05- The Tango Briefing by Adam Hall

Author:Adam Hall [Hall, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780061005305
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 1973-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Page 96

I turned twice more, full-circle.

At least there would be nomore effort needed,now that this point was reached. The reckoning had been wrong, that was all. Somewhere between the Philips tower and the zeros lining up on the computer there had been a mistake made in the figures. The margin of error, mon ami, is even larger than we'd thought.

There was no point in organizing a day's march: by the law of averages I would be as likely to move away from the wreck of the freighter as towards it. I had a compass but I didn't know the bearing. If I set off at random the odds against success were precisely three hundred and sixty to one.

Onset of lassitude, euphoria almost. Pain coming back, normal reaction, nothing important to do, can concentrate on the discomfort, crouched on the sand with my back to the heat and the light, here endeth the mission, you can't win them all. A vague sense of wonder that the sun was perfectly silent, sending this degree of heat over so much distance, you'd expect to hear a roaring, however faint, here where silence could be broken by a grain of sand hitting the side of a box.

My shadow humped before me, an insubstantial Buddha.

Try again I've tried then bloody well try again.

Lurching about, it's the sand, you can't ever get your balance. The red ring flaring at the edge of the field and the dunes flowing through, full-circle. Negative. Take a rest.

A kind of sleep, timeless and with no dream-element recalled, teeming images but so disconnected as to have no significance, then on my feet again and wandering about feeling stronger physically but not really determined about anything, the organism taking care of itself, getting the wind up because the box down there wasn't very big, forty-eight hours plus reserves and that's our lot.

Kept bumping my forehead against the eyepieces, sweat running down, awareness of sand in the boots and a thirst beginning, a certain amount of cerebration continuing: the parallax factor critically important because a near dune could block medium-field gaps, be an interesting thing to work out given a man of certain height standing upon a dune of a certain height and given a million dunes, the nearest of them concealing the gaps between those more distant, what proportion of the terrain can he actually observe, and what proportion is hidden from him?

To hell with academic problems: concentrate on the one thing that could just conceivably drag the mission back on its feet and yes, you snivelling little perisher, save our skin.

Parallax.

By lateral movement the observer exposes to view the gaps between distant dunes hitherto concealed by those in the foreground. By bodily rotation he increases this extension of view a hundredfold. Put it like that and it looks fair enough but the wreck isn't necessarily visible in one of the gaps, it can be lying on its belly full-square behind the highest dune of them all and you can practise your lateral movement and bodily rotation till the heat knocks you flat on your face.

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