Cloudeye

Catherine Stewart

Foster found the sight of his commanding officer using the wall of the medical corridor for support to be a little disturbing, but he did not comment on the startling picture Straker was presenting to the passing rank and file. Instead he continued the conversation they had begun in the Commander's office. "What'll I say it they ask me what it's really all about?," he queried, trying to curb his own inquisitive interest in the matter.

The Commander rubbed his forehead rhythmically, and gave a tiny grunt of pain. "Tell them," he said grimacing, "that 'Cloudeye' is nothing more than a western that the studio's about to start filming...," If there was supposed to be the trace of sarcasm in his tone that Foster expected, it seemed to have been overshadowed by the tight, strained set of the Commander's voice as he covered his eyes briefly with a flexing hand.

"That won't satisfy them," observed Foster, not adding that it didn't satisfy him. He'd been eager to know what Operation: Cloudeye was for months - ever since he'd overheard Alec Freeman mention It in a private conversation with the Commander late in the previous year. A conversation abruptly cut off as the two of them had noted his presence. "It doesn't seem," he continued when he received no reply, "an altogether likely reason for a simulated shutdown. Making a film's never had priority before." He grinned, and made a cough of apology. "It'll have the whole base believing the executive's gone cuckoo..."

The Commander pressed his middle fingers against his temples, stroking with a firm, even pressure. Then he sighed in obvious, if slight, relief. "No, they won't think that," he corrected at last. "They'll simply be as curious as cubs about what we're actually up to..." He began to push his scalp in slow circles. "...and it's up to you, Colonel, to keep the leash on."

"I need to keep my own leash on," Foster mentioned, admitting his impatience finally. He gave his superior a concerned sidelong look "Are you going to allay my curiosity, Ed? Or do I have to be restrained too?"

There was a fractional pause as the Commander left the security of the wall and took a crisp step up the corridor. The next step wavered a little, and Foster fell into stride beside him at once. "All you need to know Is the access code," said Straker, then he frowned. He stopped. He pulled his hand down the length of his face, and gave a brief, shallow cough. "Shall I give it to you tomorrow before you leave... or shall make you work it out yourself? It'd be a good training exercise..."

"Please...," pleaded Foster. "I've enough problems without having to figure out some strenuous code you've devised. Moonbase is going to be having kittens as it is..."

"But the point of the whole thing Is," said Straker, his face distorted by grimacing muscles, "that if the worst ever really does come to the worst, finding a code might be the least of your problems..."

"Let's pray then," smiled Foster, "that the worst never comes to the worst..."

"Optimist," asserted the Commander

"Pessimist," flung Foster, pointing an accusing finger.

"I'm a realist," corrected the Commander, and a wave of pain seemed to come over him again, for his face was suddenly obscured by his hand, and his teeth were gritted in a tense white line.

Foster no longer bothered to veil his concern. "Maybe you ought to tell me the code now, Ed," he suggested, "and go straight home and get a good night's rest."

The Commander gave a tiny negative flick of his head. "I'm alright', he countered. "I might just drop in on Jackson and get him to prescribe a painkiller."

"He might prescribe a rum toddy and an early night," returned Foster, leaving the half-bait dangling for a swift retort. But there was no reply to his comment, and after a silent moment he went on, "Any other special instructions for Moonbase? I know Gay's already anxious about the little you've let drop on the exercise."

A slow shake of the head. "No," replied the Commander. "We'll just see how they react. You can tell them though, that from this end, they can expect absolutely no help at all. That's not, of course, to say that we are going to actively operate against them. But they'll soon figure out that we're trying to determine whether or not Moonbase can operate autonomously in the event of all SHADO Earth installations falling into the hands of the enemy."

"So that's what this is about!," exclaimed Foster. He expelled a whistling breath. "This will require lateral thinking of a pretty high order! Moonbase Is almost wholly Earth-dependent."

The Commander sighed wearily. 'That is not what this Is all about - but it's as good a reason as any to spread around for the troops to hear. "1 don't expect you to contact me, except in case of a total emergency. From tomorrow morning on, regard me as a passive enemy..."

"Passive enemy?," demanded Foster. "You've no objections if we continue to think of you as an inactive friend? One who really will answer if a true emergency arises? You can carry this drill-thing just a little too far..."

The Commander nodded carefully. "It would be better if you reserved contact to extreme emergencies only. Of course, if worst ever really does come to worst, you'll always be able to get in touch with me personally via the Cloudeye disc. I'll give It to Alec. It'll have everything you need to know on it, and a heap of things you'll probably never have the slightest need for. But, if it works as I anticipate, it will retrieve the emergency for you. Even if all other SHADO installations fan. Just plug in the right code sequence, and away it'll go..."

"What was the name of the code that'll perform this little miracle again?," asked Foster. He tucked the previous speech into a clear, easily-accessed corner of his mind. It undoubtedly was full of hints about what to do if trouble arose - if only he could make sense of it. But it was certain, with the Commander as insistent on keeping this drill as close to reality as possible, that there would be no immediate translation of its more cryptic segments.

The Commander smiled, very faintly. A shadow of pain was evident in his mouth's curve. "This little miracle is so top secret," he answered, "I'm not telling anyone anything about it until I have to. All I'm telling you is - that it is possible to determine the access code to the Cloudeye disc with a little luck and a lot of perspiration - and if all hell breaks loose round here, you activate the sequence, and the program takes over... and the cavalry, hopefully, arrive in the nick of time As Straker finished, he blinked several times rapidly in succession, as if the subdued lighting in the corridor was suddenly too harsh for his eyes.

Foster was becoming more puzzled. Exactly what was Straker anticipating when he spoke of all hell breaking loose? "Expecting something unpleasant?," he inquired.

"Not particularly," the Commander shrugged. "No more than usual."

But Foster was not convinced. Sometimes Ed seemed almost telepathic in the way he could size up the enemy's projected movements. "Hunch?," he asked, respect tingeing his voice. Straker's intuitive insights were becoming almost legendary amongst the old-timers. Strange to think that after only five years he was nearly an old-timer himself. Yet there were people who'd served in SHADO over three times as long as he had. And there were few people who'd been here as long as the Commander himself - and certainly no one who seemed to be able to comprehend the alien's tactics quite as well. But the only reply to Foster's query was an ambiguous shrug. That, and a flexing of facial muscles once more.

Foster was relieved when they reached the door to the medical centre and the Commander did not hesitate to turn in. "Jackson?," called Straker into the dim shadows, before fumbling towards a light switch. Foster was there before him, finding the lights, flicking them on. The doctor was obviously absent.

But this tact did not deter the Commander. "Wonder where he keeps them," muttered the Commander under his breath, listing his head slowly from side to side, eyes quickly scanning shelves of medical and psychiatric texts.

"Keeps what?," Foster asked, worried about the way the Commander's head seemed to have developed a definite skew.

"Aspirin, panadol, tylenol," came the preoccupied reply. "I'll even settle for an old-fashioned powder . . .anything." He ran a flustered hand along the polished rim of the doctor's desk, and rattled the locked door briefly.

"Alec usually keeps something handy," Foster offered. But the Commander did not seem to be listening. The whole of his attention seemed to be concentrated on the lock of the drawer in front of him. He squatted down in front of it. A few rapid taps on the desk, a thump on the top, insertion of an unfolded paper clip from the tray near Jackson's intercom, three hard whacks on the drawer frame; and the lock clicked open. The Commander responded to his triumph with a frown rather than a smile. "Well . . .!" commented Foster "I'll know who to come to next time I lock the keys in the car!" His eyebrows flew up, astonished yet again at the remarkable range of skills that the Commander never displayed unless the occasion required It. Still waters...! "You didn't learn that at MIT," he continued with a wry smile.

"A misspent youth," affirmed the Commander absently, expressionlessly. Foster was unsure whether he was serious or not. "One of the few useful things I learnt when I spent some of my honours year at the tracking station in Hawaii." On discovering nothing after riffling through the first drawer, he started into the second. "Eureka!," he said quietly as he found a small unmarked bottle of white tablets, and unscrewed the top. He shook three pills into his hand, and pressed them into his mouth.

Foster was the one who nearly gagged. The thought of swallowing them without water was unpleasant. But it didn't seem to trouble the Commander, who simply pocketed the bottle. "I'll write Jackson an I.O.U. later," he said, and he wheeled out the doorway, evidently feeling much better by the spring in his step. Foster hurried In his wake. "I think it would be better," the Commander ruminated, "now that I come to consider it clearly, if I briefed both you and Alec on Cloudeye. And it might be a good idea to give one of you two a copy of the Cloudeye disc tonight." He stared speculatively at Foster for a long moment, as if trying to make up his mind. Then he nodded slowly to himself. "Go and find Alec and meet me in my office in twenty minutes," he ordered.

It was the last direction he was to give as SHADO Commander for a very very long time.

When the news broke, no one on Moonbase took it seriously at first. We all thought it was some kind of slack joke. I mean, when you've got pseudo-wits going around asking revoltingly sickly stuff like, 'Why did the alien attack the garage? Because it saw the 'Spare Parts Available' sign', you get the general gist of the standard of rubbish we had to put up with from time to time. So no one was inclined to treat Gay=s question, "Did you hear that the Commander took three amnesia pills?" as anything other than the opening for another putrid one-liner. Especially when you know that the amnesia procedure involved an injection. It was Gay's face that gave away the fact that it was no joke. She was a kind of ashen grey, and her eyes were puffed as if she'd taken it badly. Badly? I have never heard a silence more profound, more devastated, as that when it slowly dawned on the lot of us that she wasn't having us on. A deathly hush descended on Central Park - no one knew quite what to say, even though a million questions roiled in each of us. But that was all Gay could tell us. No details. She had none herself. All she knew was that Colonel Foster wouldn't be coming up to start Operation: Cloudeye, and that it was indefinitely cancelled. That meant, of course, my immediate return to Earth on the next shuttle. Things, I guess, went on pretty much as normal for us, though there was a tendency to talk in muted whispers. Isolated on the Moon as we were the events on Earth didn't affect us as directly, and we heard nothing further from headquarters, even though Gay made several discreet enquiries.

I think we were all deep-down expecting the worst. I mean, I suspect that Gay knew more than she gave out from the very beginning - or she wouldn't have been so upset. So what if the Commanders lost a few week's worth of memory? Bit of a problem, sure, but nothing to go to pieces over.

Four days later, Mark Bradley arrived on the LM I was to take back to Earth. The news, for all its vagueness, was grim. "Apparently, it was an accident," Mark revealed. "Foster said he had a migraine and took some pills from Jackson's drawer. Thought they were painkillers. Turns out they were a new and pretty potent amnesia drug. Still in the experimental stage."

"How much has he forgotten?," asked Nina. Anyone with half an eye knew that she was more than professionally worried. I occasionally wondered, in those days, whether unrequited love made you more efficient, or less. Of course, she wasn't the only one madly infatuated with the Commander. He didn't exactly bring out the mothering instinct in females - well, except in the case of the great-aunties. Sometimes I was sure that they thought of him as the son they had never had. A son they were fiercely proud of.

"Anyway," Mark said, all solemn and uneasy, "It's all hush-hush, but...," he hesitated.

"A year?," ventured Gay. Everyone knew that that would cause immense problems for her. She'd been discussing plans for the proposed five new moonbases with the Commander for nearly twelve months, and most of their resolutions weren't on paper; It was all locked up in their heads.

But three pills, even at - well, if they're that potent - a month each, should wipe out only the last quarter of the year. I gave Gay a smile of encouragement. "Not a chance," I said.

Mark swallowed reluctantly. You could see the pressure on his dark face. "There's a rumour," he said at last, quiet as a grave, "that the Commander doesn't remember SHADO at all."

"TEN YEARS?," Nina blurted out in disbelief, though it must have been more than that for her. I knew she'd been around since the beginning. The rest of us were just too stunned to say anything.

Mark nodded numbly. "Fifteen more like," he corrected gloomily.

I took the module out an hour later, and got back to New York on the Sunday after the disaster. The first thing I did was ring Aunt Hobbit, but there was no answer, so I got on the transport to England and tried to find out what was going on. It wasn't hard. The sole topic of conversation seemed to be the Commander, but I soon discovered that facts were pretty thin on the ground. No one really knew anything. Every man and his dog seemed to have a theory or speculation, but none of it was concrete.

Even though strictly I was supposed to be on leave, I made a bee-line for headquarters the minute the transport set down on good old British soil. HO was in, what seemed to me, total chaos. Keith Ford later informed me that comparative order had settled by the time I arrived, so I can only imagine the horror of the previous week.

Freeman had been appointed acting-Commander - but his leadership seemed largely titular. Foster was apparently running the show (and according to Ginny Lake, loathing every minute of it) and Henderson was floating in and out like a mother hen checking on a brood of unhatched eggs.

I collared Karl Neuhaus as soon as I was able and wormed the chronicle of the catastrophe out of him. "Vell," he said In his best Teutonic accent, which was a dead give-away that he was under stress, for Karl is normally perfect when it comes to the Queen's English. "All anyone really knows Is that the Commander had a headache and broke into Doctor Jackson's desk drawer, and took what he must have thought were headache tablets. He was still feeling pretty gruesome after he took them, so he just left the studios very abruptly. He was supposed to have a meeting with Colonels Freeman and Foster, but he left before that and asked Keith Ford to tell them that he'd call in early in the morning and give them a briefing on Cloudeye. By this time, Jackson is tearing around asking who's made off with his amnesia pills and demanding some action in reprimanding the culprit. It takes Foster about two seconds to make the connection, and he goes tearing out of here like your proverbial bat out of hell. About two miles down the road, he finds the Commander's car wrapped around a lamp-post, but no sign of old Straker himself. There's panic round here like Armageddon's come, but Ford finally tracked him down to a local hospital and off he and Freeman go. By the time they got back, Henderson had made an announcement, and Colonel Freeman was made acting-Commander"

"How much memory has the Commander lost?" I asked.

