All of the astrochemistry, all the geophysics, all the thermomechanics, all the political intrigue: no matter how technically complex our project became, the real imponderable remained unchanged. Time. My initial limit of six short weeks lurked behind our every effort like an eternal echo. Before we had even started, Major Thompson cast serious doubt on the validity of such a limit, and I had developed the impression that nobody else took it awfully seriously either. But I had failed to extract an alternative prediction from anybody, and soon I stopped raising the question. It was the elephant in our room, or our cave.

Once Norris became involved, the problem deepened. The elephant grew agitated. Time itself became confused. Where previously hours and days had proceeded in a predictable, if occasionally rushed, order, they now fitted and started. Minutes wandered off without a word of explanation. Seconds looked around nervously at each other for clues about what they ought to be doing.

Norris himself worked at a breakneck pace. Nothing took as long as expected, and nothing ever effectively completed. He covered multiple ideas in each sentence, in order to save time. He saved even more by skipping the parts of conversations where others would traditionally speak. Some might have hailed him a genius.

And yet, time dragged when he was present. Where once it tripped by, lightened by the creative cloud of the genius Sergeants, now it stumbled and chuntered and swore.

It was not just Norris, either. He had multiplied. He had become three. In the early afternoon following his initial introduction, he reappeared, flanked by a couple of ominous stooges. From that point on I never saw him alone.

‘This is it, boss. Is it? Looks like the sort of place you said,’ Corporal Blackburn announced their arrival. He was taller than Norris, or so it seemed. It was impossible to form any solid understanding of Norris’ exact size and shape. To my eyes, though, Blackburn was the taller man. His clothes and hair were lank, and he gave the impression it had been a long time since his last meal. Even his tie hung off him where it ought to have fitted snugly. A prominent nose and two hungry eyes took up much of his grey face. His mouth moved a lot. On his head sat a peaked cap which bore the slogan ‘Corporal’.

‘It’s alright,’ he surmised as he moved slowly into The Bunker. He looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor, around at the walls, but not at the three of us. ‘A bit dark, just having these little spotlights, but we can do something about that, and there’s probably too much room to hide in those far corners. You don’t like that, boss. We’ll have to bring the boundaries in a bit. But, yeah. It’s alright.’

Magath and Scharf turned back to their work. They were working on the cardboard landing strip, removing a microscopic slice of filling in the light of results coming through from some detailed stress tests carried out on the new asphalt. Blackburn and the others made a roundabout way toward me.

‘Sorry we’re a bit late, guv,’ he landed in front of me, finally. ‘Got what you might call lost.’

‘Lost?’

‘Up in that basement,’ he said. ‘It’s like one of those funfair rooms. All looks the same, don’t matter which way you look at it.’

‘One of those funfair rooms?’ I said. ‘Do you mean a hall of mirrors?’ The basement didn’t resemble a hall of mirrors in any sense.

‘Yeah. That’s the thing. Close your eyes and turn round for a few seconds and when you open ‘em you’ve got no idea which way you’re facing.’

‘Why would you do that?’ I asked.

‘Well, we didn’t. But still, if you did…..’

‘You’re probably right,’ I humoured him. ‘I’ll be sure not to try it next time I’m up there.’

‘The boss couldn’t remember which one it was. Tried three doors before we got the right one. All led nowhere. We was ready to call it a day, wasn’t we, Nipper? Put it all down to a dream the boss’d had.’ He looked at the other new face. It belonged to Corporal Young, although I was unaware of his name at the time. He could not have been more opposite in appearance to Blackburn. His face was healthy and ruddy, squarely stamped onto the front of a head that could have been modelled on an ice cube. His shoulders and everything underneath told of a similar geometric precision. Unlike Captain Norris, Young gave the impression he would remain the same shape even if you dropped him into an industrial crusher or took an electric sander to his corners. His square face radiated no emotion whatever. He had been morosely staring at the array of models ever since entering, and continued to do so while Blackburn spoke to him.

