In the next room, Thérèse is sleeping. She sleeps several times a day now. At first it was structured – morning nap, 10.30 to 11.15; afternoon rest, 2.15 to 3.30 – but as things advanced it started to just happen when it happened. Where it happened, too: chair, sofa, bench … It’s almost narcolepsy. This time, at least, she looked vaguely comfortable, propped up by cushions in a window seat, well covered by a shawl, and the heating’s on. Pilkington, post-prandial, thought he’d catch some himself, but got diverted, intercepted, passively or not, en route through his study, where, best part of an hour later, he still finds himself. He’s trying to compose an email, response to a request that Garnett’s sent him: his old friend wants pointers as to how a spaceship might start to collapse when placed inside a ‘solar wind’. For comparison, Garnett has written, think of a fighter plane in a Mach 25 environment: what panels would give first? How would they peel away? Is there a formula for determining the brittleness of sheet-metal and rivets relative to age, stress factors, pressure? Etc…. It’s for a film Pantarey’s working on, some sci-fi blockbuster. A little quid pro quo. He’s jotted a few notes down, but for the last twenty minutes he’s been ruminating, letting his thoughts glide idly back to last week’s Canard meeting: the clay-wrapped duck … the ice cream … the damn ice cream … with the wafer-grid, no less … That kind of detail always brings it on: old Project Albatross. It’s as if people knew. Do they? Those little jabs and accusations seem to follow him around, to hang or coalesce around him, rumour-cloud of smirks and whispers, words so familiar they don’t even need vocalising: How do you lose an aeroplane …?
He’s seated at the secretary. Both the object and the term have come down to him from his grandfather. As a child, he’d spend hours playing with the cubbies and the drawers, the slant-front opening, the small under-the-counter catch that, once depressed, released the hidden recess from mahogany depths. In the first weeks of their marriage, when they moved into the house, shuffled the furniture around, it confused Thérèse when he spoke about it. You make it sound like a person – like a mistress with whom you slink off to spend your time, she told him. Call it an escritoire instead. Or just plain desk. But he persisted stubbornly with secretary. The word, for him, is less suggestive of humans – stenographers, PAs, what have you – than of secrets, recessed, catch-protected; or, perhaps, at some more bodily scale, of secretion, moist, dirty and shameful. Pilkington’s hand slides furtively around above his knees, making its way towards the button. It still works: he feels the spring-load mechanism give, hears sprockets, rods and chain crank through their paces, waits for the small compartment to slide out from behind its thin facade, Potemkin panel … About once a year he undertakes this ritual, akin to prelate flagellation or to Filipino auto-crucifixion. This is why he thinks that, on the balance of probabilities, it’s a good bet that Vanins has some notes, some records, something of the sort Thames House are so keen to get hold of, stashed away: because he does, in defiance of all acts and contracts, interdictions, vows … This residue he’s held out or held back, held to him, siphoned off and buried like toxic waste, or dark, disgusting treasure, serves as his private autobiography, his unpublished confession, scrawled in code, a hieroglyphic alphabet of sine and cosine, channel-filter frequencies, glide-path degrees, strain-gauge transducer settings and transmitted pelvic loads …
He sets the disgorged recess on the desktop, covering Parkinson’s carer support information packages, reunion invitations and phone bills, and lifts the notebook from it. It’s a Silvine memo pad, red, 10 by 16, the brand name slicing cursively across an empty shield around whose sides two laurel branches curl on the front cover; pages lined, not graphed, inside. Pilkington’s surprised, each time he thumbs them, at how un-aged they are: thirty-plus years on, they should be yellow, crinkled, like old parchment. But, as though the secret drawer contained a humidor, the paper, the card binding, the whole book is soft and pliant to both touch and eye; the jottings could be yesterday’s, today’s … The agelessness brings on a double recognition: not just of the notes, but of the nature of the memory for which they serve as peg and cipher. Hasn’t it, too, stayed forever young? Rather than obeying the rear-view mirror optics that dictate all mental objects must retreat down one-point avenues of time, dwindling and fading, the whole thing has become fixed by the perspective, drawn into sharper focus – not shrunk but compressed, infused with greater density; through concentration, made to loom larger. Wasn’t that the whole point in the first place? A compression that was also an expansion? Four years into a single second – a second that contained a million others, and as many lives and deaths …
He got the gig six months into his posting. Not through the normal chain, his MOD line-manager or the one above him; no, it was McReady, his old supervisor back at Edinburgh, who tapped him on the shoulder, took him to tea in the Four Seasons, introduced him to Sir Ronald, figure who loomed large, if spectral, in the military-aeronautical imagination: MOD’s Chief Scientific Adviser, full member of both Defence Management Board and Defence Council … And to Dashell, Langley’s Vice Principle of Research Projects, who found tiered cucumber sandwiches and scones perplexing.
