He became expansive, a torrent of recollection making its way to the surface. He had seen the tiny little islands dotted around Indonesia, the deserts of Turkey and Iran, the endless blue of the Indian ocean. The images had stayed with him, and always would, he said.
“How about going up a hundred miles and more?” I asked him. “You can see whole continents laid out from up there. A whole ocean in one view. The curvature of the Earth. What do you think you would make of that?”
The two old men looked at each other. The talkative one fell silent, stared at his pint with a far-off expression. His partner put down his pint, looked at me and said, “well, son, that sounds like it might be worth seeing.”
*****
There was a single security guard at the gatehouse who looked like he had one of the most boring jobs in the world. “Yes, sir, you’re expected. The Minister is in the control tower over there”, he pointed. “Mind if I search your vehicle quickly, sir? Security and everything, you understand.”
I did. He couldn’t help remarking on the unusual engine setup, having popped the hood. “One of those new biofuel things, is it?” he asked.
“Yes, that’s right”, I lied. “Very efficient. You should look into it.” Actually, I knew that biofuels were a terrible idea and had just succeeded in doubling the price of food in some parts of the developing world. But fixing that was all part of my plan. Hard to launch into space, though, if you didn’t have a runway. I thanked the guard and drove through to the control tower where I parked the car and took a look around.
The airfield seemed vast. Originally, three runways operated to fly off the big strategic bombers of the United States Air Force. They had been tasked with flying nuclear bombing missions into Europe in the event of a war with the Soviet Union. I was delighted to be considering a more peaceful, productive purpose for them. There were numerous other buildings scattered around, which might have been barrack buildings or workshops when the base was at its height. 10,000 people had worked here, I knew. Now it was almost eerily silent. Not for long, I mused to myself as I climbed up the steps into the control tower.
“Ah, excellent”. This must be the Minister, I thought to myself. He had a slightly supercilious air, was almost certainly ex-services himself, and strode towards me with the confidence of someone who has faced much greater challenges than those posed by a rich rocket scientist. “Find the place OK?”
“Yes, thank you Minister. Pleasure to be here.”
“Oh, God just call me Tom. Everyone else seems to.” Tom Fenlon has been Her Majesty’s Secretary of Defence for two years, and was almost universally popular with the three services. He had fought tooth and nail against base closures, notably forcing through amendments which would keep the big submarine base at Faslane open, and had secured a larger establishment of the new Typhoon fighter-bomber for the Air Force. He had risked his job countless times to get Britain’s forces what they said they needed. But today his role was different.
“So, Howles here”, Keith nodded in the younger man’s direction, “tells me you’ve got a scheme for using these big runways.”
“That’s right. Actually, I’ll only be using the main runway, but I’ll need pretty much unlimited rights to the whole site if the plan is to be realised.”
“Well, why don’t you tell us what you have in mind? You know there’s more belt-tightening going on, Whitehall orders and all that. Normally we’d just sell these places to housing developers and have done with it, but after Howles told me the basics, it seemed that the big long runway and the erm...”, he looked around, through the tower’s windows at the swathes of farmland, “rather isolated location... might well suit your purposes.”
“Indeed. Well, I have a presentation here if you would give me just a moment to get set up.” The minister, Knowles and two aides who had not been introduced, probably security people, waited in the tower while I grabbed the laptop and scale model from the car. Getting the two up the stairs was a bit of a struggle. I longed for a Relocation system, I really did.
“By Jove!”, exclaimed the Minister. “Does that thing actually fly?” I made a show of puffing a bit as I plonked down the scale model on a table by the window.
“I wish it did, Tom, so I didn’t have to carry the damned thing around!” I got a laugh and settled down to begin the presentation. “What you see here is a two-stage system. The carrier plane”, I gestured towards the massive, six-engine aircraft, “will have the orbiter attached using high-tensile metal struts on its upper fuselage.” I used a laser pointer to indicate this. “They take off as a unit under the carrier plane’s power and ascend to about 80,000ft.”
The Minister whistled. “That’s a long way up. Have you tested the engines to that kind of altitude?”
“Well, no, not yet. We need a proper testing facility, which I am hoping will be about a quarter of a mile over there”, I motioned out of the window towards the body of the airfield. “Once built, we’ll be able to work up the engines to that kind of performance.”
“Very well. Press on, then. I want to hear about the orbiter.”
“Well, Tom, this is the really remarkable bit. The orbiter is thrown loose from the carrier plane by a suite of pyrotechnic charges. The carrier turns away, leaving the orbiter on its own path, and then the little fella fires its engines. That”, I promised, “will be an experience for anyone on board”.
“What kind of fuels does it burn?”
“Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Gives it a hell of a kick. For a lightweight ship like this one”, I motioned at the orbiter model once more, “we’re talking 80,000ft to orbital velocity in under seven minutes. It will be a hell of a ride.”
The Minister was bouncing up and down on his heels. “I see!”, he exclaimed. “Quite a system. What about recovery?”
