The Thing Itself Read online

  ‘No deal,’ said Roy. Then he wrung his speccy face into a parody of a concerned expression. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself, Charles.’ And he shut his door.

  I went through to the common room, fuming. For a while I toyed with the idea of simply grabbing the letter back: I was bigger than Roy, and doubtless had been involved in more actual fist-flying, body-grappling fights than he. It wouldn’t have been hard. But instead of that I had a beer, and lay on the sofa, and tried to get a grip. We had to live together, he and I, in unusually confined circumstances, and for a very long period of time. In less than a week the sun would vanish, and the proper observing would begin. Say we chanced upon alien communication (I told myself) – wouldn’t that be something? Might there be a Nobel Prize, or something equally prestigious, in it? I couldn’t put all that at risk, even for the satisfaction of punching that bastard on the nose.

  Maybe, I told myself, Roy would thaw out a little in a day or two. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar, after all. Maybe I could coax the letter out of him.

  The week wore itself out. I went through a phase of intense irritation with Roy for his (what seemed to me) immensely petty and immature attitude with regard to my letter. Then I went through a phase when I told myself it didn’t bother me. I did consider returning his tenner to him, so as to retain the high moral ground. But then I thought: ten pound is ten pound.

  The week ended, and Diamondo overflew and tossed the supply package out to bounce along the snow. This annoyed me, because I had finally managed to write a letter to Lezlie that explained the situation without making it sound like I valued her communiqués so little I’d gladly sold it off to weirdo Roy. But I couldn’t ‘post’ the letter unless the plane landed and took it on board, so I had to hang on to it. And I couldn’t even be sure the letter Roy had purchased had been from her.

  On the fifth of July the sun set for the last time until August. The thing people don’t grok about Antarctic night is that it’s not the same level of ink-black all the way through. For the first couple of weeks the sky lightens twice a day, pretty much bright enough to walk around without a torch – the same dawn and dusk paling of the sky that precedes sunrise and follows sunset, only without actual dawn and dusk. Still, you can sense the sun is just there, on the other side of the horizon, and it’s not too bad. As the weeks go on this gets briefer and darker, and then you do have a month or so when it’s basically coal-coloured skies and darkness invisible the whole time.

  Diamondo landed his plane, and tossed out the supply package, but didn’t linger; and by the time I’d put on the minimum of outdoor clothing and grabbed a torch and got through the door he was taking off again – so, once again, I didn’t get to send my letter to Lez.

  That was the last time I saw that aircraft.

  There were two letters in this week’s batch: one from my old grammar school headmaster, saying that the school had hosted a whole assembly on the ‘exciting and important’ work I was doing; and the other from my professor at Reading. This was nothing but a note, and read in its entirety: ‘Dear A. I often think of Sartre’s words. Imagination is not an empirical or superadded power of consciousness, it is the whole of consciousness as it realises its freedom. Where is freer than the very bottom of the world? Nil desperandum! Yours, A.’ This, though slightly gnomic, was not out of character for Prof. Addlestone, who had worked on SETI for so long it had made his brain a little funny. No letter from Lez, which worried me. But, after all, she didn’t write every week. I reread the Professor’s note several times. Did it read like a PS, a scribbled afterthought? Did it perhaps mean that the letter Roy bought had been from Addlestone? Maybe. Maybe not.

  We got on with our work, and I tried to put the whole letter business behind me. Roy did not help, as far as this went. He was acting stranger and stranger; simpering at me, and when I queried his expression (‘What? What is it?’) scurrying away – or scowling and saying, ‘nothing, nothing, only …’ and refusing to elaborate.

  The next thing was: he moved one of the computer terminals into his room. This was a proper hefty 1980s terminal; not one of those modern-day computers the size and weight of a copy of Marie Claire, so it was no mean feat getting the thing in there. He even cut a mousehole-like shape in the bottom of his door, to enable the main cable to come out into the hall and through into the monitor room.

  ‘What are you doing in there?’ I challenged him. ‘That’s not standard policy. Did you clear this with Adelaide?’

