Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  It sounded to Robert like a very good way of getting rid of all his past transgressions, but Kaupff disapproved of such illegality.

  ‘If information can’t disappear then it has to go somewhere,’ said the professor. ‘Perhaps the frozen star is really the gateway to some distant region of the galaxy – or to an entirely separate universe, a mirror world whose history is quite unlike ours. There could be another you, with a completely different life.’

  ‘Bet I’d still get kicked out of university,’ Robert said balefully.

  ‘Most probably,’ Kaupff agreed. ‘But if my theory of quantum gravity is correct, the Red Star ought also to be emitting information in the form of scalar waves. We have to ask where that information came from. Your body is the detector.’

  Robert thought it even more absurd than his essay, though he had already seen the army of scientists and technicians devoted to making it work. ‘Why me?’

  ‘Rosalind showed me your score from the card experiment,’ Kaupff told him earnestly. ‘You got eighty-five per cent. Have you any idea how extraordinary that is?’ Robert remained silent, still holding the empty glass that had contained his mulled wine, whose warming effect had quite worn off. ‘The probability of obtaining a result like that from random guessing is less than one in a million. You’re not the first person with such a gift that Rosalind has encountered; she has made a study of similar cases, and some of the people she identified went on to do patriotic work of a strategic kind. But none of them was physically suited to an active mission. You are.’

  Robert had the gift of telepathy. Somehow he’d gone through nearly twenty years of life and had never even noticed it; but if he thought hard enough – or simply relaxed his mind – he ought to be able to see what they were doing right now, Rosalind and Willoughby, just as he had discerned the colours of playing cards seen by her eyes only. And so, with eighty-five per cent accuracy, he saw plump Willoughby sitting naked on the end of his disordered bed, Rosalind kneeling on the floor before him with her face buried in what lay beneath his hairy paunch. ‘Why was I never aware of this?’ he asked Kaupff.

  ‘It seems that just before you became ill, your ability was artificially stimulated.’

  ‘By the drug?’

  Kaupff shook his head slowly. ‘There was no drug.’

  Robert was confused; why had Kaupff lied, and how had the lie so convincingly explained what Robert felt?

  Kaupff saw his discomfort. ‘You understand that information about the mission has to be carefully controlled. If we had told you prior to the card experiment that we were convinced you possessed extrasensory perception, it would have destroyed the experimental conditions. My story about the drug was convenient at the time; now I can tell you the truth.’

  ‘How do I know it’s the truth?’ asked Robert.

  ‘You can’t. So if you prefer, let’s call it the next stage. Do you remember the facility where you stayed during the induction period?’

  ‘Not very clearly.’

  ‘No, I suppose not. Nor, I expect, do you recall very much about the aptitude tests, or the pictures you were asked to draw, or the bedroom you slept in for each of the three nights you stayed there, or the pillow you laid your head on.’

  ‘I thought it was because of the drug that all those things are like a dream now.’

  ‘We were testing prototype equipment. It was inside your pillow.’

  Now Robert did remember something very clearly. Something small, round and hard had been inside that pillow. At least, he thought he could remember it.

  ‘We believe it was these trials that made you ill,’ said Kaupff. ‘But whereas before the experiment you scored little better than average in telepathy tests, now you get eighty-five per cent. That tells us we’re on the right track, though more work is needed before we can launch you in the capsule.’

  ‘But I might fall ill again.’

  Kaupff nodded. ‘You consented to all risks.’

  ‘I’m still willing to take them,’ said Robert; and it was true. Whatever had altered his mind – drug, hidden machine or the invisible waves of another universe – it had given him a genuine sense of courage and purpose. The facts were open to doubt, but not his feelings. ‘I shall do my duty.’

  ‘Let’s go to my rooms,’ Kaupff instructed, and they went out to the bare-walled corridor with its doors marked ‘in’ or ‘out’. One of them, Robert noticed, belonged to Professor Vine, another to Dr Carter, who Kaupff had said would play the piano later. Life at the Installation for these scientists must perpetually revolve around a handful of locations, at each of which the same people would appear in permutation, like moving figures in a mechanical clock.

