But that isn't what the Bureau is for.
Parkis had given us the picture after he'd fired Edwards: Parkis doesn't like unrest among the ferrets. During the end-phase of the mission it had been decided that the only way to get Edwards right through to the objective was by cutting him off from most of his escape lines and letting the opposition think that no one would attempt this brand of the impossible unless he were a lunatic. To an extent it came off because they withdrew a lot of surveillance and Edwards got through to the signals room of the Hungarian Embassy and was closing on the objective — his actual mission was a cipher-bust near the centre of the Jugoslavian network — when he'd seen what London had done to his escape lines and panicked and got out.
We don't like Parkis but we thought he was right. All we ask is that the Bureau doesn't plan a mission thatdepends on an expendable executive. That, in certain cases, would amount to murder.
In my case there was a fact among the unknown background data that I knew must exist and that I had tacitly accepted when Loman had given me final briefing at the Yasmina. It was obvious, and it was this: if I failed to reach Tango Victor I couldn't expect to be pulled out of the area. The entry in the book wouldn't readMission Failed butExecutive Deceased. In most cases it comes to the same thing but there's a technical nuance because the failure of a big operation creates a lot of depression at the Bureau and it makes the whole thing look a bit better if it can be shown that the executive lost his life in the attempt: it means that no one can say he wasn't trying hard enough.
London wanted me to find an aeroplane and examine its cargo and if I couldn't do it they'd want to make it very difficult for anyone else to do it. They'd taken great pains to put me down here in strict hush and if I couldn't find the objective they wouldn't allow Loman to make any noise pulling me out.
Understood and accepted.
But it seemed a long way to the top of the dune.
They were Zeiss 22–50's but I didn't use them until I'd turned full-circle and looked for the freighter with the naked eye because if I had to use a 22 magnification to pick it up it would mean it was a day's march distant and the sun was already hot on my skin.
From the low area among the dunes I had looked and seen nothing and from this height I looked and saw nothing but it was infinitely worse: down there the piled waves of sand had limited my range of vision but from here I could see for fifty miles in every direction andstill there was nothing. It was a dun-brown seascape, an area so vast that it had no end until it met the sky itself. The silence of it alone was diminishing to the spirit, adding lifelessness to endlessness: the semblance of a seascape, because of this, was only partiaclass="underline" there was no sound here of the wave's leap or the hiss of spindrift. Silence and stillness together cast the mind beyond the thought of death and held it in awe of this place where life itself had never been.
My shadow alone moved, turning as I turned, its giant pointer lying curved across the dunes.
An instant's hesitation of the hands, fear of confirming the negative findings of the naked eye, then I raised the binoculars and adjusted the focus to infinity. The red of the spectrum refracted at the edge of the field to leave a glowing ring, and through it passed the flow of images, repeated until they became meaningless: one sand-dune looked like another, and here they were spread in their millions.
After two minutes I had to lower the glasses, mesmerized. The agoraphobia still played in my senses, a hovering dread of exposure that I couldn't quite keep away as I stood here in the middle of the empty earth beneath the empty sky, a goose-flesh feeling of vulnerability: I was a creature without shelter, without a hiding-place, caught in a trap where the vastness of freedom itself imprisoned me.
I prefer the more natural haunts of my kind, the sooty warrens of the city streets, to this cosmic waste where the grains of sand are unimaginably many.
I turned twice more, full-circle.
At least there would be nomore effort needed,now that this point was reached. The reckoning had been wrong, that was all. Somewhere between the Philips tower and the zeros lining up on the computer there had been a mistake made in the figures. The margin of error,mon ami, is even larger than we'd thought.
There was no point in organizing a day's march: by the law of averages I would be as likely to move away from the wreck of the freighter as towards it. I had a compass but I didn't know the bearing. If I set off at random the odds against success were precisely three hundred and sixty to one.
Onset of lassitude, euphoria almost. Pain coming back, normal reaction, nothing important to do, can concentrate on the discomfort, crouched on the sand with my back to the heat and the light, here endeth the mission, you can't win them all. A vague sense of wonder that the sun was perfectly silent, sending this degree of heat over so much distance, you'd expect to hear a roaring, however faint, here where silence could be broken by a grain of sand hitting the side of a box.
My shadow humped before me, an insubstantial Buddha.
Try again I've tried then bloody well try again.
Lurching about, it's the sand, you can't ever get your balance. The red ring flaring at the edge of the field and the dunes flowing through, full-circle. Negative. Take a rest.
A kind of sleep, timeless and with no dream-element recalled, teeming images but so disconnected as to have no significance, then on my feet again and wandering about feeling stronger physically but not really determined about anything, the organism taking care of itself, getting the wind up because the box down there wasn't very big, forty-eight hours plus reserves and that's our lot.
Kept bumping my forehead against the eyepieces, sweat running down, awareness of sand in the boots and a thirst beginning, a certain amount of cerebration continuing: the parallax factor critically important because a near dune could block medium-field gaps, be an interesting thing to work out given a man of certain height standing upon a dune of a certain height and given a million dunes, the nearest of them concealing the gaps between those more distant, what proportion of the terrain can he actually observe, and what proportion is hidden from him?
To hell with academic problems: concentrate on the one thing that could just conceivably drag the mission back onits feet and yes, you snivelling little perisher, save our skin.
Parallax.
By lateral movement the observer exposes to view the gaps between distant dunes hitherto concealed by those in the foreground. By bodily rotation he increases this extension of view a hundredfold. Put it like that and it looks fair enough but the wreck isn't necessarily visible in one of the gaps, it can be lying on its belly full-square behind the highest dune of them all and you can practise your lateral movement and bodily rotation till the heat knocks you flat on your face.
The red ring flaring, the sand flowing through. The shadows changing as I turned from the sun through the south to the west. The sun hanging there in its roaring silence and pouring the sky ablaze across the eastern wastes of the earth until its tide lapped about me, burning.
They are there, the gaps you couldn't see before: you're looking at them now but can you tell which they are? You expect to find any difference between one thing and another in this region of the damned where the sun and the wind have driven away identity?