Neuhaus shook his head. "No one's saying," he replied with that perpetually-grim look I was coming to notice everyone was wearing. "But they wouldn't keep him in hospital a week if it wasn't serious, would they?"

Quite frankly, I didn't know. But I could think of other reasons for keeping him there. The simplest being that he'd hurt himself when he'd dented his car on the lamp-post.

I decided to butter up Keith Ford, who obviously was the one who was going to know more about what was really going on than anyone other than Foster or Freeman, neither of whom I felt I had the confidence of. Ford took one look at me and said, "Bobby Casterville, am I glad you're back! For heaven's sake, go and find out what's happening!"

"Me?!" I was thunderstruck. "I don't know anything," I protested. "I've only just got back from Moonbase! How would I get access to information that you guys haven't been able to ferret out in a week?"

"Ask your great-aunties!," insisted Ford.

"The aunties?," I blurted out, and suddenly I twigged. I bolted out of there like a streak of lightening, took the back exit rather than the office-lift, and tore across the street and up to the flat. Aunt Print was home and arguing loudly on the telephone - Aunt Hobbit was nowhere in sight. I managed to disengage Aunt Print from the telephone with some difficulty. "No, young man," she was stating testily, "it's German - spelt G-E-O-R-G, without the final 'e', and the surname is Gamow, G-A-M-O-W ... yes, I'll call back in half an hour..."

Colonel Freeman was much, much later to tell me that the aunties had been absolute bricks right from the start - and I believed it. I wondered, in fact at that moment, how I could ever have doubted their sterling qualities. I soon managed to get the story out of Aunt Print - and what a mad tale of coincidence it was! If you read it in a novel, you would discount it as too farfetched for reality! Apparently, the evening of the accident, Aunt Hobbit and Aunt Print had taken a taxi to some exclusive French bakery to pick up a gateaux, chocolate with cherries liberally adorning the top and dripping with pecans - it was a special order, three feet by two feet, to celebrate the anniversary of finding the 'not-very-modern-UFO'. It was also apparently going to be their big surprise for everyone in SHADO, but especially for the Commander. The old dears had morning tea every Thursday with their "sweet young American Colonel" - an occasion I have reason to believe all three of them looked forward to. It had been clear to me for at least six months that the aunties were privy to more secrets than I was. I guess having an independent view, tempered with the wisdom of advanced age and lacking the gung-ho spirit of the ambitious and adventurous operatives who had only served two or three years, appealed to the Commander. I further suspected that the three of them got on so famously because they were all closet radicals at heart. The conservative front was a bit of a sham once you'd penetrated it.

Well, there's the aunties in the taxi, coming home with their precious cake, balanced precariously on their knees, when they see a SHADO car swerve off the side of the road and hit a ditch. "Lamp-post?," asked Aunt Print doubtfully, when I queried her on this bit, "No, just hit the ditch."

Well, they halted the taxi with a screech, of course, and were out of it in a flash, and as soon as they realized it was their darling Commander, they left the cake on the side of the road, bundled him into the taxi and were off to the nearest hospital. "He looked fine," said Aunt Print, "but we didn't want to take any chances with concussion or shock."

"What happened to the chocolate cake?," I asked.

"Who knows?," shrugged Aunt Print dismissively, in a tone of 'who cares?'.

The next bit made me sorry I was not a fly on the wall of the hospital. It must have been an absolute classic of a scene. They get the Commander all tucked up in bed at St. Martin's-by-the-Way, and the doctors are telling him to watch their fingers and so on and so forth, and the Commander takes it all in good part and munches on a chocolate bar and some grapes that the aunties get him, and it's a lovely pastoral, idyllic Interlude with them all ducky (Aunt Print didn't tell me that, but I can read between the lines) and he's listening to Schubert on the radio and scrawling Schrodinger's wave equations on the wrapper of the chocolate bar, and screaming in like twin tornadoes come Freeman and Foster.

"Hello, Alec," says the Commander pleasantly.

"Are you alright, Ed?," asks Freeman.

"I'm fine," replies the Commander. "The doctors say they want to observe me over-night, but I think I'll discharge myself..."

Colonel Freeman breathes a sigh of relief and sits down on the side of the bed.

"How's your headache?," asks Foster.

The Commander looks up as if a bit puzzled - like as if he doesn't recognize the speaker. "It's fine," he says at last.

"Look," says Freeman, giving him a pat on the hand, "don't discharge yourself just yet. I'll get Jackson to give you the once-over... it may as well be here as down at the studio."

Again there's this faint puzzled look from the Commander. But he shrugs with a smile and says, "Okay, Alec ... if you say so. But don't tell Henderson ... I'll never hear the end of it. He'll be on at me about working overtime again..."

Foster smiles. "I've never heard him complain about the time you put in..."

"Besides," says the Commander, "I'll be out in the morning. No need for Henderson to know at all."

"Hear, hear," agrees Freeman. "But what if the doctors want to keep you longer? Did they give any reason for wanting to keep you under observation?"

"I got a bit of a bump on the head," replies the Commander. "Can't remember what I ate for breakfast. They think I might have a bit of temporary amnesia ... the last couple of hours seem to be a bit blank."

Foster grins. "It's probably got nothing to do with hitting your head, you know. Do you remember taking Jackson's pills?"

The Commander shakes his head, and smiles politely, the way people do when they know they should know who's talking to them as if they've known them half their lives, but they can't for the life of them put a name to the face.

"I'm not surprised," grins Foster.

"Well," says Freeman, "I think you should stay in bed. You weren't feeling too well before all this started..."

Suddenly the Commander hits his head with the flat of his hand as if he's suddenly remembered something vital. "I can't stay," he says urgently, and makes to get up. Freeman pushes him back down firmly, but gently for all that. "Alec," says the Commander, "you know I've got to go. Craig will skin me alive if I don't at least put in an appearance at the buck's party. You know how much trouble he's gone to..."

"Craig?," says Freeman, really slowly, as if something terrible that he hardly wants to admit is becoming apparent to him.

"Buck's party!?!," mutters Foster under his breath, as if he can't believe his ears.

"Oh, damn!," continues the Commander. "I promised Mary we'd go and talk to the caterers tonight. I'd better give her a ring and tell her I'll be a bit late..."

"Mary?!," squeaks Freeman, looking shocked. Then suddenly, his training comes to the fore, and he says briskly, "Look, Ed, I'll give both Craig and Mary a ring and explain the circumstances..."

"Don't tell Mary I've been in an accident," interrupts the Commander at once.

"No, of course not," returns Freeman swiftly. "I'll tell her it's all Henderson's fault - and you can't get away . . ."

The Commander likes this and gives a nod of assent. Freeman turns to Foster, who's standing there with his mouth open like a stunned mullet, and gives him a jerk of the thumb to get outside and stop looking like a dill. Then he notices the aunties for the first time and says, "I've got to make a couple of phone calls." It is obvious that they are not going to be to Mary and Craig. "Don't' take your eyes off him," continues Freeman with a worried smile, and hurries out.

The Commander looks disconsolately at the bare stalk on what was once a saucer of grapes. Aunt Hobbit divines the stare at once. "Black or white?," she asks.

"Either," smiles the Commander boyishly, and off trots Aunt Hobbit to get him some more grapes. Out in the corridor she comes across Freeman and Foster having one wacko of an altercation. "How could he not remember that Craig's dead?," Foster's voice is lowered, but it carries for all that. "And who the hell is Mary?"

"Ed's wife," responds Freeman.

"Wife?!" half-screeches Foster, as if he's having trouble believing any of this. "Wife?!," he repeats, and shakes his head.

"I know it's hard to believe that Ed was ever not married to SHADO, but to a real live flesh and blood woman," says Freeman drily, "but he was pretty human once."

Foster looks even more stunned, but finally he gets the right question. "Is the buck's party he was referring to his own?" He pauses and swallows uneasily. "How long ago is it since he was married?"

"He's been divorced fourteen years," reveals Freeman.

Foster swears fluently for several seconds. "Stick around," orders Freeman, "and if he tries to leave, stop him."

"How?," asks Foster.

"Any way you can," responds Freeman. "I don't think, now that I recall the way he looked at you, he remembers who you are. So, you can hit him if you want. With immunity."

"I don't think this is anything to joke about," says Foster darkly. He is patently upset.

"If I don't joke about it," returns Freeman, with a bitter, wan smile, "I think I'll cry." He turns towards the nurses' station. "Stay here," he directs. "I'm going to call for Jackson and Henderson." And off he goes.

So does Aunt Hobbit. She gets the grapes, and comes back to find the Commander and Aunt Print deep in discussion about radio astronomy. No one, it seems, has told him the bad news yet, and he is happily chatting with Aunt Print about the Third Magellanic Cloud and its recent discovery.

"Hold on a minute," I said, interrupting the flow of Aunt Print's story, "who brought up the Third Magellanic Cloud - you or him?"

Aunt Print thought for a minute. "Don't remember," she said at last. I glared at her suspiciously, then she continued with the narrative.

Well, another ten minutes go by, and suddenly Jackson's there, and there's a lot of explanation by Foster to the nurses that this is a military matter and could they please stay out of the way, thank you very much. Jackson examines the Commander and asks him a lot of questions, and the Commander smiles benignly the whole time while Jackson is shining lights in his eyes and peering down his ears and making him say 'Ahh'! He asks Freeman how Mary took the news.

"Didn't seem to react at all," says Freeman evasively.

"Breathe in," says Jackson.

The Commander frowns, and obeys. "Do me a favour, Alec?," he asks. "Take her a bunch of roses on your way?"

"Breathe out," says Jackson, with a stethoscope to the Commander's chest.

"Red roses," he says.

"In," says Jackson, then starts tapping the Commander's ribcage. "Does the name Foster mean anything to you?"

The Commander looks thoughtful. "Should it?" he asks. Colonel Foster doesn't move an inch.

Jackson says, "Roll over and breathe deeply in and out for me again." The Commander complies and Jackson applies the stethoscope again, asking "How about the name Ellis?"

"I went to school with a John Ellis," offers the Commander.

"Tell me if you recognize any of these names: Lake, Grey, Carlin, Waterman, Bradley, Ford, Barry, Casterville, Ealand, Harrington, Roper..."

"What is this?!" demands the Commander suddenly and flips over on his back. "Am I supposed recognize these people?" he insists, glaring at Jackson. "I hit my head on the dashboard of the car. My memory of today is a little hazy, but if you're trying to insinuate that I've lost a large chunk of my past you're off-beam, doctor!" He is not quite shouting by the end.

"Do you know me?" counters Doctor Jackson, ignoring the outburst. "What's my Christian name?"

The Commander looks blankly at him. Jackson gestures over his shoulder at Foster. "What's the name, rank and serial number of the man standing there?" The Commander just looks at Foster as if he's viewing a new species of insect. "What year is this?," asks Jackson finally.

The Commander looks wary. "What would you say," he says, "if I said '1969'?"

Henderson arrives at precisely this juncture, and stands in the doorway, staring at the Commander with his mouth half-open.

"General!" exclaims the Commander.

"Thank God you're here, Sir! This place is crawling with loonies. Or is this some kind of exotic test of my sanity?"

Henderson looks nonplussed. Straker probably hasn't called him 'Sir' since the early '70s. "I get this not-quite frantic phone call from Freeman here that I'd better come over as soon as possible"

Henderson as if he's wanting clarification and he's dreading what the clarification's going to be, "and I arrive to find you raving about it being 1969..."

"Next you'll tell me it isn't, sir," snaps the Commander, as if he out-grew childish tests like this the same time he out-grew his diapers.

Foster looks in consternation at Freeman, who looks at Jackson, while Henderson is staring balefully at the Commander and getting the full brunt of the arctic blue orbs in return.

Suddenly Henderson notices the great-aunties discreetly standing in the background. "Who are these two?" he asks, as if the pair of colonels have been mighty lax.

"They've got full clearance," says Freeman.

"Outside," insists Henderson with a curt gesture to Freeman, Foster and Jackson, and they shift into the corridor. Not that it makes the slightest difference. Their conversation is still clearly audible. "What's the meaning of this?," the General demands.

"It looks like what it is," says Jackson.

"Amnesia?" asks the General tautly. There is a pause. "So give him a shot of that stuff you injected him with during the Timelash incident."

"Get someone else to do it," responds Jackson. His tone is unusually belligerent.

"Why?" demands the General. "I got the impression from Freeman that he's accidentally overdosed on some experimental drug..."

"Exactly," replies Jackson. "Who knows what the combined effects will be? I'm not going to take the responsibility - at least not at the moment. If I've got a few days to run some tests first." His voice trails off, and there is a long pause.

Henderson breathes heavily, giving a ponderous sigh. "Right," he agrees eventually. "We'll keep him under wraps until then."

"It's not that simple," interposes Foster. "Everyone in the control room knows what happened. And what they don't know, they're smart enough to figure pretty close to the truth. And the effects of speculation on morale could be extreme - I think an announcement should be made immediately."

"No," says Freeman and Jackson simultaneously.

