The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  “A beneficial monster, if that’s true.”

  Joel Tierney was catching on, looking from one to the other and figuring things out. “So you’re the geezer who fed her all that earth-mother codswallop,” he said.

  “Are you dissatisfied with your percentage, Joel?” Andromeda said coldly.

  “I think I need a piss,” Joel said and left them.

  Thyssen watched him walk out of sight and then tilted his head and looked sideways at her.

  “I like your friends,” he said with an ironic smile.

  “A sorrowful soul, Harley. But I didn’t want you leavin’ without a word.”

  “Are all managers as seedy as that?”

  “All the useful ones are.”

  Thyssen nodded and said no more.

  She sipped her drink quietly. She was in no hurry to get to the point of this, whatever that might be. For there had to be a point—with Thyssen there always was. The situation called for light chit-chat but a man like him was hardly likely to be interested in that. Surprisingly, he made an attempt.

  “Harrandel Thöensen Heuwenstrepp,” he said emphatically, turning to face her directly now.

  She frowned.

  “That’s my real name,” he grinned. “I was nine years old before I was able to pronounce it properly. Harley Thyssen was the invention of an unimaginative immigration officer on Ellis Island.”

  Andromeda smiled and words avoided for a decade suddenly flowed from her with ease. “Edna Krebbs.”

  “I think we’d both be well advised to stick to our alias’,” Thyssen chuckled.

  She raised her glass to toast him and he responded.

  “How is it that you have an American accent when you aren’t American?” he asked pointedly.

  “There was a time when I got to thinkin’ it would be good for my image. But once I took it on, it stuck. What’s your excuse, Lover?”

  “Same as yours. Except I didn’t plan it. Technically I’m Norse.”

  “Well, Vikingperson, so now that you know my deepest secrets, what is there left?”

  “A deal.”

  “Deal?”

  “Yes,” and he paused, looking toward the men’s toilet to determine that Tierney was not yet returning. “An arrangement that you may not want your manager to be in on.”

  “Joel, believe it or not, is an honest man,” she pointed out.

  “There are some concepts too incomprehensible for even so vast an intelligence as mine.”

  “Tell me about the deal.”

  “I want to employ you. That is, take you on as a member of Project Earthshaker.”

  “And there I was thinkin’ I was just another lemming.”

  She found herself very proud of that, especially because he stopped and chuckled before continuing.

  “That’s the point. Felicity’s medical team have taken over the new sleepers from Antarctica and are keeping them in isolation as a control group. Which means you guys—the original six—are now redundant, from a medical research point of view, that is. You’ve all been tainted and contaminated by your subsequent experiences.”

  “I am aghast. Should I be checkin’ out my health insurance, Sugar?”

  “That may be completely pointless. But you have been living normal lives out in the real world rather than being safely quarantined in an isolation laboratory like you should have been.”

  “You scientists sure have a funny way of looking at the world.”

  “Don’t I know it. Anyhow, what it all means is that it’s likely that your period of usefulness as a research subject is ended or at least minimal. But I want to keep you around. So I’m suggesting we take you on the staff.”

  “You’re offering me a job? Doing what?”

  “What you do.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “I want to incorporate your act as part of the project.”

  “Just a moment. The germ is returning.”

  Joel Tierney’s timing was impeccable as usual, for as he made his unsteady way through the tables toward them, it gave her time to think. Unfortunately, thinking it through did not make things any clearer. Perhaps he misunderstood what she did.

  “Take a seat over there for a moment, Joel,” Andromeda called, and Tierney immediately sat on the chair nearest him.

  “You’ve trained him like a dog,” Thyssen mused.

  “Explain to me, Harleykins, how a li’l’ ol’ night club singer like me can possibly be regarded as a component of a scientific project.”

  “Well, you’ve already incorporated the project into your act. Why not go the other way?”

  “Ain’t soundin’ reasonable so far, Honey.”

