‘Where are you?’ Canning asked. I told him I was nearby, although stopped short of naming the pub. Some secrets, however lame, were worth keeping.

‘That’s great news,’ he rabbited, barely letting me finish. ‘You’ve got to come over. We’re waiting for you now.’ He was already in a conference room and had possession for the next half hour. Whatever I thought of Canning, I couldn’t let such a prize go begging. Besides, he sounded as skittish as a racehorse. Something must have happened.

The giddy Captain was pacing the room when I arrived. He wheeled around as I entered and rushed over to shake my hand. Then he sped back to sit next to the other man in the room, who fixed him with an inquisitive stare for a second before returning to the view above his head.

‘I don’t believe you know Regimental Sergeant Major O’Hara?’ Canning licked the cream from his lips.

‘No, I haven’t had the pleasure,’ I said, and advanced towards the legend, who looked just like a normal man. In fact, he looked like two normal men, melted down and reconstituted by scientists. Even seated, his head came to my shoulders and he made the chair look like a child’s. His hair was long, lank and black, parted far over to the left and greased down across his enormous skull before dropping halfway down his back. His eyelids were half shut. I offered a hand and he took it in one of his enormous shovels. I had never felt a limper or damper shake, and I shuddered with shock. I searched for his eyes with mine but failed to locate them.

I sat down. Canning gave me a long rundown of O’Hara’s background, which was slightly less detailed than what Thompson had told me in two or three sentences. Throughout, I kept my eyes on O’Hara. At no point did he divert his gaze from the ceiling. He didn’t even have the courtesy to stop Canning when it became clear he had gone too far. I stepped in.

‘Thanks, Captain. I know we’ve only got a short time, so I think I should bring RSM O’Hara right up to date on where we are.’ I turned to address the man-mountain. ‘Are you familiar with our program of work and what has prompted it?’

‘Is O’Hara familiar? Yes, you could say he was. You could also say that if it weren’t for O’Hara, you would not be here asking him these questions. You ask what prompted your program of work, as you put it. It might not be so very far from the truth to suggest that O’Hara himself provided that prompt. Some time ago, O’Hara sent a warning to those who would listen. He is disappointed to find that the warning is only now heeded.’

His fixation on the centre of the ceiling, when added to his referral to himself in the third person, gave the very strong impression that RSM O’Hara was actually inhabiting another room while the conversation was taking place. My total concentration on him meant that I was dragged away to that remote place along with him. I found it relatively disturbing to be within touching distance of Canning yet in an entirely different location.

However, that was not the most pressing thing on my mind at the time. Here was another senior member of the military apparatus who had been well aware of the distant risk quite some time previously. Here was another with the know-how and the influence to have put into place a long-term solution by now. Here was a man, around whom the entire logistics model revolved, yet who had stood back and watched as reality slowly tightened its inevitable grip and an embryonic issue grew from unthinkable into the impending catastrophe we now found ourselves facing.

I remembered Thompson’s words to me: don’t annoy him. He can make sure you fail. Why had nothing been done? None of the planned major upgrades of infrastructure had even been started on, despite the writing on the wall being clearly visible to the entire relevant audience of bigwigs. A catatonic management had allowed the country to sink into a violent whirlpool of almost certain death. I was not to annoy him.

‘I understand. It has been a long time coming, but I’ve got a small team together now and we’re really making some progress. And I’d be very interested to hear your views on what the most important challenges are. Our scope covers everything from moon to plate.’

He clicked his tongue against his palate a few times. Canning looked at him like a dog waiting for a Frisbee.

‘O’Hara can only tell you what you already know,’ my sage told me. ‘You have larger shuttles, you have higher demand. It stands to reason you’ll need a bigger infrastructure all round.’

He was spot-on: I already knew that.

‘Do you have, given your vast experience, any ideas about where my efforts ought to be concentrated in the first place? Or any real gotchas, areas we might have overlooked? In your experience, is there a regular blind spot?’

‘You will know that yourself, better than O’Hara. You have, it seems, the very brilliant Sergeant Magath at your disposal. O’Hara cannot tell you what, where, how, how much. You need to test, like in all undertakings of this nature. Design. Test, test, test. Design some more. Test, test, test. Design. Test once again. Then build. The design verb is meaningless without the test. Also, in the absence of the test, the build can never happen.’

