by Barry Klemm
“What’s fuckin’ goin’ on, Harley?”
“Come here and I’ll show you.”
The guileless Brian Carrick slowly made his way through the rows of computers and sat at the terminal beside Thyssen. Feeling not unlike the villain in a James Bond movie, Thyssen quietly explained everything Brian saw.
“So we’re prisoners here?” he said at the end of it.
“Shouldn’t bother you, Brian. I understand it’s almost your natural state.”
“The sort of prisons I frequent don’t look like this.”
“No,” Thyssen said. “What you see is a wonderful, fantastic, glorious, ingenious, state-of-the-art technological bribe.”
“They bribed you with this?”
“I’m Eve and everything you see is the apple.”
“Where’s the snake?”
“The snake is my own self-created Frankensteinian monster, Glen Palenski.”
“I never knew him.”
“Neither did I,” Thyssen said ruefully.
Brian looked around, shaking his head in bewilderment. “Now, you wouldn’t bullshit me, would you Harley?”
“I bullshit thee not. All I have to do is press the right buttons and show them how I make my predictions and we’ll both be free to walk out of here.”
“Simple as that?”
“Simple as that. Isn’t that right Glen?” he called over his shoulder.
There was no reply.
“Glen said, simple as that,” Thyssen smiled.
“Yeah. I heard him.”
“Sadly, that’s all it will take.”
“So why don’t you do it.”
It seemed like a silly question, until Thyssen took a moment to think about it. Maybe they chosen wisely indeed, sending Brian Carrick for him to talk to.
“I think you just fulfilled your purpose, Brian.”
“You mean, they actually imagine I might talk you into it?”
“That’s right. After five humanless days, maybe anyone could talk me into anything.”
“So why don’t you do it, and we can get out of here and start doing something useful.”
Again, Thyssen thought about it. Brian was such a persistent fellow.
“I don’t know, Brian. Maybe I’m just pig-headed.”
“You’re that all right. Look, Harley. Time is running out. Give them what they want. What harm can it do at this stage?”
“I don’t know. But I just can’t get it out of my head that if I give them what they want, these bastards will take it away from us and make it top secret and then start figuring out how to turn it into a weapon.”
“Yeah. They’ll do that for sure.”
“And I just don’t like losing.”
“I know how you feel. But I think they got you fucked, mate.”
“I really don’t want to admit that.”
“We gotta have the accurate prediction. We need it now. Where else are you going to find a system that you can do it on except this one?”
“Are you sure you’re still on our side, Brian?”
“I’m on our side. It’s you who’s loyalties are all fucked up. We’ve done everything we did in spite of these people, regardless of how much they lied and cheated and fiddled and regardless of how much they knew. Now, you can use them to get what you want. So use them.”
“I feel too ornery to do that.”
“Then be ornery. Let’s make them an offer.”
Thyssen looked at him in puzzlement. “You lost me. I’ve only had machines to talk to for five days. Human beings are much harder.”
“Since we seem to have no choice but to give them what they want, so we trade. For something we want.”
“They don’t have anything we want.”
“They must have something we want.”
*
Negotiators ! Was she sick of them? Almost every day, a committee of some kind came to speak with the infamous Lorna Simmons. They had all sorts of origins, and were led by all sorts of notables—congressmen, senators, movie stars, religious groups, business people, media anchors, mysterious people from the White House—but all of them contained negotiators, siege-breakers from the law enforcement agencies. And it was always the negotiators who did the talking, and what they tried to talk her into was submission.
Which wasn’t easy, because there wasn’t anything to submit to. They wanted her to say that the sleepers did not exist, that she or Harley or someone had used psychological techniques to cause these people to think they wanted to go walkabout, that there was no such thing as linkage of minds. That Harley Thyssen was a fake and Project Earthshaker was a confidence trick.
“For what purpose?” she demanded.
“You tell us, Miss Simmons.”
They wanted to know by what right she spoke of the people of the affected region. She was obliged to hold a popular election and the people, who knew she was the answer to their problems, voted her their representative with a majority of over eighty percent.
“Are you considering running for president?”
“How can I? I’m not a bloody American.”
“President of New Zealand then?”
“New Zealand doesn’t have a President.”
“But just what do you want, Miss Simmons?”
So many times had she explained. On the morning of the eleventh, these people would set off on their journey. The National Guard and the FBI had them hemmed in and they will have nowhere to go. There would be chaos.
“Are you threatening violence, Miss Simmons?”
It didn’t help that previously they had gone north, for absolutely no reason whatsoever. This time they would go south, for the same nonexistent reason.
“Why are they going south?”
“Because Professor Thyssen arranged it that way.”
“Oh yes, Professor Thyssen.”
Again and again, she had tried to get through to them.
“He has arranged the neutral ground in Brazil by moving the Japanese sleepers there. Those people who are in the zone on the 13th will be cured.”
“Cured from what?”
“The Shastri Effect.”