  ‘Is Professor Vine married?’ Robert asked.

  ‘Yes. He’s got two children.’

  ‘Do they all live here in the College?’

  ‘His wife does; the children board in the Town. All the Installation children do – it keeps them out of mischief.’ They reached the winding staircase which took them to the landing where Kaupff’s door stood beside Willoughby’s. Robert waited while Kaupff found his key, and through the jingling tried to catch any sound that might be leaking from the neighbouring flat. Then, once inside, Robert saw again the private library that was so much more welcoming than the one he had visited in the Town.

  ‘Come, let me show you something,’ Kaupff told him, leading Robert to the bedroom where the professor switched on a table lamp that cast a glowing tongue of light onto the striped wallpaper. ‘Sit yourself down while I find it.’ The only chair was covered with books, so Robert sat on the bed while Kaupff began looking along the spines on the shelves. ‘That’s strange,’ Kaupff murmured. ‘I suppose I must have moved it.’

  From the wall behind him, Robert heard a bump. On the other side of that wall, he realized, were Willoughby and Rosalind. Kaupff was still looking for the book he wanted, but the twisting of his head to read the spines appeared to be giving him neck ache, because he straightened and sat down on the bed beside Robert, casually placing his hand on the young man’s knee. ‘Don’t know what’s happened to it,’ he said with an absent-minded air. ‘Might someone have … ?’ Suddenly he seemed concerned; Kaupff withdrew his hand and stood up, went to a book-case at the other side of the room, and took from the top shelf a cardboard box which he put on the bed and opened. It was full, Robert saw, of handwritten notes. ‘All seems well here,’ Kaupff said with relief. ‘I don’t mind too much if a thief has stolen a single book from me, as long as there is no disturbance to my thousand pages.’

  ‘What are those pages?’ Robert asked, and Kaupff, still stooped over his precious work, looked at him gravely.

  ‘The distillation of years of thought.’ Kaupff sealed the box, returned it to its place of safe-keeping, and once more sat down beside Robert. ‘Now tell me, what made you come out with that line you quoted?’ Again he placed his hand on Robert’s leg.

  ‘So let me seem, until I become?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ Kaupff’s fingers tapped on the soldier’s thigh as if on a desk in a seminar room. ‘Do you know the source?’

  ‘I found it in a book of Goethe’s poems.’

  Kaupff smiled. ‘It’s from one of his novels. But why that particular line?’

  Robert could feel his leg being subtly stroked by a hand working independently of its genially innocent master, as if two entirely separate conversations were being conducted, each unnerving in a different way. Robert stood up. ‘It was a random choice …’

  ‘Nothing in the universe is random.’ Kaupff’s words yearned, as they always did, for the stars; Robert struggled to interpret the second urge that the old man’s hand had implied. ‘You can have no idea how perfectly appropriate your words were; the song of a strange, beautiful child, neither male nor female, transfigured by death. A pale, angelic child …’ Kaupff trailed off and looked down at his lap, where he folded his hands and rubbed his thumbs pensively. ‘How I admire and envy your courage.’ When he
looked up again, Robert was surprised to see films of moisture in the professor’s eyes. ‘You really aren’t afraid to die, are you?’

  The possibility, despite all Robert had been told, still seemed as remote as the planet he had seen through Kaupff’s telescope. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

  ‘I was brave once. The Nazis could have shot me for being a communist – sometimes I almost wish they had.’ Kaupff gave a wistful laugh, and at the same time there was another sound on the wall from the neighbouring room, this time like something small and hard being tapped against it. Kaupff appeared not to notice but Robert wondered if Willoughby and Rosalind were eavesdropping.

  ‘If you’d been shot then you would never have been able to do your heroic work on the Bomb.’

  ‘Someone else would have done it instead,’ said Kaupff. ‘In science, no one is indispensable. I console myself with a flabbier kind of courage – some would call it foolhardiness. For years I’ve worked alone on my theory of quantum gravity, and my ideas have come from unusual sources. That’s what my thousand pages are about – quotations from authors down the ages, wisdom assembled in the hope of synthesizing a new approach to space, time, consciousness. an unorthodox approach, but we can already see the success of it in the progress we’ve made. Though if my academic peers outside the Installation knew how I got the initial inspiration for scalar-wave theory they’d probably think me a mad old fool.’

