‘I can’t think of a better place for him to be.’
Gaby helped herself to more coffee from the stainless steel vacuum jug. No. Don’t drink it. Do it. Say it.
‘Shepard, there’s something else I have to ask you.’
In her imagination she saw figures in white isolation suits running along the neon-lit corridors of the decontamination block to hastily convened meetings in midnight conference rooms; the disc shining on the desk top while voices spoke in quick, hushed tones. She saw heads nod, hands shake, voices agree: this could only be satisfactorily ended by flames.
‘Would it, by any chance, concern this?’
A click of fingers and the disc was between them, and then on the leather desk top, like a captured sin.
‘Have you watched this?’ Gaby asked.
‘I have.’ There was not much Paul Newman in Shepard’s eyes, unless it was the Paul Newman in the scene from
‘You have to give me that back, it’s my property, it’s my story. You cover it up, it’ll only make it worse when the truth finally gets out. And it will, in the end, believe me. You’re either for or against me in this.’
Shepard flipped the disc on its side, held it upright by the pressure of a single finger.
‘What makes you think I’m part of a cover-up conspiracy?’
‘You’re UNECTA, aren’t you?’
‘You obviously don’t know as much about what’s going on in this country as you think. There’s little love lost between the military and the research community. The army wants the research division militarized. Because they see us a gang of fuzzy-minded, subversive, undisciplined anarchists, they would buy in expertise from the multinationals, who, if they had corporate souls, would mortgage them to dabble their fingers in the Chaga. I know of a dozen major companies; petrochemical, biotech, molecular engineering, chip design, agricultural, with lawyers on round-the-clock standby to slap patent applications on anything we bring out of there they can reproduce. It’s a bigger game than you think.’
‘You’ve seen what’s on the disc. So what do you think of it?’
‘I think it deserves a goddam Pulitzer Prize, Gaby McAslan. And I think you should bless whatever gods you journalists pray to that it found its way to this office and isn’t lying on the desk of some general back in Kajiado. Which is why I’m going to have it squirted to SkyNet, because the longer the one and only copy is in Tsavo, the more the chance that people who will be embarrassed by it will find out what it is and go over my head to get their hands on it. The military have their moles, even here. This will give fresh impetus on the whole debate of why there needs to be an international military presence in this country at all. And when the men in suits next put their heads together to talk about funding, this may be the wild card to take a trick for science rather than institutionalized paranoia.’
‘I didn’t do this as a sucker-punch in the UN’s internal street-fighting,’ Gaby said. ‘I did it because it was wrong, and people should see and know it.’ She was so wide from the truth she could not believe she had just said what she did.
‘A principled journalist,’ Shepard said, not believing her either. Gaby wished she had not lied to him. She wanted to be Ms Valiant-For-Truth to him. She also wished he had not told her the dirty things about UNECTA. She wanted him to be a rescuing angel, without ulterior motivations. ‘Could you give me SkyNet’s teleport number?’
She wrote it on a yellow sticky notelet. Shepard turned again to his computer, called up a screenful of icons. The processor accepted the disc and released it a few seconds later. It was sent. It was safe. But it was raw: the tale needed to be well told.
‘Shepard, is there anywhere in this place I could borrow a camcorder and a couple of discs for a few hours? I need to get a final report done.’
‘I think that could be arranged.’
Do this, and she might be more than safe. She might be able to win one. But one more thing needed doing first.
‘You don’t know if anyone here is a Manchester United supporter, and if so, whether they have any gear? I can’t make the most important face-to-camera of my career in a sweatshirt with AC Milan on the front.’
22
Gaby’s videodiary: supplemental.
July 16 2008
Not only did Shepard find me a camcorder, he’s let me borrow it for the duration of my visit. Tembo and Faraway have gone back on a shuttle flight to sweet-talk T.P. with the report. I’m staying – officially – until William gets out of decontam. Unofficially, because Dr M. Shepard, Station Director, thought I might like a look at the cutting edge of Chaga research. He’s assigned me an empty cabin on Tractor Two, Level Two: there’s always someone off-base on R’n’R or at a conference. At least this woman has something approaching a make-up kit. Borrowing cosmetics is like a starving man stealing food: it’s not a sin, it’s survival.
I like it. This is a good place. Ironic: it’s the nearest inhabited place to the Chaga, but it feels the furthest. I can see terminum from my porthole, but it doesn’t feel inevitable the way it does in Nairobi, or immediately threatening, as it did in Merueshi. It’s because this mobile community is one place on Earth the Chaga is not drawing any closer to.
Tsavo West. It’s like a New Age pirate ship: not for having a porthole in my cabin, or being a-sail upon a sea of grass, rigged with gantries and radio masts and satellite-dish crow’s-nests, or that Tsavo West is aggressively self-contained: the processing plant over on Tractor Three recycles every drop of water, dry sewage waste is processed to the rooftop gardens where apparently they grow killer gene-engineered hemp. It’s the people. They have a joyous single-mindedness, like surfing communities; a deeply engraved subtext that informs everything they do. I can understand why the military hates them. There is no formal structure, no imposed discipline, no uniforms – there is no need. Discipline, community, efficiency come from within, from this credo.
So, me hearties, run out the Jolly Roger, set sail for the Chaga, and be thee the Governor of Panama’s lovely red-haired daughter, ah-har-har-har?
For all the hippy chic, Shepard’s got a pretty tight set-up. Tractor Two is mostly biochemistry and molecular engineering labs and the equipment is state of the art. A guy with beads woven into his beard showed me the remote handling facility. Custom built. Nothing like it anywhere else. The virtual reality manipulators can take Chaga-stuff apart down to the component molecules and let the operators walk through the atoms. No wonder they’re so manic about contamination. The knowledge they have backed-up, but they’d never be able to replace the equipment.
Speaking of decontamination, they still won’t let me talk to William. The closest I can get to him is a woman’s face on the other side of a thick glass panel in a steel door, and she says they are awaiting the results of further tests on the poor kid’s viral symptoms. All that stainless steel and blinding white: it’s like a Douglas Trumbull movie in there. Tractor One, which is the main ingress/egress port to Tsavo West, is designed to blow free in case of a major incident, while the rest sprints away at its top speed of three miles per hour. Tractor One is virtually a city within a city. Up on the other side of the level from the place where they kept me there is a facility for Away Teams; the ones who actually go into the Chaga and bring samples back. They’re totally isolated, like divers on oil-rigs who live in decompression tanks for months on end. I suppose they make their own entertainment, like Oksana on those long, cold Siberian winter nights. One night was enough for me. The thing that impressed me most about Tractor One – and this says a lot about my mind – is that it’s the first tee on Tsavo West’s one-hole golf course. You drive from the landing grid over to the sun-deck on Tractor Two and then it’s a five or seven iron to the astro-turfed green on the service platform three-quarters the way up the side of Tractor Three. If you hit it into the Chaga, it’s out-of-bounds, but you have to buy everyone a drink. I suppose golf balls in the Chaga are no stranger than golf-balls on the moon, though my heart agrees with Mark Twain: golf is a good
