Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘They’re playing tricks with our minds.’

  ‘Some trick. But it’s down to you now, college boy.’ He looked towards the door. ‘Here she comes.’

  Rosalind had appeared at the entrance, and approached them with a stern expression. ‘Can either of you two shed light on Volunteer Harvey’s whereabouts? He’s gone missing.’

  The men were aghast. ‘I walked home with him last night,’ said Robert.

  ‘I was only informed a few moments ago – security are on full alert.’

  ‘Have you spoken to Commissioner Davis?’

  ‘No, but I assume he’s in charge of the search.’

  ‘It’s his fault Harvey’s done a runner,’ said Forsyth.

  Rosalind’s eyebrows rose. ‘That’s a grave and reckless allegation. It’ll be officially noted.’

  ‘Won’t make much difference,’ said Robert. ‘This mission’s record is bad enough already.’

  She stared at both men, suddenly aware she was dealing with a minor mutiny. ‘Well, Rosalind?’ Forsyth taunted. ‘Is it my turn to be ejected?’

  She glanced round the dining room; no one was within earshot but she looked ruffled. ‘This is not the place …’

  ‘Go on, baby, sling me off the mission.’

  ‘We can’t discuss it here.’

  ‘You’ve got college boy all to yourself now.’

  ‘Don’t get any romantic ideas,’ Robert interjected. ‘She’s not the type.’

  ‘Be quiet, both of you.’

  ‘So tell me, Rosalind,’ Forsyth demanded, ‘am I in or out?’

  ‘Your heart-rate and blood-pressure readings were a little high …’

  ‘He was terrified!’ Robert burst in. Forsyth flinched but said nothing; Rosalind looked round the room again with mounting confusion. ‘All these readings of yours aren’t just pen-tracks on a roll of paper, they’re people’s feelings.’

  ‘You don’t know what you’re saying.’

  ‘You’re playing games with our lives.’

  Her composure returned. ‘I assure you both that this is no game. Forsyth, you’ll be assigned other duties – you won’t be flying but you’re still part of the mission. And, Coyle, as soon as you finish eating we need to go to Professor Kaupff’s seminar in the education centre.’

  Robert pushed his half-empty plate away. ‘I’ve had enough.’ He stood to follow her out and gave Forsyth a parting nod. ‘I’m sorry for what I said. No one doubts your bravery.’

  Forsyth looked broken. ‘Good luck, college boy.’

  They walked in silence back to Rosalind’s office; it was not until they were nearly at her door that she said under her breath, ‘What an odious man.’

  ‘Who? Forsyth?’ Robert watched her bring out her key. ‘You’re surely not claiming moral superiority, after what you did to me in the laboratory?’

  She unlocked the door and stood waiting while he went in to retrieve his coat and bag. ‘At least I didn’t rape you.’

  ‘That’s a matter of opinion. And are you telling me Forsyth’s a rapist?’

  She nodded. ‘He was due to stand trial before he came here. He volunteered so he could escape a court appearance.’

  Robert buttoned his coat, unable to decide who were the Installation’s monsters and who were its heroes. ‘So do you think we’re all like him?’

  ‘I’ve got more important things to think about.’ She watched him pull the rucksack over his shoulder. ‘What have you got in there?’

  ‘Nothing much.’ He made to leave but Rosalind blocked his way.

  ‘What kind of nothing?’

  He shrugged. ‘A few things I bought this morning.’

  She folded her arms, still barring his exit. ‘So when you say nothing you mean something. Show me.’

  Fear seized him. ‘Why?’

  ‘I want to see.’

  He tried to be light about it. ‘You think you can simply order me around?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘What if I don’t want to open it?’

  ‘Then I’ll do it for you.’

  She reached out and Robert wondered what he was going to do when she saw the gun. He could say that it was his weapon and he was authorized to carry it; that he was given it by Harvey; that he didn’t know how it got there; it was all a mistake. He could pull it out in an instant, point it at her forehead, punch a neat crimson hole in her smooth brow and watch her tilt backwards into the empty corridor like a felled tree.

  He took the bag from his shoulder and put it behind his back with a teasing smile. ‘It’s a secret.’

