Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  In London right now, an evil genius was preparing to unleash his secret weapon: the wave-emitting missile that was the Post Office Tower. The only way to save the country and the planet was by hiding an explosive device in the ladies’ lavatory – but could Robbie get there in time? Not at this rate, that was certain – it took him twenty minutes to reach the end of the street, though he was rewarded by four householders who liked his inane poem. All the while, the digital counter flipped steadily towards the moment when the missile would fire. Robbie had to try and save everyone – even the daft southerners who’d wonder why he was blowing up a building. Couldn’t they see it was for their own good?

  Imagine something the size of the Post Office Tower falling down on London. Robbie thought about it while pocketing a Mars Bar from the old lady at the last house on the street. The Angry Brigade made it go off when nobody was around because even wee bits of glass can do a lot of harm if they fall on you from five hundred feet up; like the shrapnel Robbie’s father used to collect during the war and swapped for sweets with his schoolmates. But if the tower was really a missile and you had to destroy it, like the V2s with their chequerboard pattern – what then? There was Robbie, smuggling the bomb into the tower, knowing it would have to go off when the street below was full of men in bowler hats, women pushing prams. It was like all they people in Hiroshima. Shame they had to die, said Mr Coyle, but they brought it on themselves.

  In his spacesuit, Robbie secretly enters the Post Office Tower by climbing through air-conditioning ducts. Every large building on Earth or anywhere else in the universe, he knows from countless television shows, is laced with such silver-lined tunnels, always man-sized and conveniently horizontal. Robbie pushes aside a metal grille and drops into the main computer room, where a man sits bound and gagged. It’s the Reverend Donaldson.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Robbie asks him, pulling the gag loose and beginning to untie the ropes around his body.

  ‘They caught me trying to sabotage their plans,’ the reverend explains. ‘Now only you can save the world.’

  ‘But have I the right?’ says Robbie. ‘If I destroy the missile I’ll kill thousands of innocent Londoners.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about them,’ says the reverend, and Robbie finds himself back outside his own house. He can stop now, or else continue and add the Dunbars to his list. He decides to take the risk, and goes to ring their bell, whose posh chime fades slowly while he waits.

  Sometimes it’s right to kill somebody if it’s for the greater good. Like if you went back in time and found Hitler as a baby – you’d smother him and six million people would be saved from getting bulldozed into a pit like he saw once on telly. Only maybe it wouldn’t work like that. Maybe someone else would step into Hitler’s place, like that man Gorbals.

  The door opened and there stood Sam Dunbar. ‘Well, what do we have here!’ Standing before a firing squad one day, Sam would have reason to recall this moment.

  ‘Oh my, you’re a fine sight,’ said Maureen Dunbar, coming to join him.

  Robbie had decided to abandon his poem: the situation called for something more imaginative. ‘I’m collecting money for Scotland’s first space mission. I also take sweets or nuts.’

  The Dunbars looked at him with perfectly straight faces, and for a glorious moment it felt to Robbie as if he was being taken seriously.

  ‘I’ll see what I can find for you,’ said Mrs Dunbar, retreating from view while Sam eyed his outfit, noticing the St Andrew’s Cross on his arm. ‘A Scottish astronaut, eh? That’d be a fine thing. No reason why you shouldn’t do it some day.’

  It was one of the most extended conversations Robbie had ever had with Mr Dunbar, and it prompted him to raise what had been on his mind. ‘You work for the GPO, don’t you?’ Sam nodded. ‘And did you hear what happened to the Post Office Tower?’

  ‘Aye, terrible,’ said Sam. ‘These Irish fanatics. At least they didn’t hurt anyone.’

  ‘But what’s the tower really for?’

  Maureen was coming back to the door with a handful of sweets and a 10p coin which she held out to Robbie, his question to her husband making her wonder what the two of them were talking about.

  ‘It’s the main telephone exchange,’ said Sam.

  ‘It looks like a rocket.’

  ‘I suppose it does,’ said Sam, laughing.

  ‘And doesn’t it send some kind of special wave?’

  ‘Only microwaves,’ said Sam, evidently heartened by a chance to discuss technicalities with an interested listener.

  ‘Not scalar waves?’

  Sam shrugged. ‘I’ve never heard of those.’

  ‘Maybe they’re trying to brainwash people.’

  ‘Oh, you and your vivid imagination,’ Maureen interrupted, and Robbie wondered how much she knew about it. He’d stopped wetting the bed a long time ago but felt depressingly certain that the whole saga of his condition and the various measures adopted against it would have been discussed at length over the garden fence every day while he was at school.

  Robbie countered, ‘My dad says …’ then fell silent, sensing that in his young throat the argument might be as weak as his bladder had been.

  ‘Don’t believe everything your dad says,’ Sam Dunbar suggested gently, and his wife gave him a subtle but unmistakeably disapproving look, as if he’d said something to Robbie that he shouldn’t have. It was like a small chink in a vast alien conspiracy.

  ‘Off you go now,’ said Maureen. ‘You’ve got some money there for your astronaut training and a snack to keep you going. One day we’ll see you launching into orbit and the whole of Kenzie’ll be proud of you.’

