Gloucestershire in September: willowherb drooping and flaking in weak sun against the wall, meadowsweet’s last flowering in the ditch, cut grass composting in the pile, and Thérèse sleeping. Now she sleeps more than she doesn’t. At some point in the summer it flipped over; he didn’t record it then, nor could he put his finger, now, on the precise week, let alone day, on which it happened – but a tipping point has been reached, passed, left behind, and sleeping has become her main state, her default mode. Doctors are hopelessly reluctant to commit, endlessly pussyfoot around his questions, no matter how circuitously phrased (How might we begin to plot …? In terms of temporal parameters … So what type of trajectory …? … timeline from here on in …?) – but the chatrooms, the support groups seem to give her three to six months. Speech is going; so is taste; smell’s gone already. She doesn’t admit it, but she’s seeing and hearing things, hallucinations: he can tell that from the way her eyes, last part of her that’s still alert and active, fix on the empty space above his head, or on a spot of wall beside the door-jamb, then dart off again towards an edge of cornicing or stretch of carpet and hover there, fiercely attentive, by turns frightened, bewildered and enchanted. What are they saying to her? What magic lantern shows is she being treated to? They’ve upped her Levodopa levels, to deal with the cramps and neuralgia, but her dopaminergic transmission is degenerating, and toxicity is setting in. Incontinence, too. Human tolerance finds its own boundaries, its limits: illness is a way of tracing, rubbing and redrawing these, over and over, an endless experiment, blueprint drafted on the body’s foolscap …
Pilkington’s in his study, and he’s got it out again: his secret ledger, laurel wreath that brings with it no public office, manifesto that no joyous crowds will ever hold aloft, Red Book destined to remain unread. Strangely, his anxious dreams nowadays concern it, and Albatross, as much as her. The two scenes seem to have merged together: it’s her arm, her shoulder, or the casters of her wheelchair that he’s trying to steer round, realign with target centreline, guide safely to their landing corridor, their kiss-spot on the sand. RLOS: the acronym’s scrawled on the page open in front of him, above a sketch showing the signal-command chain he set up to lead the 720 from Diego Garcia to Septentrion. Radio line of sight: a terrestrial-oceanic network, simple as Ancient Greek beacon towers or games of pass-the-parcel, with each post receiving from the last one temporary jurisdiction over the plane, giving it a little airborne left-and-right to check the telemetry, keep the old thing responsive, then handing it onwards to the next one. There they are, each station’s sign: DG, LV Siren, RPS Sept … the letters float about the page, reanimating for him metal pylons rising from cement set into sand, or from the deck of the light vessel bobbing just beyond the fourteenth parallel, the Siren. The mast beside the landing strip, beside home base, Ground Zero, was a triangular guyed lattice, red and white, with tensioned steel cables set at various angles, Lilliputian bindings pinning it down to the beach. Beneath it, the green tents; the generators; the recording vans; the instrument stations of Marconi, BA and the rest, arrayed in complex subdivisions like a desert sheik’s encampment …
And, between all these, orienting their scatter, attracting them around it like so many shavings round a magnetised lead bar, the landing strip, evacuated main street of a western town awaiting its high noon. With static cameras planted all about so as to cover every angle, to provide shot-reverse-shot capacity for each phase, each moment of the action, the beach reminded Pilkington (who’d never seen one but held in his mind the same popular image of them as everyone else) of movie sets. And the plane heading towards it … that, too, was like a film set: less protagonist than mobile studio, equipped with its own cameras and mikes, lead players, extras, props, all bound by their adherence to a script whose first draft was – is – written down right here; whose final typescript, shooting version, had been photostatted and distributed in various modified, partial forms, like an orchestral score adapted to each instrument. Turning the page, he finds, spread out across the next two, a block diagram of the data acquisition system: Time Code Generator (IRIG A) feeding Tape Recorders #1 and #2, Camera (IRIG B) and Syst 1 PCM, which last box is also fed into by Signal Conditioner and in its turn feeds two more Tape Recorders, #3 and #4, Delay Memory and S-band … The arrow-headed flow lines bi- and trifurcate as they run left to right, verso to recto, kink as they dip into the notebook’s central gutter. The plane, too, was meant to slide across the boundary between each control zone, pass eventually the margin separating sea from land, and hurtle in, an arrow to its mark, transducing multi-channelled secrets to the giant IBM housed in Dashell’s and Sir Ronald’s tent, the largest, greenest, shadiest one: master converter that would process all the multiplexing input cards’ sequential data, filter and sample and make legible once more – to them, to him, the world and all posterity – the millions of words hurtling their way, 8 bits at 129 per frame, across the great unworded silence, the blank space.
