The War of Immensities

by Barry Klemm

  The hut was completely destroyed when she arrived, and she could smell pork chops cooking. When she realised what that was, she wanted to run right back up the hill and hide in the cruiser. Instead, she steeled herself and attacked the perimeter of the fire, in the places where it threatened to spread. Soon the hut was just a heap of charred wood, under control she assessed from no knowledge or experience whatsoever. Now the village had become deathly quiet. Earlier, there had been noise everywhere. Voices, birdcalls, things rattling. Now nothing. She held the torch high. Several bodies lay in the street—all of them men. She went to each in turn, found a pulse, rolled them over and straightened them out. Harley’s comments about the ants eating out their eyes worried her briefly, until she remembered there wouldn’t be any ants. The last man she found had fallen in a puddle, face down, and had drowned. She backed away. Yes, there remained dangers. Now she could see what she had to do.

  One of the more substantial huts had collapsed and she soon found several people trapped in there. She set the torch on a post and dragged the bodies out. All alive but one youth had a terrible open wound. She tore the boy’s shirt off and used it to bind the wound and staunch the flow. Left here, he would surely have bled to death. Her sense of importance soared. She started to check out the huts one by one and soon made a shocking discovery. A mother had thrown her body over her children to protect them and now they were suffocating under her. She hauled the woman aside and the gasping children immediately regained normal breathing.

  Now she had a mission. She rushed from hut to hut, and found three other places where misguided attempts to protect the innocent had backfired, on one occasion fatally but Lorna reckoned she had saved four young lives. At a table, she found a man whose face had turned blue in the midst of his meal. She belted him on the back until he vomited and resumed normal breathing. A lot of people had fallen on sharp objects or awkwardly—she extracted them and bound the wounds as best she could, and straightened out everyone she encountered. She was running toward exhaustion and was aware of the sound of the helicopter for some time before its significance occurred to her.

  She raced outside, shouting and waving the torch but the chopper was only a glow of landing lights amid the dense overhead haze. It passed right over her, very low, and still she could not make out its shape. Then it was landing, on the hill by the vehicle. Frantically, stumbling and falling twice, she ran that way, shouting and screaming like a mad thing lest they go away before they found her. Then the pilot shut down the engine, and she stumbled breathless into Harley’s arms.

  “Where the bloody hell were you?” he demanded with annoyance. “Didn’t I tell you to stay with the vehicle...”

  He hadn’t. She was sure of it. But she had no breath to fight back. “There were people... needed help... I was saving... lives...”

  Harley looked toward the village, and then held her tighter as his anxiety passed away. “Yeah. We expect to lose a lot of sleepers before we can get to them.”

  Her breath was coming back. She looked up at him. “You yelled at me.”

  “I’m sorry. You weren’t here and it gave me a fright.”

  “I thought you stood me up.”

  “No. I’m on time. You woke up early.”

  “Did I?”

  “Eight days early, in fact.”

  “Oh yes,” she said, the significance of it only occurring to her slowly. “I was only unconscious for a few minutes, I think.”

  “Well, we’ll have to wait and see how you behave at the next event,” Harley said benignly, “but my guess is that you’re no longer a pilgrim.”

  She thought about it. Did she feel different? Or was it just that she was able to feel at all. “You mean I’m cured?” she asked, wondering aloud really.

  “Well, yes,” Harley smiled. “That is, if we are to assume you were ever sick.”

  *

  Sulawesi, at the best of times, was not a place where a person could expect to lie unconscious for eight days and survive; the climate was too hot, the air too fetid, the terrain too rugged, the earth too damp, the insect life too rampant.

  Felicity set up operations at Makasa Airport since that was the place where she first touched down, and started gathering the nearby victims, attempting to control the circumstances as best she could. She stayed at the airport because from all around the world, people and supplies from government and private aid agencies began pouring in.

  She went on television, and was able to transmit the situation on all news outlets.

  “The country is littered with comatose people,” she said, her hand constantly pushing her hair off her brow as she spoke, urgently and unapologetically. “We estimate four million people spread over an area of 160,000 square kilometres. The terrain is mostly mountainous, dense jungle, there is no organised transport, few roads, no railways, one decent airport. You reach most places by the rivers, then you walk. Getting to the victims will be the hardest part. Once they are located, they have to be lifted onto a stretcher or a bunk or table or anything at all, to get them off the ground where they are very vulnerable. Then they have to be hooked up to a glucose drip, tagged for identification, and examined for injuries. Any unattended wounds, no matter how minor, could be fatal in a day or so here. We need helicopters and pilots, medical staff, bedding of any kind, glucose, catheters and stands, blankets, bandages, disinfectant, in short we don’t have enough of anything. We need it all, right away. Tomorrow will be too late. We expect people to die at a rate of 100,000 a day. Come to Makasa Airport and we’ll direct you from there.”

  She was not overstating the situation. Possibly half the sleepers were doomed never to wake. The response was immediate—the UN teams were on stand-by anyway but most had gone to Java and the other islands devastated by the volcanoes, where there were millions of rescues awaiting them, and tens of millions of lives to save. Armies from all of the surrounding countries—Thailand, Australia, Malaya, friend and foe of Indonesia like—landed and took over under UN direction. There was no longer any government in Jakarta to object. Felicity and her sleepers were regarded as the secondary problem.

