Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  Robert fidgeted in the car’s small seat; his knees were pressed against the grubby glove compartment, and when he tried to adopt a more comfortable position the flap dropped open. Papers were crammed inside, but also something else. Letting the flap fall fully, Robert saw a small black automatic pistol. He glanced once more towards the shop, satisfied himself that the driver would not return swiftly, then reached inside the glove compartment to touch the gun’s dull metal, sliding his fingers beneath the handle and finding the weapon far lighter than anything he had used in his military service; more like the kind that a D5 man might conceal inside his jacket. Taking it out of the glove compartment but keeping it low in his lap, Robert found it was fully loaded. And as negotiations reached a conclusion inside the butcher’s shop with the exchange of several vouchers for a small brown-paper bag passed across the counter, Robert decided he would give Dora a more useful gift. He hurriedly opened the rucksack at his feet, hid the gun there, then closed the glove compartment and restored as much of his composure as he could before the returning driver had even reached the shop’s open doorway. What he was doing was potentially a capital offence but he had no fear of consequences, only a sublime indifference when the driver climbed back in and passed the package to him along with the depleted voucher book. Robert could feel the meat’s soft, moist bulk inside its wrapper. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘A kilo,’ said the driver, ‘so you can think yourself lucky.’

  ‘But what kind?’

  The driver laughed hoarsely. ‘It’s a kilo, I told you. Don’t ask me what the animal’s name was – we weren’t that intimately acquainted.’ He started the car with two or three turns of the ignition key, and Robert slipped the package into his bag on the floor, being careful not to open it too widely.

  ‘Where now?’ the driver asked, startling Robert, who thought their destination was to be the College. ‘You said chocolate, didn’t you?’

  Robert wanted only to escape before his theft was discovered, but he knew the most dangerous mistake he could make would be a sudden change of plan. ‘That’s right, chocolate. And a pair of warm gloves.’

  ‘I know just the place,’ the driver said, turning into a small side street lacking shops which Robert took to be a short cut, though they soon pulled up at a terraced house through whose small lace-curtained window could dimly be seen the limbless mannequin of a dressmaker. ‘You’d better go and choose. What sort of hands has she got?’

  Robert was absent-mindedly gazing at the dummy’s narrow waist and smoothly swelling breasts. ‘Who?’

  ‘Your landlady – you want to buy her gloves, don’t you?’ The driver must have seen the dreamy look on Robert’s face, because he added, ‘You do mean your landlady, don’t you? Or might there be some other young woman you want to buy a present for – a friend you met in the Blue Cat, perhaps?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Robert conceded, lacking the power or will to deny it.

  ‘I thought as much,’ the driver said with a satisfied air. ‘Go in there and get what you want.’

  Robert realized what a perilous situation he was in. Left alone, the driver might decide to look inside the glove compartment. ‘Come and help me.’

  ‘I’m no expert.’

  ‘But you must know a lot more than I do about what women like.’

  This scrap of flattery brought the sardonic smile back to the driver’s lips. ‘I know what the girls in the Blue Cat like, if that’s what you mean.’ He opened his door, Robert did likewise, and the driver led the way to the dressmaker’s door, ringing the bell and waiting until a small, elegant middle-aged lady appeared.

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Baxter, I have a gentleman here who’s looking for ladies’ gloves.’

  ‘You’d better come in, then,’ she said, showing them to the front room where the mannequin stood proudly on a tall metal pole. Here was both sitting room and shop; behind an armchair, dresses were ranged on a rack; a glass cabinet displayed female underwear whose frilled edges had the untouchable beauty of submerged anemones. The whole room smelled of women, Robert thought; the secret aroma of that other planet where one half of humanity so comfortably resides.

  Spectacled Mrs Baxter, prim as a headmistress in her black cardigan and pearl necklace, went to a tall, highly polished wooden chest with many drawers, one of which she opened. ‘Is it for a formal occasion?’

  ‘More for warmth,’ said Robert.

  She turned, looking at him almost with disdain. ‘I see. Everyday winter wear, then?’ She reached into the drawer. ‘How about these?’ It was a fur-lined pair made of suede, and Mrs Baxter laid them across her wrist like strangled rabbits.