Outside the study, a small gust draws from the meadowsweets white spray eruptions, puffs that hang about the air like smoke when canons have been fired. Above them, birch trees rustle and shed leaves. First breath of winter, of a future with no Thérèse in it. On the first of April 1984, a light breeze skimmed Septentrion, fuzzing the atoll’s sand. Beaufort would have ranked it 2: the vane beside the landing strip was stirred but not priapic; wavelets on the sea were glassy but not broken. By quarter past nine, everyone was at their posts, although there were still two hours to go until the kiss-down; mood was busy but informal, people calmly and good-humouredly getting on with what they had to do, zapping about by jeep and foot, or radioing from one station to another, or, when stations were adjacent, just calling across: Hey, fool, get your ass over here …
The beers, at such an early hour on this day of all days, were confined to their fridge-barracks, cooling beside champagne bottles that they’d had to bribe (with other champagne bottles) Diego’s quartermaster to enter in the manifest as ‘technical hardware’; but ice creams were out in force. No one in the command chain had objected: they kept the men cool, and happy; Dashell was himself partial to them. Anderson, some time in February, had started experimenting: now, beside the pre-fab chocolate and vanilla, there were mango and papaya, coconut and litchi, guava, starfruit and jamalac on the menu, scooped out of a Gaggia gelatiera (inventoried as ‘counter-antifreeze device’) that, like a commercial airliner with instant turnaround, was kept in non-stop operation. Albatross Ice Cream, Anderson called it; Comes in seven deadly flavours … Pilkington, like most of the other senior personnel, had a scoop in front of him more often than not: working his way through the sins, sloth to envy, litchi to guava, one at a time, held in a small glass beside his console, although not for long; in these temperatures, you had to polish them off quickly. Today, he was downing more than normal – out of nervousness, perhaps, or perhaps because he garnered comfort, reassurance even, not so much from the ice creams’ taste as from their form. With an old Japanese Nevco serving spoon on the inner cranium of whose aluminium scoop-head flaking blue paint had produced a surface that resembled, it struck Pilkington, that of the atoll-flecked Indian Ocean if viewed in gnomonic projection from on high, the Marconi man, like a cosmic magician pulling newly formed planets from his hat, managed to turn out compact globes of coloured coldness that, time after time, came up impeccably, exquisitely spherical. Pilkington must have gone back for a new serving every half-hour, small rewards to help him tick off each task: copying the pre-fires, clearing the frequencies with each guidance station, checking flight-path coordinates yet once more … In the last stretch, the final minutes just before Hour Zero, it was a jamalac scoop that stood in front of him – most exotic of all the flavours: wax apple, syzygium samarangense, white with a pink blush. Beyond this scoop, his radar screen, gridded, green and empty; beside these, the book.
At two minutes past eleven, on Diego Garcia, the Boeing took off. Twenty-one and a half minutes later, it was handed over to the Siren. In another twenty-three, it would come within range of Septentrion. Pilkington was to bring it down himself. Any of his team could probably have done it, but the final approach seemed, from a symbolic point of view, consistent with the rites and protocols of nautical tradition, to demand his individual pilotage, his personal conveyance. Kubernetes: he’d plotted its route and relay; he would carry this Olympic torch through its last few steps, sink it in the bowl, the cauldron of its final conflagration. On the landing strip, the heavy steel wing-opening blocks gazed seawards, impassive as Easter Island statues. On his screen, the plan-position indicator’s radial trace swept its way round the grid’s concentric circles, drawing swathes and segments out into an afterglow that faded and returned with each new sweep. At 11:45:32 he glanced at the scoop: it needed eating, but he didn’t dare divert his hand, his eye, one jot of his attention from the console on which, from one instant to the next, a new dot would appear, and grow into an outlined shape: wingspanned, an albatross, his very own one, coming home to roost …
‘Hey Pilko!’ Anderson hailed him from the Marconi tent. ‘Turning up fashionably late. Is that an English thing?’
They were a little past handover time: forty-five seconds … now a minute … now two … Pilkington felt, for the first time since coming here, effect even the ice cream never gave him, a chill spreading outwards from his skull, down the back of his neck. He radioed to LV Siren, who said the plane had left their zone four minutes ago.
‘But you can see it on your radar still?’
‘Negative that.’
‘Then why can’t we?’
In the loud silence riding the waves back to him, he heard fear massing, finding its inchoate frequency. His walkie-talkie buzzed: it was Sir Ronald, ‘checking in’, voice calm and measured, deep bass over which Dashell’s more dramatic baritone soon cut in:
‘Where’s our fucking airplane?’
