by Barry Klemm
“Please have a bit of faith, Harley. Since I anticipate being able to show you something that I know is medically impossible and don’t even really believe myself, even though I witnessed it, I need just a small degree of indulgence.”
“Okay. They’re all different.”
Thyssen was mostly busy with logistics. Air forces, both Australian and US, were on stand-by with aircraft fitted out to his specifications. Thyssen would have rather avoided involving the military, or even governments, but there wasn’t time, nor available skills, to fit out private aircraft. They had a USAF 707 fitted out to duplicate most of the equipment in the ward, and although it would not be completely ready for three months, still it had arrived and stood on the tarmac at Tullamarine, just in case it was needed.
The RAAF was standing by with an Orion, fitted out for weather observation and hunting down lost yachtsmen in the Southern Ocean, which would fly Jami and a vast array of equipment to the scene of the next eruption. In addition, two buses had been fitted out as medical laboratories, residing in the belly of a USAF C-130 Hercules, ready to collect any new sleepers should they occur, and two further wards had been made available in the Alfred to receive them. These arrangements, coordinating the various authorities involved, were what occupied most of Thyssen’s time. It was a great deal and all of it based on Harley’s speculations. He tried as hard as he could to shrug off the pressure.
His first moment of relief came at ten minutes to eight on the morning the 18th of May, when suddenly Felicity summoned him urgently to the nurse’s station.
“It happened three minutes ago,” she said. “See how Chrissie and Joe have locked together.”
Thyssen watched the ongoing lines streak across the screens for some time before he could see it. Yes, identical. The others were not... Though you really needed an expert eye to detect it.
“Lorna says Chrissie has always been more sensitive to it,” Felicity said. Thyssen went with her through the ward. Everything was checked. There was no other indication that anything had changed and even the subjects themselves had not noticed anything.
“I don’t even feel it coming on yet,” Chrissie said uneasily.
“Well, don’t force it. Let it happen of its own accord,” Felicity smiled.
There was hardly room around either bedside for all the activity of the nurses and technical equipment, much of which Joe Solomon tried to fight off grumpily. Even while they were there, Andromeda Starlight locked in.
“Did you feel anything at all?” Felicity asked.
“Nothing,” the black woman shrugged.
“I was taking her pulse at the time,” a nurse added. “I’m sure there was no physical indicator.”
The various specialists and their teams busied themselves, each shaking their heads negatively. Somehow, Felicity was not surprised.
Within two hours, all six monitors were reading identical brain waves. Thyssen, Jami and Felicity went to the cafeteria and relaxed over coffee.
“Well, I’m glad that’s over,” Felicity said, stretching her neck.
“Indeed. I can only hope that I can match the precision of your observations, Fee,” Thyssen said.
“What’s your current guess?” Jami asked in mock awe.
“If my theory is correct, the event will occur tomorrow evening at about five or six, Melbourne time. You’d better be ready to go then.”
“I have such faith in you, Harley, I’ll be sitting on the aeroplane with my parachute strapped on.”
“Are you kidding about the parachute?” Felicity asked.
“Yes.”
“But it wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Thyssen mused.
“It’s a very bad idea, Harley,” Jami said coldly.
Thyssen turned to Felicity.
“At the earliest possible time, I want you to move the group into the bus and get them underway.”
“Underway where?”
“Kyabram, we have to assume.”
“What if the story of there being sleepers in Mongolia is true?” Jami asked.
“Then the focal point will lie in the Pacific west of the Philippines. But you’d think we’d have heard something positive by now if there were. The damned Ruskies are supposedly not keeping secrets these days.”
“Yeah. Like us Americans,” Jami said dryly.
“So. Assume Kyabram,” Felicity said.
“Well, the airport lies in the same direction. So we can at least make a start.”
“I’ll check around my team and see how soon they can free the patients.”
By the time the test procedures had reached a point where they could be temporarily broken off, it was nearly noon. By then, each of the subjects was beginning to feel seriously agitated.
“We ought to let them sleep,” the psychologist said.
“They’ll be too agitated,” Felicity was sure.
“Sedate them.”
“No. Leave them be,” Thyssen instructed. “Tell them to get what sleep they can. We’ll move them this evening. That’ll still give us twenty-four hours before the event. Ought to be enough.”
“You should sleep too, Harley,” Felicity said.
“I’ll sleep on Tuesday. Jami sleeps now.”
“Am I supposed to be asleep?” Jami asked.
Thyssen and Jami had been establishing a control room on the same floor as the ward, in which they had installed a full array of monitors. Those from the ward, and others by satellite from Glen, full seismic equipment and monitors and videos from each of their transport vehicles. In the end, it needed two technicians to run it.
“I think that covers everything,” Thyssen said.
“We ought to be able to tell if someone down there spills their coffee,” Jami remarked.
The evening was foggy and very cold as the group were wheeled in chairs with their attending equipment onto the ambulance bus. Each had a technician, a nurse and one specialist and Felicity overseeing it all. Thyssen sat in his control room and watched them on monitors and communicated directly with Felicity.
