I was the proud owner of two large sheets of freeform braindump. It certainly was not the first time in my life I had had to work hard just to make sense of an apparent jumble of conflicting thoughts: I had lived through childhood, like everybody else. What concerned me most was that, with every passing day, additional orphaned responsibilities found their way underneath my paternal wing. The associated complexity and intractability appeared to increase each time, and my appetite for challenge was rapidly approaching satiation. I was unsure where the line needed to be drawn around my scope of influence.

Like a magnet, I drew inherent weaknesses and shortcomings toward my central purpose and they swam in a threatening moat of prerogative and obligation all around. Any solution I began to put together would set off a catastrophic chain reaction whereby another element fell apart, or a current irritation was exacerbated to the point of crisis. Slightly more rewarding, if only in an academic sense, was the painstaking exercise of systematically listing the known issues and sorting them into the order in which they would need to be attacked. The result, however, was intimidating. I was struck by the thought that the same process must have been carried out by hundreds of initially unscarred protagonists before me, but the sheer scale and complexity would likely not have dovetailed into their schedules and expectations. I knew how they felt.

Alex returned from his ritual day. Evidently his fast was over and he ate happily from a newspaper package. Crab and chips, I expected. That was his favourite. I could smell the vinegar.

‘You’ve been busy,’ he said, while working his way through the words on the sheets which had encroached on his working area. ‘Tell me: what does it all mean, exactly?’

I tried to concentrate on the beauty of the problem without overplaying the seriousness of it. Mostly I apologised to him for spilling over physically. Being Alex, he made light of it. He didn’t need anything like as much room as he had, and it was much better employed in my service. It looked like I needed it. I couldn’t tell if he had fallen for my understatement. He just looked happy to be eating again.

Chas appeared, as he often did when lunch found its way indoors. He helped himself to a chip or two and gazed at my scribbles critically for a few seconds.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I hope that doesn’t say what I think it says! Otherwise we’d be in real trouble!’ He glanced at Alex, who raised an eyebrow. They understood it. They really understood what I had written. All of a sudden, Chas grabbed my arm.

‘Check this out,’ he said in his version of a hushed voice, which was louder than anybody else’s. We followed his eyes across the office to a lanky figure who had just emerged from the main stairwell.

‘Watch this guy,’ he said once more. ‘Amazing.’

The man in question appeared anything but amazing. He was making his way across the floor in our direction. He took several detours around occupied floorspace and stopped to speak with a number of people en route, but there was no doubt he was heading our way. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about him, except that he wore dark glasses and, in his left hand, he jiggled a white plastic rod, around 12 inches in length. Every now and then while talking he would spin it into the air and catch it neatly after a revolution or two. He did that without looking, like it was a habit he couldn’t break.

‘What’s so amazing?’ Alex asked. ‘He’s taller than most people I know, but not enough to make it amazing.’

‘Look at him closely,’ Chas urged. ‘Look at his eyes.’

‘We can’t see his eyes, genius,’ Alex said. ‘He’s got dark glasses on. Why is that?’

‘Why do you think? Why might somebody wear dark glasses at all times?’

‘He’s not blind,’ Alex asserted. ‘I’ve just seen him walk across half of this floor and I can tell you categorically he’s not blind. Don’t tell me he’s blind.’

Chas almost became his own smile. ‘You’d better believe it, brother,’ he slapped Alex on the shoulder as he spoke. ‘The guy is 100% sightless. Blind as a cave fish.’

We watched. The blind man moved on to another old friend and shook his hand. He pulled up a chair from behind himself and perched on the edge as he continued his conversation.

‘He doesn’t look blind, apart from the glasses,’ I said.

‘I don’t believe you, Chas,’ Alex gaped. ‘How do you know, anyway?’

‘It’s true!’ Chas laughed out loud. ‘I’ve just been in a meeting with him downstairs. That’s his stick he’s twirling around in his hand. It’s folded up. I’ve not seen him use it yet. I think he knows this building pretty well.’

‘Looks like it,’ I muttered. I was hypnotised by the blind man’s insouciance.

‘You’re not the only one,’ Chas winked at me. ‘You should have been in that meeting. Everyone treats him like he’s some kind of god. As far as I can tell there isn’t anything relating to space travel that he doesn’t know about. They hang on everything he says. And you’ve got to listen hard, because he speaks really fast.’

He was on the move again, heading straight for us. He stopped around where Alex was sitting. He appeared to sniff the air. Maybe he was listening.

‘Hello again, Sergeant,’ Chas said. Our visitor’s head snapped around instantly and he looked straight at the voice.

‘Chas!’ he cried. ‘Fancy running into you again already. I had no idea you worked up here! I would have come up with you, but I had people to see.’ He approached Chas confidently, skipping around Alex’s chair in the process.