  Kaupff was interrupted by a loud knocking on the door to the flat. He got up and went to see who it was; Robert went too, and stood watching in the main room as Kaupff opened the door to reveal the waiting figure of Jason.

  ‘You are told to expect a telephone call in ten minutes, sir.’

  ‘I’ll be right down.’

  Jason nodded and Kaupff closed the door on his retreating figure, then turned to Robert, his eyes quite dry now and his mood less intimate. ‘Let me have another quick look for that book I wanted to give you, before we have to leave.’ He rapidly scanned the shelves and at last cried, ‘Ah, here’s another copy – an even better translation.’ Kaupff handed Robert an old leather-bound book that looked as though it dated from the turn of the century or even earlier. On its spine Robert saw, in gold letters, the name Goethe. ‘It’s the novel where your poem came from.’

  ‘Do I have to read it?’ Robert asked. He still hadn’t even started Rocket to the Stars and already he was being given more homework.

  ‘You probably don’t have to. Information permeates the universe, and some minds have the disposition to detect it. I wonder if the whole of this book isn’t already somehow in your unconscious mind, which is why you chose the line you did. How much else lies inside that head of yours?’ As if to emphasize the point, Kaupff stroked Robert’s hair. ‘Science frees us from superstition and makes us see the world as it really is, but Goethe knew that if life is to have any meaning there must be more. We must see the world with love. Do you have love in your heart, Robert?’

  It was like being asked if he feared death, and again the answer lay far off, drifting against a starry background. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Love makes us do the strangest but greatest of things,’ Kaupff said, his voice momentarily darkening. ‘But come now, I must hear what some bureaucrat in London wishes to instruct, and you must be driven to your lodgings – I’m sure you are ready for a meal.’ Kaupff opened the door and followed Robert onto the landing. There was another sound in Willoughby’s neighbouring flat: a heavy bump, though no voices. Kaupff glanced towards Willoughby’s door, then began to go down the spiral staircase with Robert close behind. It was only once they were in the corridor and well beyond earshot that Kaupff told Robert in a low voice, ‘I didn’t get off to a very good start with the Academician, did I?’

  ‘I think not,’ said Robert, glancing at the ‘out’ on Professor Vine’s door.

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder if it was a mistake inviting him here.’

  They emerged into the panelled lobby, where Jason stood at the desk and silently pointed Kaupff towards the private booth in which the telephone call was to be received. ‘Goodnight, Robert,’ Kaupff told him. ‘I shall see you here tomorrow morning at nine o’clock, and then we shall begin tuning that mental receiver of yours – who knows what frequencies we might pick up!’ Kaupff stretched out his hand which Robert took in order to shake; but the young volunteer was surprised to be wrapped in a fatherly hug before Kaupff swiftly turned on his heels and went across the lobby to the booth, whose soundproof door he closed with a heavy thud. A moment later, a red light came on above it.

  Robert, still holding the book Kaupff had given him, stood wondering what he ought to do next. He turned to Jason, whose head was lowered over some paperwork. ‘I’ll need a car.’

  Jason looked up, his short fair hair and smooth, pale skin glowing in the yellow light of the desk lamp beside his hand. ‘Not yet,’ he said flatly.

  A voice came from behind Robert. ‘There you are.’ He turned to see Davis standing at the far end of the lobby. ‘Come with me, please, Volunteer Coyle.’ Robert obeyed, feeling like an errant pupil called to see the head as Davis escorted him through a door to a corridor he had not seen before, just as cold and bare as the one leading to Kaupff’s flat, but without any intervening row of other dwellings. Instead this corridor was a featureless tunnel, harshly lit, whose bricks were painted gloss white, and which had the appearance of the entrance to a prison. Robert walked silently with Davis, the clacking of both men’s feet ringing in his ears, until they reached a reinforced door which Davis unlocked, bringing them into a shabby office. There were three desks, a typewriter and telephone on each, and one was occupied by a man in civilian clothes whose eyes never strayed from the keyboard at his fingers while Davis led Robert into a room with a plain wooden table and a chair on either side, lit by a bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  ‘Sit down,’ Davis instructed, remaining standing while he lit his pipe and closed the door on the clattering typewriter whose sound, now muffled, was like a last precious link with the world beyond the interrogation room. ‘Did he do anything to you?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What did you and Kaupff get up to in his flat?’

