23.

'There's a scene in A Canticle for Leibowitz,' Baxter said, walking along a window-walled corridor to his office, 'where a have you read it, by the way?'

'Yes,' I said. 'Years ago. On my dad's Kindle, if you can believe that.'

'Kindle, ah,' said Baxter, 'takes me back. Anyway, you may remember a scene where one of the monks has an audience with the Pope, in a very grand room, and afterwards he notices holes in the carpet and dirt in the corners and chips off the gilt and such like. I was quite young when I read that, and it made a lasting impression. My old job took me to all kinds of posh places, as you can imagine. I've been in billionaire's mansions, stayed in hotels in the Gulf States that might as well have been carved out of a solid gold asteroid, and walked through actual palaces, and every time I've noticed rust on radiators, dust on windowsills, that kind of thing a what I've come to call the ubiquity of grot.'

He took me through the front office, nodding to a research assistant and a secretary on the way, opened his inner office door and waved me in. 'The Scottish Parliament,' he went on, taking his seat behind the desk, 'is a fine example, I'm afraid.'

I sat in the visitor's seat, avoiding the draught from the closed window, and had to agree.

'Mind you,' Baxter added, picking up a pen and fiddling with it as if he missed smoking, or handwriting, 'I have to admit a there are exceptions. These minimalist modern hotels a you know: the white rooms where everything is a shelf and you can't see where the light's coming from or the water's going to?'

'Uh-huh.'

'Not a speck. I've looked. They must hose them out or something.' He laughed. 'The kind of place where you could never have an abduction experience, because if you wake up in the middle of the night it's like you're already in the flying saucer!'

I forced a smile, genuinely impressed at how skilfully he was winding me up. Of course he knew I'd read Canticle a everything you read on a device is recorded somewhere. Of course he knew that scene had impressed me a I'd mentioned it in a school homework essay, its record likewise available. And of course the only reason he'd mentioned it was to bring up, seemingly naturally and in passing, the topic of abduction experiences.

Classy, Baxter, classy. The former MiB and present MSP knew how to dish it out. Let's see how he could take it.

I shifted in the chair, which creaked alarmingly, and took out my phone and pen. Baxter made a face of apology, swivelled his chair, picked up a flask from a recess, poured a couple of coffees and passed me one.

'Now,' he said, 'let's see ...' He tapped the pen on the desk and pretended to consult a diary. 'Ah yes, the Rammie. What exactly do you want from me about it?'

'Well, on the record, seeing how you recused yourself and that, I was wondering if you'd worked on that project's precursors, and if you had any interesting technical details or, you know, human interest stories you could recount.'

'And off the record?'

'What you really think about it.'

'Ah.' Baxter tilted back his seat, and clapped his fingertips a few times. 'That first. Off the record.'

I nodded. 'Of course.'

'"Sources close to the Shadow Minister believe that privately, he thinks ..." OK, what I think is a have you ever heard of Cheng Ho?'

'The Chinese admiral?' I felt smug at recognising the name, and thrown off balance by the conversational swerve.

'Yes. Sailed this enormous fleet of gigantic ships to Africa and the rest of Asia and so on. And you know the sequel: the Emperor's decision not to send out any more treasure fleets, to shut down any building of ocean-going ships, and all the rest. China turned its back on the outside world, until the outside world came to it, and not in a good way. That story troubles me.'

'Why?'

'I'm sure you can imagine a future analogy.'

'China shutting out the world again? Stopping trade and all that?' I shook my head. 'I can't imagine it.'

'No,' said Baxter. 'That's not what I had in mind. I can't imagine it either. But what I can imagine, very easily, is China turning its back on space.'

'Space?' I was even more surprised at this suggestion. 'China a with their Moon and Mars bases and their space stations and Jovian expeditions and deep-sky astronomy satellites and everything?'

'Cheng Ho fleets,' said Baxter, dismissively. 'They're not turning a profit, not even the orbital hotels when you strip out the cadre reward-holiday subsidies.'

'Asteroid mining-'

'Marginal. Depends entirely on how quickly deep-crust prospecting and drilling become worthwhile. One a not even a technological breakthrough a just an engineering improvement, something as simple as a better drill-bit, and asteroid mining drops off the bottom of the balance sheet. And with all the new materials anyway ... sure, some of them increase demand for rare earths and so forth, but most of them reduce demand for metals, petroleum, minerals generally.' He spread his hands. 'Bottom line a yes, I can well imagine China under some future government, Communist or not, deciding there were more pressing problems here on Earth, and pulling the plug on all space development outside lunar orbit, give or take a few astronomy experiments and robot probes.'

