by Barry Klemm
“Well, can we get to here?” she asked, pointing at the spot to the southern extremity of Lake Tanganyika.
“That’s almost due west of our present position.”
“The next linkage ain’t til the 17th. Right now we can lead them anywaywhichway we like. We jest stand me someplace, have the supplies dumped there, and they will follow. Ain’t that so?”
“It will also take us into Zambia.”
“Just sneak along the edge of it—below the lake. I don’t reckon the Zambians will mind.”
“And then into the Republic of the Congo.”
“But on course. And no more lakes or major rivers to worry about, leastwise for the moment.”
“The government in the Congo is not going to like it.”
“Otherwise we push north, risk running them into the lake when they link, and then have to get through Rwanda, where I hear tell there’s a lot of trouble.”
“But at least the population there is familiar with mass migrations.”
“Sure, and they got rebels who know how to hold whole nations hostage. I think it wise to avoid them.”
“Yes ma’am, they surely will. Maybe we could get some boats and sail them right up the middle of the lake?”
Andromeda had to laugh. Maynard was not one to hide his true motivations. “Yeah, I can see how you sailors might fancy that, but I’m sure it ain’t practical. And remember what happened on those crowded trains in Rwanda. No, I reckon they’re better off doing what they do best—walking.”
“If you say so ma’am.”
“Whatever way we go, we eventually gotta cross the Congo Republic from one side to the other. We deal with that when we come to it.”
“You’re the boss.”
She paused and looked him in the eye with a wry smile. “Still think this job is better than the brig, Captain?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Okay, Sailor. Let’s get them past Lake Tanganyika. Then we worry about the rest.”
*
As they flew in the Orion, Felicity insisted on doing Lorna’s physio-telemetry herself, and the girl brazenly stripped off her blouse right there and then and, since she wasn’t wearing a bra, seriously compromised the technical team’s ability to concentrate. Felicity pushed her into a seat behind the meteorological monitors which offered basic modesty and some chance of the seismic data making sense. There, as she began to stick on the patches with their micro-transmitters, Felicity saw that those breasts—amongst the top ten of the most admired in the world if you read the trashy women’s mags—were in fact somewhat small, and very perky, and splattered all over with freckles. She shook her head to get it back into her almost forgotten detached medico mode, but Lorna had seen the look and was grinning at her. Even faced with crisis, she couldn’t help being a tease.
“Now look, Lorna, one more time...”
“I know. I know,” Lorna sighed, the those breasts heaved up and down far more than the occasion demanded. “I don’t have to do this. I know. But really, Fee, if you disapprove so strongly, why not let someone else do this?”
“Because I want to make damned sure it all works perfectly,” Felicity said doggedly.
“It always does, and it will this time.”
“Your blood pressure is dangerously high for someone of your age and fitness,” Felicity said coldly. “Admit it, Lorna. You’re scared witless.”
“Well, what to you expect, Fee?” Lorna laughed. “I am, after all, as Chrissie put it, about to walk straight into the valley of death.”
“But why are you doing it?”
“Because somebody has to, and I’m the right person for the job.”
“He’s using you as a guinea pig for...”
“Eeekkk!”
Felicity rolled her eyeballs toward the ceiling and said through gritted teeth. “Was that supposed to be a guinea pig sound?”
“No. I always squeal when someone touches me there.”
Felicity groaned, and sat with her head bowed. It was all just too exasperating. Amazingly, Lorna slipped her bare arms about her head and pressed her to her bosom.
“Fee, Fee, don’t worry so much. It’ll be alright, really. You’re being far too emotional about this.”
Felicity allowed the moment, then gently disengaged herself—not only because no patient had ever done that before, but because one of the transmitters was sticking into her cheek.
It was probably true. She was plainly feeling the strain and all her bodily signs assured her it was so. It was like being constantly at the weepy stage just before menstruation. She had visited her family, and they were as thoughtful as ever, but Wendell especially seemed frayed. They had at no time discussed the subject that had dominated their lives this past year—when it would end and she would come home. Wendell, plainly, had grasped the fact that the planet would be destroyed sometime before that would be possible. Instead they had been tender with each other, in a way they never had been before, as if both of them were made of some exquisite and extremely fragile glass. For the first time since it began, the family departed tearfully as the Orion warmed its engines at Wellington airport.
They picked Lorna up in Auckland where she had been visiting family and friends—farewelling? Not according to Lorna. But now they had hopped to Darwin and Denpassar, where the Orion had taken on maximum fuel. When they landed in Makasar in the Sulawesi Islands, they would be a hundred miles inside the expected Zone with the linkage only hours away.
There, Harley would be waiting with an especially modified Land cruiser and a jet helicopter. The Orion would drop Lorna off and return to Denpassar until dawn approached on the following, fatal day. It would be airborne, as usual, when the Effect occurred, and just outside the Zone with the usual margin of safety. The Zone was expected to swallow the southern half of Sulawesi, but there were no active volcanoes within it. However just to the south, along the main spine of Indonesia, there were a hundred volcanoes waiting to erupt and destroy their surroundings.
