by Chris James
“You’re a mongoose among cobras. I could give you examples. In the pursuit of something just or right, nothing stops you. Of our six candidates, you scored second overall.”
“Second?”
“I’ll be honest with you, Lonnie. Six months ago, our first choice was killed in a drive-by shooting in Philadelphia− innocent bystander caught in the cross-fire. That you and I are here together right now is a gift of fate. A must happen transition.”
Pilot smiled with his eyes. “I’ll have to take your word for it, Forrest. Your people are very good, by the way. I never noticed anybody watching me, ever.”
“That’s because you saw no reason why anybody would want to. We see things when we’re wary – miss them when we’re not. If I put one of my people on you tomorrow, you’d spot them immediately.”
As they approached Penzance, Pilot gazed at the endless parked cars that had taken the place of the trees. “Is Mrs. Vaalon here with you?” he asked.
“No. She’s in Flushing, New York. Mount Hebron Cemetery. She died seven months ago.”
Pilot noted an emptiness in the man’s voice. “I’m sorry, Forrest. I didn’t– ”
“It’s okay, Lonnie. She’s cheering us on from the sidelines now.”
Half an hour later they were eating fish pie at the Tolcarne Inn. “So, Forrest, let me get this straight,” Pilot said. “You want to hire me to become governor of a strip of rock in the Bay of Biscay.”
“Correct.” Vaalon rotated his chair forty-five degrees and crossed his long legs in preparation for a monologue. He leaned forward and lowered his voice so as not to be overheard by the adjacent tables. “There’s a simple scale at play in the world today, Lonnie. On one side you have the accepted order of the human presence. Let’s call it the old oak tree. It’s well established, with roots that go deep and a canopy that throws its shade over everything. To many, it’s a beautiful and magnificent tree. Others know it’s dying because it has extracted all but the tiniest remainder of nourishment from the soil. It’s grown too big. On the other side, we have this,” he said, picking up the nearest beer mat, his chosen prop of the day.
“An acorn.”
“Most definitely not an acorn, Lonnie. That’s the whole problem. Acorns only grow up to be other oak trees. It’s cyclical.” Vaalon turned the beer mat over. “The world needs to be turned upside down, inside out and back to front just to get it back to where it should be. And to do that, we need a base. Not one within an existing country, but a virgin land free of history, tradition, religious and political dogma and the other barnacles of so-called civilization. But where do we find this place? In Africa somewhere? The South Pole? Lapland? All used up. There’s nowhere on earth that isn’t already in the hands of the opposition, apart from the bottom of the sea.” Vaalon paused to let his words settle across the table. “Lonnie, it’s my job to give you that base and your job to use it− to establish a state which, by its very nature, calls into question the entire validity of the existing order. If all goes to plan, you’ll have it. It’s simply a matter of being in the right place at the right time and then stepping ashore and claiming it. Believe me, your nation will be far more than a strip of cold, wet rock in the Bay of Biscay.”
Vaalon stopped talking and Pilot stopped eating to allow the man time to catch up. “For the first few years you’ll be playing under the world’s rules,” Vaalon continued when their plates were equal, “using its resources and financial institutions, sheltering under its international laws and so on. You’ve got to be clever, though, and not build lines of exchange that can’t be severed if necessary. Here−” Vaalon reached into his briefcase, withdrew a thick hardback book and handed it to Pilot. “This is to supplement your previous studies. Read, digest, memorize and then, from August, live the contents of this book.”
Pilot looked at the title and smiled. The Psychology of Leadership.
“Back to our island, the first part of the process shouldn’t last more than five or ten years,” Vaalon continued. “By then, your land should be self-sufficient. It’ll occupy a strategic location in the world, yet be free from the world’s grip. At this point you’ll be in a position to develop your model more effectively. But before we carry on this conversation, there’s something else I’d like us to do over a hot cup of something.”
When Pilot’s coffee and Vaalon’s mint tea came, along with two brandies, the old man stood up, lifted his snifter and beckoned his guest to do the same. “To Ruth,” he toasted.
