Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘Wait,’ said Robert, taking hold of her arm, almost pinching it.

  She scowled at his impudent hand, then at him. ‘What do you think you’re doing?’

  He lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘They know what you did last night.’

  Miriam’s face went white. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘You know what I mean. It was on. In your bedroom.’

  She moved so close to him that her pile of books pressed equally into both their chests in what was almost a strange kind of embrace. ‘Later,’ she hissed. ‘We can’t talk here.’ Then she stretched up on her toes, puckered her lips, and planted on his cheek a kiss that startled him so much he put his fingers to it, as if on a wound, when she stepped back from him, turned, and moved on without a further word.

  ‘See you then,’ he called after her, slowly realizing that her kiss was a way of confusing anyone who might have been watching, by way of some peephole or security camera, into thinking that their only secret was a romantic one. With the fading of Miriam’s footsteps and the swing of a door in a distant corridor, Robert became aware again of Willoughby’s voice.

  ‘Shakespeare was no Marxist – history did not offer him that option. The Copernican revolution was still fresh, and its implications were slow to reach British shores. Yet we should no more criticize Shakespeare for his ignorance of it than we should condemn Oliver Cromwell for not having instigated communism. Each was a product of his epoch, each was instinctively aware of the rights of the proletariat, and each played his part in the ultimate triumph of socialism. For that we should all be thankful.’

  Applause rang out, and Robert pulled the door of the lecture theatre ajar, then slipped inside to see the novelist’s appreciative smiles while the crowd cheered him. A few people rose to their feet, and this was swiftly copied so that soon a full standing ovation was being delivered to the academician’s humbly outstretched arms. Willoughby’s talk had clearly made an enormous impact on this gathering of scientists and technicians, most of whom presumably understood Shakespeare no better than Robert did. The recruits were all standing, applauding, as was Rosalind, who emanated the unsullied radiance of a political campaign poster. Her clapping hands were held high, almost at her lips, as if to offer Willoughby a kiss of infinite gratitude. What exactly had he said? Robert tried to remember one of the quotes from Henry V – we are all nothing except place, degree and form: a certain time, a certain position. And here was Willoughby, in the position of a famous writer, being treated as a famous writer. Here, too, was Rosalind, a nothing, being nothing – an open, receptive nothing, waiting for Willoughby to come and help himself. There were only three other women in the room, and Robert couldn’t imagine Willoughby preferring any of them to Rosalind, whom he appeared to look at momentarily but significantly, rustling his notes like bed sheets. And Dora, thought Robert, a different kind of nothing – the kind that never disappears, no matter how hard you try to erase its trace.

  Willoughby had drunk enough applause now; he gave a last wave and lowered his head, moving away from the lectern as the clapping faded, stuffing his notes into a leather briefcase. It marked the breaking of a spell; Willoughby was once more a shambling academic with a slight limp evident in his heavy gait, and people began moving towards the exit where Robert stood.

  ‘You missed an inspiring talk,’ Rosalind told him.

  ‘I heard some of it through the door.’

  ‘Then I hope it cured your headache, because now it’s time for us to go to the simulator.’

  7

  When they got back onto the bus that stood waiting outside, Rosalind told Robert to sit beside her. ‘Your state of health concerns me.’

  ‘It was only a headache. It’s gone now.’

  ‘Is it an after-effect of your illness?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  She lowered her voice. ‘Kaupff suspects you may be the best man to pilot the capsule. We can’t let the mission be jeopardized by a migraine.’ The bus revved into motion but soon halted again at a checkpoint. The driver leaned out of his side window to speak with the guard.

  Robert said, ‘To be honest, I didn’t feel like sitting through the lecture; there was nothing wrong with me. Though from what I heard of Willoughby’s talk, nothingness is a subject he’s very interested in.’

  ‘Then I’m glad you learned something.’ They moved on, entering some kind of industrial complex.

  ‘I had an interesting conversation with Dora about the Blue Cat.’