“But, Miss Simmons. Independent medical examiners have agreed unanimously that there is no such condition as the Shastri Effect.”
“The condition only occurs at the time of the linkage.”
“Miss Simmons, surely it is obvious, even to you, that such conditions do not and cannot exist.”
Around and around they went and it was endless. And then, on the morning of the 6th, without warning, President Grayson appeared on television.
He admitted the existence of the Shastri Effect.
He admitted the validity of Project Earthshaker.
He admitted that Professor Thyssen had been maligned in the media.
He agreed to the transportation of the Bakersfield pilgrims to Brazil.
Anyone who wanted to go could do so. The US Air Force would be providing aircraft, as of that very morning. Lorna watched in awe. Somehow, someway, Harley had talked them into it. She could only wonder what it had cost him in return.
That morning, there were scenes of jubilation in Bakersfield and Fresno and all points in between. Lorna was their hero, although she could not exactly see what she had done. All she wanted was to find one of those bloody negotiators and let them ask their cynical questions again. But they were nowhere to be seen.
*
“So,” Thyssen said. “Drongo.”
Brian put up his fists pugilistically. “You talkin’ to me, buddy?”
Because their bar-room humour went nowhere with Glen and his team, they shrugged at each other. Every seat in the control room had been filled, and the technicians were poised to transfer Thyssen’s wisdom into their respective systems.
Thyssen continued. “It begins with an assumption. An object formed in the intense heat of the big bang. It’s tiny—no bigger than just a few atoms, maybe. Maybe much smaller than that. But it’s dense, very, very
dense. The elementary particles of which it’s made are compressed so close together that if you could catch it you could weigh it on a butcher’s scale. It might weigh a kilogram, probably less. And it travels the universe for 15 million million years or however long you reckon it is since the beginning of time.”
“I remember this lecture,” Glen said with groan. “It was the one you always gave new students.”
“Oh no. This one I’m making up on the spot. It just sounds similar.”
“Well how about cutting to the chase.”
“No point telling a story if you don’t tell it all. I’m just reminding you Glen, of what I taught you but you forgot.”
“How do you know I forgot?”
“Because if you hadn’t, you’d have figured this out for yourself.”
Glen bowed his head and listened with a humble expression. Brian, who thought it all fascinating, was only too well aware that he was hearing the first astrophysics lecture of his life, and from its greatest living exponent, even if he was really a Vulcanologist.
“So it travels throughout the vacuum of space, picks up a few stray particles here and there and absorbs them, maybe doubles in size but increases tenfold or more in weight, until, on the morning of June 30, 1908, it finally hits something—the atmosphere above Tunguska. Food! It is instantly insatiable and begins to devour. As it passes through the atmosphere, it sets off a chain reaction that flattens the surrounding forest and then ploughs into the earth and drops right through to the core. It passes through the centre, but it is captured and slowed by the earth’s gravitational pull, loses momentum, and before it can escape the core, it’s turned and goes into orbit.”
“I did all this,” Glen said. “I modelled it, like you said.”
But it was Thyssen who pressed the keyboard and brought the images up on the screen.
“Yeah, and your model was right.”
“So what are you calling this... this object? Mini black hole? Antimatter? What?”
“I call it death. Doesn’t matter what it is, or how theoretically possible and impossible it might be, it exists. Maybe it’s made from some kind of elementary particle we haven’t discovered yet. There’s bound to be more. And this thing is primal. It could only have been created in the first millionth of a second or so of the universe, and never again. It doesn’t matter what we call it. The Palenski Particle if you like. But there it is.”
Brian could watch it, fascinated. The earth was on screen in cross-section, the core, the mantle, the crust each delineated, and with it the object traced out it course at blinding speed, each orbit about the centre a different course to that before.
“From there, all I needed to do was slip in the recent Shastri events and we had the whole course of its life plotted.”
“I did all that. So what?”
“What you forgot was the immense speed at which this thing travelled, and the fact that it was growing in size all the time. It burrowed through the matter in the core, gulping it in, constantly accumulating, and as it gained size and lost momentum, its orbit was always decaying toward the centre of the earth, where, eventually, it would come to rest. But not yet. Something else happened.”
Thyssen ran up a new model, one that Glen plainly had not seen before if the way his eyebrows raised was any guide. The model showed the singularity closer, in animation, creating a brief tunnel through the core that the molten rock gradually filled behind it. And as it orbited, it turned back on itself.
“Once it attained a certain size, and its orbit a certain configuration, it went around so fast and so tightly that the tunnel of matter it had created in its wake had not had time to heal yet. And so, suddenly, it hit a vacuum of its own creation as it crossed its own prior course—and the effect would be shattering. Material crushed to elementary particles at the fringe would be blasted off by the impact as it hit the other side, and in an instant those particles, mostly fermions, would radiate outward to the surface of the earth. And that was the Shastri Effect. Out there, on the surface, were living intelligences, us, with brains full of bosons, and when the added fermions hit, those bosons would immediately attack the onslaught. At the point where the particles reached the surface, any available bosons would align in defence and strike back. And that created the mind link.”