  ‘They’ll do.’

  ‘Well, that was an easy choice,’ the driver declared, wondering why his presence had been thought necessary.

  Mrs Baxter shared his distaste at such hurry. ‘Might I show you some others? They’re not for every day, but they’d make a very fine gift.’ While Robert held the thick suede gloves, Mrs Baxter brought out three more pairs, each a work of art. One was black and covered in tiny sequins, another was richly embroidered with a dense pattern of flowers while the third was so marvellously diaphanous, lilac coloured and made of what appeared to be silk, that the pair seemed almost too flimsy to wear. Yet when Robert stroked and held them he immediately sensed the sweet touch of Dora’s fingers, as gentle and delicate as the interior of her mouth. He raised the gloves to his lips as if to kiss them; involuntarily he had been overcome by an urge to smell them.

  ‘That’s the sort of thing a young lady likes,’ the driver confidently asserted. ‘You can take it from me.’

  Mrs Baxter looked modestly downwards while the two men silently assessed the proposed purchase. ‘How much are they?’ Robert asked.

  She raised her eyes and pursed her lips. It was a matter for discussion. ‘He’s with the College,’ the driver explained. ‘He’s on D book.’

  ‘Then we could say fifty for both pairs.’ Though she looked like a headmistress, Mrs Baxter had the shrewdness of a businesswoman.

  ‘Fifty for two pairs of gloves!’ the driver complained.

  ‘That’s no ordinary pair,’ Mrs Baxter insisted, nodding towards the ones Robert still held lovingly. Even more than the full-bosomed mannequin in the window, these soft gloves were a tangible simulation of the object of his desire. He reached into his pocket and brought out his voucher book.

  ‘You’re either mad or in love,’ the driver told him.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ Robert said, tearing out sheets of coloured paper that Dora considered worthless.

  Mrs Baxter took the gloves but not yet the payment. ‘I’ll wrap them for you.’ From out of the drawer she lifted a small, flat box of white cardboard, filled with fine crêpe paper which provided a bed for the most extravagant purchase of his entire life. The suede rabbits were an unwrapped afterthought, tossed onto the closed box when Mrs Baxter sat at her desk to write out the receipt and complete the transaction. Then she handed the items to Robert.

  ‘You’ve made a very good choice,’ she said, showing the men out. ‘If any young man had bought something like that for me when I was a girl, I’d have …’ she paused, lost for words. ‘I really don’t know what I’d have done.’ With this comment, spoken as Mrs Baxter opened the front door to release her customers from her feminine world, the meaning of Robert’s gift assumed a startling clarity for him. Whether it was with vouchers or with gloves, or with meat or anything else, the only commodity he could buy was sex. It was rationed exactly like everything else.

  ‘Chocolates next?’ the driver asked when the door was closed behind them and they stood facing the parked car.

  ‘Never mind about that,’ said Robert. The only gift that mattered was the loaded one in his rucksack.

  17

  They now went straight to the College, where the driver halted at the checkpoint to be scrutinized by the armed guard. It was the usual routine procedure, but Robert clenched his knees nervous
ly over the bag at his feet when the guard approached and the driver wound down his window to call a friendly greeting.

  The guard grunted in response, steam curling from his lips into the cold air, then nodded towards the car’s passenger. ‘Authorization?’

  Robert had only his military papers and identity card; he hadn’t been issued with any special pass for the Installation and had never yet been asked for one. It was as if the rules had changed now that he had something to hide. He was about to speak, but it was the driver who saved him. ‘He’s with Professor Kaupff’s group, surely you know that.’

  ‘I need to see some authorization.’

  The driver chuckled. ‘You’re new here, aren’t you? I’ll show you the mandate, then we can get a move on before our balls freeze.’ It seemed as if he was about to stretch across to the glove compartment to retrieve what he wanted, but the driver’s grip rested instead on the gear stick as he put the car in neutral, then reached inside his leather jacket and brought out what looked like a photocopy of an official state document, stamped with the government seal. He passed it through the open window and the guard inspected it with great deliberation, though it was probably unintelligible to him.

