by Barry Klemm
The Orion banked across the place where Ventura used to be and flew towards two large islands that were once Reyes Peak and Mt Pinos, and he radioed ahead to Bakersfield airport and got no reply. This he reported to Felicity.
“The flood couldn’t have gone that far,” she called back. The navigator was able to assure her she was right. The pilot could see that far ahead himself.
“The city’s still there. I just can’t raise anybody.”
Felicity went forward to watch from between the two pilots as they approached the city and then the airfield. There had been some flooding along the Kern River, but not enough to have any major effect. Fires blazed at several locations, but none of them were large enough to suggest wide area damage. Three such fires were on the airfield itself, one plane and two helicopters had crashed there.
“Oh my God,” Felicity breathed with suddenly realisation. “I think you’ve managed to bring me to the exact place I want to go.”
“You think they’re all sleeping down there?” the pilot said in astonishment.
“Yep. If you want to talk to them, come back in eight day’s time.”
They checked the runway and it seemed undamaged and then flew on for a while before attempting to land, and in that time the radio operator searched his network and by determining who he could and could not contact, was able to draw Felicity a rough map of the Zone of Influence. It swallowed the cities and towns from Fresno to Mojave and the new coastline to King’s Canyon, and all of Bakersfield along with it, and those colossal temporary camps to which those Los Angelians who had fled along US99 had gone. There were almost one million sleepers in the zone.
“Harley, what have you done?” Felicity breathed as the cold reality closed about her.
14. EVERLOVIN’ BOSONS
So it had come to this. Thyssen had known it would, sooner or later, and the fact that it was sooner impressed him. They gathered in what had become called the control room, in the convent on San Carboni, ten days after the destruction of California. The location of the disaster meant other authorities got involved sooner than usual, and allowed them time to converge here, for what he presumed was to be a Council of War.
It was the first time they had all been together since Melbourne—just over a year ago which meant it was long overdue—and some things had changed and some had not. He looked them over now, with his memory firmly locked on the images of that gathering. Then he had been king, the master, the boss man who knew it all and would take them in hand and guide them through the nightmare that confronted them. Now they were his equals, or betters, each of them as powerful as himself, a force to be reckoned with individually, greater still in unity. His little hotchpotch team of galactic warriors were ready to go into battle. And the next thing to be done was to resolve what even Thyssen agreed was a growing crisis of confidence in their leader.
Felicity Campbell, who had called them all to this meeting, perched on the far end of the long layout bench with her arms folded below her breasts, dressed in a neat business skirt and blouse. Gone forever was the harried yet cool medico from Wellington, now her lanky blonde curls had been pulled back severely into a small tight bun at the back of her head. Her gentle features had all disappeared and been replaced with sterner lines—perhaps a slight flabbiness had gone from her cheeks leaving them gaunt and sharply defined. The overall effect was that she looked her forty-three years of age, whereas before she’d seemed much younger. She was the Queen who had lost faith in her King.
Behind her, Brian Carrick leaned casually against the chart cabinet, also with his arms folded, but he was utterly unchanged by his experiences. If Thyssen’s memory served, he was even still wearing the same clothes, as if it was the only outfit he possessed when his wife kicked him out. Flopped on the top of the cabinet was the Akubra hat that had been stiff and new in those days but now was battered and full of character. It was the only sign of the several hells he’d been through since then. The permanent smile still fixed his lips and his eyes still darted around, eternally seeking mischief. Plainly he was not prepared to take this matter seriously because he knew that no meeting in history had ever solved anything serious. Nor was his loyalty likely to be swayed by anything less than absolute betrayal.
At the centre of the bench, Joe Solomon had wheeled himself, resplendent in his best lawyer blue pinstripe suit, and flopped before him a huge stack of documents—the file on Harley Thyssen presumably—to make sure everyone got the facts straight. The Greek looked sleek and alive, as any man who had made many millions in the past year ought to, but he was also sharp-eyed and ready for anything that might portend his inevitable downfall. And nothing was more likely to bring that about than doubt over Thyssen’s leadership. He would remain impartial until someone presented him with irrefutable evidence of something. Which, in this case, wasn’t likely. Two votes to one...