  ‘I’m working on something,’ he told me, not meeting my eyes. ‘I’m close to a breakthrough. SETI, my friend. Solving Fermi’s paradox! You should consider yourself lucky to be here. You’ll get a footnote in history. Only a footnote, I know: but it’s more than most people get.’

  I ignored this. ‘I still don’t see why you need to squirrel yourself away in your room.’

  ‘Privacy,’ he said. ‘Is very important to me.’

  One day he went out on the ice to (he told me) check the meteorological data points. It seemed like an odd thing – he’d never shown any interest in them before – but I was glad he was out of the base, if only for half an hour. As soon as I saw his torch beam go, wobbling its oval of brightness away over the ice, I hurried to his room. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, I told myself. I was just checking the identity of the letter’s author. Maybe have a quick glance at its contents. I wouldn’t steal it back (although, I told myself, I could. It was my letter after all. Roy was being an idiot about the whole thing). But once my itch was scratched, curiosity-wise, then everything would get easier about the base. I could wait out the remainder of my stint with equanimity. He need never even know I’d been poking around.

  No dice. Roy had fitted a padlock to his door. I rattled this uselessly; I could have smashed it, but then Roy would know what I’d been up to. I retreated to the common room, disproportionately angry. What was he doing, in there, with a whole computer terminal – and my letter?

  I had enough self-knowledge to step back from the situation, at least some of the time. He was doing it in order to wind me up. That was the only reason he was doing it. The letter was nothing – none of my letters, if I looked back, contained any actual, substantive content. They were just pleasant chatter, people I knew touching base with me. The letter Roy bought must be the same. He bought it not to have the letter, but in order to set me on edge, to rile me. And by getting riled I was gifting him the victory. The way to play this whole situation was to be perfectly indifferent.

  However much I tried this, though, I kept falling back.

  It was the not knowing!

  I tried once more, during the week. ‘Look, Roy,’ I said, smiling. ‘This letter thing is no big deal, you know? None of my letters have any really significant stuff in them.’

  He didn’t reply to this, but he did look at me with a ‘that’s all you know’ sort of expression. This was, I decided, just winding me up.

  ‘I tell you what I think,’ I said. ‘You can, you know, nod, or not-nod, depending on whether I’m right. I think the letter you bought was from my girlfriend. Yeah?’

  ‘No comment,’ said Roy primly. ‘One way or the other.’

  ‘If so, it was probably full of inane chatter, yeah? Fine – keep it! With my blessing!’

  ‘In point of fact,’ he corrected me, holding up his right forefinger, ‘I do not need your blessing. The transaction was finalised with the fiduciary transfer. Contract law is very clear on this point.’

  I lost my temper a little. ‘You know how sad you are, keeping a woman’s letter to another man for your own weird little sexual buzz? That’s – sad. Is what it is. I don’t think you realise how sad that is.’

  ‘Oh Charles, Charles,’ he said, shaking his head and smirking in that insufferable way he had. ‘If only you knew!’

  I swore. ‘Suit yourself,’ I said.

  Then the airstrip lights failed. I assumed this was an accident, although the fact that every one of them failed at the same
time was strange. Diamondo came through on the radio: ‘Fellows!’ he declared, through his thick accent. ‘I cannot land if there are no lights to land!’

  ‘Don’t know what’s happened to them,’ I replied. ‘Some manner of malfunction.’

  ‘Obviously that!’ came Diamondo’s voice. ‘Can you fix? Over.’

  Roy suited up and went outside; he was back in minutes. ‘I can’t do anything in the dark, with a torch, in a hurry,’ he complained. ‘Tell him no. Tell him to toss the package out and we’ll fix the lights for next time.’

  When I relayed this message, Diamondo said,‘Breakables! There are breakables in the package! I cannot toss! Over.’ Then, contradicting his last uttered word, he went on. ‘I can take out the breakables and toss the rest. Wait – wait.’

  I could hear the scrapy sound of the plane in the sky outside. Then, over the radio: ‘Is in chute.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Where are you dropping it? If there’s no lights – I mean, I don’t want to go searching over a wide area in the dark with …’ There was a terrific crash right overhead, as something smashed into our roof.