‘Doors have always been one of the major causes of project failure,’ he droned. ‘Too many doors, not enough to distinguish them from each other. It’s lazy manufacturing. I’ve been at places where they’ve had more doors than this. There are simple techniques we can apply for making sure there’s no repeat of what we’ve just been through. I’ll get somebody onto it.’

‘Knew you would,’ Blackburn said. He was beaming from ear to ear. ‘Got somebody for every job, Nipper has,’ he turned to address me again. ‘It’ll all be sorted before you even know it. Just don’t ask too many questions. Know what I mean?’

I had no idea what Blackburn meant, but that mattered very little. The three of them settled down around my place and watched in silence as Scharf and Magath worked. Their operation took all of my Sergeants’ attention and they were blissfully unaware of the audience.

Two minutes passed, and Norris stood.

‘Magath is the taller one, with the bald head and the glasses, is that right?’ he asked me. I nodded. ‘He’s the one we need,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Magath!’

Magath rose slowly from his task.

‘We’re expected at headquarters,’ Norris told him. Young and Blackburn got to their feet and collected their things. ‘Let’s hurry. Colonel Watson wants to see us, and we don’t want to keep him waiting.’

‘What does Colonel Watson want?’ I asked.

‘If I knew that,’ he slid part of his face sideways towards me, ‘we wouldn’t have to go and find out.’ He winked at Blackburn.

‘Is it related to our design here?’ I tried once more.

‘I can’t imagine it’s related to anything else,’ he shrugged. ‘It’s the only initiative I can tell him about. Corporal Young has been given responsibility for nothing else.’

I started to get up. ‘I was under the impression that I was responsible for this design? Has something changed?’

An aggressive silence grew out of the question mark. I waited for Norris to respond. Blackburn looked at him too. Scharf was sliding a piece of cardboard, several molecules thick, out from within the runway. Every few millimetres he would stop and wipe his brow and flex his working hand to encourage maximum blood flow. Young watched him from out of his catatonia. Magath was organising himself for his trip, pulling on shoes and gathering notes. His preparations did nothing to disturb the perfect silence.

‘So there is life here!’ exclaimed Lieutenant Mortenson. He stood in the entrance arch. All heads turned his way. ‘Couldn’t hear a thing from out there. I thought you’d all abandoned ship. Time for a dip, anybody? Where’s Captain Lincoln?’

Captain Norris looked back at me with a question in his eyes. I introduced Mortenson.

‘Perfect,’ he announced. ‘Pleased to meet you, Lieutenant. You’re coming with us,’ and they left.

So began the routine. Uninterrupted periods of five minutes or more were consigned to the past. The three would troop in mob-handed, take one or other or several of the team, and head off to a hastily-arranged appointment. They never took me. I was too vital as a stabilising influence to the design effort, he told me. A design effort, I noted, which was becoming seriously compromised. A definite sense of edge had descended on our once serene workplace.

Scharf and Magath, the rare times they were allowed time together, appeared to be working blindly and often in conflict with each other. They had to rework a number of pieces which had fallen apart under light test conditions. My own corner of workings, which represented the consolidated, public face of their genius, began to stutter and unravel. If I could make no sense of it, the confusion would scream its hopelessness at my executioners. Watson, Thompson, General Mann; they would see through it as soon as they set eyes upon it. I despaired for our future. One day Magath had been removed before Scharf and I even arrived. We had to find an alternative breakfast, which we did at a café around the corner. We had never visited before. While I paid the bill, Scharf’s phone rang. By the time I returned to the table, he had been poached. Breakfast had cost me so much more than the headline price. I lost Scharf for the whole day, and it took me half of that day to guarantee his safe return to me the following morning. Magath returned around lunchtime, but used up a lonely afternoon in no more than flicking gravel asteroids listlessly at his perfectly painted shuttles.