  Thyssen leaned back, lighting a cigarette, thinking, not wanting to explain himself so deeply. “We will pay you five thousand US a month. Anything you earn over and above from your performances is yours.”

  She regarded him as suspiciously as she would any promoter. “For which you get, what?”

  Thyssen couldn’t look her in the eye—instead he played with the crescent of fluid left on the table by his glass. “I’d like to be able, from time to time, to offer further ideas for you to make use of on stage.”

  “Do I have a right of veto?”

  “No.”

  So it wasn’t a soft-sell then.

  “How come I get the feelin’ that ain’t all of it, Sugar,” she was sure.

  “It is.”

  “You want to use my act as some sort of promotional tool for the project.”

  “Why didn’t I think of putting it like that?”

  “And that’s the deal?”

  It wasn’t. The tiny puddle before him got another work over. She was realising this was the basis of his charm—being able to swing between Tyrannosaur and naughty child at will.

  “I might want to have some power to arrange your venues and locations.”

  “You can do that?”

  “I have some interesting contacts.”

  It was her turn to think about it. When she did, the answer was fairly obvious, although she hated herself for having to admit it. “Harleykins, there ain’t no need for you to pay me for this. Why, I figger it’s an honour to work with your ideas, and I’d go anywhere and do anythin’ for you.”

  He looked up. His eyes, at all times, carried a great sadness. “That might not always be the case. I’ll have Christine draw up a proper contract.”

  “Chrissie?”

  “I’ve taken her on as project administrator.”

  “Oh fine. That I can understand. I just don’t see why you need me.”

  Thyssen was nodding. He gave it a lot of thought and then seemed to suddenly decide to be more candid than he had originally intended. “Okay. Consider this. I believe that the population of Planet Earth is facing a catastrophic disaster. Humanity is going to need to be strong to face the threat. There will need to be the sort of strength that Londoners showed in the blitz, and you will be the Vera Lynn who symbolises that strength. You see?”

  She wondered if she should have been shocked. Obviously, he was trying to shock her. But instead she could smile. “I sure ain’t never been averse to immortality, Lover.”

  “Then we better get your man over and start working on the details.”

  *

  Much to his discomfort, everything was running so smoothly that when Barney Touhey rang and said he had the good dope on Harley Thyssen, Joe Solomon felt a severe pang of guilt. By that time, about half of his daily workload was taken up with the Project Earthshaker accounts. There was a credit understanding with the Chase Manhattan and he needed only to forward the bills as they arrived and soon cheques returned for his signature and dispatch. All costs, no matter how great, seemed to fall without a murmur into the black hole of that account. Well, not quite. Indeed, it almost came as a relief when one of them came back with a query. Looking it over, Solomon was surprised that he had accepted it himself, even though he had been a participant in the expenditure. Was it true, the ba
nk wondered, that a chartered USAF Boeing 707 had flown Melbourne—Darwin—Melbourne to absolutely no purpose whatsoever. Apparently the crew had grumbled about the pointlessness of the flight.

  So had all the others. In fact Darwin had just been a refuelling stop on the way out and the passengers had been allowed no further than a guarded transit lounge. The actual destination had been a point over the Pacific Ocean five hundred kilometres east of the Philippine island of Mindanao, where the plane had circled while its passengers agreed that this was the place.

  “It’s like a religious trek,” Lorna Simmons said. “We’d be pilgrims if we had somewhere to pilgrim to.”

  But it wasn’t funny at the time. A twenty hour flight to nowhere and back was assured to induce grumpy moods and they collectively confronted Thyssen about it when he met them at the airport. It was as effective as all protests were with him—he took the wind out of their sails by admitting that, yes, it was all his fault, that he had known where they were going, that it was a waste of time.

  “What bloody drongo came up with this plan,” Brian Carrick muttered, looking Thyssen right in the eye.

  “I just thought you’d be more comfortable at the focal point,” Thyssen said. “We would probably have had to sedate you, had we tried to keep you in Melbourne.”

