Part 4 (1/2)

There was no distance between open-mindedness and gullibility with blokes like Blake. They were too distrustful of their own judgement and ever wary of the wind-up, for that. With a bloke like Blake, incredulity was the default setting. He was the granite-hard combat veteran who believed in nothing he couldn't poke with a bayonet blade.

He was an insecure w.a.n.ker desperate to prove a toughness he had never actually possessed. That was Napier's considered opinion, who liked his commanding officer less with every strange occurrence this peaty northern paradise threw at him. Except that Blake wasn't really his commanding officer because the days of command structure and with them respectability had long gone. He was just the man in charge. He was the gaffer, whatever his military pretensions. And Napier had no respect for him or trust of his judgement at all.

The Seasick Four?

Do me a f.u.c.king favour, he thought. Napier reckoned he would tear out his own finger nails with his teeth before confiding anything that might come across as remotely inexplicable or spooky in any of them. It might amuse them. It might scare them. What it would most likely do would be to baffle them and alienate them even further from someone they already considered aloof and probably odd.

It left him alone. He was entirely alone. Whatever was happening on New Hope, and he had no f.u.c.king idea what that might be except for its apparent fidelity to a period theme, he would have no choice but to work out for his lonely old self.

Was he scared? Yes and no.

He was not unaware of the wider imperatives of the world. He knew about hype and sensationalism and the urge for publicity and vindication that would fuel a media mogul such as Alexander McIntyre in pursuing a project such as this. The stakes were vast. He had worked briefly as a bodyguard for a major Hollywood player and seen up close what megalomania could do to distort the values and perceptions of a man at the centre of things and addicted to remaining there.

What if New Hope Island produced nothing of interest? What if the wind scoured topology surrendered no new clues as to what had happened to its vanished inhabitants? Would McIntyre tolerate that? Could he endure such a crus.h.i.+ng anti-climax to his expedition? Probably not, was the answer. He would fabricate things, wouldn't he? He would conjure and invent them to provide a world hungry for sensation with what it craved most from his investigation of the great unsolved enigma.

That was possibly what he, Napier, had experienced. It was just conceivable. It was more plausible physically than any other explanation he could think of. McIntyre hoped for revelations but in their absence had a stock of special effects to fool the world into believing along with him in some paranormal phenomena, something terrifying and malevolent involving ghosts and their attendant paraphernalia. He hoped something real would manifest itself. If it did not, these tricks would be used and interpreted as hard evidence of something other-worldly. They would insure he would not face ridicule.

Old folk songs mordantly sung at sunset by singers who weren't there and clay pipes smoked by phantoms were probably only the start of things. There would be wraiths in moonlight, the weeping of infants carried on a midnight wind. There would be the creak of spectral vessels approaching the sh.o.r.e. It would scare the s.h.i.+t out of the a.s.sembled experts and their contagious fear would afflict the readers of McIntyre's paper as they shuddered, reading it over their bowls of muesli or aboard their commuter trains on the way to work.

It was the most plausible explanation. It was quite a seductive theory. He had experienced only the tentative rehearsals for the bogus haunting to come. McIntyre had employed a crack team of special effects people and they were already secretly occupying the island, perfecting their smaller turns and preparing the larger set-pieces for when the show properly began.

It was always tempting to believe what was rational. The human mind was too tidy for ready acceptance of the inexplicable. What was inexplicable generally became unpredictable and from there it was a very short step indeed to uncontrollable. People liked to be in control. It was a lot safer than the alternative. And they liked to be able to determine events for themselves. Surprises, once a person achieved adulthood, were almost always of the unpleasant variety.

But despite agreeing intellectually with all of this, Napier did not really buy the plausible explanation for the mysterious oddities he had heard and smelled and seen and touched since arriving on New Hope Island. In his past, before he lost his self-respect and his professional status in the world, he had been a highly trained and formidable soldier; an expert at tracking and concealment, someone who could live covertly in hostile terrain for as long as a mission took to successfully complete.

Blake and the Seasick Four were the only other human beings on the island. If it had any other mortal inhabitants, he would have detected the evidence of their presence by now. He would have sensed their spoor, even if they hid themselves, in the manner of the predator he used to be. He was certain of this, even if it was not a terribly comfortable conclusion to have reached. Did it mean then that he now had to believe in ghosts? He had never done so before. But he thought that in that small and barren place, with its mysterious past, he might over the coming days and weeks, have to accommodate the possibility.

The nights, he muttered to himself. The days would likely be alright. The nights, however, he thought might prove to be altogether trickier.

