by Barry Klemm
“One moment, Professor. Let’s wait for the smoke to clear and then see what action is to be taken here.”
“I understood you were going to take no action.”
“Not exactly. What action will you be taking?”
“Myself and my team will proceed and do everything they can to persuade those people to leave those islands.”
“Very candid of you, professor. I’m sure the French government, not to mention the New Zealanders, will have opinions on that.”
“As I say, I will only do what I can.”
“Allow me to express to you the grave dangers involved in creating a panic of this sort. You would be wise to keep your speculations to yourself.”
“How would that be wise?”
“It will avoid great destruction to your credibility later on.”
“Whereas, ladies and gentlemen, let me assure you that yours will be safe. I will not tell anyone that you were warned of these dangers in advance. And now, good afternoon.”
“Please, Professor, try and understand...”
But he did understand, perfectly. He rose and walked from the room, and smiled to himself as he went. Yes, it had gone as expected and he had probably got the best possible result he could have hoped for. Life was always a lot easier when important decisions were taken out of your hands and the way forward obliged by the actions of others. They gave him no choice which meant that there was no further need for consideration. As soon as he was in the corridor outside, Thyssen pulled the mobile telephone out of his pocket, switched it on and jabbed a precoded number.
“Yes?” a female voice inquired.
“Okay, Lorna,” he said. “Do it now.”
*
Lorna liked best, when enjoying sex, to watch herself on television. She had set up a large screen at the foot of the bed and had prepared a tape of every video moment of her short but prolific career as a media celebrity, which she replaced with an updated version each day and kept plugged in at the right spot. All she had to do was reach sideways to the bedside table and press the Go button and there she would be in all her glory.
“It’s better than a vibrator,” she told the man in question candidly.
Since the man ordinarily had his back turned to the screen, it offered him little hindrance.
“Hearing your voice coming from behind gives a bloke that little bit of distraction he needs to avoid shooting his bolt too soon,” the man of the moment admitted. She kept the volume just a little louder than necessary, hoping for that very sort of voyeuristic effect.
“The next event will occur on the morning of the 13th of September, at a point halfway between the Society Islands—Tahiti—and the Cook Islands,” her video self said gravely.
“How can you be so sure?” one of the disembodied voices beyond the array of microphones before her asked.
“I am sure because the scientists of Project Earthshaker tell me it is so,” she replied with a nifty little arch of her eyebrows at the end.
Just because she was the bearer of dire news didn’t mean she couldn’t be playful. That, after all, was the whole effect. She had a cheeky beret perched on her flowing red hair and always offered a touch of cleavage for the upper body camera shots, and plenty of leg for the full length stuff. Best of all were those sorts of interviews where they placed her in an armchair and she could cross her thighs straight at the camera. The Harbinger of Doom was the sexiest thing on television and the combined effect gained her almost nightly admission into every lounge room in the world.
She wondered how many other women used her image in pursuit of a speedier orgasm.
Already the journalists hated to see her—well, all except the French and Italians and the gutter press who never tired of finding new angles on her anatomy. But those journalists who took their work seriously knew she was a buffer, a wall that they were never allowed to see behind, the Cerberus, guardian of the jaws of hell, as one of them lugubriously put it.
“But you don’t possess any appropriate qualifications to make these statements, do you Miss Simmons?” those earnest sorts of late-night female interviewers accused.
“You don’t need a degree to read an autocue, love,” Lorna replied slyly. She could match them, bitchy for bitchy, and loved it.
“But you don’t have any sort of degree at all?”
“No. But the people who write my script do. And bigger degrees than those who write yours.”
And cunning she could meet with cunning.
“So who is the real Lorna Simmons?”
“A Kiwi receptionist lucky enough to land a job fronting for the most important scientific project in the world.”
“But you, personally, are not important.”
“Oh, I don’t know. How long since you last had your picture on the front page of Time, Maxine?”
If she wasn’t well on the way to her orgasm by then, she never would be.
She knew the reason why she was there and was permitted to be honest about it. Nothing could have been worse than a genuine geologist facing these interviews where their every statement could be twisted and distorted by the media and every sentence taken out of context to create those sensational but false headlines that media moguls were sure they needed. To most serious questions, the ones that really probed the situation, she was able to offer a shrug that enhanced her bosom and a mischievous wrinkle of her nose and admitted she had no idea. No scientist could have got away with that.
The truth was that Harley wanted to make sure that the public clearly understood everything he told them. What Lorna understood, anyone could. Not being burdened with extraneous expert knowledge, she was never able to jump to conclusions, nor add confusing jargon, nor assume a certain base level of knowledge on the part of the audience. Lorna was the model of her own audience—she said everything from the heart and in terms that the lowest common denominator viewing public could easily understand.
“I tell the public what I am told to tell them. No more or less because I don’t know any more or less. And you can’t bamboozle me into saying more than I should because I don’t know any more than I should.”
