The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  “That’s all of it.”

  “You really don’t give me much to work with.”

  “You can go now, Mrs. Tribe. Thank you for your attention.”

  “I have just a few...”

  “Are you leaving or do I have to get security to throw you out.”

  Lorna, clearly, was warming to the task. She was still all smiles as she herded Stella Tribe out the door. Then she turned to Chrissie, and all trace of the smiles were gone.

  “How’d I go?”

  “You were great, Lorna.”

  “And tomorrow, I’ll have to be even greater.”

  “If the prediction is right.”

  “Yes,” Lorna said sadly. “It’s very good of Harley to make me the one who looks silly if he proves to be wrong. But that’s the job.”

  She was packing her things, ready to make a dash for it. Chrissie realised that she had a question. “If he can predict this event, he can predict all the future ones.”

  “I guess so. The dates are on a fixed diminishing scale, or so he said.”

  “Do you have the dates?”

  “No. But you can probably work them out for yourself. Gotta go. Bye.”

  Chrissie was left alone in the office. Brian was out organising their coming expedition, Wagner off guarding something somewhere. Yes, she had calculated the dates, but she would rather have had Harley’s official figures.

  On the other hand, it might have been better if she had more time, since she had certainly achieved little along the line of what she regarded to be her primary purpose—that of converting her fellow pilgrims in preparation of the Apocalypse. She was fully ready herself. She wore simple dresses that did not follow the line of her form, always white. She no longer wore make-up, nor did she interfere with the natural growth and colour of her hair and nails. She was studying The Book of Revelation assiduously, and looking for clues in the real world. But, apart from the spiritual guidance of Father Gilbert, she was all alone.

  Andromeda Starlight wasn’t about to believe in any God but herself—Gaia—whose personification she had completely embraced. “Christianity is out of date, Chrissie. You must get with the new religion.”

  It was discouraging that the one person who had been converted had given herself to a different faith.

  Brian Carrick was more thoughtful. “I seem to recall that the Messiah is supposed to turn up, before we can have the Apocalypse.”

  “And the Anti-Christ,” Chrissie murmured.

  “Let’s assume that’s Harley,” Brian chuckled. “And is there anything in your bible that says the Messiah can’t take the form of a French-Vietnamese female?”

  “That is blasphemy, Brian.”

  “I was trying to be nice.”

  “And heresy, and sacrilege, and… and…”

  “No reason why it can’t be so at all.”

  Lorna was an even more hopeless case.

  “I wonder what turns God on? I hope he’s a bit of a spunk.” she mused.

  Kevin Wagner believed only in himself. “The Bible got it wrong, Chris. It’s man who made God in his own image.”

  Joe Solomon was a Communist and knew all about the pernicious effects of the ‘opiate of the masses’.

  “If bloody Jehovah is behind this business, we’re all fucked. He lies about everything and can’t be trusted. Read your Old Testament, you’ll see. A megalomaniacal mass-murderer. Give him a chance to destroy a whole planet and he’ll jump at it. And no one will be saved if he has anything to do with it.”

  Jami Shastri she had only got to speak to briefly.

  “Put it out on the net, kiddo. All the other god-bothering whackos will think you a wonder.”

  And as for Harley Thyssen.

  “It is as valid a theory as any of the others, at this stage, Chrissie. I’m afraid I can find no argument against it.”

  Yes, it was going to be a tough job all right, but who ever said it would be easy. Nightly Chrissie worried about them, poor heathens all hell-bound, and there didn’t seem to be anything she could do to help them.

  But she had gained something. She followed Jami’s advice and put herself on the internet using the computer Harley had provided in the office, introducing herself and her message to the world. After a month, she was getting a hundred hits a day and stacks of email. There were some abusive responses but mostly everyone was asking her what they should do next.

  “Pray,” she told them, following Father Gilbert’s advice. “And tell everyone you can about this. We have so little time and so very many souls to save.”

