by Jake Arnott
He went downstairs and got Juanita to make him an egg-white omelette. He ate it on wholemeal toast with a glass of orange juice. He went to see Lorraine in the office.
‘When uhn… Mr Zagorski…’
‘The writer guy?’
‘Yeah… show him…’
Danny pointed at the vast open space of his house.
‘Where do you want me to show him?’
‘Library… uhn… I’ll be there.’
Danny’s bookshelves were filled with books about the occult, the paranormal and UFOs. He had a considerable selection of counter-factual and alternate histories, and a whole section devoted to works that speculated on the nature of ancient civilisations. He found the box file that contained most of the papers he had acquired from the professional investigator the grey-suited man had mentioned. He removed a dossier and put it on the table in the middle of the room next to a pile of notes.
Larry Zagorski arrived just before four. He wore an aloha shirt, cargo pants, black Birkenstocks. Cropped grey hair. Lorraine introduced them. As they shook hands Danny felt a surge of power pulse into his limp palm.
‘Wow, this is quite some library,’ Larry said, looking around at the shelves.
Danny gestured at his science fiction section.
‘Do you want me in this meeting?’ Lorraine asked.
‘Uhn… no.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘It’s fine.’
Lorraine shrugged and walked away. Danny saw that Larry was stooping over a bookshelf.
‘Can I… uhn… help?’
‘You’ll have to forgive me. I always start at Z. Writers, you know, can’t help checking if we’re on the shelf. Good God. They’re all here!’
‘I’m a fan.’
‘I’ll say. Even I haven’t got some of these. You want me to sign them?’
‘Please.’
Larry stood up holding a battered paperback of Lords of the Black Sun, a garish illustration of a spaceship with swastika markings on its cover. He opened it.
‘This one already has a dedication. “To the gorgeous Danny, my favourite space cadet, love, Vita.” A girlfriend?’
‘Uhn… no.’
Danny made a sign for them to sit down at the table.
‘You know,’ Larry said, ‘all the big West Coast SF writers used to meet up around here. At Heinlein’s house. Just up the road, Lookout Mountain Avenue.’
‘Heinlein? Robert Heinlein?’
‘Yeah. He had this salon. The Mañana Literary Society, he called it. I met them all there. Jack Williamson, Leigh Brackett, L. Ron Hubbard…’
‘Uhn… Hubbard?’
‘Yeah. Jack Parsons, too. You know, the rocket scientist.’
‘Uhn…’
‘So, Lorraine tells me that you’re up for a part in this remake of Fugitive Alien.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, you know, I’m not involved in it. They’ve offered me this one-off payment, but I don’t think I even own any residual rights. I should really ask Mary-Lou about it.’
‘Uhn?’
‘She was the director and, well, we were friends.’ Larry sighed. ‘You know, the older I get the more I think of her. Back then. Sorry, what were we saying?’
‘I… uhn… just want to…’
Larry looked at Danny with sudden concern in his face. For a moment he seemed about to have a seizure or something.
‘Uhn… talk.’
Larry smiled, relieved.
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Uhn… I find it hard to talk… but…’
‘It’s okay. Take your time.’
‘Thanks.’
‘So, you want to talk about the film?’
‘Yeah, and… uhn, ideas… you see things…’
‘See things?’
‘Visions… imagination…’
‘Well.’ Larry shrugged. ‘Not so much any more.’
‘Uhn… here…’
Danny picked up the dossier on the table and handed it to Larry who opened the folder and looked at the first page.
‘Read… uhn… please.’
‘“Dated 19 September 1947. Memorandum for the military assessment of the Joint Intelligence Committee. Subject: examination of unidentified disc-like aircraft near military installations in the state of New Mexico: a preliminary report. 1. Pursuant to the recent world events and domestic problems within the Atomic Energy Commission, the intelligence reports of so-called flying saucers and the intrusion of unidentified aircraft over the most secret defence installations, a classified intelligence project is warranted…” Wow, is this supposed to be the Magenta Memorandum?’