  ‘She’s Category O – if you speak to her again at the College I may have to inform Commissioner Davis.’

  ‘Do you ever go there?’ Robert asked. Through the window he could see a towering maze of pipes and gantries in which the only humans were tiny yellow-helmeted workmen on aerial walkways.

  ‘Everyone goes,’ said Rosalind. ‘It’s the only night spot in the Installation. You’ll find Professor Vine there nearly every night with his colleagues, talking physics and doing calculations on the tablecloths. They have to take them away afterwards for security reasons – it drives the staff nuts.’

  ‘Does Kaupff go?’

  ‘He prefers to spend his evenings in the Lodge. Why are you so interested in the Blue Cat?’

  ‘Dora told me it’s a brothel.’

  Rosalind fell silent for a moment. She glanced round at the other volunteers as if to see whether any of them had overheard. ‘Don’t believe anything you hear from an O. She’s dirt, nothing but trouble. For your own good, stay away from her.’

  They arrived at what looked like a blast-proof door on an otherwise featureless concrete building, as big as an apartment block, painted in green and black camouflage. ‘All change,’ Rosalind announced, and once everyone was off, the huge door began grinding open with a mechanical whirr.

  What they saw inside was a kind of hangar, windowless but brilliantly lit by powerful floodlights, teeming with technicians who scurried purposefully like ants beneath a stone. Rosalind could no doubt have brought the volunteers in by some smaller side entrance; her purpose was theatrical, and the effect succeeded, because what the sliding door revealed to the recruits drew a unanimous gasp of wonder. Kaupff had been teasing them, giving them cause to doubt whether it really was a space mission they were embarking on; but here was the evidence standing before them, in the centre of the hangar, tethered by electrical cables. Here was the capsule that Robert was to command.

  It was a tapering white cylinder some ten or twelve metres high; a smooth metal craft with a large red star painted on its side and the initials of the British Democratic Republic arranged vertically beneath. It had no portholes, no visible means of propulsion, as if the object were designed to convey its passive occupants magically into orbit.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Robert whispered.

  The capsule was supported on a massive platform beneath which thick steel pistons could be seen amid a tangle of wires and tubing, tended by numerous white-coated engineers who inspected the jumble intently.

  ‘It’s not the real thing,’ said Rosalind.

  ‘What?’ Robert was still as spellbound by it as the others.

  ‘This is the simulator,’ she told them. ‘It’s where you’ll be trained.’ It looked real enough – but that was because at this stage there was still so little of it for them to see. Even the entry hatch was hidden from sight, on the far side. ‘Come this way,’ she said, leading them along one wall of the hangar to a railed viewing area from which they could see the vehicle’s small circular door hinged open while a technician crawled inside.

  ‘Not much room in there for five,’ Forsyth muttered.

  ‘Worse than the lift we all squeezed in this morning.’

  Rosalind looked at them. ‘Haven’t you understood yet? You won’t all be going.’

  The hatch closed, there was a loud hissing, and a moment later the capsule gave a shudder as its supporting platform rumbled into motion. A klaxon sounded, a red light flashed, the volunteers watc
hed a spectacle they took to be routine; but engineers were shouting, running. This was not routine: it was an emergency.

  ‘I think someone’s trapped inside!’ Rosalind exclaimed.

  The capsule shook and juddered on its platform while a squad of men leapt up to try and open the hatch, some of them stumbling and being thrown clear by the machine’s violent motion. Suddenly it halted and gave a loud dying groan, then a moment later the hatch sprung open and the dazed prisoner stuck his head out, beaming. A great cheer went up.

  ‘He could have been killed,’ Rosalind gasped, then saw how the volunteers were staring at her. ‘Don’t worry, boys, you’ll be securely restrained when you use it.’

  While operations swiftly returned to normality, she led them through a swing door that took them into a corridor lined with offices and workshops, where she began explaining what went on, as though the near-disaster had never occurred.