The Bunker was totally empty. I had never known it so in all the time since we had started work. Even since the advent of Norris, there had always been at least one of our team to keep me company. But this time they had all been summoned to headquarters. As it happened, I was also due there later: a rare treat for me. In the meantime, the void of an empty cave left me empty and apathetic and I traipsed upstairs.

Alex was on his own. Chas hardly ever showed up any more, he told me, and Bernard was mostly busy at that time of day with the lunchtime rush at his bar. Donnie was tracking down some archive material for the relaunch of one of their extinct sports.

‘You look lost,’ he said to me. ‘Shouldn’t you be downstairs? Saving the planet from starvation?’

I told him of the emptiness I had left down there. How it was becoming rarer and rarer that I had my team around me any more.

‘But I’m fine. Besides,’ I added, ‘I’m due up at HQ. I think it’s time I was off. Is it four yet?’ I looked outside to gauge the time of day. All I saw was a street scene. It occurred to me that I had no idea what to look for.

‘It’s half past one,’ Alex shook his head. ‘Are you alright?’

‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘I appear to be confused about most things today. Recently. Confused about time. About how I’m feeling. About why. About people.’

‘Yeah, who are those three amigos you knock about with now?’

‘You’ve seen them, have you?’ I asked.

‘They were up here a day or two ago,’ he said. ‘Picking at things, asking questions, making notes. The scrawny one was talking to everyone. Making some friends. They planning on moving in or something?’

‘What can I tell you?’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything any more. Major Thompson has disappeared, so it seems. This guy Watson is running the show now. His people are everywhere. First there was Lincoln, now there’s Norris, and he comes as part of a package. I think Mortenson is probably a good thing. He works well with the boys, so he’s no concern. Then I find out that Watson has some kind of power over Magath, Thompson and O’Hara. And what’s he all about? O’Hara? All I know is that he wields supreme executive power over anything I might try, but I can’t figure out how to get him on my side. Every time I talk to him, he makes it perfectly clear the whole solution is my baby, and it’s up to me to make all the decisions. And then there’s Cowper. I love him as an phenomenon, but I’m not sure I can help him. Besides, he’s likely to run himself into an early grave if he’s not careful.’

‘Corporal Cowper? Little guy with a beard? Used to be a doctor?’

‘That’s him. Don’t tell me you’ve met him? How was that?’

‘He’s consulting on our relaunch. Apparently before he joined up he was some kind of expert on sports injuries. Specialised in sports which are no longer played. Knee ligaments, ankles, intercostals, that sort of stuff. Brutal, they were, in those days. But Cowper is the only one around who knows anything about preventative training or treatment. I spoke to him quite a bit. He didn’t really want to get involved, but they promised him a couple of extra stripes if he could see it through. He’s mad for a promotion.’

‘Yep, that’s him,’ I smiled to myself. How Cowper had time to get involved in that was a mystery to me. But, if anyone was capable of it, he was that person.

‘Freaked everyone out, too’ Alex added. ‘Have you seen his party piece?’

‘What party piece?’

‘He reads minds.’

‘What do you mean, he reads minds?’ I asked.

‘Just what I say. He actually reads minds. He can tell what you’re thinking.’

‘What are you talking about?’ I demanded.

‘I’m not joking. He did it about five times in the meeting. I was sitting next to him. He’d whisper to me what was going through somebody’s head, write it down, then he’d ask them a question and they’d respond exactly like he’d predicted. Questions were nothing to do with what we were talking about, either. It wasn’t like he was just making a sensible guess based on the context. Totally random. Then he’d show them what he’d written. And he’d never met those people before. Hilarious.’

‘Hilarious,’ I said.

‘Apparently he does card tricks, too. I didn’t get to see them, though.’

