The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  “Which ones exactly.”

  “Oh, um... Miss Simmons, and Miss Rice. And Mr Solomon who was with them in the helicopter but he has serious injuries...”

  “..but no head injuries...”

  “CT was negative.”

  “Who else?”

  “Mr. Wagner—the American chap—multiple fractures to the lower limbs...”

  “But not his skull.”

  “Yes, again CT negative.”

  “Keep going.”

  “Miss Starlight.”

  “Is that really her name?”

  “Apparently. Um—Mr. Rogerson—the pilot of the helicopter. But he’s on a respirator and not expected...”

  “Any others?”

  “What are you looking for? We still have thirty-one ICU casualties in the building.”

  “CT scan negative—no head contusion or other injury that justifies coma.”

  “I see. Well, I think that’s all.”

  By this time, George had broken away from the couple and come to join the discussion.

  “I want those cases isolated to a single ward. Full quarantine,” Felicity was saying.

  “You sure that’s justified?” George asked.

  “No. But all of these people are comatose and there isn’t any identifiable reason why they should be. Maybe its some gas or some bacteria thrown up by the volcano. I don’t know, but I think we’d better isolate them until we do.”

  *

  They reached the chateau on the third morning after the eruption. There were still hot spots everywhere and bubbling mud pools in the midst of the grey moonscape. An eerie, acrid steam drifted across the whole mountainside.

  The rescue team looked at the chateau and saw what they already expected from aerial photographs—that the building was completely flattened with most of the debris scattered over a wide area and the whole lot buried under several centimetres of mud that was the result of the ash combining with the melted snow.

  There was no hope of survivors by then—it became the morbid task of digging out the forty or so bodies that they knew to be in amongst the dripping wreckage. Twin-rotor helicopters lowered in excavation equipment and the gruesome job began. The machines gnawed at the ever-hardening wall of ash and the men came in behind, removing the remaining fragments by hand. Within a few days, those bodies not removed would be entombed in stone forever.

  The bodies they found were charred, fragile remnants: it soon became apparent that nothing recognisable was going to be recovered. They directed the mechanical claw in ahead of them to hurry the job, but after about an hour, a new tragedy almost occurred when the machine and its driver broke through the surface and crashed into a hole. The driver broke a leg and was evacuated and the machine had been towed out only with great difficulty. As the men stood around the dark chasm they had inadvertently opened, an unexpected odour reached their nostrils.

  “Shit,” the leader said. “We’ve broken through to the wine cellar.”

  Two men in fireproof suits and breathing apparatus entered the hole, flashing brilliant torches. They saw the cellar roof remained intact even though the shelving had collapsed and the floor was a swamp of wine and broken glass. They searched for a time and then came upon a corpse. And then came the cry.

  “We got a live one here!”

  Paramedics went in and carefully brought the injured man out on a stretcher. He was unconscious and someone even dared joke about that being the result of two days and nights immersed in fine vintage wine. But in fact he had been lying on a raised bench with the corpse of another man on top of him. They found a few minor lacerations and a great deal of contusion; he had serious respiratory problems and something similar to scurvy had glued his clothing to his flesh. But he was alive.

  Eighty-five people had died, two hundred and thirty-three were rescued from the ravaged area, forty-two were admitted to hospital needing intensive care, eleven were missing never to be found. Brian Carrick was the last miraculous survivor of the triple eruption on Tongariro plateau.

  *

  Gavin served breakfast on the patio—it was a rare treat. He enlisted the aid of the girls as waitresses while Wendell scanned the newspaper.

  “They’ve unearthed another survivor,” he announced, perhaps not realising the cruelty of his words.

  Felicity tried not to care. She had obeyed Barbara’s orders. Long sleep, two meals, time with the family. Gavin should have been at school, she knew, and the girls at childcare, and Wendell at his rooms. They all took the morning off because mum was finally awake. Breakfast was at ten that morning.

  Melissa spilled the grapefruit juice on her dressing gown, Megan slopped too much skimmed milk into the muesli, Gavin had boiled the egg thirty seconds too long, and the croissant was cold by the time Wendell filled it with blackberry jam. In other words, it was the most perfect breakfast she could ever remember. And the freshly brewed coffee, after gallons of the muck at the hospital, was a joy in itself.

  “Amazing after all this time,” Felicity murmured.

  “Ah,” Wendell grinned. “Am I to assume that your lack of interest indicates the crisis is over?”

  “What makes you think I’m not interested?”

  “You let me read the paper first. Didn’t jump up and rush off to the hospital when you heard about your new patient. I regard all this as indicative of your recovery.”

  “I’ll get there soon enough.”

  “Well, at least it banished politics from the front page for a few days,” Wendell mused.

  “There wasn’t much lava,” Gavin protested.

  “What happens to the people when their toes are coma-ed?” Melissa asked.

  “Your mother doesn’t wish to talk about that,” Wendell scolded gently.

  “You didn’t come home for three days,” Megan said, crawling into her lap.

  “Meegs, mum is tired,” Melissa said bossily.