'All the more for the rest of us,' I said, flippantly.

'No.' Baxter beetled his brows. 'You really don't get it, do you? Soon, sooner than you think, there'll be no "rest of us", unless we do something about it. Look around you, man! Everything's made in China, which means that in the long run every decision that matters is also made in China. In fact a lot of them already are. The Big Deal only happened because China threatened to call in its debts, and-'

I held up a hand. 'Excuse me, Mr Baxter, but what has this to do with the Rammie project?'

Baxter gave a self-deprecating chuckle. 'I do go charging off on my favourite hobby-horse sometimes, don't I? OK. What all this has to do with the Rammie project, and others like it, is very straightforward. We can't afford to risk having a single government, whether or not it's formally a world government, deciding to shut down space exploration. I have to admit, in terms of gut feelings that's my strongest objection to socialism a that it makes such decisions possible. So, basically, what I'm saying off the record is that whatever my Party says and whatever my principles might be on the wisdom of pouring public money into such adventures, inwardly I'm cheering the Rammie and hoping fervently that it succeeds.'

'Well, me too as it happens, so ... yeah, thanks, I'll make sure that view gets forcefully expressed in my article, without attributing it to you.'

'Fine, fine!' He rubbed his hands. 'And the on-the-record stuff?'

'Yes.'

I looked down at my pad, feeling nervous and trying not to show it. When I'd walked into the lobby and shaken hands with Baxter a quarter of an hour earlier, he'd given every appearance of never having spoken to me before. I hadn't bothered to remind him of our encounter a few years ago and a few yards away. He'd kept up the pose throughout the conversation with a consistency that had me almost doubting myself. I took a deep breath, scrolled my notes, and looked up.

'The ramjet component or, uh, aspect of the Rammie,' I said, 'seems to be getting plenty of attention, for obvious reasons. So I'd like to look more carefully at what everyone's calling "the balloon". It isn't strictly a balloon, is it? It's a very big version of the flying spheres that BAS developed.'

'That's right,' Baxter said. 'It's similar, but in very different proportions. The skin is literally inflated and functions as a balloon, lifting the payload. The ionisation engine is in the centre of the sphere, and obviously with such a large surface the thrust developed is less than in the spheres we tested, but more than enough to counteract the wind.'

'I'm afraid it's not obvious to me why the thrust is less over a larger surface. In effect the entire surface is covered with tiny jet engines, actively moving air in or out. Why shouldn't the thrust be more? For that matter, why bother with any kind of shaped shell a wouldn't a single sheet of the stuff move through the air just as well?'

'I suppose so,' Baxter said. 'Some kind of closed surface, and sometimes streamlining, is a convenience. As for the lesser thrust, larger surface question a you're quite right, in theory a large, say, sphere could move as fast as a smaller one, if not faster, but the size of engine and power source required would be quite impracticable, as well as prohibitively expensive. The whole point of the Rammie is that it isn't all that costly, and that it saves an immense amount of fuel in just lifting the payload the first twenty miles or so up.'

'OK,' I said, 'I'm clear on that, thanks. But just out of interest a why do the new craft move so slowly?'

'I beg your pardon? Slowly? Sixty to a hundred knots is a respectable enough clip, if you ask me.'

'Yes,' I said, 'if you compare the craft to balloons or blimps, which because of their shape we naturally do. But that's not the relevant comparison, is it? They putter about the sky like light aircraft or even drones or microlights. Their precursors used to keep pace with airliners and jet fighters, and could zip along faster than the speed of sound.'

Baxter looked puzzled. 'Precursors? You've lost me, I'm afraid.'

'You know,' I said, in as casual a tone as I could manage, making a few half snaps of my fingers as if trying to remember something trivial, 'when they were still secret military aircraft and secret drones, and when BAS was test-flying prototypes or whatever.'

'The BAS prototypes?' said Baxter. 'These were ... what, a couple of years ago? They were slower, if anything.'

'I know,' I said. 'I saw the first one in Orkney. No, I'm talking about the ones you were flying secretly ten years and more ago.'

'BAS never did anything of the kind,' said Baxter. He gave a short laugh. 'Not in my time, anyway. And I would have known about it.'

'Oh, you probably did,' I said. 'I saw one of those things over ten years ago. More than saw it, actually. It fell out of the sky on me and a friend and knocked us out. Burned a big circular patch in the heather around us. I had some very weird and terrifying dreams that night a and for years afterwards, I can tell you.'

