“More plainly?”
“It’s like taking a photograph of a photograph of a photograph. What’s actually going on gets less clear. Shadows get darker. Faces are blurred. Eventually, it’s all in the interpretation—but the interpretation is being done by people whose job is to look for danger. So they will err on the side of caution. Eventually, a photograph of a child’s birthday party becomes a blurred image of an arms deal. The pixelated face of Guthrie Jones, under-nines balloon-modelling champion, becomes the grizzled visage of Angela Hedergast, infamous uranium seller. Each investigation of the same facts increases the likelihood that something will be found which is frightening—or rather something will be found to be frightening. Eventually, the mere fact that something or someone has been investigated eleven times becomes suspicious.”
“And therefore the numbers of suspected enemies of the people?”
“Would explode. The Government Machine is looking at itself in the mirror, of course; it’s seeing an image of its own weaknesses.”
“So what, practically speaking, would be the upshot of this?”
“You end up with a machine which knows that by its mildest estimates it must have terrible enemies all around and within it, but it can’t find them. It therefore deduces that they are well-concealed and expert, likely professional agitators and terrorists. Thus, more stringent and probing methods are called for. Those who transgress in the slightest, or of whom even small suspicions are harboured, must be treated as terrible foes. A lot of rather ordinary people will get repeatedly investigated with increasing severity until the Government Machine either finds enemies or someone very high up indeed personally turns the tide . . . And these people under the microscope are in fact just taking up space in the machine’s numerical model. In short, innocent people are treated as hellish fiends of ingenuity and bile because there’s a gap in the numbers. Filling gaps in the statistics . . . Oh. Crispin?”
“Pont.”
“Did you just drag me through that entire fandango to get an explanation of ‘stat filler’ for one of your chums with a secure annexe?”
“I always enjoy our little talks.”
Pont sighs heavily.
“Leave me, please, Crispin and friend. I have a futility-induced migraine.”
“Thank you, Pont.”
Crispin Hoare leads me back to his office. I sit.
“Is it true?” I ask.
“Broadly,” says Crispin Hoare. “It’s more nuanced, of course. The system is more reflexive than that. People are permitted a degree of freedom to express opinions. Usually the witch-hunt stops after a few iterations and we can all go back to what we’re doing. Except for Pont, of course.”
“Why him?”
“Oh, didn’t I say?” Crispin Hoare smiles thinly, and there is a flicker of warning in his genial face. “Our friend Pont is the witchfinder general. The real one. He goes through the numbers. He reads the confessions. He tracks and he traces and he never forgets anything. Very clever man. He finds the really dangerous people and he deals with them.”
“How does he find them? If it’s all so messed up?”
“Sympathy, of course. Pont agrees with them. He loathes the Government Machine. Despises it. Anarchist, is Pont. But . . . he hates violence more, d’you see? Thinks it replicates and alienates. No answers in violence for Pont, just more rules, which of course he hates. So Pont . . . well, Pont thinks like the enemy, from our point of view. And from his, he turns in notional allies who think like us, and lets us deal with them. If you were ever thinking of getting involved in a real insurrection—not some student thing—you should be very afraid of Pont. He’s never wrong.”
Brrr.
“We tracked down your chum Sebastian, you know, offered him a job in Pont’s office. No go. He and his wife—I think you know her too—are content with their new professional direction. One can only say it takes all sorts.” He shrugs. I imagine vaguely that Sebastian and Aline must have opened an antique shop or started a business selling hand-woven linen goods.
“Sign,” Crispin Hoare says. He slides a form across the desk. It is long and fairly complicated and it is filled out already. It is titled, with magnificent redundancy and majestic self-importance, “Form.” At the bottom there is a space for the signatures of refugees from hostile interrogation who are lost at sea.
“What is it?”
“Only job I can give you. Only one you’ll get. George Copsen Wants You, and all that.”
“For what?”