After their brief renewal of acquaintance, I was surprised to hear the blind man ask for me by name. Chas introduced us. ‘This is Sergeant Magath,’ he told me.

I pulled up a chair for Magath and we spoke. Or rather, he spoke and I listened. This appeared to be how it was. His CV was impressive and he took me through it: he spoke easily of men whose names I had only read: to me they were reputations, to him they were colleagues, even subordinates. All the iconic projects I had read about bore his fingerprint. It was like meeting Achilles or John the Baptist. And yet it was impossible to be intimidated by him. Time spent in conversation with Magath was exactly what it ought to be. The subject matter was given his complete attention. There were no external distractions, there was no prevarication, no dissembling.

I asked about the helium pumping solution, which I assumed was the purpose of his visit. His face dropped.

‘Thermodilution?’ he asked. I admitted I had no idea of the scientific name for the process. Small had simply mentioned pumping helium into the atmosphere.

‘Well, that’s a fair description of thermodilution,’ he said. ‘It’s big, but not particularly clever. It’s also mostly a misnomer.’ He paused for thought. I checked that my easels were facing the other way, that he wouldn’t catch a glimpse of the confusion they broadcast and think less of me. Then I realised who I was with. ‘How can I put it? The thermosphere is hot, but at the same time it’s not. Each atom is heated to over 2,000 degrees, even more when you’re especially high up, but they’re so dispersed that you’re pretty unlikely to encounter one, so the heat won’t be transferred. Unless, that is, you’re an enormous shuttle travelling at high speed. That’s when you can run into trouble, especially if you come across a hot spot with a high concentration of atoms. Solar winds and tides might cause that, and it would be fatal. So we came up with thermodilution as a concept.’

‘We dilute the thermosphere?’ I suggested.

‘The opposite,’ he smiled. ‘Think about it: the thermosphere is already incredibly dilute. What we’re doing by pumping helium is massively increasing the concentration of atoms. That gives the superheated atoms much greater opportunity to meet other, cooler ones and the heat will be dissipated and equalised to a level where it’s no longer dangerous to our shuttles.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘Does it work?’

‘It should work well enough,’ he nodded. ‘We ought to be able to get the shuttles through, even the next generation ones.’

‘Fantastic!’ I was sold. Magath folded his hands together and looked sombre. I calmed down a little. ‘There’s a “but”, isn’t there?’

‘A couple,’ he said, and slumped slightly in his chair. ‘For a start, we wouldn’t be able to monitor it for intruders. That’s a massive problem for Security Services. The change in the geophysical make-up of the ionosphere would probably play havoc with our discovery machinery. It’s mostly based on radio waves, of course. And even if we did find anybody lurking, our anti-trespass missiles would be rendered a joke. They’d be slowed down so much by the dense atmosphere that evasive action would be quite straightforward. In fact, they’d probably not even make it as far as the target anyway.’

‘Is that a big concern?’ I asked. ‘How often do we need to deploy missiles against intruders?’

‘About twice a year, but that’s not the point. If word got out that we didn’t have a workable defence system, it’d be open season. We’d lose everything coming in. But really, the bigger problem is the cost. It could never be more than a short-term solution. The country would go bankrupt within months.’

‘I take it nobody else, none of our competitors, is using a similar solution then?’ I said. ‘At least, nobody who will admit to it.’

‘Not a chance. There’s no need for anybody else to do anything quite so extreme. And it’s a complete unknown. Anything could go wrong. Our limited testing shows that it works as far as the cooling principle is concerned, but we can’t possibly know what would happen to the shuttles if you were to try it for real.’

‘That’s a shame. Captain Small had given me some hope. Sounds like it’s not really an option.’

‘I expect that Captain Small has her wires crossed a little,’ he sat forward once more. ‘Thermodilution is on the table as a short term last resort. It is being actively worked on, and we’re doing what we can to minimise the levels of dilution so that maybe the other problems don’t arise quite so seriously. We have a better solution in development, but thermodilution is getting some attention because it can be brought on stream much more quickly.’

I wondered how quickly he meant by “quickly”. ‘We could probably have something working within two or three months,’ he told me.

‘So, what’s the other solution?’ I asked.

‘Ah! Now we’re talking. It’s the right one, and it’s what we ought to be concentrating on. We’re preparing it for other types of interplanetary aviation, so I mean holiday traffic, refuse disposal, transportation of criminals, that sort of thing. But theoretically it could be applied here too. You want me to take you through it?’

‘Yes please. I’d like that very much.’