‘Are you meant to eat bottom-to-top or top-to-bottom? Why do they cut the crusts off, anyway?’
‘For symmetry, I think,’ opined Sir Ronald. ‘Given that they’re triangular, two sides with crust and one without would seem a tad off-balance …’
Then they got down to cases: a collaboration, hook-up, joint-planned and -conducted, between NASA, British Aerospace, the FAA, Marconi Avionics … There were others, junior partners, outliers, subsidiary parties … The idea was to stage a CID – the first of a civilian aircraft. Dashell’s people in Virginia were interested in acquiring baseline structural crash-dynamics data; BA and FAA in testing out an antimisting kerosene they hoped could not just fuel a plane but also prevent fireballing when spilled at impact; Marconi in the validation and improvement of their nascent structural-mathematical aircraft model; all parties in load measurements and load transmissions, fuselage acceleration, occupant human tolerance and the various sliders linking these to one another and a host of subcats, all interrelated. CID stood for Controlled Impact Demonstration. Simply put, they were to crash a plane, deliberately, on a beach out in the Indian Ocean.
‘Project Albatross,’ Sir Ronald informed Pilkington, cleaning a spot of clotted cream from his cheek with the back of his little finger. ‘So named for the bird’s wingspan, and the Tristan of that family’s presence – admittedly quite rare, often through misadventure, which you could say complements the one-off nature of our test – in the region.’
‘And what role would I …?’
‘Navigation,’ replied Sir Ronald. ‘It’s quite simple – just a big remote control, really. We need to guide a Boeing 720 safely to its doom.’
‘Emphasis,’ Dashell leant in, ‘on safely. The impact footprint will be tiny. And the interrogation window – the one we’re interested in – is the first second after impact.’
‘The first second? But the fuel … the antimisting agent …’ Pilkington turned to McReady for professorial support – and was met with a look of detachment, the three years of tutelage, the entire scaffolding of academia revealed now as a sideline to the real work the Prof. Emeritus had been doing when he reared his charges, falling away now as the intellectual vessel was delivered to the orbit of this higher purpose. On his own, he turned back to the other two, and asked: ‘Won’t that play out over an extended period – say, half a minute or so? And the load transmissions too, as they react to one another while the plane …’
‘Exactly,’ Dashell told him. ‘There’s so many factors that it’s basically random, or as good as, two, three links down the event chain. Our good friends can throw their private-sector money on that bonfire if they want. That initial second, though … We’re banking on it giving us a pretty stable metric in terms of the data traces it could generate, if intelligently primed.’