Pilot was watching the scene as if he were a one man audience at a one man play. He did not yet buy the pretense. “To Ruth.”
“We needed to wet our whistles for this next exercise,” Vaalon said. “Word and phrase association. I say something and you pass the thread back to me with whatever comes into your head− no hesitation allowed from either side. We go back and forth like this, sewing our word garment until one of us falters. Are you ready?”
“Ready…”
V: “The forgotten old.”
P: “The betrayed young.”
V: “The death of the buffalo.”
P: “The death of the American Indian.”
V: “Deforestation.”
P: “Rape.”
V: “The Dodo.”
P: “The Maldives.”
V: “Skylines.”
P: “Bread lines.”
V: “Wine lakes.”
P: “Butter mountains.”
V: “Gross National Product.”
P: “Gross National Paradox.”
V: “Sinking coastlines.”
P: “Sinking morals.”
V: “Organized crime.”
P: “Organized religion.”
They played verbal ping-pong for two minutes – batting back and forth over a hundred different ‘passwords’, each one a door into its own vast debating room beyond. They stopped only because Vaalon had to urinate again.
On his return, Pilot said, “It was like a mantra, that thing we just did.”
“A litany against life’s dark side,” Vaalon replied. “By the way, you’ll be pleased to know that you passed the interview. What I need to know now is whether you’ll accept this position. I’ve already told you too much.”
Pilot pretended to weigh up the offer, but found it hard to keep a straight face. “Your secret’s safe with me, Forrest,” he said through his thawing skepticism. “I accept.” At the same time, he was wondering what the hell he was getting himself into.
Vaalon took out his wallet, withdrew a gold credit card and handed it over. “This is yours. Sign it on the back. You’ll need spending money between now and August.” He slipped Pilot a small piece of paper. “This is the pin number. There’s a £50,000 credit limit. The statements will come to me and I’ll pay them off each month. If you need more than your £50,000 limit for anything, my man in Zurich, Franz Barta, can release any amount for you, but I’d appreciate it if you ran it past me first. One last piece of weaponry,” Vaalon said, reaching into his briefcase and taking out a smart phone and charger. “Press star-one for speed dial direct to me.” He took the napkin off his lap and tossed it on the table. I don’t know about you, Lonnie, but I’m exhausted.”
“Ditto.”
“In that case, let’s call it a day. We’ve made good progress and we can start fresh in the morning− there’s still a lot of ground to cover. I’m staying at the Abbey Hotel and I suggest we meet somewhere nearby after breakfast. Any suggestions?”
Pilot thought for a minute. “Morrab Library. It opens at ten. You’ll like it.”
New mobile in pocket, and carrying an overstimulated brain, Lonnie Pilot walked his bike the short distance to his net-shed-cum-flat as if on air. He had begun the day like a prospector awaiting a map. Forrest Vaalon had given him the map and Pilot was ending his day within touching distance of the mother lode.
Just before going to bed, he decided to google Forrest Vaalon, borrowing the faint, non-secured broadband signal from the holiday
cottage next door. It took a while to crack the navigation on his new phone, but when the search results eventually came up, he clicked the top link to bring up a page from Wikipedia and began skim reading.
‘Forrest Arnold Vaalon is an American geophysicist, environmentalist, investor and philanthropist best known as the founder of The Insitute of Geophysical Projections, which predicted the earthquake responsible for the Oregon-California Tsunami. After years of derision by the scientific community –’ Pilot skipped to Early life and career.
‘Forrest Vaalon was born in Taos, New Mexico, to unmarried parents. His father, Hunter Vaalon, was the son of wealthy east coast industrialist, Bertram Vaalon. His mother, Annemarie Frey, was a Swiss artist. Together they had one child. On inheriting the Vaalon fortune, Hunter took his family back to New York and enrolled his previously home-schooled eight year old son in The Taft School, Watertown, Connecticut. At the age of fourteen, Forrest Vaalon was sent to Lake Forest Academy in Illinois – ‘
Pilot scrolled further down the page, looking for a reference to Ruth, and soon found it.