Against which the Indonesian government had taken no precautions whatsoever, for the government was composed of hard-line Islamics who weren’t about to believe anything the Americans or the United Nations told them. On Sulawesi, there were six million people—about four million of whom were likely to become new Sleepers. And along the volcanic line from Timor to Sumatra, a hundred million people would face the devastation of the volcanoes. Felicity’s mind could not cope with such massive figures. In reality, the Indonesian government was right to take no precautions, for both sets of victims had nowhere to go and would have had to take their chances where they stood anyway.
Into this hell, Lorna was to walk like a lamb to the slaughter and Felicity found the prospect unbearable. She despised Harley for making it so, and for choosing this wonderful healthy young woman as his victim, but most of all, that he had the power to make Lorna go so willingly.
Now, as the Orion made its approach toward Makasa and Lorna buttoned her blouse, Felicity had run out of arguments. Lorna could smile for her.
“You just don’t understand, do you Fee.”
“Why you need to do this? No. I don’t.”
Lorna cocked her head on one side and gave a sparkling smile. “I’m doing it for the only reason I ever do anything, Fee. I’m doing it for love.”
“Love?”
“Yes, Fee. Remember you heard it here first.”
*
Logistically, it was a very difficult thing to organise, for although there were no volcanoes within the expected Zone, the region would be subjected to severe earthquakes. 10.1 on the moment-magnitude scale was anticipated—with the potential to kill far more millions than in California. The main catastrophe would be in the very active volcanic regions lying outside the Zone, but still the dangers from falling buildings and trees, earth fissures and uncontrolled vehicles and animals, flooding and explosions—the list went on, and Lorna was to take herself right into it all, and presumably find a place were she could safely lie
unconscious until help arrived. Then they had to find her again, before the ants ate out her eyes.
For this, Harley had obtained a big solid four-wheel drive with extra fuel tank, reinforced on all sides, airtight, unbreakable glass, stuffed with transmitting equipment. Lorna would drive northwest along what seemed to be a reasonable road out of Makasa, moving as the lure of the focal point directed. Of course, no one could go with her. The place had been chosen because there was a good road heading in the right direction, arrowing the anticipated focal point.
They had made a bed for her in the back of the vehicle where she would lie herself down as sunset approached, hooked up to the array of monitors and wait for it to happen. Several different types of homing devices would direct rescuers to the spot—in fact Harley himself would be airborne in the jet-helicopter positioned just outside the Zone and race to collect her as soon as the Shastri moment had passed.
“The plan is perfect,” Lorna insisted. “Nothing can go wrong.”
Underground gas chambers might explode, the sedimentary soil could liquefy and swallow the vehicle whole, boulders and snakes might fall out of the sky.
“The snakes will all be Shastri-ed too,” Lorna said stoically. “Bring a shovel.”
She drove along the bumpy road with dense jungle to either side. There were people and villages all the way, and all of them stopped doing what they were doing to watch her go by.
“Keep looking for the turn off on your left,” Harley was saying on the radio.
“I don’t see no turn off. Nor any hill for that matter.”
“It’s there. Just keep looking..”
She found her hill. The sun was already below the treetops and she knew from experience how suddenly night fell in the tropics, but she found the right road. It went through three crowded villages in less than a kilometre and was not made for motor vehicles. She bumped and jolted her way forward, soothed along by Harley’s deep controlling voice and then the upward incline and she broke up into sunlight again.
“Good hill,” she reported faithfully. “No doubt about it.”
The land around was relatively flat, a swampy plain between the sea and the mountains and there was a village in visual distance just below the barren crest of the hill.
“You there, darling?” she asked.
He always was. Harley remained in radio contact for every moment of her journey.
“Don’t you ever go to the toilet or anything, Harley? You don’t need to nursemaid me. I’m fine.”
“Your blood-sugar is down. You need to eat something now,” he replied.
She was doing it for love, she had told Felicity. Well that was true enough. Felicity had stared, and did so all the more when they were on the tarmac in Makasa and Harley directed her to the vehicle, offering unnecessary final instructions. Lorna had kissed him full on the lips, mostly to shut him up. She glanced over at where Felicity stood not actually wringing her hands but looking like she wanted to, and saw her jaw drop. It was worth the whole damn thing, just for that moment.
“This is your last chance to back out,” Harley said, to prove he didn’t have a romantic bone in his body.
“My life is now entirely in your hands, Harley,” she said softly. “And that is just exactly where I want it to be.”
And she climbed in the vehicle and drove away.
True, they had slept together only once and no one had actually said anything to anyone about love. Nor anything else much for that matter. But she was on a mission and bundled him along, and to her complete astonishment, although none of it went according to plan, still she had learned everything about him that she might ever hope to know.
At first, he had been rather shy and embarrassed. “It’s been too long. I’m not sure I can do it anymore.”
