The O.D. (10 page)

The adenoidal hoot of an unseen tugboat closed this particular thought tangent and brought Pilot back to his current position. Serman was still looking at him as if he were ill. “Sorry, Aaron. Where to next?”

“You can’t leave without visiting the The Freedom Tower.”

The elevator to the 100th floor observation deck didn’t feel as if it were even in motion, but when it stopped and the two emerged, there, spread out below them, was the whole of greater New York semi-obscured by a layer of smog, the roof of which must have been five hundred feet below them. His legs were like rubber and the urge to jump barely resistible. The half-inch-thick plate glass, although insuring his body stayed in the building, did nothing to arrest his imagined fall. He sat down on the floor as far away from the window as he could, dreading what the future held in store for them.

“Tomorrow morning I’m flying to Madrid to brief your advocate there,” Vaalon said later. “As for you, Lonnie, you need to relax. With E-Day approaching, you can’t afford a nervous breakdown. When you get back to England, think of a diversion and
do
it
.”

Pilot was glad he’d seen New York, because for him, that city – and he was thinking Wall Street, not Harlem or The Bronx – represented the advance camp in civilization’s relentless march to the edge of the precipice. The rest of the world was fast catching up, and then, like the last pieces of garbage completing the landfill, it would all be over. The destruction of the World Trade Center and the Statue of Liberty by outside forces, and self-inflicted wounds by the bankers, fiscal conservatives, survivalists and the growing army of anarchistic, unemployed youth throughout the States had been mere surface symptoms of the deadly canker growing deep below the skin of the corporate global body.

As he was dropping Pilot at Departures, Serman began laughing.

“What’s funny, Aaron?” Pilot asked.

“Just something I read in the flotilla manifest yesterday.”

“What was that?”

“Five thousand condoms.”

VI

Pilot discovered the diversion he needed in a banner ad on a hot air ballooning website. He pulled out his phone and pressed speed dial 1. “It’s a week’s course in theoretical and practical instruction,” he explained to Vaalon. “Do you mind if I put the cost on the credit card?”

There was silence at the other end of the connection, and Pilot was ready to retract his request when Vaalon answered. “For this one, phone Franz Barta. You’ll have to introduce yourself some time, so it might as well be now. He can pay them direct. Let me have a quick word with him first and you call him first thing in the morning. It sounds like good medicine to me. Just don’t fall out of the basket.”

The next day, Pilot gave Barta the banking details of the Bath Balloon Club, thanked him and hung up. Then he headed for Newlyn harbour to read up on hot air ballooning in the ‘plein air’.

“I can envisage an entire fleet of them, with flights to Spain, France, England, Ireland and maybe even Iceland, depending on which way the wind’s blowing,” Pilot said to his aunts on his return from Bath.

“Lonnie, what on earth are you talking about?” Sally asked.

“Blimps,” Hilda said. “He’s talking about blimps.”

“Not blimps, Hilda, hot air balloons. Blimps use hydrogen or helium and have rudders and propellers. With mine, you heat the air in the canopy with a gas burner underneath and up you go. As the air cools, down you come ... slowly. The only thing you haven’t got control of is your direction.”

The two sisters raised four eyebrows. “What good is it then, if you can’t go where you want to go?” Hilda asked.

“Having control of our direction only takes us to bad places,” Pilot answered. “Human nature can’t help but steer towards them. Like Icarus.” His aunts looked at each other blankly. “By the way, I’m leaving the country for good on August first.”

A piece of toast, which had adhered to Hilda’s lower lip when her jaw dropped, fell off onto her plate. “Leaving the country? Whatever for?”

“You can’t,” Sally added. “It would break your mother’s heart. We’d miss you too.”

A rare feeling of affection welled up in Pilot. “I’ll miss you, too. It’s time I moved on all the same.”

“Where are you going, Lonnie?”

“I was thinking Australia.”

“In a balloon?”