Baxter's lower lip twisted. 'Sorry to hear that.'

'I'm sure you are, because you came to see me the week after it happened, posing as a minister-'

'Oh!' cried Baxter. He shook a finger at me, half laughing. 'That's who you are! I knew I'd met you before. Of course! You had an altercation with me on the steps outside during the Forum. Yes, it's all coming back now.' He shook his head sadly. 'You made the same accusation then. And again, I'm sorry, but I'm completely baffled by this story of yours.'

'Don't worry about it,' I said, waving the matter aside. 'Water under the bridge, as far as I'm concerned.'

His eyebrows shot up. 'Really?'

'Seriously, yes.'

'So why bring it up?'

I shrugged. 'Just so you know where I'm coming from. But let's leave that aside for a moment, and talk hypothetically. That OK with you?'

Baxter made a show of looking at his watch. 'I have half an hour to spare, if you have half an hour to waste.'

'Good,' I said, ignoring the barb. 'Hypothetically, then. Suppose the new propulsion system that BAS rolled out recently had existed for years or decades before as a secret military technology, black budget, black programme, all that. What any ordinary observer would see when one of these things flew over would be, precisely, an unidentified flying object.'

'That's a truism,' said Baxter.

'Uh-huh. But here's my hypothesis. The ionisation engine produces a powerful electromagnetic field; ionised air has an electric charge; and between them they do very odd things to people's brains. Not everyone's, and the pilots and crews of these aircraft can wear metallic helmets and suits a flexible Faraday cages if you like a to counter the effect. For ordinary civilian use, that would be a bit of a nuisance to say the least, but hey, not a problem really, no civilians are going to be on board, and any who do encounter the machines up close can attribute any weird experiences they have then or afterwards to alien Greys or just hallucinations. Even so, you'd want to check up on as many of these civilians as possible, just to be sure they weren't saying or doing anything too awkward. You've got the whole UFO mythos working for you, not to mention the Men in Black mythos. As long as people believe that it's all about the government covering up its knowledge of aliens, you needn't worry for your military secrets. And by monitoring their reactions, you gather some interesting data on the physiological and psychological effects of the fields. So far, so good.

'Eventually, though, your secret propulsion system and your advanced metamaterials are superseded by something new a could be just the sheer ubiquity of surveillance satellites and drones, could be a new stealth system or cloaking device, it could even be some breakthrough technology out of the blue-sky section of the black budget. Anti-gravity, space warps, whatever. Doesn't matter. Your hitherto top-secret technology is obsolete. So what do you do?

'Well, for a start you can just reward your loyal defence contractors and sub-contractors who've kept your secrets all those years by letting them roll out the ionisation engine and the metamaterials for civilian use. Strange fabrics flap on catwalks, silvery globes flit through the skies at air shows. And here we have a problem. A significant fraction of the population will have a noticeable reaction to the electromagnetic fields, a smaller fraction I think will have no reaction at all, and most will be somewhere in between and just not feel good about the whole experience. You can't have random passengers and crew seeing visions, or having an uneasy sense of unseen presences, or even just a feeling of being watched, every time they ride the shiny new flying machines. I suppose you could issue everyone with special suits or helmets, but come on, that's inconvenient and it doesn't build confidence.

'So what do you do? You limit the engines' output to a level that doesn't affect people, at least not in such a drastic way. The civilian selling point of your new machines isn't speed, after all a it's manoeuvrability, dirigibility, silence, vertical take-off and landing, et cetera. They don't need engines powerful enough to run rings round MiGs and startle airliner pilots.

'But still ... let's think of the future. You might want to have faster and more powerful machines. You might want to compete with the airlines. Heck, the airlines themselves might be interested. The freight market looks very inviting. So there's a continued pull towards more powerful engines. Wouldn't it be handy if you knew in advance who was likely to have a bad reaction? And who could be sure not to have any reaction at all? And suppose you knew the genetic basis for these differences? That would open the way to isolating the biological mechanism a and then maybe the whole problem could be circumvented by something as simple as a pill, like a seasickness pill. Wouldn't that be worth having?'

Baxter looked at his watch. 'Are you finished?'

'Not quite,' I said. 'Still in the spirit of letting bygones be bygones ... like I said, I and a friend had an encounter with one of these machines ten years ago, and I had some very unpleasant and vivid experiences afterwards. My friend didn't. I've traced his family history, and I've found evidence of a lineage of people who form an almost isolated reproductive group within the population. It ties in nicely with other evidence of speciation within humanity, from infertility studies and so on. I've made a family tree, with notes. I think you might find it interesting.'