---

‘I’m telling you, no. It’s counter-productive; a complete waste of everybody’s time. If you want that sort of detail, you’ll have to…..’ Norris started to cough while I spoke. Not a normal cough of a normal person, but a deep rattling echo of a cough that built somewhere inside his rickety ribcage and rumbled up and out of his unguarded mouth like the drone of a diseased bagpipe. Next to him, Blackburn sat, immobile, note-taking hand at the ready. Always ready. A pre-packed sandwich lay on the table in front of him. He had unwrapped it as soon as the meeting had started and it had remained untouched since then. Every now and then he would wipe away a trail of slaver from his chin. Farbrace had not taken his eyes off the man or the sandwich since the stand-off had begun. Further around the table, Corporal Young’s perfectly geometric attention was focussed on the hasty diagram I had reluctantly scribbled on the board.

I had to stop and let Norris finish. It was not the sort of cough over which one could talk. The pause was probably timely, though. I had lost patience with them, once more. On the back of a rough outline I had used to illustrate a fundamental point of discussion, Norris had requested that I recreate my entire working output within the mobile office that Blackburn and Young carried around with them. In other words, draw our full portfolio of designs out on their array of fold-up and roll-up and stick-on whiteboards. I had refused point blank.

His cough rumbled to a halt in a siding. ‘Why can you not trust us to produce the solution the way we see fit?’ I asked him. ‘Do you have a specific reason for doubting our capacity?’

He looked at me and said nothing. His eyes widened, and that seemed to send his eyebrows toward the top of his head.

‘If anything,’ I continued, ‘our work has started to deteriorate since you were assigned to the project. The constant interruptions, external distractions and your insistence on rehashing the same details over and over again, detail you really don’t need to understand, have destroyed the momentum we had built up. Our delicate balance has been upset. I’d even go so far as to suggest that we know less now, or at least can be sure of less, than we did when you started. You have materially retarded our effort.’

‘Get that down, will you Roy?’ Norris turned to Blackburn and indicated the schematic behind me on the board. ‘Then work with the guys to get the rest copied up, too. One way or another, we need this information with us at all times.’

Corporal Blackburn swivelled in his chair to face the board. He turned over a new page in his book and started to trace my sketch line for line.

‘Love it,’ he trilled to himself. ‘Sharp end of the space travel industry. Copyright, Corporals Roy B and Nipper Young. Heh heh heh. Just…. join…. up…. those….. boxes. Got….to…..get……these….arrows…….pointing…..’

I looked across to Scharf and Magath for some sort of check on reality. They were both inspecting their fingernails. I sat down next to Blackburn and inspected his work. Somewhere between eye and hand lay a problem. His interpretation was crude, boxy, inaccurate in terms of both conceptual illustration and specific annotation. He had transcribed every acronym incorrectly. He had elevated the purely meaningless to an entire new level. I wanted to cry.

‘Colonel Watson doesn’t think we can test,’ Norris said. Blackburn continued his deranged doodling. ‘I’ve had a number of meetings with him on the subject, and we’re both convinced. There’s no viable test facility within the country.’

‘We’ve been making this point for quite some time,’ I said.

‘Yes, and I can confirm it is indeed the case,’ Norris confirmed my suspicion.

I counted to five. I considered it a miracle I made it so far. Blackburn drew. Farbrace watched the sandwich. Scharf was approaching a state of grace.

‘As a matter of fact, it’s probably less the case today than it has been at any time since we started,’ I began. Norris showed no emotion whatever. ‘I made some good contacts on my tour of the various facilities with Corporal Cowper,’ I said, ‘and it’s just possible that one of them might have come up with what I consider a breakthrough. I think I could have a foot in the door.’

‘Colonel Watson wants us to run tests at the dedicated superchiller lab,’ Norris said. It was as if none of my words had made it as far as his ears.

‘I’m sorry, Captain, but did you hear what I just said?’ I asked.

‘Every word. Colonel Watson wants to pursue the superchiller lab route.’

I tried Scharf and Magath. ‘What do you say to that idea, chaps? Could that work?’

