by Barry Klemm
There was a couch on which he could recline and, on the assumption that he would be here for some time, he lay on it and fell sleep immediately. When he awoke three hours later, he was still alone. He used the facilities, shaved and washed and was just about to begin to think of what to do next when there was a knock on the door. A pleasant woman brought coffee and breakfast—bacon and eggs—and she smiled as asked if there was anything else he wanted. The large soldier standing in the doorway suggested that any remark concerning freedom could at best be regarded as a joke.
He ate his breakfast, changed his clothes, dug a paperback out of his pack and lay on the couch to read. It was, after all, a random universe where the laws of mathematics and physics had no meaning, except as good descriptions of the way our minds worked. In such circumstances, was it reasonable for him to expect his own miserable life to make any sense?
So he mulled his way along until there was again the polite knock on the door. They entered, all smiles and deference, and collected him and his luggage and took him out to a transit lounge where he found Felicity Campbell waiting. She sat serenely in the lounge wearing her nice travelling clothes, her suitcases at her feet.
“What’s happening?” he asked with a warm smile.
To his astonishment, Felicity gave him a hug. Then she handed him a letter.
“I got one of these too,” she said.
Brian tore the envelope open and read. It was signed by the General Secretary of the United Nations, and informed him that Project Earthshaker had been discontinued, and that he was to place himself under house arrest and make himself continuously available to the Special Investigative Committee formed to look into the project and its activities. He was banned from speaking to the media or anyone concerning the project, every part of which was now classified as Top Secret—failure to comply would result in charges being laid under the Official Secrets Act and, more immediately, confinement to a state institution.
It was a very polite letter, on fine paper and with the UN crest at the top but no address for reply. Brian folded it and stuffed it into his pocket. “Tricky to put myself under house arrest when I don’t have a home to go to.”
“You’re welcome at the humble Campbell home in Wellington if you wish, Brian,” Felicity said.
Somehow, Brian suspected his rough domestic standards would not quite measure up there, but still he could smile with appreciation at her gesture.
“Nar. I gotta get back to Melbourne and do some sorting out. Custody of the kids and all that. Ain’t seen ‘em for months.”
“If you need any help, just call.”
“Sure. How’d you go with the Navy?”
Felicity snorted and threw her hands in the air. “I never got near them. The sailors all awoke from the coma on schedule, completed medical checks successfully of course, and the USS Barton sailed for Pearl Harbour yesterday.”
“It must be nice to be able to believe your problems will just go away,” Brian said.
“Ours have,” Felicity smiled. “I must say, it’ll be nice to have a rest. I’m looking forward to this.”
“Where’s Jami?”
“Oh, she skipped out of here days ago. Didn’t discuss her plans.”
“And the others?”
“Thyssen is apparently under guard in a suite at the Washington Hilton and Lorna, always the opportunist, got herself confined to a room in a different part of the same hotel. You can imagine what house arrest means to her.”
“Andromeda is in London, I know,” Brian said. “She’s got a big concert there next week.”
“I wonder if the muzzle will extend to her songs.”
“She’s a big sell-out everywhere. A lot of disappointed people if they try and cancel her.”
“And Wagner?”
“Well, I think I know where he is but I’d better not say.”
“I heard something about the convent in Italy,” Felicity said, leaning and whispering in his ear.
“Joe bought it for him.”
“Good old Joe. Can he get me one?”
“I don’t know how it happened. But it did. Just shows how little I know.”
“We are all learning how little we know, Brian.”
“You can say that again,” Brian laughed.
*
You could lose anything in New York, especially if it wanted to stay lost. People, their whole lives, even complete cultures, had vanished there without a trace. Along with vast sums of money and vast quantities of drugs, and millions of careers and disconnected fragments of creative talent. Such a talent was Val Dennis, who was rich enough to do whatever he liked and chose Astrophysics, of all things, and related disciplines. He had been abducted, so he said, by aliens when young and therefore believed every known conspiracy theory, and since there wasn’t a lot of work in his trade outside government projects, he had set up his own private laboratory in a tenement in The Bronx where he gathered other brilliant outcasts and any black market equipment available and was available to do any scientific projects that the government banned or refused to take seriously.
Jami had suffered through the freakiest night of her life when she met him at a UFO conference and they indulged in a one night stand that got lost sniffing coke. It was unclear whether they had actually had sex. But, importantly, Val was a friend that no one knew she had, because it would not have offered the slightest benefit to anyone’s career in sciences to have Val Dennis appear on their credentials. She only realised the value of that as a secondary line of thought—she had intended to consult him over Earthshaker anyway and events simply added an imperative of immediacy.
Fate, plainly, was on her side, delaying her arrival at the Earth Sciences Building by means of a flat tyre. When she arrived, a removals van was parked outside the building and men in black suits were loading equipment. She halted in the car park, watching, sure the scene did not fit somehow. Glen saved her by putting up a fight and she saw him brought out, handcuffed, still shouting abuse and struggling and they put him in a black Lincoln with tinted windows and drove him away.