  ‘That’s the imaging team,’ she said, pointing into a room where men and women were looking at computer screens with colour pictures on them: something none of the volunteers had ever before seen, or even thought possible. ‘Telemetry is over there, and around the corner is ballistics.’

  They followed Rosalind past an encyclopedia of scientific specialisms until at last they reached her own. Bringing a key from her pocket, she unlocked the plain white door of her office and ushered them inside. ‘Do make yourselves comfortable,’ she said, though there were no chairs except the one behind her desk, positioned in a corner of the large room. There was a bookcase too, a filing cabinet and a blackboard on the wall; but most of the floor was taken up by a square woven rug, Turkish in appearance, on which plump cushions were scattered in an approximate circle, as if in preparation for an informal discussion group.

  ‘Some people need the cushions but I prefer to do without,’ said Rosalind, casually removing her shoes after having taken off her coat, then going past the volunteers to the far end of the rug where she kneeled down, her coarse grey skirt being long enough to cover her legs. ‘Come, join me.’

  It was an unusual situation for the volunteers, and after some embarrassed hesitation they did as she invited, taking off their coats and boots and finding a space on the carpet – though each of the men required rather more room than Rosalind occupied, since most stretched out their legs, trying to use the large cushions as a support for their backs.

  ‘My field is psychophysics,’ she explained. ‘The relationship between mind and matter. And before we go any further, I should like to teach you all a better way to sit.’ She hitched up her dress, exposing her stockinged knees and pink thighs without a qualm, and began to bend her legs into shape. ‘This is the lotus position,’ she said, though every man was more concerned with the way that Rosalind’s pale-blue knickers – strictly utilitarian in form yet no less arousing in appearance – were freely revealed in the course of her demonstration. It was only when she had completed her adoption of the difficult posture that she draped the loose cloth of her hitched dress onto the floor before her lap, allowing only her knees and thighs to remain visible. ‘You might prefer the half lotus,’ she said calmly, ‘in which just one foot is brought up onto the calf. Or else simply cross your legs.’ Macleod rolled over a few times as he made a game attempt at the full lotus, but the others expended less effort. Forsyth, sitting directly opposite Robert, had his legs splayed to reveal a very obvious erection.

  Rosalind looked from one volunteer to the next, examining each man’s posture. What she saw in Forsyth was mirrored in other volunteers too. ‘I’m glad you find yoga so stimulating. It demonstrates an important fact of psycho-physics: mind affects matter. For example,’ she said, nonchalantly adjusting her dress and revealing once more, for a deliberate moment, her underwear, ‘if we feel a certain emotion, this can have measurable physical consequences. Fear or joy correspond to specific secretions, changes in pulse or perspiration. Sexual arousal has evident manifestations, so strong and powerful they even led some foolish male philosophers to think that all matter is really a product of mind, in which case the world is little more than a wet dream. This idealism may have suited bourgeois nineteenth-century professors who imagined their great mental systems would be a terrific way of impressing women – but I am not impressed.’ One or two men gave a nervous laugh, but each now felt as Robert did – somehow invaded and abused by this strange manipulation, like the lewd stunt of a stage hypnotist in a fairground tent. ‘Nor were Marx and Engels impressed,’ Rosalind continued. ‘Mind is made of matter – this is the philosophy of materialism – and we have a clear demonstration of its truth in this room. You see part of a female body, you become erect, and you think of sex. This is the order in which it happens, as we know from animals, who see a potential mate, become sexually prepared, but don’t think anything at all. They just stick it in, and nature – matter – does the rest. If any of you are now thinking about sex it is only because you received a visual stimulus – a material phenomenon – which caused a physiological modification in your body that has now acted on your mind.’

  Macleod burst into laughter and started shaking his head.

  ‘Is something wrong, Volunteer Macleod?’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I can’t quite believe this is for real.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said sternly.

  ‘Well, what’s this got to do with going into space? Are we meant to wank ourselves into orbit?’

