The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  Solomon was surprised to find himself saddened. Within him he felt the spike of a loyalty to Thyssen that he would liked to have denied but could not.

  “So?” Barney asked.

  “So what?”

  “Can I tell Cornelius that you want to talk with him?”

  “Are you certain of his credentials?”

  “Absolutely. A trustworthy CIA veteran.”

  “Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

  But he was stalling, and he knew it. He almost flinched with pain as the spike was withdrawn. It was the sadness he often knew in court, when the fine ideals of justice once more fell to tawdry pragmatism. But the other thing he also knew was that Harley Thyssen was far too good to be true. While Barney was still trying to puzzle out the joke, he said.

  “Yes. Tell him it will be okay.”

  *

  Immediately upon their return from the pointless flight to the Philippines, Thyssen had taken Kevin aside for what was obviously a formal chat.

  “You used to run a security company in San Diego, Kevin?”

  Thyssen, of course, thought he knew everything.

  “Not exactly. It was a fire-fighting equipment company. Therefore alarm systems. Security crept in as an optional extra.”

  “Still, you have some experience of the matter.”

  “Some.”

  “I want you to take charge of security for Project Earthshaker.”

  “Surely the military...”

  “That is exactly what I want to avoid. I don’t want us to be beholden to government at any level. Which means we must make our own security arrangements.”

  “Look, it does sound interesting, Prof, but I’ve just established myself a nice lifestyle in Sydney and I’d like to get back to it.”

  “It’ll pay very well. There will be a formal contract...”

  “I don’t need money.”

  Thyssen scratched his nose. Plainly he wasn’t expecting to be turned down. It was nice to see him off-guard for a change.

  “Give me a chance to interest you,” Thyssen said carefully. “If my expectations are even slightly right, Project Earthshaker is going to expand, very rapidly. I anticipate further outbreaks, large numbers of sleepers all around the world, very broad research operations, large scale logistics. All of which needs to be secured against all manner of threats.”

  “I don’t see any threats.”

  “Immediately, media and government interference are the concerns, but in the future I expect us to be in danger of espionage by other research outfits, direct threats by local authorities and individuals, maybe even terrorist attacks. It will become very big and I want the security system to grow with it, and with the growth, there will be expanded profit for the security company involved. You follow me?”

  Wagner followed him all right. He had been ahead of him, in fact. Riding the crest of a rapidly growing organisation to a global level. Yes. It was a great opportunity all right. But he liked to see Thyssen squirm.

  “Sure, I understand all that, Prof,” Wagner said with false uncertainty. “But you gotta understand the state of my life. All that is behind me now. I don’t have to work anymore and I don’t think I want to.”

  If Thyssen had been talking to Felicity—and you could bet he had—then he would have known her belief that the sooner he, Wagner, ceased to take such profound precautions against grief and arranging his life to shore up his denial, the better he would be. Now he expected Thyssen to indulge a plea along those lines.

  Instead, the big man nodded, smiled, and thumped his shoulder. “Fair enough. It’s your life, buddy. It was just a thought.”

  And he started to walk away.

  Shit! Kevin Wagner thought. He was being outplayed at his own game. Or was it that Thyssen truly meant everything he said. Just a dim scientist who, in his essential honesty, didn’t realise how clever he was being.

  “Just a minute, Prof,” he had to call and Thyssen paused on the tarmac and looked back. Wagner had to try and shrug off the defeat. “I just need a bit of time to think about it.”

  “Twenty-four hours enough?”

  “Sure.”

  “I want to fly back to the States on Saturday. If you’re interested, you’ll need a couple of hours briefing before I go.”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  So he turned up for the briefing on Friday, in this vacant shop near the hospital that had been rented as the temporary headquarters of Project Earthshaker. This office would be his, if he wanted the job. Brian would be organising transport and logistics in the other upstairs room, and downstairs Chrissie was office administrator and Lorna in charge of PR.

  When he learned all that, he realised Thyssen’s intention of keeping the project in the family.

  “Apparently, we’ve been superseded,” Brian explained. “The eight fit healthy young people they picked up in Antarctica make much better subjects than we do. They haven’t been contaminated by being exposed to their former lives the way we have. So they become the control group.”

  “So we became redundant,” Wagner said.

  “Yes,” Chrissie said. “But Harley didn’t want to lose track of us, so he’s given us all jobs.”

  “I didn’t realise guinea pigs could be promoted,” Lorna smiled.

  He hadn’t troubled to mention that, which meant, to Wagner, that he had been outplayed after all.

  “I want you to throw a net over the whole project and the idea is that the security expands with the project, wherever and however necessary,” Harley explained when he arrived for the briefing. “So you will always need to be ready to move fast to cover any new developments.”

  “What sort of equipment and manpower is available?”

  “You obtain whatever you think you need, whenever you think you need it. No limit. I want a monthly report, but you have full responsibility for all decisions.”

  “And budget?”

  “Joe will provide whatever funds you need and Chrissie will do the paperwork and ordering.”

  “Okay. It’s a big ask, you know, Prof. I don’t know the local security scene at all.”