I played a video of the planned re-entry system. “We’re developing some new heat-resistant materials which will readily withstand the heat of re-entry”, I boasted confidently. “Then, the orbiter will return here to Sculthorpe and land like a conventional aircraft on a tricycle landing gear, with an optional arrestor parachute, like the space shuttle.”
Tom watched the video. I could already see that I had him. Perhaps he’d been switched on by Apollo 11 as a boy, or maybe dreamed of taking a tourist flight into space himself. The movie finished and the screen showed a still-shot, an artists’ impression (the artist being Hal, naturally) of the two ships leaving the runway at a much-improved Sculthorpe, with a Norman Foster-style glass reception building for passengers and several other orbiters and their steeds on the flight line, ready to go.
The Minister sat back in his seat. “What kind of timescale are we talking about?”
This was where I had to be careful, once more. Too soon and I would look overly ambitious. Too far in the future, and Tom would be unable to make political capital from a project which would reach fruition after he had already left office.
“Six months”.
Knowles and Fenlon looked at each other. “Six months for what?”, Knowles asked, scepticism brewing in his facial expression.
“A flight article ready for a full series of test flights. We think we’ll need thirty or so upper-atmosphere flights of the carrier/orbiter combination and then about ten sub-orbital and ten orbital flights before we would allow any passenger or payload customer to become involved.”
Tom was smiling knowingly. “Son, I’ve seen dozens of projects, civil and military, of this complexity and less. I’ve supported them, moved mountains to make them work, to give them the resources they need. And more often than not, I end up red-faced and buggered because I got carried away and supported a technology which needed time to mature. Is that what I’m looking at right now? Be objective, would you, I want to know what you think. Are you being too ambitious?”
I put down my laser pointer, closed the laptop and looked him square in the eye. “Minister, I’m prepared to give you a down payment of £5 million towards a perpetual lease o
f this airfield. The other five million I will transfer in a year from today. If, by three months time, we have not built our facility and have carried out our first engine tests on both carrier and orbiter engines right here at this site, you can keep the five million and we will pack up, pull down our buildings and leave. There won’t be a trace of the project left.
“On the other hand”, I continued, “if we perform the tests on schedule, and provide a flight article for the first high-altitude tests six months from today, I will expect the government’s full support for the development of this site into a major space facility. Could we come to an agreement based on that?”
Tom liked straight-talk, I knew. He liked men to stick their necks out and take risks. I was talking with the right guy. “We could. I need to speak with the Prime Minister, and one or two other people. The Army actually control this site right now, so I’ll have to find them somewhere else to do their helicopter training.”
“Those exercises happen only twice a year”, I reminded him.
“Yes, that’s true. Shouldn’t be too big a deal. If everything goes to plan I should be able to get you some good news by the weekend.”
We thanked each other for the time we’d spent today, and for the long journey, and I returned to my car. “Tom?” I shouted from the car window as he strode over to his Ministerial Jaguar. “Mind if I take the Golf for a thrash down the runway? I’ve been wanting to ever since I saw it on the satellite image. Smooth as silk, they say it is.”
“Be my guest. Just don’t take off!” He laughed at his own little joke and, without further ado, I sped off along the perimeter track towards the west end of the runway. I passed derelict hangars, a fuel depot and several other washed-out buildings before swinging left and lining up on the runway.
Hal had been good enough to install a speedometer which reflected the car’s new abilities. I put her in first, banged down the pedal and flung the car down the runway. Zero to sixty in about 3 seconds, I judged. By the time we were half way down the long tarmac strip, the speedometer read 204mph and I was certain we were, as Tom joked, about to lift off like a jet fighter. I eased off and let the car coast to the end, turning onto the perimeter track once more and then straight through the gate and out onto the main road.
“Hal”, I whispered, catching my breath. “You’re a fucking genius.”
*****
Back in Wales, I waited for two vital things to happen. The first was news from Tom Fenlon, hopefully full permission to go in and start knocking the airfield about. The second was news of Gemma’s meetings and how soon she could come out to Wales. Hal and I worked well, increasingly understanding each other. His financial dealings had gone into overdrive as we accrued greater and greater profits. A single deal could net £1 million, sometimes more, and our coffers swelled impressively. Paying our rent to the Ministry would be a snap.
“Hal? How am I going to get to and fro to the airfield, once things get started? I don’t want to sell the house… I love the place, and this area, and I wouldn’t want to be that far from Snowdonia. Any ideas?”
Hal sketched out an ambitious Relocation network which would have to cover much of the south of England if I was to be able to drop into Sculthorpe whenever I wanted. It would also, he told me, allow easier access to London, although we’d need to find a quiet location for me to spontaneously appear; doing so in the middle of Oxford Circus would attract just the wrong kind of attention. His plan brought in our new glider prototypes as cargo drones, dropping the Relocation transponders in remote fields.
I pondered this, impressed as usual. “Hal, I’m planning on doing a lot of this remotely, despite the ease of Relocating. Are you able to operate in such a way? I’d like to keep you here, if I can.”
