The Weight of Numbers (7 page)

The sailor, muffled against the cold in a threadbare black parka and thin knitted gloves, noticed him from across the snowbound street and recognized him for all his winter clothing. He just shambled right on up to Jim in the street and spoke to him, big-eyed and awestruck.

He was a big man so when Jim shook his hand the feel of it – its smallness and fragility – frightened him. The man's features were small, too. They were a woman's features – no, a doll's. Beautiful and cruel. Jinks, he introduced himself, in an English accent.

Nick Jinks.

They made, to begin with, a sort of over-serious smalltalk typical to extreme places. In Punta Arenas, everybody seems to be making a documentary about everybody else, and even the sportsmen and climbers couch their hiking plans in the rhetoric of the study trip. Jinks knew all the teams, but he didn't seem to belong to any of them. He claimed to have drifted in one day – and he didn't seem in any hurry to leave. The man seemed a throwback to the Antarctic's brutal beginnings, years of whaling and sealing, frostbite and trench foot and filthy cabins lit by penguin oil.

Jinks wanted to know if there were any rats on board Apollo Thirteen.

‘Come again?'

How did they keep the rats off the ship?

‘Well, I don't think—'

That main B bus undervolt which was the start of all their peril – could it have been the work of a rat?

Jim extricated himself as fast and as pleasantly as he could.

In Ellsworth Land, Antarctica, and especially on the Patriot Hills, you can find bubbles in solid ice, sometimes in strings like a diver's air bubbles, and in the summer, when the sun shines continuously, a liquid film forms on the inside of the bubbles, and things in the water begin to grow.

It is -20°F without windchill and Jim Lovell is out here looking for
bubbles
. He feels as clumsy as an infant in his cheery standard-issue red parka, and his hands, snug in layers of polyfleece and wool and leather, feel as useless as paws, when a sudden, unbelievably chill gust nearly takes him off his feet.

Instinctively the team huddle together like penguins under the onslaught of the wind.

Wind whips snow into the air. It is old snow: Antarctica is a desert, and precipitation falls as rarely here as it falls on the Sahara. The granules, ground against each other over decades, are so tiny they will penetrate the weave of rucksacks and the walls of tents. The team leader has them rope themselves together. Any second now, visibility is going to vanish. Really vanish. (Back in Chile, during their familiarization programme, the instructor had them put white plastic buckets on their heads to simulate the effects of white-out.)

Careful, groping, blind mice, the team edge down the slope towards their camp.

How they missed the body on the way out is no mystery. A thin skein of snow would have been enough to conceal him completely. The fierce wind has revealed ice that would be blue were there any sun. Now it is as black as jet.

There he is, inside the ice.

Jim's cry is inaudible in the gale. Katabatic winds – flash floods of cold thick air, spilling from rocky pockets in the highlands, fierce as waters and unimaginably colder – steal his words away. Finally the rope translates his sudden stop to the others of his team. Careful, purblind, they gather round. Jim kneels.

It makes no sense. This man here in the ice. Each inch of ice is an eon of human time. How can this man be buried here, arms spread as though he were treading water, head straining for the surface, eyes open, a trail of bubbles from his screaming lips?

They have to leave him, then. Nothing they can do in this wind. Nothing they can do, period. The next day, they cannot retrace him. They do not try hard, or for long. No way can they dig him out from under all that ice and anyway, what would be the point? In the fug and fabric-whip of their igloo-like Scott tents, the men talk out what they have seen. It must be the body of some early casualty of exploration, interred now in a grander coffin than any undertaker can provide.

A week later, in the relative warmth and comfort of the Amundsen– Scott station at the Pole, Jim Lovell and Skylab astronaut Owen Garriott sing for their supper; they glad-hand the residents and give talks about their experiences. Shouldering his burden (‘veteran astronaut and motivational speaker') Jim stands and, without notes, begins his address.

But to be upright in the ice, one knee up and one knee straight, head tilted back like that, the ice so clear?

