Descent (28 page)

The Forum! It was as if a light flickered in my mind. Not the connection itself, but a tiny indicator that I was close to the connection …

Then I saw it. I literally jumped out of my seat.

‘Fuck!’ I said. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.’

Half my life suddenly made a lot more sense. I’d never been the person of interest, the focus, the centre of attention. I’d been collateral damage. I’d been played. Well, fuck that for a game of soldiers, I thought. I was a player now, I was going to play Baxter right back, and I was going to play him
good
.

I picked up the phone. I made a call, then wandered through to the kitchen and made a coffee. The time was about 3.30. I decided to give it an hour.

I took my time over the coffee, and crafted a pitch with care. Some journos pitch by buzzword bingo, and you can see the results all over the net, but reputable sites like my first target,
Sci/Tech World
, have more sophisticated editors. You can game these, too, with subtle logical constructions. You’ll get the gig, maybe. But your story will get pulled as soon as real people see it (which can take some time, admittedly) and in the long run you have to change bylines so often that you never build up a reputation.
Sci/Tech World
’s front-end editor knows me from way back. It considered my proposal and commissioned the piece in, literally, less time than it takes to tell.

I cheered, celebrated with a toke of Zip, then did a bit more background research while keeping an eye on the clock icon. As soon as the number changed from 4.29 to 4.30 I called Baxter’s office at Holyrood, and got straight through. This was unprecedented. I wasn’t surprised.

‘Hello?’

‘Good afternoon,’ I said. ‘I’d like to speak to Jim Baxter.’

‘Speaking,’ he said. ‘How can I help you?’

I’d already recognised his voice. He had me at hello, I thought. He’d had me at hello from the start.

‘My name’s Ryan Sinclair,’ I said. ‘I’m a science journalist, and I wondered if we could meet to discuss the Rammie project. Off the record, if you like.’

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Ten thirty suit you?’

‘Yes indeed,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘I can give you an hour and a half.’

‘That’s great! Thank you very much.’

‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘It’s just my job.’

We’ll see about that, I thought.

‘See you then!’

‘Cheers.’

He clicked off.

‘There’s a scene in
A Canticle for Leibowitz
,’ Baxter said, walking along a window-walled corridor to his office, ‘where – have you read it, by the way?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Years ago. On my dad’s Kindle, if you can believe that.’

‘Kindle, ah,’ said Baxter, ‘takes me back. Anyway, you may remember a scene where one of the monks has an audience with the Pope, in a very grand room, and afterwards he notices holes in the carpet and dirt in the corners and chips off the gilt and such like. I was quite young when I read that, and it made a lasting impression. My old job took me to all kinds of posh places, as you can imagine. I’ve been in billionaire’s mansions, stayed in hotels in the Gulf States that might as well have been carved out of a solid gold asteroid, and walked through actual palaces, and every time I’ve noticed rust on radiators, dust on windowsills, that kind of thing – what I’ve come to call the ubiquity of grot.’

He took me through the front office, nodding to a research assistant and a secretary on the way, opened his inner office door and waved me in. ‘The Scottish Parliament,’ he went on, taking his seat behind the desk, ‘is a fine example, I’m afraid.’

I sat in the visitor’s seat, avoiding the draught from the closed window, and had to agree.

‘Mind you,’ Baxter added, picking up a pen and fiddling with it as if he missed smoking, or handwriting, ‘I have to admit – there are exceptions. These minimalist modern hotels – you know: the white rooms where everything is a shelf and you can’t see where the light’s coming from or the water’s going to?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Not a speck. I’ve looked. They must hose them out or something.’ He laughed. ‘The kind of place where you could never have an abduction experience, because if you wake up in the middle of the night it’s like you’re already
in
the flying saucer!’

I forced a smile, genuinely impressed at how skilfully he was winding me up. Of course he knew I’d read
Canticle
– everything you read on a device is recorded somewhere. Of course he knew that scene had impressed me – I’d mentioned it in a school homework essay, its record likewise available. And of course the only reason he’d mentioned it was to bring up, seemingly naturally and in passing, the topic of abduction experiences.

Classy, Baxter, classy. The former MiB and present MSP knew how to dish it out. Let’s see how he could take it.

