Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘Here we are,’ she said when the lift stopped with a ping, and she extracted her right arm from the squeeze so as to pull back the cage and free them all from an experience Robert would have wished to last for hours. Her shoulder dug into Robert’s chest and her unused arm found secret employment of its own as it brushed Robert’s front, swiftly, but with an apparent precision he would mentally revisit many times afterwards, for it brought the ends of her fingers into glancing contact with his penis. It lasted no longer than the flash of a photograph but she’d done it on purpose, he was immediately sure of it. She pulled the cage aside, opened with her own weight the steel door beyond, and as the passengers disembarked into the fluorescent illumination of a windowless lobby, Robert reflected on the discreet but, to him, unmistakable message she had given.

  Two middle-aged men came through a swing door, deep in conversation. One of them – short, balding and with a drinker’s glowing face – looked pensively at the new arrivals and informed Rosalind, ‘Kaupff is ready to start in the seminar room.’

  ‘Thank you, Professor Vine,’ she said, waving her charges to follow until they arrived at a small lecture room with enough moveable seats and desks for thirty or so people, though only a handful were present – all mature-looking men, whom Professor Vine and his companion went to sit among. Davis was there too, Robert noticed, but the commissioner did not look round at them, instead keeping his attention fixed on Professor Kaupff, who was slowly pacing before the blackboard, chalk in hand.

  Kaupff turned and noticed the new arrivals. ‘Ah, here are our brave volunteers. Come, Rosalind, bring them to the front, then we can be properly introduced.’

  She led them in single file past the desks so that they could assemble in line for inspection by their elders. Like a choirmaster, Kaupff prompted them to recite their names one by one: John Harvey, Colin Forsyth, Lachlan Macleod, Gordon Beatty, Robert Coyle.

  ‘These,’ Kaupff said to his colleagues, ‘are the cream of our youth. All of them, whatever happens, are heroes. Now, if you would like to be seated, we can begin.’

  Davis rose from his chair just as Rosalind and the recruits were finding theirs. He paced slowly to the open door of the seminar room, stuck his head out into the corridor, looking both ways with great deliberation, and then, watched silently by everyone in the room, he closed the door and came to the front, where Kaupff stood aside so that he could speak.

  ‘I have an important announcement to make,’ he said. ‘Last night an unauthorized radio signal was detected, coming from somewhere inside the Installation. It was too faint and too short to be decoded, but we know that it was on an illegal frequency reserved for military use. You are all scientists, and you all understand what this means. There is a spy in the Installation, and he – or she – is presumably transmitting information to the Yankee imperialists or their allies. If the capitalists discover the frozen star – and more importantly, if they discover the means by which Professor Kaupff hopes to reach it – then the consequences could be catastrophic. We all know the cost of failure. We all know that a great many lives – not only our own – are at stake. You can rest assured that my men from Department 5 are undertaking the most intensive search for the spy – the records of every single person in the Installation are being studied, and we are systematically interviewing personnel. You will all be invited to take part in this process soon. Security measures here, as you know, are always of the strictest kind, but we also value the freedoms that make it possible for people to live and work happily in the Installation. I assure you we will do everything in our power to preserve those freedoms. The spy will be caught. Justice will be done. The imperialists will not be allowed to win their war on our way of life.’ Davis went to sit down again, the only sound in the room being the click of his heels and the nervous coughing of one or two elderly scientists who were no strangers, Robert guessed, to episodes like these.

  Kaupff took the floor once more. ‘The illegal radio signal was intercepted by Dr Simpson and his team.’ Simpson, singled out by the point of Kaupff’s chalk, smiled modestly from where he sat at one side of the room. ‘When the frozen star was first discovered we hoped to detect X-ray or gamma radiation produced by dust falling and accelerating into the object’s intense gravitational field. No such emissions were found, so we extended our search to radio frequencies, still without success, apart from the unexpected signal from within the Installation itself. I should further add that Commissioner Davis is wrong to assume the source was a transmitter. As all the physicists in this room will attest, any radio receiver re-emits a small amount of energy, somewhat like the reflection on a window. What Simpson’s team may have detected was the illegal use of a receiver tuned to a forbidden waveband—’

  ‘That still counts as spying under the Penal Code,’ Davis interrupted. ‘As every patriotic citizen in this room, with or without a PhD in physics, will attest.’

