Dark Side of the Moon by Les Wood

Author:Les Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Freight Books

The Model

They were grudging, but they gave Boag credit anyway. He’d spent hours at it, measuring, sawing, gluing, nailing.

Knitting.

Well, not knitting exactly, but certainly indulging in wool-related activities.

They’d gathered round Boag’s life-sized model of the Dark Side of the Moon display plinth which he’d set up in the living room of his flat – inspecting, judging, questioning. Boag was handy; not in the good-man-to-have-in-a-street-fight sense of handy, but in the good-at-building-things-from-scraps-of-wood sense. He’d done a very decent job on this, if he said so himself.

‘And you’re sure this is the right size, the proportions are all correct?’ Kyle had asked.

‘Ah told you before,’ Boag replied, exasperated. ‘Ah took everything from the picture you took on your mobile. Scaled it all to Campbell’s height.’

***

After the session in the tattoo parlour, when Boddice had set out the details of their tasks, Kyle had gone back to the store on his own. Posing as an excited rubber-necking tourist, an eager beaver desperate to see where the mighty Dark Side of the Moon would be displayed. The perfect excuse to grab a photo of the display plinth on his mobile, made easier, of course, by Campbell being on security in the Bubble that day. A few days later, and it would be the big boys, the Securarama heavies, watching the place, even though the diamond was still a thousand miles and a fortnight away. Anyone whipping out a camera or a mobile phone then would have politely, but firmly, been told to shove it the fuck up their arse.

Once they had the picture, Boddice had pulled Boag aside and told him he was ‘tasking’ him to build a life size model, something to practice on. Tasking. Fucking management speak; where had that come from for Christ’s sake?

Still, by having Campbell standing to attention beside the plinth in the picture, and by measuring his exact height, Boag could easily work out the relative proportions of the structure – the height, the diameter, the angle of taper as it swept up to the apex holding the single spike on which the diamond would rest. But most importantly, he could calculate the dimensions of the array of lasers surrounding the whole construction.

Boag painstakingly reproduced the whole set-up, using fishing line to suspend the mock-up of the laser grid from the ceiling so that it floated above the plinth at just the right height, and arranging the positions of the ‘sensors’ on the floor surrounding the base of the plinth. The really tricky bit was replicating the path of the beams; Campbell had told him that each of the lasers was angled such that the beam fell not on the sensor immediately underneath, but on the one four along to the left, clockwise. This gave a slanted pattern of forty-eight beams that Boag reproduced using strands of red wool. There were a further two banks of lasers and sensors running down either side, sending horizontal beams criss-crossing those coming down from above.

More measurements, more foutering about with red wool.

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