by Barry Klemm
As Lorna wheeled him out into a rare day of winter sun, Joe knew that his commitment to the project was complete.
“Harley said to send you wherever you want to go. So, where do you want to go, Joe?” Lorna asked him lightly.
“Italy. To the convent.”
“You planning to become Chrissie’s first real convert?”
“No. Despite the fact that I think it’s a miracle that I didn’t end up doing decades in Sing-sing, it’s Wagner who interests me now.”
“You think you’ll need his protection.”
“No. That isn’t at all what I have in mind.”
*
He got out of the cab in the Bronx, huddled against the wind and pouring rain. It was four in the morning and there was no one about.
“You better watch yourself in this neighbourhood, buddy,” the taxi driver warned and he searched out the change.
“Keep it. Any mugger who comes out in this weather deserves what he gets.”
“If you say so, buddy.”
Thyssen watched the cab until it disappeared from sight. He was wrapped in a yellow raincoat with the hood pulled right over his head. The driver might remember him but would never be able to make a positive identification. He turned then and surveyed the street—the ruined tenements towered all about and the gutters spread to lakes as the garbage blocked up the drains. With his hands in his pockets and his head down, he started to walk along a carefully planned route through streets and alleys until eventually he came to a wide square that he crossed. He did not know the area and had no idea where he was—he was tracing his course on a map secluded in the folds of the raincoat. At every possible corner, he halted and looked back to ensure no one was following. But he knew that a professional tail would never be caught by that method.
At the next corner, a man sat in a car, lighting a cigarette as Thyssen passed on the other side of the road. Neither acknowledged the existence of the other. Thyssen walked on and the man in the car, who was Val Dennis, waited ten minutes without moving, watching for signs of life, contented himself there was none, and then drove off. Thyssen meanwhile was two blocks away, and stepped into a doorway and made a call on his cell phone.
“All clear,” Jami responded. “You go in the steel door in the alley across from you and up to the top floor in the goods lift.”
When he got to the lift, Val Dennis was standing there, grinning and smoking. “Yo, Prof. Remember me?”
“I seem to remember kicking you out of one of my tutorials about ten years ago, Val.”
“Hey man, big favour. I was so pissed, I assholed Geology and took Astrophysics in a rage of vengeance. It’s much more fun looking up than looking down.”
“Pleased to oblige.”
“So, are we at the end of the exercise in paranoia?” Val asked with a grin.
“Yeah. I was sure I lost them at the airport. They’ll still be watching my luggage waiting for me to collect it. But I didn’t want to take any chances.”
“Cool, Daddio. I surely don’t wanna get tumbled at this stage.”
“Unless, of course, they didn’t need to follow me because they’ve tumbled your little set-up already.”
“No way, bro. They been tryin’ to bust me for years. I got so many anti-counter-measures installed that Deep Thought will need another Earthlife to find me.”
“Well, we’ll soon know if that’s true. Is there somewhere warm around here?”
They rattled their way up in the elevator to where Jami awaited them on the top floor.
“Welcome to Hole-In-The-Wall, Butch,” she grinned.
“Gawd,” Thyssen grinned back. “You could hide the Titanic in here.”
“It’s in the room out the back,” Jami laughed.
There they shed rain coats and she handed them towels to dry the peripherals as they made their way into Val’s amazing clutter of equipment.
“What is all this stuff?” Thyssen asked in amazement.
“What falls, I catch,” Val said with a shrug.
Thyssen saw a bathysphere, and a jet engine, and what seemed to be a communications satellite.
“Got outmoded before it got launched,” Dennis explained when he saw Thyssen staring.
“You wouldn’t have a nice, standard Pentium around someplace, would you?”
“Thisaway.”
It was in fact the sort of place where Thyssen was at home, the machines reduced to their components and reconnected by exposed wiring. Jami sat at the screen. “We tried to duplicate Glen’s set up as near as possible. How is the blue-eyed boy, anyway?”
“Gone over to the other side, I fear.”
“Bastard.”
“Taken you far too long to realise that, honoured student. But Glen’s a practical lad. Either he works for them or he doesn’t work. Eventually, he’ll see reason and return to the fold and when he does we’ll know everything they know.”
“But doesn’t that mean that right now they know everything we know?”
“They know everything he knows. But I managed to pump a few vital bits into the net.”
Jami opened the page. “User name?”
“Drongo.”
“Oh boy. Isn’t it some sort of bird?”
Thyssen leaned over her shoulder and typed in the password with one emphatic finger. “Yes. It’s also a word I picked up from Brian Carrick. Australian for someone who knows less than they ought to.”
“Isn’t that everyone?”
“No. Only the undeluded. You got it?”
“Yep.”
“Okay. Dump it into the models.”
“Just like that?”
“Indeed. Set ‘em running.”
“How long will it take?”
“About ten minutes.”
“And it’ll come up with the answer?”
“It will come up with an array of statistical possibilities that will need to be analysed.”