Jami Shastri had rolled her own wheelchair to the end of the bench and glared at Thyssen with utter resentment. Her bones would mend but she looked thinner and her face was all the blotchier from burn spots. Thyssen looked at her and could not avoid a pang of guilt that surged through his body and pumped blood into his ear lobes and other extremities. She was the very manifestation of his errors—as if, Dorian Gray style—she took on wounds and scars that he did not allow himself to feel. The challenge, the only challenge really, for Thyssen that mattered was the task of winning her back to his side and that, he knew, would be hardest of all. The worst mistake he had made to date was to underestimate her devotion to him, and the depths to which she would plunge when her belief in him faltered.
Back in the corner, a picture of pure menace, Kevin Wagner was all but unrecognisable in his military outfit all brass buttons and straight creases. He stood with his feet apart and his hands clasped behind his back but he was anything but at ease. The product of another grave underestimation, Thyssen knew, but who could have predicted the way a man who had lost his family and his existence at one blow would react. The old charmer was outmoded and replaced by this Hollywood hero figure, waiting to receive his orders for the next mission impossible from whoever made the strongest show of giving the orders. And ready to take complete control if that show of strength didn’t happen, for such a man was utterly loyal to whoever was in charge for only so long as they maintained absolute authority.
Chrissie Rice sat on the window sill, in faded jeans and a light top, bare feet despite the cold stone floors of the convent. Her hair was cropped short and her head was permanently bowed, as if she had resumed her former, shy, self. Gone was the saintly robes and celestial glow, and she clasped her hands in front of her but rested them on her knees. It was impossible to know what she might have been thinking.
Lorna Simmons sat sideways on the other window sill with her shoes kicked off and feet up, offering a fine show of leg and absolute disrespect for her short skirt. Her hair was down and her head flopped against the window glass but when Harley entered she raised it and offered him a warm reassuring smile. That smile would have been impossible had she known what he had in mind for her.
And Andromeda Starlight, now arrayed in African robe and a floral cotton headband, dozens of bangles and necklaces and dark glasses despite the dimness of the room, as if she didn’t want to see what was happening. Of them all, she had voiced the greatest protest at beginning brought here, for the Malawi pilgrims had passed straight through the capital and continued marching, northward generally, and so Andromeda had been obliged to continue leading them. Daily Wagner’s supply planes parachuted food to that vast swarm of humanity advancing through Tanzania toward the Congo Republic, while on the ground Maynard had taken command of the trek. Andromeda had refused to leave, but Felicity had insisted and so she allowed herself to be borne off by helicopter and jet to attend the meeting, and when it ended she would be going right back again. She allowed her annoyance to show, but still Thyssen was sure he could count on her support. Not that he needed it because he knew he had the numbers anyway.
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He walked in and every eye was on him. They had arrived at various times during the night before but he had deliberately avoided contact with any of them, remaining in a separate part of the convent, just to be sure no one could accuse him to trying to influence the outcome. He took two steps and flopped in a chair, rolling on the castors a few feet and leaning back, smiling. He was seated lower than everyone in the room, just to give them every chance. And he spoke immediately because he knew he needed to.
“Before we begin,” he said. “you should all know that the word ‘Unofficial’ has been dropped from our name and we are once again the one and only Project Earthshaker. The UN Security Council voted on it this morning, their time and we got eighty-two percent support. President Grayson himself telephoned to tell me.”
All of them laughed except Jami, whose head swivelled violently as she glared from one laughing face to another with growing horror. Even the rigidity of Kevin Wagner cracked, even Felicity Campbell had to smile crookedly and bow her head and turn away, therefore looking at Brian Carrick who was chuckling behind her.
“Clean bowled first ball for a duck, luv,” Brian said.
Solomon slapped his files closed. “Meeting over. We can all go home.”
“You can’t...” Jami gasped, overcoming her initial shock enough to finally find speech.