As the bus set out along the Tullamarine freeway, Chrissie Rice said. “We’re going the wrong way.”
“Kyabram is in this direction.”
“This way.”
The direction she indicated was ten degrees east. Each of the others indicated agreement. Kyabram was slightly west of north—they indicated somewhat east of north.
“Shit,” Thyssen snapped. “That means the Russians have got sleepers in Mongolia. The bastards and their fucking secrets.”
“So where does that mean we are going?”
“We calculated some place in the Pacific Ocean, just east of the Philippines.”
From the bus, there came a collective groan.
“Do we really want to go there?” Felicity asked.
“The plane’s waiting. So we just fly you out there and back again. Aim to be over the location at an hour before sunset and you should be right. And your exact location ought to give us a precise location for the Mongolian sleepers. Who, we must assume, are presently heading south.”
“Do you suppose we’ll meet them?”
“Beats me. Depends on whether the Russians have been taking any notice of me. If not and the poor buggers are on their own, they have to cross the Gobi Desert and all of China from north to south.”
“I think I’m just beginning to appreciate you, Thyssen,” Brian Carrick chuckled.
Thyssen leaned back and smiled. It wasn’t every day that someone said that.
*
The snow-cat ran out across the white land, trundling over flat terrain, beneath an amazing sky. The winter night had just begun and the Aurora Australis—unusually for this time of the year—danced across the entire heavens in every known colour. Great swirls drifted back and forth, the size of the milky way, looking like the bottom of a gaudy curtain rippling in the breeze, intermingled with blinding flashes of light and darting streams of iridescence. The greatest fireworks show in history was underway and the
polished orange skin of the cat reflected such an array of colour that it might have been driving under the neon lights of Las Vegas.
And back behind, in the direction that the twin caterpillar tracks had scoured across the snow, another display of pyrotechnics was underway. There a black cloud that thundered skyward, illuminated constantly from underneath by a brilliant red glow. Great bolts of lightning burst continually from the cloud, cracking downward into the white steam cloud beneath. From back that way, bone-rattling roars were heard, as if the clouds hid a gigantic dinosaur, and there were other, deafening cracking sounds as massive fissures opened in the Ross Ice Shelf. It might have been that the cat was fleeing this ice bound inferno, except that it made no haste, rumbling on its way at just twenty kilometres an hour. And never at any time did it deviate from its course.
The cat had trundled on for five hours by the time they located it. True, the terrain here was flat as a table top, yet still it was surprising that it had come so far without dropping into a crevasse and being overturned by one of the upthrusts that dotted the landscape. And still it might, before it ran out of fuel and ground to a halt. The helicopter followed it through the dazzling night, helpless, keeping it under the eye of its landing light, praying that the cat’s engine died before the helicopter reached its own maximum fuel range.
Earlier that evening, at 1727 hours, they had felt the earth shake and a few minutes later, the seismic station at Oates confirmed what they already guessed—that the region had been hit by a massive earthquake. From then on, reports came through every few minutes; that the single shock measured 7.1 on the scale—by far the most powerful quake in the admittedly limited recorded history of the Antarctic continent—that the epicentre was located twenty-eight kilometres east of McMurdo Sound; that whereas all of the bases in the Ross Ice Shelf region had suffered damage, there were no casualties. Almost immediately, they were informed that an Orion aircraft was on the way from Australia, bringing a team of geologists and prepared to return any casualties to Melbourne, even though none had been reported. Throughout the Summer, the Americans flew back and forth from New Zealand to their bases all the time, but the Orion was on its way and seeking permission for a risky night landing on the nearest US runway when already in the air.
Then they remembered the survival group. They had been forgotten because they were not part of any particular scientific team, but instead sponsored by an oil company for a promotional television program. They were camped near McMurdo, and last reported fifteen kilometres from Mt Erebus, which, they had every reason to believe, was probably in full eruption.
The helicopter came out of Roosevelt Base, and Kim Ah Cheung went along as observer. Being a climatologist, she was as near to a geologist as was available at the time, and if able to constantly report on the remarkable aurora, was a little out of her depth with more terrestrial matters.
“There are huge cracks running all over the ice shelf, and colossal ice bergs breaking off. Gee, I think the whole shelf is going to collapse.”
A trained geologist would have known better than to say that—still, the largest icebergs in known history were already beginning their long diminishing journey north.
“Erebus is gone,” she cried over the radio. “It just isn’t there. Oh, hang on. It’s obscured by steam. I can see lava flowing onto the ice shelf. Oh wow, you ought to see this. It looks like there’s a great big crack opened up in the west side of the mountain and great streams of lava are gushing out. But there’s steam everywhere. Jesus, and lightning in the cloud above. Is that usual?”
From the Orion, Jami Shastri, to whom these reports were relayed, reported back that it was not uncommon. She asked an array of technical questions in response, but the poor woman peering out of a helicopter flying in very rough and dangerous conditions, was not really able to understand them. Jami understood. The volcano, the aurora, the shattered ice shelf, in a chopper bouncing from one thermal to another, out over the ice in the endless Antarctic night—any one of these things would have made most people babble, all of them would have been devastating.