  She didn’t see any wisdom in mentioning that she had not managed to save a single soul herself at this stage, and so doing probably even doomed her own.

  *

  So they went to Bali, with Earthshaker Tours, as Brian Carrick joked. In the end they all went by scheduled flights, the USAF 707 being unavailable because it had been held back to bring the control group and medical team and equipment later. By then it had become conspicuous that they were being kept separated from the survival team from Antarctica.

  “Scared we might pollute them with Thyssenism,” Lorna said.

  They spent the week-end relaxing at Kuta Beach and environs. Andromeda Starlight was already there and in full song at the Paradise Room, but Felicity and her family preferred to head inland to Ubud. Wagner was off looking for rock faces to scale, Brian and Joe Solomon settled into a beachside bar and saw little reason to stray, Lorna was left to frolic on the beaches with no less than three admiring males at any given time while Chrissie sat meditating in the shade. There was no sign of Thyssen himself.

  Each day, Brian organised tours in which they could participate if they wished, but on the 13th, which was the Tuesday, a compulsory tour had been organised.

  “Why compulsory?” Solomon demanded.

  “Because that’s they way Thyssen organised it, and he’s paying for all this.”

  They all went, in the end. They flew to Jakarta where a boat waited to take them on the Krakatoa tour. Though there remained little of the island left to see, that was the point and the enormity of it was not lost on them. Next day they roamed Jakarta and then returned to Bali, overflying two active volcanoes—Semeru and Mt Bromo—along the way. It was plainly intended to give them some idea of the sort of forces they were dealing with. They were told tales of the year without a summer in Northern Europe, caused by the explosion of Tambora in 1815.

  Until the second weekend they were left to their own devices with the warning that they should be ready to get down to business on Monday. That morning they were gathered in a transit lounge at Denpassar, waiting for the link.

  “Why here?” Lorna asked.

  “As near as I can figure,” Felicity explained. “The control group is on a boat, parked in the ocean about two hundred kilometers south-east of here. Which means the halfway point between them and the Mongolian pilgrims is Hong Kong. Harley is waiting for us there. He’s so confident that he’s booked us all into the Hong Kong Sheridan.”

  They sat about the lounge, watching Chrissie for she was always the first to detect anything.

  A few minutes before noon, Chrissie smiled and told them she could feel it. Moments later, a telephone report informed them that two members of the control group had linked. Within an hour, all except Joe Solomon and Lorna were linked in.

  “Can’t we go now,” they protested.

  “We have to be sure, or all this is for nothing,” Felicity persisted. She was nearing her wits end. Plainly a week on holiday with her family had not relaxed her. Lorna linked shortly before two and they all glared at Joe.

  “Are you sure your detectors are stuck on properly?” Wagner asked him.

  “It’s not my fucking fault!” Joe snapped back.

  “All that sweating. Maybe they aren’t connecting properly.”

  “I’m holding them down with me fucking fingers, okay?”

  At twenty past two, he linked, and they headed for the waiting aircraft.
/>
  “We’ll be in Hong Kong at sundown,” Brian told them.

  “Isn’t this the time Harley predicted?” Andromeda wondered.

  “Yeah,” Brian pointed out. “But we’re about seven hours behind the time zone at the latitude he named.”

  They landed in Hong Kong and just after eight, gliding in amidst the mountains and apartment buildings to where Harley Thyssen met them as they came through the aero-bridge.

  “Well, is this the place?” he asked them.

  They knew it was, almost.

  “Just over there a little way,” Brian considered. They all agreed.

  Just over there a little way was Hong Kong Island with its luxury hotels to which they proceeded on the ferry. When, eventually, they came to rest, they saw they were standing right in the middle of the lobby of the Hong Kong Sheridan and Thyssen bought them all drinks.

  “All right, Harley,” Andromeda smiled. “You’ve hit the spot, right on.”

  “Certainly near enough for my liking,” Joe Solomon concurred.