‘We have some difficulties with the testing environment,’ I said.

‘Correction,’ he corrected me. ‘You do not have difficulties. You have no testing environment. Nothing. O’Hara is well aware.’

‘Yes. I wanted to ask you if you could suggest any alternatives. Perhaps there are unused parts of the atmosphere that we could press into service, or suitable landing strips we could do some work on to bring up to the required standard. Any way we can avoid the death by procedure we’re faced with at the moment.’

‘There are no such unused facilities. The challenge is yours alone. Remember, without testing you are only guessing. Such an approach will not be looked upon kindly.’ Canning looked at me knowingly as O’Hara delivered his warning.

Attempting to find some more optimistic ground while we still had time, I ran O’Hara briefly through the ideas that Magath and I had been discussing in the morning, mostly around the detailed deployment of the timelock and the superchiller. As I spoke he stood and took up a position by the window. He filled almost the entire pane. He could have reached up and touched the ceiling without fully extending his arm.

‘These ideas are completely self-evident,’ he interrupted me before I finished. ‘The timelock is the only feasible solution for your problem. Superchilling is unproven in a deployment this large, but you will test. The operational management will be proven or not proven. It is incidental. Nothing of what you have said was necessary.’

Canning scowled. I ignored him. As long as O’Hara was talking and listening to me, I was happy. I tried another approach.

‘One idea I’ve been playing around with is the possibility of bringing in food at night only,’ I started. He jerked his head around so that he was turned away from me completely. I continued. ‘The atoms in the thermosphere hold considerably less heat when not being directly heated by the sun. Surely that removes the larger part of the risk from the re-entry process?’

‘Shelf life,’ he droned. ‘You must know already, but O’Hara will repeat it for your benefit. In order to increase the shelf life of the crops to enable the approach you suggest, you would compromise the nutritional content to such an extent that you’d have to triple the size of your shuttles just to bring in enough food to feed the country at today’s consumption levels.’

Of course. I had not discussed this topic with Magath: it was something I had thought of on my journey up to see Thompson earlier. Had I run it past my friendly oracle first, he would undoubtedly have pointed out the same shortcoming.

‘Besides,’ O’Hara continued, ‘you would probably cause a sickness epidemic as a result. The physiological make-up of our people has become highly specialised by now, and is growing more so continuously. They demand, and require, uncompromisingly fresh food. To send them back into the dark ages, nutritionally speaking, could be extremely dangerous. If nothing else, you would see an enormous migration, and that is what our government fears the most.’

‘Mass migration?’ I asked.

‘They would find a country that could feed them properly. Would you not do the same? Take O’Hara’s advice and abandon the idea before it does you harm. Did Sergeant Magath not tell you exactly the same?’

‘Realise our destiny through density,’ Canning spouted, solemnly. It was a catchphrase used by the Safety in Numbers campaign, an eternal initiative designed to attract as many bodies as possible to the country. I ignored him.

I was in a bit of trouble. My gambit had backfired. I was losing O’Hara, and it was my own fault.

‘I must admit, it’s not something I’ve discussed with Sergeant Magath,’ I said. ‘I’m still in the thinking aloud stage, and sometimes I remove too many filters before speaking. I apologise for my recklessness. But I’m sure you can see that this is a particularly complex and delicate situation, and it requires expertise across the whole gamut of logistics. I’m lucky to have Magath involved, and it would be a very great advantage to be able to rely on your involvement too. I get the feeling we’ll need all the big logistics brains to solve this one. Is that likely to be possible?’

He appeared to soften slightly. He turned to face me, his eyes dropped from the ceiling and focussed somewhere near my right ear.

‘Major Thompson has asked O’Hara the very same question. O’Hara will give you the same answer, out of respect for the spirit of the question. By all means use O’Hara when you must. But there are no guarantees. He is fully utilised already. DMpE has reached a critical point, and it will become another success. O’Hara does not let projects drift to unsatisfactory conclusions. Still, you must try. Do not be afraid to try.’

‘DMpE?’ I started to ask. O’Hara held up a monstrous hand. With the other he pulled his vibrating phone from his shirt pocket. It looked minuscule in his giant grasp.