  “That’s not the thing to say to a bunch of people at their wit’s end from lack of sleep,” Felicity pointed out.

  Thyssen could not have looked more miserable. “Well, let’s look on the bright side. We did get the precise co-ordinates of the focal point—that might be useful later on. And we did prove that you all lost interest in the focal point at the very moment Erebus blew. So we gained a great deal.”

  “Hardly worth a good night’s sleep,” Lorna grumbled.

  Thyssen smiled at her. “Yes, and one other thing. Pilgrims. I like that. I think from now on we will call you pilgrims, to distinguish you from those sleepers who are still comatose.”

  Lorna beamed a big smile and gave a little bow.

  “Better than bein’ called fuckin’ lemmings,” Brian Carrick muttered as they walked away.

  But that was Thyssen—always able to charm his way out of anything. Joe Solomon would have preferred to keep an open mind but how could he when the man was so bloody likeable. But, in any case, Barney Touhey who turned up in his office next morning, carrying a video cassette and a thick file of documents. He dropped the file on Joe’s desk with a heavy thump. Joe regarded it grimly.

  “I need to read all that?”

  “No. That’s just the supporting evidence,” Barney smiled. “Mostly, we have it all here on video.”

  He waved the cassette and Joe indicated the video player set in the bookcase opposite his desk.

  “You’re not going to like it. He’s one of the good guys.”

  “That doesn’t exactly make me unhappy.”

  Barney plugged the cassette in, fast forwarded to the right place, then put it on pause.

  “Open the file to the first page. You’ll see his real name is completely unpronounceable.”

  “Harrandel Thöesen Heuwenstrepp,” Joe Solomon attempted, with a pause between most syllables. “I can understand why he changed it.”

  “He didn’t, apparently. That was done at a refugee camp in USA when he first arrived there. Born in Holmestrand, Norway, 1941. Mother was Jewish, apparently. Parents fled the Nazis to New York but were interned until the end of the war. They returned in 1947 to a small place named Lavik in the fjords of Norway, but little Harley was entitled to a US passport, which he has never claimed apparently.”

  “An un-American American?”

  Barney ignored the heckler. “Educated in sciences in Bergen and graduated first class honours in geology from University of Oslo, 1965. Post grad in Hawaii, specialising in volcanoes. Wrote some sort of ground-breaking paper on gas pressures in fumaroles, which is in the file if you are interested.”

  “Was the pun intended?”

  Barney looked a little puzzled. He pressed the play button. “He was a tutor at Berkeley in California at the time of the student riots protesting the Vietnam war, but he sided with the students and became very politically active at the time.”

  “How active?”

  “Arrested seven times. Fired from the staff but by then was travelling as a sort of professional student protester.”

  “No friend of the CIA, then?”

  The video was running. At times, a slim gangly man with flowing hair and beard appeared, looking half-stoned most of the time.

  “Apparently not. He got fired from three lectureships at three different universities throughout that time. Even UCLA. Finally, no university would touch him. In 1972, National Geographic took him on to do a series on the world’s active volcanoes. The work he did then established his early fame as a vulcanologist—no one else could get so close to eruptions as he did. He seemed to have an uncanny sense of where and when major eruptions would occur.”

  “A talent that seems to have deserted him now. His predictions have been woeful.”

  “No man is ever quite as good nor as bad as his reputation,” Barney smiled.

  On the screen, volcanoes were blasting and lava was flowing, buildings were falling, the earth was opening. Solomon had seen most of it before at various times. They were amongst the great early images of volcanoes.

  “All of the film you are watching now was taken by Thyssen at different times. But we don’t see the man himself again until 1974, when still no university would touch him and so Greenpeace snapped him up.”

  Now the scenes were of spray-swept Zodiacs tormenting whaling ships and challenging French destroyers and Thyssen, bulkier but all muscle, hair and beard trimmed along ancient warrior lines, looking fierce, usually in a wetsuit.