“They tell me you never forget how.”
Determinedly she led him by the hand toward the bedroom, and if he didn’t actually dig his heels in, still he made a chore of it. “Oh, I remember all right. It’s just that the physical side isn’t what it ought to be anymore.”
“I do the physical stuff,” Lorna said grimly. “You just lie back and take it.”
Nothing like that happened.
They stood in the dimness of the bedroom and tried to be romantic. But she needed something to stand on to kiss him and he didn’t seem to know how to stoop.
“I just don’t think I can take seduction seriously anymore,” he admitted, though only when that was ridiculously obvious.
“Look,” she said, getting irritated. “Let’s just take our clothes off quickly and jump into bed and fumble about and do what comes naturally, okay?”
There was no fumbling.
He went at her the very moment their flesh contacted, and seemed to want to devour her completely. It was more like a bear tearing its prey apart in a cave than making love. Never in her life had she experienced a man so completely overcome by rampant passion and it frightened her at first. All attempts to slow him down were futile—the biggest and most powerful man of her sexual experience was completely out of control and she was thrashed this way and that in the bed without relenting. He was eating her, snorting and grunting furiously and he seemed to come twice before he even entered her and three more times before she knew what was happening. She calmed her panic while he pawed and mauled every part of her body simultaneously and finally she managed to go with the flow. The sheer power of the moment brought on her own orgasms, not by any conventional means but because suddenly she too was caught up in the animalistic rampage. Then suddenly their passion went screaming into the night and it was over.
He had collapsed on top of her, his body still between her legs though at about the chest region, his head on her breasts. Oh god he’s dead she thought at first, but then her inner thighs told her of the tremors that periodically racked his body. He convulsed, cried out, settled again, and something wet dripped onto her right breast. To her complete amazement, she realised he was crying.
Now this had never happened before, and she truly didn’t know what to do. This massive man was weeping in her arms and didn’t seem able to stop. But slowly it came to her and she relaxed with it and still his convulsions went on. In fact they continued unabated for over an hour and she wrapped her arms and legs about him as tightly and protectively as she could and stroked his wet hair and made soothing noises. Eventually, every muscle in her limbs was aching with strain and some were crushed to numbness by his weight but still she held on, as if to a life-raft. And finally he eased off her and slept beside her and she lay, caressing him, until her own sleep came. He snored thunderously but she was so drained and emotionally and physically exhausted by then that she didn’t care...
In the morning when she awoke, he was gone. Her body had scratches and bruises everywhere and when she tried to rise, her legs had trouble co-operating. Inwardly too, she was numbed by the shock of the experience. He had wept in her arms, more profoundly that anyone in her experience. It was a staggering emotional trauma shared, even though only one of them had any idea what it was all about. With shaking hands, she located her cell phone and pressed out his number and he answered immediately, from wherever he was, near or far, she never bothered to ask.
“Okay, Harley,” she said. “I’ll die for you.”
And now that the moment of dying had come, she was astonished to find she remained without doubt. Of course, she knew that she wasn’t going to die really—every precaution had been taken and her faith in Harley was unshatterable. In any case, she would be in a coma, for eight days or forever, what did it matter? That Harley himself was unable to assume the obvious and needed to conduct this experiment was just his exacting empirical scientific mind at work. Science was never about obvious truths. It was about what you could prove by experimentation and so the experiment needed to be done. There was no doubt. A double dose of the Shastri Effect. Maybe she’d sleep sixteen days this time. In any case, it was worth it. But even had she thought it wasn’t, still she would have
done it for him.
“I do wish you were here, Harley. It’d be so much easier if I could hold you in my arms.”
“You do realise,” Harley muttered, “that about twenty other people are tuned in to this.”
“I don’t care about the others. I only care about you.”
“This is supposed to be a serious scientific experiment, Lorna.”
“Your adoring guinea pig drools at the sound of your voice.”
The sun was setting. She’d slipped out into the nearby jungle and cleansed her inner self, as Chrissie might have put it. She did so with great trepidation, snakes or spiders or scorpions might easily have bit her on the bum but she persisted until it was all done. After all, her Prince Charming was coming to find his Sleeping Beauty and she didn’t want him to have to give her the kiss of life while she lay in a puddle of excreta. A girl needed to offer her best at such moments, when so helpless.
“Where the bloody hell were you?” Harley demanded over the radio.
“I’m here, Harley. Don’t yell at me or I’ll turn you off.”
“We should do one last instrument check.”
“The instruments are just dandy, Harles. Why don’t you tell me how much you love me instead.”
“This is being taped for posterity, Lorna.”
“All the more reason why.”
She’d dressed for the occasion, as if she was an Ancient Egyptian Queen expecting her sarcophagus to be opened in some future paradise. A good strong halter to make sure her breasts stayed up front as she lay on her back, tight shorts, her favourite beret on the hair that she had just spent an hour brushing assiduously.
“How are you feeling?” he demanded of her.