Simon Ings
THE SMOKE
For Michelle
ONE
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This desert, stretching in every direction visible to the observer, is not smooth. Its topology is in fact absurdly disordered. Yet the observing eye, unable to parse its complexity, flattens everything. Simply to comprehend it, the eye must reduce its thousand thousand defiles and dried riverbeds, stands of silver gidgee trees and banks of Mitchell grass, to a flat monotony.
This desert is made of stones and sand and indeterminate things which, alive or not, have found little use for the living state. Anyway they are so coated with dust that they are already halfway mineral.
The sun has risen too far to reveal, by way of shadows, Woomera’s natural topography: how the ground rises to the north; the geological remnants of an ancient coastline to the west; to the south-east, the rubbed-out, filled-in sketch of an archaic meteor strike. The blast pits, on the other hand, are as clear as an artist’s first marks with charcoal upon an orange paper. The lips of three, four, half a dozen arcs of pitch-black shadow are distinguishable by plain sight, with a suggestion of further, similar pits stretching as far as the horizon.
The pits are all the same size, curvature and depth. The nearest of them may stand for alclass="underline" a great scorched hole in the fractured ground, suggesting not so much a massive blast as a caving-in and blackening, as if, in this diseased zone, the rocks themselves have shrivelled.
Between the pits run lines of finer, whiter stuff that might be roads, though they are in fact just the crushed marks left by heavy vehicles rolling from one pit to another. Not roads, then; only desire lines. (Desire lines: a strange expression to apply in a place like this.)
The wall is made of glass. The observer – your own brother – looks down through the wall and sees, reflected there, the white rubber boots encasing his feet, the white tiled floor on which he stands, the grey-green grout between the tiles. Focusing past this Pepper’s Ghost, he sees, in an oblique and foreshortened fashion, the lip of the pit in which this structure stands. High as this eyrie seems – twenty storeys at least – the whole structure must be even bigger, to rise so high from so deep and sharp-sided a bowl cut in the sickened earth.
Around the pit he spies little vehicles, and little men, wielding white hoses that from this vantage point resemble nothing so much as strands of spaghetti, trailing across the ground and down into the pit. Your brother leans his head against the glass wall, straining for the angle. He glimpses a ring of small, windowless towers – units threaded like beads around a great metal girdle which curves out of sight to left and right.
These are the shock absorbers. The angle of observation is too steep, the pit too dark, for your brother to see more, but he knows that below them there is a shallow domed plate weighing a thousand tons, built of steel and coated on its underside with a rubberised concrete. And above that, in a hermetically sealed zone, there is a pipe, and down this pipe the bombs are meant to falclass="underline" bombs that are held in magazines arranged within the ring of massive shock absorbers.
The bombs, each weighing half a ton, will drop at a variable rate, sometimes once a second, sometimes much less frequently, their speed matched to – indeed, dictated by – the resonant frequency of the shock absorbers. Once they have fallen a precise distance through the small bomb-shaped hole in the centre of the curved plate, the hole will clam shut and the bomb will detonate with the force of five kilotons of TNT – an atomic blast about half as powerful as that which devastated the city of Berlin in 1916, ending, at the cost of some 40,000 lives, the bloody farrago of the world’s Great War.
The bombs boast virtually no propellant; a smear of tungsten paint. Material just enough to spread a hydrostatic wave across the surface of the plate. The heat generated by each explosion is immense – ten times the temperature of the visible surface of the sun – but very short-lived, so that the inner surface of the plate is hardly ablated. It will survive this treatment for years.
The pressure exerted by the blast pushes the plate. The shock absorbers dissipate the kick, spreading the acceleration along the length of the tower. By the time the shocks reach that part of the structure where your brother is now standing, he and his fellows will hardly feel them.
In this manner, the whole ungainly structure will rise from the ground and through the air and, at an altitude of around 300 miles, be serviceably clear of Earth’s gravity well. From this comfortably high orbit, the stars beckon. The Moon. Mars. Even Jupiter is not beyond this ship’s projected range.
Whether your brother will see Jupiter, and explore its rings with an unaided eye, remains a secret. Before Jupiter, before Mars even, there is a necessary duty he and his fellows must perform, a mission only the captain knows about – and your brother is not the captain. He is a midshipman (first class, mind) and his name is Jim. Jim steps away from the window. (There is plenty of room to manoeuvre – the economics of this kind of propulsion favour big craft over small, and this vessel is as big as a frigate.) He reads his name, backwards, reflected in the blast-proof, heat-proof, cold-proof, pressurised and tinted glass of the wall. James Lanyon. Over his name, a Union Jack. Over that, stitched to the breast of his white leather flight jacket in gold thread, the name of his vessel.
HMS Victory.
1
Troy has fallen. The belly of the wooden horse has splintered open in the town square, vomiting forth Greek elites. The gates are torn open and the city, gaping, lost, runs with blood. Priam, King of Troy, is dead, slaughtered on his throne; his lieutenant Aeneas saw it happen. Now all the heartsick warrior can do is try to save his family. His wife Creusa. Ascanius, his son. His father Anchises.
Anchises, that Venus-lover, that lame old goat – you’re put in mind of Billy Marsden the fitter chasing after the barmaid of the Three Oaks, out Halifax way three winters past, and laugh.
Two men you do not know look up from their game of cards and stare at you. Their eyes, carrying no hostile intent, are nonetheless like crossed staves barring your path. No overtures. No gambits. Stranger, keep to yourself. Four years in London have made you a foreigner here, who grew up in streets not three miles from this spot.
Helplessly irritated, you feather the onion-skin pages of your mother’s Aeneid, turn and read on.
Aeneas’s other half, Creusa, she’s no slouch. She’s set, little Ascanius upon her hip, sandwiches packed, water bottled, tickets in her purse, scarf tight around her chin, Let’s go! Bus leaves in ten! Ancient Anchises feels all his years and wants to stay put, Here I was born! Here I will die! Not a shred of Billy Marsden now, and much more like your own drear dad.
It is a relief to you – if only for a moment – that by tomorrow you will be free of Yorkshire and back in London for a while. For a moment (only a moment) you wish you were already embarked on the long, rickety journey back to the capital. There is very little left for you to do. In this home that has forgotten you, all you can do is wait. Weather the afternoon. Weather another Friday night fish-and-chip supper with your dad, self-stoppered Bob Lanyon (who, according to persistent rumour, nonetheless slapped Billy silly once, for grabbing at your mother). Weather another sleepless sleep in that garret bedroom you know as well as the cavity of your own mouth. The room’s absurd: it is too small to accommodate a grown man, and the truckle bed is even more ridiculous, your feet hang over the end of it at night. At one and the same moment, however, that room feels too big for you to bear. When you were little, you used to share it with your brother Jim. But you are on your own now, and Jim is off to outer space, by Woomera.