  Kaupff was discomfited by the intervention. ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘I merely reiterate what I said to you earlier, as soon as you informed me about the problem, which is that if your men from D5 spend all their time looking for a transmitter they might miss their target. If only we remember to approach the problem dialectically, we see that reception and transmission are two sides of the same phenomenon, as the Penal Code fully recognizes. And we can also apply this methodology in our efforts to reach the object – for which, incidentally, we have an appropriate name proposed by one of our recruits: the Red Star.’

  A combination of muttering and mirth greeted what everyone conceded to be an ideologically acceptable nickname, and Robert was soon identified as the proposer of what he knew to have been Kaupff’s own idea, donated out of paternalistic generosity.

  ‘Some of you here know just as much as I do about the mission, its rationale and the physical principles it seeks to invoke; others do not. Those who remain in greatest ignorance are you, my young recruits, and so we must begin to educate you. No doubt you will already have noticed certain curious commonalities among yourselves – you are all exactly the same height, the same weight, the same age, and you all scored equally on the intelligence and personality tests that formed part of the initial selection process.’

  None of this commonality had been apparent to Robert – nor, it seemed, had it occurred to any of the others, since all now shot comradely glances among themselves in acknowledgement of the new bond they had discovered, which explained among other things how Rosalind had known the lift would bear them.

  ‘The allowed physical dimensions of our volunteers are constrained by the geometry of the capsule; but this mission is more than purely physical. It is also mental – indeed, one could say it is predominantly so, which is why our volunteers have to be of exactly equal intellectual capacity and development.’ Thus at a stroke Kaupff confirmed what Robert had suspected then doubted. Regardless of Scotland’s distance from the equator, they were somehow to be its first cosmonauts. ‘Let’s think about basics,’ the professor went on. ‘Something lies between us and the Red Star. What is it?’

  He paused, waiting for an answer, but no one spoke. Robert was aware of the silent experts seated behind him – surely they were not the people from whom Kaupff hoped to elicit a response to so elementary a question. It was the volunteers he aimed to test, and Robert raised his hand.

  ‘Yes, Coyle?’ Kaupff spoke as if he had never met him before.

  ‘Space, sir.’

  ‘Very good, Coyle. But what is space? Harvey?’

  The volunteer whom Robert had yesterday found so friendly had been noticeably quieter this morning, and took a moment to answer. ‘Space is emptiness … it’s nothing.’

  The professor addressed his peers who sat further back. ‘There we have it, gentlemen, the essential problem. Space lies between us and the Red Star – and if space is nothing then the problem is solved. So space must be something, and the question is what kind of thing. Any ideas, Macleod?’

  ‘Eh … what about distance? Is that
a thing?’

  ‘I suppose we have to ask what exactly we mean by “thing”,’ said Kaupff. ‘Do we mean that which is not a predicable attribute, or do we mean moveable substance? Distance is neither.’

  Now Davis interrupted again. ‘I can’t quite believe what I’m hearing, Professor Kaupff. We have several of the finest physicists in the Republic gathered in this room, and you’re taking us through some pedantic game that makes no sense whatsoever. Are you making the volunteers – and myself – the butt of an academic joke? What’s all this nonsense about something and nothing? Get to the point, man!’

