The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

Lorna Simmons was escorted to the airport by a squad of US Marines and put on a plane that she discovered to be the old Project Earthshaker 707. The pilot introduced her to the team of technicians and then directed her to a seat in the cramped body of the aircraft, for it was filled with computers and other monitoring equipment. The navigator sat beside her and awaited her instructions.

  “That way,” Lorna said with an indicatory hand.

  “Are you sure. That’s almost due north. They said...”

  “It’s that way,” Lorna assured him.

  So they flew north, to Anchorage in Alaska where they refuelled and wasted some time then flew on over the ice cap and landed in Reykjavik, Iceland, with Lorna furious because they had passed the spot. She was pacified only when they flew again and as the deadline drew near and were circling over a spot off Cape Richards, in the Queen Elizabeth Islands, 700 kilometres from the North Pole when it was agreed the journey ended.

  “I’m glad we didn’t have to walk,” Lorna snapped at the pilot. “Harley used to organise it better than this.”

  “Not all he organised, apparently,” the pilot said grimly. “There’s been a big earthquake right in the middle of Japan.”

  *

  The problem had been Joe Solomon who, as he had expected, was arrested and handed over to US Treasury Officials and eventually flown to New York where gentlemen from the United Nations Investigative Committee wanted to talk with him. No one realised the effect it would have. When the link came, Joe raged and was hospitalised and sedated.

  *

  Not far away, also in New York, Jami Shastri and Val Dennis were capturing seismic waves and trying to get them to read out on a spectroscope.

  “So your man was right, Jami-kins,” Val smiled. “Honshu, bang on, 8.2. Outstanding.”

  “I’m getting nothing here,” Jami protested, offering the palms of her hands in frustration to the computer screen.

  “Don’t chill me, Babe. It’s rock-a-billy right around the geosphere. We’re an all shook up and shaking all over, shimmy-shimmy planet. You gotta be gettin’ something.”

  “Not a sausage.”

  “Well bite my ass.”

  “How can you be picking them up and I’m not?”

  “The spectros fucked out.”

  “It reads the same on the back-ups.”

  “Well, then, if our hardware is fine and it reads weird, then it’s weird.”

  “You are picking up seismic waves coming around through the crust but I’m not getting any coming through the mantle. How can that be?”

  “A disco at the Moho.”

  “The Mohorovicic Discontinuity can’t be a factor. Seismic waves have always travelled through the mantle in the past. Why not this time?”

  “Core distension.”

  “Not to this degree, surely.”

  “Figure it assupwards, dodo. Where can’t seismos go?”

  “Where there’s no solid matter.”

  “Which means somewhere between here and Japan, as the gopher burrows, there’s a lack of solidarity.”

  “Harley’s bubble!” Jami shrieked.

  “I guess it ain’t burst after all, hey Babe?”

  *

  In his cell at the Remand Centre in Melbourne, Brian Carrick emerged from a haze of sedation. Outside he could hear excited voices.

  “D’ya hear? Big earthquake in Japan.”

  He tried to pick up the remote control and switched the television on but discovered he was strapped to his bunk. He felt like hell.

  “Hey, out there,” he called throatily. “Bung the telly on, will ya. It’s almost time for the six o’clock news.”

  *

  In the pouring rain at the side of the road, Chrissie knelt in prayer. All along the road behind her, the jumbled outlines of the stalled convoy flashed as people walked past vehicles with shining headlights. But most were no longer walking but also out on the road, and praying. A police official had come down the line and explained to Fabrini that about ten frozen bodies had been recovered from the passes above and wanted to know how many more might be expected.

  “They were wet and not appropriately dressed. When their vehicles stopped, they got out and walked. They died in a few minutes.”

  “We have no idea how many got past us. But most seem to be here,” Fabrini said, shivering but not from the cold.

  “It was lucky,” the police chief said, “that the sister was able to stop them in time.”

  “I didn’t stop them,” Chrissie said. “They just stopped.”

  *

  Harley Thyssen sat quietly in his room, the curtains drawn, no lights on, quietly waiting in the dimness. There was a knock at the door, but he ignored it. They had keys and he did not but, being well trained in politeness as all FBI men should be, they always knocked before they let themselves in. This time, he noticed, the knocking lacked its usual authoritative tone. He allowed himself a sad little smile.

  12. THE GRAVEYARD OF GALAXIES

  On the morning of the day following the Japanese event, Lorna discovered that the guard was gone from the door. There had been three of them on a rostered shift, and the morning chap was a rather cute guy named Elmer whom she had several times tried to lure into her room for coffee... and whatever...

  “Sorry Miss Simmons. Against regulations.”

  Elmer and each of his colleagues were required to stand at her door for eight hours, and they were all young and very polite in their nice suits with the bulge of the gun in the shoulder holster. Secret Service—the same lads who guarded the President. She was very impressed by that.

  That morning, she was too hung-over to bother with seduction and gathered her breakfast and the paper from the hall in her green-with-shamrocks flannel pyjamas and it was only when she decided to shoot Elmer a smile anyway that she noticed he was gone. Maybe he went somewhere for a pee? No. Such desertion of their post for any reason had not occurred before. She suspected Elmer and his associates had perfect control over their bladders and every other bodily function.