‘Uhn… yeah.’
‘Well, I’ve heard all the rumours about it, of course.’
‘In the film…’
‘In the film it’s just a bit of dialogue. I don’t think it was even in the original script. Just something Dexter added.’
Danny jabbed a finger at the dossier.
‘What do you… uhn… think?’
Larry shuffled through the file.
‘About this? Well, it’s a great plot idea.’
‘It’s an… uhn… fake?’
‘Who knows any more? Look, you know there’s all this stuff about the government covering up UFOs and things like that? The TV’s full of it at the moment.’
Danny nodded.
‘But what if there was some other kind of cover-up going on? Take Roswell. No one made much fuss about it at the time. Back then there were flying saucer stories in the papers every week. Believe me, it was a craze. No, Roswell became big only when a book was written about it in 1980. Close Encounters of the Third Kind had just made UFOs big again. And at a second glance, the Roswell incident did look a little strange. The air force issued a statement that a flying disc had been recovered and then later denied it. Then they say it’s a weather balloon.’
‘Uhn… yeah.’
‘It’s all a bit suspicious and confusing. Because maybe there was a cover-up at Roswell.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. But not in the way all these conspiracy theories play it. Okay, it’s 1947. The Soviets have just started running atomic bomb tests, ballistic missile launches. Everybody’s paranoid as hell. We’re sending up radar-tracking balloons over enemy airspace. If the Russians find out, there could be an international incident. Flying saucers, they’re perfect disinformation. You can use them to confuse a situation, then you can deny them. You can blame it all on the aliens. They become a convenient myth for all kinds of security issues. Maybe the Magenta Memorandum is just part of that.’
‘But, I see… uhn… things.’
‘Sure. We all see things. We wouldn’t have much of an imagination if we didn’t.’
‘There might be… uhn… something.’
‘Yeah, maybe. Maybe we see some things that we don’t understand. That’s why they are called unidentified flying objects. Because we just don’t know. Sometimes we don’t know what we see.’
‘Uhn… yes… I always… uhn… the stars.’
Danny gestured at the space above his head. He wished that he could explain to Larry Zagorski all the thoughts that he had been having. He grabbed at the pile of notes on the table and sorted through them. He found a page and put it in front of them. Larry looked down at the sheet of foolscap.
John Six explained the secret of the universe to Bella Berkeley telepathically, using an analogy that he knew she would understand. It came to her like a memory. She had grown up watching holovision, the three-dimensional images that were beamed into every household by the Corporation. As a child Bella had thought of this seemingly solid phantasmagoria as an independent entity, but now she knew them to be projected from another source. John’s wisdom came into her mind as a simple revelation: that the whole of the cosmos was one vast projection, a vision expanding from a surface of pure information.
Larry Zagorski, American Gnostic (1958)
Appollonius of Tyana, writing as Hermes Trismegistos, said, �
�That which is above is that which is below.’ By this he meant to tell us that our universe is a hologram, but he lacked the term.
Philip K. Dick, Valis (1981)
According to t’Hooft the combination of quantum mechanics and gravity require the three-dimensional world to be an image of data that can be stored on a two-dimensional projection much like a holographic image. The two-dimensional description requires only one discrete degree of freedom per Plank area and yet it is rich enough to describe all three-dimensional phenomena.
Professor Leonard Susskind, The World as a Hologram (1994)
‘Wow,’ Larry murmured. ‘Yeah, I saw something about this hologram theory. I thought it was some kind of gimmick.’
‘Uhn… volume of space encoded on its boundary… on an event horizon…’
‘Complex stuff. But, you know, a physicist once told me that you can’t really use these theories as a description of the world we live in.’
‘Uhn… or appear to…’
‘Sure, but—’
‘The entire universe… uhn… an information structure.’
‘Well, I never had enough of the maths to get to grips with this. I once tried to explain quantum theory on a date. I really blew it there.’
‘But you saw…’
Danny pointed at Larry’s quote on the page.