  Professor Vine, claret-nosed and genial, spoke up for his colleague. ‘Commissioner, I first worked with Heinz twenty-five years ago on the Pluto missile system, and I quickly learned that nothing this man says is without meaning. He’s human and he makes mistakes – we’ve had our disagreements about all sorts of scientific questions, and sometimes I can’t believe the damned foolish things he says. But even when he’s wrong, he’s meaningfully wrong, because he’s a scientist, and that’s how we do things. Now I admit that these volunteers we’ve brought here are still in the dark about matters you and I already know concerning the mission, and I also admit that giving them a quick lesson in Aristotelian categories might seem a strange way to start their education at the College. But I recall that when I studied the scientific writings of Engels as an undergraduate, as we all did, I learned from him that Aristotle was the founder of the dialectical method in Western thought, so although Heinz’s approach is doubtless unorthodox, it’s also ideologically impeccable, and I think we should let him continue. So, Heinz, you’re telling us first of all that there’s an opposition between being and nothingness?’

  ‘Exactly, Roger,’ said Kaupff. Robert understood that it was a conversation they must have had many times, perhaps over a diminishing bottle of whisky in the wood-panelled Maxwell Room with its crackling log fire.

  ‘And next,’ said Professor Vine, ‘you’ll be pointing out that such oppositions can only be understood in relative terms, by virtue of the negation of the negation.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Kaupff agreed with a smile. ‘You really deserve a house point.’ There was laughter.

  ‘But we’re not in Pioneer Camp any more,’ said Vine, ‘so let’s get to the nub of the question. We know from the deepest philosophical reasoning – from the materialist viewpoint that is basic to everything we do as physicists, as well as to everything we do as socialists – that space is not just some empty container, but is itself a thing, an entity with physical properties. Space can have pressure – Einstein found this nearly seventy years ago – and the pressure can be positive or negative …’

  ‘We mustn’t rush ahead of ourselves,’ Kaupff said, silencing Vine as though wishing to still the inappropriate words of an adult before children. ‘Let’s stick, though, with your picture of an empty container. A jam jar, say, like the kind in which I collected pond life when I was a child.’

  Robert had a similar memory: a gob of frogspawn crowded in turbid water.

  ‘Let’s pour out all the water and creatures and screw the lid firmly back on the jar,’ said Kaupff. ‘There’s still air inside, of course. So let’s get a vacuum pump and remove all the air. In fact let’s imagine that our pump is fantastically powerful – more so than any on Earth – and that our jar is inordinately strong, so that we are able to remove every single gas molecule floating around in the jar. Not one of them is left – the jar surrounds a perfect vacuum. So what’s inside – nothing or something?’

  Robert glanced behind himself at the experts, one or two of whom were nodding in approval at Kaupff’s lesson. Davis was still stony faced, unconvinced that there was any point to this charade.

  ‘Well, Coyle?’ Kaupff, wanting an answer, made him turn. ‘You’re holding the empty jar, looking through it. What can you see?’

  Robert pictured the fictional scene. ‘Someone else who’s with me.’ A face distorted by glass.

  ‘Then there’s our answer,’ said Kaupff. ‘Even when we thought the jar to be completely empty, light is still passing through. This transiting light shows that the jar is not empty at all – far from it. Photons of light, like tiny tadpoles, fill every part of the jar – and they fill our universe. The Red Star is not falling through a void – it is falling through the light and heat of the Sun, and before it entered our solar system it fell through the light, heat and other radiation of the stars in our galaxy. More than that, it fell through the photons of the microwave radiation which remain from the universe’s birth, and which vastly outnumber all the particles of matter in the cosmos. So, if we really want to make a jam jar empty, we have to deal with these photons – we need a way of removing electromagnetic radiation. Any suggestions?’

  Robert was still seeing the face through the glass. ‘Cover it up,’ he said. ‘Wrap the jar in thick paper, or paint it black, then light can’t get in or out.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Kaupff. ‘We can easily exclude visible light. But it wouldn’t block microwaves or radio signals, as Simpson and his colleagues could tell us. If you were sitting inside a blacked-out jam jar with a radio receiver you’d still be able to pick up the news bulletin.’