  ‘Very well,’ the guard said at last, handing it back. ‘Move on, please.’

  They sped past the raised barrier, the car’s acceleration indicating the driver’s displeasure. ‘Fucking new boy thinks he’s going to be a general. He’ll soon learn what’s what around here.’ They took the turn-off for the Lodge. ‘Once you’re posted here it’s for life. No promotion, no change, no nothing. That’s how the Installation works. Good pay, decent perks, no worries.’ He glanced towards Robert. ‘You’ve figured that out already, haven’t you?’

  Robert nodded.

  ‘And if there’s a nice young lady who likes fancy gloves, so much the better. I expect the two of you’ll end up having ten kids and retiring to a flat in F District, if you don’t get given rooms here instead.’ They’d reached the forecourt, where the driver halted in front of the Lodge’s main entrance and switched off the engine. ‘I hear you had some kind of mishap last night.’

  The comment came from nowhere and took Robert by surprise. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘After you came out of the Blue Cat. This is a small place, people see things. Got beaten up, didn’t you? Jealous boyfriend, I expect. Never enough women to go round.’ He leaned closer and lowered his voice; a gesture of comradeship rather than secrecy, since the nearest guard was standing at a far-off corner of the building. ‘You take my advice – don’t fall in love with her.’

  ‘Who?’ Robert feigned innocence.

  ‘The one that’s getting those gloves you paid a week’s wages for, that’s who. You’re a newcomer, just like the lad down there thinks he’s got to see authorization for every single person comes through his barrier. A few days of seeing the same faces again and again’ll soon put him right. And you? I wonder how many times you’ll need to get beaten up before you realize there’s not a single woman here who isn’t a whore.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I don’t mean they all work at places like the Blue Cat, but they have to look after themselves one way or another. If they can get themselves a big man then maybe they can get out of here – but that’s more than the lad down the hill will ever manage.’ He had put on the handbrake and seemed set for a rest before the next journey in his schedule.

  ‘You surely wouldn’t call your own wife a whore.’

  The driver was unperturbed. ‘In this place we don’t ask questions,’ he said simply. ‘When you’re sitting up there in your room in the Lodge twenty years from now with your good lady wife, there’s going to be half the men in Town have slept with her. They’ll be passing her in the street, ignoring her, same as you’ll be ignoring all the women you’ve known who’ve got married to your colleagues. That’s how it works here. I don’t say it’s right or wrong, but when I see a young fellow in love then I can’t help offering a word or two. But don’t listen to me – you’ll learn for yourself.’

  ‘Thanks for the advice.’ Robert got out, carefully carrying the rucksack, and walked to the Lodge’s entrance lobby.

  Jason was standing at the reception desk as usual, pointlessly inactive yet with the alertness of a basking chameleon waiting for an insect to come within range. ‘Professor Kaupff is expecting you,’ he said with a mildly impatient air, coming out from behind the desk. ‘Allow me to take your belongings.’

  Robert fumbled uneasily with the buttons of his overcoat, the incriminating rucksack hanging by one strap from his right shoulder. He had no choice but to pass it to Jason, then his coat, which the smooth-skinned butler took behind the desk and skewered deftly on a hook, while the bag, as if thought too coarse with its suggestion of rugged hill walks for such elegant surroundings, was secreted out of sight beneath. He then led Robert across the panelled lobby to the Maxwell Room, where they found Kaupff sitting with Professor Vine, the two of them drinking coffee from white china cups. A shiny steel coffee pot and a third, empty cup rested with the milk jug and sugar bowl on the small table between the scientists’ leather armchairs. Kaupff stood up; Vine remained seated.

  ‘Good morning, Coyle,’ Kaupff said, approaching to shake the recruit by the hand while Jason quietly retreated. ‘I trust you’re not too hungover after your night on the tiles.’