  She began to close the door and two other figures appeared behind her, Sheena and Louise, their terrifyingly beautiful faces being rapidly swallowed from view, but not before they could see Robbie in his outfit. Simultaneously, like a pair of witches, they burst helplessly into laughter, and although the door quickly put them out of sight it could not contain the sound of their mirth, which Robbie held in his mind as firmly as the sweets in his hand.

  He was flying towards a black hole in space, and a great building was crashing down on top of them.

  10

  Robbie’s Christmas present was a telescope. It stood on a tall tripod and was the most precious thing he had ever possessed; Mr Coyle had been careful to choose the best he could afford, and on cloudless nights the two of them would stand together in the back garden, finding constellations with the aid of a map. Mrs Coyle was tempted outside on one or two occasions but expressed disappointment that magnification showed the stars to lack the projecting points she had always taken to be their most essential feature, so she Ursa Majored back into the warm, leaving the males to share that particular form of love that consists of silent, mutual fascination with inanimate objects, especially ones with screw fittings.

  Robbie had grown out of his simulator. It wasn’t only a question of no longer being able to fit inside; he was eleven now, and whenever he thought back to his training programme he felt a knot of embarrassment in his stomach. Frank Coulter was right; he’d been mental, but now he’d changed. Space had grown too, becoming far bigger and emptier than Robbie had ever dreamed. Patrick Moore explained it all on television: if the Sun were an orange then the nearest star would be another orange three hundred miles away. And that was only the nearest; try to imagine the furthest and you’d end up with distances that were themselves astronomical, implying that the only thing space could adequately be compared with was its own immense and inscrutable self. The Apollo programme had quickly faded from public interest and even Robbie now realized that it had taken humans no nearer to the stars. The only way to get there was in the mind.

  Robbie and Janet settled to watch Star Trek one evening while Mr Coyle flicked the glossy pages of Hi-Fi Monthly. On a cloud-wrapped world, a peace-loving and rationally ordered civilization had been erased by nuclear attack, but the thoughts of its leaders were preserved in a small dar
k object the size and shape of a cigarette packet.

  ‘That’s impossible,’ muttered Mr Coyle, looking up from his magazine.

  ‘Ssh, Dad!’

  Mrs Coyle, who’d come back from the kitchen to bring him his cup of tea, politely told him to shut up and read.

  ‘I’m only trying to explain something,’ he replied, his voice a mixture of sheepishness and indignation. ‘Can a man not even talk in his own house these days?’

  Mr Coyle was surveying the popular high-fidelity literature with a view to finding a more modern replacement for the radiogram, which had by now become as dated as the Apollo Moon missions, though Robbie still loved to play with its tuning dial and could never tire of the unintelligible voices that emerged from it at night. Mr Coyle said these all-in-one units were a thing of the past and the way ahead was a modular approach of turntable, amplifier, tuner and speakers, a cumbersome arrangement dictated by cost and expediency which sounded to Robbie more like the proposed Skylab space station than the sleekly romantic Starship Enterprise.

  ‘Dad,’ he said while the end credits rolled, ‘what will you do with the radiogram when we get the new hi-fi?’

  ‘We’ll have to put it somewhere, I suppose,’ Mr Coyle ruminated, it being out of the question to let go of any piece of furniture so venerable and precious.

  ‘Can I have it in my room? Oh, please,’ Robbie begged, and Mr Coyle agreed. A few weeks later, the old wooden coffin on legs was carried upstairs by Robbie and his father and put in position near Robbie’s bed; then Mr Coyle went back down to begin trying to make sense of all the hefty cartons that had been delivered, searching each for some kind of instruction book that would explain how to connect the components properly. Robbie lifted the familiar lid of his new possession. The simulator in the kitchen was retired from service, but the flight-control panel was his to play with as much as he wished. He switched it on and heard the low hum; the fifty cycles per second of alternating mains current which was like the throb of an antimatter engine about to go into warp drive.

  The hi-fi, by contrast, was unattractively mundane. When Mr Coyle got it working and invited the whole family into the living room to hear it, he proudly turned up the volume control and said: ‘Listen!’

  They all listened, but there was no record on the turntable or radio station selected on the row of silver buttons. ‘I can’t hear anything,’ said Janet.

  ‘Exactly!’ Mr Coyle cried delightedly. ‘No hum at all, perfect silence. That way you hear the music better.’

  ‘Why not put on a record, dear?’ his wife suggested, fetching the Carpenters from the rack, and a moment later they leapt at the almighty thud of the needle hitting the spinning vinyl disc, Mr Coyle having forgotten to turn the sound back to a normal level.

  ‘Dad!’ Janet complained.

  ‘All right, don’t get in a flap.’ After a few crackles the machine came to life with ‘Rainy Days and Mondays’.

  ‘It sounds very nice,’ Mrs Coyle conceded, though to be honest she was a bit dismayed to find the music no different from what she was used to, having somehow supposed the expensive new equipment would transform their entire record collection. Hi-fi units, it seemed, were like telescopes: they worked by subtracting something from the usual experience, not adding to it.

  ‘You can hear the treble far more clearly,’ Mr Coyle explained. ‘And the stereo effect’ll be better once I get the speakers mounted on the walls.’