  She considered immediate escape. Perhaps this was only a momentary window of opportunity. But no—not a chance. The image of the front page of the popular press, with photo of Lorna Simmons, fleeing through the streets of Washington in her pyjamas, barefoot, hair like a Condor’s nest. No way. She went back in, nibbled toast and drank the coffee and then peeked out the door again. Elmer was nowhere to be seen. Okay—so if it was to be an escape, let’s do it with a bit of style. Lorna headed for the shower.

  Forty-five minutes later, she was dressed to face the rainy November weather in Washington, sporting a long yellow scarf overflowed by her red hair, a green beret, an ankle-length black coat from which her black-nylon legs protruded below the mini-skirt as she walked on her highest heels. Classiest jailbreak in history, she murmured to her mirror-image. Handbag swinging from her shoulder, she strode the corridor to the lift and went up to the thirty-third floor. Although she had never been there before, the number was easy to remember—3333—and she saw there were no Secret Service men there either and knocked. A ruffled, weary Thyssen answered the door, walking away with a motion for her to enter.

  “Has all been forgiven?” she asked as she wandered in.

  “The arrest order has been withdrawn, if that’s what you mean,” Thyssen said in a thick grumble as he flopped into the chair before the computer screen.

  Five floors lower, Lorna had been occupying a room that would have been identical to this one a month ago, but now there was hardly any point of comparison. Once she collected her suitcase, there would be as little trace of her occupation as any other relatively tidy guest, but Thyssen’s room had been utterly engulfed in Harleyness. Gutted computers and other machines with exposed wires hanging all around, dozens of books with pages marked with scraps of paper, every newspaper published in the world during the last month, each left open at relative pages or dumped in disorderly heaps, many pizza and other takeaway containers, innumerable Styrofoam coffee mugs. M
aps and charts were plastered all over the walls. Harley’s clothes and personal belongings were jumbled into the midst of it—it all stank to high heaven. Harley himself looked ill and unwashed, as much a wreck as the room. It was perhaps the shaggy toothbrush protruding from a Coke bottle, standing in the middle of the coffee table like a misguided flower arrangement, that stuck in her mind most.

  “How’d you get all this stuff in here?” Lorna gasped. She had been confined to videos and newspapers and her request to visit a library or bookshop had been denied.

  “They let me have anything I wanted. All properly fitted with bugs and homing devices no doubt. I bet they even go through my garbage every night. I know they had people in here going through stuff when I was sleeping. I got to play with every pet project that crossed my mind over the last decade. It was great fun. And it’ll take them years to figure out what it all means.”

  “You’re going to leave it all?”

  “You bet,” and he walked over and addressed a mirror behind which you could only assume there was a hidden camera. “And yes, you guys, what you want to know is in here somewhere.”

  Lorna was looking over everything, the staggering clutter about her, and something caught her eye. Under the circumstances, something had to. It was a sheet of paper on the table on which Harley had scrawled in large red letters—everything else was output from the printer. She picked it up and looked at it aimlessly—CONSIDER ENTROPY, it said. Immediately, Harley was standing before her, extracting the sheet from her fingers and balling it up, throwing it onto the heap of similar balled papers on the corner buried under which, she supposed, there was probably a waste paper bin.

  “Mustn’t pry,” he said, giving her fingers a playful slap.

  “What, exactly, is Entropy?”

  “The graveyard of the galaxies,” Thyssen replied as he collected his wallet and cigarettes and herded her toward the door. She supposed it was a silly question.

  “Come on. Let’s walk,” Harley said. “There’s a lot to do.”

  They went through the lobby to the elevator, and still Lorna was thinking that perhaps they ought to be making a run for it, just in case someone changed their mind and decided they ought to be confined again. As it happened, she was very nearly running to keep up with Harley’s long strides—it was just so hard for a girl to be elegant beside such a rough and rampant man.

  “Can we pause for a moment to enjoy our freedom or are we making a fast getaway?” she asked as they waited before the lifts.

  “Neither. But they have, for the most part, admitted that they were wrong and I was right, and the pilgrimages fucked up completely without the rest of you guys organising them.”

  “So is the project to be restored?”

  “No. Not yet, anyway.”

  “Not yet?”

  “They’ve offered me a consultancy, which I declined.”

  “Why?”

  The elevator arrived and they entered, and Lorna was wondering if they should be talking so frankly in places that could harbour listening devices. But that was just her being paranoid, she realised, since they weren’t saying anything Harley didn’t want them to hear.

  “Their trouble is, they think I know something they don’t, but they don’t realise that I get it right and they don’t for the same reason the rest of you do your jobs better than anyone else can. Because we were all in on the ground floor and learned how to do these things when it was simple and easy to learn. Now everything’s become too complex to comprehend properly. But for all of us, our best guess is better than anything they can learn from the data.”

  “Not very scientific, Harley.”

  The truth was, she didn’t believe him. She had been there when he had worked alone for an hour to come up with his prediction. It was a strange moment. She waited for a sense of betrayal or disloyalty to hit her but it didn’t. Apparently, it was quite natural to distrust him. She’d never thought of that.