Thus began the next four years – four years which, if their destiny was to be swallowed and consumed by just one second, prepared for this fate by gorging themselves on the previous two decades. All transport accident files, company and govt., from Boeing, Lockheed-California, McDonnell Douglas, the FAA, the CAA and all the rest, were gathered, sifted, strained; each passenger jet crash between ’58 and ’79 broken down, stripped, fed into the accumulative database that in turn produced, after eight months, a Venn diagram revealing that, of 993 disasters in this period, 176 were both well documented and within the catchment area for survivability; which special crashes were then evaluated in great detail: context, cause, collision-nature, outcome … Every wing detachment and tail break-up, every stabiliser loss and slat retraction, tail strike, stall, fuel-tank explosion, pressure bulkhead failure; the whole spectrum of fuselage deformation following impact, conflagration timeline, crumple pattern and debris trajectory, injury-type distribution and row-based survival odds – all these were cross-indexed, each factor bringing with it, like so many plane shards, patches of its originating context and scenario, the pieces joining together in the manner of a jigsaw puzzle made from piles of other puzzles, mixed, scrambled perhaps but now quite neatly reassembling into a new image that, instead of just remaking one of the originals, creates a new composite in which each of the old ones stays recognisable even as it’s wiped. Call it the Ur-crash (or, in Gilbrethian style it occurs to Pilkington in reverie beside his secretary now, the one best crash); the one that hasn’t happened yet as such, but that nonetheless has underlain each of the ones that has, rulebook and blueprint, sum of possibilities, totality that hovers spectral above every partial iteration, haloed blur or maybe heat mirage – and hovers, too, above the spectres of its victims, past and future, open ledger always full yet always holding space back for new entries.
By March ’82 this ur-disaster had been planned and plotted. Statistics, magicked up through rounds of filtering and cross-indexing, revealed that 54.5 per cent of mishaps happen during approach and landing, which dovetailed neatly with the practical requirement that the thing descend on to a strip of beach. Glide slope would be a representative 3.3º to 4.0º; nose-up attitude 1.0º; sink rate 17 ft/sec; no roll or yaw attitude; longitudinal velocity 150 knots … It got so Pilkington could actually see it, see the plane descending, again and again, guided by nothing other than his own volition, held in the phase-lock of his mind’s variable frequency; and hear, on repeat too, not just the roar of its approach, but also static crackling around this channel’s edges, taking on the character of voices – hundreds, thousands of them, filling the bandwidth with their cries …
His first visit to Septentrion was in the autumn of ’82. He was flown commercially via Lagos to Mauritius; onwards on a military plane, a giant propellered Atlas, to the Diego Garcia base; from there, on a Short C-23 Sherpa to the atoll, touching down in the footprint itself. You see it long before you reach it: this distended pretzel floating in the sea, emerging in a patch you could have sworn you’d stared at for some time already and had thought was empty, like an anamorphic image in a painting or germ culture in a petri dish. Its shape, folded and curled round a central lagoon, earns it its designation as an atoll, but to all intents and purposes it’s a bank – a set of sandbanks ringed together, elongated white-tack lumps pressed on to a blue wall. Ground-side, the white takes on an even whiter quality. Grabbing a handful of beach as he stepped out of the Sherpa, letting it trickle back between his fingers, Pilkington noticed the people waiting to greet him exchange appreciative glances, observing the eager act of a professional – material analysis, soil-sampling – and felt fraudulent: in reality, his gesture was simply an attempt to clasp, to get to grips with this consuming whiteness, with the pigment not so much of a mineral as of a concept, a condition. The sunlight was white, not yellow; the sea-glare too; and so, apart from one black private, were the personnel, American and British servicemen and engineers. No locals: they’d been shipped out forcibly two decades earlier; their own catastrophe, a crash no one would model. White: sand, people, light itself were blank and virgin, plasmic surfaces awaiting first impression. Then blue: sky, sea, electric matrix of emergence, of potentiality – blueprint indeed … If this small, narrow strip would be Ground Zero, then this moment he was engineering two years hence, this charged and stretched-out second, would be not only his, but (it seemed to him, somehow) his whole epoch’s founding instant, the explosive now from which the futures of both would billow, find their mass and shape …
‘We’ll be acquiring,’ Dashell was also on the atoll with a spotty-faced assistant, Briar, overseeing the NASA side of things, ‘over three hundred and thirty time histories. Fuselage accelerations normal, transverse, longitudinal; wing (inner, outer, bridge and tip) accelerations normal and spar longitudinal; bending moments wing and fuselage vertical … Then loads: seat, dummy, lap-belt, shoulder-harness, bin-support link … Dummy accelerations normal, transverse, longitudinal – head, chest and pelvis …’
‘Pelvis?’
