. ‘It has been an excellent introduction. I’m full of ideas already. There are people I need to see… no time to waste.’ He stopped when he had passed me, and turned back. ‘I think we’re going to work well together. I can feel the friction. Already I think I despise you. I hope you feel the same. Do you? I know, it’s not natural for you. But don’t fight it. Mark my words: you’ll abhor me in no time. It’s a knack I have.’

‘I don’t doubt it,’ I replied.

His empty laugh filled the stone staircase and he followed it up to the basement. I heard him close the door behind him, and I sat on the stone lip of the path. Thompson’s words came back to me. Had Watson told me anything specific that might help me deal with the likes of Norris? Nothing came to me immediately. My guard had been found wanting once more: nobody had ever taken me outside The Bunker specifically in order to carry on a private conversation. Maybe I didn’t despise Norris quite yet, but he had certainly laid down some excellent groundwork, and had killed off, at source, any trust that might have been in danger of developing.

I rejoined my men, who were free-associating while applying poster paint to their shuttles and spaceport. Their initial experience of Captain Norris had been less disturbing than mine, it seemed. He had been a terrible visitor, they agreed. They expected nobody to fully understand the technicalities of the solution, but an appreciation of the overall shape of the beast would have been reassuring.

They told me this without a hint of exasperation. Norris’ arrival, as they saw it, made no material difference to their daily routine, or to the eventual success of our efforts. Change was change, and so rife in this organisation as to be irrelevant. It was neither good nor bad, and signified nothing more than it meant in reality. I listened carefully, clenched my mind tight, squinted into the bright glow of the truth and wished as hard as I could that they were right.