  “She’s all right,” Felicity smiled. Her knees, like her back, were still very stiff. She had pushed it all right. Still, she was rested and feeling good. Then the telephone rang.

  Wendell went and answered it, and returned immediately. “Possibility one,” he said sourly.

  With a groan, Felicity set Megan back on her feet and found her own and hurried through the house.

  “Dr Campbell here.”

  “Oh, Dr Campbell,” Shirley Benson blubbered on the other end. “We had a new IC patient come in overnight...”

  “Yes, Shirley. I heard.”

  “CT was clear, but he’s in a coma—like the others. Can’t really justify it from his condition.”

  “What major traumas do we have?”

  “None really, except his epidermis is falling off...”

  “Truly?”

  “He was pickled in wine, apparently.”

  “Lucky bugger. I wish I was.”

  “I really shouldn’t have rung you at home but...”

  “What’s your problem, Shirley?”

  “Do you want him isolated, like the others?”

  “Yes. Have any of them showed signs of consciousness?”

  “No.”

  “Okay. Yes, isolate him too. I’ll be there in a couple of hours anyway.”

  “Fine...”

  “Is everything else okay?”

  “Umm… Oh yes. Yes. Everything’s fine.”

  When she hung up, Felicity stood by the telephone for a few minutes. It wasn’t like Shirley Benson to make such a call. She had already known the answer to her own question anyway. Felicity could not help thinking that there was some other reason why she rang—something that, once on the telephone, Shirley could not bring herself to express. Felicity returned to the patio, smiling at her family.

  “I have to go,” she said.

  “You should really rest a little while yet...” Wendell scowled.

  “No. I have to go now,” Felicity insisted.

  *

  Shirley Benson had suffered a rare fright. The truth was that the ne
w patient—Mr. Carrick—was already in the isolation ward and had been since he arrived that evening. Shirley was on night duty and should have gone off in the morning but she waited for Doctor Campbell to arrive. She would wait—no matter how long it took.

  In the night she had visited the isolation ward and stood amidst the beds, the lights were dimmed but for the monitoring equipment with its screens of tracings busily indicating that everything was normal. The lights flickered, and the room was abuzz with a faint sound, and it was probably only Shirley’s long experience with such equipment that caused her to sense something was wrong.

  She busied herself, trying to ignore what was an irrational sensation. These people were all ones across the board on the Glasgow Scale—yet there was full EEG, ECG, respiration normal. Every four hours, they needed liquifilm to keep their unblinking eyes moist but otherwise nothing happened. There was no decerebrate rigidity—their limbs remained flexible, skin texture good except poor Mr. Carrick. For all intents and purposes, they might have been asleep. Electrolyte balance good, respiratory and circulatory status good. Nothing was wrong, except she could sense at the core of her being that something was different. Something weird.

  At first it was impossible to say what. She walked over to Mr. Solomon’s console and considered it for a time. All readings normal. EEG, ECC pulse rate, blood flow, normal, normal.

  “You seem fine, Joe. Everything ticking along perfectly,” she told the unconscious man.

  Joe Solomon’s spine was broken and no one had told him yet. No one had told him that his wife was dead either. You could never tell just how aware comatose patients were. For Joe Solomon, it might be better if he never woke up.

  Worse still was the American gentleman, Kevin Wagner, who didn’t yet know that he had lost his whole family. Alone and far from home—but he was a fit and healthy young man who, unlike Joe Solomon, would eventually make a full recovery. Chrissie Rice had some nasty abdominal injuries, and there was Brian Carrick’s pickled skin—best not to drive after being too close to him. Lorna and Andromeda were in perfect health. Only sleeping. Strange in itself. But there was something else.

  She crossed to Lorna Simmons’ monitor and thought about that. Normal, normal. All normal, even Mr. Carrick. And then it struck her. It was all just a little too normal.

  For a time she moved about the monitors, not quite sure of what she was doing but doing it anyway. She switched switches, individualising the screens and sequences until she found what she wanted. And when she did, she jolted with shock. She almost screamed. She did run out of the room.

  She took herself to the cafeteria and had a cup of coffee. Her hands were still shaking. The equipment was faulty. That had to be it. She would call maintenance in the morning and have them sort it out. Only it wasn’t an equipment fault. She had checked each monitor and knew the absurdity it indicated so clearly was the truth.

  For it had been when she cut out the input from all sources except the EEG on all six monitors that she understood what had bothered her. They were all the same. All six patients had precisely the same alpha waves. It was as if only all of the monitors were reading the output from just one patient.

  She went back, calmer now, and tried the experiment again. It wasn’t a maintenance problem. They hadn’t foolishly hooked all the EEGs into just one patient. All six people were experiencing exactly the same brain activity. There was no doubt. The fact that it couldn’t possibly happen was rapidly becoming irrelevant.

  *

  Felicity stood in the ward with Barbara Crane, Roy Bannister the Maintenance chief, and George Hanley, as they considered the machines. Shirley Benson had been sent home with a sedative.

  “Perhaps they were all switched on at the same instant,” Barbara suggested to show how little she knew about it.

  “Doesn’t matter,” Roy Bannister said. “Each monitor would immediately pick up on the waves of the individual brain it was monitoring.”