  ‘You idiot!’ I called. ‘You could have broken our roof!’

  Static. And, through the walls, the sound of the plane’s engines diminishing. Roy looked at me, and I at him. ‘I think it rolled off,’ Roy said. ‘You go out and get it.’

  ‘You’re already suited!’

  ‘I went out last time. It’s your turn now. Fair’s fair.’

  It was on the edge of my tongue to retort: Stealing my letter – is that fair? But that would have done no good; and anyway I was hoping that there would be a new letter from Lezlie in the satchel. So I pulled on overclothes and took a torch and went outside.

  It was extraordinarily cold – sinus-freezingly cold. The air was still. The sound of Diamondo’s plane, already very faint, diminished and diminished until it vanished altogether. Now the only sound was the whirr of the generator, gently churning to itself with its restless motion. I searched around in the dark outside the main building for ten minutes or so, and spent another five trying to see into the gap between the main prefab and the annexe, which was half-full of snow. But I couldn’t find it.

  When I went back to the main door it was locked. This was unprecedented. For a while I banged on the door, and yelled, and my heart began blackly to suspect that Roy was playing some kind of prank on me – or worse.

  I was just about to give up and make my way round to try the side entrance when Roy’s gurning face appeared in the door’s porthole, with the graph-paper pattern woven into the glass. He opened it. ‘What the hell were you playing at?’ I demanded crossly. ‘Why did you lock the door?’

  ‘It occurred to me that the lights might have been sabotaged,’ he said, not looking me in the eye. ‘I thought: security is valour’s better part. Obviously I was going to let you back in, once I was sure it was you.’

  ‘Have you had a nervous breakdown?’ I yelled. ‘Are you high? Who else could possibly be out there? We’re three hundred miles from the nearest human settlement. Did you think it was a ghost?’

  ‘Calm down,’ Roy advised, grinning his simpering grin and still not looking me in the eye. ‘Did you get the package?’

  I sat down with a thump. ‘Couldn’t find it,’ I said, pulling off my overboots. ‘It may still be on the roof. Seriously, though, man! Locking the door?’

  ‘We need to retrieve it,’ said Roy. ‘It has my medication in it. My supplies are running low.’

  This was the first I had heard of any medication. ‘Seriously? They posted you down here, even though you have medical problems?’

  ‘Just some insomnia problems. And some allergic reaction problems. But I need my sleeping pills and my antihistamines.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. ‘What is there to be allergic to, down here?’

  He gave me a pointed look. But then he said: ‘Come and have a drink,’ he said. ‘I’ve got some whisky.’

  Now, I knew the base was not supplied with whisky. Beer was the most they allowed us. I should, perhaps, have been suspicious of Roy’s abrupt hospitality, doubly so since I knew he hardly ever drank. But I was cold, and cross, and a whisky actually sounded like a bloody good idea. ‘How have you got any of that?’

  ‘I brought it with me. My old tutor at Cambridge gave it me. Break it out when you’ve solved the SETI problem, he said. He never doubted me, you see. And solved it, I have.’

  And then a second thought occurred to me. It came to me like a flash. I could get Roy drunk. Surely then he would be more amenable to telling me what was in the letter he’d snaffled from me. I couldn’t think that I’d ever seen him drunk; and my judgement was that he would hold his liquor badly. He’d be a splurger. OK, I thought, butter him up, some, and get some booze in him.

  ‘I’ll have a dram,’ I told him. Then: ‘Kind of you to offer. Thanks. I didn’t mean to … you know. Yell at you.’

  He ignored this overture. ‘You didn’t go to Cambridge, I think?’ he asked, as we went through to the common room. ‘Reading University, isn’t it?’

  ‘Reading born and bred,’ I replied, absently. I half-leant, half-sat on one of the heaters to get warmth back into my marrow whilst Roy went off to his room to get the whisky. He was gone a while. Finally he came back with a bottle of Loch Lomond in one hand and a bottle of beer in the other. He handed me the former.

  I retrieved two tumblers from the cupboard, but Roy said: ‘I’ll not have the whisky, thank you anyway. I don’t like the taste.’