Lucy asked Karl Cooper would he mind if she taped the interview. He was a media veteran and she could think of no conceivable reason why he should object to the recording, but asking was a necessary courtesy and she'd decided a sort of exaggerated professionalism might be the best way to get her subject to drop his guard. He was a vain man. That was her instinct. He would relax into himself if made to feel important. Pandering to his substantial ego was the admission price paid for entering his comfort zone.

'Have you always believed in alien life?'

'Certainly I have for as long as I can remember.'

'How did that belief originate?'

He smiled. He said, 'to paraphrase a far more eminent scientist than I will ever be, I always thought that the universe to be not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.'

'Haldane, the biologist,' Lucy said.

'Very good, you've done your research.'

'So you a.s.sume the aliens are superior to us intellectually?'

'That's a given,' Cooper said. 'If they've been here, and I believe they have, then in order to get here, they have to possess technologies light years ahead of ours.'

'Pun intended?'

'Absolutely.'

'So at a young age you decided that there was compelling evidence of alien life. And then you concluded that those aliens had visited earth?'

'No. It was really the other way around. I looked, as a child, at the anomalies of history. The Aztecs constructed buildings of breathtaking intricacy yet an invention as fundamental as the wheel apparently never even occurred to them. Colossal sa.r.s.ens hewn from a Welsh quarry somehow got to Salisbury Plain in Wilts.h.i.+re to form Stonehenge; a structure of such geometric complexity we still debate its true purpose. Hauled there by Bronze Age man? Erected by Bronze Age man? I don't think so. I could go on. But your readers have most of them heard me argue this stuff already on their television screens.'

'Yet the general level of scepticism concerning alien life remains high.'

'Does it? It might at the shabbier end of media, Lucy. It might in the halls of academe. It might among the scientific community, though that hasn't been my personal experience. My peers don't regard me as a laughing stock.'

'I didn't for a moment mean to imply they did, Professor Cooper.'

'Karl, Lucy. Please. And anyway, I suspect the scepticism is a recent thing. You know about the ancient temple at Alexandria, about the library there?'

'It was believed to contain the sum of human knowledge.'

Cooper nodded. 'The answers to everything; the answers to questions no one had yet dreamed of asking and wouldn't for centuries.'

'It burned down. The knowledge was lost.'

'And yet men with great minds through history believed it was there to be lost. That's the crucial point. From Copernicus to Galileo, from Bacon to Newton, they believed. And they were rational men. And how would that knowledge have been accrued? Who would have compiled the information and a.s.sembled it there?'

'A blueprint for civilization, handed to us by benevolent visitors from another galaxy?'

Cooper smiled. 'I could hardly have put it better myself,' he said.

The ego stroking had been done. It was time to take a risk. Lucy drew in a breath. 'Jane Chambers believes the New Hope settlement vanished because of plague.'

Cooper shrugged. His eyes betrayed nothing.

'What do you think of that theory?'

'I think that she's ent.i.tled to it. I also strongly suspect that the forthcoming expedition findings will prove her spectacularly wrong.'

'Have you discussed it with her?'

'No.'

'But you do know her?'

Cooper smiled a tight smile. He reached forward from where he sat to the low table between then and switched off the voice recorder. He said, 'You mean do I know Jane Chambers in the biblical sense? The fact that you ask the question suggests you're aware of the answer already.'

'It's something you don't wish to talk about?'

'It's a subject I can't talk about, Ms Church. It would be at best discourteous and at worst a betrayal. We had a brief relations.h.i.+p. It ended badly. What the tabloids subsequently printed was pretty much a web of lies it would've made things even worse to try to disentangle by telling the truth. All of that's off the record, by the way. I can't and won't talk about this stuff, though I do respect the journalistic imperative that compelled you to ask.'

Was he being sarcastic? She really could not tell. She decided to ask him about his own theory about the New Hope Island disappearance. It was safe ground and of more interest to most of her readers than her subject's patchy love life. She switched the machine back on. He smiled at her. She was reminded of what Jane Chambers had said, about her being fundamentally a seeker after truth, under the fripperies of her fast car and designer wardrobe. She wondered had the man she faced at that moment, the same basic integrity.

'Why did aliens abduct the settlers of New Hope Island?'

Cooper didn't answer her for a long time. Then he said, 'Perhaps Jane's right and they were afflicted with disease. And that disease was incurable with only the primitive medical resources available then to earth. Perhaps they were taken away to be cured. Salvation was their objective in the New Hope Island community. It's possible the aliens saved them, but in a manner they hadn't expected.'