"Speculation," continues Freeman with guarded softness, "however wild, would be unlikely to come at the truth. Whatever they guess, they're not going to think of sixteen years' worth of amnesia. So let 'em guess."

"Agreed," says Jackson clearly. "But I concur with Foster that we have to let them realize that the situation is serious. I think an interim acting-Commander should be appointed."

"What's the point if you're going to have him right in a few days?" queries Henderson sharply.

"Precisely because it may not be a few days," responds Jackson. "We've never had any call to reverse the amnesia process before. A fatal mistake in anyone else's case would be unpleasant for us all - but in this case, it would be disastrous." The asperity combined with sarcasm in his tore convinces Henderson.

"Freeman?" the General asks at once.

Freeman sounds none too happy about the prospect as he answers, "Do I have to?" Then he sighs and says, "Well, I guess I might be able to cope with the strain for a couple of days."

"Good," says the General in a clipped decisive tone. "I'll go back to the studio and tell them the good news. Are you coming?"

"Take Foster," says Freeman. "I'm going to stay here for a little while longer and try and rouse tiger's memory..." And as he came back in, and Jackson and Henderson poked their heads round the corner, they were met by the round, startled eyes of the Commander who was sitting mighty still in bed, glued to every word and nuance of their dialogue.

And that, finished Aunt Print, was about the size of Wednesday night. I gathered that since that time, the Commander had been resting up, much like a bear chafing to be out of hibernation, but strictly obeying Henderson's orders to stay in bed, and calling him 'Sir' with unfailing respect. Freeman had been bringing him up to date on his personal life, talking about how he had left the military and embarked on a career in films. Jackson, for reasons that he was only to reveal after a week was over, made the subject of SHADO taboo, coming the real heavy to both Foster and Freeman and making even mention of the military utterly verboten.

So the Commander's main entertainment, apart from the soaps, was reading newspapers and magazines and chatting with the great-aunties, who took it upon themselves to visit him daily. He soon tired of his situation, and asked the aunties to hunt up some physics papers for him, saying he wanted to bone up on the latest developments.

And that was all Aunt Print could tell me. "Thanks, Aunt Violet," I said, giving her a peck on the cheek, and was off to report my discoveries to Ford and Neuhaus. I felt a lot lighter as I tripped across the road. Sure, the news was bad - but only temporarily bad. Jackson would have the anti-amnesia drug into the Commander in a few days, and, well - it was probably all to the good. Everyone knew that Bwana Straker worked far too hard, never letting up on himself. Half the reason why so many people were willing to storm the gates of hell for him was that they knew he would never ask someone to do something he wasn't willing to do himself. Therefore, this enforced rest was undoubtedly one of the best things that could have happened to him. And the delightful part of him not being able to remember SHADO was that he wouldn't worry about what was going on while he was holidaying in hospital!

I told Karl all Aunt Print's revelations and he concurred with my conclusions that it would all turn out well, after all. We were so relieved and high on happiness that between us, we started a rumour that it was all Jackson's fault - the doctor had deliberately set the Commander up to take the amnesia pills just because he was so frustrated at never being able to get the chief to slow down and take things easily. We never expected the rumour to really take off, but apparently, so I discovered a week later when it got back to me in an exaggerated form, It carried a lot of weight since half of SHADO had seen my elegant dash across the road to question dear old Aunt Print.

It was well past midnight when I finally returned to the flat to discover both the aunties still up and burning the candle at both ends. I tip-toed in quietly, hoping not to awaken them, when I heard their voices in the kitchen. "Have you located the Feynmann yet?" Aunt Hobbit was asking. A hiss of steam was coming from the pot on the gas burner - the eternal cup of tea was on the boil.

"I tried London and Oxford," replied Aunt Print. "I'll ring Cambridge in the morning." The sound of a yawn drifted out to me. "I finally managed to locate the Gamow, but unfortunately it's not in English."

There was a low chuckle from Aunt Hobbit. "Well, Vi dear, you'll just have to sit by his bedside and translate it for him. . ."

"Amy!" The protest sounded weary, but there was a faint undertone of pleasure to be detected in it. "It's one thing to know the language - but I've not the slightest acquaintance with the scientific terms! I don't know a quark In German from a tachyon. And as for the formulae, I wouldn't have a hope in Hades of translating those!"

Gamow! Suddenly I recognized the name. And Feynmann, too. Of course! They were both physicists! Feynmann, if I remembered correctly, was one of the leading lights of quantum theory in the '50s and Gamow was into gravity. Or was it the other way round? I was more familiar with the gurus of astrophysics than the other branches.

"Isn't mathematics a universal language?," asked Aunt Hobbit. "He'll probably be able to read the formulas himself."

I trooped into the kitchen. "Don't suppose there's a cup of tea going?," I asked hopefully.

"Help yourself, dear," said Aunt Hobbit, pulling back a chair for me, and gesturing to the warm pot.

"Robert dear!," exclaimed Aunt Print. "How are things?" I was perfectly aware that it was not my health she was enquiring after - she meant other 'things'.

"Not too bad," I admitted, taking a cup from the cupboard. "I think everyone's over the first shock. But we'll be glad when the Commander's back." I settled the strainer over the lip of my cup and poured the brew slowly, looking up just in time to see Aunt Hobbit recovering from a sudden gulp. Her face became a pleasant withdrawn mask, and I didn't like what I suspected was lurking there, behind that sweet and perhaps fraudulent smile. "He's coming back, isn't he?," I asked, surprised that my voice seemed incapable of rising above a whisper. "He is coming back?" I stared at her. "Soon?"

Aunt Hobbit glanced uneasily at Aunt Print. "I don't think we should tell you," she said in her soft soothing calm-Robert-Clown voice. "You'll find out soon enough through official channels..."

"If I'm going to find out soon enough," I retorted shakily, "you may as well tell me now..."

Aunt Hobbit looked doubtful. Aunt Print looked implacable. "Please," I pleaded to Aunt Hobbit.

"Oh, I don't know," demurred Aunt Hobbit. "You would have to promise not to disclose to anyone..."

I raised my right hand instantly. "Scout's honour - so held me God," I swore.

"That strange doctor, Jackson," began Aunt Hobbit, "thinks Ed is a very sick man..."

'Ed?!!', I thought to myself. Ed!?!! Great nodding nebulas! Things had changed in the past week.

"He's a good man, Jackson," continued Aunt Hobbit, "don't get me wrong, Robert. I respect his opinion in many things, but I don't think Ed is quite as ill as the doctor would have us believe."

"Of course Ed was under stress," Aunt Print suddenly interposed, "but to suggest that Ed did not take the amnesia pills accidentally - it's just absurd to think it was deliberate!"

"Deliberate?" I couldn't believe my ears. I equally couldn't believe that Jackson had said it. The aunties had to be mistaken.

"Not deliberately deliberate," corrected Aunt Print as if this modification should make sense to me. I didn't see what she was getting at. "Not consciously deliberate," she stressed.

"Unconsciously deliberate," Aunt Hobbit spelled out. She twisted a fine linen handkerchief in her gnarled hands. "Jackson says that Ed knew about the amnesia pills - he, after all, had authorized their manufacture. And the mind is a devious thing - when it can't cope with a situation, it devises elaborate ways of escape."

Aunt Print shook her head. "The human mind is capable of self-deception, and Ed's position was a difficult challenge, but even so, it's just not credible that he would go to such lengths..."

"Yes," agreed Aunt Hobbit. "Even if he wasn't coping, I can't see him resorting to such a tortuous method of escape."

I was silent, unable to contribute or contradict a word - in spite of the fact, I didn't really agree with them. I saw now what Jackson meant about the accident being deliberate. It was all too plausible. After all, if the Commander, for any reason at all, desperately wanted out of SHADO, what could he do? Resign? No one would let him. Retire? Not a chance - it wouldn't even be considered - for the simple reason that even if the powers-that-be could be persuaded, the aliens would be after him In a flash, and the sort of protection he'd need for the rest of his life didn't bear thinking about. Transfer? To what? Who would replace him? His skills and talents were irreplaceable. 'What Sir? No, Sir, you can't retire, resign or transfer, Sir. Unless you die, Sir. Then we'll accept your application, Sir. Here, Sir, have a tranquillizer, Sir. Now, back to work Sir, immediately, if not sooner, Sir...'

"Besides which," Aunt Print went on, "if Jackson's right, and Ed did want a means of escape, the amnesia pills are certainly a sudden death solution - and the consequences unforeseeable. And furthermore, Jackson is not even consistent in his own opinion - he says that the amnesia drug, by itself, is incapable as far as testing has gone so far, of producing this result. He says that the drug would have some effect, but certainly not sixteen years, and therefore, the reality must be that the knock on the head combined with the drug was the mind's opportunity to produce a situation where Ed could forget - and the real problem is neither the bump nor the drug, but the fact that Ed really doesn't want to remember."

"And I think both theories are wild," muttered Aunt Hobbit, taking another sip of her tea with a righteous sniff.

I found there was a constriction in my throat where some sort of file must have been rasping away. "There are drugs," I said hardly above a whisper, "that can open the memory."

"Jackson's standing out against using them," revealed Aunt Hobbit. "As I said before, he's a good man. Not one to put up with Henderson's nonsense."

Henderson's nonsense? I wondered. My, how the aunties were intimate with the comings and goings of the big-wigs!

"Jackson maintains," Aunt Print went on, "that since no one really knows how the amnesia drug works - whether is simply inhibits memory or whether it erases it - that it's perilous to try and open Ed's mind, when he's already got not only the amnesia drug itself but the residues of a number of other drugs, some of them alien, in his system. After all, no one knows what the alien mindbender was - whether it was chemical or not. Not to mention the stimulants he put into his body during the Timelash incident."

I stared, suddenly realizing something fundamental. I used to have two sweet and faintly great-aunties. Used to. I now had two very sharp and alert defacto operatives for relations. Just when the transition had occurred was anyone's guess. I supposed I ought to get them to do the weekly check on the flat for audio or visual bugs from now on.

"However," smiled Aunt Hobbit encouragingly, "Jackson's big hope is that it's mostly the bump on the head that has caused the problem, and that Ed's memory will come back eventually and naturally."

"Eventually?" I pounced. I didn't like the sound of its vagueness.

"Hours," shrugged Aunt Print. "Or weeks. Or years."

That's what I was afraid of. I felt sick. "How long does Jackson think?" I asked in trepidation.

A secret glance passed between the great aunties. "Don't spare me the gore," I said.

"There's a difference," said Aunt Hobbit quietly, "between what Jackson says in private to Freeman and what he says to Henderson and Foster." I didn't say anything. I just waited for one of the aunties to go on. "He says to Henderson," continued Aunt Hobbit, "that a quiet peaceful relaxing environment will probably bring about a positive change in a few weeks."

"I think," interposed Aunt Print reflectively, "that he says that just to stop Henderson from insisting on the use of one of the mind expanders, Amy. The General seems to me the type, who if he knew what the doctor really thought, wouldn't hesitate to get someone else to administer the drugs."

"Even if Ed never remembers," mulled Aunt Hobbit, "he's still got a fine mind - it would be a pity to take a chance on destroying it."

I nodded. Too bloody right. The Commander could lose ninety-nine percent of his memory and still run rings around the rest of us, even if you allowed us a fifty point handicap in the IQ scores. His present devotion to Gamow and Feynmann was ample proof of that. I licked my dry, dry lips and asked the fatal question finally, "What's Jackson's private opinion on when the Commander's memory will return?"

I was already expecting the aunties' dire answer. "Never," they said together, bluntly.

My tea was cold and bitter when I got to it.

I was posted to the new skydiver dock in Alaska the following day to de-bug the security interlock system. It turned out to be a real beggar of a job. If I could have got hold of the twit who wrote the original programme, I would have cheerfully watched him or her commit hari kari. Finally I got sick of the regular hiccups that sent the system into convulsions promptly at eleven a.m. "Elevenses!" Lew Waterman would bellow gleefully at me each time it happened. I took to calling him 'Winnie the Pooh', and sent him a jar of honey and a map of the east pole when I got back to HQ and instead of trying to do a patch, I re-wrote whole thing and then had to stay on to do the documentation.

Four weeks it took me, four weeks after I threw my hands up in horror and decided to start from scratch. There were some really shaggy sub-routines in the system whose purpose I couldn't figure hide nor hair of except that they looked like inter-system connectors. But there was no reason on sweet blue Earth to have them sitting there; one of the security highlights on the Skydiver systems were their rigorous independence. Which meant that, if ever the aliens controlled the flight or navigation modes of, say, Sky One, it wouldn't necessarily follow that they could control all the other Sky jets as well.

So, not perceiving that the sub-routines had any use or relevance, I left them out of my new program. Much to my regret. Before five months were out, I was to discover exactly what the inter-system connectors were for, who had put them in, and why. And I had to go back to Alaska, start over and re-insert the sub-routines. But, by that time, I had not the slightest reason to complain.

When I got back to London at the end of the following month, Colonel Foster was doing a brilliant imitation of a chook racing round with its head chopped off. Gloom and doom reigned supreme. Even Ginny Lake looked harassed, and seemed to have lost an inordinate amount of weight. Things had changed. Oh, how things had changed!