“Unlike your boss,” one interviewer said cruelly.
It was, of course, reference to the official condemnation of Harley’s public announcement of his predictions. Harley had learned from these misfortunes, which was exactly why he had placed her so firmly between himself and the media. How they would have loved to have got at him and Harley was the first to admit that under pressure he would babble and create chaos. Now, with Lorna telling everything he knew, he was able to dismiss the media out of hand. When they trapped him on the steps of important buildings, Harley could herd his way through them like a half-back going through the pack, grumbling at them to ‘fuck off’ to make sure his words never went on air in prime time.
“How can you be sure that he is right about this, Lorna?”
“I can’t. I don’t know any better than you do. We’ll all just have to wait and see.”
“What would you recommend people do if they are in the designated region?”
“Go somewhere else.”
“And if they can’t?”
“Hide under the bed.”
“Is that what you’d do, Lorna?”
“No. I’d be on top of the bed with my favourite lover. It ought to be a fantastic moment.”
Like everyone ever interviewed, all of her best bits ended up on the cutting room floor.
Afterwards, they leaned back on the pillows and shared a cigarette. She ran the tape from the start so he could see what he missed.
“Well, what do you think?”
“Looks to me like he’s moulded you into exactly what he wants you to be.”
“Yes. It’s just me, doing what I used to do locally, suddenly gone global. Do I live up to my media persona?”
“You might be the only person in the world who does.”
But of course it wasn’t always about her. She considered sex something share
d and the man was important, whoever he may be.
“Aren’t you allowed to go home anymore, Brian?”
“I guess not.”
“Well, I think she doesn’t appreciate you. I think you are a truly fine man in every way. Very loving and attentive to a girl’s needs, and a strong lover. Good sense of humour. Interesting to talk to. They don’t make you men better than that.”
“Thanks, Lorna. Coming from you, that is one hell of a recommendation.”
10. THE CHAMPAGNE FLOWS
Amid the orderly chaos, dazzling neon and seething heat of Las Vegas, Andromeda felt she had come home even though it was a place she had never been before. When Tierney had told her of their next engagement, she had snorted in faint disgust.
“I might have known Harley would have gangsters for friends,” she said.
“You think that’s how he does these things?” Joel asked seriously.
“Everyone knows Las Vegas is run by the mob. I guess the connections to Washington are strong.”
“That’s history. The mob is out of Las Vegas these days.”
“Not according to Martin Scorsese.”
“What would he know?”
“More than most people,” she said, and she believed that too. Great artists told the truth, even when they lied.
But she went to Las Vegas and found it different to her expectations. Oh, it was big and brassy and fake and miserable like every place where the high rollers were the basis of the economy, but there was something about it that suited her and she knew she settled into it like an old shoe. Maybe she was made for the casino world. She had done gigs at casinos in Australia and the Pacific but they were truly sleazy and their criminal basis unmistakable. Las Vegas was more like a businessman’s convention in Disneyland. It was like the aristocrat—having risen above its origins and putting on airs. For all its fierce modernity, it was a staid old lady at heart.
There were two engagements, actually, at the Sands and then The Golden Nugget, but for Andromeda there was little difference. Her act fitted in perfectly and was a hit, almost as if it was preordained. Even she could see how appropriate she had become to this world. She flowed through it, seamlessly, and if she could see the mechanical processes in operation, plainly no one else did.
Anyone who tried could blend in here—there was a universality about it that said ‘we don’t care who you are as long as you play the tables’. She even saw men like Harley looking quite at home, and one night a girl who looked like Jami Shastri, except she was wearing a dress. And thick make-up. And she had done something civilised with her hair. Really, the only reason that this person resembled Jami at all was because it was actually her.
“Jami, darling, you look fabulous.”
Jami did a little curtsy and smiled brilliantly. Sure, her thighs were too thin to be on show like this and the dress fitted her like a sack, but there was no need to quibble.
“I didn’t know whether it’d be okay to come and see you. Now that you’re such a big star and all.”
Andromeda gave her a big public hug, just to cure her nervousness. “Of course it is, sweetheart. You people are like family to me these days.”
Which was true. She found she hung out for every small fragment of news about the others of Project Earthshaker, from whom she constantly felt estranged. They were always off, doing things elsewhere and together, a team, while she was somewhere else and alone. It was a strange sensation to feel so close to people she hardly knew. And yet it was so. When they were amid the disaster in Italy and nightly they variously appeared on television, she was like a mother with sons and daughters away at a war. And on these rare occasions when one of her fellow earthshakers came her way, she found she was desperately anxious for gossip about the others.
As she was now, with awkward Jami, but she could see that would have to wait. Plainly Jami was unhappy and needed to confide—Andromeda felt the earth mother within her assume immediate ascendancy. She knew a place where they could meet for dinner later and have a good chat. Jami was delighted.
“I’m on my way to Tahiti, but yes, dinner will be terrific.”