She got back in her car, a ball of nerves, and drove off the campus, stopping at the first telephone box she came to. She rang Harley and got no response. She rang the dungeon and a strange voice answered. She drove back to her apartment building and saw two men standing by another black Lincoln in the street outside. Instinct, and maybe too may conspiracy thrillers, warned her to keep driving. She went to an Internet Cafe and made use of the web. There was email from Wagner. ‘You will be arrested,’ his message, plainly directed to all project members went, ‘effective immediately. Thyssen directs you to surrender without a fight and tell them anything they want to know.’
Not fucking likely.
Not without a trill of excitement, she immediately formulated a plan. They would be able to trace her car—she drove downtown and parked it deep in an underground car park and walked around to the station. She waited until the buses deposited a large crowd in the station, put on her overcoat and sun glasses and a woollen beanie, and went in, mingling with the travellers, and bought a ticket to New York. She travelled all the way to The Bronx on public transport—cab destinations could be traced and she didn’t want to risk that—and walked the last distance constantly stopping to check if she was being followed. By then it was after midnight, and these streets were not safe, but she slunk along in the shadows and arrived.
Val, straggly and undernourished as ever, was delighted to see her.
“Hey, Jami, Hey. Yo, baby. Who let you loose in the Big Apple?” and such like went down. He offered every known drug of abuse before he thought of coffee.
“You know the one about government agents hunting down the innocent lab assistant because she is the only one left alive that knows the secret formula?” she asked him.
“Does that make me Cary Grant?”
“As near as you’ll ever get, Val.”
“Hey, whoa there. I sure hope Hitch’s directin’.”
; “Alfred Hitchcock is dead. And so is Cary Grant. And so will I be if it gets known I’m here.”
“Babe, welcome to the other side of the event horizon.”
It wasn’t at all clear whether they had sex that night either, but in the morning she made him the sort of breakfast that only sexually contented women can, and then put him to work.
“Consider a black hole. How would you detect it?”
“Ain’t none been detected, so who knows?”
“How do they try?”
“There’s a scream, they say. Registers small on the spectro. X-rays from the stuff fallin’ in. Get it?”
“Perfectly.”
“Like the water goin’ down the gurgler. Matter being eaten spins, faster than light before it pops in and goes out of existence. Synchrotronic radiation they call it.”
“Suppose there was a black hole inside the earth’s core. What then?”
“Direct me to the next shuttle to Mars. One way ticket, Babe.”
“But how would we detect it?”
“Get real? Terra don’t swallow black holes. Black holes gulp galaxies.”
“A mini black hole.”
“Singularity. Oh yeah, I get it. Whacko idea.”
“Eating the earth out from the middle, like a worm in an apple.”
“Heard it before, Babe. Asimov. Sci Fi. That’s his gospel.”
“If it did exist, and it was there, how would we know?”
“By noticing our non-existence.”
“Before that. Early stages.”
“X-ray. Wheel the whole planet into radiology and zap her. It’d show as long bright streaks with no apparent energy source.”
“Does such technology exist?”
“No way, Babe. Getoutahere!”
“Could it be made to exist?”
“You bet. Fifty satellites spaced evenly, shooting X-rays at each other. Cat scan the whole planet. Can have it hot to trot in the millennium after next.”
“How about next week?”
“I got appointments next week.”
“Can you do it for me, Val?”
“Got a hundred million Georgie Porgies and I’ll see what I can do. Hey Babe, you’re talking post-Slartibartfast.”
“We need a way of proving it’s there, and then a way of tracking it.”
“You’re talkin’ Earthshaker, Babe. You’re talkin’ Thyssen.”
“It’s just one theory.”
“No way. Big Harls won’t go for shit like that, Babe.”
“He’s mellowed out. It was his idea.”
“He knows it ain’t so.”
“But it is the best he’s been able to come up with.”
“Make the theory fit the data, huh?”
“Find it for me, Val.”
“Hey Babe, for you, anything. These guys on your tail—they wear white coats?”
“First time you’ve ever been short of a plan, Val.”
“Can’t be bigger than microbe size or the planet would have already collapsed, Babe. Travelling at maybe half light speed. In 260 billion cubic miles of hot stuff. Hey Babe, that’s the ittiest needle in the gargatuanest haystack.”
“There’s got to be a way.”
“Drill a hole to China and wait a million years for it to pass by.”
“Well that’s something.”
“Build a moon sized power station and shoot an X-ray bullet to a catcher on the other side.”
“Go on.”
“Wait through a thousand years of evolution until we can understand what it really is.”
“Meaning?”
“I know, and Big Man Harley knows, and you know if you use your greystuff—that there ain’t nothin’ of the kind down there. Black holes are just a best guess based on limited knowledge based on mathematics that are meaningless.”
“God dammit, Val. Don’t give up on me.”
“Babe, I can die now. I’ve had my last idea.”
*
The continual intrusiveness of the media had obliged the Campbell family to take extreme defensive precautions. It was just too difficult to get in and out of the house, even though Kevin had provided a roster of security guards who stood permanently at the front and rear doors. Wendell had taken to sleeping at his surgery, Gavin and Melissa were both staying with friends and Megan had been sent on an unscheduled holiday at Granny’s.