The Commander was back - but not as Commander. He was in his top office making a pretty amazing fist of being a film executive. There were several stories doing the rounds about his return, but my all time favourite is the one where Foster and Freeman bring him back, introduce him to Miss Ealand and install him in his office. He apparently looks dubiously at the rather conspicuous DO NOT ENTER sign, and spends the next five minutes, eyes darting uneasily around the room. He reaches for a cigar finally, and Freeman nearly lops off his hand retrieving the cigar box that had been inadvertently left on the desk. "Empty," says Freeman and hastily removes it into Miss Ealand's protective custody. The Commander still looks faintly uneasy. Finally he says to Freeman, very quietly in an aside, "Alec - do I have a . . . " Big hesitant pause ". . . a... err, casting couch?"

"No," says Freeman unequivocally.

The Commander breathes a lot easier but the thought obviously occurs to him that, although he's been updated on the state of his marriage, no other personal relationships have been mentioned. "Do I have a girlfriend?" he stage-whispers.

Freeman shakes his head. So does Foster.

This revelation seems to be a momentary relief, until a perplexed frown takes up residence Commander's brow, and he takes up looking at his shoes in absorption and giving Foster veiled and anxious glances.

Freeman twigs to the trouble. "Nor any of the other variety," he says, smirking. "You're celibate."

"Really?" asks the Commander blankly.

"Absolutely," grins Freeman. "Dedicated to your job, you are. An example to all of us. Workaholic."

"Oh." The Commander's nose wrinkles faintly, before he gives a huge sigh of relief and a sunburst smile. "Well," he says almost jauntily, "a clean slate to write on any way I wish." And he beams some more.

He was the only one smiling, in fact, in the whole complex. There was nothing anyone else could find to be cheerful about. We had all been instructed to use the back exit to SHADO as a main entrance and not to use the lift In the Commander's top office - even when he wasn't there. Which he was - most of time. With Freeman and/or Jackson and/or one or both of the aunties. I collared Aunt Hobbit the first chance I got and gave her the not-quite-third degree.

"Ed's very happy," she informed me. "He's a bit anxious about making a faux pas and therefore he likes to have Alec around, but by and large, he's growing more and more confident everyday. He says so himself."

Alec? I thought to myself. Well, what else should I have expected by this time?

"Is this the only reason Colonel Freeman spends just about every waking minute with him?" I asked. "Surely not just to stop him putting his foot In it..."

"Of course not!" replied Aunt Hobbit. "Alec thinks that talking to Ed constantly about the past in a light-hearted, general, non-threatening way - not specifically mentioning SHADO, of course - might just stir something in Ed's memory."

"Oh," I said. "And why does he let you and Aunt Violet hang around so much?"

Aunt Hobbit paused. "He says he likes our scintillating personalities."

I stared at her, taken aback. Was she serious or sarcastic? I couldn't imagine scorn from her. But if she was serious, had the Commander been? I avoided the possible snare. "What's Jackson think?" I asked cautiously.

"Jackson thinks," smiled Aunt Hobbit. "that Ed should relax a lot more, and stop spending every spare moment reading Gamow and Einstein as if his life depended on it. Violet's translating the Gamow from German for him, you know." I didn't know. But perhaps that explained things. Perhaps Aunt Print's fluency In German was the reason he was putting up with the octogenarian duo.

The Commander's passion for physics had not gone un-remarked by either the top brass or the average SHADO operative. There was a stupid idea floating around for a couple of days that the Commander could be integrated into SHADO with a research job - nothing stressful, of course - something useful that would ease him into a situation where memory recall would be enhanced.

But, as Jackson quietly pointed out, the problem might well go on for years - and then the psychological dilemmas that would confront the old-timers (the 'fossils' we gung-ho newcomers called them) would be horrendous. There'd be people like Joan Harrington, Nina Barry and Lew Waterman, to mention only three, who, however professional they might be, would really find it next to near impossible to give orders to Lieutenant Straker. It just wasn't on. In too many people's minds hung the motto: Once the Commander of SHADO, always the Commander of SHADO.

And quite frankly, I agreed with Jackson's succinct analysis whole-heartedly. I couldn't be classified as a fossil by any stretch of the imagination, but I'd have been hesitating before telling old Vizier Straker to even lift a pencil. And with his background in astrophysics and computers overlapping with mine, take one guess who'd be in charge of orchestrating the production of this 'non-stressful, useful, peaceful, relaxing, environment to enhance memory recall'. No thanks, Jackson old enemy mine. No deal. No way.

Well, this idea was, thankfully, hoisted in short order and tossed into the next parsec, and Colonel Freeman and Doctor Jackson combined to come up with an ace of an idea. It was called "Cloudeye." The film, that is.

The basic concept behind this whole shebang, so we were told, was the following: one, a whole lot of familiar faces would be paraded in front of the Commander and hopefully he'd start to recognize some of them (step one to recovery, or so the theory went!); two, we'd say a lot of familiar things in the film (write or ring Doctor Jackson if you can remember the Commander quoting or saying something significant to you, or you saying to him!) which would make the Commander succumb to a sense of deja vu; three, a relaxing environment would be good for both him and us; and four, we'd see how much we could say about SHADO without mentioning it at all, and see if that would stir the Commander's mnemonic juices.

Freeman apparently had a devil of a job selling the Commander the film - but eventually managed it on the basis that the backers had hundreds of millions invested in the project already and, not only would it be a waste if it didn't go ahead, but the solid reputation of the organisation as always coming through no matter what the odds, would be in jeopardy. He was, according to Ford, who was there during the discussions, profoundly eloquent and subtle.

Jackson wrote the script. The basic plot line was that the Great White Inscrutable Indian Chief Cloudeye, (played by none other than the Commander himself, in his on-screen acting debut) has organised his tribe into three camps: the Big Wigwam-ery (whence all smoke signals originated), the Skyleaper warriors (who lived in an old civil war cavalry Balloon that was moored on a raft floating on a grubby duck pond, and who were fired, with peerless accuracy of course, from a cannon to assault the enemy!) and lastly, the wacky Treetribe (who inhabited the top of a laminex kitchen table perched on top of an old oak tree and who shot flaming arrows from time to time while screaming "Red alert! Red alert! Interceptors immediate launch!" Colonel Foster was the producer/director of this folly.

We all played 'ourselves' - well, a sort of cardboard cut-out versions of ourselves.

Jackson's interpretation of some personalities had a few people worried for a while. Foster, in fact, was never sure whether it was true that Jackson's only reason for not having him act in the film was that producing and directing was a heavy enough load. Whenever it was a 'Foster scene' - that is, an interaction between Foster and the Commander, Chief Cloudeye would be confronted by a Sooty puppet.

"Why Sooty?" exclaimed Foster.

It took us three glorious weeks to film, and it was mainly about the grimness of war.

"Violent, isn't it?" asked the Commander dubiously in one of the breaks. He had his head stuck, when he was not in front of the cameras, firmly in Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. He was making notes.

Still, if you asked anyone who worked for SHADO in the mid-eighties what was the high point of those times, the answer would unquestionably be "Cloudeye!" It was enormous fun at the time, and in retrospect, when we see what Jackson was really up to, it looms as even more delicious. This, despite the fact that the reality of the scenes we were parodying was bleak. There were some difficult things to film - the scene that referred to the loss of Sky Three over the Marianna Trench was funereally quiet. John Grey and Peter Carlin both had been very popular, and the tragic disappearance of them both on a routine flight had never been adequately explained.

But, overall, Cloudeye was a riot. And, being about fighting, there were lots of fights: pillow fights; cream pie fights; water fights; shaving foam fights; fire extinguisher fights; mud flinging fights; watermelon seed fights (never face the Commander with a poised watermelon seed, let me tell you! Is he ever deadly accurate!) and even, believe it or not, a snowball-in-the-middle-of-August fight! Where on Earth they got the snow from, no one who knows is telling. There was a rumour that Colonel Freeman had authorised trip to the Himalayas, but I think that's a bit farfetched.

The great-aunties, who were acting as the Commander's own personal tea-ladies throughout this madness said it came from Snowdon, and it's quite possible SHADO operatives would do amazing things for the sake of Cloudeye If you had a few days leave in those weeks, it meant that you were immediately supposed to report to the Cloudeye set to take part in one of the aforementioned bizarre raids that the Chief would direct at the instigation of the Great Sky Spirit, SID, who dwelt not far from the Happy Hunting Grounds and whom it was alleged that the Chief had frequently visited.

Jackson's script was adhered to with occasional minor variations. There was, on the part of us noble warriors, a tendency to ad-lib as the muse struck.

During the filming of the Treetribe on their laminex table, Squaw Ellis, in defiance of the script, repeatedly kept mentioning the fact that five other tables had been requisitioned by Chief Cloudeye to be put in the tree. She was not deterred in this, even during an unseasonable thunderstorm which dampened the enthusiasm of the rest of the Treetribe, as well as their famed flaming arrows. Chief Cloud eye, responsive to Squaw Ellis' nagging, spontaneously and magnanimously, (and without script approval!) presented her with five mis-matched barstools as a compromise gesture. ("Are all our films like this?" the Commander asked dubiously of Colonel Freeman when they didn't edit out his variation of the script. "There's never been a film like this before," answers the Colonel, and the Commander goes back to E = mc² and all that. Sometimes it seemed that he wasn't sure whether Squaw Lake was interpreting the script accurately when she continually batted her delectable baby blues at him, and said, "Yes, Sir, didn't know that, Sir. Time is relative, Sir.")

The film, of course, was never intended for public consumption. It was, as far as most of us were concerned, nothing but an enjoyable exercise in potential memory restoration. Unfortunately, it didn't work. Why it didn't work was only to become apparent much later. The performers were all terribly earnest - so very earnest, of course, because we weren't playing it for laughs, we were hoping that the star of the production would remember something; desperately hoping something would unlock his memory. So there we all were on celluloid, being fearsomely serious and unflappable even while delivering the most over the-top lines. Even the Sooty puppet stand-in for Foster never cracked a smile. It thumped Chief Cloudeye fair in the kneecaps, threatened him with a water pistol and said In a deep voice, "It's a question of physique. I'm younger, fitter, stronger..." To which Chief Cloudeye replied: "You're forgetting one thing Sooty - willpower." (This line caused a tremendous dispute between the Commander and Jackson Commander protested that he'd been fed a really good line for a comic reply - he wanted to say, "Your forgetting one thing - you're nothing without the hand that holds you up!" - but Jackson and Foster combined to refuse to let him tamper with the line.)

After the film was finished and edited into a comic farce, and all SHADO had seen it, and laughed and cried, it disappeared for several years into the Harlington-Straker vaults. Eventually, it was discovered by someone, somewhere, who, knowing nothing of its history, dusted it off, thinking it good enough for cinema release. Surprisingly, given the obscurity of the dialogue and situation, it became one of those sleeper - a cult film - and, of course, in the mid-nineties there was the frantic scramble to retrieve all the copies to avoid the mass identification of ex-SHADO personnel. That was naturally after SHADO had become defunct, Moonbase was being transformed into Moonbase Alpha, the last of the Project Bluebook files were released and HQ had virtually become an overnight tourist attraction. Things were so bad at the time that the World President, not entirely facetiously, publicly contemplated the possibility of criminal proceedings being instituted for severe harassment of former SHADO personnel. But this was still more than a decade on, and none of us even dreamed at this stage that the aliens would suddenly and mysteriously vanish in the early 1990s. "Lulling us into a sense of false security," suggested Colonel Messer at the time that final orders came through for SHADO's disbandment. Time was to prove his words prophetic.

I came across an odd piece of information during Cloudeye. When I first spotted it, my immediate reaction was to be suspicious - until I realized that suspicion was absurd. Nonetheless, it was a strange coincidence that the Commander had applied for six months' leave to begin on the day his car had swung into the lamp-post (or the ditch, depending on your preferred version). I discovered this when I was updating the computer records for Philip Dowlands while he was sick, and getting the leave applications processed and recorded and approved or otherwise. The Commander's application was notated by Doctor Jackson that it was to be approved if at all possible, citing psychological factor, "sub-critical tension". I supposed that was an unobvious way of saying that if the Commander didn't get his sabbatical soon, he'd crack up. However the application had been knocked back by General Henderson. No one of this, so far, was suspicious - it all fitted too well with the facts. What was intriguing was the indecipherable erasure on the original forms and the one word reason given in the Commander's handwriting: Cloudeye.

Now, of course, Cloudeye: The Operation, as distinct from Cloudeye: The Motion Picture, had been shelved. But by this time we all knew what It was supposed to have entailed - the simulated enemy occupation of all Earth installations. We were yet to discover how grossly disinformed and almost misinformed we were. Still, I was curious why Cloudeye was supposed to take six months in the Commander's estimation. A curiosity that had to be dismissed without answers.

The aliens were remarkably quiet around this time, fortunately for us. "Building up for another mass attack," suggested Ginny Lake dispiritedly.

Colonel Freeman had, after an independent psychiatric report on the Commander's state of mind, been offered the permanent command chair of SHADO. He didn't think about the offer for more than two seconds. "There's only one Commander of SHADO," he said as he turned it down, "and there will only ever be one."

It was to our great surprise, shock, consternation, and ultimately, dismay, that we heard the UN had appointed General Aaron MacPherson to the position. I suppose it shouldn't have been as unexpected as it was - the situation of having an acting-Commander, though less than ideal was not intolerable.

Colonel Freeman, of all SHADO, was the most horrified. I've often wondered since if anybody else noticed that the first time in all this business that Freeman really lost his cool when the new Commander was announced. Foster was fast becoming a by-word for neuroticism, Ginny Lake was as frazzled as a short-order cook at lunch time, but Freeman had hardly been ruffled until MacPherson's appointment. He had not anticipated that the UN would be so decisive. He had also not anticipated that Henderson would refuse the position.