  This was about par, I thought, for the weirdo that he was – bringing a bottle of Scotch all the way to the end of the world, to not even drink it. On the other hand the seal was broken, and about an inch was missing, so perhaps he had tried a taster and so discovered his aversion. I honestly didn’t care. I poured three fingers, and settled myself in one of the chairs.

  ‘Cheers!’ I said, raising a glass.

  ‘Good health,’ he returned, propping his bum on the arm of the sofa.

  ‘So,’ I said, smacking my lips. ‘The fact that we’re drinking this means you’ve solved the Fermi Paradox?’

  ‘We’re not drinking it,’ he said, with a little snorty laugh of self-satisfaction. ‘You are.’

  ‘You’re such a pedant, Roy,’ I told him.

  ‘Take that as a compliment,’ he said, smirking and making odd little snorty-sniffy noises with his nostrils.

  ‘So? Does the fact that I’m drinking this mean you’ve solved it?’

  ‘The answer to your question is yes.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  I took another sip. ‘Congratulations!’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘And?’

  He peered blankly at me. ‘What?’

  ‘And? In the sense of: what’s your solution?’

  ‘Oh. The Fermi Paradox.’ He sounded almost bored. ‘Well, I’ll tell you if you like.’ He seemed to ponder this. ‘Yeah,’ he added. ‘Why not? It’s Kant.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ I said, laughing. ‘You complete nutter.’

  He looked hurt at this. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean – the best part of a year of our lives, millions of pounds sunk into this base, probably billions spent worldwide on SETI, and all we needed to do was open a seventeenth-century book of philosophy!’

  ‘Eighteenth-century,’ he corrected me. ‘And the kit, here, certainly has its uses.’

  ‘Glad to hear it! But – Kant? Really?’

  Roy took the smallest sip from his beer bottle, and then rubbed his chin with his thumb. ‘Hard to summarise,’ he said. ‘Start here: how do we know there’s anything out there?’

  ‘What – in space?’

  ‘No: outside our own brains. Sense data, yes? Eyes, ears, nerve-endings. We see things, and think we’re seeing things out there. We hear things, likewise. And so on. But maybe all that is a lie. Maybe we’re hallucinating. Dreaming. How can we be sure there’s
anything really there?’

  ‘Isn’t this I think therefore I am?’

  ‘The cogito, yes,’ said Roy, with that uniquely irritating prissy inflection he used when he wanted to convey his own intellectual superiority. ‘Though Kant didn’t have much time for Descartes, actually. He says I think therefore I am is an empty statement. We never just think, after all. We always think about something.’

  ‘You’re losing me, Roy,’ I said, draining my whisky, and reaching for the bottle. Roy’s eyes flashed, and I stopped. ‘Do you mind if I have another?’

  ‘No, no,’ he urged me, bobbing forward and back in an oddly birdlike way. ‘Go right ahead.’

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘You’re saying we can’t be sure if the cosmos is a kind of hallucination. Maybe I’m a brain in a vat. So what? I’ve got to act as if the universe is real, or,’ I directed a quick look at Roy, ‘they’d lock me in the loony bin. So? Does this hallucination also include ET, or not?’

  ‘Quite right. Well, Kant says there is a real world – he calls it the Ding an sich, the thing as it really is. There is such a reality. But our only access to that real world is through our perceptions, our senses and therefore through the way our thoughts are structured. So, says Kant, some of the things we assume are part of the world out there are actually part of the structure of our consciousness.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Quite basic things. Time and space. Causality.’

  ‘Kant is saying that time, space and causality aren’t “really” out there? They’re just part of our minds?’

  Roy nodded. ‘It’s like if we always wore pink-tinted contact lenses. Like we’d always worn them, ever since birth. Everything we saw would have a pink tint. We might very well assume the world was just – you know, pink. But it wouldn’t be the world that was pink, it would be our perception of the world.’

  ‘Pink,’ I repeated, and took another slug. I was starting to feel drowsy.

  ‘We’re all like that, all the time, except that instead of pink contact lenses on our eyes, we’re wearing space-and-time contacts on our minds. Causality contacts.’