  “Then how do you explain it?” Barbara wanted to know.

  “I can’t. It’s kinda like they all got the same brain.”

  “A sort of collective unconsciousness,” George suggested.

  “That’s right,” Roy thought. “You know. They reckon we all share the same sub-conscious mind.”

  “Let’s leave Freud out of this, shall we?” Barbara scowled, knowing a dirty word when she heard one.

  “I don’t know if we can,” Felicity murmured, looking around as if Sigmund was standing right behind her.

  “Well, the patients all seem to be surviving it, whatever it is,” Barbara said irritably. “And we do have a lot of other sick people to deal with. Can’t afford to waste time over this.”

  Barbara hurried off as if she had patients needing her attention, rather than paperwork, and Roy wandered away, scratching his head but then he often did.

  “Well, at least now we know why the comas don’t relate to their injuries,” George said thoughtfully. “They’re all in the same coma, literally.”

  “I doubt that. It has to be in the equipment somewhere,” Felicity knew. “Computers behave like this. People don’t.”

  “As far as we know.”

  “You have a better idea for me, George?”

  “Maybe this does have something to do with the collective unconscious.”

  “Well,” Felicity smiled. “They’re an unconscious collective, at least. The rest is psycho-babble, George.”

  *

  There was an annoying young man who wore a black silk shirt, lurid checked pants, a tweed jacket and dark glasses even indoors. His hair was all greasy curls and the tatters of a failed beard clung to his acned chin. He strutted about making demands in his abrasive English shop-steward accent, pouting with resolution.

  “She’s got commitments, you know. I gotta to know when she’ll be available.”

  “We can’t possibly know that, Mr. Tierney.”

  “I’ve already cancelled engagements right round the South Island. A lot of bloody disappointed people. Andromeda Starlight is a big name in show biz, you know.”

  Felicity had never heard of her. “We just have to wait, Mr. Tierney,” she said wearily.

  “I gotta to book her in Oz. There’s contracts and all sorts of arrangements. King’s Cross, Surfers, big time!”

  “I’m sure that when they hear she was blown up by a volcano, they’ll understand, Mr. Tierney.”

  “We really didn’t need this right now. Her career was peaking. Gold dust is slippin’ through our fingers here.”

  “You must be patient...”

  “But how come you keep sayin’ there’s nothing wrong with her.”

  “Apart from a lack of consciousness, there isn’t.”

  “You must have some idea. Come on. Give me your best shot.”

  “We have no idea. People have remained in unexplained comatose conditions like this for all their lives, although not usually. A few hours or days is much more common. It really is quite unpredictable.”

  “How many days, average? Give me somethin’ to work with.”

  “We have no idea.”

  “Can’t you give her somethin’ to wake her up?”

  “No. No such inducement exists and there would be no moral basis for using it if it did.”

  “But what the hell is she doing, just lying there!”

  “Just lying there,” Felicity said.

  *

  Looking like a Viking Chieftain who had just wandered in from a distant century, Harley Thyssen inhabited his office the way a bear inhabits a cave. The whole place was an abominable mess of books and charts despite Brenda’s constant efforts to maintain some sort of order.

  Of Norwegian origin, Thyssen was a massive man in all directions with wild red hair and beard beneath a weather-beaten balding crown. His narrow eyes looked straight through you. He looked like a man who had spent most of his life too close to the rim of erupting volcanoes and had a voice like an earthquake as well. He sat behind his desk with rounded sh
oulders and his elbows up and hands placed flat, like a gorilla poised to spring over the laminate and tear his visitor limb from limb.

  “You look awful, Jamila,” he said gruffly.

  It wasn’t the lack of welcoming compliment that surprised Jami but the fact that he noticed her appearance at all.

  “I got in late last night. Had to book into a cheap hotel. I spent the morning trying to arrange accommodation at one of the colleges.”

  “You should have called,” Thyssen said. “Brenda already arranged a room for you on the campus. See her on the way out.”

  The office suddenly yawned before her like a trap.

  “Thank you,” she said properly.

  Unlike most student-professor relationships, the longer Jami had known Thyssen the more she had become intimidated by him. It gave her little comfort to know that he scared the living daylights out of everyone else on the campus as well. He was her mentor and intimate colleague and she was terrified of him.

  “I spent thirty years trying to get into a position to see a mountain blow its top and never made it,” Thyssen was saying. “You ought to feel privileged.”

  “Perhaps I will when the jet-lag wears off.”

  In fact she was growing appreciative of her numbed senses. She was preparing herself for a classic Thyssen roasting from a man who learned everything he knew from Etna and Stromboli.

  “No time for jet-lag,” Thyssen said, smiling, although his smile was always a threat. “While you were lounging in the luxury of modern flight, I was saving your ass.”

  “Really?”

  “Have a look at this,” he said, searching under a pile of papers to find his keyboard. She got up and walked around to his side of the desk to observe the computer screen.

  “I got Pascoe to model your data from Ruapehu,” he said, thumping keys as if he was making a stone hammer. “Three simultaneous epicentres, each 6.3.”