“You can’t prove any of this.”
“If you’ve got a better explanation—that works as well as mine—I’m interested.”
Glen’s dark eyes glowed. Thyssen continued with cool certainty.
“Following on the heels of the particle burst would be a shock-wave—arriving thirty-three hours later at the point directly ahead of the impact. But, because of the rotation of the earth, that impact would always be at the trailing edge of the planet at the time. Once it hit the surface, it would dissipate over an increasingly wider area, pouring in more fermions creating more boson defences, creating new sleepers. And setting off any volcanoes that happened to be in the vicinity.”
Brian, watching it happen, could almost have figured out the rest himself.
“And this is the model you ran?” Glen said grimly. “This is your... your... Drain-o.”
“Drongo,” Brian corrected. “It means someone who ain’t as smart as he oughta be.”
“Yes. That’s it,” Thyssen said grimly.
“But how did you know?”
“I knew because it worked. My early predictions were just guesses and they were all hopelessly wrong. It wasn’t until after I theorised on Tunguska that I came up with this and found it got the right answers.”
“But how come,” Brian asked. “The Shastri Events grew larger and more frequent?”
“Because, despite losing potential material, it was still generally growing larger, travelling shorter orbits, and making a bigger tunnel and therefore a bigger impact, each time.”
“It’s a great theory, Harley,” Brian said. “You think it’s true.”
“I’m sure it isn’t,” Thyssen said. “It’s just the best anyone can come up with, given the enormous immaturity of our present knowledge. In a few thousand years, maybe, someone will figure out the right answer. Right now, this is the best we can do.”
Glen looked forlorn. “I hoped there’d be more. You realise I have to try and explain this to the President.”
“You just tell Grayson I sent you,” Thyssen grinned.
“You yelled at him, Harley. The President of the United States. Right there in the Oval Office, you yelled at him. They say he still hasn’t fully recovered from it.”
“I wouldn’t like it if everyone loved me,” Thyssen grinned.
*
Katsumi Sukurai was the most wanted man in Japan. In the newspapers and public places, his picture smiled at the population, teasing them with his wry grin, challenging them to spot him. He was a young man, a student of accounting, unemployed, the rest of his family was already in Brazil, and Katsumi had escaped from them three times already, and now had gone into smoke. And time was running out.
The final day had dawned and he was not to hand. By midnight, he needed to be on a plane and inside the circle before the link occurred or else everything was wasted.
Kevin Wagner spent most of his time pacing the floor, roaring at the latest group of searchers as they came in, policeman, guardsman, soldiers, volunteers, whoever they were they met with Wagner’s rage.
“Fifteen thousand eight hundred and twenty-two people and we found them all and moved them all. Except this one elusive bastard.”
“And the old man in the temple,” Tamiko said sweetly.
“He said he would die and he’ll die.”
What bothered Wagner most was that, as he said it, he fingered the imaginary butt of the pistol he wasn’t wearing on his hip. Had it really come to this?
Tamiko saw the gesture and frowned at it, because she saw everything he did and frowned at a good deal of it. She was in love with him, Wagner knew, and very efficient and decorative besides. She was completely devoted to his n
eeds.
Wagner realised in that moment that, if it came to that, he found himself unwilling to commit murder to satisfy Harley’s needs, Tamiko most certainly would oblige.
He made a fierce effort to calm himself.
“Let’s think about it.”
“You have done nothing other than think about it, for weeks,” Tamiko said. “You must rest now. What is one man, more or less?”
“You don’t understand. It’s all of them or the whole thing is wasted.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know why. That’s just the way it is. Bring me the file.”
“You already have the file. That’s it there.”
“Oh.”
He’d been reading it not an hour before. “Three times we had him and three times he vanished. How? And why?”
“Is why important? Maybe he just doesn’t want to go.”
“His family has gone. All his friends have gone. Why stay?”
“Maybe he sees it as a challenge.”
“Challenge?”
“Yes. It’s become a game. Read the file. Each time the escaped, he didn’t go anywhere.”
Wagner did not want to read the bloody file again. “Explain what you mean?”
Tamiko shrugged her beautiful shoulders and smiled benignly.
“Okay. Please consider. First time, his is in airport, ready to board plane. Then he disappears.”
“True.”
“He hid in a baggage locker for two days. Then he went to a party at some friend’s place.”
“We’ve got all those places covered.”
“But don’t you see. He didn’t really try to escape or else he’d have stayed away from the party. But he was willing to spend what must have been two very uncomfortable days in a baggage locker to do so.”
“Must have been a hell of a party.”
“It was an ordinary party.”
“So?”
“Forget the party. Think about the locker.”
“I don’t understand how a man can do something like that.”
“It was a reasonably large locker and he is a very small man.”
“Okay. I don’t see what it proves.”