  It was playing beside his bed in the military hospital, he remembered, and in all that time, when he was so close to dying, his mother and father never visited, Robert was sure of it. No one came, except the kind people from the Ministry. Now he wanted to cover the glass completely and never see through it again – never see the outside that had forgotten him. And another radio: the old device in his bedroom. Yesterday it had been tuned to London, this morning Athlone, and while Kaupff spoke of waves and frequencies, a possible explanation became apparent to him. Miriam and her boyfriend had been fooling with the radio late last night in the darkened bedroom – innocently turning the control they should not have touched, the volume so low that Mr and Mrs Frank heard nothing. Probably all they wanted was the soft illumination of its antique dial during their lovemaking, but the radio leaked some of the electromagnetic tadpoles it received from the sex-drenched ether, and a few of them had fallen into the prophylactic grasp of Simpson and his sleepless henchmen, who had monitored the treacherous droplets as they spilled onto the scientists’ sensitive dish. It was a theory of unimpeachable logical rigour; and if it were empirically proven, Miriam and her boyfriend could end up being shot as spies. Robert couldn’t stand her but there was no need for a firing squad.

  ‘So there’s a simple way to shut out radio signals,’ Kaupff continued. ‘All we need do is enclose our jam jar in a metal box, then any receiver put inside would remain silent. In fact, if we make the metal thick enough, and cold enough, then all electromagnetic fields will be excluded, and we shall have the nearest thing in the whole universe to a portion of perfectly empty space, devoid of matter, radiation or heat. Think of that perfect emptiness, comrades. Think how pure and sublime it would be.’

  Robert saw the darkened bedroom where Miriam and her boyfriend had done what he wished to do with Rosalind. He imagined the room encased in thick metal, the radio falling silent, and only the glow of its silent dial caressing Rosalind’s naked rump, whose curve he had felt in the ascending lift. She was sitting to his right, out of clear view unless he dared shoot his gaze at her, but he was sure she was watching him, monitoring his performance.

  ‘Have we really attained perfect emptiness?’ asked Kaupff. ‘Our container holds no matter, no radiation – if we were to place a camera inside it would show nothing; a radio would pick up no signal. Yet we have forgotten something. The camera or the radio would have weight. Though we have made our container emptier than the most remote depths of space, still we find that gravity can act there. How can we shut out gravitational fields? H. G. Wells offered a fanciful solution – a magical substance which resists gravity in the same way that a curtain obstructs light – but that was only a novelist’s dream. There is no such substance, and there is no evidence that anything like it could e
ver exist. But we do know a way to remove the effects of gravity. Think of the lift you all came up in.’

  Robert had never forgotten it.

  ‘Disaster strikes, a cable breaks – the lift compartment plummets.’ A euphoric nausea gripped Robert as he imagined the shared moment of imminent death. ‘The lift and its occupants are in free fall,’ Kaupff explained. ‘And we know what this implies. All objects accelerate through empty space at the same rate: a hammer or a feather, a human or a speck of dust. Everyone in the lift must therefore feel weightless, since the floor falls beneath them at the same rate as their own bodies.’ In Robert’s mind there dwelt no more the weight of inhibition which had burdened him during his brief ascent. Now he was freely moving his hands across Rosalind’s light body, encircling her, reaching up towards her floating breasts. ‘Gravity draws us like a roaring river, and rather than resist we can yield to it, going effortlessly with its flow. So to remove the effects of gravity from an empty container we simply let it fall freely through space.’ There was only Robert and Rosalind now; the metal lift compartment was their orbiting bedroom. ‘This is the freedom nature cherishes most,’ Kaupff added; ‘the freedom experienced by bodies which don’t resist, don’t remain stubbornly at rest – and it would seem that we have at last found an answer to our riddle. What can be left inside an empty falling container? Well, Coyle?’

  He had been caught daydreaming. ‘Pardon, sir?’ Somebody laughed behind him.

  ‘If we are to find a correct solution to the problem of being and nothingness we must think more carefully about the freely falling elevator – a thought-experiment which all these wise people behind you learned when they were no older than you are now, though they were perhaps a little more attentive.’ Then Kaupff smiled. ‘Don’t worry, Robert,’ he said softly. ‘The path to enlightenment is never easy.’