“No idea.” I stare at him. “It’ll be all right,” says Crispin Hoare. “At least,” he adds, “I do hope it will be.”
I sign.
. . .
THE PLACE is called Project Albumen. It has nothing to do with eggs. The designation was randomly assigned by a computer program which apparently was not instructed to avoid names which are unsettling or mildly disgusting. For all I know it is not in fact called Project Albumen at all, or at least not to anyone but me. It has that kind of feel about it, of secret operations and clearances and vanishing off the face of the Earth. It is therefore very much in line with my last George Copsen experience, although not with my childhood ones, which involved biscuits and orange juice and camping under canvas in his living room while Gonzo and Lydia played a variation of Doctors and Nurses whose convoluted rules seemed to require me to be the corpse most of the time and allow them both to heal me with improvised surgical instruments (a butter knife/scalpel, a handkerchief/bandage and a length of plastic tubing filched from the garage whose precise purpose was mercifully never revealed to me).
If you stand in front of Project Albumen and look up, you don’t really see it properly. It is angular and stylish; the facade of the building follows a blocky in-and-out pattern like a ratchet or the tread of a sneaker. It has huge iron doors, burnished and sealed like a Greek temple with vague gestures in the direction of modernism. From close up, it’s hard to get an accurate picture of it—it’s just that big. If you go back along the road in order to look down on it, the sweep of the hill gets in the way. If you leave the road, against the stern advice of the signs reading “Danger—mining” and climb the hill, you will almost certainly be blown up. The signage is accurate, but coy.
Even should you manage to reach the crest of the hill in one piece, you would not see the project itself, because it is at all times partly hidden by a flirtatious mist. A slice of the eastern wing tempts you to look one way, a flash of the rear court draws you back again. You could obsess over this building, grow frantic to unveil its mysteries and plumb its inviting depths. If you were that sort of person, you could start to feel that this building wants it bad, that it deserves to be the subject of a hostile military action, an espionage-driven commando raid, just to teach it to behave.
A few months ago three highly motivated gentlemen assailed Project Albumen in fine special operations style. They wanted the secrets this building so plainly keeps beneath its lush deco exterior. After weeks of planning, they got into their sexy black outfits and made their move. They blew open the back door and, no doubt with a grand sense of empowerment and dominance, thrust mightily inside.
Unfortunately, the entire main building of Project Albumen is a honey trap. The interior is very large and has intricate, folded metal all around the walls. This falsely gives the impression of a large number of secret doors and passages, so it took them twenty-nine or so minutes to establish that there are in fact no exits. Shortly thereafter they discovered that the sanctum sanctorum, the warm, secret heart of Project Albumen, is in fact rather cold and unwelcoming, because it floods on a half-hour cycle with liquid nitrogen. The motivated gentlemen were removed somewhat later in the day when they had thawed enough to be prised loose from the floor.
All this I learn by way of welcoming chit-chat from a man called Richard P. Purvis. Lieutenant Richard P. Purvis. He drives right past the car park and carries on down a small access road behind some empty gas cylinders and a water tank. He stops the
car next to a run-down Portakabin with “Foreman” stencilled on the door, and leads me inside. It is, of course, not a Portakabin, but the real entrance to Project Albumen. When this is revealed, I very nearly make the mistake of asking Richard P. Purvis whether, somewhere near here, there is a tank containing man-eating sharks, into which enemy agents can be tipped by means of a trapdoor. I do not ask, because I am very much afraid that the answer will be yes. This place has no sense of its own ridiculousness, and that self-regard is fortified by the fact that it kills people.
The back of the Portakabin segues smoothly into a numinous creamy corridor with curved walls and a grillework floor which winds away into the distance like something from an all-too-optimistic science fiction flick circa 1972. A cheery woman in a uniform I do not recognise greets me and politely tells me to undress. I undress. The cheery woman does not look away. If my revealed genitals alarm her, she conceals her consternation very well.
