The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  *

  Lorna and Chrissie saw the same video images as they sat in the bar of the Savoy Hotel in Melbourne, as they waited for the departure of their train north from Spencer Street station following another frantic flight from New Zealand. The video images appeared on the TV screen at the end of the bar. Since the sound was turned down, no explanation of the strange scenes was possible, but Lorna was spluttering into her Harvey Wallbanger and pointing. “Hey. That’s what I did!” she cried.

  “Well, don’t tell everybody, Lorna,” Chrissie hushed her.

  *

  Andromeda Starlight saw them in a motel room in Charters Towers to where her erratic hitch-hiking had eventually delivered her. She was so stoned by that stage that that a bunch of humans leaping to their deaths for no reason did not seem at all strange to her.

  “I know how they felt,” she told the vodka bottle, raising it in a toast and taking the final swig. She threw the bottle aimlessly over her shoulder, and then fell off the bed and was asleep before she hit the floor.

  *

  Joe Solomon had seen them sitting in the lounge at Fairhaven, an instant in which television wasn’t quite as dull as usual, but he thought nothing of it.

  *

  The penumbra passed right across Asia and Europe and reached the United States where there was a scandal in the Senate, riots in the Bronx and a train wreck in Alabama and the Canary Islands story was committed to the weird and wonderful segment of the news, along with the new baby Panda at Chicago Zoo and the latest shots of modifications to the Hubble Telescope by the space shuttle crew.

  The Lemmings item had little story to go with the pictures but the location was enough to draw the attention of Jami Shastri, who almost choked on her veggie burger when she heard it. She was on the telephone to Harley Thyssen before she had fully recovered from her coughing fit.

  “It’s exactly the same place as the previous eruption occurred, Harley,” she was gasping.

  “You think there’s a connection,” he wondered.

  “I’m sure there is.”

  “Well, that oughta up our funding submission.”

  *

  By the time New Zealand descended into the gloaming, the wild speculation that these unfortunate suicidal souls had been apparently affected by a volcanic eruption three months earlier was included with the pictures. A cold chill passed through the body of Felicity Campbell when she heard two nurses talking about the Canary Islands, but she was on her way to an emergency and had no time to ask questions. When she passed the patient through to theatre, the surgeon remarked to his intern about the silly buggers that walked straight off the cliff.

  “Which silly buggers?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

  “Some island off the coast of Africa,” he said. “Whole villages of them, just up and walked over the edge and fell into the sea. You oughta see the pictures.”

  “Which islands?” she demanded. But no one remembered.

  As soon as she was sure her patient was settled, she went looking for Kevin Wagner. She found him the first place she looked, on his crutches at reception, arguing frantically with the charge sister as he tried to discharge himself.

  “I’m sorry, Mr Wagner. I can’t do anything until Dr Campbell signs the release.”

  “Which I will do at the first available opportunity,” Felicity smiled as she walked up. “But that’s still a few months away yet, Kevin.”

  Looking at Kevin Wagner, she could see he had once been a handsome, rugged, well built man, and all the signs suggested that he would be again, but the present figure before her was a grey faced, hunched object that swayed unsteadily on the crutches. The tragedy that his life had become still glazed his eyes and deepened the lines on his face. His hair had turned completely white.

  Nevertheless, she knew his rehabilitation results had been excellent so far and the grief and trauma counsellors declared that he was coming to terms with the annihilation of his family. She wondered. She searched his face for pain from non-clinical sources but found none.

  A hard man, tough and strong, beaten down but rising again like a phoenix from the ashes of his former life. Such recoveries gave doctors like Felicity the strength to go on.

  Even now, when she knew that added to his daily pain and the effects of the drugs was that nerve-shattering agitation that had caused his previous mysterious convulsions—convulsions that had continued for days unabated and then subsided completely. Now, although conscious and more or less ambulatory, he was showing clear signs of that agitation again. He was shaking like a scared rabbit, unable to raise his head properly, plainly near the point of collapse, and yet he could smile and reply in his cool West coast accent. “No chance, hey, Doctor C?”