Eventually, Felicity had offered to go elsewhere but her family saw their absence as proof of their determination to stand behind her—as contradictory as that sounded—and anyway, the officials pointed out that there was a legal requirement that a person under house arrest remain in their normal place of residence.
By turns, one of her brood would stay in the house with her, prepared to run the gauntlet of the microphones and lens to gain access to their normal lives. She wanted, anyway, to be where she could be easily contacted, especially as the time of the linkage drew nearer.
To her surprise, at first, she found she was free to maintain communication with the others of Project Earthshaker. It became less of a surprise when Brian had pointed out that it was probably because her telephone was tapped.
“I don’t care. I don’t have any secrets,” she told him. But it still made her flesh crawl, every time she picked up the receiver.
All of their cell phones seemed to be off the air, but after a while, she began to open lines of communication. She needed something to do anyway—there was little hope of making arrangements to see patients when they had that mob of jackals at the front gate to fight their way through.
Chrissie had been confined to the convent in Italy, where she spent her time in prayer. There was a continual problem of both reporters and devotees jumping the convent wall and invading the grounds, but the chapel door was kept locked and the nuns brought her food and comfort through the secret passages that such places contained as a matter of course. She sounded well and happy and naturally very relaxed, even though she expressed genuine anxiety concerning how the pilgrims would manage without her.
“They’ve done it before,” Felicity assured her. “They can probably manage all right by themselves.”
She didn’t want to think of where they might go, without Thyssen rigging the focal point. She had no idea whether the people who had taken charge knew about that or not—she had tried explaining it to every official she had spoken to but none seemed to grasp the idea.
The riots that followed the last minute cancellation of Andromeda’s London concert had led her to the singer, who was confined to a posh hotel in Mayfair. She rang and left her number and, a day later, Andromeda called back. She was still very distressed—the riots had led to deaths and many injuries and she was condemned by the establishment as a danger to society.
“The same people said the same thing of the Beatles, Andromeda,” Felicity assured her. Andromeda had called again several times, when she needed a sane voice to talk to. Her hotel remained picketed by thousands of her fans and there was on-going trouble.
Somehow too, her colour had made it a racial issue and there had been other riots in Memphis, Cape Town and other places in her support. She might have been the first political prisoner in history that the human rights movement wished to liberate from a luxury hotel.
With Brian, contact was almost daily until it suddenly stopped, but she knew why. He had been staying in a pub in Melbourne and trying to arrange for a lawyer to set a case in motion for the custody of his children but no one would help. A homeless man with a history of violence and criminal acts, not long before released from a mental institution, involved with undesirables and foreign radical fringe groups—there really wasn’t any hope. It was amazing how these things could be described.
In the end he made the news as far away as New Zealand when he took the media on, hospitalising two reporters and a cameraman. Under arrest in Melbourne, he made his one permitted telephone call to Felicity. “You can’t imagine how much better I feel,” Brian laughed.
Felicity coul
d. In the past month there had been many times when she might have envied a violent nature. “You must have done wonders for your custody case, Brian.”
“It was hopeless anyway. And since the media invented the stories about my violent nature, I decided to make it a wish fulfilling prophecy.”
“Do you have a history of violence?”
“Snotted one or two blokes in pubs and on the footy field. Of course, the way they say it, you’d reckon I’d been laying into Judy every night, but I’ve never hit anyone that didn’t have a fair chance of fighting back on equal terms.”
“Should I try and get on to Joe, Brian?”
“You won’t be able to. He’s dropped out of sight.”
“Yes. I know. But someone from his office might be able to help.”
“No. I got lawyers if I need them. Anyhow, it ain’t so bad here. The way things were out there, a bloke’s better off in the slot.”
“I’d better go. I suppose they’ll be annoyed if they realise you’ve made a long distance call.”
“Fuck ‘em.”
“Take care of yourself, Brian. Remember the next link is due on the evening of the 29th.”
“Yeah. The coppers here understand that and they know what to expect. She’ll be right.”
Joe had dropped out of sight. Kevin too. Rumour had it he was building a private army on some secret base somewhere. Jami had vanished completely but you could bet she was making her way to wherever the next prediction suggested somehow. The surprise was one evening when Lorna rang.
“I wish they’d let the media get near me,” she protested. “I’m comfortable but under close guard. They won’t let me out at all.”
“Have you seen Thyssen?”
“No. But I know they’ve got him here in this hotel somewhere. You know they changed his prediction. He said it would be the middle of Honshu but they’ve moved it...”
The call was immediately cut off.
Felicity sat for a long time with her arms locked between her knees and her head down. The location of the next eruption had been announced a week ago and the public was assured that all the affected populations had been moved to safer ground. They had said it would occur in the Pacific Ocean, at the northern extremity of the Marianas Trench, a thousand kilometres south of Japan. In the region there were just a few small islands that had been evacuated. But that wasn’t Harley’s prediction apparently.