Jim, standing there before them all – the ultimate captive audience – falls silent. To cover his confusion, he takes a drink of coffee. Where is he up to? What was he talking about? Apollo Eight? Thirteen? It's Thirteen everybody wants to hear about, not least because of the movie. He doesn't mind. It's a decent movie. Is he so precious that he should look such a gift-horse in the mouth? Heck, no, the film's put him back in demand. Would he be here without Ron Howard? Well, yes, for certain – but the expedition sure wouldn't have gotten a plug from CNN.

They have logged the body, as well as they can, with the search and rescue people, and together they have agreed not to rehash the episode in front of the press. Besides, death and dereliction rarely make it out of the back pages this far south of the sixtieth parallel.

Now where was he?

Apollo Eight? Apollo Thirteen?

His audience wait expectantly.

Jim fakes a cough and takes another sip of coffee.

Gemini Seven maybe. Nobody's very interested in Gemini Seven. Not when the talk is only an hour long and they know that Thirteen, the explosion and NASA's most testing hour is still to come. It's not cynicism that makes him think this. He's been at this racket long enough to know what makes a good story and what doesn't. The sad fact is that it's very hard to make Gemini Seven exciting. The way everything, but everything, started packing up around them. Thrusters. Fuel cells. Poor Frank Borman, with a commander's tunnel vision, just itching to twist that abort handle, and who could blame him? Still, they hung in there, waiting for Stafford and Schirra to turn up in Six. Fourteen days in a capsule that, hour by hour, malfunction after malfunction, came to resemble a floating toilet cubicle.

Gemini Seven. The one he never gets to talk about. The one, therefore, that has come to haunt him more and more.

Rising through a calm black ocean, this steel bubble of ape life.

Winter comes. The sun is gone in now. Blue ice turns black. The film of water round each air bubble freezes solid, killing everything inside. There is no colour anywhere. Life stops.

Hoar-frost on the rations in the
Odyssey
command module. Conditions aren't much better in
Aquarius
. (Is this where he is now? Is this where he is up to – Apollo Thirteen, the lunar module their lifeboat, and nothing to do but wait?) He is speaking. The audience is leaning forward, rapt. Now and again, there is laughter. He wishes he could grasp the meaning of the words as they slide, smooth and practised, out of his mouth.

Nick Jinks, the strange Englishman who had approached him on the street in Punta Arenas, was gone by the time they returned, five weeks later, on the first leg of their long journey home. Nobody in town knew of him or remembered him.

So Jim, unable to find any evidence to contradict it, has had to carry this impossible image around with him ever since, unable to shake it free, unable to discount it: that the man in the ice
was
Nick Jinks. That Nick Jinks somehow fell into the ice. Which is the same as saying, that he fell into time. Jinks's pretty, cruel, close-set eyes stare out at Jim from the unimaginable past. His mouth, in rictus, mimes a ghastly
Eeeee!
In boots that look modern – not seal-skin, but plastic – Nick's right foot is raised to step on a sabre-toothed tiger's tail; the left, toe pointed, tests the warm waters of the Cambrian.

There is no
Shangri-La.
Where is the fucking
Shangri-La
?

Jim fumbles behind the steering wheel for the light switch and fills the unlit Lake Forest road with light. The dashboard comes alive, a soft green glow. Windscreen wipers squeal back and forth. Jim snaps them off with a curse that becomes an instant chuckle: in his eighth decade, he can freely admit that he's never been particularly good around buttons and switches. (He'll never forget the dirty look Frank shot him in Apollo Eight, the time he accidentally inflated his life jacket.)

Beyond the immediate splash of illumination cast by his head-lamps, the world is a ghostly grey, no colour anywhere. But Jim Lovell is a professional. With a set smile and eyes tuned to the colours of the world, the greens and the reds, the instruments and signs, Jim Lovell, bubbled in steel, steers his way home as he has steered his way home before, across unimaginable distances, across oceans of night, through the deep black calm of death.

Summer 1939.

The British government believes that an air war will destroy civilization.

It has forecast the number of casualties likely to be sustained following a Luftwaffe attack on London. The numbers are apocalyptic. Bleaker still is Whitehall's estimate of the city's psychological resilience. Analysts believe the experience of bombardment will send the survivors mad.