She takes my clothes and wanders off with them and, when I remain where I am, patiently tells me to follow. I pass through a door and into a room full of clinical personages in masks and gowns, and I am examined with considerably more thoroughness; probed, X-rayed, shaved, showered, scraped, biopsied, deloused, disinfected, polygraphed, MRI’d and then given some new (nasty) clothes, and finally sent onward and inward to the place of business of one General Copsen, who is either my best friend or my implacable enemy and I am beginning to think the difference would be impossible to discern, except that maybe he would have pressed the button instead of just showing it to me in that room back in Jarndice. Lydia’s father favours me with a piggy grin and says “Welcome to the strength” as if I’m not some kind of conscript.
“I guess you’re wondering why I’ve called you here,” says General George as we pass through a high-tech portcullis and into a hexagonal tunnel with something very like hair all over the walls, because he thinks he’s seriously funny, and he wants me to think so too. I think so, at least enough that he nods in response to my wan little grin and doesn’t have me put on a soggy cushion and strapped down.
“Truth is, you’re one of my great white hopes. My boys. And girls, of course, but I call you all my boys. One of the best. Came through it all, head up, chin up, good kid. Crispin says you’re clever, too.”
I stare at him. George Copsen is misting up. The ogre of electrical death has a tear in his eye. He wants to be loved. He thinks bygones can be bygones and I can join his twisted research family and marry (not Lydia) one of his daughters. General George Copsen wants to play pater familias.
“It was bad back there,” he says. “We had a quota. They said. ‘Find us this many terrorists, we know they’re out there!’ So I was playing catch. Saving the best. You’re one o’ the best, of course. One of my boys.” I wonder, briefly, what happened to the others. Tried? Held indefinitely? Released, forever suspect? Or just vanished? I’m furious with him for making me glad that I’m one of his boys.
He throws an arm around me like my skin isn’t crawling and I don’t want to be sick every time he twinkles at me, and he walks me along another big science fiction corridor towards whatever is at the centre of this spooky ant farm. The corridor is lit in some manner which defies my immediate analysis, and therefore I am unable to speculate what possible effect it might have on any shrews or shrew-like animals, save that I suspect they would be rendered placid and wide-eyed with wonder by the soft reassuring gleam of this walkway. It is devoid of right angles and has uneven foam spikes protruding from it in odd places to deaden the sound and make the whole thing undetectable to methods of espionage whose theoretical basis I am not cleared for, but which clearly require symmetry or solidity, a line of speculation I abandon in case I should figure out something I would have to be killed for knowing.
At last we round a corner and instead of another asymmetrical door or tangled staircase, there is an ill-proportioned room filled with men and women doing the kinds of things that produce grave expressions and thoughtful lip-chewing. Several of them, against the prevailing wisdom of the dental profession, are chewing pens or pencils, and of these one has a great smear of ink in the middle of his lower lip, and it is to him that General George is taking me.
“That’s the guy,” George Copsen says, all hushed and loved-up, “the number one. Clever like you and me and all these others together. He designed Albumen. Made this place. You’re working with him!” This last as if this man were the Rolling Stones or this year’s Audrey Hepburn. I’m underground in an insectoid, paranoid, futuristic maze, and my last encounter with my boss involved non-consensual torture games, but I’m going to be working with the man who created an entire architectural style for use as a lethal weapon. Yessir, George, that makes it all okay. Despite George Copsen’s urgency, I stop to look around, and take in what is happening to my life. Perhaps he takes this as awe.