‘…and later that year married Holocaust survivor Ruth Belkin, who went on to found the international educational charity, Scholasticorps. Pilot remembered what Vaalon had said about Ruth’s inability to have children as the result of a trauma endured when she was younger. Holocaust survivor. A cold chill ran up Pilot’s spine. He went back to his search results and clicked on one at random, which landed him half way down a page on the Forbes website.
36. Forrest Vaalon. ‘Thirty-sixth what?’ Pilot scrolled to the top of the page. The Forbes 400. The Richest People in America. He clicked a link to another Forbes page, The World’s Billionaires, and there, in black and white at number 97, was Forrest Vaalon.
II
“You won’t determine the shape of this island by walking around its coastline,” Vaalon said to Pilot across a first floor table at Morrab Library the next morning. “I’ll give you a brief flyover now and over the next three months you’ll have time to read all the support files and background studies in detail.
“On the first of August a launch will take you from Falmouth to an ocean-going barge anchored offshore. She’ll then be set on a southwesterly course, and, two days later, will rendezvous with the other barges about here.” In the atlas open before him, Vaalon pointed to an area west of Brest in the Bay of Biscay. “We calculate that the island will crest some time between August fourth and August eighth.” Vaalon opened his laptop and switched it on.
“I read that Ruth was a Holocaust survivor,” Pilot said as they waited for the computer to boot up. Vaalon looked up with a pained expression. “How old was she when she got out, Forrest?”
“Twelve.” A vein in Vaalon’s forehead had grown larger. “But she survived, and threw their hideous crimes back in their faces with what she achieved over her lifetime. She’s a silent partner now, sitting here with us as we dot the i’s and cross the t’s of what is, to a large extent, her vision. I couldn’t have done this without Ruth.”
Vaalon typed in a password and the screen lit up the old oak tabletop. He clicked Documents, then the folder Flotilla, then the document Configuration, positioning the laptop so that Pilot could see the screen. Although it was just past ten thirty, Pilot had been up since five, too overstimulated to sleep. His eyes felt grainy and the bright light of the screen made him squint. Vaalon scrolled down a page of text and stopped on a series of images.
“Fourteen other barges will be converging on your position on August third.” Pilot looked at a diagram showing three rows of five barges each, all tightly bunched in a rectangle. Vaalon returned to the Flotilla folder to give Pilot a glimpse of its other files: Mooring Procedure; Deployment of Barrage; Deckside Preparations. “You’ll have plenty of time to absorb what’s in here. Moving on, once the flotilla is lashed together, the fifteen barge masters will be removed to the mainland. Then, it’s just a matter of waiting. Before I forget, I need you to fill this out.” Vaalon pulled a form from his briefcase and pushed it across the table. “Passport application. You can get photos done at the Post Office. Use your credit card to pay the fee.”
“I need a passport to get on the island?” Pilot joked.
“Dublin.” Vaalon pulled an envelope out of his case and handed it over. “This is your plane ticket. On June 2nd you’ll be meeting three of your crew, for lack of a better word. It’s easier for one person to travel to Dublin than for three to come to Penzance. Macushla Mara is chief speechwriter for the Prime Minister of Ireland, and her communication skills will be an important asset down the line. Jane Lavery has agreed to head up food production, and Josiah Billy will be your island’s master builder. Out of the 86 who have signed up to the project, only you four and two others, who you’ll meet later, know the true destination. Background details, photos etcetera for all your crew are in here.”
“Where do the other eighty think we’re going?”
“I told them they’ll be taking part in a unique social experiment with other like-minded people; that they’ll be travelling to a remote part of the world; that they might be in for a rough landing; that it’ll be subsistence living to start with; but that all the hardship could be worth it at the end. None seemed to have a problem with that.”
Pilot thought for a minute. “About that rough landing, Forrest, is there any chance the island could kill us on its way up? If so, don’t you have a moral responsibility to tell us?”
“I exaggerated the dangers and even told them there was an outside chance that they could die. There would have been a hundred of you if fourteen had decided to accept the risk like the others. Let me just say that your landing module has been designed to absorb g-forces in excess of what the physics tells us will be the maximum collision speed. “
“Landing module?”