Hospitals surrounding the capital have sent home their non-urgent cases. They are making up beds ready for tens of thousands of ‘nervous cases'.

The government believes that following an air attack, survivors who make it into the city's tunnels will refuse to emerge; that they will turn their backs on the devastated Overground, preferring to live and breed beneath the earth, a Morlock terror to the Eloi above. In London, the Underground is locked at night against those who would seek shelter, come the raids.

Nineteen-year-old former abattoir clerk Kathleen Hosken knows better. She has inside information. With halting fingers, Kathleen has typed up data which even the government has yet to read. She has worked with the government's own specialist on a project to assess the physiological effects of ground shock waves and blast, a man of such luminous intelligence and charm his associates have nicknamed him ‘Sage'.

From Sage, she has learned that if you look into the eye of the thing you most fear, and replace your passion with a rational curiosity, then the horror – he calls it ‘funk' – goes away. So Kathleen Hosken has left
the rain-swept border country of Darlington, and has boarded a train for London, the soon-to-be-devastated metropolis. This journey to the epicentre of the coming war is not just a journey of necessity – a search for employment and a place to live. It is also a test she has set herself. She believes that if she approaches her life there rationally, carefully interrogating her every assumption, then she can protect herself, even from bombs and fire storms.

The men sharing her train carriage – the crooked teeth their smiles reveal, the Players and Capstan cigarettes they offer her – are objects for observation. From Sage, she has learned something about the scientific method. This novel way of thinking requires her to suppress her emotions and to put herself at a distance from things. Besides, she does not smoke.

Some of the men on the train are in uniform. Most are not: volunteers, they have yet to be received into the service. There is a camaraderie between the two groups which marks them out from the handful of young, scrape-faced commercial travellers who also share the carriage.

‘The air's sweeter over here, love.'

‘There's room to stretch your feet by me.'

‘I'm a Darlington man meself, dearie, come and have a chat.'

They are teasing her. She is being offish with them and she isn't pretty enough, and not nearly well dressed enough, to get away with it.

‘Cat got your tongue?'

‘He joined up already then, love?'

‘Tore himself away, he did, from the sparkling ray-pah-tee.'

They laugh.

Kathleen takes a steadying breath. She thinks up an experiment – and smiles softly, knowingly, to appease them.

A lad with infected acne lets out a cheer. The company of friendly elders has made him boisterous. ‘Knew you could do it, love!'

She notes, for future reference, the success of her strategy. She has identified, confronted and resolved a problem in her human relations. For the first time in her life, the boys have not made her cry.

She remains – for all their barracking – in the seat she has chosen for herself, riding backwards, facing west. She is looking her last at the moorland of her childhood. More than that: she is looking out, past barren scarps and low stony ridges, over long-abandoned dry-stone walls and between hawthorns stunted by the wind, for the remains of a series of sheds. Given the lie of the land, it is only by facing backwards to the direction of travel that she will be able to spot them.

That these sheds have been visible from passing trains at all is an error Sage made early on in the project, when he misread the contour lines on his Ordnance Survey map. He spotted the error while studying the map for other sites, and before the sheds were ever erected – a feat of magic which amazed Kathleen at the time. The error was tiny, however, and Solly Zuckerman, Sage's colleague and keeper of the project's top-secret experimental menagerie, persuaded him to let it go.

Kathleen remembers her first train ride with Sage. Since going to work for him, she had persisted in calling him Mr Arven, and he was teasing her, telling her that, since he was a professor, she should call him ‘Professor Arven'; that he had letters after his name and, since she was so fond of honorifics, she ‘ought to recite them, an' all'. Abruptly, he had broken off his jesting and took out his watch. He paused a moment – he appeared to be counting – then he glanced at the window. He took her hand and pulled her with him onto the seat opposite, facing backwards.

‘I feel sick this way,' she protested. He did not reply. She wondered when he would let go of her hand. Instead, he squeezed it, painfully hard, and pointed out the window: ‘Watch… watch now… There!'