The room is painted in shades of grey, and the ceiling is covered in the same irregular foam spikes as the corridor. The desks, like everything else, have been shaped to avoid sharp edges, which unfortunately means they are uneven and the scribbled papers on them are all slowly falling off onto the floor. Research assistants bend and pick them up once every two minutes or so in a repeating pattern which I assume must be determined by the height of the pile of paper, the friction between individual sheets and even the amount of graphite or ink scrawled across them. In other words, the more prolific the boffin, the more likely he is to find his best idea under the leg of his chair. One genius (I have no doubt that they are all genii of one stripe or another) has hung her notes from clothes lines strung over her workspace. This solves the storage problem, but unfortunately she is short-sighted and can’t see the ones at the far end from where she is sitting, so her day is a sort of geek version of a step-aerobics class: sit, work, check figures, stand, run to the far end, run back, sit. Repeat. (Armageddonetics! Get healthy the superweapon way!)
In the approximate (or for all I know the mathematically exact) centre of the room there is a Perspex tank filled with a clear liquid, and at the bottom of it is a fake battleground with toy soldiers and artificial grass, and a collection of not-to-scale military vehicles like the ones I had when Gonzo and I played WWII in the garden of Gonzo’s house, and chased the geese with firecrackers.
The guy with the inky lips—the only person with more paper and more space than the aerobics woman—is called Derek, or at least is to be called Derek, because this is etched on an oblong slice of metal which occupies the upper left panel of his white coat, thus: “Professor Derek.” If this appellation seems truncated, appearances are quite accurate. A strip of white cloth tape or self-adhesive bandage has been applied with precision but without reference to aesthetics across the nether part of the badge. I am despite myself darkly fascinated by an organisation which requires its assets to label themselves, while at the same time demanding that they conceal this information from one another. Professor Derek looks at George Copsen and receives a genial nod.
“Okay, people, positions, please.”
Like a rather sloppy chorus line in rehearsal, assorted people with bell curve–smashing brains take refuge behind screens and peer through scopes. Paper is shuffled to “safe” positions on chairs and in box files. Professor Derek glowers at everyone until they are all ready.
“Let’s go . . . And . . . testing protocol: battlefield. The test area is flooded to allow precise measurement of volume displaced . . . Charging . . . firing.” He ambles over to a small bank of switches and pushes one, then another, and finally—against a backdrop of spinning red lights and klaxons—a third. There is quiet. There is anticipation. There is a sudden wet splash.
The side of the tank is gone, a perfect circle bitten out of it, along with a slice of the mock battlefield and all the little soldiers. The water—or whatever it is—inside the tank immediately acts in accordance with physical laws regarding surface tension, fluid dynamics and gravity. My shoes get wet, and George Copsen, now the dampest general in the servi
ces, says “Oh, f’crissakes” and several words which he assumes Lydia does not know, although in fact to judge by my recollections of Gonzo’s lengthy and in-depth apology, she not only knows them, but could teach a fairly advanced course in the particulars of certain subsidiary activities not actually an integral part of the original unmentionable verbs, but considered excellent accompaniments by those with relevant skills and experience. All this distracts somewhat from the realisation of what we have just witnessed, which is a magic button that can apparently destroy matter in a specific and alarmingly personal way. At which point George Copsen announces that I will henceforth consider myself in the unconventional weapons and tactics industry. He implies that this is a market sector which will shortly see some expansion, that I will be getting in on the ground floor of a pretty good thing. He further enthuses that, owing to my youth and resilience under pressure (having a bag put over my head and being told I may at any moment be used as the filament in a human light bulb), I am also suitable for military training.
Without Ma Lubitsch to watch and guide me, and in the absence of good lunches, I have wound up in a dangerous place. I am gone to soldier.
“WHAT I AM about to tell you,” says Professor Derek the following day, “may make me sound like a crazy person. So I need you to remember, to bear in mind very carefully, that I have an IQ of such monstrous proportions that if, for the sake of argument, I were totally insane—if the palace of my intellect were a scary ivy-covered mansion in Louisiana with peeling paint and dead flowers and a garden full of murdered corpses planted by a man named Jerry-Lee Boudain—I am so much more intelligent than anybody else you will ever meet that there would be no way for anyone to tell.” He glances around and finds that this comparison has not had the intended effect. He sighs.