‘It’s where most of the body load goes, typically. The plane crash-lands, and everyone performs a giant synchronised hip-thrust.’
He wandered off whistling ‘Ain’t Nothing but a Hound Dog’, leaving the Marconi man, Anderson, to bring Pilkington up to speed on anthropometric modelling:
‘Thirteen of the dummies will be instrumented – triaxial accelerometers, restraint load cells and the like buried in their various cavities, to ascertain whether the load transmissions and accelerations stay within parameters of human tolerance – of liveability, in other words. These ones will be diffused about the cabin, to maximise coverage; some upright, others set in brace position. Then seventeen more, non-instrumented ones, your basic CPR types, will make up the numbers, keep the smart ones company; just like in life.’
‘And how will they relay their intel?’ Pilkington asked.
‘Transducers,’ answered Anderson. ‘Four hundred of them, transmitting from the dummies, engines, fuselage, you name it … Gain ranges from one to one thousand, with full-scale output of 5V into the pulse code modulation system, which has a frame format: 129 8-bit words per frame at one megabit per second; 60 words assigned to the 180-Hz channels and 58 words to the 100- and 60-Hz ones. We keep word size down at 8 bits to allow for the high sample rates, and send the whole thing through a low-pass four-pole Butterworth filter before sampling, to stop aliasing errors …’
Anderson had lost him with pulse code modulation … Daydreaming, Pilkington found himself mixing the term in his mind with human tolerance: the idea of a pulse, a pulse-beat, persisting amidst all the wreckage, sending out its signals past the barriers that death, aliasing errors and all other weapons stockpiled in oblivion’s arsenal have set up in a bid to stifle it … It was when Anderson got on to describing the aircraft structural mathematical model they were developing that his attention was reined back:
‘… that this will be the takeaway: whether DYCAST gives us an accurate view, or not …’
‘What was that?’
‘Whether it gives us an accurate …’
‘No, the bit before: die cast …’
‘It’s the finite-element code the model runs on: DYnamic Crash Analysis of STructures. If this little outing ends up validating it, we won’t need to keep smashing aircraft on to beaches.’
Pilkington tracked back to the Four Seasons meeting, Dashell’s spiel: so many factors … basically random … two, three links down the event chain … Now, in his mind’s eye, he saw a pair of dice, flung down on to a table of white sand, striking and bouncing, glancing one another, every new collision upsetting whatever spin axes they’d – if just for a millisecond – settled into, diverting roll paths into new ones which would lead to new collisions, on and on, chance multiplying, mushrooming exponentially, infinity reached by the first tenth … It was, indeed, random. But that first strike, that initial contact … that could be willed: the angle that the dice are held at, how hard they’re thrown, which side is upwards-, downwards-, sideways-facing … So it was with the plane’s impact: scale the dice-throw up a thousand-fold, milli- to second, and you’ve got the time-frame of the crash – the same proportional relations, same progression into randomness, but also the same window for control. Glide slope, velocity, sink rate: if well primed, these could, as Dashell said, provide a stable metric, generate a set of numbers that were unique, finite, true …
Whence his own role: die-primer, off-vessel helmsman. Kubernetes: wasn’t that where Wiener dug up the name cybernetics in the first place? If McReady, playing pilot himself, had steered Sir Ronald to him it was because he knew that the Ph.D. he’d midwifed into being contained the most up-to-date overview of the field. On the Use of Emulator Software in Remote Navigation Systems: most cited thesis in the department’s history; earned Pilkington his stripes – and now this. Armed with Sir Ronald’s seal, he got to hand-pick his team. Back in the UK, they designed this project’s tailored remote navigation system – thirteen channels, one per servo – plotted the 720’s path from NSF Diego Garcia’s runway (Septentrion’s strip wasn’t long enough for take-off) over the sea, the banking turns – first left, then right – that it would make, worked out the wiggle-room it had to dampen oscillations, realign with target centreline, the final approach angle. Like (it strikes him now here in the study, duck and wafer still crowding his mind’s stage) a Gilbreth wireframe, yes … Then Vanins. Garnett said that he’d put a man on it already. Others are on the trail: Thames House knows that, through its own various feedbacks. Everything leaks. Typewriters and ribbons, word-size, sample-rates … The pulse code modulation data on four of the channels of the airborne tape recorders, Anderson informed him, would be digitally delayed by 256 milliseconds, to ensure data acquisition in the event of a momentary tape-speed perturbation during impact.
