Binscombe Tales - The Complete Series (50 page)

Hood brought out a padded envelope from his sports jacket and made a space for it on the table amid the plates and sauce bottles.

‘Maybe... maybe,’ he said cautiously, ‘but first you gotta understand how I came by them.’

Apparently Mr Disvan had heard all this before. He ostentatiously left the table and went to make free of my drinks cabinet. I thought that was a bit much and turned my head so as to say ‘help yourself’ or some such sarcasm. Like one of Dr Pavlov’s doggies I was brought to heel by a ringing noise. Mr Hood had rapped the edge of his tea cup with a spoon.

‘Pay attention,’ he growled.

I did so, now ignoring the chink of bottles behind me.

‘Do you recall the Viking 3 Mission, Mr O?’ Hood was gently stroking the padded envelope with his fingertips as if he was drawing up his story from inside.

‘Um... no.’

‘Permit me to refresh your memory, then. Viking 3 was the last unmanned Mars probe. It circled the Red Planet for a while, sent down a lander, did a lot of tests, took a lot of pictures—that kinda thing. Are you with me?’

‘So far.’

‘Good. Well, there’s always a few military personnel attached to missions like that. We’re meant to look for armed-forces-applicable information, do a bit of liaison work, etc, etc. In practice, we listen to the dome-head’s idiot blurbs and drink beer, okay?’

‘If you say so.’

‘I do. For Viking 3, I had the honour of heading the combined services team attached. I’d just had a rough tour in “Contra-Land” and people figured I needed a rest to cool out. Someone read my records and found I’d got a science major a decade or so before. I couldn’t remember a damn thing about it, but it clinched me the job. That’s the way things go.’

Mr Disvan rejoined us. From the kerfuffle he’d made, I was expecting to see an exotic cocktail with umbrella and jungle at the very least. It turned out that all the effort had produced was a heroic-sized vodka. He sipped at it daintily.

Hood’s tea-cup chime once again brought me to order and started another round of conversation.

‘Well, to tell you the truth, Mr O,’ he continued, ‘I don’t much like beer. Neither do I necessarily believe the bulletins NASA put out for the press corps. I’ll give you an example. There was this guy in a white coat, with his hair on upside down, do you know what he said to me? “Here, have the newsletter we send out to junior high-schools—see how you get along with that’’.’

Mr Disvan laughed, unkindly I thought, and Hood grimaced.

‘Hell,’ he said, ‘I’m a professional, I didn’t reply but I took that as an insult. I thought I’d take my poor old brain over and have a look-see at the raw data. They couldn’t stop me, I had the clearance—it was just that no one had reckoned on me using it.’

‘If you’re part of an organisation of several million armed men,’ mused Mr Disvan, swirling his drink to and fro in the glass, ‘it’s amazing what doors are open to you.’

‘Quite,’ agreed Hood, missing the sledgehammer humour. ‘Anyhow, while my colleagues were making nuisances of themselves with the lady whitecoats, I went through every damn print out and photo that had come back. Then I saw something interesting and ordered it computer enhanced. Shortly after, my service career came to an abrupt end.’

Hood’s large hairy paw nigh on covered the padded envelope—otherwise I’d have got to the heart of matters by simply enquiring within. A moment of silence ensued. Mr Hood looked puzzled and hurt.

‘Aren’t you going to ask me why?’ he said. ‘Or is this just some of the “English cool” I’ve heard about?’

Actually, it was a hard day at work and a degree of world-weariness, but I thought it easier to go along with Hood’s interpretation.

‘I do beg your pardon,’ I said. ‘Please carry on. Why did your service career come to an abrupt end?’

‘Because they, by which I mean everyone with push, didn’t like what I’d found. I was told to hush my mouth. They made nasty noises about my pension rights should I fail to do so. Some Viking 2 pictures were substituted in the records for the ones I’d located. Everything was wrapped up tight—me included.’

‘There’s a smudge on your forehead,’ said Disvan matter of factly.

Hood was caught off balance. ‘Really?’ he said and—plainly the product of a good home—instinctively rushed to wipe it off. Mr Disvan leaned forward and picked up the momentarily unguarded envelope.

‘Here you are, Mr Oakley,’ he said handing it to me, ‘this is why Mr Hood lives in the woods.’

Hood wasn’t best pleased at being tricked, but not quite displeased enough to fight me for the package so he could finish his spiel.

‘Oh well,’ he said, ‘I guess they’re the long and the short of it anyhow.’

He went off to splash a great deal of my only bottle of single malt into his empty glass.

I found that the envelope contained two colour photographs. They wouldn’t have made the grade as Royal wedding snaps, but otherwise the resolution was so-so. I studied them for a while.

‘Okay,’ said Hood from beside the drinks cabinet, ‘whaddya think?’

I found it hard to work up any enthusiasm, genuine or otherwise.

‘I think you’ve brought the wrong set along,’ I said eventually. ‘Is this your house in Texas?’

Mr Hood moved from scowl to roaring laughter without a gear change. He went so far as to slap his knee with the hilarity of it all. Mr Disvan smiled politely.

‘I can see why you might think that, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan as Hood rejoined us at the table. ‘The reddish, rocky landscape, the little “house” in the distance and so on. However, you’re a shade off target.’

‘Texas my ass!’ said Hood, pointing the ketchup bottle at me. ‘Man, that’s
Mars
you’re looking at!’