‘I was mostly stoned when I wrote that book. And I can’t remember coming up with that bit. Sometimes you get lucky with ideas. Phil Dick certainly did. He had a thing about precognition, of course.’
‘And… uhn… you?’
Larry sighed.
‘When you get to my age precognition isn’t so much of an issue.’
‘Uhn.’ Danny smiled and suddenly had a thought.
He went over to one of the bookshelves and crouched down in front of it. One section was a false front that clicked open as he pushed at it to reveal a small wall safe concealed behind it. He dialled the combination lock, opened the door and took out a padded envelope. He stood up and shook its contents out onto the table. There was a sheaf of yellowing sheets of A4 paper. A manuscript with a heading on the first page: The Hanged Man. With it were newspaper clippings, articles about Vita Lampada and Marius Trevelyan.
‘What’s all this?’ asked Larry.
‘I want you to have…’
‘Is this a story you’ve written?’
‘Uhn, no… Secrets, official secrets.’
‘Listen, I’m really not looking for material, you know.’
‘Please.’
Danny knew now that he had found a safe place. Where better to hide a pebble than on a beach? Larry would have stacks of papers and manuscripts. And he was a writer, so he might be able to do something with the story.
‘You, uhn.’ He looked imploringly at Larry. ‘You understand.’
‘Well, you know how to flatter a guy.’
‘Take it… uhn… please.’
Larry looked at Danny and then down at what was scattered across the table. Words, words, words, he thought. As if I need any more of them. Then he shrugged and scooped them all up. Danny smiled.
‘Uhn… thanks.’
Larry left at six. Danny then went to see Lorraine. He asked her to find him a new doctor and to order him some sushi, four types of nigiri and miso soup. At eight he watched an episode of The X-Files. In the show the FBI agents Mulder and Scully investigated a series of assaults in a community of carnival sideshow performers. The attacker turned out to be one of a pair of co-joined twins who had found a way of detaching himself from his brother but was then compelled to find another body to connect with.
After sundown Danny went up onto the terrace. He lit a Marlboro Light and looked out over the constellation of lights in the valley. A matrix: each bright dot a soul. An airliner crept across the horizon, a signal pulsing against the night. Somewhere, waiting in the sky. Danny felt that he had let go of some of the dangerous knowledge of the world. Maybe now he would get his voice back and he could take some studio time, sing again. Part of him wished that he could go to the Celebrity Center and get clear. If only he could really be brainwashed, his mind wiped clean of it all. But it hadn’t worked. He was still lost in space, in the free-fall of a slow decaying orbit. There’s a starman, over the rainbow. But he had never landed. Danny had watched the skies for years but they had never come. Alone. Set adrift on memory bliss. Sampled sighs and feedback distortion, his mind a tape-loop. He felt a great weariness, all his experience repeats and reruns. Perhaps this whole universe was just a remake, a cover version.
18
the moon
Hitler had always despised the moon.
‘You know, Rudi,’ he had told him when they had been in Landsberg prison, ‘it’s only the moon I hate. For it is something dead, and terrible, and inhuman. And human beings are afraid of it… It is as if in the moon a part of the terror still lives which the moon once sent down over the earth… I hate it! That pale and ghostly creature.’
Yet Hess had allowed himself to be beguiled by it. Inconstant, deceptive, a reflected light illuminating a hidden imagination. A journey into the unknown, a dream or a nightmare. The astrologers had delivered an auspicious reading for the night of his flight. The horoscope had indicated six planets in the constellation of Taurus, enough bias to cause the earth to tilt. But it was the conjuction of a full moon that had spurred him on.
In Spandau he followed the Apollo landings. He obtained minute-by-minute timetables from NASA giving details of space activity. That they might get to the moon first: this was his adamant wish as he followed the flight of Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins. With, of course, the legacy that Germany had bequeathed them. Then they might defeat the Russians in space, as the Reich had failed to defeat them on land.