The following verbatim conversation is courtesy of Keith Ford who was trying to find a crack in the Earth to slide into at the time: both participants being particularly belligerent to one another.

Freeman:	Why in hells name didn't you stop this MacPherson being foisted on us?
Henderson:	This is a special NATO secondment, Colonel, and I expect you to give the General the same loyalty you've given Straker.
Freeman:	Why the hell didn't you take command yourself? It's something you've always wanted. An empire of your very own. A kingdom to rule. That's why you always accused Ed of empire-building - because you can't imagine anyone not doing it, when if you were in his position, you'd be doing it yourself.
Henderson:	I'd be careful about insubordination, Colonel.
Freeman:	What are you going to do? Bust me out of SHADO? I'd be delighted! Come on, Henderson, don't change the subject - you've wanted command of SHADO since its inception. Why pass up your big chance?
Henderson:	SHADO's a young man's game.
Freeman:	MacPherson can be no more than five years younger than you, General. Don't give me 'young man's game'!
Henderson:	SHADO needs fresh blood, a new perspective.
Freeman:	Hogwash, bloody hogwash. SHADO needs someone experienced with alien military strategy. Or at least with thinking outside the rules. Thinking with a perspective outside all the books, all the theory. MacPherson will take the decade that Ed took to get it - if, if he ever can. At least someone from inside SHADO has a head start.
Henderson:	So why didn't vou take it on?
Freeman:	You know I can't handle the pressure. Why didn't vou take it on? Not because you can't handle the pressure?
Henderson:	No, not because of that. Because, ultimately, the biggest problem facing any new Commander is the simple fact that he's not going to be Ed Straker. Because in too many people's minds. Straker is SHADO.
Freeman:	In your mind?
Henderson:	Straker was good, was good. It was a mistake to appoint him Commander in the first place, but I'm the first to admit, it was one of the best mistakes the UN ever made. We can thank Duval for getting hot under the collar: Straker was the right man for the situation, though no one could have guessed that at the time. And he's too hard an act to follow - anyone, anyone who steps into his shoes will automatically be unfavourably compared with him. Straker built SHADO from the first brick, he was familiar with every piece of wiring, every nut and bolt that went into the organisation, and no one, will have that familiarity again. No one will have the intimate, unconscious sense of when things "feel" right or "feel" wrong. So, since anyone in the organisation is going to be overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task, SHADO is better of with a complete outsider.
Freeman:	The end of an era.
Henderson:	The advent of a better.
Freeman:	You'd better damn well hope so.

General MacPherson, replete with military attache, arrived within forty-eight hours, direct from Hamburg. It felt awkward having Henderson bring him around and introduce him as 'Commander MacPherson'. No one, however, called him that. Colonel Freeman set the trend right from the start. He glared at Henderson, and then said loudly, pugnaciously and unapologetically, "There's only one Commander, and there only ever will be one." He had said it before, but never so bluntly and publicly. He called MacPherson 'General' and once Foster had followed his lead, no one was going against the lay of the land.

MacPherson was a dour, stout American of Scottish extraction. Receding peppery-grey hairline, thick-jowled, heavy brow, eagle-sharp eyes. It seemed that the good old US of A, still being the major contributor to SHADO's financial coffers, had again insisted on having an American appointed to the top job.

The General's aide was a crisp little kraut name of Erwin Messer, who had been seconded by the West German Army to work with MacPherson in NATO. Colonel Messer was, as we were to discover almost immediately, an efficiency controller. That was his title, not just his job: and man, did he ever control efficiently. He was formidable. He also provided a level of confusion for the lower echelons in SHADO. He wasn't strictly attached to SHADO, in fact, he had no official position at all, but he was a Colonel. In the West Germany Army. We knew this really didn't, as far as we were concerned, mean that he out-ranked Colonels Freeman, Foster and Lake, but did he think he did? More importantly, did MacPherson think he did? The answer to that was not long coming.

However, the advent of MacPherson and Messer and the whirlwind cook's tour Karl Neuhaus (take one guess why Karl got picked for this little excursion - and I was Karl's choice as reserve!) and I did with them of every SHADO installation and auxiliary station is the last thing I remember clearly of the next four weeks.

The mist in my mind gets foggier and foggier until there's just about complete obscurity. From time to time over the years, a random phrase that can only have come from that era of a sudden ghostly scene floats up Into my consciousness like a leaf In a dream-scape, but overall, there's just nothing. Nothing at all. The amnesia drug, I can tell you from personal experience, works like a charm. Whether they're memory inhibitors or memory erasers is pretty academic; try as hard as you like to remember something that someone has clearly described your participation In - and all you get is a pain in the head. In spite of my lack of memory, it doesn't mean that I don't know what happened in the next seven weeks. I do. At least I think I do. I've been able to re-construct it from conversations with the aunties, from talking to Karl Neuhaus and Erwin Messer, and from quizzing Doctor Jackson on certain chemicals and how they came to be administered to me. Lastly, I've listened to quite a few conversations on the matter over the years, and I'm pretty sure I've got the events arranged in chronological order. Naturally, my account's pretty patchy, but what else can you expect in the circumstances?

The General, on this aforementioned whirlwind tour, sticks his nose in just about everything, and gets Karl and I to explain exactly what is what, how it operates, how it integrates into the total SHADO defence system, where SHADO's strengths and weaknesses lie. He took a crash course in the history of SHADO from Nina Barry, who had been with the organisation from the year dot. He studied the records to see what tactics the aliens had used. And eight days after Henderson had given him the key to the throne room, he instituted a review of all, and that means all - every single one - procedures and operations. He was looking for ways of running things more smoothly, more efficiently, more cost-conservatively. And he sent out his little snooper watch-dog, Colonel Messer, to do an independent report on the situation.

The first thing that fell to the axe was the lunar module flight programme. Moon trips were cut from four to two a week. Moonbase was up in arms. Gay was down to Earth the first thing she could protesting that Commander Straker had promised that Moonbase flights were shortly to be increased to five per week. It did no good - after all, Colonel Foster had already protested vehemently to no avail. The two of them tried to enlist Freeman's help against the General's decree, but it was difficult since the Colonel spent most of his days top-side In the Commander's film executive office trying to resurrect an elusive memory.

While Messer's hatchet job went on, Colonel Freeman was more concerned with the Commander's severe depression. It seemed that it was pretty incomprehensible to him why his marriage had failed and why he had abruptly abandoned a promising career in the US air force. ("What happened to Project Bluebook?" he asked. "Folded," replied Freeman. "Nothing left of it today.") But, however incomprehensible these two events might be, they were nothing in comparison to the confusion he felt In trying to understand why he was producing films when his heart was in astrophysics. Very much in astrophysics. Jackson went up for one of his long, long sessions and came back with the amazing piece of Information that the Commander had secretly applied for a job at MIT, and had been turned down. "Too old," he was supposed to have said of the letter from the institute. "And I'm not up with the latest of the current theories." He brandished the Physics Review In Jackson's face. "Shows what they know."

Jackson, it turned out, was concerned enough by the Commander's state of mind to suggest to Henderson that some strings might be pulled in at some university. After all, Jackson was heard to maintain, the government surely owed Straker more than a disability pension for his years of unstinting service. Besides which, he went on to argue, a career in astrophysics was both near enough and far enough from SHADO's concerns that memory restoration might occur.

Henderson wasn't remarkably happy about this idea. A number of factors were involved, after all, if Straker did suddenly remember all now, exactly where did that leave MacPherson? Shunted back to NATO? No, he knew too much. So, mind you, did that daunting Colonel Messer. Amnesia procedure for them? Well . . . Freeman bought himself into this dialogue between Jackson and Henderson after a savage argument with Jackson. He told the doctor to stop messing around in the Commander's life, and to keep his nosy parker where it belonged. Films, said Freeman, and Harlington-Straker film studios were where the Commander belonged. He'd done his bit for humanity and now he was entitled to retire in peace.

Less that twenty-four hours after the argument Henderson had managed to get the Commander a research position at Caltech. I think he was the only one who never knew of the handshake of congratulations that Jackson gave Freeman straight after the announcement Between the two of them, they'd manipulated Henderson well and truly - but even they later admitted, the Caltech appointment was a gift from the gods. Straker, apparently, nearly burned Freeman's hand off with the speed of gratitude. He shut up his office and was off so fast that you couldn't see him for dust. Even the aunties were stunned at the haste of his removal.

Over half the UFO flights in the next sixteen weeks were aimed at Southern California. Not unnaturally, the aliens didn't believe one word of this alleged amnesia disability.

Meanwhile the General - MacPherson, that is - was becoming both more respected and much more unpopular. Kelly's research grant was terminated, and his microphotography project halted. Salutes were introduced. "Salute?" asked Foster. "Be damned if anyone's saluting me. if the respect isn't there, the salute isn't going to generate it." We all could recall those nods the Commander used to get that were infinitely more respectful than any salute. But protesting didn't change the decree. We didn't really care enough about it anyway. Salutes? Well, if it's a big deal to the General, we'll co-operate quietly. Nothing to get uptight about.

Virginia Lake was posted to Skydiver for three months, her major job profile being to search the Marianna Trench for the wreckage of Sky Three. "The deepest part of the ocean?" she inquired coldly. "Apart from the volcanic activity and the fact that the trench probably goes down as far as the Earth's mantle, what's the point in finding anything?" it was a good question. One that MacPherson didn't answer. In all his brisk efficiency, it was odd for him to order us to waste time and effort on a search that had proved futile twelve months previously. But it was the fact that MacPherson clearly thought a woman incapable of her role, and the fact that he said that the main reason he was sending her to Skydiver was that there were too many colonels sitting around on their lazy backsides doing nothing when they should be out in the field that incensed her. Ginny was righteously furious. And not just at MacPherson. At Freeman too. He had apparently again refused to protest to the General, merely replying that anyone who couldn't see that her backside was not in the least bit lazy, but beautiful, needed to visit an optometrist. Freeman was spending hours each day on the radio phone link to Southern California. It was obvious to everyone that, given the distance now separating the Commander from us, the Colonel wasn't going to give up hope on the Commander's memory.

MacPherson extended the tour of duty for all field personnel, Skydiver increased by fifty percent time-wise and Moonbase personnel by a whopping hundred percent. There was a fair bit of gritting of teeth going on. However, on the bright side, he did increase our pay by a quarter, which made everyone more kindly disposed towards him. "But," said Freeman, "there's only a certain amount of money to go round. Where's the pay rise coming from? Equipment repair? Hardware?"

"Maybe," said Foster caustically, "It's just what we've saved on reducing the Moon flights to criminally low levels..."

MacPherson authorised SHADO's first audit, cut back on the amount of rec time we could spend up in the studios, sharpened and honed and cut and pared wherever he could. He obviously had his orders from Henderson to prune as much dead wood as he could. The only trouble was that he seemed to be attacking the living sapling.

There was only one protest that succeeded - and that was by stealth. Sharp little Erwin. Messer was not the big bad wolf that he appeared on the surface. Up he fronts to MacPherson and challenges him on all the changes - particularly on the Moon flights.

"But Erwin," responds MacPherson, "all I've done is to implement your recommendations."

"But zese are not my recommendazions," says the Colonel. "Zese are my first imprezzions. Zese are ze zhings zat I keep my eye on for next zix months. Before zat, I recommend nothing change. I obzerve."

"Erwin," says the General, patting his distressed aide on the shoulder, "your observations are, as usual, spot on. I couldn't have done better myself. And there's not point in delaying fixing a flaw. The disease may spread. . ."

"But, mein General," says Erwin, but is cut off by MacPherson. "Delay and pay, Erwin remember , delay and pay!"

"Ja, mein General," says Erwin, "but ve must remember zat zese people are ze profezzionals, I hat not experienced ze alien attack, and zerefore, I am not yet fully qualified to be ze judge." There was one thing you could always say for Messer - he never called a spade anything other than a bloody shovel, but he was always scrupulously fair in making his recommendations.

"You're too modest, Erwin," says General MacPherson. "How often have you been wrong before?"

Not often, apparently. But Erwin frowns, and says, "Vell, I zink I vill change my mind about ze Moonbase cargo flight recommendazion I vas going to gif you." Colonel Messer was a cunning brute when all was said and done. Too cunning by half. "I vas going to recommend zey be cut. I vas going to recommend three flights in ze veek - but I zink zey should be four."

"Three flights a week it is, Erwin," says the General. "I'll write up the memo to Moonbase right away . . ." and off he went.

Colonel Messer did not so much as have even the ghost of a smile on his face - the deceptive little rat! There had never been any Moonbase cargo flights. The Teutonic Colonel had, but to use a fallacious turn of phrase, not only restored the status quo, but had actually got that extra flight the Commander had long ago promised Gay.

No one bothered to inform MacPherson that he had been out-manoeuvred. But don't get the idea because of this small deception that the General wasn't respected. He most certainly was.

He had not been a week settling into the organisation when the aliens tried a new tactic. At fifteen minute Intervals, four UFOs came in one after the other on the same flight path.

It's not the sort of thing you expect from them - or from anyone - throwing good after bad. The interceptors got the first and second, and were half-way back to Moonbase when the call went out again. I guess aliens thought that we would think that the least likely flight path for their fellows had just bit the dust. As it was, the first missile went wide, and the UFO screeched in on a trajectory for, you-guessed-it, Southern California.