  Still, they began to flow in and she supplied them, briefed them and dispatched them in accordance with a huge gridmap of the Zone that she had set up on the wall of the terminal building. Mostly they were from private agencies, some of them decidedly shonky, but Felicity welcomed them irrespective. Many demanded to be paid up-front and she had found a safe in which to place several sacks of money in various currencies from Joe, surrounded by a team of Wagner’s men, menacing the jungle with machineguns. Out there, looters and bandits rampaged.

  In those moments when she allowed herself to pause for a cup of tea, she realised that she was presently the dictator of a small country, where all of her subjects were asleep. Kevin Wagner would have found the experience exhilarating, she only found it an appalling responsibility and utterly exhausting.

  Her teams radio-ed in whenever they had anything to say. They had been able to take over the control tower to facilitate communication. She had several people receiving messages and compiling statistics and huge charts. The reports indicated one in five sleepers were dead or dying. Almost a million people. But that was a good result, compared to the thirty million who had died in the islands to the south.

  She wept every time she thought of Jami. Over a hundred members of the International Geological Survey had been down there to observe the eruptions at the time and more than half of them had been killed. Jami had apparently slipped herself in amongst them, although there was no confirmation available. They couldn’t even prove she had arrived. Flight manifests established that she had flown to Hong Kong, but since all traffic into the endangered area had been fully restricted, there was no record of where she went from there. No doubt she had talked her way onto a military or UN plane, using her US Geological Survey status to do so, but no one knew that for sure.

  Except people like Felicity who were only too aware of Jami Shastri’s determ
ination to get where she was going. The silly girl should never have been out of hospital...

  Still, Felicity always terminated such moments of melancholy with the thought that the `missing’ status meant that Jami might come wandering in at any time, suddenly materialising, leaning on a doorjamb taking big munches out of an apple, looking like a street kid checking out the joint to see if there was anything worth stealing.

  At night Felicity wandered in the hanger which, like all other accessible buildings, had been turned into a temporary hospital. The main lighting had failed, and all illumination was from light stands below eyelevel. It cast gigantic shadows, her own was a monster fifty feet high that rippled along the galvanised iron of the structure, massive and terrifying, following her everywhere. Her despair was like that monster now, dwarfing her but just behind, waiting to pounce and devour her.

  She wondered why she was bothering most of the time that she allowed herself to wonder anything. Why not let these people die now, while they were at peace? Why trouble to save them for the even more appalling disasters that lay ahead of them? Hoping for the miracle that Jami might have survived was little different to hoping for the one that somehow the destruction of the planet might be averted. And now Harley reckoned he had the cure for the Shastri Effect. The double dose. Could she really, in any medical conscience, allow him to subject these people to this a second time? And that only to die anyway when the planet collapsed under their feet.

  On the television in the Orion, she had seen Lorna on the screen, on a tape that Harley had sent her. Lorna spoke with great excitement of her adventure, of how she had gone into the Zone and emerged awake and unharmed. No longer a sleeper, no longer a pilgrim. Just another media superstar ordinary person, healthy and unaffected. At the bottom of the screen her words were mimicked in Arabic subtitles, and then, on another appearance, with Italian subtitles. Now she was off to California to spread the word. Hear ye! Hear ye! Follow me and I will free you of the burden of the pilgrims. Like some mad evangelist. Did Harley truly plan to stand them in the middle of the Matto Grasso, where the next Zone of Influence was expected to fall, and zap ‘em all again? And for what?

  “That seems to be the way to go,” Thyssen had said with a faint smile before he left.

  “But you don’t know the long term effects.”

  “In the circumstances, long term effects are the least of our troubles.”

  “You can’t be sure, from one instance, that they’ll all come through it the way Lorna did.”

  “You examined her and passed her fully fit yourself.”

  “But she’d had a hell of a shock.”

  Thyssen gave a big sigh of exasperation at her persistence and explored the distant mountains as he continued in a deliberately controlled voice. “Felicity, I believe this is the answer. No other suggestions are offering. Are you seriously proposing I ignore it?”

  “These are people’s lives your playing with, Harley.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m not God. So I’ll just have to fake it.”

  The truth was, in her grimmer moments, that she knew she had lost her faith in Harley Thyssen completely. Even when she knew he was probably right, still she was unable to believe him.

  *

  Beginning from the town of Chitipa, there was a road they could follow approximately that led them along the border between Zambia and Tanzania, directly toward the southernmost tip of Lake Tanganyika. Sometimes the bulk of the pilgrims travelled in one country, sometimes the other, and sometimes Maynard wasn’t at all sure where most of them were. But every day the two C-130s flew overhead and parachuted supplies into the intended path and would report what they could see of the migration from the air. Mostly, they reported a vast cloud of dust from the tramping of a million feet.

