‘She’s a smart kid, smarter than you.’
‘Someone once told me the Aviary disseminates disinformation.’
‘It’s true.’
‘And one way they do that is forge the truth in order to discredit it. It seems to me,’ I said, ‘that if there really were such things as genuine contactees and the organisation you work for wanted to prevent anyone taking them seriously, if you wanted to somehow suppress the truth like Raspiwtin says . . .’ I paused.
He looked at me. ‘Go on.’
‘A good way to do that would be to spread stories like this. Maybe even arrange for the contactee to be hypnotised and claim later that he disgorged all manner of nonsense. After all, a person under hypnosis would have no way of knowing afterwards whether it was true or not.’
‘No way at all,’ said Sauerkopp.
‘You could claim he said anything you liked.’
‘Yes, it would be like someone claiming you talk in your sleep. How could you dispute it?’
‘The poor bloke coming out with a story like that would be mocked.’
‘What you describe is a classic disinformation campaign. But that’s not what happened with the farmer. What he described in the hypnosis with Mrs Bwlchgwallter really happened. And now, a quarter of a century later, they came back to see Iestyn.’
‘For old time’s sake, I suppose?’
‘Why not?’
We both sat hunched over, anchoring the styrofoam cups with our hands lest the wind tipped them over.
‘And yet,’ I said. ‘And yet . . .’
‘The “and yet” is always the interesting bit.’
‘If there was nothing to hide, why would you be here hiding it?’
Sauerkopp looked up and over my shoulder into the distance. ‘Out there somewhere in the far reaches of our universe there is a planet identical to ours in every detail except that the two men sitting here on the summit of Constitutional Hill this afternoon are drinking rum.’
I took out my hip flask and poured rum into the tea. ‘Where does Raspiwtin fit into all this?’
‘Officially he’s an ecclesiastical policeman from the monastery on Caldey Island, investigating the rumours about Skweeple. If he finds out it’s true that Ercwleff violated Skweeple, he’ll put a Zed Notice on the town. Have it razed and ploughed into the ground. But he’ll never find any evidence. Old Sauerkopp is too smart for him.’
‘What about unofficially? What is he really up to?’
‘What did he tell you?’
‘Lots of things. He told me about his time in Burma, and in the Vatican laundry, but mostly he said he was here to save humankind from making war. He said if he could prove there were aliens out there we would all stop killing each other. Was that all moonshine he was telling me?’
‘No, I think he’s serious.’
‘It sounds like quite a noble plan.’
‘It is. The trouble is, it wouldn’t work out the way he thinks. It would be a catastrophe. That’s what my job is all about. Keeping well-meaning fools like him in check.’
‘Why? If there are aliens, why are we not allowed to know?’
He looked at me as if the answer was obvious.
‘Why?’ I asked again.
He sighed. ‘Yes, I know. People think the revelation that we are being visited by aliens would be just so wonderful for Planet Earth; but the truth is, it would be a disaster. Do you own stock?’
‘Couple of share certificates in the Rock Factory left to me by my aunt. That’s about it.’
He forced a smile. ‘How much do you think they would be worth the day after the aliens landed at Cardiff Arms Park? Believe me, the reaction from the mob wouldn’t be pretty. I don’t care greatly for religion, but I’m not sure I’d want to wake up the day all those billions of people who had devoted their lives to it suddenly found out it wasn’t true. For a lot of them it is the bedrock of morality, the reason they don’t kill or steal or violate your daughter. Would you like to be around when they find out they’ve been duped? The ultimate sanction, the penalty you pay in the next life, is no longer valid? Goodbye governance, law and order, goodbye everything. We’ll all be finished, including you.’
‘Don’t humanity deserve to know the truth?’
‘Of course they don’t, you stupid fool. That’s just idealistic nonsense. You know that in your heart. Even if you thought they deserved it, would you want to be the one who told them? The world might be in a mess at the moment, but it’s a familiar sort of mess, it’s a mess that works, and we get by after a fashion. If the President of the United States addressed the people of the world tomorrow and told them aliens were official, it would be as cataclysmic as a comet hitting the Pacific Ocean and generating a tsunami 5 miles high. It would be like the end of the dinosaurs. They’ll have to disclose it one day, but I sure as hell don’t want to be around when they do.’
‘Of course, because once people find out the government have known for forty years and not told them, they might not be too happy about it.’
‘For sure! But trust me, Louie, your head will be the first on a stick. People like you and me will be the first to get that honour because we are the stupid ones who will put up a fight when the mob arrive. When they turn up with their torches flickering in the night, the same ones who used to leave flaming crosses as their calling cards, you’ll be there saying, “This is my house, no one crosses this threshold, you’ll have to kill me first,” and they’ll be happy to oblige you. You and me are in the same business, you just don’t want to believe it.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You wage your war every day against the heads-on-sticks guys, the cross-burners. You get paid peanuts, risk your life for people who don’t deserve it, you get banged over the head with tyre irons . . . You don’t realise how close we are to the sharpened sticks. The only thing holding back the tide is the cops. You’ll say they are venal and corrupt, and I wouldn’t disagree, but they do the job that someone has to do. However bad they get, they will never be as bad as what happens if they don’t show up to work tomorrow. And this is the golden uplands as far as humanity is concerned. In the past it was much worse. It wouldn’t take much for us to regress a few centuries. That charlatan Raspiwtin says we are all in thrall, imprisoned in a cage of our own imagining, bars of delusion that we could blink away if we awoke from our trance. He’s right, mostly. We are all held in thrall, but the magic spell is the delusion that the status quo I just described is robust. The head-on-sticks guys keep a low profile, they lurk in the shadows, but really, what’s stopping them taking over? Almost nothing. It’s just a realisation away. Have you seen how little it takes for them to take to the street and start looting? That’s always where it starts. Sure, we conceal the truth. But only because we are not in the slightest doubt about what would happen if it ever got out.’
‘Maybe there would be anarchy for a while, but humanity would be better off in the long run.’
‘I’m sure you are right, but we’ve only got one life. It’s like planting a tree that won’t fruit in your lifetime. What’s the point?’
‘So you are saying it would be like that here? Aberystwyth would be like the inside of that locked-down prison you told me about?’
‘Not Aberystwyth, Louie, the whole world.’
I drained my tea, crushed the cup into a ball and put it to rest on the ashtray. A puff of wind blew it away.
‘The letter Raspiwtin gave me, the interdepartmental Aviary memo. I took it to a kid, a forensic linguist. He said it was a fake. But according to you it told the truth?’
‘Exactly! The investigation into the story of Iestyn, the discovery that he had been resurrected, was true. So we faked the account of it.’
‘In order to discredit the truth. And the Buick?’