‘The superchiller lab,’ Scharf looked at Norris. ‘You mean their usual development lab?’

‘That’s the one,’ Norris confirmed. ‘Colonel Watson has managed to get an in principle agreement to use the facilities on a time-slice basis.’

‘It’s in Vaurania,’ Scharf informed me. ‘I’ve been there. I can always go back if you want me to. Spend a bit of time making sure it all goes well.’

Vaurania was a playground for the rich and dissolute. Several technology companies had a presence there due to the complete lack of regulation or government intervention. Very few serious products emerged from what was effectively an administrative and commercial swamp, and a creative acid trip. The superchiller was a notable exception.

‘You’re suggesting we set up a fully-functional lab environment in Vaurania?’ I asked Norris.

‘Colonel Watson suggests it, yes. It’s where the product is developed. We’d have access to all their experts.’ He was leafing through a thick printed copy of a presentation as he spoke.

‘You’re referring to the experts we could tempt away from their yachts, I expect,’ I asked, in a churlish interlude. ‘But, realistically, is Vaurania viable as a test site? It’s on the equator. The movement of air in the upper atmosphere, the temperature, even the exact constitution of the various strata, they’ll all be slightly different from here. Won’t they?’

‘Correct,’ Magath didn’t wait for Norris to reply. ‘Testing there will give us a very vague indication that things are sort of alright. There’s no guarantee that anything will operate in a similar way anywhere else on the planet. And what about the timelock?’

‘What about it?’ Norris asked, without raising his eyes from his page.

‘Can we transport it to Vaurania? Those chaps are very careful about letting competitors lay hands on their secrets. I can’t see them going for this type of set-up.’

‘You’re right, up to a point’ Norris said. ‘They refuse to send their latest product, but they’re happy to supply the previous version. Less sensitivity around the intellectual property.’

‘There is no previous version,’ Magath pointed out. ‘This is new. That’s the point.’

‘I’m talking about the prototype,’ Norris snapped. ‘It’s the closest we can get to the real thing. That’s the one they used for all the beta testing.’

‘How far downstream are they able to build?’ Scharf asked. ‘Warehousing, processing, transportation. What I’ve seen of the place, there’s no facility for that. It’s mostly casinos and coastline.’

‘The shuttles are flown through the atmosphere and landed,’ Norris said. ‘If you really want to, I believe we can simulate the ordering process beforehand and the unloading process once they’re on the ground.’

‘Am I here?’ Scharf asked me, ‘or is this just a bad dream?’ It was the first time I had smiled for quite some hours. I savoured the feeling, which I knew would not survive the first chill breath of a reality within which it could never have expected to land.

‘You may consider it less than perfect, Sergeant, but it gives us a test case to work with,’ Norris responded.

‘It gives us a test case to discard,’ I corrected him. ‘Any results we end up with will be meaningless.’

‘Nonsense,’ Norris insisted. ‘There are so many elements of so many components we can prove.’

‘Proof, in this scenario, will be irrelevant,’ Magath spoke up. ‘Yes, you can prove whatever you choose. And then you can leave your proofs right there in Vaurania. You bring them back here, they die. Think of it this way: it would be like you trying to breathe the atmosphere on the moon. Your body isn’t programmed to operate on that mix of gases. Within seconds you would be asphyxiated. As dead as your proofs. If you really want non-portable truths, we can provide as many as you need from our own Bunker. That might not be so diverting as a trip to Vaurania, but, sadly, equally valid.’

Next to Magath, Scharf nodded his violent agreement. Further along, Farbrace remained non-committal. He continued to watch Blackburn’s neglected sandwich.

‘Listen, I want the same things as you lads do,’ Norris pushed aside his pile of papers and gave us, his sceptical audience, the full weight of his odious attention. ‘I know we have to test. I know we can’t test here. I know that testing in Vaurania isn’t the ideal scenario, but it’s preferable to the alternative.’

‘Which alternative, Captain?’ I asked.

