My immediate response to the growing Pfister problem was to retire to the pub. I had to take action with which I was comfortable. Whatever the game was, I could no longer play. In fact, the game, from whichever angle I approached, appeared to be mostly a part of me. I believed that if I disappeared, the game would also. I sent word to the team that I would be out of action for a while, and that they should continue as if everything were normal. After all, everything was. I also made sure they knew that Corporal Cowper was back in action. It felt like the right thing to do. Despite, or perhaps because of, his stated desire to break free of his self-imposed professional shackles and spend some time with his family, I thought some contact with my team might be just what he needed. It seemed wrong that his genius remained so self-contained. Even if I was unclear exactly what to do with it, that didn’t mean that Magath or Scharf couldn’t benefit from it.

I made no attempt to conceal myself. I sat in my usual chair at my local and drank the day through. Occasionally I stared through the windows with an impertinence that made sense only if they operated just one way, but mostly I remained where I preferred: within myself. Outside, the flywheel world continued to spin, the weather rose and fell, and sometimes it stayed the same. Inside, my body adapted expertly to the physiological changes wrought by endless beer. I conversed regularly, briefly and insubstantially with a subset of the other boozers, as was customary for me. I ate whenever I felt the alcohol needed some counterbalance. After a while I stopped examining myself for evidence that the game might have followed me. When I left the premises, I did so quietly and staggered slowly home through the menaceless streets of my neighbourhood. Public order was like a religion in our city.

It was an interlude in my life so far removed from noteworthy that the time it occupied appeared somehow less solid than usual.

And yet it stood out like it was the inverse of that. There was not a single minute when I felt completely comfortable with my absence, but I had decided it was the correct approach. It seemed self-pitying to suggest that they were better off without me, but there was some truth in that: maybe, I thought, if not quite a cruel game at my own expense, the role I occupied had become that of a portal into the real world; a world where the creative work of our gifted team came into crashing contact with the serried impossibilities of a practical application. I considered my situation highly unsatisfactory from a personal point of view, and a danger to the success of our collective purpose. On my stool, at the bar, having shut off that portal, I was allowing unfettered productivity to flourish, necessarily ignorant of its final destination.

In the meantime, mostly to assuage my own guilt, I decided to establish some background on Major-General Pfister. This man who dominated our thoughts. All I knew was that he was highly predictable, that his priorities were completely reasonable and that everybody was terrified of him. Before we put ourselves in the firing line, whenever that might be, I felt I needed to know more.

My attempts failed, for the simple reason that I was hopelessly unsuited for such work. When confronted with the task, my mind became a total blank. My phone sat next to me on the bar, redundant. I didn’t know who to ask, not that I had any decent contacts anyway, and even if I had found somebody, I would have had no idea what to ask. I lacked the sort of curiosity that might have brought me useful information. When it came down to it, I already knew everything I needed to know about him, and I was looking forward to our meeting. I figured I was the only one who was.

So I uncovered nothing new. That left me more time to drink.

Two whole days I spent, uncovering nothing. I felt confident that an overwhelming urge to reconnect with my team would overtake me at some point. On the third day I felt that urge, and I followed it.

The Bunker was empty, so it seemed. The pool was still, like it had been tied down. I flung in a small handful of the tiny pieces of gravel that sometimes accumulated at the edge of the path, just to check it was still alive. I would never have done something like that had I not been half-cut. As it happened, the majority of the ripples radiated half-heartedly from the landing spot for a few inches, then fizzled out in the face of the pool’s general apathy. The rest of them didn’t even bother to start their journey and the stones sank to the bottom with no legacy, not even temporary. I shrugged and entered The Bunker.