‘Fine. I’ll try to be concise today. We’ve got plenty of time to get into the details later. It works, effectively, in two parts, but the end result is a single channel stretching from the thermopause right down to the top of the stratosphere. It removes the mesopause, in other words. Quite beautiful the way it does that. Anyway, we’ll talk about that another time. Two parts, I mentioned. The first part is new, and exciting. It’s a kind of timelock. Are you aware of the work that’s been going on in that area?’

‘No, sorry.’

‘It’s not a surprise, unless you’ve been close to the latest developments. Its major trick is that it compresses the fourth dimension across a pre-defined area. In other words, it creates a tunnel. Anything that travels through that tunnel, like a shuttle, in our case, can be sped up quite significantly, without altering its actual velocity. It’s the holy grail of interplanetary travel. And we’ve got the bunch who cracked it on our side.’ He looked directly at me while he was telling me all this. His face insisted that I didn’t miss a single word. For the first time since I had started listening to him, his voice started to break just slightly.

‘The timelock would probably be enough by itself, but we’ve improved on it by applying another component. That’s the superchiller. It chills the entire channel, so as to remove any residual chance of burn-up. Without the timelock there would be no hope of chilling the enormous area we use, but when it’s just a relatively thin channel, it’d be mad not to.

‘And,’ he wound up, ‘apart from any of the thermomechanical advantages it gives us, it’s incredibly secure in terms of external interference. That’s the icing. The timelock gives us an incredibly small attack surface, see? Meaning it’s difficult for saboteurs to locate, and easy for us to control. It’s a simple process to reject anything that isn’t our own. Everybody’s happy, except for the bad guys.’

‘You say this solution is being prepared? It’s not in use already?’

‘Not yet, no, but soon. The holiday industry, particularly, is desperate for it.’

‘But you’re sure it’s feasible?’

‘It’s feasible alright. It’s perfect,’ he assured me.

‘And could we implement the same solution for the food deliveries, then?’

‘No reason why not. You’d need a larger timelock channel to deal with the increased size and frequency of traffic, and that would call for more chilling capacity, but neither of those is impossible. We can ramp this stuff up in modular fashion. Just bolt on more of the active components. The real beauty is that we can retain the same tiny entry surface, too. Operational management will be a breeze, compared with today. Currently we use almost the whole of our assigned atmospheric volume. Total madness. We have to police that, monitor the geophysical make-up, keep track of shuttles that might have gone off course, all that sort of thing. It takes an unsustainable amount of manpower. It’s just grown and grown over time and nobody has done anything to control it. This is now the opportunity to replace that team of drones with one man. Maybe a family. It really is that simple.’

‘I can’t see the catch. You’re going to have to let me in on it,’ I said.

‘No catch,’ he chuckled. ‘It’s a little cheaper to set up than thermodilution, but the real advantages are in the running costs, which are a tiny fraction. It’s the closest to a no-brainer you’ll ever see. I’ve been saying that to whoever I can get to listen for ages. Now the timelock is perfected, it’s time to move.’

‘What’s stopping us? Let’s get moving!’ I clapped my hands.

‘Nothing. And that’s the important thing. We need to act quickly. We’re losing shuttles.’

‘From burnouts?’ I asked. I had put the same question to Small, but it didn’t hurt to clarify it.

‘Some burn up, yes. The odd one. It’ll get worse, too. More of them simply end up in the wrong place.’

‘Wrong place?’

‘Another country’s airspace, in other words.’

‘How does that happen?’

‘Could be a number of reasons. There are some poorly trained pilots out there. We’re rushing them into active service, really. It’s a vicious circle: the less training they get, the more likely they are to make those mistakes, and we have to replace them from the same pool of duds. Although sometimes it’s experienced pilots taking the wrong trajectory. They’ve all got their own ideas on how to avoid burnouts, and they don’t all think it through fully. Then, a small proportion are misdirected by deliberate sabotage. Our navigation systems on those old shuttles have a few known weaknesses. We can’t guard against them constantly.’

‘And what happens to them if they end up in another country?’

‘They’re destroyed.’

‘Oh,’ I said.

‘It can’t happen with the timelock,’ he added. ‘All of those scenarios are rendered unimaginable.’

He felt his wristwatch, then excused himself. He had another meeting to attend, but we could catch up the next day.

‘That’d be great,’ I said. I walked with him to the stairs. Having somebody of his standing involved, even a little, could make my task almost possible, I told myself. ‘Do you have some time to spend helping me with this, then? I think you might be exactly what I’m looking for.’

‘Oh yes,’ he looked surprised. ‘I’m all yours.’

‘All mine? How do you mean?’

‘I’m 100 per cent allocated to your program of work as of tomorrow. Major Thompson has taken care of everything. Did he not tell you?’