The weather during the middle two weeks of July had been strange all over the world. In Penzance there had been neither sun, nor rain, nor wind – only a damp-looking, yellow-grey blanket spread from horizon to horizon. The air below was hot and heavy, like the people who walked through it, gamely trying to accomplish their daily tasks with the good humour expected in mid-summer. Not even Lonnie Pilot could motivate himself to a level deserving of his impending big day.

As if on cue, Eydos sent Pilot a message care of the BBC News website. He almost missed it, so lax had his concentration become, but the familiar detonation in his chest told him that what he was half reading was, in fact, news of their own first labour pains. He went back to the beginning of the item and shut out everything in the world but the text rising up his screen.

Earth Tremors Recorded in Bay of Biscay

A
P−
Geologists in France, Britain and Spain last night recorded a series of mild tremors centred in an area of the Bay of Biscay 150 miles southwest of Brest. At their most severe, the tremors registered 2.5 on the Richter Scale.

Dr. Philip Graff of the Royal Seismographic Observatory said, ‘What we recorded was something called a harmonic tremor, which is caused by a continuous release of seismic energy typically associated with the underground movement of magma. Under land, this magnitude of activity would have caused tea cups to rattle in their saucers, but, occurring at sea at a depth of over 5,000 metres, the tremors were felt by no one.’

Dr. Graff also stated that, although there are no records of previous seismic activity in this area, the people of Western Europe have nothing to fear from the event. ‘It is unusual, but unthreatening.’

According to RSO readings, eighteen separate tremors, lasting a total of two hours and twenty-five minutes, ended shortly after 0200 hrs GMT.

Any lingering doubts Pilot may have had regarding Vaalon’s prediction no longer held water. Two point five on the Richter Scale was all it took to shake him out of his lethargy.

“There’s another of your crew I’d like you to meet before E-Day,” Forrest Vaalon said in a phone call to Pilot the next morning. “His name is Henry Bradingbrooke. We can meet you halfway, and I was thinking the day after tomorrow in Bristol.” After they’d arranged a time and a place to meet, Pilot went straight to the laptop, opened Bradingbrooke’s file and began reading.

Thinking it an apt venue, Vaalon had chosen a restaurant with a view of Bristol’s floating harbour for their meeting. Pilot arrived first, was led to the table Vaalon had reserved, ordered a jug of water and got out his newspaper to finish reading a piece about the latest US crop failures. When he’d finished, he tore out the article, put it in his shoulder bag and ran his eyes across Bristol harbour. Cary Grant was born here, he thought, dredging up another piece of useless information from his vast well of ephemera.

When Vaalon and Bradingbrooke entered the restaurant, Pilot stood up, shook Vaalon’s hand, pulled out his chair for him and was about to do the same for Bradingbrooke when he remembered his place in the pecking order. He sat down and let Henry Bradingbrooke, a baronet, pull out his own chair. Pilot had never been impressed with titles, especially inherited ones. But he
was
impressed by Bradingbrooke’s qualifications. Henry Charles Finucane Bradingbrooke, Bart., held a PhD in meteorology and had been working at the IGP for two years. Over several days, Pilot had been harbouring a nagging suspicion that the man now sitting next to him was Vaalon’s ‘Number Three’, and it wasn’t a comfortable feeling.

“Glad to meet you, Henry,” Pilot said, extending his hand.

“And you, Pilot.” Bradingbrooke used the public school practice of addressing cohorts by their surnames.

“Henry’s been running studies on the ramifications of solar tides on the world’s weather patterns,” Vaalon said. “Henry?”

“The solar tide exerts an imperceptible drag on the jetstream,” Bradingbrooke explained. “Although barely measurable, it causes anomalies in our weather patterns, such as those we’re experiencing at the moment. So far, they’re working in our favour. When it comes time to bring the barges together and secure the flotilla, we just hope the seas are as flat as they are now. From what I can tell, it looks as if they will be.”

“The calm before the storm,” Pilot said.

“Indeed. What I’m also trying to ascertain is what sort of weather we’ll have in the weeks
after
the storm. What we don’t want are gales or torrential rains when we’re trying to get a toehold.”

“What’s the forecast?”