"Launch Sky One-" Keith Ford sends to Skydiver and gives them the appropriate co-ordinates.

"Belay that order," says General MacPherson, who was watching his first alien invasion on the screens with narrowed eyes and folded arms. All that he need was a slide rule tucked under his elbow to give the impression that he was Straker re-incarnated. "Direct Sky One and Sky Two and Sky Four to an intercept area on the Earth's surface antipodal to the present UFO trajectory."

Ford looked up sharply, hesitated a moment, then did as he was told. "Track that wee beastie," the General continues, pointing to the UFO on the screen, "and send out an alert for ground forces to deal with it." Then he disappeared momentarily into his office - Straker's old den. It had been redecorated. The General hung a bold geometric pattern curtain over the screen with the pastel floating mural, saying that he found the aimless drift and the soft colours to be nothing but a distraction and an irritant and he couldn't see that it had any calming effect at all. No and told him what it's ulterior purpose was, Foster merely giving him the hint: "The Commander was claustrophobic. It helped him adjust to this small confined space underground."

When the General returned in a few minutes, he had a cigar clamped between his teeth. If you happened to glance at him quickly out of the corner of your eye, his profile was enough to give you momentary shivers. He was much more solidly built than the lean, only just six foot, Commander, but there was something that was haunting about the set of his mouth and the hawk-like look of his staring eyes. Something that was vividly reminiscent of the Great White Chief, but something different, too. There was no leavening of light that the Commander had had. Straker had never been a ray of sunshine, of course - we'd been too afraid of him, and too much in awe of him for that - but he was occasionally a patch of blue in an overcast sky. There's no one you would rather have listened to in an emergency. And, somewhere deep down, he had a not-quite-black sense of humour. Anyone who came up with the names 'Skydiver', 'Markers Universal' and 'Intercept' is not that sour. But MacPherson was. Sour, that is.

Anyway, the General clamped the cigar between his teeth and chewed it like a cheroot, and when the fourth UFO showed up blazing down the same trail as the third, he said nothing, just gave Ford a withering glare when the lieutenant queried if any of Sky One, Two or Four should be recalled from their present position.

Well, it turned out MacPherson must have had a sixth sense, because the four UFOs were, as he had anticipated, decoys. Twelve of the little hell-bats came tearing down on a course whose trajectory was exactly the areas where the three Sky jets were waiting. We got four in very short order and the other UFOS, surprisingly, turned tall and scuttled hell for leather for whatever celestial bolt-hold they had up there. The incident was noted all over SHADO. There was a new respect in the salutes MacPherson was afforded. The incident won Henderson's unqualified approval. He came and gave Freeman a few quiet words on the subject of the daily calls to California.

I was supposed to have a few days leave, and was going to go home to see the folks when I decided to stay in London. The major reason for this, at least the only major reason I can conceive of in this reconstruction, was a strange phone call I intercepted late one evening, just as I came into the flat. I picked up the ringing receiver and the operator's voice said, "Person to person for Misses Violet or Amy Casterville. . ." I could hear Aunt Hobbit in the kitchen humming a hymn, so I said, "Go ahead," to the operator, and called, "Aunt Amy..!" out to the kitchen. "Whyalla, Australia, calling," said the operator, and over it came a deep male voice, "Amy? Peter Carlin here... I hate to trouble..."

"Captain.. .!?" I burst out unexpectedly. "Captain Carlin?!"

Click. The line was dead.

"Who was that?" asked Aunt Hobbit, as she came out of the kitchen, rubbing her hands on a tea towel.

"That was Peter Carlin!" I exclaimed. "He's not dead! He's somewhere In Australia."

Suddenly, I stared. Why on Earth would Captain Carlin be hiding the fact that he was alive and why further would he be ringing the great aunties? If Carlin was alive, maybe so too was Colonel Grey - and if so, what were they doing in Australia? Had Sky Three crashed or did they have it with them? A thousand questions rolled in my brain.

"Australia?" asked Aunt Hobbit, perplexed, and then she gives a comprehending smile. "Oh, you mean Peter Darling. An old friend of Vi's, he is."

I didn't believe her. I don't know why now I didn't believe her, but I know I didn't.

"Writes novels, too," continued Aunt Hobbit. "That's how Vi met him." It was plausible - in fact, knowing Aunt Hobbit's predilection for the truth, there probably was a Peter Darling who was a friend of Aunt Print's - but equally I was certain that it had not been Peter Darling on the phone. That sudden, abrupt click been too definitive.

I sent straight back to SHADO and, after much thought, got myself a secure, private line to Skydiver. I spoke to Ginny Lake. "Marianna Trench is just about straight line north of Australia," I pointed out. Ginny was obviously thoughtful. "Don't tell anyone else this," she said. "If you're wrong, big deal. But if you're right, something very strange is going on . . . and I think we'd better tread very warily . . ." She smiled engagingly. "How are things in drydock?" she asked finally. I told her about MacPherson's first experience of an alien onslaught.

"Things must be looking up," she said, as she signed off, telling me to keep in touch. She expected to be back at HO within the week and maybe we could sort out the Carlin mystery together.

I was looking forward to the prospect. Maybe, the future would not be as bleak as we all had once anticipated.

As it turned out, it was worse. Long before Ginny got back, a shocking chain of events unfolded. It started with the audit that MacPherson had authorised in his first week - there had, apparently, been nothing more than a cursory internal examination of SHADO's books done in more than a decade - and a strict and thorough inspection of the financial records revealed some discrepancies. Revealed in fact that a great deal of money had been funnelled out of SHADO In the last five years, and revealed that the person responsible seemed to be Colonel Freeman.

He was taken into custody and questioned about the disappearance of 28 million pounds sterling. It was unbelievable when, after the questioning was over, formal charges were laid.

But what was even more unbelievable was the fact that Colonel Freeman did not, even for a moment, try to evade the charge. In fact, he admitted to it.

I was reading the article in Encyclopaedia Britannica on Whyalla and Aunt Print was making monosyllabic affirmatives into the telephone to some unspecified individual. I was wishing for a second extension in the bedroom to find out who was on the other end of the line - but I wished in vain.

The article was quite short. It mentioned that Whyalla had once had the biggest shipbuilding yards in Australia, but they had closed down in 1978. There was a reference to blast furnaces and excellent port facilities and . . . just as 1 was about to look up the cross reference on South Australia, I tumbled something instinctively important. "Colonel Freeman's an Australian!" I said aloud. Aunt Print suddenly turned and stared at me, still mumbling her acquiescence into the telephone. I hadn't heard her say one word other than "yes" in the last ten minutes.

I smiled at her, then frowned at myself. I knew that Colonel Freeman was an Australian, and I suspected that Peter Carlin and John Grey were in Australia... but what was the connection?

Suddenly, Aunt Print gives a final clear, "Yes, John," and hangs up.

"Who was that?" I asked as Aunt Print made towards the kitchen.

"An acquaintance," she replied. I could hear her striking a match for the gas burner, so I left my reading and headed out for a cuppa.

"Oh," I said. "This acquaintance wouldn't happen to be an aristocratic Colonel, would he?"

Aunt Print, to her credit, look blank.

"An English Lord?" I persisted. "Disappeared about a year ago on a routine flight over the Pacific?"

Aunt Print looked at me dubiously. "You have a vivid imagination," she said. "You ought to be writing novels, Robert."

"You haven't answered my question," I reminded her.

"I thought you were telling me something," said Aunt Print briskly, "not asking me. Did you enjoy your trip to Alaska?"

I gaped. "Aunt Violet, even I, dense as I am, could not fail to notice that rather abrupt change in subject. . ."

"You're not dense," Aunt Hobbit said kindly as she came in. "Did you enjoy your trip to Alaska?"

"I wasn't there to enjoy it," I said, wondering why the topic had suddenly come up a full seven weeks after I'd got back. "Why do you ask?"

"It must have been tiring - all work and no play," said Aunt Print evasively. "Did you spend all your time on the computers?"

I was taken aback. What this tack of the great-aunties was all about was confusing. Should I terminate the topic or should I play along? "It must have been a very extensive job that you did," said Aunt Hobbit, obviously fishing for something. For what?

"Umm... well... yes," I said, puzzled. Then I asked bluntly, "Why don't you two come right out with it and ask whatever it is you want to ask?"

There was a moment's silence. "We were wondering," said Aunt Print slowly, "how extensive the changes were that you made to the programme you were working on."

"I re-wrote It from the beginning," I said.

"From... the... beginning?" asked Aunt Hobbit, carefully. "You mean you changed everything?"

"No," I replied.

"No?" asked Aunt Print. "So you didn't erase the sub-routines?"

I stared. How on Earth did Aunt Print know about those daft sub-routines?

"Did you nest them?" asked Aunt Hobbit.

I swivelled to her now. Aunt Hobbit's not the sort of person who blithely asks you questions using computer terminology. "Did you leave any of the interface hooks in?" she asked. Now that had me baffled. What were interface hooks when they were at home? I'd never heard that sort of jargon before.

"I re-wrote the programme from scratch," I explained, "and I couldn't see any reason why the thing was programmed in FORTRAN or why the sub-routines were necessary, so I left them out."

Both the aunties shook their grey heads sadly. Aunt Hobbit changed the subject stunningly yet again. "Is Alec sick?" she asked.

"Colonel Freeman?" I hesitated. "Sick?" I hadn't told the great aunties any of the events of the past forty eight hours. I was too upset - and I knew they would be even more upset. Besides, I hoped there was a reasonable explanation for Colonel Freeman's actions and that the whole thing would blow over in a few days. "Why?" I asked.

"Ed rang this morning," said Aunt Print, "and he seemed a little concerned. He said that Alec usually rings him everyday and he hoped that nothing had happened, so he asked us to ask you."

"Ed rang this morning?" I repeated. "You mean, Commander Straker?"

"Of course," responded Aunt Hobbit, "how many Eds do you know?"

I ignored that rhetorical question. "Does he often ring?" I asked.

"This was the first time," replied Aunt Print, pouring herself a second cup of tea. "Is Alec not well?" she asked, as she clinked the cup and saucer.

I hesitated, wondering whether or not to tell them all. But I must have decided that truth will out sooner or later, for after only a brief pause I said, "Well, actually, Colonel Freeman's been arrested."

"Arrested?!?" squeaked Aunt Hobbit.

"Arrested?" barked Aunt Print, coldly. "Why?"

I gulped. "Fraud," I said quietly.

"Fraud?" frowned Aunt Hobbit. She considered the matter for about three seconds. "Absurd," she stated.

"What fraud is Alec alleged to have committed?" asked Aunt Print sharply.

"Siphoned more than 52 million pounds of SHADO funds to parts unknown," I reported. It was dreadful to contemplate. The auditors were still uncovering the exact extent of the misappropriation but they were certain that the crime had been both systematic and continuous - extending over at least four or five years. The total amount involved was stupendous. As I was about to find out, no one really had a clue to exactly how stupendous. "Maybe he put it in a Swiss bank account," I said sarcastically.

"No, it was a Liechtenstein bank account," Aunt Hobbit corrected me casually.

I jumped up. I wondered whether she was serious. "Liechtenstein?" I queried.

"Just as discreet as the Swiss," replied Aunt Print, "and no one ever thinks of a slush fund there."

"Slush fund?" My eyes must have been the size of soup plates.

"Only kidding," said Aunt Print. Why did I have the feeling she was mis-representing herself?

I finished a leisurely cup of tea and then went back to the studios. It was third shift, and after midnight, and all was quiet on the Earthly front. I had hoped Karl Neuhaus would still be around, but my next best bet was going to be contact with Nina Barry. I got a line to Moonbase, rustled her out of her hard-won sleep and demanded her father's telephone number from her. Nina's father was a big-wig in the City, and if he couldn't make some discreet enquiries about bank accounts in Liechtenstein, no one could. I didn't, of course, tell Nina why I wanted the number. It was possible that the great aunties were talking nonsense off the top of heir heads, and If so, there was no point in making the bully-boys down in security suspicious. Third degree and then some - that's what it'd be, all because of a little joke.

But I never did get to contact Nina's father. A booming voice behind me as I tried to surreptitiously leave the studios changed all my plans. "Casterville!" bellows MacPherson, "just the man I want to see!"

I swung on my heel and snapped a smart salute.

MacPherson nodded decisively to me and thrust a computer disc into my hands. "Find out what's on this!" he ordered. And off he went, leaving me there, gaping open-mouthed, after him. He must have caught my look of horror out of the corner of his eye, for suddenly he whirled back, and demanded, "Something wrong, Lieutenant?"

"The impossible I do at once, Sir," I replied, "but miracles take quite substantially longer." Suddenly I saw Ford coming up behind the General and winking at me with approval.

"I don't think I like your tone, Casterville," said the General with a hint of menace in his voice.

"I know I don't like the job, Sir," I answered apologetically. "I don't even know what this is." I held up the disc. "Does it contain data or is it a programme? What's its access code?" Without the last, it was well-nigh Impossible to find out what was on the thing.

"That's what I want you to tell me," ordered the General. "You told me that the computer complex here has a number of specific access codes for different programmes. Try them all."

I looked at the disc dubiously. "What Is it?" There was nothing - not even a colour code on the side to indicate whether it was simply data or whether it was more than that.

"You will be given Information on a need to know basis," snapped the General, "and you do not need to know what it is - or where it came from. I just want you to access its contents and report to me immediately you have done so..."

