[Sticks]

Notes on Episode 12

[strike]Clean Slate[/strike] – Clean Wipe
I managed to find that in the 1993 rewrite, operation Clean wipe in chapter 11 became Clean Slate in chapter 12. I suspect this may have been an error in the 1993 rewrite, so for this reprinting this “error” has been corrected.

Sexual Harassment of an employee
In the past, as in the future / present the character of Reynolds sexually harasses his secretary in a certain way. This was also not in the original 1988 version and came in with the 1993 rewrite. It is dubious anyone would get away with this treatment of an employee, so this was to show not just how evil this villain was, but how powerful he thought he was. One could point out that as the secretary has a recent criminal record how would she get the job there in the first place and get into this position, especially as her probation condition for staying out of prison is to hold down a job. Would an air base allow someone like that near them?

All I can think of is that maybe Reynolds saw her somewhere in a pub trying to find work or maybe he just happened to be in court that day, and found a way to bypass the official hiring and firing process which would have been carried out by the RAF and not the USAF. I suppose this would have to be chalked up to poetic or literary licence, vastly stretched to breaking point. I would hope that with my more contemporary output I was giving more thought to how things could come about.

Membership of a clan?
Although this is set in Scotland, where there are a number of Scottish clans, each with their own unique tartan, at the time I was not thinking about Scottish clans, more something along the lines of a cross between the Klu-Klux Clan and the Masons. (Apologies to and Masons here) The Klu-Klux clan were a white supremacist group in the United States of America.

Man in a White Suit
This character appears a number of times throughout this story. All I can think of having checked through the 1988 and 1989 originals is that I was planning on augmenting one of the other stories, of which the last one included time travel. Yet again this is to show how confusing time travel can be.

RGU St Andrew Street
Actually the RGIT St Andrew Street building as I remember it was quite substantially built, presumably from granite, as quite a number of buildings in Aberdeen are. Unfortunately I can find no images of it to put up here. It is dubious a simple air to ground missile fired from a helicopter would have done much damage to the main fabric of the out side. The only thing that could level it I suppose would be a few cruise missiles. This was obviously something I overlooked from the first Gulf War in 1991. I suppose if they were to hit through windows, they might achieve some severe damage. At the time of the original 1988 story line, it just sounded so cool, so once again, it must have been poetic licence and lack of research.

As another aside, I looked up the online prospectus for Robert Gordon’s University, and the course I did, involving physics does not seem to be run anymore.