On Pilkington’s second monitor, a message appeared: Integrity Event. Could mean just about anything: antenna obscuration, interference, doppler shift, clock error, or some kind of drift … They were using extended Kalman filter; nowadays, it would have been unscented, with all arbitrary non-linear functions replaced by derivative-free higher-order approximations and their Gaussian distributions, sigma points furnishing state vectors and uncertainties, all propagated via state transition model. The drones at Farnborough have IMUs and built-in geodetic systems, little onboard globes with their own prime meridians and tropics … That’s now, though; this was then. A big remote control, just like Sir Ronald had said. On his main monitor, the radial trace continued sweeping, drawing into luminescence the plane’s absence, the grid’s emptiness. In front of it, the scoop was melting: sagging, crumpling, sloughing off its symmetry. Out on the runway, slicers stood brutal in their unusedness. Over the next few minutes, hours and days, they, like the pylon and the generators, like the vehicles and the tents, would transform themselves in his eyes, without actually changing their form or appearance, from idols issuing exultant summons to their god, a living deity who any second now would manifest himself, into mute testaments to their, or to the world’s, abandonment. It was the physics, though, not metaphysics, that would imprint itself on and stay with him. Not the advanced aerodynamics of forces and moments, of wind axes and velocity, of drag and side-force coefficients; but the simple physics, so child-simple it was colour-coded, of the radar screen’s vacant web (green), the sky’s undotted upper plane (blue) and the beach’s undisturbed lower one (white), all arranged around this pink-blush sphere that was dissolving, and dissolving with it all the other shapes too, running them into a flat, continuous surface on which nothing was and always would be taking place.
There was an inquiry, of course. It took two years; and, like Albatross itself, it kind of fizzled out. It was in no one’s interest to bruit the affair about. All documents and drives, all screeds and scripts and transcripts touching on, feeding into or output by each phase of the operation were commandeered. His own station, every monitor and floppy disc of it, was impounded; the red notebook, though, remained, like the 720, off-radar. Hiding in the light, perhaps: everyone had grown so used to seeing him clasping it that it had become, for them, a part of him, not of the project, like a pair of glasses hanging by a strap around a person’s neck, a wallet in their hand – or, in previous centuries, a monocle or ladies’ fan. Irony of all ironies: the inquiry reproduced the fatal error of its subject of interrogation, as though ritually replaying, in a blind spot, its own blind spot. They pored over the printouts, looked at the transmitting hardware, at the sampling rates, the signal-to-noise ratios, the onboard sensor-switching frameworks … They checked and rechecked the flight-path coordinates, tracing the chain of copies and transferrals all the way back to the first typed pages. But the error, as he could have told them right from the beginning, from Hour Zero – April Fool! – wasn’t in the reproduction from one typescript to another: it was there ab ovo, in the first ever typing-up. On the lined Sylvine pages, for coordinate conversion, geodetic to ECEF, he’d used Newton-Raphson iteration to determine the meridian arcs that, in their turn, specified the reference ellipsoid. For the third flattening, he’d gone with Bessel-Helmert series; for the evaluation, Clenshaw summation. Typing his cipher out for distribution by the project’s secretariat, he’d substituted, for convenience, Jacobi ellipsoidals – which substitution, he’d presumed, would be self-evident to everyone, all down the chain. It wasn’t. He’d seen that within two minutes of the plane’s disappearance, or (more correctly stated) of its failure to appear, and understood immediately what had happened. The numbers and equations that had been uploaded might, on their own terms, have been completely sound; but between the Siren and Septentrion, they’d lost traction – on the stations and the masts, on one another, on the territory they were traversing – and, cut loose from their fixed moorings, embarked on a frenzy of auto-conversion that had rapidly transformed the onboard navigation system into a random event space. Like a dice roll. He had given them a crash, after all: a pure, numeric crash, so perfect it negated any external enactment. Within two and a half minutes, he’d also understood that this sequence of causation would never, in the absence of the notebook (whose scrawled cipher was, in any case, illegible) be traced back to him.
They never found the plane. Two spotters, an RAF Poseidon and a US Navy Orion, flew around, first north, then south of the fourteenth for a week, scouring the sea for wreckage; for a week after that they extended their search westwards, to Mauritius and the Seychelles; for a third week, eastwards, towards Cocos, Christmas Island and Jakarta. Then they gave up. Amidst all the tech, the hardware, all the data acquisition tools, no one had ever thought of installing a black box. Why would they? In the ‘normal’ run of things, if the experiment had gone to plan, it would have been superfluous: the whole plane was a giant flight recorder. Possibly, years later, parts washed up on beaches – in Oman, or Pakistan, Australia, Holland, Norway, who knows where: a fragment of tail section or a tape machine head, an accelerometer’s dial, the arm or pelvis of an instrumented dummy … Would these scraps have found their way into a database, been locked on by and steered to the restricted section, laid to rest, in name at least, in some memorial archive? Or would they just have been prodded by child combers, like lumps of jellyfish and mermaid’s purses, plastic bottles, hunks of styrofoam and all the other spawn of cargo-spillage, sea-dumping and general world-discharge, draincocks and drowned dolls, bath ducks and deformed squishies, curtain hooks, door hinges, dehumidifier grilles and baking moulds, ball valves and parts degraded beyond thresholds of their name, the host of things released from purpose-contract to meander pointlessly from zone to zone? He wouldn’t have known one way or another; he was well out of the loop. He pictured the plane, though, over the months and years that followed, as having found a kind of berth, a gate slot, somewhere, in some spot for which no geodetic data point existed: an aporia, blind alley, cubby-hole or nook … He still does now: he sees it, sometimes on the ground, at rest, and sometimes flying, still, after all these years, a white bird gliding in a parallel and empty sky, above a darkening flood.