  ‘I already told you, I don’t play games.’

  ‘But you like mysteries, don’t you?’

  ‘I like solving them.’

  ‘And once you’ve solved them, what then, when everybody’s thoughts have been turned into waves and numbers in your machine? Is that your idea of happiness?’

  ‘Are you trying to insult me or flirt with me?’

  ‘Why not flirt? You said it yourself, every man in this place who isn’t a queer makes a pass at you. When’s my turn?’

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

  ‘And what about in the lift, when you touched me?’ He brought the bag from behind his back and let it dangle from his hand; he had distracted her sufficiently. ‘What sort of game was that?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

  ‘Oh, you do, Rosalind. You may be cold and clinical in your work, acting like an insensitive robot because that’s the only way you can get ahead, but you’re still a woman. And women are all the same.’

  She smiled thinly. ‘Tell me about it, since you’re such an expert.’

  ‘You want a dashing knight who’ll sweep you off your feet, care for you, give you babies and a nice home.’

  ‘Not all of us are quite so unrealistic. And in case you’ve forgotten, we had a revolution in 1946 so that we could get rid of bourgeois fantasies. I’m a worker and a patriot, Robert, just like you. Yes I have feelings, we all do, but in a place like the Installation, feelings only get in the way.’

  ‘Have you never been in love?’

  ‘I’m in love with my work and my country. They’ve never let me down.’

  ‘You sound like a disappointed woman.’

  ‘Don’t go thinking you can cure me.’ She stepped closer and lowered her voice. ‘You think you understand so much – but you know nothing. You talk about trivialities and you miss everything that’s significant. Do you think you were brought here for a romantic adventure? Stop and consider for a moment where you are, why it was created.’

  ‘To make the Bomb.’

  ‘Yes, and all the other projects: the missiles, fighter aircraft, spy satellites. What do they have in common?’

  ‘This is a military research base …’

  ‘Death, that’s what this place is about. That’s its purpose. We’ve all got a gun at our head and the only question is how long we can keep the trigger from being pulled, yet you don’t see it. You’re too busy trying to fall in love, too upset I’m not some silly girl in a pretty dress who’ll hold hands with you.’ She reached down towards the bag in his hand. ‘Show me your secret.’

  There could be no escape; he awkwardly loosened the buckles, his fingers mutinous with anxiety. She peered down into the aperture he created.

  ‘What’s in the box?’ she asked, seeing the uppermost item.

  ‘A present.’

  ‘So that’s it; a gift for your lady friend. Underwear, I expect.’

  ‘Never mind what it is.’

  ‘Surely I can take a peek?’ She began to reach inside the rucksack and Robert rehearsed the surprise and shock he’d show when the gun was found; but first she prodded the brown-paper bag that covered it. ‘What on earth’s this?’

  ‘Meat.’

  She drew out her arm in disgust and looked at him with a puzzled expression, then broke into a laugh. ‘You really do know the way to a woman’s heart.’

  ‘And you don’t
know the way to anyone’s.’

  Her face froze. ‘Close it up before the stink escapes, and make sure you don’t leak blood on the floor. There’s a car waiting outside for us.’

  20

  Kaupff was standing at the blackboard ready to begin when Robert and Rosalind arrived for the seminar. Davis was in the same back-row seat he had occupied the previous day; Willoughby sat beside him. Vine and the other physicists were there too; the only absentees were the four recruits who had all been eliminated.

  Kaupff showed none of the grief Robert had seen a few hours earlier. ‘Close the door and let’s begin,’ he ordered, sounding mildly impatient at the enforced delay. Robert did as he was instructed, then went to join Rosalind in the front row, placing his rucksack beneath the table.

  Then Kaupff began. ‘Last night some of you looked through my telescope. I told you about Kant’s theory that the universe undergoes perpetual evolution through a balance of opposing forces. Goethe sought to understand life in similar terms; yet Marxism teaches us that the balance cannot be static: every part of nature contains its own antithesis, its own negation.’ He looked solemnly at Robert. ‘The more fully we live, the more certainly we die.’