"But, Sir," I interrupted, "if this is a private data disc, there's virtually no way I can access it." I stared at Ford who was standing wooden-faced behind the General. "Is it a private data disc?" I went on.

I did not get an immediate answer on that. "What makes it impossible?" asked the General frigidly.

"Sir," I explained quietly, "the computer complex here uses access codes of up to eight letters. Do you know how many possible codes that makes? Over two hundred and eight thousand million for eight letter combinations alone!"

"So?" demanded the General, his voice still as cold as an arctic winter. "The only variations you've got are the letters of the alphabet - surely it's simple enough to write a programme that will run through all possible combinations - even if it takes more than a couple of nanoseconds to run." He was being sarcastic and I knew it.

"There's a security problem, Sir," I stated, holding back the snap that I would have liked to have let loose. "Commander Straker installed a number of security features that were designed to make life difficult for the aliens. He realised right from SHADO's inception that if the aliens could link Into our computer system that we'd have no chance from the word go. He made it impossible to run a programme like the one you suggested. Well, not impossible. You can do it, of course, but you can't run it at faster than normal human typing speed."

"What!?" demanded the General.

"Ingenious," said a voice behind me, and I turned to see Colonel Messer coming up the corridor. He nodded to himself. "Quite brilliant."

"Explain, Erwin," snapped the General.

"To dizcover SHADO's Zecrets," said the Colonel smiling wryly to himself, "ze aliens must firzt penetrate ze complex and type in all ze pozzible codes. If zey try to read ze data electronically, ze zystem zhuts down . . ."

"Well, actually, we can't depend of that," I admitted. "We know that it's possible that their technology might be capable of overcoming our computer constraints, so we can't stop them indefinitely. Though we've succeeded so far..."

"If you don't know what the aliens are capable of," the General pointed out, "you can't know whether they've succeeded or not."

"We can know, Sir," I corrected. "We can't know what they take when, or if, it ever happens, but we can know that they've done it. It's quite simple, Sir. It's based on the principle that a watched quantum never interferes."

Colonel Messer burst into delighted laughter. General MacPherson stared at him, stunned, as if this phenomenon was unique. Somehow both Ford and I suspected that it was. "How elegant!" enthused the Colonel. "How efficient! I vould like to zhake the ze hand of ze perzon who zought of it."

"It was the Commander's idea," said Keith Ford, smiling thinly.

Colonel Messer nodded and kept on nodding In approval.

"Will one of you specialists explain?" asked the general testily.

"Well, Sir," I replied, feeling pleased at being able to be on top for once, "computer information is electronically based. This means that all sorts of sub-atomic particles like electrons and so on. Electrons obey the laws of quantum physics. They form what's called an interference pattern if you force them through an opening about the same size as they themselves are. But they don't form this pattern if you watch them..."

"What are they, telepathic?" interrupted the General with a dubious and fixed stare.

"Exactly what Einstein suggested, Sir," I answered. I could see MacPherson's look of disbelief, a look that dissolved when Colonel Messer agreed. "Ja, he did zay zat..." There was a wry smile lurking in the back of his eyes. You slimy skunk, I thought to myself. You're as bad as I am, Erwin Messer! Maybe even worse, because you have no excuse! "So the Commander had a number of quantum gates put into the system - they won't stop the aliens, but at least we'll know when they've been tampering with our data."

The general stared at me for a long, long moment. Suddenly his mouth formed a cold thick pout. "I do not care whether it takes you from now to eternity," he said to me, "find out what is on that disc." And he turned away and stomped off.

I turned accusingly on Colonel Messer. "Einstein thought electrons were telepathic?" I challenged.

"You know as veil as I do zat Einstein vas opposed to qvantum theory," he responded, "and he was sarcastic vhen he suggested ze idea. Myzeif, I agree mit Herr Albert mostly, but I also zink zat qvantum theory is an efficient dezcription - until zey find ze better anzwer." And he bowed slightly to me, that cagey devil, and off he went in MacPherson's wake.

I was left with Keith Ford and a very impassive disc. "What's this all about?" I asked the lieutenant softly.

Eyes darted up and down the corridor to see if anyone was coming, then he whispered to me, "Just quietly, even I'm not supposed to know."

"But..." He looked over his shoulder hastily again.

"But..." I prompted.

"But Colonel Freeman tried to destroy it," he went on. He indicated the offensive disc.

I stared.

".... and," continued Ford, "he won't tell what it is or what its access code is, even under truth serum."

"Even under truth serum?" I asked, needing reassurance. "He can't possibly know then."

"That's not what either Henderson or MacPherson are prepared to believe," Ford replied.

I stared at the unmarked disc. What secrets did it hide?

"There's another thing," Ford went on, and handed me a photocopied sheet of paper, folded into a tiny square. He was carrying it in the inside pocket of his uniform. "Don't tell either of the Generals I took a copy of this," he said, "or I'll be busted so low you won't be able to reach down that far to find me."

I unfolded the square of paper carefully, and read the contents twice before handing it back. "I take it the Commander wrote it," I said.

"It's his handwriting," Keith confirmed, "and the original was in an envelope with the disc."

"Thanks, Keith," I said gratefully, as I headed towards the computers with my burden, turning over the letter in my mind. 'Alec,' it had begun, 'a couple of things that need to be checked on straightaway:

• the Alaskan interface hooks - John's been having repeated trouble trying to check the links - someone to patch the system.
• we may need more aluminium that originally specified. Order 1000 tones - hold delivery.
• green alert until further notice.

John had been having trouble linking with the Alaskan interface hooks, had he? Well, that just about confirmed to my mind that John Grey was alive and well and living somewhere in Australia and making not too discreet enquires though my relations. The main reason for this was that Colonel Grey was the only person in SHADO that the Commander called 'John'. They had become fairly close friends since after Craig Collins' death; indeed, for a time it appeared that the friendship between Straker and Grey was deeper than that with either Foster or Freeman. They had spent enormous time in each other's company - a situation that only terminated with Grey's disappearance. Well, no wonder Freeman had spent so much time and effort trying to resurrect the Commander's memory. If there was a conspiracy afoot, it must have been a disaster for the conspirators to find that their leader suddenly didn't remember either the conspiracy or the conspirators at all. The reference to the aluminium went totally over my head. I didn't have a clue what it was about. A thousand tones of the stuff was a huge amount considering how light the metal is compared to steel. But, if it was baffling, the was message not. The disc I held in my hot little paw had to be the same one Colonel Freeman had been ordered to destroy rather than have it fall into the hands of the aliens.

Which put me Into the heard of a dilemma - if Colonel Freeman had tried to destroy it, should not I do the same?

I hesitated. Well, there weren't any aliens around, that was for sure. Alien spies - well, that was another ball game altogether, but one thing was sure, I wasn't going to let anyone I didn't trust get so much as their beady little eyes upon this thing, let alone their hands. I was prepared to die first.

I glanced at the thing nervously, aware of my orders to find out what was on it. I got Ford to lock me in the auxiliary computer room and set about my assigned task.

I sat down, frowned at the thing, put my chin on the back of my hand, and slipped the disc into the drive. I wondered if I'd get anything at all other than a blank screen. I did. Not that it helped. Up came the nice, totally inscrutable prompt - "Ready". Just that. Plain, wonderfully ordinary, "ready". Well, I sighed to myself, was I expecting something less from the devious mind of the Commander? If the aliens ever did get their hands on this thing, they were going to be in for more than they bargained for. "Run Alamo" I typed in. "Can't find Alamo," came back almost at once. I scratched my head. Maybe I hadn't used the right instruction. "Load Alamo."

"Can't find Alamo" came up again. And a third time on "Read Alamo". Well, it was worth a try, I thought the phrase "Remember the Alamo" in the letter might have had more than a personal significance. Obviously it didn't. But I tried the three instructions on "Remember". And then on "Cloudeye" and on "Alaska". And on "Straker," "Freeman," "Carlin," "Grey," "Mariana," "Trench," "Whyalla," "South" (I tried to type in "Australia" but it was more than eight letters), "Studios" and several dozen other unsuccessful others.

Dawn was breaking as I decided that I'd better get cracking on writing a programme to link into the disc - it was going to be a billion to one chance if I guessed the right code - and though it might be worth the effort, the miracle rate In SHADO was pretty low recently. It didn't take me long to write the link programme. I decided that the chances were that the word would be more likely to be long than short 0 that were was much more chance of it being eight letters than two or three letters - so the programme ran, at the rate of a very fast typist, through all the possibilities, starting with the eight letter ones. "Run AAAAAAAA." "Can't find AAAAAAAA." Well, I hadn't exactly been hopeful on that one. "Load AAAAAAAA" and "Read AAAAAAAA" were just as successful. "Run AAAAAAAB". "Can't find AAAAAAAB". And so it went on for over an hour. I watched it, obsessively for the first ten minutes, then with desultory concentration after that. What other ways were there of cracking this code? This system might well take forever.

Ford came and unlocked me at eight o'clock. "How's it going?" he asked. "MacPherson's looking for you . . ."

"It's going at the rate of about a possibility every fifteen seconds," I answered. "Chances of finding it this way are about the same as finding a needle in one of a million haystacks."

"I'm going to change the lock on this door," said Ford quietly to me. I raised my eyebrows in silent query.

"Everyone knows what you're in here doing," he continued. "The way I figure it is that, if the Commander wrote the disc and it's that important that Freeman's willing to jeopardize his career over it, it's bloody damn vital. It may well be the Cloudeye disc."

"I tried 'Cloudeye'," I offered.

"Well," shrugged Ford, "It's unlikely the code and the operation would have the same name. Too easy to break."

I nodded thoughtfully.

"I was talking to Foster about the thing," Ford went on. "Apparently the Commander told him just before the accident that it was possible to determine the code - and if you could and you got into an emergency, the code could well retrieve the situation for you..."

I wrinkled my brow at him. "That doesn't sound feasible."

"Unless it's a programme set to activate something..." Ford suggested. "Or re-activate something..."

"What?" I queried dubiously. There was nothing I could think of that wasn't operational.

"Your guess is as good as mine," Ford admitted. "It was just an idea..." He turned to the door. "If you want to get back in," he smiled wanly, "come and ask me first." and he opened a lock removal kit.

"Why?" I asked. And I wasn't referring to having to get back in, but to the reasons for the combination change.

"I figure that the Commander made the disc alien-proof," Ford asserted. "He's brilliant enough to have done that. But I think what he meant by the instructions to Colonel Freeman to destroy it was this: it might be alien-proof, but it's not traitor-proof." He gave me a long hard look.

"I get the picture," I nodded, and went off, deciding to spruce up before I went to see MacPherson about my lack of success. A wash, a shave, breakfast. Not necessarily in that order.

I did some uneasy figuring as I walked across the road. Even at the pretty swift rate of one possibility every ten seconds, just to get through the eight-letter ones would take nearly 7,000 years. The Commander was no slouch when it came to fending off the aliens.

I walked through the door of the flat to find Aunt Print setting a plate of toast and omelette and crisp bacon rashers in my place at the table. The old dears were simply perfect mind-readers at times. "Breakfast, Robert," she said, and Aunt Hobbit came out of the kitchen with a pot of tea. "Have they got the business with Alec sorted out yet? Ed's quite anxious, you know."

"Is he?" I asked. "What did he say?" It wasn't so much that I was avoiding the question as wondering about the Commander's motives given his amnesiac state.

"I can't repeat what he said," announced Aunt Hobbit with a frown.

"Top secret?" I asked, ribbing her.

"No," she answered. "Just unrepeatable. I didn't think a nice young man like him would know so many swear words."

"He must be upset," I said, unnecessarily. And wondered to myself. But my musings were interrupted by Aunt Print's persistence. "Are they going to release Alec?" she asked.

I shrugged. "I don't know," I answered truthfully. "It's much more complicated than it appears on the surface." I speared a bacon rasher. "No one know what happened to the money, Colonel Freeman refuses to say anything even under the truth serum, and there's this computer disc that he tried to destroy that he won't tell anyone anything about."

"Alec's no traitor," stated Aunt Hobbit firmly.

"I didn't suggest that he was," I insisted. "It's just that the whole business of the money has everyone under a cloud. If only he'd denied the charge..."

"Why should he?" asked Aunt Print. "He was only acting under orders.. ."

"Acting under orders?" I repeated, stupidly. "Whose?"

But I already knew. And I knew why MacPherson was not giving up on the disc or on the questioning - I should have seen it before.

There was no way the Colonel could have perpetrated the fraud without the Commander's knowledge. The way SHADO was structured, he would have had to have known, and since it was never stopped, Straker must have, at the very least, turned a blind eye to it. At the worst, he must have, as the aunties suggested, have done a lot more than condoned it - he must have been involved. But that was even more unbelievable.

"I think we should go over and tell them the truth," said Aunt Hobbit suddenly. "We can't let Alec be accused of this all by himself. Especially when we did most of the speculating, after all..."

"You!??!" I stared at them both, amazed. "You?" I repeated. "Most of the speculating?"

"Yes," nodded Aunt Print. "Short term money market - futures - that sort of thing."

My mouth was open and doing fish-breathing imitations. "High risk stuff," I managed to gulp, appalled by the revelation, disbelieving most of it.

"Not if you know what you're doing," commented Aunt Hobbit in mild reproof.

"Did you?" I asked. "Know what you were doing I mean?" I wasn't only referring to the speculations, but to the reasons for them.

"Ed was never displeased with our investments," responded Aunt Print.

"What sort of profit did you make?" I asked uneasily. With more than 52 million pounds as a base, we could be talking about the best part of a hundred million here. I was soon to discover my rampant conservatism.