For the first time in the meeting, Bradingbrooke smiled. “Easterly, gale-force French, followed by heavy British from the North. Joking aside, I think it will be mild and dry throughout August, with winds gradually building up velocity in September. Then, Pilot, all hell will break loose.”

After dinner, the meeting took a more casual turn. Vaalon told them about his childhood in New Mexico and how the geology bug had bitten him at the age of seven. Henry Bradingbrooke attributed his interest in the weather to many months spent sailing with his late father in the Solent. Pilot wanted to know more about what lay below Bradingbrooke’s education. “Are you married, Henry?” he asked, knowing full well the man wasn’t.

“I very easily could have bee
n−
three years ago. But my head was in the clouds,
literally
, and I missed my chance. She married a banker.”

“Not a good investment on her part. You’re in a position to travel then.”

Bradingbrooke laughed again. “I can’t wait to shuffle off this mortal coil.”

As he walked back to the station, Pilot reflected on his meeting with Vaalon and Bradingbrooke. He liked Henry. More importantly, he had at no point felt inferior to him. Whether that was through growing self confidence or Bradingbrooke’s seeming acceptance of the leadership hierarchy remained to be seen.

Pilot spent the next few days saying goodbye to his old life and his old haunts. For all its lack of pulse, his neighbourhood had something he knew he was going to miss. He would never again enjoy the comfort to be found in being insignificant and living in an insignificant place. Ahead of him lay the prospect of a future on centre stage, forever a public person, and this frightened and enticed him at the same time.

He decided to take a last walk, and as he was passing Humphry Davy’s statue, he came across a group of teenage girls, one of whom he had in the past privately referred to as
Botticelli’s
Cornish
Venus
. He barely recognized her now, though, so dissolute and hardened had she become through three years on crack cocaine and two abortions. He railed at the cruel defacement inflicted on her and at his present impotence in the matter. He averted his eyes with sadness, gave them all a wide berth and began walking to Newlyn.

When a figure crossed his field of vision at Wherrytown, he recognized the walk as belonging to the vagrant with the special light in his eyes. On an impulse, closely followed by an idea, Pilot ran and caught up with him. “I’m leaving here for good in a few days,” he said to the man, “and I’d like to give you something. Come for a drink at my place and I’ll show you.”

The sharp eyes blazed and Pilot feared the man was deranged. Then the face morphed into a grimy smile and answered, “So long as you’re buyin’, son...”

The hot spell had broken that day and it was just beginning to rain. Had Bradingbrooke got it wrong, Pilot wondered, or was this just a temporary anomaly? He bought a flagon of scrumpy from Lidl’s and led his new friend through the downpour to his net shed.

The odd couple sat around the paraffin heater drying out and sharing their life experiences. When the cider ran out, the man dug deep in his overcoat and brought out a bottle of cheap, gut-rotting rum. Pilot reciprocated by bringing out the key to his net shed and holding it up to the man. “You’ll like it here, Llewellyn,” he said. “You can move in on Saturday. I’ll leave the key behind the drainpipe.”

The next day, Friday, Pilot was fighting a hangover. Despite the feeling of being three hundred feet underwater, he decided to cook his aunts a special farewell dinner of fresh squid from Trelawney’s, spinach, sautéed potatoes and apple crumble.

Later that evening the aunts announced that they’d never had such an enjoyable meal, which Pilot thought a dishonest statement considering they hadn’t touched the squid. They had resigned themselves to their great-nephew’s leaving, but were still no wiser as to where he was going. “Do you at least have a forwarding address?” Hilda had asked.

“Not yet.”

“If I were you, I’d let out the net shed for some extra income,” Sally had suggested.

“Can’t. It’s not mine any more. The new owner’s moving in tomorrow.”

In the morning, the two women were travelling to yet another out of town fête and this was ‘goodbye’ forever. He would miss Sally and Hilda. They’d been good to him and, now that he was leaving, he wished he’d been a better ward. If I could reverse time, I would be, he thought.

On entering his new home the next afternoon, Llewellyn Martin found a seven word note from his young benefactor on the table.

THE
BEGINNING
OF
THE
WORLD
IS
NIGH
.