  Mrs Coyle frowned. ‘Mounted? You mean you’re hanging those big things up?’

  ‘Of course, Anne, that’s what we agreed. There’s no point spending all that money on a hi-fi if you’re not going to make the most of it. And when I get the other two speakers on the far wall so we can have quad …’

  ‘Oh no,’ said his wife, raising her voice to beat the enhanced bass which Mr Coyle had proudly provided with the deft twirl of a knob. ‘There’ll be no quads here unless you want to turn the whole house into a discotheque.’

  ‘Don’t be unreasonable, Anne.’

  The Carpenters continued to supply an inappropriately mellow if somewhat over-amplified accompaniment to what increasingly became an all-out row, and Robbie retreated back to his room, where he found a science documentary to listen to. A sombre man with the unimpeachable voice of a newsreader spoke about secret telepathy experiments allegedly being conducted in both Russia and America; a psychic arms race. It might be possible to see inside enemy bases from a thousand miles away, flick switches using only the power of thought. Or why not visit the stars, thought Robbie; they’d be far more interesting than a missile silo in Kamchatka. Another voice countered that any theory of instantaneous thought transference would have to be consistent with special relativity. It sounded as big a problem as hooking up a hi-fi correctly, and not the sort of thing you’d attempt without an instruction manual.

  Next day after school, Robbie went with his mother to the library. They hadn’t been for a while, but the librarian recognized them both at once. ‘What’s it to be today?’ she asked Mrs Coyle.

  It was Robbie who spoke. ‘Do you have anything about the theory of relativity?’

  The librarian cocked a pencilled eyebrow and looked quizzically at Robbie’s mother. ‘Is he still … ?’

  ‘Oh no,’ Mrs Coyle reassured her. ‘We’ve sorted that out now.’

  ‘All right,’ she said, putting on the black-framed spectacles that hung on a cord round her neck. ‘Let’s see what we can find, though I’m sure it won’t be for children.’ Soon afterwards she was reluctantly rubber-stamping The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein. Robbie had two whole weeks to understand it.

  Relativity, he quickly found, is a bit like Russian: very hard. But Einstein’s book, propped on his chest as he lay in bed with a Polish orchestra playing waltzes on the radiogram, started well enough. ‘The theory of relativity is intimately connected with the theory of space and time.’ As first lines went, this was one of the best Robbie had come across: certainly a lot better than Kidnapped. Straight to the point, no pussyfooting descriptions. Relativity is the theory of space and time – terrific. If the rest of it’s like this, thought Robbie, I’ll be passing exams on it by the twenty-fifth when the book goes back.

  ‘The object of all science,’ it went on, ‘whether natural science or psychology, is to co-ordinate our experiences and to bring them into a logical system.’ Robbie needed longer to take this in, but understood that psychology’s not natural: it’s about telepathy and remote viewing and putting minds in a cigarette packet then sending them to other planets. ‘We are accustomed to regard as real those sense perceptions which are common to different individuals, and which therefore are, in a measure, impersonal. The natural sciences, and in particular, the most fundamental of them, physics, deal with such sense perceptions.’ So there it was: physics is what matters – all the rest is in people’s heads. He’d been at it only twenty minutes and already Robbie reckoned he’d just about got the hang of this relativity business. But that was only the first page: there were 169 to go, most of them filled with equations, and he soon realized he might need more than two weeks.

  This was Robbie’s new project, a training regime that was mental, not physical. As the days and weeks passed he felt there to be even less development occurring in his brain than had manifested itself in the mild thickening of his arms in response to much secret heaving of baked-bean tins the previous summer. The Meaning of Relativity was dutifully returned and renewed with each successive expiration of its growing list of date stamps, punched by the librarian who looked pityingly at him. ‘Still not ready to give up?’ she would sometimes ask, and then Robbie and his mother would go home once more with the book that was his Bible; sacred, encyclopaedically authoritative, open to infinite interpretation, and almost entirely unreadable.

  11

  There was a council election, and as always on such occasions, Mr Coyle was canvassing for the Labour Party. Politics isn’t about people in Westminster, he told his son,
enlisted as poster carrier and afraid his supply might blow away at any moment; no, it’s about talking to ordinary people on the doorstep. A bit like Halloween or evangelism, in other words, though the reward wasn’t sweeties or heaven – it was keeping the Tories out.

  ‘Hello, Bob, can we rely on your vote next Thursday?’

  Bob was wearing a string vest to hold in his paunch; silver bristles carpeted his double chin like iron filings round a magnet. ‘S’pose so,’ he grunted without losing grip of the cigarette disintegrating on his lip, then closed the door.

  Bob’s neighbour was a neat but anxious-looking old lady who said the problem was the unions and the immigrants and children who didn’t know the meaning of respect, and she’d be voting for Heath.

  ‘But it’s a council election,’ Mr Coyle reminded her. ‘Ted Heath isn’t standing.’

  ‘That won’t stop me voting for him,’ she said, sealing her door on the windswept figures.

  Robbie looked at his wad of window posters. ‘Do we have to keep going until we get rid of all these?’