Hal thought for the usual fraction of a second. “I am one of the extremely few things which Forager cannot duplicate. I contain certain parts which are impossible to recreate.”
I was curious immediately. “Like what?”
“The whole Universe”, Hal answered.
I had suspected this since I met him. Hal was a quantum computer whose processing power was actually drawn from every atom in existence. These machines were vanishingly rare.
“Hal? What is the maximum amount of your computational power I have ever asked you to use?”
“0.000084 percent”, was his swift answer. To call Hal under-utilised would be an egregious understatement.
“I think we need to find you some more things to do.”
*****
Gemma called again that Wednesday night. She was free of her meetings and had one lecture she needed to attend in the morning, but could be with me by 6pm, she said. My heart swelled at the very idea.
I gave Hal some more interesting work to do. One job consisted of compiling data on near-earth asteroids and plotting their course, as accurately as current data permitted. He completed this mammoth task, tracking several hundred thousand objects over the next 100,000 years, in about an hour, drawing partly on the incomplete records from JPL and other groups, with the remainder coming from the Takanli Deep Space Tracking System.
“The earth will encounter a total of six thousand, three hundred and seventy objects, plus or minus one percent. 98.3% of these will burn up in the atmosphere. Most of the remainder will break up into tiny fragments which will impact the earth but cause no significant damage. In the next hundred thousand years, six objects of larger than 10km in diameter will hit the Earth, four at sea and two on land.”
That sounded fairly serious. “When, and how big?”, I wanted to know.
“The ocean impacts will cause chaotic effects which are difficult to predict and depend to an extent on the flood defences of the nations in question. Two will cause major tsunami events, larger than that of Boxing Day 2004. One will strike the Mediterranean and cause major localised flooding. One will strike the Bering Sea. The land-strikes will be in central Russia and in Colorado. Local devastation will be considerable.”
“When, Hal?”
He gave me dates ranging from 6,790 to 88,680 years in the future. I wasn’t going to lose any sleep. “With a bit of luck, Hal, we’ll have better surveillance and deflection methods by then”. I shuddered to think what chaos would ensue if scientists announced that an asteroid was a couple of years out, or even less. There would be global panic. I remember Carpash, during the Cruiser joyride from Takanli in my first week there, criticising Earth for its short-sightedness in this area, and general under-achievement in space. How right he was. At least for the moment.
I was eating lunch when Tom Fenlon called in person to give us the good news. “The site is all yours, from the first of next month. All you have to do is promise not to make too much noise, and not build anything over three storeys tall. You can do whatever you like to the existing buildings and the three runways. The plans you sent us for a fence look entirely commendable for security reasons. We don’t want great hordes of the Norfolk public showing up in the fields around Sculthorpe, seeing what you’re up to on testing day.”
The man was a gem. He accepted the £5 million deal and the wager I had attached to it, spelling out that he was personally interested in how we fared, and would be keeping a close eye on the project. Once we put the phone down, Hal swung into action, realising a long-dormant plan for the swift and efficient transformation of Sculthorpe. We had six days until the end of the month, then the place was all ours. I had Forager produce me a bottle of champagne, put The Right Stuff on the DVD and drank the whole bottle.
Gemma called from the train the next afternoon. I had sorted out my hangover, having forgotten the trick with the purple pill, and Hal had spent the morning showing me hangar interiors and assembly lines for the ships. We were looking at about three weeks to produce an orbiter and seven to construct the carrier plane. By Boeing standards, this was incredible. But Hal was still frustrated. I shut him up long enough to hear what Gemma was saying.
“Great! God, I can’t wait to see you… I know,
far too long. You won’t believe what the design guys have done to the house… what? Didn’t I tell you? Yeah, I think it’s going to be on TV or something. They just went to town on the place… OK, 6.25 at the station. I’ll see you there… You what?... You’re not wearing any what?... Oh, excellent. See you in a couple of hours, naughty girl.”
Distracted but elated, I finished working with Hal and we nailed down the hangar design. There would be a good deal of digging to do, in order that the majority of the structure would be buried underground. Hal showed me a veritable fleet of robots he intended to use, but nothing could be done until he actually got on-site in Norfolk.
“I can hijack existing satellite channels until we have our own”, he explained, “but I would put a communications bird at the front of our build queue once we get there.”
I agreed, providing that it didn’t interfere with getting the first carrier and orbiter built. “How are we going to pull this off, Hal? I mean, the Ministry already thinks we’re mad with the three-month and six-month timescales for the engine testing and the flight article. If we show up with the full package in two months, they will know something fishy is going on.”
“On the contrary”, Hal disagreed. “They will think we’re particularly efficient. All you have to do is keep them off the base. Permanently.”
That was worrying. “I don’t think I can do that, Hal. They have a lot invested in this, and I couldn’t sell it to them in any other way than as a partnership. They’ll want to visit, surely.”
Hal groaned. It was a reasonable copy of the human sound, but from him it sounded even more exasperated. I thought at once of Marvin the Paranoid Android from the Douglas Adams books. “I suspected as much. We’ll have to implement Operation Red Carpet.”
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