“No, Jami’s right,” Thyssen said. “You each have grievances. Let’s get them out in the open where we can get a good look at them.”
“I assume what you say is true,” Felicity asked, superbly disguising her disappointment.
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Thyssen said pointedly.
“Yes you would!” Jami Shastri shrieked.
“No,” Thyssen said, turning to look at her directly. “No, my beloved and very heroic student, I would not.”
“Explain Drongo.”
“You’ve been studying it for two weeks and know as much about it as I do.”
“It’s just a bunch of statistics.”
“That’s right. A little statistical tool I use which seems to work better than anyone else’s. But it still comes down to an informed guess.”
“But how can you be so accurate, if that’s the case,” Felicity asked.
“I’m not. It’s an illusion. I didn’t expect Bakersfield and Fresno to fall within the Zone—I expected something further out in the Nevada desert—but it did fall at the limits of my margin of error. And the consequences for California would have been the same, either way.”
“But why can’t anyone else predict as accurately as you do?” Wagner said bluntly.
“Three reasons, Kevin,” Thyssen said, wondering if indeed there were three. “First, as much as my name might be discredited these days, I am still the top man in the field. My intuition is pretty likely to be better than anyone else’s. Two, there were other geophysicists who got it right and agreed with me but they didn’t get any publicity. The publicity went to those with alternative points of view and axes to grind—those who wanted to prove me wrong. Three, I always knew the volcanism and earthquakes were collateral damage. Only the Zone of Influence counted. From the viewpoint of the project, the recent event did not take place in Los Angeles nor along the San Andreas Fault. It happened in Bakersfield. Few people would be able to see it that way. And you, Jami, were the first to do so.”
“That’s not enough,” Jami said flatly. “It doesn’t explain it at all.”
“Then perhaps there are other reasons that even I don’t understand,” Thyssen said, losing his calm he noticed now, in his desperation to win her back. “You people have always imagined that I knew more about this than I did. Every scientist, every person, working on this, has a point of view. They are going from a certain angle. Geophysicists see it as a geophysical problem. Volcanologists as vulcanism. Seismologists look at the Tectonic plates. Spiritualists see it as divine intervention. Each of you see it differently, from your own point of view. But I see it entirely as a function of all of you, as a whole, with none of the outside angles. And that simply places me closer than anyone else.”
“Harley,” Chrissie Rice asked quietly from her corner, “do you know when and where the next events are going to happen?”
“Yes. Within a scale with a rapidly escalating error possibility, I do.”
“Then why aren’t you telling anyone?”
“Because of the danger involved in someone like me engaging in speculation. Suppose I make statement A and then tomorrow get better data and realise that it’s B instead. Given the way the media and the world behaves, there will be no withdrawing A. The consequences of the reaction to A would be so great that there would be no changing it.”
“God must have similar difficulties,” Brian remarked.
“Precisely. All of my pronouncements have become Godlike, which meant I needed to avoid making public statements and had Lorna reading carefully prepared announcements. Only those things I could be sure of.”
“Okay,” Joe said. “But you can trust us, Harley-boy. Tell us, where and when for the next, say, five events.”
“Jami can do that.”
“Can you?” Felicity asked abruptly.
Jami ruefully nodded her head.
Thyssen pulled a scrape of paper from his pocket, opened it out and handed it to her. “You agree with these?”
They all waited while a flushed Jami read it through. There were tears appearing in her eyes and she had to pause to wipe them away with the back of her bandaged hand. She passed the sheet back and swung her wheels to face away from them all.
Thyssen read from the list although he hardly needed to look at it—it was firmly impressed in his memory. “Java, 20 Feb, magnitude 10.1, 3 percent error margin; Middle East, with all that bloody oil it ought to be the biggest bang ever, 20 March, magnitude 10.6, ten percent error margin; somewhere in Brazil, 12 April, magnitude over 11, twenty percent accurate but it ought to be a real horror; then the Pacific maybe around Hawaii, 2nd of May, biggest magnitude ever at probably 11.5, forty percent error margin and it ought to cover something like 6000 square kilometres; then the mid-Atlantic Ocean on the 20th of May maybe around the Caribbean someplace but after that the error margin grows too large to be realistic.”