I shifted in the chair, which creaked alarmingly, and took out my phone and pen. Baxter made a face of apology, swivelled his chair, picked up a flask from a recess, poured a couple of coffees and passed me one.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘let’s see …’ He tapped the pen on the desk and pretended to consult a diary. ‘Ah yes, the Rammie. What exactly do you want from me about it?’

‘Well, on the record, seeing how you recused yourself and that, I was wondering if you’d worked on that project’s precursors, and if you had any interesting technical details or, you know, human interest stories you could recount.’

‘And off the record?’

‘What you really think about it.’

‘Ah.’ Baxter tilted back his seat, and clapped his fingertips a few times. ‘That first. Off the record.’

I nodded. ‘Of course.’

‘“Sources close to the Shadow Minister believe that privately, he thinks …” OK, what I think is – have you ever heard of Cheng Ho?’

‘The Chinese admiral?’ I felt smug at recognising the name, and thrown off balance by the conversational swerve.

‘Yes. Sailed this enormous fleet of gigantic ships to Africa and the rest of Asia and so on. And you know the sequel: the Emperor’s decision not to send out any more treasure fleets, to shut down any building of ocean-going ships, and all the rest. China turned its back on the outside world, until the outside world came to it, and not in a good way. That story troubles me.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m sure you can imagine a future analogy.’

‘China shutting out the world again? Stopping trade and all that?’ I shook my head. ‘I can’t imagine it.’

‘No,’ said Baxter. ‘That’s not what I had in mind. I can’t imagine it either. But what I can imagine, very easily, is China turning its back on
space
.’

‘Space?
’ I was even more surprised at this suggestion. ‘
China
– with their Moon and Mars bases and their space stations and Jovian expeditions and deep-sky astronomy satellites and everything?’

‘Cheng Ho fleets,’ said Baxter, dismissively. ‘They’re not turning a profit, not even the orbital hotels when you strip out the cadre reward-holiday subsidies.’

‘Asteroid mining—’

‘Marginal. Depends entirely on how quickly deep-crust prospecting and drilling become worthwhile. One – not even a technological breakthrough – just an engineering improvement, something as simple as a better drill-bit, and asteroid mining drops off the bottom of the balance sheet. And with all the new materials anyway … sure, some of them increase demand for rare earths and so forth, but most of them reduce demand for metals, petroleum, minerals generally.’ He spread his hands. ‘Bottom line – yes, I can well imagine China under some future government, Communist or not, deciding there were more pressing problems here on Earth, and pulling the plug on all space development outside lunar orbit, give or take a few astronomy experiments and robot probes.’

‘All the more for the rest of us,’ I said, flippantly.

‘No.’ Baxter beetled his brows. ‘You really don’t get it, do you? Soon, sooner than you think, there’ll
be
no “rest of us”, unless we do something about it. Look around you, man! Everything’s made in China, which means that in the long run every decision that matters is also made in China. In fact a lot of them already are. The Big Deal only happened because China threatened to call in its debts, and—’

I held up a hand. ‘Excuse me, Mr Baxter, but what has this to do with the Rammie project?’

Baxter gave a self-deprecating chuckle. ‘I do go charging off on my favourite hobby-horse sometimes, don’t I? OK. What all this has to do with the Rammie project, and others like it, is very straightforward. We can’t afford to risk having a single government, whether or not it’s formally a world government, deciding to shut down space exploration. I have to admit, in terms of gut feelings that’s my strongest objection to socialism – that it makes such decisions possible. So, basically, what I’m saying off the record is that whatever my Party says and whatever my principles might be on the wisdom of pouring public money into such adventures, inwardly I’m cheering the Rammie and hoping fervently that it succeeds.’

‘Well, me too as it happens, so … yeah, thanks, I’ll make sure that view gets forcefully expressed in my article, without attributing it to you.’

‘Fine, fine!’ He rubbed his hands. ‘And the on-the-record stuff?’

‘Yes.’

I looked down at my pad, feeling nervous and trying not to show it. When I’d walked into the lobby and shaken hands with Baxter a quarter of an hour earlier, he’d given every appearance of never having spoken to me before. I hadn’t bothered to remind him of our encounter a few years ago and a few yards away. He’d kept up the pose throughout the conversation with a consistency that had me almost doubting myself. I took a deep breath, scrolled my notes, and looked up.