I looked again.

‘It can’t be,’ I said, still reasonably convinced within myself; ‘there’s a house in the photograph.’

‘More of a trapezoidal megalith I would say, Mr Oakley,’ said Disvan. ‘But I agree, with a picture of that type you can’t be dogmatic about interpretation. Call the thing a house if you like.’

Rather pointlessly, I turned the pictures through three hundred and sixty degrees without them yielding up any fresh wisdom. Now that I came to think about it, the horizon did seem suspiciously close, the sky suspiciously pink and somehow ‘thin’. The scattered rocks didn’t look ordinary anymore.

To allay the icy-fingered disquiet I now felt, I refocused on the ‘house’. It wasn’t much help. This time round the ‘housey’ features were playing hide and seek—either that or my eyes had created homeliness where none existed.

‘There was a five minute time lapse between the pictures,’ said Mr Hood. ‘Do you see any difference between the two?’

I found that I wasn’t so keen to study these views again. All of a sudden, the sense of wonder associated with new worlds was entirely lost on me. I realised I was quite happy with the world I’d been born on, thank you very much. After all, I hurriedly rationalised, the pictures were not exactly a visual feast, were they? As studies of an arid bit of Texas they’d been merely dull. Now that I was informed they were considerably more far-fetched, the snaps seemed somewhat sinister as well.

I glanced at them for a scant second, a mere fig leaf for me to say, ‘No, I can’t see any difference. There’s just a red desert with a block sort of thing in the distance.’

‘Concentrate on that block,’ said Hood, leaning forward and touching one of the photographs.

I concentrated. ‘It’s a block... or house,’ I said.

Hood shrugged his shoulders. ‘Okay, Mr O. And in this one, taken five minutes later?’

‘The same house. Oh Lord... with a black gap... with its door open!’

Mr Hood folded his arms.

‘Viking 3 didn’t take any more pictures, Mr Oakley. Less than five minutes after that picture, its camera got zapped.’

‘Or simply broke down,’ suggested Mr Disvan.

Hood gave every sign that he didn’t think much of that theory.

‘Well .... maybe, Mr D, but it’s a hell of a coincidence if that’s so. The remaining Viking 3 systems, which all kept on working, suggested a sudden and total camera misfunction. I reckon something zapped it. More importantly, they—the button men—reckoned so too.’

I put the pictures face down on the table and slid them back to Mr Hood.

‘So why should you have to flee?’ I asked. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

Without asking permission, Hood lit the first of a succession of cigarettes. Mr Disvan took the cue and produced his wretched pipe. Soon enough my dining room was under battle-style smoke cover and was acquiring a new, tar-based wallpaper.

‘I agree,’ came Hood’s voice from within the cloud, ‘but wanting publication was my fault. Protesting the substitution of old Viking 2 photos for the genuine article was my fault. Complaining about them laying heavy manners about silence on the flight control staff was my fault. Poking my nose in and shouting my mouth off about “affairs of state” were my fault also, I guess. It was one dumb thing to do.’

‘I disagree,’ said Mr Disvan. ‘Honesty was the only honourable policy.’

Hood took a serious draw on his (my) whisky.

‘Maybe so, Mr D. But there again, you don’t have to live in a hole in some goddamn woods.’

‘True,’ agreed Disvan cheerfully.

Mr Hood gave a bitter laugh.

‘And it was mite hypocritical of me as well,’ he said, ‘considering some of the other things I’d done in my service career. Why, I recall that village in Nicaragua and the donkey timebomb I rigged up...’

‘I’d rather you didn’t, actually,’ I said swiftly.

‘Okay, Mr O, I’ll clam re that tub of blood. All I’m trying to say is that my conscience was a little late in arriving on the scene—but when it got  there...’

‘You found it had no brakes?’ prompted Disvan.

‘Pre-cisely, Mr D. I tell ya, I could have lived with the cover-up, gotten smashed a few times and called the whole thing just part of life in the raw. However, “they” tried to kiss it better for me and let me in on their game plan. That’s what pushed me over the edge.’

He smiled and spread his hands.

‘And,’ he said, ‘at the bottom of that cliff, here I am.’

The jargon had been a little hard going but, doggedly, two or three seconds out of phase because of the translation problem, I had followed so far.

‘What was their “game plan”?’ I asked.

Hood finished his drink and went to replenish it before answering.

‘It was a two-option, uneven loaded strategy, Mr O,’ he said eventually.

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. The way they saw it was that they could maybe tack an afterthought high-res TV camera on the next scheduled US Mars probe, alter its flight plan, and get some real good home movies of just what’s going on at Cydonia Region, 41NOT North, 10NOT West. Trouble was, that’s five years off, minimum and, sad to say, the good ol’ USSR’s Phobos probe will be there three years beforehand. That was a no-no apparently.’

I was reasonably sure I wasn’t going to like what came next. Since that was true of so much of life, I pressed on anyway.

‘So?’ I asked.

‘So,’ Hood went on abstractedly, ‘they thought it would be a whole lot easier all round just to get out any old mothballed prototype capable of making the trip, strap a baby-nuke to its belly and send it on a one way mission to Mars, Cydonia Region, 41NOT North, 10NOT West. That way, the Soviets don’t get there first and maybe discover the secrets of the universe and take over said universe. “How sad,” we say, “our probe has crashed—set up a day of national mourning”—you get the picture?’