  “No chance, Kev.”

  “You sure are a tough lady to deal with, Doc.”

  “With patients like you, I need to be Kev.”

  “Waal, here’s your big chance to get me offa your hands, Felicity my sweet.”

  “Oh, sure. Just exactly where were you planning to go?”

  “Beats me. Ain’t got nowhere to go, actually. But I sure as hell wanna go there, and right now.”

  “Come on. Come with me. Let’s talk about this.”

  “You don’t know how badly I want outa here, Doc. Just go. Get movin’.”

  “Can you manage on the crutches or should I get a wheelchair?”

  “Better walk while I can. I know you guys are gonna slip me a mickey at the first available opportunity and then strap me down again so I don’t make a run for it.”

  “Sure we will. For your own good, of course.”

  “Of course. But Doc, you don’t know how badly I wanna get moving.”

  “I think I do, Kevin. Let’s go somewhere quiet and talk about this.”

  “Hey, is that a pass?”

  “Save that stuff for the nurses, okay?”

  *

  She must have dozed off—when the telephone rang, it startled her. Or perhaps she jumped because she knew it would be Harley. At this stage, no one else would have known the number of the dungeon where he kept her. His voice boomed down the line at her without any greeting or even verification that it was her who had answered. But then, no one else could have.

  “You’ll be delighted to know that you are now a funded research project. The Board of Governors have approved.”

  Her heart sank. Had the funding been denied, maybe she could have escaped back into the real world. Now she was trapped forever. “How did you manage that?”

  “Swamped them with BS about the possible far-reaching effects of the Shastri Effect and the duty of the university to pursue the project to its ultimate point.”

  The Shastri Effect—she cringed to hear her own name used that way—it was as if, like certain deities, she had become a swear-word. “We don’t even know if there is any such thing as the Shastri Effect, Harley.”

  “There is now. It says so on the budget documents. The Governors believe it. So you just better get down to work and prove it.”

  “Harley, you have me trying to prove something that doesn’t exist. Just exactly how do you do that?”

  “There is a story they tell of how the great Ernest Rutherford postulated that there was more to the atom than had been previously realised. There had to be, he was sure, a neutron, a negatively charged, undetectable particle in there somewhere. But how to find it? To prove it? He went and asked H. G. Wells.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard the story, Harley.”

  He went on, completely undeterred. Once one of his stories began, there was no stopping it. “‘Imagine an invisible man walking in Trafalgar Square,’ Wells answered, no doubt sublimely. ‘How would you know he was there?’ Rutherford had little chance to point out that it was, indeed, the very question, for Wells immediately answered it himself. ‘Why, by the reactions of the people he bumped into of course? And the scattering of the pigeons before his feet.’”

  “All of my sources assure me the story is apocr
yphal, Harley.” Jami interrupted wearily.

  Even that would not stop him. “And so it was done. HG wrote an immortal novel called The Invisible Man, while Ernest hurried away to discover the neutron.”

  “I don’t see how that is of the slightest help, Harley.”

  “I just thought it might inspire you in your search for the impossible.”

  “As I recall, Harley, the discovery of the neutron would which would prove to be the means by which the atom could be split and a whole new age of power and horrors would be born, was one that Wells had also predicted in The Shape of Things to Come. And meanwhile your beloved Rutherford went on the record declaring that anyone who imagined great amounts of energy might be released by splitting the atom was talking moonshine.”

  “I like my version better.”

  “You would. Yours is fiction and mine is fact.”

  “Slippery notions, fact and fiction, Jamila. I’d be more careful with them if I were you.”

  “The fact is that we don’t know anything about this, Harley. Not a damned provable thing.”

  “As Socrates pointed out, true wisdom is to understand your own fallibility. The measure of a worthwhile person is not in terms of what they know, but instead in their awareness of what they don’t know. The more you know, the more you discover you need to know. True ignorance is thinking that you know all about it. And the really dangerous people are those who are determined that they are right.”

  “Okay, so our ignorance puts us on the side of the angels. But no closer to the truth.”

  “Too many people these days confuse truth with the facts,” Thyssen rambled. What was happening? Was he drunk?

  “They are mutually dependent…”

  “Not at all. A fact is that which you can prove to be so. The truth is what you earnestly believe is how things are. There is no necessary connection between them. Consider a man—I know his name, so do a lot of other people and we all agree on his address, who his friends are, what he wears, his eye and hair colour, what mode of transport he prefers, how his voice sounds—far more than adequate evidence to prove the fact of his existence, but that existence is untrue if he is Santa Claus or Sherlock Holmes. It is true that JFK was killed by more than one assassin, even though the facts assure us Oswald operated alone.”

  “This conversation isn’t about what I thought is was about, is it?” Jami said warily. All of a sudden, it occurred to her that she was receiving an insight into the mind of the true Harley Thyssen—the one he was usually careful to keep well hidden.

  “It’s a random universe, you see—at least so they would currently have us believe—and in a random universe, no amount of accumulation of facts can ever possibly add up to the truth. All of the facts, and the truth, are totally different things. Science is accumulation of facts. Religion is nonsense. But where is truth? Picasso said: Art is the lie that reveals the truth. So, here we are, both lying and telling the truth. The trick is to believe everything, until you know its a lie. But when you know its a lie, never believe it again.”

  “I’m not quite willing to abandon the facts at this stage, Harley.”

  “Neither you should. But remember that Albert Einstein was horrified when he realised that the logical conclusion of his discoveries was that we live in a random universe where there is no order and nothing makes sense. `I cannot believe that God plays dice,’ he declared. We cannot believe it either. Things do seem to make sense to us, and we cannot accept that the very idea of something making sense is itself an illusion. And therein lies the answer. Einstein was right: that things can make sense and that humanity strives to make sense of them is the truth—that it is a random universe where nothing makes sense is simply a result of the facts. There’s no truth in it at all.”

  “So how do you explain the fact that the facts work for us, even though they don’t exist? How do you explain the fact that there is order everywhere we go, and we never encounter any of this randomness?”

  “Maybe because that’s the way we make it happen.”

  “Are you suggesting I should rig the facts and make the Shastri Effect real?”

  “Not at all. No, definitely not. I’m suggesting you open your mind to the wider possibilities.”

  “You think that is what’s happening here? That something truly random is taking place?”

  “Just think about it, that’s all.”

  She hung up, realising he was no longer there. At least now she did know one truth. In the night when he was all alone, weird weird things were happening in the mind of Harley Thyssen.

  *

  Now that they were being guided by the hand of God, things went far smoother. Her newfound sense of purpose placed Chrissie in control and where she took them was directly to the airport without any of the bewildered meandering they had suffered when Lorna had been the prime mover.

  “Are you sure about this, Chrissie,” Lorna did bother to ask. “I’m not sure our budgets can stand two unnecessary trips to Australia in three months.”

  “The one good thing cancelling a wedding does, Lorna, is solve all your cash-flow problems.”

  Bendigo had been off-course—instead they took a train to a place called Shepparton and then a bus to the town of Kyabram, where they realised they had by-passed their mysterious destination. Another bus took them out through open country until, about five kilometres from Kyabram, they came to a place in open country where a dirt road intersected theirs, and Chrissie was tapping the driver on the shoulder.

  “What’s down that road?” Lorna thought to ask the driver, while Chrissie had already jumped off and was hauling both suitcases.

  “Nuthin down there, luv. Just a few properties, then the creek and I think the road runs out after that.”

  “Okay. Thank you,” Lorna said in her disappointment.

  The bus pulled away and they stood there, contemplating the dirt road before them. It was really just a gravel track, leading through flat open fields where occasional cattle roamed. Trees lined both side of the track and otherwise dotted the landscape, all individual gums, mostly fifty or so metres away from each other but the horizon was so flat that they created the illusion of a forest way out there in all directions. Behind them, they could see the shining iron of what might have been a large shed, and there did seem to be a farm further down their road, off in a clump of trees.

  “Well, do we walk or wait?” Lorna asked.

  They were dressed in jeans and light tops, Chrissie in joggers and Lorna in sandals and both had hats and sunglasses. They could walk, or so they thought. The grass was too long to leave the track and anyway, barbed wire fences paralleled them on either side, the dirt of the track was too soft and the gravel in the ruts too rough. They hauled their suitcases about a hundred metres and then stopped and sat on them.

  “You sure this is right, Chrissie,” Lorna protested. “There doesn’t seem to be anyone down here.”

  “You expect to meet the saviour on a freeway?” Chrissie snapped back.

  They should have prepared better, brought water to drink at least. Instead they lit cigarettes.

  “Better watch we don’t start a fire in this dry grass,” Chrissie warned.

  “Get rid of the snakes,” Lorna sighed.

  This place had the most ferocious bushfires and the most deadly snakes in the world, both of them knew. It was hot, dry and alien—a fearful place, unfriendly and forbidding. Neither would admit to the other that they wanted to go home, now. But less definable urges thrust them onward relentlessly.

  Instead they walked along the rough track, each trying to keep up the other’s enthusiasm.

  “Almost there.”

  “Yeah—I know.”

  But there was nothing—no farm, no cultivation, nothing at all. And then. “What’s that out there?” Chrissie asked. Lorna saw sunlight flashing off something away to their right.

  “Dunno,” Lorna declared, staring with a hand shading her eyes. “Looks like a truck. Big semi, without it’
s trailer. What the hell’s it doing out there?”

  They stood by their suitcases, contemplating the scene.

  “I don’t see anyone around,” Lorna said.

  “Right place though,” Chrissie smiled. “I know it is.”

  The shining truck was parked under a solitary tree about a hundred and fifty metres off the track. Plainly, chariots weren’t what they used to be, Lorna thought but didn’t say.

  Chrissie was already heading off that way, hauling the case with two hands, heedless of snakes and everything else. “Come on, Lorna, come on.”

  They swished through the long grass, following the path flattened by the truck and advanced upon the vehicle boldly. At the foot of the tree, they saw, a man lay sleeping with his hat over his eyes. He was lying on a sleeping bag even though he had a tent and full scale camp set up. He snored.

  Lorna looked over the heap of empty cans—Victoria Bitter and a few baked beans, and many empty cigarette packets. Surely God was not going to appear to them as the Jolly Swagman. Chrissie stood back, puzzled by the normality of it all, looking around, wondering. But Lorna went forward and lifted the hat from the man’s eyes.

  “Hello, under there,” she said sweetly.

  Brian Carrick blinked and stared—of them all, it was only he would have the vision of angels.

  “G’day,” he said. “Who the fuck are you?”

  Lorna smiled, squatting and looking around at Chrissie. Chrissie shook her head sadly. If it was God, surely he would have known who the fuck they were.

  *

  This was the place where they fell. Sixty-three men and eight women plunged to their deaths from this precipice and two other similar points along the nearby cliffs. Harley Thyssen tried to hold the scene of those dreadful moments in his mind, to experience being there, amongst the victims, to know how they were and what was happening inside them at the time. They walked like zombies, he had been told, possessed by demons. But still it was impossible to conceive, how one man could fall, then the one behind him, then the next with his hysterical wife clinging to his legs. Jonestown, he thought. Or men going up out of the First World War trenches, scrambling over the slain bodies of those ahead of them, or the redcoats marching resolutely without breaking ranks as snipers felled individuals in their ranks. Yes, something like that, but not exactly. His main difficulty was that the Padre did not speak English and Thyssen had to gather his picture through an interpreter.