‘The ramjet component or, uh, aspect of the Rammie,’ I said, ‘seems to be getting plenty of attention, for obvious reasons. So I’d like to look more carefully at what everyone’s calling “the balloon”. It isn’t strictly a balloon, is it? It’s a very big version of the flying spheres that BAS developed.’

‘That’s right,’ Baxter said. ‘It’s similar, but in very different proportions. The skin is literally inflated and functions as a balloon, lifting the payload. The ionisation engine is in the centre of the sphere, and obviously with such a large surface the thrust developed is less than in the spheres we tested, but more than enough to counteract the wind.’

‘I’m afraid it’s not obvious to me why the thrust is less over a larger surface. In effect the entire surface is covered with tiny jet engines, actively moving air in or out. Why shouldn’t the thrust be
more
? For that matter, why bother with any kind of shaped shell – wouldn’t a single sheet of the stuff move through the air just as well?’

‘I suppose so,’ Baxter said. ‘Some kind of closed surface, and sometimes streamlining, is a convenience. As for the lesser thrust, larger surface question – you’re quite right, in theory a large, say, sphere could move as fast as a smaller one, if not faster, but the size of engine and power source required would be quite impracticable, as well as prohibitively expensive. The whole point of the Rammie is that it isn’t all that costly, and that it saves an immense amount of fuel in just lifting the payload the first twenty miles or so up.’

‘OK,’ I said, ‘I’m clear on that, thanks. But just out of interest – why do the new craft move so slowly?’

‘I beg your pardon? Slowly? Sixty to a hundred knots is a respectable enough clip, if you ask me.’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if you compare the craft to balloons or blimps, which because of their shape we naturally do. But that’s not the relevant comparison, is it? They putter about the sky like light aircraft or even drones or microlights. Their precursors used to keep pace with airliners and jet fighters, and could zip along faster than the speed of sound.’

Baxter looked puzzled. ‘Precursors? You’ve lost me, I’m afraid.’

‘You know,’ I said, in as casual a tone as I could manage, making a few half snaps of my fingers as if trying to remember something trivial, ‘when they were still secret military aircraft and secret drones, and when BAS was test-flying prototypes or whatever.’

‘The BAS prototypes?’ said Baxter. ‘These were … what, a couple of years ago? They were slower, if anything.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I saw the first one in Orkney. No, I’m talking about the ones you were flying secretly ten years and more ago.’

‘BAS never did anything of the kind,’ said Baxter. He gave a short laugh. ‘Not in my time, anyway. And I would have known about it.’

‘Oh, you probably did,’ I said. ‘I saw one of those things over ten years ago. More than saw it, actually. It fell out of the sky on me and a friend and knocked us out. Burned a big circular patch in the heather around us. I had some very weird and terrifying dreams that night – and for years afterwards, I can tell you.’

Baxter’s lower lip twisted. ‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘I’m sure you are, because you came to see me the week after it happened, posing as a minister—’

‘Oh!’ cried Baxter. He shook a finger at me, half laughing. ‘
That’s
who you are! I
knew
I’d met you before. Of course! You had an altercation with me on the steps outside during the Forum. Yes, it’s all coming back now.’ He shook his head sadly. ‘You made the same accusation then. And again, I’m sorry, but I’m completely baffled by this story of yours.’

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I said, waving the matter aside. ‘Water under the bridge, as far as I’m concerned.’

His eyebrows shot up. ‘Really?’

‘Seriously, yes.’

‘So why bring it up?’

I shrugged. ‘Just so you know where I’m coming from. But let’s leave that aside for a moment, and talk hypothetically. That OK with you?’

Baxter made a show of looking at his watch. ‘I have half an hour to spare, if you have half an hour to waste.’

‘Good,’ I said, ignoring the barb. ‘Hypothetically, then. Suppose the new propulsion system that BAS rolled out recently had existed for years or decades before as a secret military technology, black budget, black programme, all that. What any ordinary observer would see when one of these things flew over would be, precisely, an unidentified flying object.’