"Oh," shrugged Aunt Hobbit. "Nothing spectacular. We always erred on the side of caution. We didn't want to lose the capital, of course..."

"How much?" I insisted.

"Only nine hundred and seventy million," mumbled Aunt Print, as if it were a very sore point with her.

Apparently it was, for she went on, "We would have liked to have cracked the thousand million. . ."

At this stage, my tongue was hanging out of my mouth, absolutely incapable of a reply. My eyes were doing dangerous things, like threatening to come out of their sockets. "A ... thousand . . . million . . .?" I stuttered finally.

"I just told you, Robert," corrected Aunt Print, shaking her head testily, "that we didn't quite make it. . ."

"I know.. .1 know" I interrupted shakily. "Where did the money come from? Originally, I mean?"

Aunt Hobbit's wrinkled brow suddenly cleared. "Ed's been saving a few years," she said. "It's profit from the studio..."

"Profit?" I demanded. "It's not green stamps you're talking about saving here. It's a billion dollars!" I saw the glare of protest from Aunt Print. "An American billion, anyway," I amended. There simply wasn't any profit from the studio - in fact, a large part of the security budget went towards bolstering the failing fortunes of the studio, since they were our indispensable smokescreen. There hadn't been a time when the studios had made a profit since the time when the embarrassing surplus in the late seventies. So embarrassing it was still talked about. SHADO security actually would up having more money on its hands at the end of the financial year than at the start - the studios had made several hugely successful films and had managed to more than off-set the expenditure of security in maintaining it. "Besides," I snapped at the aunties, "It's impossible. Harlington-Straker hasn't been in the black for over seven years!"

And then I could have kicked myself. For what if they had been in the black all along? What if the cream were being skimmed off the top? What had happened, if this were true, to the profit? And more than the profit! For if the studies had never been a crippling debt to overcome, what had happened to the funds that SHADO security had poured into the place over the years?

"The Commander wouldn't have done it," I said to myself quietly. He couldn't have. Ripped off SHADO when we were always so desperately short of funding? No, I couldn't believe it. The great-aunties simply had to be off their trollies. "He wouldn't feather his own nest at SHADO's expense," I muttered.

"What a horrid thought!" Aunt Hobbit was absolutely shocked. I was glad to see it.

"But there's no reason for him to do it!" I explained. "The IAC provides all the funds. A thousand million will go a long way - a couple of new moonbases, sure - but, it wouldn't be worth it. As soon as everyone realized we can live on less, they'll cut SHADO's budget. Not only that, the Commander would be out on his ear for concealing SHADO's true requirements. We'd never be able to maintain the moonbases if we got them. A deception of this kind is just inexplicable! It's absurd! It's self-defeating! I can't think of a single altruistic motive for the Commander to have a slush fund!"

"Exactly what he called it!" smiled Aunt Hobbit, more cheerfully now. "His very own slush fund."

"He was quite proud of it!" added Aunt Print. "Said he was going to corner the world market on aluminium..."

"Aluminium?" I queried. "why?"

Aunt Print shrugged. "He said boron nitrite was much lighter and harder, but it was too expensive. With only nine hundred and seventy million in kitty, it came down finally to a question of economics..."

"What came down to a question of economics?" I asked.

"Operation : Cloudeye," replied both the aunties at once.

"And what is Cloudeye?" I asked. Since they knew so much else, I wondered if they knew that.

"Simulated shut-down of all Earth installations in the event of an alien takeover," quoted Aunt Print. "Do you think we should ring Ed?" she continued worriedly. "It's difficult to know what to ask him we should do when he doesn't remember, but at the same time, we can't allow Colonel Freeman to languish in a prison cell..."

I hesitated. Should they warn the Commander that the Spanish Inquisition was likely to be on its way? Security, when they discovered that the Commander was involved in the shady dealings, would not hesitate to lift him from the clutches of Caltech, squirt some mind-openers into him, and demand to know what, where, how, why and who. And they would not do it with kid gloves.

"Colonel Freeman is quite capable of taking care of himself," I said, and the instant I made the statement I must have realized that it was true. He would, In his own time, tell us whether the whole business was criminal or legitimate, and in the meantime, I would do well, like the Aunties, to err on the side of caution. Maybe there was a simple explanation. Maybe the Commander had been saving up for five new aluminium moonbases - perhaps he wanted them made out of metal rather than the extruded plastic the present one was, and the aluminum would be less of a problem weight-wise than other metals when it came to escaping the Earth's gravitational field. Or, maybe there was another reasonable explanation. I knew there couldn't possibly be, but the mysterious phone call from Australia, tipped the balance. I decided not to tell anyone what the aunties had told me until Ginny Lake got back from Skydiver. She was, after all, a Colonel and if there was any reason on sweet blue Earth for what was going on, she'd know and keep my nose squeaky clean for me. In the meantime, I had a code to discover. I finished my breakfast and said "Well, back to the salt mines," and gave both the aunties a peck on the cheek with the admonition not to anything before they consulted me and I had consulted Colonel Lake.

I went straight back to HQ and fronted the General. He handed me a folder. it contained Commander Straker's personal file. I was too stunned to speak for several seconds after I opened the first page and realized what it was.

"Know the man, know the way he thinks, know the code," stated MacPherson assertively at me, and I was dismissed. Out through the communications room I went, and they were all staring at me. Later, I discovered that everyone knew what I was holding, because Jackson had made such an incredible stink about letting MacPherson have it. Even now, I can't understand Jackson's attitude - it must have only served to make MacPherson suspicious - when the whole business of knowing the Commander's psychology and therefore knowing the code was so ridiculous. I mean, it's great in theory, but in practice it leaves a lot to be desired. Jackson came close to muffing the whole thing, and if I had been alert enough, I would have realised a lot of things a whole lot sooner. But, it didn't occur to me that MacPherson didn't trust most of SHADO when it came to a conflict of loyalties. I knew he had sent Foster to Moonbase, but neither I, nor anyone else, had really twigged that he didn't want any of the Colonels still around to pull rank on either himself or Messer when it came to dealing with Freeman. Not that they could have pulled rank really, of course, but they could slide around procedures in SHADO that neither of the newcomers were fully familiar with yet, and pull a fast one. Me - well, I'd been in SHADO less than twenty-five months and most of that time had not been in HQ, but jaunting here and there, trouble-shooting on the computer system. My inherent loyalty was more likely to be to the organisation than to any specific person - at least that appeared to be the General's reasoning. Pity he was wrong.

I went back to the auxiliary computer room and began to read the Commander's file. Fascinating was the only word to describe it. The small bits of trivia, the larger-than-life humanity of a very private person, the scrawlings of a number of doctors In the margins - it was an intriguing jigsaw.

He loved golf, classical music, and muscatel grapes. Besides astrophysics, of course. Was educated at Roosevelt Preparatory School in the suburb of Lynn, Boston, and later at Selwyn-Lincoln College, Massachusetts, and at M.I.T.. Spent a summer at the tracking facility in Hawaii, when his studies got interrupted by Vietnam and several combat citations. He applied for NASA and even got as far as the astronaut training programme before his claustrophobia was picked up and he was barred from pursuing a career in that direction. (The ironies of life, eh? Can't be an astronaut, sonny, so you'll just have to command the largest permanent military presence on the moon, and visit it from time to time; of course!) He was shunted straight from NASA to 'Operation Bluebook' and after being largely responsible for collecting enough information to unequivocally prove the existence of UFO's was asked to head up SHADO on the recommendation of some Frenchman named Duval. Married 1969. Divorced 1971. Wife's name: Mary. Lives In Crocus Cottage . . . Surrey. There was an erasure along the whole length of the a and 'query? query?' was noted in the margin. One son, John, born April, 1970. Once a month rights. (Query by Jackson: No evidence of use of visiting rights since May, 1981. Still visiting irregularly or not at all? Query why?)

Then there was a lot of technical detail about standard psychological testing, physical testing and the usual guff. There were reams of monthly comments by Jackson and Fraser, none of which was particularly helpful.

I sat with the open file on one knee and set the manual override on my computer programme, I punched in Edward, Mary, John, Maryjohn, Johnmary, Crocus, Cottage, Surrey, Bluebook, Vietnam, Mekong, Delta, Saigon, Medal, Congress, Honour, Boston, Lynn, MIT, Hawaii, Selwyn, Lincoln, Kennedy, Cape, April, Duval, French, Shado, Shadow, Shadows, Light, Dark, Darkness, Gamow, Gravity. I even tried to try Roosevelt, Canaveral, Commander and Massachusetts, before I realised they were too long.

I took me two hours to run through just those few. I set the automatics back on line, locked the door and sat down with Keith Ford for a cup of coffee. "I don't suppose Colonel Freeman has given over with the access code yet?" I asked hopefully.

"I think he'll die first," said Ford quietly and bleakly. "If MacPherson orders Jackson to pump anything else in the serum line into him, I don't know how he'll survive..."

"I don't know how he's keeping quiet," I said. "Maybe they haven't thought of torture yet - these truth serum cocktails are really for. . ." I broke off, alarmed at the look on Ford's face. "Hey," I lowered my voice to a whisper, "they aren't torturing him, are they?" Ford didn't answer. "Are they?" I persisted, and when he still didn't answer, I swore a great deal. What was so precious on that damn disc that had to be so dearly protected? I scooted across the road to the flat, pounding through the door like a rampaging elephant. "Ring California," I commanded Aunt Hobbit. "ring that dear and damn Commander of yours and ask him if he was going to use an access code of eight letters or less, what would it be?" I thrust the phone into her hands. "Ring," I yelled into her face.

She complied, merely protesting quietly, "If you're trying to find a specific code, he probably doesn't remember it." The phone rang out before it was answered. In a cold, blazing fury I stalked out without a word and went back to the auxiliary computer room. Ford let me in and, seeing the state of the desk thanked him at once for cleaning up. I had left in an unholy mess - with the Commander's file scattered all over the place. "I haven't touched a thing," said Keith. I stared at him. And he at me.

"You told me no one else can get in here," I said, diving for the disc drive. The disc was still in there, remaining merrily elusive about its contents. I breathed a huge sigh of relief and plunged towards the file. It was stacked into a nice, neat order, personal stuff first. Physical and IQ results next. Psychological stuff last. Not at all the chronological file I had originally been given. I checked on my own programme disc. It was still running. I wondered who had been in. But Keith was wondering other dire things. "There's so way in here," he mused to himself. "And there's no one authorised to come in. I asked MacPherson to make it off-limits." His eyes were dark and troubled, and he looked at the Commander's file carefully. "Can I have the folder it's in?" he asked. "There can't be too many people who ever had their hands on the Commander's file. I might just be able to get the boys down in the lab to dust up a few fingerprints for me."

I handed it to him, and he took it gingerly by one corner. Then he locked the door again and I punched in America, States, physics, astro, Einstein, Feynmann, New York, Newyork, London, Geneva, AC, national, nation, Earth, Kepler, Newton, ellipse, calculus, Leibniz, Germany, German, Galileo, Galilei, Italy, Rome, Greece, Athens, Pericles, Oracle, Delphi, Diana, Huntress, Hunter, Orlon, Moon, Lunar, Lunatic, Lunatick, (I had high hopes of that one, briefly, as it was just the sort of thing the Commander would name something) Module, Mode, Model, Hero, Heroine, Heroes, Heroines, Columbia, Shuttle, Space, Frontier, Beam, Beam me, Beam up, Beammeup, Scotty, Muscatel, Grape, Grapes, Champagne, Toast, Victory, Triumph, and at that stage I had better start writing down the ones I'd used so that I wouldn't duplicate them. After hours straight, my back was killing me, my eyes felt like they were going to fall out, my head ached atrociously and I was stumped. I typed 'stumped' into the computer on the off-chance. But it didn't work. I went back to the flat for forty winks after setting the automatics back on line. I also left a thread in the doorway.

I was dog tired, too tired for an interrogation by the aunties. "We rang Ed," they said. "He wants to know how bad things are. He ways he can come back if there's a real emergency. But he stresses - it's got to be end-of-the-world type emergency. Is it, Robert?" I shrugged, too brain-wilted to know. Then I tumbled into bed. I punched words in computers in my dreams and felt no less tired when I awoke. Aunt Hobbit, the old sweetie, brought me in a hot, steaming, sugary coffee. They must have gone out especially and got it for me, because it's not the sort of thing they kept In the house. Even for Aunt Hobbit's prayer meetings. It was tea, or hot water, if you weren't into the tannic flavouring. "Did you ask the Commander about what code he would choose?" I queried, sipping the warm, sweet liquid.

"He asked what the code was for," replied Aunt Hobbit. "He said he'd probably name things by the operation it entailed. So, he said that if you could give him some hints what the code was used for, he might be able to tell you what it is." She sat down on the quilt beside me, and stared into my eyes. "Why don't you go to California and see him and tell him all the truth - all about SHADO? He might just remember..."

"I'd never get permission," I stated flatly. Actually, I was of the suspicion that the Commander might be back in England sooner than anyone anticipated - it was only a matter of time before Henderson gave the security boys orders to go pick him up for questioning, memory or no memory.

Aunt Print suddenly loomed in the doorway. "You've no objection if one or both of us go though, have you, Robert?" she asked softly.

I jerked up against my pillow. "I don't think it's... well, necessary... or wise," I said.

"If we'd already booked the tickets to Los Angeles," asked Aunt Hobbit, patting my h