  Robert glanced across at Vine but saw on the seated professor’s smiling face no record of the Blue Cat, other than a general ruddiness of complexion brought on by many years of excessive drinking, to which last night’s bottle or two of wine could hardly have added. ‘I feel fine,’ he said as he received the old man’s grasp.

  ‘I’m relieved to hear it.’ Kaupff waved towards an empty armchair. ‘Do sit down so that we can run through today’s programme. Coffee?’ Robert shook his head, sank into the chair, and realized how much more sleep he needed. Kaupff sat too, then Vine placed his coffee cup on the table with a clink of its saucer and began the meeting.

  ‘Yesterday Professor Kaupff explained to you how to screen out electromagnetic radiation. Do you recall the method?’ It was a kind of exam, and Robert didn’t have a good track record with those. Even telepathy couldn’t help him now. Vine saw his confusion. ‘A metal box? Don’t you remember that electromagnetic waves can’t penetrate it?’

  Robert said meekly, ‘I don’t have a good memory.’

  Vine and Kaupff looked at each other knowingly. ‘Alpha interference?’ Vine said, and Kaupff nodded. Then he asked Robert, ‘What about gravity? Is there any way of removing its effects?’

  Robert could think only of the gun in the bag beneath Jason’s desk.

  ‘The lift,’ Kaupff prompted. ‘Think of the falling elevator compartment I drew yesterday on the blackboard. When you fall you are weightless and hence free of gravity.’

  Robert’s theft had made him free; falling was what he wanted.

  ‘Here’s something for you to think about,’ said Vine. ‘An airliner is flying through the sky and a man jumps out of his seat waving a gun.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s a thought experiment,’ Vine explained. ‘Let’s try it.’

  And all at once he was there, a passenger in seat 13C gazing out at white clouds rolling like cauliflower far beneath, about to bring the gun from his rucksack and point it at the crisp firm breast of air hostess Barbara Perkins, the same actress they saw in some other show. It was on a television screen a thousand million light years away. ‘And there are cracks in our close too.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Vine.

  ‘Slippage,’ Kaupff murmured. ‘Robert, how old are you?’

  ‘Twelve.’

  ‘And where are your parents?’

  ‘The aliens took them and gave me new ones.’ He came to. ‘What did I just say?’

  The two professors were staring at him; Vine glanced at Kaupff. ‘Has she used the invasive transducer on him yet?’

  �
��No, later,’ said Kaupff. ‘Robert, you understand that we want you to help us detect signals from the visiting object. We think it must be emitting scalar waves, but they’re easily swamped by electromagnetic or gravitational fields.’

  ‘Somebody fires a bullet,’ Vine continued. ‘The bullet falls.’

  Barbara Perkins is moving in a parabolic arc towards an unconscious lady while a male passenger in seat 16D – married with two children, the director of a pet-food company – gets out of his seat some distance behind the hijacker, who hears what’s coming, turns and faces his assailant with gun raised.

  ‘Mission: Impossible.’

  ‘Not at all, Robert,’ Kaupff assured him. ‘There’s nothing impossible about the mission. Difficult, certainly. Dangerous. One could even say …’

  ‘Potentially lethal,’ Vine concluded. ‘But never mind about our thought experiment, Coyle, I only wanted to explain to you the principle of equivalence, which says that all things fall equally.’

  ‘A wonderfully socialistic principle, Robert.’

  ‘So if we want to detect scalar waves with minimum interference, we need a metal capsule in free fall. A bullet with you inside it.’

  An aeroplane that could fly as fast as a bullet. ‘Concorde,’ said Robert.

  Again the professor’s faces were blank but intrigued. ‘A fine and noble sentiment,’ Kaupff observed, taking a pencil and notebook from his jacket pocket and jotting something. ‘Peace and harmony between nations – or even between worlds.’

  ‘Why did I say concord?’ Robert asked them, confused. ‘What did it mean?’

  Kaupff put away his notebook. ‘You’re already receiving faint signals from the visitor. They don’t make any sense; they’re random patterns but your brain interprets them as words. When you’re flying in the capsule, connected to the right equipment, we’ll be able to understand those signals.’

  Vine explained, ‘The non-invasive transducer has attuned you.’