‘Speak,’ he announced, and stood. He left the room while listening to the speaking noises, almost crouching to make it through the door. He walked steadily away, covering huge amounts of ground with each stride. Despite that, his figure still loomed larger than life even though he had made it almost to the other side of the office.

I turned to Canning. ‘Is he coming back?’

‘I shouldn’t think so,’ Canning shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you ask me, we were lucky to get that much of his time. He’s a very key person in this environment, so I’ve been told. Certainly put you in your place, didn’t he?’

‘What’s DMpE?’ I said.

‘Ah, hang on,’ he started to flick madly through his notes. ‘I spent some time coming up to speed with RSM O’Hara before I called you. I wanted the quality time with him.’ He reached the page he was looking for. ‘Distributed Marketplace Enfranchisement,’ he read. ‘It’s his pet project currently. A bit niche, to be honest. Much of our most senior generation still prefer to pick up their food from an old fashioned market. For them, the personal interaction is part of the whole process. And apparently they feel more empowered when they can see the actual goods before choosing them. Not to mention the fact that the majority don’t know how to use the supermarkets. Quite a few don’t even have the automated consumption tracking cards. They have to fill in forms, by hand, with the stallholders. It’s quaint. The government has insisted on a few staying in place, at least until the fag end of that generation disappears. Anyway, as you’d expect, the markets need fresh supplies too, just like the larger outlets. That’s what DMpE is for: it’s effectively a brand new road network that supplies the markets as efficiently as possible, using the latest technology.’

‘You’re telling me these dying markets have their own transport network?’

‘Yes, it’s dedicated. There are certain targets they have to hit in terms of speed of delivery from the central depots. They use specially constructed electric minivans, and something called a timelock, which apparently cuts the distances. I’m not sure how, exactly.’

‘It compresses the fourth dimension,’ I told him. ‘We’re looking to use the same solution in the thermosphere. Surely we can learn something from his implementation.’

‘Hang on!’ he exclaimed. ‘I asked him that very question. Colonel Brown told me to.’ He flicked once more back and forward through the pages of his earlier conversation. ‘Oh. Not really, it appears. Their volumes are tiny in comparison to ours, the timelock is operating in a different mode since it’s on the ground, the electric cars are bespoke and they only employ the most rudimentary security controls, given that nature of the goods and how they’re transported.’

‘What did they do for testing? Maybe they’ve got some of the machinery already in place, and we can reuse it? Could we adapt their test zone for our purposes?’

‘I asked him that, too. They didn’t really need to test. The whole thing was so straightforward that they didn’t build a test zone. Just ran a few dry runs with the new equipment. Now they’re transitioning the whole set-up to that and releasing the old roads back into the general network. Even if they had, O’Hara told me, there’s no space element to any of it, so it wouldn’t really give us what we need. He’s recommended that we start from scratch with our own. Told me to get in touch with someone called Scharf. He should be able to organise that.’

Scharf. Scharf. It rang a loud bell in my head. Scharf, yes: the bad-tempered Sergeant with the frayed cuffs. I could have kissed Canning, but I remained outwardly calm.

‘But still,’ Canning continued, ‘he did say we should use him whenever we needed, didn’t he? That’s a real bonus, don’t you think? I’m rather pleased with my day’s work.’

‘Have you got any contacts from Project Tardis yet?’ I asked.

‘Tardis? Oh yes. I’m working my way through some names I’ve got there. I’ve almost identified the right person, I think. They have their own protocol for engaging with anybody there. I’m trying to bypass it where possible, but sometimes I have to play along. I’ll have somebody for you soon.’

It was my turn to look pointedly out of the window. My head was so full that I found it impossible to be sure, but a rough run-through told me it had only been three full days since Major Thompson had commandeered me in the pub. Three days that had turned my life upside down. Thompson’s, O’Hara’s and Bernard’s words all jostled for space inside my head, each rising and falling like the waves in the sea under whose spell I had spent so many calming hours on my rooftop. Canning continued to prattle somewhere in the background, but his voice couldn’t break into my cacophony. I too was powerless to quiet it, and I longed for the simplicity and bonhomie of Magath’s company.