  The planes reloaded primarily at Wilson Airport in Nairobi, when the incoming stores were accumulated, but would usually make refuelling stops in Tanzania, with the result that the Tanzanian officialdom knew what was happening and chose to ignore a problem that they could be sure would soon go away. Zambian officials, however, were of a different attitude. Almost daily, individual or groups of officials would arrive and seek out Andromeda Starlight, ask for her autograph for their children and the children of friends and then inform her that the pilgrims were not allowed to enter Zambia.

  “They are not,” Andromeda told them. “They are in Tanzania.”

  She gave the same answer, even though sometimes they were as much as twenty miles inside Zambia.

  There were always many forms to be filled in and instructions concerning any matter the gentlemen from Immigration could think of.

  “You need a permit to parachute in Zambian airspace,” was the sort of thing they were told. Andromeda walked at the head of her flock, filling in the forms on a clipboard without reading them, signing the CDs and photographs of herself, always pressing on.

  Then one morning, a helicopter landed and Harley Thyssen stepped off. Captain Maynard lowered his weapon and extended his hand. It was their first meeting, but each was so familiar with the other that they did not bother with introductions.

  “Sorry to drag you so far from the sea, Captain.”

  “Most days, my men and I climb a mountain and we can see one lake or another. That sustains us.”

  “How are your men standing up, Captain?”

  “They are standing up very well, Professor, considering the constant difficulties of the trek. One dead in a vehicle accident. Two seriously injured in a food stampede...”

  “Food stampede?”

  “They don’t happen anymore, now that the pilgrims understand the food drops are regular events.”

  “It’s been a long tour of continuous duty for your men, Captain, and in unfamiliar circumstances. I can arrange for you to be relieved by some of Wagner’s men if you wish.”

  “We’ve already had a meeting and canvassed that idea, Professor. My men decided by unanimous vote that we’d like to go all the way. If that’s okay.”

  Andromeda Starlight emerged with a broad smile and a welcoming hug for the big man. “Harley, what a delight. Are you staying for tea?”

  “No. I just dropped in to hand you this,” Thyssen said and handed her a large envelope in heavy paper. “It’s a right of passage from the President of the Republic of The Congo.”

  “Another friend of yours, Harley?”

  “No. But acquaintances of mine did study with him in Paris.”

  “Fine. But we’re not in The Congo yet. And we are having enough of trouble with the Zambians to keep us on our toes.”

  “It’s just practice for The Congo, I assure you,” Thyssen told her. “There, every petty official will hold you up by force of arms if necessary, until appropriate bribes are paid.”

  “We’ve already paid out a fortune in bribes to the Zambians.”

  “Stop doing it. It only encourages them.”

  “They make a pretence that it is some official tax or duty.”

  “If they ask for it in US dollars, it’s a bribe. The best policy is never pay. In The Congo, the officials will literally queue up with their hands out if you do.”

  “So how do we handle them?”

  “That document will help with the real officials. But most are conmen and bandits and with them, concede nothing.”

  “And if they make a fight of it?” Maynard asked.

  “Use your discretion, Captain. One shot in the leg, I’m told, ought to get rid of most of them. But, whatever you do, do not let them get the upper hand. Take any action necessary to prevent that.”

  “And the government of The Congo...”

  “Is very unpredictable. However, The Congo Republic is a big place and most of the military power is concentrated at the centre, protecting the President. You will always be a long way away from there and their transport and communications are woeful. Everything favours you, Captain.”

  “I think I understand.”

  “However, to be on the safe side, the Preside
nt has offered a little toy that might help. It will be delivered with the first drop when you reach the border.”

  “Harley, where are we going, exactly?” Andromeda had to ask.

  “Every bit of ground you make to the west helps us with adjusting the focal point,” Harley said and he pulled out a small map, folded in preparation for this moment. “See this road? From Kalemie, it goes north-west, given a few staggers, all the way to the Congo at Bogbonga. Stay on that road. Otherwise, you’ll get trapped by the rivers.”

  “And then what?”

  “And then it’ll be June and if we all still exist, we’ll need a new plan.”

  Within the hour, Harley was back in his helicopter and gone.

  “Always inspirational when the commander-in-chief drops by,” Maynard remarked.

  *

  The two gentlemen—agents of the US Treasury—sat with their hands clasped before them. They might have been waiting for the teacher to ask them the next question. The younger one was a very handsome, neat fellow, in a designer suit and wearing cufflinks embossed with the American Eagle. The older man was exactly what the younger man would become when he went bald in twenty years time, frequented the same tailor and wore the same cufflinks. Maybe they were a departmental job lot. Maybe they were a uniform. Joe Solomon had never met two such polite and obliging gentlemen in all his life. The very improbability of finding two such considerate souls in one American city made them suspicious in itself. They made you want to confess everything, just because they were so nice.

  “I want to confess everything,” Joe Solomon said cheerily.

  They even took him to the hospital where he lured them into the morgue to watch while he identified the body. Val Dennis had no known relatives—apparently Joe’s dubious status as ‘colleague’ was the nearest thing he could manage to a friend. Or at least, a friend who would willingly expose themselves to official channels. Joe considered the fact that he was under arrest and escorted by two US Treasury Agents at the time was most appropriate.