Our cave had become so familiar to me that I had been in danger of taking it for granted. This, then, was the perfect time to reacquaint myself with it. Addled as I was, I was especially receptive to the emotional resonance of the place. I had actually missed it. The imposing entrance arch stood astride me like a giant with arms clasped protectively. The acoustics were so different from the outer pool chamber. Echoes were short and precise and gave the slightest depth to voices, to footsteps, to thoughts. The rock walls were always close but never threatening: it just seemed as though they would give everso slightly under the right sort of pressure. The whole impression was womblike.

By my reckoning there was half an hour or so until sunset. Light still made it through the tubes, although already it had begun to turn rusty. The enormous model on the central plinth, as a result, was lit in a way I had never witnessed exactly. Heroic, it seemed.

I took a slow walk around the creation. The feeling was of recent familiarity, although this time I was on my feet rather than my knees. This one was also a work of art. I could identify no imperfections. Maybe it could never be as organic as Cowper’s Castle, but within its substance of recycled plastic and cast-off tin and incidental cardboard, every eventuality was covered. The similarities were uncanny. That two sets of people, working independently, could come to identical solutions, was almost beyond belief, but the very fact it had happened gave genuine credibility to both solutions. Admittedly, our model included the atmosphere, where Cowper’s did not, and his extended beyond the warehousing, the limit of ours, but the common area, the spaceport itself, had been recreated brick by beautiful brick.

Naturally, I reminisced to my very first view of the actual thing, from the opulent window of the executive dining room. What had I seen then? Chaotic organisation. Accidental efficiency. That was how I had described it to myself, and it had made total sense. In all the years I had spent designing solutions, not once had I given any thought as to how one of those designs might actually be turned into an end product: a housing project, a leisure complex, a wind farm, a code of conduct. The reality of it, for me, ended on the piece of paper I handed over to the next link in the chain. Whether or not anything substantive came of my designs, I never knew. But the one thing I suspected was that if they were to become real, it would be by accident. My work might possibly guide the initial efforts of those charged with the build, but they would soon figure it out for themselves by trial and error. As a result, it was very difficult to justify one’s efforts, or even feel attached, and that knowledge had a deep effect on my understanding of the life I led. I gathered I was not alone within my profession.

This, though, was different. This was the opposite of everything I had ever produced. This was an undeniable masterpiece. I sat and allowed the tears to run down my cheeks. Between us, we had exactly understood the requirements. And, more than that, we identified the exact solution to fit those requirements. And, more than that, we articulated it clearly and unequivocally. That articulation, modest as it appeared even under the dramatic light of the channelled sunset, stood in front of me and made my entire life worthwhile. Better than that: it might even work.

A low voice drifted across from the far side. I didn’t hear it until it was far inside me.

‘I wondered when you might be back,’ it said. I looked up slowly and could make out a tall figure approaching me. The voice was Sergeant Magath’s. ‘How do you think we’ve done?’ He held his hands out to feel the rays of the setting sun and gave a knowing nod.

I attempted to tell him what I thought of the model. I was gushing in my praise for the whole team.

‘Let’s go,’ he interrupted me. ‘There’s a celebration.’

Everybody was at Bernard’s place. The party was in full swing. Evidently they all recognised, like I had, the importance of the work they had completed. I immersed myself in the bonhomie and the atmosphere. I told myself, and nobody suggested otherwise, that I was as responsible as any of the others. I sat amongst them all, eyes mostly closed, for some time and was left in peace. Eventually I was ready to talk. Sergeant Scharf was next to me. His shirt was open almost to his navel and his hair had become untamed. His hands were clenched into victorious fists, like he didn’t know how else to physically manifest his elation.

I asked about the testing environment.

‘It’s a done deal,’ he looked at me with disbelief. ‘All the pieces are in place.’ I started to cry once more, without blinking. He didn’t care. I was looking straight at him, and crying. He might have been tearful himself. I couldn’t see clearly enough. ‘We’ve earmarked a large wedge of atmosphere. We can reroute the traffic that currently uses it. Turns out the logic that led to allocating it in the first place was never really tested. There’s plenty of space, even at busy times. And the big breakthrough is that we’ve identified an area to build a landing strip that can land two of the new shuttles at the same time. The unions have agreed to build it, using the new asphalt. They’re happy to use it as a proving ground, get the material onto the approved product list.’