“What answer are we expecting?”
“Indian Ocean.”
“You always say that, Harley, and you’re always wrong.”
“African side.”
“But hang on. If we can do it this easily, why can’t they?”
“We’re smarter than they are.”
“Getoutahere! This is really simple.”
“If you get the right answer. It will require my magic touch afterwards.”
“What now?”
“Delete Drongo.”
“But it hasn’t done anything yet.”
Jami watched the models flashing on the screen and the columns of figures building in the window in the corner. And suddenly she knew.
“You’ve done something to it.”
“Oh?”
“Drongo is readjusting the figures. I can see it happening.”
“What a sharp eyed little student you are.”
“You’ve put a virus in the models so that they’ll always come up with the wrong answer unless they run Drongo.”
“The data must be safeguarded.”
“You bastard!”
“You seem to hang that descriptive on all the men in your life, Jami.”
*
They walked out into the sunlight, the first that Brian Carrick had enjoyed for some time.
“I seem to be making a habit of being rescued from these places by beautiful women,” Brian mused.
Lorna’s eyes darted brightly. “It’s hard to know which of your bad habits to criticise first, Brian.”
“Still, it was good of you to think of me,” Brian grinned.
“I was ordered to come and fetch you. I didn’t realise you were still in gaol.”
“It was the best way of keeping myself out of trouble.”
They walked across the road and into the Flagstaff Gardens, both of them absorbing the fabulous Melbourne sunshine through their pores. It was an equal delight—after a gaol cell or a Northern Hemisphere winter.
“That’s the worry, Brian. The rest of us are all going from strength to
strength while you go down and down. We all feel a bit guilty.”
“Life’s a bitch, then you die.”
“Life can improve, if you let it.”
“Is it too early for a beer?” Brian asked.
“Far too late, I suspect.”
“There’s a nice pub down the hill with a beer garden.”
“Lead me. But please, no more trouble.”
“I promise.”
They found the beer garden and sat, he with a beer and she a frightening cocktail.
“So the Harley Thyssen show is on again,” Brian said. “You just can’t keep a good man down.”
“As far as I know, we are very unofficial. Almost covert. But yes. You’re needed in Japan. The Japanese government even asked especially for you. That’s the only reason we’ll be able to get you out of the country with all these charges pending.”
“But he sure showed ‘em, our Harley. Didn’t he?”
“He surely did. Tell me, what’s Entropy?”
That raised his eyebrows. He knew the answer—he was simply surprised that someone like Lorna might bother to ask the question. Usually she was the first to glaze over when he went into one of his raves.
“Heat death of the Universe,” he said as if it occurred every day.
“Yeah,” Lorna said with a roll of her eyeballs. “Harley said something like that. Now explain it so a dumb bum like me can understand.”
“Not so easy. Tell me why you want to know?”
“Aren’t I allowed to know?”
“Usually, when I talk about such things, you nod off in five seconds.”
“This time I’m interested.”
“Which makes me wonder why?”
“Something that caught my eye amongst Harley’s papers. He was evasive about it. Harley is never evasive about anything.”
Wasn’t he? Brian could not agree. If he read the right books for a thousand years, he would never know as much as Thyssen, but millimetre by millimetre he was gaining ground. He knew enough now to be sure that Harley Thyssen had all the answers. He was only telling people what they needed to know. For there were things that were obvious that he seemed surprised by, and it was impossible to believe that Thyssen’s surprise at anything was genuine.
“No need to be evasive about this. It ain’t no sort of secret. And I can’t imagine what it has to do with anything. And I can’t imagine you’ll last more than twenty seconds before you switch off anyway.”
“Try me. And I’ll reward you with the hottest send-off to Japan in history.”
Brian got himself another beer and lit a cigarette and when he was settled, gave it his best shot. “The driving force of the universe is energy, and the most basic law of nature is the Law of Conservation of Energy. What that means is that the reason why the universe is not a stagnant solid ball of dead matter is because bits of energy flow from one place to another, sometimes changing in form as they do so.”
“I haven’t glazed over yet. Is there an English translation?”
“It’s all about electrons and other elementary particles. The particles move from atom to atom, always tryin’ to simplify things. Inside you. Inside stars. Everywhere. No energy moving and all you got is dead matter.”
“Like my brain, huh?”
“Okay, so all this to-ing and fro-ing of subatomic particles all over the universe is called energy. The movement gives off heat and light and radiation and that is the engine that runs everything.”
“Why does it move?”
“The energy is unevenly distributed throughout the universe—because it began randomly with a big explosion, you see? Ever since, its been flowin’ to try and even up the distribution. Light, nuclear reactions, electricity, the neurons firing in your brain, is all transferred between elementary particles in their various forms, and that movement increasingly occurs spontaneously, they reckon, and always from uneven distribution toward even distribution. Still with me?”
“Hanging in there.”
“This transformation of particles creates heat and energy, and as they even out and slow down and eventually stop, energy, and therefore life, is no longer possible.”