On the eve of the launch Wernher von Braun eulogised his adopted nation at a press conference. ‘Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed,’ declared the former SS Sturmbannführer and chief architect of the Saturn V rocket that would propel the Apollo spacecraft into orbit.
Hess listened to the launch on the radio in his cell:
Guidance system goes internal at seventeen seconds leading up to the ignition sequence at 8.9 seconds. We’re approaching the sixty-second mark on the Apollo 11 mission. T-60 seconds and counting. We have passed T-60. Fifty-five seconds and counting. Neil Armstrong has just reported back: ‘It’s been a real smooth countdown.’ We have passed the fifty-second mark. Forty seconds away from the Apollo 11 lift-off. All the second-stage tanks are now pressurised. Thirty-five seconds and counting. We are still GO with Apollo 11. Thirty seconds and counting.
On 10 May 1941, he had his own countdown. Alfred Rosenberg, head of the party Foreign Affairs Department, had arrived at noon. Hess had given him lunch, his mind distracted with thoughts of instruments, jettison fuel tanks, auxiliary oil pumps, radio-direction finders, Scottish mountain altitudes. A light meal of cold meats and salad had been laid out in the dining room. They ate alone — Hess had given instructions to the household staff that they were not to be disturbed, and his wife Ilse was in bed with a cold.
Hess did not speak of his secret mission but merely listened while Rosenberg told him of his own preparations for the planned offensive against Russia. ‘The solution of the Jewish question will presently enter its decisive phase,’ Rosenberg assured him. Himmler was busy preparing his Einsatzgruppen who would follow in the wake of the offensive to eradicate communism and its carriers. Special instructions had already been issued concerning the army’s operational area that ‘commissioned the Reichsführer-SS with special tasks resulting from the final settlement of the struggle between the two opposed political systems’. Directive 21, the order to invade the Soviet Union, had been given the code name Barbarossa.
This made his own operation all the more crucial. He had seen Professor Haushofer only days before and they had talked once more of the geopolitical situatio
n, and his former mentor’s theories on the subject. Peace in the West was essential so that all the Reich’s resources could be concentrated against Russia. Finally the source of Jewish Bolshevism could be burnt out and purified. This was the very presage of their Weltanschauung.
In his final conversation with the professor they had talked of the struggle for survival. A war on two fronts must be avoided at all costs. The continuing war in the West was suicidal for the white race. He did not tell the professor of his planned flight. Haushofer had described a dream in which he had seen Hess striding through the tapestried walls of an English castle, bringing peace to the two great Nordic nations. Did he suspect something?
Rosenberg left at one o’clock and Hess went to take tea with his wife. She had been reading The Pilot’s Book of Everest, an account of the first flight over the Himalayas by the Duke of Hamilton. Albrecht Haushofer, the professor’s son, had been a close friend of Hamilton before the war. Albrecht was a passionate advocate of peace between Britain and Germany and had tried to contact the duke via a dead-letter drop in Lisbon.
Hess and the Haushofers had been exploring all possible channels for negotiation with the British. Peace feelers reached out all over neutral Europe: Switzerland, Portugal, Spain. There was talk of arrangements for a secret meeting between Hess and the British ambassador to Spain on an abandoned tennis court outside Madrid. There were intelligence reports of a powerful underground in England, virulently opposed to Churchill and ready to make terms. And all this time his astrologers had marked out the auguries for his own personal intervention. For now all boded well in his stars, but this could not last. At times his mood rose in exultation, then descended to deep melancholy. He was impatient, overcome with a growing sense of romantic destiny.
As he set down the teacup on his wife’s bedside table he had picked up the book and opened it. In the front there was a full-plate photograph of the duke.
‘He’s very good-looking,’ he said.
She had frowned, unsure as she so often was of her husband’s true sentiments and unaware that Hamilton had become the key to his quest. Hess had an intuitive understanding of the man: an aviator, just as he was. Hamilton had been selected as chief pilot for the Mount Everest expedition on account of his flying skills and his exceptional physical fitness.