19/10/1985 - Great Scott

I stood in Princes Street Gardens and gawped. The monstrous Scott Monument stood before me like a freakishly alien Eiffel Tower. Geigeresque in appearance, its four thunderous legs with their spearing pinnacles, its endlessly reaching, impossibly sharp spire, its perfect quadrilateral symmetry and its sleek streamlined profile all glaringly belied its status as 'tourist attraction'. It may have been superficially decorated in intricate gothic finery but it was quite perfectly obvious to anybody who even glanced at the thing that it was a spaceship. All pretence that it was a monument to a great explorer was frankly ludicrous and this, perhaps, is why my new employers had managed to get away with stationing a ruddy great rocket ship in full view slap bang in the middle of a major capital city. It was obviously a spaceship, so therefore nobody would ever believe that it was one.

Which was good, because it wasn't a spaceship.

It was a missile.

The thought gave me the creeps. And made me shiver. Although that may have been the Edinburgh weather. But I was certainly very profoundly disturbed by the thought that not twenty metres away from me was a 200 foot tall alien missile with the power to destroy half the world. And I was even more disturbed by the thought that, should I fail in my mission, that very power would be devastatingly unleashed by an enemy as yet unknown to me.

I decided to do a bit of sightseeing whilst I was there, so I paid the man at the foot of the monument and climbed the narrow stone spiral staircase up to the first floor. I emerged after what seemed an eternity into a confusing maze of narrow walkways, overlooked menacingly by shadowy, looming gothic figures and motifs. I followed the walkway round and realised that it was actually just a simple circuit of the monument. The mass of shapes and the networks of light and dark cast as the sunlight found its way through tortuous gaps in the architecture made the geography of the monument seem more complex than it really was. At each of the four corners were narrow viewing platforms that bridged the gap to the monument's leg pinnacles. I ventured onto these and peered down at the people lazing about in the park below as the buses passed down Princes Street on one side and the trains passed beneath the shadow of the castle on the other. They were small and content and blissfully unaware of so much. Again I felt that slight pang of superiority, but I suppressed it quickly - I knew that ruin lay down that road.

I continued the perfectly symmetrical perimeter walk and ended up back by the entrance to the stairs, which I now understood to be in one corner of the monument. I looked around again and spotted something I hadn't seen before. There was a doorway into the very centre of the monument. I knew what this was - the mission instructions had been very specific. I peered in cautiously, but nobody was present. I remember being very surprised by the sumptuous interior decor of the room - the symmetrical array of twin stained glass windows, the beautifully finished light wooden detailing, the polished stone floor. But the thing I was most interested in was the object in the exact centre of the room.

Most people would probably describe the object as a table. I guess in a way it was. It had lots of spider-like metal legs, it had a circular wooden surface. But it also had a truncated cone-like structure poking out from its centre, of a diameter about one-quarter that of the table's and a height of two or three feet. Without the prior knowledge of my mission details I would have been at a loss to describe what this could possibly be. And even if I were to have guessed, I wouldn't even have gotten close. For this was the bridge of the ship. This was where the missile was piloted from. This was the command centre. Admittedly, I struggled to understand why a missile would need piloting, but hey, I was new to all this and the rulers of the galaxy probably knew what they were talking about. Who was I to question them? I couldn't find much else of interest in the room - there were some feeble attempts at tourist information and one or two flyers for local events, but nothing that really grabbed my attention.

Satisfied with my scoping of the command centre, I left the room, found the next set of spiral stairs (by one of the other corners of the structure) and set about exploring the higher floors. In total, it went up to a fourth storey, each one progressively tinier than the last. By the time I got to the top floor (which was little more than a platform wrapping the upper reaches of the monument) I was well and truly knackered, and feeling seriously impaired by the extreme lack of space. I mean, really, there was barely room to breathe up there, and as for the staircase, well, you had to squeeze yourself up, your shoulders physically brushing against the walls. A chubbier person than myself would have really struggled. And it was high - I mean, a lot higher than you might at first imagine. I seemed to be higher than the top of the half-finished National Monument I could see away in the distance, and that was stuck of top of a hill. It was all quite frightening. And this structure was supposedly just a monument? Built in the mid 19th century? Ridiculous that anyone believed that really.

I couldn't wait to get off the thing by this time, so I made my way (trembling slightly) down all the spiral staircases, noting that the final flight to the ground floor now seemed hugely spacious and easily traversable in comparison, and eventually emerged blinking into the bright daylight, basking in the huge space around me.

I looked back at the monument and breathed deeply.

Now all I had to was destroy it.