And Jami was thinking, Mt Erebus—only two thousand kilometres from the nearest point of the Indian Ocean. Guess again, Harley.
In the chopper, they were searching for the survival team, whose task, plainly, had taken on a meaning far beyond their expectations. They were a young fit group of athletes—four males and four females, all from different countries. Kim Ah Cheung remembered their smiling faces in the press photograph, standing in a line, all in the same splendid ski-suits, Japanese, French, Malaysian, Indian, American, African, Arabian and Swedish versions of the same person.
They crossed and recrossed the terrain east of Erebus but it was plain that their camp was well inside the zone of multi-hued seething steam that had surrounded the mountain. Then one of the pilots spotted the caterpillar tracks. They came out of the steam-ridden zone and went straight out across the plain and the chopper zoomed low as the pilot dived and chased after them.
Only to hover helplessly when they reached the source of the trail. They should have been able to make radio contact with the team but there was no response. They dropped down to a few feet above the ice, running beside cat and trying to shine their lights in the windows, but they had fogged up.
“If they’re fogged up, it means there are people breathing in there,” Kim was able to tell them.
They could see the green luminescence from the dash board lights. That made them hopeful.
“Put me on the ground and I’ll jump on it. It’s only going slowly,” Kim suggested.“You can’t run at twenty kay on snow, Kim,” the pilot snorted over the headset.
“Then drop me on the roof and I’ll get in that way.”
The roof racks, she could see, were empty and offered plenty of handholds.
They were within five minutes of their fuel range before the pilot agreed to let her try. Kim was chubby, thirty-eight, mother of four, but she was very fit. As soon as she was out, swinging on the cable beneath the chopper, she knew it was a bad idea. The wind howled and hurled her every whichway. No part of her flesh was exposed but suddenly if felt as if her protective clothing was rent in a dozen places. Her goggles seemed to fog up. There was no air that was breathable. She swayed and swirled everywhere, even though the drop was only twenty feet. She was bashed against the side of the cat twice before she finally got a grip on the roof rack, then had to let go three times as the turbulent air wrenched the chopper away. Swinging like a sack of potatoes, she was finally directly over the roof and she closed her eyes and released the cable. Bruised and battered, she lay on the rails of the roof rack for a few minutes.
“That wasn’t too bad,” she told herself.
In fact she’d cracked two ribs and broken three fingers.
The cat swayed violently and it rumbled along and the slipstream was buffeting her furiously and now pain savaged her lungs as she tried to move. But move she did. From the rack, she was able to get the rear doors open and then, with a frantic, painful and very awkward scramble, got herself in.
The eight young people sat, three on each side in the back, two in the front, as if going on a picnic. Icicles of condensation hung from the roof from their breathing but breathing they still were, in steamy gusts now that Kim had admitted the outside air. They just weren’t doing anything else. She scrambled over their feet and leaned past the one in the driver’s position and turned the engine off. The cat slowly rumbled to a halt.
“End of the ride, kids,” Kim smiled with relief. “You can wake up now.”
8. SLEEPERS AND PILGRIMS
She was just getting into her act when she spied him in the audience—usually she ignored them as individuals but there was no avoiding him, sitting alone at a table amid the beautiful people like a gigantic member of Santa’s elves. God knows how he got in—dressed as usual in plaid shirt, jeans and hiking boots—although at that time only half the tables were filled. Admittedly she was just the warm up act for the me
gastars to follow but that didn’t mean they didn’t give her the works—full orchestra, backing group, dazzling light show that actually met her request to establish a rotating planet earth behind her and she blasted through her routine. And she knew that tonight she gave it a little something extra because Thyssen was out there, watching. Whatever could he be thinking? she constantly wondered.
This was the Melbourne Casino, largest gambling complex in the southern hemisphere they reckoned, and they had invited her—it was by far her biggest gig yet. Amid all the glitter and excitement, the name of Andromeda Starlight was becoming known in all the places where it needed to be.
The unexpected flight to nowhere over the Philippines returned her to Melbourne with only a few days to spare to her opening night, and she was still in the process of settling the act into this larger format. On this the second night, the presence of Thyssen seemed to be the little boost she needed to pull it together. The casino management were very strict in regard to the personal conduct of the performers and so she sent Tierney to collect Thyssen and arrange for them to meet nearby in an obscure bar, an hour later.
“My, my, just look at you,” she smiled as she walked in.
“Just keeping my finger on the pulse,” Thyssen replied by way of explanation, indicating her into a chair.
“So, how’d I do?”
“Technically, very impressive.”
“Take care, Lover. I may swoon.”
He arched his big furry eyebrows at her, and looked at her through one eye. “Gaia, huh? Mother to all things. You’ve incorporated the idea nicely.”
She found she was remarkably relaxed with him. He had always been a group experience until now. Even in the half-light, she could see his face splattered with red blood vessels. She knew what that meant. His skin too was pitted all over like a surface of the moon. Sweat bubbled along his brow and upper lip. He was possibly the first man she had ever liked that she didn’t want to touch.
“You thinkin’ you’ve created a monster, Harleykins?”