The whole story was difficult to believe. How had they reached this stage, I wanted to know.

‘That’s another thing you can take some credit for,’ he smiled. ‘We had a visitor. Your Corporal Cowper. Spent half a day with us, if that. Magath had convinced the bigwigs in the unions to come along too, and Cowper had them eating out of his hand within minutes. By the time they’d left the world looked a different place. Then he gave us his ideas for getting the shuttles unloaded and back into action in less than half the time we thought possible. It’s all to do with using the old shuttles for terrestrial deliveries. It removes around 70 percent of the warehousing requirements, too. The guy’s a total genius. I can see why they sectioned him.’

Mortenson and Tom Sleep were approaching from down towards the harbour edge. They were walking close together, bumping shoulders occasionally. In some sense they were mirror images of each other, although Tom was much taller and had blond hair. Each of them, in his outer hand, held a champagne flute. In their inner hands they clutched the matching bottles. Both had shirts plastered to their skin, probably through champagne that had once been in the bottles but never made it into the glasses. Mortenson took up a place by the piano, Tom came and sat next to me. He poured me some champagne.

‘Cheers,’ I raised my glass. He hiccoughed.

‘Tom’s happy about the test zone, too,’ Scharf said.

‘Why’s that?’ I asked.

‘Because,’ Tom slammed his fist on the table and looked serious, ‘it’s the right way to do things. I’m bringing in a team of the best brains we’ve got. They’ll work around the clock. Testing, modelling, tuning. This is huge for us. Perfect opportunity.’

‘Better than us coming down to Vaurania, then?’ I winked.

‘Vaurania,’ he shook his head dramatically, whilst draining his glass and refilling it. ‘None of our real customers comes to Vaurania. It’s an enormous playpen. Nobody comes for the testing. We built that launch site and all the monitoring systems that support it, but it hardly ever got used. Once a year, if we were lucky. We stopped maintaining it over two years ago. It wouldn’t work now even if we tried it. But we never need to. Even if anyone really was interested in actually doing some testing, they wouldn’t learn anything worthwhile. Where we are, on the Equator, atmospheric conditions are different from anywhere else in the world.’

‘I don’t get it,’ I looked at him. ‘It’s miles away from the majority of your customers, and the environment is wrong, so why set up shop there in the first place?’

‘They never thought it would get to this,’ he smiled. ‘The company was set up by a bunch of rich kids who had made their money early in the space race. They only set the place up as a tax dodge and an excuse to party. Never expected to come up with anything this good. But they couldn’t help themselves. Knew too much; too clever. Next thing you know, they’re coming over all corporate and schmoozing customers. Can’t help it. It’s like a switch got flicked. As soon as they saw the profits they reverted to type. But it would ruin them to move out of Vaurania now. So they keep the HQ there for entertainment purposes and send people like me out here to do real work. If anybody tries to come and test, we normally just put them off for a while and they lose interest. Only a real idiot would genuinely want to use our facilities.’

‘It gets better,’ Magath piped up. ‘We sent Sergeant Scharf down to see Project Tardis for an afternoon and he came back with the goods.’

What kind of goods did he mean?

‘Well, effectively the majority of their budget,’ he grinned.

‘How come?’ I asked. Scharf looked modest. Mortenson was teaching Captain Small a folk song. His family was from somewhere way up north. I had never heard anything like it before, and neither had Small, judging by the difficulty she was having with its syncopated beat and its unpredictable verses.