“Positioned above the central barge on hydraulic pillars. If there were any possibility of fatalities, Lonnie, I wouldn’t be here. You’ll be fine.”
Vaalon scanned his document headings and stopped at ‘Rendezvous’. “As soon as the barge captains have left for the mainland and everyone is aboard Ptolemy, you’ll inform your crew of their true destination. They know you are the designated leader, but most of them will have never met you. So, before you tell them about the island, you have to instill confidence in you as leader. They need to know that the person leading them into the unknown is trustworthy and investable.”
Vaalon looked back at his document headings. ‘Post Landing… As soon as possible after landfall, and to ensure that the whole experiment doesn’t fall apart, you and your cohorts will devise an administrative structure for your island. You’ve read enough books on governance to know the need for mechanisms and processes through which your people can articulate their interests, exercise their personal rights, meet their obligations, and mediate their differences.”
“And I’ve observed enough Cornwall Council Planning meetings to understand the pitfalls,” Pilot said. “It should be an interesting process.” He worried a loose button on his shirt which had been threatening to fall off for a month. “Can I ask you a question, Forrest? This still bothers me – the fact that you picked me to lead this enterprise. Why not one of the other candidates you mentioned?”
“Up until eight years ago, we still had insufficient data to predict the next solar tide,” Vaalon said. “We had no idea it could happen in our lifetime. Back then, it was just science to us. And theory. The breakthrough came with the development of our ‘crust caliper’ as you call it, which allowed us for the first time to identify soft spots in the Earth’s skin. Other hardware crucial to predicting solar tides and measuring magmatic activity came quickly on its heels. Two years ago, we built the world’s first Solarmagnetrometer and placed it on the Chinese satellite, Joyous Harvest. When we’d analysed all the new data, put it into our computer model and set it against the bore samples I showed you, we realized that an event unprecedented in recorded history was about to occur. To our astonishmen
t – and horror – we now had a time, approximately, and a place, roughly, for a magmatic pulse capable of pushing the continental shelf out of the sea.”
“Why horror?”
“Because the dream of a new Utopia Ruth and I had so much fun toying with when we were younger was now a looming reality. But we were too old to do anything about it. We had been looking into successors, albeit without urgency, but now we had to find one fast.” Vaalon ran a liver-spotted hand through his hair. “I’ve told you about our six candidates and the untimely death of our first choice.”
Pilot laughed. “I’ll tell you one thing. I feel a lot more comfortable knowing that I was only your second choice.”
“I’m glad,” Vaalon said. “Back in the sixties, Avis were second to Hertz in the car rental business, but they turned that to their advantage with one of the most brilliant advertising slogans of all time. Because we’re number two, we try harder.”
“Challenge accepted. Where are the other four candidates?”
“In your crew, but I don’t think it would help if you knew their identities. Excuse me, Lonnie, I’ll be right back.” Vaalon stood up and left the room for his third bathroom break since breakfast.
Pilot ran his finger along the edge of France’s western continental shelf and allowed himself a bemused smile. This is mad, he thought. Science fiction. He still had one foot in the mud of Penwith and was far from convinced that this unexpected meeting with a rich American scientist-fantasist was going anywhere.
Vaalon returned and opened another file. “For this colony of yours to work we can’t leave any holes, so, among your crew you will find a dentist, two doctors, a nurse practitioner, a gynecologist, a topographer, and an IT/communications expert. The others are making the trip on the strength of their intelligence, creativity, awareness and drive. To help you get established, I’ve also employed five specialists – an arborist, a stonemason, a marine engineer, an amateur geologist friend of mine and an agronomist/nutritionist to help Jane. They’ll be joining you several days after landing. Their contracts run from one to three years, depending on their field. To preserve secrecy, I’ve told them they’re going to work on a development in Dubai. I don’t think they care whether they go to Dubai or Santa’s workshop just as long as it’s not where they came from. And since I can say that none has been to where you’re going, there should not be a problem.”