  “So, let’s see if I understand how you did this,” Brian said suspiciously. “By manipulating the position of the control group in their boat, you were able to cause the focal point to be right where we are standing.”

  “You got it,” Harley said proudly.

  “Why here?” Chrissie asked.

  “Most comfortable place I could think of,” Harley grinned. “Anyone disapprove?”

  “What a clever little Harley,” Lorna grinned and raised her cocktail in a toast to him.

  *

  In Sicily was twin cratered Mount Etna, at 10,902 feet and climbing, the tallest volcano in Europe, continuously active since the days of Pythagoras. In ancient times its continual bursts of flame and lava and the constant rumblings within the mountain gave rise to the myth of Vulcan, the Roman God of fire, toiling on his forge deep beneath the earth. Here too, Odysseus encountered mad one-eyed Cyclops. In the fertile soil, farmers occupied lava flows only 70 years old and sightseers engulfed the region whenever the word was out that activity was intensifying.

  There was a place where the lava flow was so thick and turgid that they had built a concrete platform for the tourists to stand and watch the heated rock creep forward, an inch or so each hour. With the spectacular sunsets that always accompanied volcanoes, the platform was full that evening. And the wall of incandescent lava that had inched along for centuries, suddenly leapt upon them and swallowed them. Vulcan growled in rage and all the new farmers on the lava flow and all the tourists to Etna were vaporised in a final moment of seething terror.

  Across the bay from Naples, Vesuvius let fly with one single great ball of cloud, pumped into the clear twilight sky to cast a deep shadow over the ruins of Pompeii and all points south of the city. The three million inhabitants of Naples and environs felt the earth shake briefly and then heard the roar, and when they saw the cloud they dreaded that the apocalyptic moment that had threatened their city for 6000 years had finally come. But then, as the cloud rose and dispersed into the upper atmosphere, the moment was passed and the Queen of Vulcan fell silent again.

  Stromboli, the lighthouse of the Mediterranean, an island cone that burps with great regularity every twenty minutes without disturbing the villagers below its slopes, broke its routine to emit a thundering blast that knocked a hundred feet off the top of the mountain and showered it into the sea all about the island.

  Across the Lipari Islands, the earth shook and the sea broiled and the black plume brought on nightfall an hour early. Hot muddy rain fell on the villages and the people ran to their boats with their ears covered, such was the impact of the blast. Vulcano and its child Vuncanello roared to life for the first time since 1890.

  But it was away from roaring Vesuvius and thundering calderas of the Lipari Islands that the full force of the impact was felt. On mainland Italy, inland from Salerno in Province Lucania, a sudden earthquake struck. Here the villages that had clung to hilltops for centuries tumbled into the valleys below and great fissures opened in the earth, from some of which fire burst forth. A deep cloud enveloped the landscape and the people blundered about, screaming the names of lost loved ones in their blindness. A region twenty kilometres in diameter was completely destroyed and with it 4000 souls. And the damage stretched fifty kilometres from the epicentre, and fires raged amongst the forests and vineyards and olive groves, killing hundreds more and causing untold thousands of injuries.

  In a street cafe in Rome, a sudden silence amid the urban cacophony told Jami Shastri something had happened. All about, men—for there were only men—clustered about cars with their radios or televisions in the cafes and bars. Commuters stopped in a stride, their mobile phones or pocket radios clutched to their ears, gasping frantic words and all around them.

  An Indian girl amongst Italians, Jami had to ask the waiter to translate what had happened.

  “All of the south. She blow up. Boom.”

  At this news, Jami simply nodded. She paid for her cappuccino, walked to a kerb and hailed a taxi to the airport.

  9. CORE PROBLEMS

  When the First Secretary spoke her name, she wanted to fall right through the floor. It was no different now, she tried telling herself, than any of the other innumerable medical conferences that she had addressed in her career, but there was no persuading herself of that. In this room of shiny coloured marble and frescoed walls and ceilings by Michelangelo’s apprentices, at the head of a huge table of polished mahogany, in plush matching chairs with pure silk liners, was the most powerful gathering of people she had ever seen in one room.