‘They had the money, and the design for the new warehousing, but were paralysed in terms of ability to deliver anything at all. They’ve become so tied up with a couple of process trails that it’s unlikely anybody will emerge from the bureaucratic rabbit warren anytime this side of eternity. It’s the sort of scenario you see all the time. The system is perfectly designed to form unpickable knots. Scharf managed to convince them that we had the ears of the unions, which was sort of accurate, although we still needed Cowper for that, and that we could relieve Tardis of their entire set of deliverables, leaving them free to follow their never-ending wormholes. They don’t need a big budget to service a project like that, just so long as everybody continues to get paid and the status reports keep coming. We’re now set up as a third party on their P&L, and they hand over all their cash to us. The unions agreed straight away to do what we wanted. Can’t believe it was so easy. We’ve always known what to do, and that was the problem – there’s no way a project so well-informed will ever get any money allocated.’

The whole thing seemed as simple as it could possibly have done. The combination of the right technical skills, empowerment of those who would really benefit from empowerment, refusal to bend to the generally-accepted raft of constraints, seasoned with the secret ingredient of a Corporal of questionable sanity, seemed to produce the recipe for success. Somewhere along the line, I formed part of it. I had orchestrated the whole thing, hadn’t I? It seemed impossible for me to put a finger on how I had managed that, exactly. As far as I could tell, most of my time had been spent in attempting to work out what Small and Farbrace were doing, marvelling at Scharf and Magath, avoiding Captain Norris and looking for Major Thompson. But still I was part of it. The party included me, there was no doubt. The others sat close around me and my glass never emptied, despite my best efforts.

We had a solution. Despite everything, we had solved the insoluble. The evening represented the beginning of the end. I had never experienced that feeling before. When working on the Inter-City Games, our designs never rose above the hypothetical, and we were totally confident that they never would. The knowledge removed all pressure from our daily routine. But this was different. I started to think to myself about how I was to progress our work to the next stage, to the point where our genius was turned into reality. I realised I was confronting an even more enormous pool of confusion, had no idea of where to even start, and decided to address it the next day. Or maybe the day after.

 

My oars double as uprights for my awning. It means that I can row only at night. During the day I rest and take shelter. I need plenty of both. I live on oily fish and tinned fruit and chocolate. I can feel the strength returning with every mouthful of the miracle rations. Every now and then I pick up the spare, emergency, paddles and, without exposing my skin to the sun, half-heartedly drag them through the water. They barely reach a few inches in, and probably have no effect on my trajectory or pace. But the sight and sound of them tiptoeing under the surface, as though they’re embarrassed by their own weedy impotence in the face of the mighty ocean and are trying not to be noticed, cheers me up and reminds me of that night. The night when we had almost achieved everything.

I take two dips a day off the back of the boat. Just five minutes each time under the water, but they’re the most beautiful ten minutes of the day. I take my time immersing myself and savour each inch as it descends into the cleansing sea. The ritual has more than a touch of the mechanical about it, in fact I often pretend that I’m a precision machine, set to lower my own body a fraction of a millimetre at a time. I’m perfectly calibrated to build the suspense amid the promise of imminent heaven. And once I’m inside that salt embrace, I’m a new man. The physical results are amazing, too: my skin has improved beyond recognition and belief. Long term, I’ll probably be left with nothing more than some light scarring.

Another shuttle came down this morning, just after I had settled the oars into their rhythm. An uncommonly large piece of shrapnel splashed down close to me. The noise was terrifying and it physically shook me. I suppose the shuttle must have made it most of the way through the stratosphere before giving up the ghost. I redoubled my efforts and before long I reached the wreckage. I poked at the debris with a paddle: our flag, and the first part of the serial number, was clearly discernible under the blackened shell. I pushed it under and it began to sink.

The garbage tanker must have been empty. There’s no way it could have moved so quickly had it still been laden. That means it was on its way back to land. I have to follow its path and head east, too. It has long since disappeared from view over the horizon, but as long as I keep my course and don’t weaken, I’ll make it for sure. We had a solution. It was perfect. It was mine. More than anybody else’s, it was mine. And it was snatched from me. Burglarised. Raped. Ruined.