I picked up the file from my pad and flicked it onto Baxter's desk. He frowned, looked down at it, and poked about with his fingers.

'Hmm,' he said. 'I'm not sure I'd be interested in that sort of thing. Why do you think I would be?'

'Apart from the value of the genetic information to BAS?'

'Yes,' said Baxter. 'Apart from that. The value isn't much in any case. It's an interesting speculation to be sure, but even if there's a genetic basis for different reactions to electromagnetic fields a which I'm sure there is a it's of very little practical use to an avionics company. Even a drug company would pass it up. Going from genomic information to medical treatments takes years, as you must know, and frankly I don't see such a minor projected benefit passing muster with the regulators, or being of much interest to investors. And apart from that ... what?'

'Well,' I said, 'it might be of interest that there's a new race of people emerging who would, if you could identify them, make ideal pilots for the new aircraft if the companies ever do want to go in for heavy lifting.'

'"A new race"?' Baxter's voice was heavy with disdain. 'I don't like hearing talk about race. I don't even like hearing Africans referred to as "the Pure Race". I know, it's meant to be flattering, in a way, a sort of compensation for past prejudices and worse, but it still reinforces the old racial thinking. In a global market we literally can't afford that sort of thing. And what does it imply about people of mixed race a that they're of impure race?'

For some reason, Sophie's face flashed in my mind, adding weight to the hint of reproof.

'No, no,' I said. 'I don't think like that at all.'

'I should hope not,' said Baxter. 'And I'd be offended if you thought I did.'

'Of course,' I said. 'But ...'

'But what?'

'I think what I've identified here is an actual human speciation event.'

Baxter shrugged. 'So what? Humanity isn't a species, it's an achievement. There have been several co-existing human species in the past. Maybe there still are, though it's a little unlikely now we can peer into every thicket. If new species emerge among us, what of it? They'll still be human, and so will we.'

'It doesn't bother you that the medical and genetic professions are keeping very quiet about this, even though they know it's going on?'

'Not much, no,' said Baxter. He stood up and stepped to the window niche, and turned around with the daylight behind him, a shadowy figure. 'In my line of work and to be blunt in my line of politics, I get my sleeve tugged every so often by sad little people who think I share their obsessions over statistics on IQ and crime and what they call "race". They assure me the correlations are all kosher, so to speak, and that scientists are playing it down for political reasons. And you know what I tell them? I tell them I don't know if what they're saying is all true, and I don't care. In a free society it has no public policy implications. And good day to you, sir, or madam.'

'Yeah,' I said. 'It must be annoying, getting pestered by racists.'

'Indeed,' said Baxter, dryly. He stepped away from the window. 'As for the matter you raised earlier. Let me put to you a point you may overlooked. I was for many years an employee of a defence avionics company. I rose to a position of some responsibility. In general, someone in such a position is required to sign the Official Secrets Act. Please note, I am not saying that I signed it. Now of course, the constitutional situation has changed since the days when someone such as myself might have done that. But it has been common knowledge for several generations now that persons who have signed the Official Secrets Act take their obligations under that Act very seriously. Unless a specific exemption is granted, nothing covered by the Act may be divulged. The commitment entered into is for life. It is inviolable.'

'Are you saying that's why you can't tell me what really happened?'

Baxter sighed. 'No. I'm not. I'm saying that someone who could tell you, speaking hypothetically as you put it, would be unable to answer your question. In my case there are two possibilities. One is that I don't know. The other is that I do, and have solemnly sworn never to breathe a word of it. I am not saying which, but in either case you are wasting your time badgering me about it.'

I thought about this.

'Well, I think that's just about everything covered,' I said. 'Thanks very much for your time, Mr Baxter.'

'Call me Jim,' he said, as if by reflex. He sat back behind his desk and looked at a diary panel, genuinely this time.

'That door handle's a bugger,' he said, barely looking up. 'Close it firmly on the way out.'

I took the hint.

My article took the rest of that week to write, and was worth every minute. After a bit of editorial back-and-forth it was accepted by Sci/Tech World and syndicated elsewhere, and it did indeed lead to a few minutes of earnest discussion on one late-night news channel. The payment came through on time. The Rammie project featured the piece in its own publicity, and sent me an invitation for the Holyrood press conference scheduled to coincide with live coverage of the ascent on the day (whatever day that turned out to be). The whole thing was a win at every level, until the last.

PART SIX.