  “Not everything is scientific, Lorna.”

  “Heresy, surely.”

  “Computers, and mathematics, suffer as perceptions do, from occasional distortions. In any case, I have told them that its no deal unless Project Earthshaker is fully restored.”

  “And what did they say to that?”

  “No one has dared answer at this stage.”

  “Are we all reinstated?”

  “Project Earthshaker continues, with or without official sanction. Okay, let’s walk. Joe is here in Washington. Apparently he’s secreted all our funds in mysterious investments and they have been trying to persuade him to tell them where.” He handed her a business card. “He’s been turned over to my lawyer at this address. You go fetch him and deliver him to Wagner at San Carboni. Felicity is in San Diego, dealing with the Navy. Andromeda is in London, hitting the big time and moving on to Paris next week. Chrissie is at San Carboni, in the convent playing nuns. They all know the situation well enough that they’ll know what to do without help from me. I know where Jami is and you don’t want to know. Fuck knows where Brian is—find him and tell him I want him in Japan. He is going to have to figure out how to move 16,000 people and he only has six weeks to do it. Got all that?”

  “Yep. What about the prediction?”

  “I don’t know yet. But Jami has set up a secret lab somewhere and that’s where I’ll be.”

  “So now we are some sort of underground movement.”

  “If you must be romantic about it. The truth is, we have to go on. We will do what we can, and governments can help or hinder as is their wont. But the Project continues.”

  “Long live the Project.”

  “I’d forgotten your weird sense of humour. You’ll be calling me King Harley next.”

  “I can’t imagine how I avoided it so long.”

  Suddenly he rushed into the street and hailed a cab. As it squealed to a halt beside them, he smiled briefly.

  “Don’t worry about checking out. The US Treasury will have to worry about the hotel bill. Just round up the team and get them moving. I’ll get the details of the next event to you as soon as I know it. You’ll have to use your celebrity status to get yourself on air and tell it to the world.”

  “All by myself?”

  “We are, each of us, all on our own from now on. We do what we do, the best way we can.”

  “You run a pretty loose ship, Harley.”

  “When will you realise that I’m not in charge of anything. I just do my part for the project, same as everyone else.”

  He jumped in the cab and was whisked away into the traffic, and she stood, truncating a wave. She was a young girl in a strange city, alone and abandoned and far from home. And she knew just exactly what she had to do.

  *

  Cardinal Valerno was a much younger man than she expected, maybe forty-something but with the general appearance of an Italian businessman—black-haired, strong-jawed, ruggedly handsome features. He arrived dressed in a simple cassock and the sisters fussed as they brought him through to the small garden courtyard where Chrissie sat on the fountain in a white robe and bareheaded, just to make sure than no one mistook her for a nun.

  Outwardly, she offered her most serene mode—inwardly, she was a ball of nerves. She had never encountered anyone as important as a cardinal before, and the word around the convent was that he was some sort of envoy from the Pope himself. Hence the younger man, someone she could almost regard as a contemporary, was a grave disappointment. She expected to be overawed, instead she wondered how appropriate it might be to ask him for a date.

  “It’s good of you to see me, sister,” Valerno said in English with a fulsome bow.

  “I don’t think it’s right to call me that,” Chrissie replied in Italian. “I’m not one of the Sisters, nor anything else officially.”

  “So we have noticed,” the cardinal smiled. His English was just the way they spoke it in Oxford, without trace of accent, cool and assured. She wondered if his Italian and Latin were as good. “We have decided
that Sister would be the best form of address only after much discussion— at a very high level, I might add.”

  If he was surprised at her Oriental appearance, or even at her command of Italian, he gave no sign of it. Undoubtedly he had been well briefed. It made her almost desperate to shock him.

  “Well we can ditch the protocol for starters,” Chrissie said aggressively, settling them into English. “My name is Christine. You should call me that. If we get to be friends, you call me Chrissie.”

  Cardinal Valerno smiled and bowed—next he’d be grovelling on his knees. “I would sincerely hope that we do become friends, Christine.”

  “Well that isn’t going to happen if I have to call you Your Holiness or Your Eminence or whatever the right term is. What’s your first name?”

  “Luigi.”

  “Okay, Luigi. Sit yourself on whatever stone you like and for God’s sake, stop all that bowing and scraping.”

  She knew what this was all about—the Mother Superior had warned her. When the pilgrimage began, three cardinals had been sent, along with other lesser dignitaries, to try and take command of the convoy. Their failure to stop it, or redirect it, or even slow it down, was a matter of record. Then Chrissie arrived by helicopter and walked out in front of the first truck and the whole procession halted, seemingly at her command. Of course they thought it a miracle and the press described it that way to the great embarrassment of the Vatican, but the truth was that, as she advanced through the rain toward the convoy, she knew the sun was setting at that very moment in Japan.

  Cardinal Luigi sat on a stone bench facing her and looked as awkward as is permitted for a man of the cloth. He nodded his approval at everything she said. But she could see beads of sweat across his brow. The day was cool and pleasant. She decided the conversation should be as well. But not just yet.