  Robert stared at the wooden table. ‘He gave me a book.’ Robert laid it on the table; Davis picked it up for inspection.

  ‘It’s from Imperialist times,’ Davis muttered, flicking through the first few pages while puffing on his pipe. He opened the covers to their full width and held the book up by them, letting the pages dangle in case some hidden note should fall, then peered into the spine’s aperture in search of anything secreted there. ‘I’ll need to get this checked out,’ he said, tossing it back onto the table. ‘What else has he given you?’

  ‘Another book called Rocket to the Stars.’

  ‘We know about that,’ said Davis. ‘It’s harmless.’ The commissioner sat down. ‘Has he done any more than hug you or put his arm round you?’

  ‘No,’ said Robert, still staring at the table and feeling unable to meet Davis’s gaze.

  ‘Kissed you? It’s not illegal.’

  ‘No, he hasn’t kissed me, and I certainly wouldn’t want him to.’

  Davis sat back with a creak of his wooden chair. ‘I don’t think you’re a queer. But you need to know one or two things about Kaupff. Hero of the Resistance, Hero of Socialist Labour – without him there would have been no nuclear deterrent and the capitalists could have walked straight back in. He’s worth a lot to us and our way of life.’ Davis leaned forward with another creak, resting his elbows on the table. ‘Doesn’t make him a perfect human being, though. We all have our weaknesses. And do you know what his is?’

  ‘I think I can guess.’

  ‘Let me tell you what it was like here in the Installation during the early days,’ Davis continued. ‘I never saw it, of course – we’re going back twenty or thirty years, when there were far fewer people here, and the Bomb was the only project. Life was pretty basic �
�� the scientists could bring their wives and children, but there were no facilities for them, so some of the personnel got together to run a makeshift school. Kaupff taught in it for an hour or two every week even though he was working night and day on the Bomb – very noble of him, you might think. Except that he had an ulterior motive. That’s his weakness.’ Davis lifted the small book and drummed its corner on the table to match the rhythm of his thoughts; a gesture not unlike Kaupff’s on Robert’s leg. ‘He likes little boys, does our professor. In fact he likes them so much that he took one lad into a toilet and raped him.’

  Robert’s stomach lurched.

  ‘I’m sure you feel exactly the same way about it that I do,’ said Davis. ‘Scum like that deserve the death penalty they get for it. In fact I’m sure you’ll agree that hanging is altogether too humane – they ought to be castrated first as an example to other perverts. The question is, why didn’t Kaupff get what was coming to him? And the answer, of course, is that he was too useful. Not all perverts are equal, and when your pederast is one of the leading scientists in Britain’s nuclear programme, well, perhaps it’s best to brush things under the carpet. The boy’s evidence was contradictory; there was bruising but no spunk; perhaps he fell and hurt his arse on the toilet and he made up all that stuff about a man coming in behind him, or else it was another man, because the boy never got a good look. Who knows? We have to accept that matters of national security and state secrecy are more important than any individual. So Kaupff was never charged – he got clean away with it. Except that he never taught at the school again, and soon a proper one was built, as the Installation expanded. It was all a very long time ago and I suppose we should let bygones be bygones. Oh, but there’s another incident I ought to mention, happened fifteen years ago. Lady who lives in the Town took her toddler to play in the swing park. She got talking to a friend, next thing she knows, the kid’s gone – wandered off. Every parent’s nightmare. She looks all over the place – eventually it’s half the Town hunting for the lad, who some say was seen in the company of a man. And where do they find the boy? Drowned in the river. Now what did a nice woman like Dorothy Frank ever do to deserve that, eh?’