Felicity Campbell stood now, planting her feet and facing him with her hands on her hips. “Harley, we call a meeting at which you are to explain your actions. You walk in with a megaton announcement and floor everybody. And that’s the problem. All the time, you seem to be one step in front of us.”
“Whereas, in fact, I’m redundant,” Thyssen pointed out.
“I don’t think so,” Felicity said, riding the switches and changes deftly.
“Oh no. Think about it. Each of you has a crucial role to play in the project. But Lorna does all my talking for me, and Jami all my research. And now that I’ve directed her to Drongo, she can make the same predictions I do. I am the only one who no longer serves any purpose.”
“If you disregard being our exulted leader who gets direct phone calls from President Grayson,” Brian pointed out.
“Figurehead leader only.”
“I know how you feel, Honey,” Andromeda chuckled.
“Okay,” Felicity put in. “For the moment let’s accept that you have reduced yourself to mere ornamental value. Why?”
“Because I was always the weakest link in the chain. At all times I was vulnerable to being attacked and discredited by the media or my peers. I was even in danger of being rolled at this meeting. Those circumstances are likely to get worse. I had to arrange things so that the project could precede without me. Which I believe I’ve done.”
They all needed a moment to take that in and he allowed them that. It sounded frightening when he spelled it out in such blunt terms, but now, at least, it was done.
“I guess,” Jami said finally, with a huge sigh. “But I still don’t understand it.”
“Nevertheless, it does make a mess of your arguments of megalomania.”
“Ye
ah,” Brian said. “We all shoulda known better than to try and argue with you, mate.”
“Look,” Thyssen said, letting go now and he could feel the pressure draining out of himself. “I admit I did some ducking and dodging, but it was all with a single purpose and that was to keep you people in charge of the Project.”
“Why must we be in charge?”
“Because everyone else is either a scientist with a theory to prove or a politician with insatiable power lust or a fanatic with a blind faith to fulfill or someone with something to sell, and if we are to see this through, it needed to be kept out of the hands of national leaders and generals and media barons and people with a research grant to defend. It is just too big for any of them to deal with. It is a global problem to be handled globally, and only you guys have the experience and knowledge to do that.”
“Fine,” Felicity said, able to recognise a snow job when she heard one. “So while we are doing all the work, what will you be doing with your redundancy?”
“Trying to free myself up and get my mind above everything and see if I can come up with an answer to this.”
“An answer to what, exactly?” Jami demanded, her emotions still raw.
“A way to overcome the Shastri Effect.”
“Won’t that be impossible?” Brian asked.
Thyssen shrugged his great shoulders. “We can sit back, assume that the earth is going to destroy itself and wait for it to happen, or else we can proceed on the assumption that there is something we can do, however hopeless it might seem. I favour the latter plan.”
“Don’t we all, Sugar,” Andromeda said. “But jest how do we go about tacklin’ something so big and inevitable?”
Thyssen rolled on his casters to the table and spread his hands there as he got it straight in his mind. It seemed for a moment that all the air had gone out of the room. He began slowly, making sure of it in his mind as he proceeded. “Look. Let’s assume there is something going wrong at the Earth’s core. There isn’t a damned thing we can do about that. The theory that it’s a singularity devouring us from the middle outwards like a rotting apple is as good as any, but we can’t prove it. It fits the known facts best within our very limited knowledge. But it might equally be a normal change to the core of some kind, or maybe a change to the earth’s magnetic field or god-knows what. We have no way of knowing and we aren’t going to find out. We do not possess the technical means to look and see the nature of the internal structure of the Earth. The truth is we know more about galaxies and stars millions of light years away on the far side of the universe than we do about the stuff that’s anything over ten miles under our feet. Even the concepts suggesting there’s an iron-nickel core, surrounded by hot rock called the mantle—which is the accepted wisdom concerning the inner structure of the Earth—as all just the best available guess. There is no proof of any of it.