  There was a cough from the back row as Willoughby prepared to interrupt. ‘This is all very fascinating, Professor Kaupff; but is it really relevant to modern physics?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Kaupff, his enthusiasm undiminished. ‘Kant understood that gravity dictates cosmic evolution; we now know the natural endpoint of this process is gravitational collapse, the formation of frozen stars, black holes, whatever we care to call them.’ His voice quickened as he elucidated. ‘The visitor to our solar system represents the highest form of evolutionary progress. The approaching Red Star is living proof of the Marxist theory of universal history.’

  A murmur ran round the room.

  ‘Physics went somewhat astray in the nineteenth century,’ Kaupff resumed. ‘Kant’s insight was forgotten; there arose a bourgeois misconception that the universe moves constantly from order to chaos. But as we know from theoretical studies of collapsed stars, entropy is a measure of information, not disorder. What capitalism sees as a dungeon of disarray is instead a region of maximal content, ultimate order, purest simplicity. We should regard the Red Star not as destroyer of information, but as processor.’

  Again Willoughby interrupted. ‘Please, Professor Kaupff, I am not an expert in this field and I confess I am struggling to connect the eclectic flow of your ideas into a coherent whole. Can you tell me who was responsible for this work you cite on the entropy of collapsed stars?’

  ‘Various physicists contributed,’ Kaupff told him, ‘but some very crucial and remarkable work was done by a former student of mine named Hawkins.’

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Willoughby, nodding with what appeared to be sudden recognition. ‘His story made waves beyond the rarefied world of theoretical physics; and I know that it was also this Hawkins who proposed that collapsed stars must emit radiation.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Kaupff agreed. ‘Their entropy corresponds to a temperature, leading to the so-called Hawkins radiation whose scalar component, in our model, should be detectable through its effect on living tissue.’

  ‘But it’s not officially called Hawkins radiation anymore, is it?’ said Willoughby, revealing rather more expert knowledge than he had previously admitted. Robert looked round and saw that he had a small pile of books and papers on the table before him. ‘And poor Hawkins is no longer alive. A pity that his short career should have been marred by public utterances on subjects he was not qualified to speak about.’

  Kaupff gave an impatient shrug. ‘Such misdemeanours are irrelevant to the present discussion.’

  ‘In an article published in a foreign magazine he described himself as a positivist, meaning he thinks physics can only explain experimental outcomes, never the underlying truths. Yet Lenin explicitly denounced such views in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. We see the misfortune that can arise when a specialist strays beyond his field of competence.’

  ‘Of course I am familiar with all this,’ Kaupff said wearily. ‘But you puzzle me, Academician Willoughby. You are a writer I respect and admire, and I invited you here to the Installation because I thought you would be enthusiastic about the exchange of ideas between artists and scientists which I believe essential for the progress of our socialist society. Yet you belittle my efforts; you think Kant belongs only to philosophers, or Goethe to poets. That certainly wasn’t the approach Engels took in Dialectics of Nature.’

  Kaupff appeared indignant rather than anxious; Robert had warned him of the danger he faced but the professor had ignored him; too old, too proud, too stubborn to listen. Or perhaps he genuinely believed in the power of genius to triumph over mediocrity.

  ‘Continue your talk, Professor,’ Davis ordered. ‘You were talking about information processing.’

  Kaupff nodded, unshaken by the intervention. ‘The scientifically qualified among us know we can think of any natural process as a form of computation; but what sort of computer is the Red Star? Where does the information come from, that it sends to us as scalar waves? If the highest form of biological evolution is consciousness, might not gravitational evolution reach the same apex? I believe the Red Star is a naturally evolved extraterrestrial intelligence with which we can hope to communicate.’

  Now there were gasps; yet Kaupff was still oblivious to the ambush everyone else could see him walking into. He was a man made reckless by the speed of his own thoughts, by the purity of his convictions, by the intellectual shallowness he perceived in those around him. ‘The cosmos is evolving towards universal consciousness. The old theories of Kant, Fichte or Schelling must be recast in a wholly Marxist unification of general relativity, quantum mechanics and information theory: a transcendental materialism.’