  “Talk to Joe Solomon. He has his own security, a guy named Barney Touhey with a nationwide security company and international contacts. He ought to be a good man for you to get to know.”

  “Can we be sure of him, Prof?”

  “I think so. He’s the guy Joe employed to check up on me. His agents were asking questions all over Washington.”

  Wagner had to laugh despite himself. “Joe Solomon has been spying on you?”

  “That’s right. I think he found out everything he wanted to know.”

  “And you don’t mind?”

  “Never been one to discourage healthy scepticism. And I don’t have any secrets.”

  It was, finally, a challenge that could not be ignored.

  *

  She was exhausted in every part of her body. The Orion returned to risk a second landing in the dark, and Jami abandoned the Erebus project as impossible to establish before the end of the winter and made a run for it.

  They flew to Dunedin and left her Orion and Antarctic crew there, and made her way on domestic flights to the northern hemisphere and finally Boston which seemed remarkably warm to her.

  It was Spring, coming on Summer, and slowly she began to thaw. She cursed the Shastri Effect and all who sailed in her. It had taken her to all the worst places in the world and she shuddered to think of what bleak rat hole would be next. Had it not been for the heroism of the Orion pilots, she would have been stuck in Antarctica for six months. The thought depressed her beyond imagining.

  Then Harley arrived from Washington and they gathered in the basement headquarters of Project Earthshaker, while Glen amused them for an hour running his models. He had become very good at it but, like Jami, he too was becoming convinced that there was nothing more to be learned this way.

  “There is always more to be learned,” Harley said brightly.

  “But n
one of the data means anything,” Jami complained. “I froze my butt off down there and I can tell you it was a complete waste of time. Not one new scrap of information was gathered from Erebus.”

  “I agree,” Glen said wearily. “There just doesn’t seem to be anything new to find out here.”

  “Well,” Harley said, eyeing them both malignantly. “If we have all the data, then we must be able to find the truth. Okay? So… let’s brainstorm?”

  “Oh, must we?” Jami moaned with every weary bone in her body. “I need rest. My entire physiology cries out for it.”

  “I haven’t been out of this dungeon for more than two days in the past month,” Glen concurred.

  Thyssen thought about it for fully ten seconds. He looked fresh and bright and sharp. Life, for him, was just one big vacation. That, at least, put an idea in Jami’s head.

  “I demand a vacation, or I’ll make a complaint to whoever you complain to about things like that,” she said as forcefully as she could manage.

  “Me,” Harley grinned. “You complain to me. And Jamila, my heroine—have I ever denied you anything since the project began?”

  “You mean except freedom?”

  “Freedom’s just another word for not enough work to do,” Harley chuckled. “Okay. A month in Hawaii, on the project.”

  “Oh no. Too many fucking volcanoes there.”

  “Okay. Florida? Bahamas? Bermuda? Anywhere you like. You take a month and then come back here and work the models while Glen takes a month, wherever he likes. Okay?”

  Even though it was perfectly okay, she hated agreeing with him. “What’s the catch?”

  “Brainstorm. Now. As a final summation before easy times.”

  “I hate you Harley.”

  If he looked pleased with himself, it was only because he won all the arguments, even when he lost.

  “Glen,” he said now with a wave of his hand. “Give me your wildest explanation. Doesn’t matter how silly.”

  “Harley, what the hell do you think I’ve been sitting here doing all these months? Any idea I have, no matter how ridiculous, and I come here and model it furiously. I’ve tried everything,” Glen said grimly.

  “But have you sat back and tried to grasp the overall?”

  “It’s too big to grasp that way.”

  For Glen, it probably was, but to her horror, Jami immediately found ideas coming to mind. “Every so often, the earth changes the tilt of its axis. Maybe something like that is going on.”

  “No,” Glen said. “I checked with the Geographic Survey. No change in tilt.”

  “Magnetic field?”

  “Done all that.”

  “What about perturbations in the Earth’s orbit?”

  “There are always perturbations, and the Shastri Effect always causes a small one. But nothing unusual, and nothing regular.”

  “Collisions with meteors?”

  “Done all that. Anyway, it’s the wrong side.”

  Harley’s woolly eyebrows raised with ponderous foreboding.

  “Wrong side?” he asked, with a profound upward inflection.

  Glen gazed at him bleakly. Jami thought furiously about wrong sides. Neither dared speak, but Harley’s glare forced words into Glen’s larynx.

  “Umm... You mean you haven’t noticed that the Shastri eruptions always occur within an hour of sunset.”

  Harley was aghast. He began whistling and put his hands in his pockets as if he intended to go for a stroll all over the campus. But he only went three paces, and then turned back. His voice was barely a murmur. “You mean we missed something as obvious as that?”

  “I’m sure I pointed it out several times.”

  “Glen, you’ve pointed out ten million bits of data in the last few months. Was it underlined and asterixed and whatever?”

  “Why should it be? It can’t mean anything.”

  Harley advanced and leaned until his nose was a millimetre from Glen’s. “It has to mean something.”