  The First Secretary of Italy, the Deputy Secretary General of the United Nations, the European Director of the Red Cross, the European Secretaries for Sciences and Medicine, a Brigadier General in charge of the NATO Central Region, three officials from United Europe, and she—Felicity Campbell, MD. To her shame, she had forgotten all of their names—though not their titles—while everyone one of them knew exactly who she was.

  She rose to speak on knees trembling in a way they hadn’t since she was a student doing her first medical demonstration. This was both the worst and most important moment of her life, and she feared mightily that she was inadequate in every way.

  All along, she had seen herself as seconded on a temporary basis. Already the Earthshaker team possessed nine medical staff more senior and more experienced and better qualified than herself and at any time she expected her position to be usurped by one of them, if not all. She believed that she would be overrun by events and finally left behind to her domestic bliss and a dream of private practice. But unfailingly they had accepted her authority without question, although that was only because they knew that behind her stood the formidable bulk of Harley Thyssen. But still she had been a pretender, waiting to be exposed. Only now she realised that she never would be—or if she was it wouldn’t matter. Thyssen had caused her to become recognised as the world’s leading authority on the Shastri Effect and now she stood to speak in that capacity, in her own right. Now, the pretence would no longer be sustainable. Nor would her dreams of home and peace.

  If she’d had any residual doubts, they had evaporated when the telephone beside her bed in the Sheraton rang and she heard Harley’s voice thunder down the line.

  “It’s happened. Get your skates on. We’re meeting in the lobby cafe in twenty minutes.”

  They were all there. Andromeda was in her performance dress; a dazzling spangled thing that, Felicity realised, bore the colours and patterns of the earth viewed from space. She and Lorna had plainly enjoyed one or two cocktails too many and had entered leaning on each other exchanging fits of giggling. Now, they obediently sipped coffee. So did Kevin and Brian, both wet haired from showers and puffy-eyed from sleep. Joe Solomon rolled his wheelchair up to the table and ordered tea while Chrissie lounged serenely on a couch. And Thyssen, massive, was busily ensuring that they were all ready to listen.

  “Okay. The hit was Southern Italy, just inland f
rom Salerno if you know the place. Jami has already flown over the area and reports a wide area of devastation. It’s much bigger than expected. Every volcano from Etna to Vesuvius erupted simultaneously, which is newly different and frightening, but the epicentre was away from the mountains and whole towns and villages have been destroyed. The primary impact zone was about twenty kilometres in diameter, and all around the circumference we can expect there to be hundreds of sleepers. If so, it gets deadly serious from now on.”

  “But we don’t know for sure?” Felicity said hopefully.

  “It was a definite Shastri event. You can bet on it.”

  “Shit,” Brian muttered and they all nodded agreement to that.

  They sat around one table, their coffee and tea ignored now, while Thyssen sat on the top of the next table, his hands pressed together with an uncommon show of anxiety.

  “Okay, so now we go into action. First job is to get in there and collect and tag all the sleepers. Fee, when we hit the ground, you will be in command. You just do it any way you can. No doubt you’ll have all sorts of difficulties with emergency services and local authorities, not to mention outside agencies, all of whom will be getting under your feet, but you just get in and do it.”

  “I can’t even imagine how,” Felicity heard herself say nervously.

  “Hopefully, it will become clearer as we proceed,” Thyssen sighed. “Kevin. You go in and liaise with Fee and Jami and whoever else you have to and secure the whole situation. The important thing is this. If we lose track of just one of the sleepers, we lose the ability to predict the next pilgrim focal point. You all saw how difficult it was to get six of you to the right place. Next time we might be moving hundreds. Which is where you come in Brian. You have to start figuring out the best and easiest ways of moving these people around. And therefore, in co-ordination with Kevin, how to tag them so you can round them up when you need to.”

  “Fuckin’ hell,” Brian gasped.