by Barry Klemm
“Straight over Sierra Leone,” Andromeda said quietly.
Maynard needed to peer at the map to understand what she meant. Indeed his ruler passed directly over that tiny state of the extreme west coast of Africa.
“So?”
“Oh nothing,” Andromeda said awkwardly, and then backed off. “You were saying.”
“Well, that’s just the direction for the next few days and it will take us that long to get these people across the rivers.”
“And then?”
“There’s a good airstrip at Mbandaka. Big enough for the C-130s. So we can float the whole shebang downriver and offload them there.”
“But that’s on this side of the Congo.”
“Yes. Then we fly them.”
“With two planes?”
“The US Air force is on the way with more. As many as we need. And the destination is N’guigmi, in Niger, near Lake Chad.”
Andromeda considered it grimly. “It sounds very complicated, Captain.”
“Best we can do.”
“Well, we have to get out of this jungle.” And then she trailed a casual finger across the map. “What’s the terrain like through here.”
“Cameroons? Nigeria? Rough. Big mountains. Big jungle. No roads. Hopeless. But that isn’t where we’re going anyway… Why do you ask?”
“Sierra Leone’s that way.”
“Sierra Leone?”
“Land of my fathers, Captain.”
“I thought you were Jamaican.”
“All black Jamaicans came from Africa somewhere, Captain, as slaves under the British. My ancestors came from Sierra Leone.”
“I see.”
“Do you?”
“You want to go there?”
“It is the way I’m going… The way I’ve been leading these people all along.”
“But you were following Professor Thyssen’s plan.”
“His plan has run out.”
“No. We have new information. Lake Chad…”
“Provided by the American government.”
“But they got it from Thyssen…”
“We can’t be sure of that. And Harley is hardly in any condition to help us now, even if he is still alive as they say.”
“You don’t believe it.”
“Black people have a funny way of distrusting the American government, Captain. With all due respect to yourself.”
“So you think there might be something wrong with the information.”
“Harley always told me, personally, which way to go. I distrust any other source.”
“I’m sure. Look, why not contact Lorna, or Wagner…”
“With Harley out of the game, we don’t know whose instructions they are following.”
“Are you sure you aren’t just a wee mite paranoid, ma’am?” Maynard said, slowly beginning to realise that she was serious.
“I’m surprised, after the way they’ve treated you, Captain, that you aren’t.”
“But… but… if you’re not going follow this plan, what are you going to do?”
“I think I should follow my instincts.”
“And what do your instincts say?”
“Land of my fathers, Captain.”
*
They had offered her a room but she remained by the bedside, dozing from time to time. Beside her a figure barely recognisable as Harley lay with a tube stuck up his nose and the only sign of life the beeping lines of luminescence charting his vital signs across the monitor screen.
Lorna stirred. Her eyes had sunk back into their hollows and showed black rings about them. She looked pale and exhausted. She saw Brian standing in front her without realising he had entered and hugged him for a long time and then told him of the circumstances.
The heart attack was survivable, but there was a lot more wrong with him than that. It was as if every part of him had been hanging on grimly and now that one organ failed, the rest went with it. The nurses were silent and did their work reverently, the doctors merely nodded and kept their distance.
Even now, as the patient slowly began to regain consciousness, there was no excitement or anticipation. “It’s all up to his fighting spirit now,” the ward doctor had told Lorna when she had made a scene and demanded a response.
“I’ve seen this before,” the Head Nurse murmured. “The only reason he’s hanging on is because he refuses to die.”
Lorna had remained at the bedside throughout the entire week. Her skin was as grey as Harley’s, her hair dishevelled, her clothes unchanged for days. She had spilled small darts of food down the front of herself and didn’t care. She had vomited everything she tried to consume. The tranquillisers the nurses had offered had given her only the minimum of sleep. The whites of her eyes were red, her lips were forced into a hard blue line.
“He can’t die like this,” Lorna said in a broken murmur. “Not now. Not after all he’s done.”
She sat by the bed, a hunched pathetic figure, and Brian advanced, hunting words that might help when no help was possible.
“Why is he hanging on like this, