by Barry Klemm
*
The white stretch limousine had been provided by Tierney, wanting her to make a big impression with the paparazzi when she arrived for her opening night at the Sands in Surfer’s Paradise.
“Keep going,” Andromeda Starlight had said to the chauffeur as they slid into the Sands’ driveway. The doorman in green topper and tails was reaching for the door-handle at that very moment and clean missed as the limo failed to stop. Andromeda glanced back saw the man standing at the end of his stumble, catching his topper as it jarred from his head. She’d also seen Tierney, harried and bewildered, come rushing down the steps. She turned back, smiling with delight. He chased them on foot.
“Hoy! Where you goin’! Where you goin’!”
Gone, Joel, gone.
“Where to, Miss Starlight?” the unflappable driver, who wore a neat uniform and was named John, asked calmly.
“Way we’re goin’, my man,” she smiled.
A thousand kilometres later, he remained calm, unruffled by the unexpected length of the journey, although he had needed to be continually reassured by the use of the credit card she had stolen from Tierney. He remained bemused and tolerant, all the way to the bumpy dirt road, to the place where a truck without its trailer and a bubble helicopter stood incongruously in a paddock and four people stood in a line and stared at them.
“My man, we have arrived,” Andromeda grinned. “You just hop in the back here and get some shut-eye. I’ll gotta go check out these dudes.”
She got out of the car in her still spangled but much crumpled dress, slipped off her high heeled shoes and on her sunglasses, and walked toward them. Two older men, two younger women, all gazing on her with appropriate astonishment. The females looked familiar, somehow.
“Hi there,” she called as she approached them.
“Hullo, Andromeda,” the red haired girl said with a cheeky tone. Not another fan... no. The name Laura sprang to mind.
“Well, bless my soul, Honey. You were in the hospital in Kiwisville,” she said as if it was an accusation.
That had them all looking at each other.
“So was...” Brian began, and stopped.
“I just come from there,” Kevin Wagner was saying.
“Good God,” Lorna gasped. “We all were.”
“Of course,” Chrissie cried. “Talk about mysterious ways. Lorna and I were in the intensive care ward and you were there too.”
“All comin’ back now, Honeychilds,” Andromeda said. “This here’s the dude in the coma. Exceptin’ you had black hair in them days.”
Kevin Wagner nodded, touching his hair as if coming to terms with the change. But there was more to come to terms with than that.
Lorna pointed at Brian. “So you must be the chap that woke up before the rest of us.”
“That’s right,” Brian said.
“We were all in that coma. That’s what this is all about,” Chrissie was gasping with realisation.
They all found somewhere to sit and gather their wits. One or the other babbled some realisation or other without adding to the general knowledge. Then Chrissie went over and sat on the log beside Wagner, and took his hands in hers.
“There was your wife and children,” she murmured. “I’m so sorry.”
Kevin Wagner’s head was already bowed as he strove to fight back the tears.
Suddenly, Chrissie was looking beyond him to the glowing horizon. The land was deep purple, the sky bright orange. She stood, backing off, peering. Then the others were too.
“It’s happening,” she said. “I can feel it coming.”
Almost immediately, Andromeda felt the nausea hit her. She staggered a little but then straightened. A sensation not unlike an orgasm swept through her body, arising from her bare feet in the soil and out through the top of her head. After a moment, she recovered, and immediately saw all of the others were recovering too. She had experienced it before and so had they, but this time Andromeda realised something she had not noticed before. The sensation seemed to come right out of the ground, entering her body through her feet. It was as if her feet were the points of a power plug, inserted into the electric earth itself.
The others were staggering or sitting, doubled up.
“Happens every time, then it’s over,” Brian said.
“How do you mean, over?” Lorna asked.
“Don’t you suddenly have the feeling that you can go home now?”
Each realised that they did.
Wagner raised his head and looked at them all.
“We gotta to talk to someone who knows about this.”
“Sure, but who?” Lorna wondered.
“There ought to be a long range cell phone in that limo of yours,” he added. “There’s Dr Campbell—Felicity Campbell—in Wellington. I promised to keep her posted. We can start with her.”
They rose as one and walked over to the limo. John snored peacefully in the back. Wagner got the phone and dialled the number. The paging system transferred him to a second number. “Felicity Campbell please.”
He waited while she was fetched from wherever she was. Finally, he spoke briefly, then listened a lot, saying yes and no. Finally, he put his hand over the receiver and called to Brian Carrick.
“Hey, sport. Your wife wants to speak to you.”
A few amusing moments followed while Brian said ‘Yes luv” a great deal into the receiver and when that was done, he hung up and Wagner explained.
“Felicity’s already in Melbourne, at Brian’s home, looking for us. She didn’t seem surprised that we were all here. She’s got some big-wig scientist from the States with her. She said we are all to go to the biggest hotel in Kyabram and make ourselves comfortable. They’ll be here in two or three hours.”
“A beer would be nice,” Brian said enthusiastically.
“Might even be a decent counter lunch,” Andromeda mused.
“Anyone remember a Mr Joe Solomon?” Wagner asked.
“Oh yes,” Lorna cried. “He hired the plane for us. A lawyer from Perth.”
“He lost his wife in the crash,” Chrissie said solemnly. “And he broke his back or something. He was in a terrible way.”
“Well,” Wagner continued. “We’re to have a search for him. They think he’s here somewhere too.”
They rode to town in the luxury of the limo, and booked a room in the pub in which they put John the exhausted chauffeur to bed. There was a bus due soon after and Lorna and Wagner met it. Indeed, a thick-set swarthy man in a motorised wheelchair emerged down the ramp provided by the bus company. Lorna went and knelt before the man, taking his hands.
“It’s me, Lorna Simmons. From New Zealand. Remember, Mr Solomon.”
Joe Solomon peered at her and smiled.
“Yes, of course, dear girl. But what are you doing here?”
“Same thing as you, Mr Solomon,” Lorna smiled, rubbing his hands warmly. “Come on. The others are waiting.”
*
“Mongolia! You got any idea how difficult it is to get somewhere like that?”
Glen shook his head as they walked across the campus in fading sunlight. Autumn leaves lay all about. The air was orange with fine mist. Glen loped along, Jami had to gallop to keep up with him.
“No magic carpet from Harley, then.”
“No. Of course the Russians don’t want us there. They think their own geologists can handle it.”
“They have very good geologists. Remember Tolbachik in 1975?”
“It was just a lucky guess.”
“They predicted the eruption, bang on.”
“Bully for them.”
Glen laughed. Plainly he was enjoying her frustration. She felt like a Pekinese beside him, trying to scare a tiger. “Anyway,” he was saying. “Word is that Russian geological pride isn’t the problem. The truth is that they suspect they might have some sort of big ecological disaster on their hands and don’t want to admit anything until they figure it out.”
“It’s one of mine.
I know it is.”
“I know,” Glen laughed. “Come to the lab. I’ve got something to show you.”
“Can’t. Got to get to Mongolia, somehow.”
“You’ve got plenty of time, Jamikins. The Geo Survey is assembling a team in London to fly in as soon as the Russians permit it. You’ll be with them. But they won’t be going anywhere for days. So play it cool.”
“How can I...”
“Come on. This will amaze you.”
They made their way down into the basement lab that had once been hers but now was his. It made her feel all the more a displaced person. He sat her before the screen and tapped the keys over her shoulder, but the intimacy did nothing for her either.
“We got this off the satellite,” he said proudly.
“Bloody hell. What is it?”
“Infra-red.”
“But I mean...”
What she meant was that such images of erupting volcanoes showed up as white hot spots, surrounded by a spectrum that indicated decreasing temperatures away from the epicentre. But this was a long narrow line running straight as an arrow. It looked like the flare at the base of a rocket.
“Good god. What is it? It must go for miles.”
“A single open fissure in the valley floor, twenty kilometres long and just a few metres wide.”
“A basalt flood!”
“Looks like it.”
“Hasn’t been one of those for a hundred years.”
“Two hundred.”
“No wonder they’re confused.”
“It gets better.”
Jami stared. A whole valley had split open as if sliced with an axe and the lava gushed all along the line, forming fiery rivers and lakes to right and left. A truly stunning event and foolish nationalistic suspicions prevented her from being there.
“How can it get better?”
“Look at this. I took the wrong satellite pictures at first—it was the sweep an hour before the eruption and I couldn’t find it anywhere. See.”
She looked at what she supposed was the same valley immediately prior to the earth cracking wide open. There was no sign of what was to come.
“Not even a hot spot.”
“Nope. Which kinda confirms your effect, doesn’t it.”
“It can’t be right.”
“So I thought at first. So I called up the pictures of Terra de Fuego. The satellite passed over there four hours before it blew. Get onto this.”
Again, no hot spots.
“Are you sure of these pictures, Glen?”
“Don’t you believe your own research, girl? The effect occurs without warning. A single blast, a few aftershocks, and then all over. But no preliminaries. And no particular type of tectonic movement. Ruapehu was a subduction zone; the Canaries is a hot spot and there can’t be any tectonic link between them.”
“But still there ought to be some sort of indication...”
“None. As you see.”
“But even extinct volcanoes have some infra-red signature.”
“This mountain wasn’t a volcano, extinct or otherwise. There was no history of vulcanism in the region at any time.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“And the same is true of Lake Baikal. No history. Ever.”
“So these things just come out of the blue?”
“No. Ruapehu was already active, Gran Canaria was dormant, and these two, nothing. So what it means is that, geologically, there is no connection between them whatsoever.”
“Baikal is a rift valley—I’m sure of it.”
“Yes. And the innocent mountain in Terra de Fuego lies right at the tip of the Scotia Plate—the very point where the fracture in the South American Plate dwindles to nothing.”
“So they are all weak points.”
“Yes, but not always the same kind of weak point.”
Jami leaned back in the chair, studying it all grimly.
“What the hell is going on?” she asked the world in general.
*
The Kyabram pub was able to offer them a sizable conference room where they sat about a large table in their various attitudes.
Joe Solomon wheeled his chair to what might have been the chairman’s position and looked completely in his element in his blue suit and red tie.
Kevin Wagner sat at his right hand and even produced a notebook as if to take the minutes, but in fact it was the log book from the helicopter and he was making his fuel calculations.
By contrast, Lorna Simmons seemed to think she was at a cocktail party, having supplied herself with a long glass of exotic pink stuff which she sipped through a straw while perched on a barstool that ensured her thighs were in clear view above the level of the tabletop.
Chrissie Rice, looking small and skinny even for an Asian, nursed a cup of tea and sat with her chair back against the wall away from the table and would have to be invited to draw it forward when the conference began.
On the other hand, no serious meeting had ever experienced the likes of Brian Carrick and Andromeda Starlight. They sat at the opposite far corners of the table, both smoking furiously, sharing a jug of beer. Brian, big and weather-beaten, and in his shirt with the sleeves hacked off roughly, was sweating and too loud and would have dominated the room had it not been for Andromeda’s plunging neckline which insisted on being the focal point.
Which failed only because Harley Thyssen was there, a man made to intimidate mountains, with his great body, great beard and thundering authoritative voice. Thyssen had placed a smaller table adjacent to the end of the main one, and then sat on it, adopting the high ground.
And, finally, Felicity Campbell who did not sit, but stood in a corner making these observations. She would continually shift to a different part of the room in order to study her patients in detail, although she later admitted that the one she studied most was Harley Thyssen. He had spent a little time interrogating his subjects and now undertook to summarise the results.
“You are all participants in an unexplained phenomenon,” Thyssen said loudly, “about which there are some things we know, and a few more things we can guess at, and a great deal that we have no idea of. Let’s deal with the things we know first. Each of you, simultaneously, experienced a comatose state for a period of eight days, from which you have apparently recovered. The implication is that the coma was brought on by exposure to a volcanic eruption of an unusual kind which, for the present, we will call the Shastri Effect. There has never been a previous instance of that effect that we know of, but there have been three instances since—one in the Canary Islands, one in Terra de Fuego and one in Russian Mongolia. The events were placed roughly three months apart. The volcanic activity in each instance was entirely dissimilar except that the Shastri Effect was present on each occasion.
“The Canary Islands event produced sixty-three victims who, like you, experienced an eight day coma and then completely recovered. However, three months later, the sixty-three rose as one and walked in a zombie like state and fell from the cliffs into the sea. All were killed. Miss Simmons has reported doing something similar. Miss Starlight too. Thirty-four hours later, the Terra de Fuego event occurred.
“In those hours prior to each event, we understand that each of you were drawn by unknown forces to gather in the paddock outside town. Mr Carrick made it each time. Others variously. Terra de Fuego produced no casualties and we have no information about Mongolia as yet. But Dr Campbell reports that while comatose in Wellington Hospital, there was some sort of linkage between your individual brain wave patterns. A biological impossibility but that doesn’t seem to have prevented it from happening anyway. This is something we need to know a great deal more about. Any questions so far?”
“Why us?” Joe Solomon asked.
Thyssen stood up and went to a large folder he had brought with him. He produced the chart he wanted and laid it on the table before them. It showed the Ruapehu site. The three calderas were evident, but wide of them, there was a circle
drawn with a diameter of roughly a kilometre from the epicentre of the blast.
“Consider this circle. Everyone inside the circle died at the time of the eruption. Outside it, many casualties survived but none of them suffered the effect. You, Mr Solomon, and the two young ladies, were flying in an aircraft inside the circle, but which crashed outside the circle. Similarly, Mr Wagner was diving in the pond inside the circle but the cascade carried him outside. And Miss Starlight’s very exciting ride in her bathtub also took her from inside to outside the circle. Mr Carrick is the exception to the theory, being stationary at the time, but he was right on the line and underground. There was considerable slippage along the fault line at that point, away from the crater. The best theory we can come up with is that the ground movement was just sufficient to carry him too, from inside to outside the zone.”
“My gawd, Professor,” Kevin Wagner was very impressed. “Whatever made you think of that?”
Even Thyssen looked impressed with himself. “The fishing-boats in Gran Canaria. The shock wave from the underwater eruption pushed the boats outward in a wide circle—we assume that the coma victims drifted from inside to outside the circle.”
“So you think that was it,” Felicity asked. “Moving from inside to outside the circle.”
“I think so, yes. Anyone inside the circle probably suffered the effect but they all died. Survivors outside the circle, whether injured or not, did not suffer the effect.”
“So it was just a fluke,” Chrissie said in disappointment.
“I think so. The miraculous circumstances under which each of you survived was also why you have suffered the effect. It is interesting to note that a lot of people who were just outside the circle at the time felt a shockwave and experienced nausea and headaches immediately prior to the eruption, but they did not sustain the Shastri Effect. So yes, it is confined to a very finite group.”