  Jami thought about sundown. It was ridiculous. Millions of dollars of state of the art technology and they had failed to notice something that would have been obvious to any peasant farmer. Yes, yes, always at sunset.

  Admittedly, it had been some time other than sunset in whatever place they were in at the time and you needed to notice that the local times of the eruptions always started with a one. But because it was impossible for volcanic eruptions to be related to the time of day, no one had looked. She even remembered noticing all the ones and thinking nothing of it herself. She was alive now, and looking at Harley Thyssen.

  “Yes, it must. But what?”

  “Glen said it,” Harley said and even gave him a thump on the shoulder. “Never occurred to me because we were looking at it the wrong way. We’ve been looking into the earth to try and see what’s in there. Instead, we’ve forgotten to look outward.”

  “You do mean meteors,” Jami said.

  “Not at all,” Harley said, unusually serious now. “Consider the Earth as a planet, orbiting the sun, rotating. What is sunset?”

  “The trailing edge,” Glen pointed out.

  “That’s right.”

  “If it was the leading edge,” Glen went on, “then we could think about collisions with whatever might lay in the Earth’s path as it travels around the sun. But it’s the trailing edge.”

  “The most protected part of the planet,” Jami thought.

  “Exactly.” Harley demanded. “So how come it always occurs at what is theoretically the least probable time?”

  Jami tried to think. There had to be something.

  “The slipstream,” she said.

  “Explain.”

  “Consider a sonic boom. The air is forced above and below the aircraft’s wing and collides with itself on the trailing side. Suppose we were hitting unusually intense cosmic rays or something that was divided and did not go through to the surface. The impact would flow around the planet, in the magnetic field or troposphere or wherever, and then all meet up exactly on the other side of the planet and impact with the other half of itself.”

  “Not bad,” Harley said. “But the older less aero-dynamically sound aircraft were always destabilised by the build-up of air in front of the wing before it broke the sound barrier. Similarly, although the real impact might be behind the earth as it travels in its orbit, still there would have to be some indication of the leading side. There must surely be a point of impact at the front initially.”

  He was pointing at her, like trying to move information by means of a cattle prod. She felt herself clutching furiously, desperate for answers now. “Maybe it’s because of something gathering at the rear, like an exhaust. It builds up and then blows.”

  “Better. But Shastri comes from within. The eruptions are outward, not inward. And with all those satellites up there, someone would be detecting something.”

  “And none of them are,” Glen said bitterly. “Because I’ve checked the data from every fucking one of them.”

  “So it has to be in the mantle.”

  “Yes,” Jami was saying. “Some force strikes the leading edge of the planet, affects the Asthenosphere, the impact flows through the mantle around the core and meets at the back side and it blasts out through the nearest available weak spot in the lithosphere.”

  “I’m liking that better,” Harley was saying. “But I still don’t like the idea of the planet running into something that can affect the mantle but have no discernible effect on the crust. We have too much detection stuff out there for that to be possible.”

  “So, whatever it is must already be in the mantle,” Jami realised. “And somehow accumulates at the back and reaches bursting point, egressing on the trailing edge.”

  “Just like any conventional rocket,” Harley said.

  Glen was already tapping the keyboard. “Let me run that through all the existing models.”

  “We’re getting somewhere now,” Harley was saying. “But we still need to figure out what it is
that could affect the mantle this way.”

  “How are you on fluid dynamics?” Jami asked innocently.

  “It must be some sort of bubble, generated by God knows what,” Harley was remembering. “It must be able to become less dense as it grows larger—perhaps many small bubbles accumulating—drawn toward the trailing edge by the momentum of the Earth, overcoming gravity as it becomes less dense until it reaches a certain size and it hits the inner side of the crust.”

  “It blows out through the nearest crack or vent or rift, and then the process starts all over again,” Glen was saying. “Look, you can see it here.”

  “Not quite,” Harley said. “Since the time span between each instance is diminishing but the other factors are constants, some part of the bubble must remain. When it blows off steam, denser gases remain, it becomes heavier and gravitation obliges it to fall back toward the core. But each time it is just a little larger, and so takes less time to build up until it hits the crust again. How does that model, Glen?”

  “Give me a few thousand nanoseconds, will you?”

  “Okay,” Jami was saying, mostly to fill the gap while Glen worked. “So the time and trailing edge theory determines the longitude of the event. How about the latitude?”

  “I’m still working on that,” Harley shrugged.

  “And then why the oscillation between the northern and southern hemispheres?”

  “Position of the moon,” Glen cut in as he punched keys furiously.

  “Hey?”

  “If the moon is trailing, it’s northern, if leading, southern.”

  “You might have mentioned that earlier,” Harley grumbled.

  “It’s factored into the models.”

  “Okay. Lunar gravitation, I suppose, would have some effect on the position of the bubble.”

  “Why not?” Jami said with a throw-away look.

  Harley looked a picture of patience and he smiled and twiddled his thumbs. “I’m pleased with that.”

  “It’s just a theory, Harley,” Jami said cautiously.

  “But it’s a theory that works.”