‘Think of it,’ the Marconi man said, ‘as a kind of memory glitch, but in real time.’
Pilkington did, and more: wasn’t the entire project like this? An instant held back or diverted from itself; a second that’s both more and less? Where was that second, then? Where is it, now – where did it go? Nowhere and everywhere, perhaps: for him, it’s turned into an overwhelming presence that’s eternally ungraspable; totality that’s incomplete; destination missed, elided; moment cut out from the flow of time and exponentially enlarged, like some eternal frame …
A small disturbance comes from the next room: a murmur, breaking the surface of Thérèse’s sleep. The pamphlets, the online support groups say anxiety can be precursor to dementia. Maybe it’s just the heat: the radiators are on full. Out on the atoll, it was always hot, even at night. On his return there, February ’84, he found the strip transformed: cameras, landing lights, lines like yard-markers on American football pitches or shove-ha’penny-board guillotine slats … Two rows of heavy steel wing-openers had sprouted in the landing corridor itself, ten or so metres past the tyre-kiss spot.
‘They’re slicers,’ Anderson, on whom the intervening eighteen months had incised their own trace, a slight jowl-lengthening, announced. ‘They’ll cut the thing wide open, spill the AMK fuel at a guaranteed rate of between twenty and a hundred gallons per second. Here, have one of these …’
He opened a pull-top metal beer tin and handed it to him. To Pilkington’s amazement, it was cold. Last time round, they’d spent all day glugging warm water out of Osprey bottles that, if you could be bothered, you could tie up, trail in the lagoon and reel back like a fishing line to drink tepid at best. Now, the Americans had fridges. Besides beer, they kept ice cream in them, industrial-sized tubs of vanilla, strawberry and mint-choc chip, which they gallantly shared with their English partners. Among all the men (they were all men), both officer and private, military and civilian, a mood of camaraderie gave over, as April approached, to one of palpable excitement, laced through with a lubricating joviality, with transatlantic banter about cricket, baseball, hockeys field and ice (relative merits of), the edibility or in- of Marmite, what in heaven’s name hominy grits were, speculation about why dummies were orange, why Septentrion was so named when its constituent sandbanks clearly numbered six, why the first of April had been chosen for Impact Day … April Fool! they took to calling out to one another, to the sky, horizon, or whatever surface they could find to hurl the call at. It became their password, their shared in-joke, unofficial project title. Who’re we foolin’? they’d bark and howl over beers and ice cream of an evening, endless stars spread out across the blue-black dome that seemed to curl not just above but around and even below them as well, as though their atoll were set in the middle of a glass-ball paperweight, a snow-globe, bone-chip particles still riding thermals generated by a contact, a shaking, that had taken place long ago, before time began …
The joke, of course, turned out to be on them. Preventing accidents indeed … The most enduring laugh, the bitterest one, would be Pilkington’s, and his alone. They didn’t, they still don’t know: it was him …