“They get a nice rest at the end of the day.”
“Right. Almost all studies of energy involve heat flow and temperature change, and this science of energy change, energy flow and conversation of energy into work is described by the Greek word for ‘heat movement’—Thermodynamics.”
“I am almost understanding this. Go on.”
“Somewhere around 1850, a German Physicist named Rudolf Clausius came up with a Second Law of Thermodynamics, which necessarily lead to the invention of the First Law of Thermodynamics: the first law stated that the universe is immortal, the second that it is doomed.”
“I’m sure I detected a contradiction in that.”
“Absolutely. Black and white. Listen: The First Law of Thermodynamics says the energy content of the universe is constant. The Second Law of Thermodynamics says the energy flow of the universe is steadily decreasing.”
“Really?”
“Really. Big contradiction. Big trouble for Physics. So, they get themselves out of it like this. The First Law says that the universe will last forever—everything that exists will continue to exist in some form or other constantly and ceaselessly.”
“A comforting thought.”
“The Second Law states that the universe is dying, that because the energy flow is always from uneven to even distribution and that it can only spontaneously flow that way, eventually everything will be evened out. The energy will still be there, locked up in dead matter, and motion, life, work and change will cease to be possible.”
“I’ve known blokes like that...”
“When it reaches that point, when everything in the universe is at exactly the same temperature and no further activity is possible, it is the Heat Death of the universe. And the process by which it occurs is Entropy.”
“Right.”
“You got all that?”
“I think so.”
“Does it help?”
“Well, how could that possibly be of immediate interest to Harley?”
“I can’t imagine. But it’ll be interesting to try and find out.”
*
Give a man too much money and too much power and too high an opinion of himself, and the result was inevitable. Joe Solomon watched in dismay as Kevin Wagner gave his briefing for the next Shastri Event. There wasn’t any problem with the briefing—it was clear and lucid and a spectacular bit of showmanship, only it wasn’t about earth bound disasters. It was just another petty king of just another Fiefdom, strutting his self-importance. Joe supposed they should have seen it coming.
“The target area is the African state of Malawi,” Wagner was saying from the rostrum, resplendent in military green, and he carried a pointer although he didn’t need it for high over his head, video images projected on a huge screen indicated the location on the map of South East Africa. “Here, right along the western shore of Lake Nyasa, where about 6 million people live an almost entirely subsistence existence. It is the highest population density in Africa and they’ve had a miserable time of it—no external economy whatsoever, subject to continual droughts and flood, and their only claim to fame is that they were a rich source of raw materials for the slave trade, and their land is the home of the tsetse fly. The place is run by a dictator named Banda who sold out to South Africa and developed the most one sided capitalist system in the world. But, believe it or not, their luck is about to get worse.”
You might have thought he cared, but Wagner showed no emotion. The speech, anyway, was written for him by Joe himself, based on raw material that came by e-mail from Thyssen with no return address.
“The zone of influence is expected to be about 100 square kilometres in the region at the middle western edge of the lake where it’s all dense forest, thousands of tiny villages, unbearable heat, poverty and disease. And the lake is full of crocodiles,
the jungle has Black Mambas and the region boasts the fattest vultures in the world. Nasty place. There are no volcanoes in the immediate vicinity but there’s a big dormant one at the north end of the lake called Mbeya, about a two hundred kilometres away and it may erupt, and dozens more volcanoes a thousand kilometres away in Kenya that probably won’t be effected, but might. In any case, we will have two hot spots, but the lake itself sits between two fault lines which may break open. Whatever happens, it’s gonna be one hell of a mess.”
They were in the main dining hall of the convent, and Wagner’s audience—only two hundred when plainly the occasion justified several hundred more—sat at the long tables. Stained-glass windows which, primarily depicting the heroisms of the crusades, looked far more appropriate to the occasion that they might have to dinnertime. Joe had wheeled himself into a position behind, where he could survey the entire scene. Wagner strutted, chest thrust out, king of the convent, although his American accent fitted badly with the circumstances. It needed British officer class, or perhaps German, to give proper weight to the event.
“The restrictions placed on Professor Thyssen by various authorities have caused the data to come through too late to be of any use. There is no hope of getting these people out of the area in time, and nowhere to take them anyway. Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania have been receiving refugees and work gangs from the region for decades and resent them, and we could start a war if we tried to get them out. But in any case, it’s too late for that.”
Wagner’s mini-army, most of them mercenaries primarily recruited during his Italian operations, had busied themselves for the past two months repairing the airstrip and one of the hangars in which the two old C-130’s were housed. Joe had been able to secure a team and deploy them to the task of building ramps all about the convent and his possible range of movement expanded daily. He could see all about him how the money was being spent and had to admit that there were few luxury items. The mercenaries had been divided into teams long before, and trained as well as they could be for their role in the forthcoming event, and almost all expenditure had been devoted to that.