‘The alternative being not testing in Vaurania,’ his face was flatter than the inner walls of The Bunker. He picked up the wedge of papers in front of him and hefted them across the table to me. Corporal Young did the same with a number of other copies. Magath, Scharf and Farbrace all got their own.

I had not heard Corporal Young speak more than a sentence or two up to that point, but he rectified that. His diction was as shaded as his eyes under their monstrous brows. He spoke evenly and without nuance. I buried myself deep in the arcane details and followed his muffled and monotonous narrative from within. I leafed through, lazily. There must have been 40 or more slides in the whole deck. I knew there was no chance of my staying conscious for the whole lot, so I scanned the main points of the next slide and looked up at the speaker. His demeanour was as turgid as his speech, and he sported the same endless stare which was becoming so familiar. He completed another slide, paused momentarily, turned over the next from the pile to his left and continued. A couple of minutes later he did the same. Not once did his eyes drop to the printed material he fingered like a blind man with a coin. He was reciting from memory. I watched for another slide, two, three. There was no denying it: he was intimately familiar with the words on the sheets.

As a child, I had been inquisitive and argumentative, in approximately equal measure. That wasn’t such a bad thing, I had always told myself, despite the trouble it regularly caused me and the weakness it opened up in my emotional shield. I found myself at my most vulnerable when confronted by the unapologetically obtuse. Sadly for me, that had been a frequent scenario during my formative years, most notably thanks to a teacher with whom I had somehow been cursed for one whole year of my school career. Quite how she had risen to such a station in a country where education was still venerated almost as much as seniority was a mystery to me. Her mastery of the prescribed syllabus was irreproachable, but her immovable ignorance on any number of extra-curricular matters proved overwhelming. Too powerful by far for my keen but lightweight brain, which often attempted to fill gaps in my wider understanding of sketchy subject matter. Time after time I would reel away from our brutal confrontations, none the wiser and mentally bruised, as if I had been bashing my intellect against an invulnerable wall of reinforced diamondrock. She stood proud, unmarked, her untutored, know-nothing exterior not even stained by my famished curiosity. A more sensitive soul than I might have been diminished with each stonewall defeat, but my youthful arrogance ensured I lived, ultimately unscathed, to fight and to suffer another day. How elastic we all once were.

That arrogance, I knew, still beat somewhere within me, despite the passage of the years, and I called upon it as I endured Young’s presentation. The turning of each gelatinous page struck me a blow square in the temple, in precisely the same way that I had known as that child. My defences fielded the blows, but I had less confidence this time that the outcome would be as harmless.

My entire future was congealing amidst his words. I was capable of nothing more than a dead-jawed stare at the pages. My faculties had been anaesthetised by his unsophisticated daubings. I consciously drifted away to a safe distance, from where I pictured my bodily self rising, zombie-like, from its seat and beating an untroubled path around the oval table to the place where my tormentor held forth, tearing his throat from its moorings with undead fangs. Scharf shifted his position and penned the real me to the safety of the corner where I had retreated. Magath sat untouchable behind his dark glasses. Farbrace gave the sandwich no respite.

Norris plotted his next move while those around him hesitated, frozen in tedium. Once, at school, I had witnessed a boy fall from a balcony. Where he landed, the blood ran from his crushed skull and formed an ever-changing pool around the crook of his neck and his twisted shoulders. It grew longer for a minute, then wider, now deeper. It became more regular, then it took on the shape of an oak leaf, now a duck’s wing and bill. The flow of fresh blood into the pool was imperceptible along the violent red tributary, but it would not dry up no matter how long or how hard I watched it. As Young drove on into the night of his deathly commentary, Norris’ shape-shifting viscous form sent me back to that distant empty playground. The blood collected around my feet. It rose over my shoes, up to my knees, my hips. Movement was impossible. I looked around. Nobody appeared. The boy had gone. Just the pool remained. My chest. My shoulders.