  There was an outbreak of sniggering which offered the men some relief, but Rosalind soon silenced it. ‘How do you know you aren’t?’ she said. ‘You know nothing about the mission, except that the frozen star possibly emits scalar waves which we have to find a way of detecting. You sniff a woman, Macleod, and you go hard. Source and receiver, signal and antenna – that is psychophysics, and your feelings count only to the extent that they are phenomena that can be analysed and if necessary eliminated from the experiment. If you cannot overcome embarrassment, gentlemen, what hope is there that you will conquer fear?’

  Once more she looked at each volunteer in turn, assessing his posture and physique. Forsyth’s erection, so prominent before, had wilted. The mood in the room was one of oppression – Rosalind had made clear to them the power she held, and each volunteer knew that the final selection would be a process in which she played an important part. Perhaps involuntary arousal had already cost one or two of them a place in the capsule – who could say? Yet suddenly she appeared more relaxed. ‘I want you to perform some yoga for at least fifteen minutes every day – do try the lotus, though here is another position which is also very beneficial.’ She uncrossed her legs, got up from the floor and squatted on all fours like a dog. ‘The curve of the back is most important. Start like this, then slowly look down, stretching the neck.’ The men watched her demonstration, then reluctantly made their own half-hearted attempts to copy. ‘And back up again … raise … stretch … don’t jerk.’

  After a while she called a halt and stood up, performing this last move rather more gracefully than the men who followed. She walked barefoot across the room to the filing cabinet, pulled open one of its heavy drawers, and took out a manila folder. ‘Let’s try an experiment,’ she said, handing out sheets of blank paper and pencils to the men. ‘I am going to look through an ordinary pack of playing cards and I want each of you to try and guess whether the card I’m seeing is red or black. Simply write R or B on your sheet. I want no conferring, no copying and most all,’ she looked at Macleod, ‘no giggling. This is a serious task and I want to see how you perform. Now go and settle yourselves anywhere you like.’

  Most of the men sat back down on the rug while Rosalind went to her desk. Robert moved towards the far wall and stood leaning against it, the sheet of paper folded small enough in his hand so that he could easily scribble on it while also keeping his answers hidden.

  ‘Here is the deck,’ said Rosalind. Held together with a rubber band, it looked no different from the kind the men might play pontoon with. She snapped off t
he band, put the cards face down on the table, and lifted the first so that the men could see only its back. ‘Each time I raise a card you must think carefully and try to decide its colour.’ There was a scratching of pencils as one or two volunteers immediately wrote an answer, but Rosalind held the card aloft for some time, encouraging them to concentrate. Robert stared at it, and in his mind he saw an eight of spades. He wrote B.

  Rosalind made her own note, drew the next card, and again waited while the recruits guessed. In this way they slowly went through most of the pack, until after ten long minutes the experiment was declared finished. She instructed the candidates to write their names on their sheets and bring them to her desk, then sent them back to wait on the rug like kindergarten pupils while she marked their answers.

  This was another guessing game, played in tense silence as the five men watched the flicking of Rosalind’s wrist. Eventually she looked up. ‘Macleod?’

  He stood and took a pace forward. ‘Yes, ma’am?’

  ‘You are free to go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You will be escorted out by a member of the technical staff.’

  Macleod was stunned. ‘You mean I’m off the mission?’

  ‘You will be assigned other duties,’ Rosalind calmly told him, almost as if reading from a script. ‘You will continue to serve in a significant supportive role but you will not proceed to simulator training.’

  Macleod was still trying to take in what he was hearing; his fellow recruits were on their feet too, equally appalled by the abruptness of Rosalind’s decision. ‘All this because of a pack of cards?’ he said, anger rising in him. ‘Because of a pack of fucking cards?’

  She was unmoved. ‘Selection is not a simple process, Volunteer Macleod.’

  ‘And what gives you the right to throw me off? You bring us here and do a mind-reading game and then that’s it, go home. Don’t you know how much this means to me, and to all of us lads? Don’t you understand, you heartless fucking bitch?’