  Throughout the audience there was stunned silence until, from the back of the room, Willoughby began clapping his hands. ‘Bravo! Well done!’ Like any Party dogmatist he was not a man to whom irony came easily; his tone was instead sourly sarcastic. ‘To have unified Schelling with Marx – that is really quite an achievement! Schelling, whose ramblings Coleridge so ably plagiarized. And I know you’re something of an expert on Coleridge, Professor.’ Willoughby began studying one of the pages of notes on the table before him, then recited what he saw. ‘The high spiritual instinct of the human being impelling us to seek unity by harmonious adjustment, and thus establishing the principle that all the parts of an organised whole must be assimilated to the more important and essential parts … Do you recognize that, Professor Kaupff?’

  ‘Of course I do; it’s from Biographia Literaria.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Willoughby agreed, ‘and immediately afterwards you quote Marx: The worker produces capital and capital produces him.’

  Kaupff froze, realizing where the page, and all the others in front of Willoughby, must have come from. ‘Those are my private notes,’ he said quietly.

  ‘No,’ Commissioner Davis interjected. ‘In the Installation there is no private property. These notes – which we found secreted in a box carefully hidden in your bedroom – are the property of the state, and you have no right to withhold them. Such subterfuge is serious enough in itself; but then we have to consider the content of the notes, which it has been Academician Willoughby’s onerous task to assess.’

  Willoughby sighed. ‘It has been wearisome work; worse than any of the undergraduate essay marking I used to have to do, because although young people often write rubbish, it is at least the innocent rubbish of childhood, and can be corrected. This, though, is incorrigible.’

  Kaupff was finally beginning to understand that the circle was closing. He rubbed perspiration from his forehead. ‘What do you mean? My notes consist of quotations, nothing more.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s how those quotations are arranged,’ Willoughby insisted. ‘You cannot pretend that your work – your monumental labour and futile drudgery – is meant
to be without meaning. No, the meaning lies in the choice and the positioning, over which you appear to have taken much care. Thus we find Marx made a footnote to Coleridge; Engels an afterthought to Goethe; Lenin an appendix to Confucius or Giordano Bruno or Raymond Lull or anybody else it pleases you to stir into this vertiginous melange, this iridescent potpourri of half-truths robbed of context and given new, false ones; this intellectual abortion of which it can truly be said that it is an eclectic pauper’s broth of the most despicable kind.’

  ‘It is nothing …’

  ‘Professor Kaupff,’ Davis had risen to his feet. ‘You are hereby relieved of your duties as head of the mission.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘You will be escorted to the Lodge and will remain there until we receive further instructions.’

  ‘This can’t be happening,’ Kaupff weakly pleaded. ‘Under what authority …?’

  Davis had come out from behind the table where the damning documents lay piled and now walked to the front of the room. ‘Sit down,’ he told Kaupff, who slid onto a chair at the side of the blackboard. The commissioner then addressed the assembled company, nearly all of whom shared Kaupff’s sense of shock. ‘As of this moment, Professor Vine is acting head of the mission. On behalf of the Science and Defence Council of the Central Committee, I wish to thank Professor Vine for bringing his concerns about Professor Kaupff’s recent behaviour so swiftly and promptly to official attention.’

  Robert looked round at Vine and saw a man whose head was bowed in shame.

  ‘We all admire the great patriotic work which Professor Kaupff has done in the past,’ Davis continued. ‘We shall never forget how his inventions helped repel our foreign enemies. But now the enemy walks among us. The Installation has been infiltrated by spies, saboteurs who pose as loyal workers then seek to undermine our freedom and way of life. In these dangerous times we must look closely at every man and we must ask: is he one of us, or is he one of them?’ Davis swung round to face the accused who sat slumped beside him. ‘Which are you, Professor Kaupff?’ The physicist remained silent, and Davis turned to his audience again. ‘He promised to tell us the full nature of the mission today, and I will not disappoint you. Here, in simple outline, is the scheme which Professor Kaupff seriously asks the Central Committee to regard as a viable means of investigating the frozen star.’ He brought a piece of paper from his jacket pocket, unfolded it and began to read.