  “For the next six years, he’s one of the top Rainbow Warriors, in where the action is thickest, picking fights with French paratroopers on nuclear bomb sites, riding the bow-wave of US nuclear warships, chained up in front of all sorts of dangerous machinery—that sort of thing.”

  Muscle-bound, teeth-gritted Harley grappling policemen and shoving whalers around—the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the Green movement. And then all smiles with his arm about a lovely woman, in matching wet suits on a ship in bleak seas.

  “Met and married Karla Ann Somers at the time—fellow Greenpeace hardliner, two children. Elmore lives in France, married, works for the Lyon Transport Authority. Katrina is an Anthropology student, presently working somewhere in Peru.”

  Now the wild man was replaced by more serene images of a comfortable family in suburban surroundings as the children grew older. The beard became very neat, the muscles diminished and the waistline expanded and the wetsuit was replaced by a suit and tie with aplomb, or else smart casuals.

  “They quit Greenpeace in 1980 and settled in Washington where Thyssen became a major lobbyist for the Green movement. No politician dared close their door to him in those days. Every Congressman and Senator wanted to be seen as his friend. With Greenpeace, he made prominent friends right around the world. As a lobbyist, he’s owed favours by everyone in Washington. And that is how he gets things done.”

  “That’s Harley. Everybody’s friend.”

  There were a series of pictures of Thyssen with famous people—Jacques Cousteau, Richard Nixon, Jackie O, Carl Sagan, Jane Fonda, Sadam Hussein, Paul Ehrlich, others Joe knew he should have been able to recognise.

  “Yep. For all that trouble and conflict and controversy, he seems to be the best buddy of just about everyone who matters and doesn’t have an enemy anywhere, outside France.”

  Joe Solomon laughed. “Yes. If you’d met him, you’d understand why. He has a jovial way of being humble and commanding absolute authority simultaneously. He has an aura of great knowledge and strength and he gives it to you straight and simple, no bullshit. He allows everyone, even lowly underlings, to ridicule him openly, admits his every little mistake, seeks your opinion and makes you feel really important
by taking it seriously, no matter how silly it might be, and the result is that you feel desperate to get the chance to do whatever he wants. He’s kinda like God if God was a good bloke instead of being a complete arsehole.”

  “You seem very impressed by him, Joe.”

  “I would be if I wasn’t so bloody scared of him. I just hope to hell we’re on the same side.”

  “Well, according to all this, you are.”

  “Yeah. That’s what bothers me. He’s too much a good guy.”

  “Not completely. We’ll come to that. May I continue—there’s not much more.”

  “Go on.”

  Now on the video, the volcanoes roared again, this time more intense video images.

  “Then he got bored with Washington life, whereas his wife was deeply into it. He ran off, chasing volcanoes again, getting closer and closer than anyone had before. He was after chemical changes in the magma itself prior to eruptions with a view to predicting outcomes. Very dangerous. The papers he wrote were all the rage in volcanoland. It took him to the top spot in the discipline and, when he discovered his wife’s illness, took the Chair of Earth Sciences at MIT, in 1992, where he still is. Karla died of uterine cancer in 1993, aged 41. He seems to have little contact with his children these days.”

  The woman in the hospital bed was smiling, and still very beautiful despite the obvious ravages of the disease.

  “Wow,” Joe Solomon said.

  The video began to provide images of Thyssen matching those familiar these days, the shabby lumber-jack outfits, unruly hair, an obesity that ought to have been ponderous carried lightly on massive legs.

  “That’s the good news over with. Ready for the bad?” Barney said slyly.

  “How can there be bad news after that?”

  “I have an old CIA contact—John Cornelius—who is very interested in all this. He even wants to come here and suss it all out for himself.”

  “What does he think?”

  “That Thyssen gets whatever he wants from the US Government because his work has weapons applications.”

  “Oh really? Do you have any evidence of this?”

  “I’m just the messenger. But Cornelius is serious. He said he’d like to make contact with you some time in the future to discuss it.”