No flight to Tahiti demanded an overnight stop in Las Vegas that she knew of. Andromeda felt she was right. Jami had a big problem.
And naturally, it turned out to relate to men. Who else could cause a girl such obvious grief and on what subject could Andromeda better give advice? The chap’s name was Glen, a colleague on the project. Yes, Andromeda had heard of him. The mysterious extra member of the Earthshaker team, locked up in a dungeon in Boston, being fed on microchips and water, condemned to an eternity doing Harley’s sums. She had never met him and imagined some stodgy, cobwebbed fellow until she saw his photograph. Good looking, athletic, all American boy. The nature of the problem was obvious. Just when Jami had begun to dream her dreams once more, Glen dumped her for a water-ballet star.
“We’re just friends, Jami. You must understand that.” he had told her and she left for Tahiti immediately after that.
“You don’t need me to tell you what to do, honey-child,” Andromeda said, sadly.
She could see the future easily. Most likely he would abandon her eventually for someone as handsome and clever as himself and Jami would be left to devote herself to her career. Or, should she succeed in trapping him, he would continue to have affairs and she would grow to tolerate it and never allow his infidelity to diminish her devotion. Many attractive men were like that. And just as many foolish women put up with them.
“But I want Glen,” Jami insisted tearfully. “I know we’re made for each other.”
Since it would have been cruel to point out that they almost certainly were not, Andromeda could only sympathise and pacify and advise her to transfer her unbounded love to someone worthy of it. Which she would be the first women in history to achieve, were she to manage it.
But there was far more historical fame going on at present than anyone could handle. Eventually, they got around to the gossip. Naughty Lorna and cuckold Brian. Felicity Nightingale and Saint Chrissie. Harley the bull in a bureaucratic china shop, suspicious old Joe and his conspiracies, Adolf Wagner.
“Everyone is becoming famous,” Jami said, her tears dried for the moment.
“I find it majorly weird, Jami. Remember Kevin and his master race idea?”
“It’s nothing like that.”
“Are you sure, Jami? If it did happen that a new improved species evolved, wouldn’t they all start over-achieving and become celebrities? I mean, how else would they be superior?”
Jami looked at her, beginning to take the idea seriously. “I always imagined that a superior race would excel in sciences. I’ve never thought media stars superior to anyone.”
“But think about it, Jami. Lorna, Chrissie, Brian, Kevin, Joe and me. We were all nobodies when this first happened. Now we are all big successes.”
“Joe hasn’t changed.”
“No, I guess not. But his capacity for change is mighty limited.”
“And Felicity has become just as famous even though she wasn’t touched by the effect. And my name has become a household word around scientific circles. And Harley, although he was famous in his way all along.”
That was the trouble with talking to scientists—they always knew the facts and messed up the loveliest theories.
“Damn. I sure thought I was on to somethin’.”
Jami smiled. She was finally beginning to loosen up. “I can’t blame you for thinking so, Andromeda. I began to think so myself for a while. Lorna is so utterly brilliant on TV. You ought to see dull old Brian strutting about like a field marshal, organising everything. But, when you think about it, nothing has really changed.”
“Hasn’t it?”
“You were always a terrific entertainer. You were waiting to be discovered. Earthshaker gave you the break you needed—that’s all.”
“There’s a lot of better performers around than me.”
“Sure. And a lot who are better than
Elton John and Sharon Stone. Being good gets you to a certain level. Then you need a break. A bit of luck. Your bit of luck was being on Ruapehu when it blew.”
“You gotta be in a position to exploit a break when it comes. Yeah, I get it. Harleykins has simply oiled the wheels and let it happen.”
“It’s the same with the others. Lorna was always a quick-witted sexy thing. Brian is a natural organiser who never had anything to organise before.”
“I ain’t so sure about that…”
“He was the one who always got to the focal point and did whatever was necessary to get there.”
“He had the shortest distance to go.”
“But he didn’t try public transport or hitch-hiking like the rest of you. He stole a truck and drove straight there.”
“Hmm, I guess so….”
“Kevin ran a security company in the past—this is just on a bigger scale. And Chrissie was born to be a martyr. And that explains Joe—he continues doing what he does best.”
“Oh all right then.”
“They are all doing what they do best. So am I. So is Glen. So is Felicity. And so is Harley. And one of Harley’s great talents is arranging for people to do what they are best at.”
“So you think it is just a natural progression.”
“Extraordinary events are taking place. At such a time, anyone doing what they do best, unhindered by outside forces, are always going to look pretty good.”
“And you reckon Harley read us all like that?”
“I think he just opened the opportunities and allowed each of us to flow into them.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why did he take the trouble? Why bother to help us all along like this?”
“I have no idea.”
“But do you think Harley has a plan or does he just make it all up as he goes.”
“Harley? He doesn’t have a spontaneous bone in his body. He plans everything, as meticulously as possible, as far ahead as possible.”
“So what’s his real agenda?”
“You’ll have to ask him that.”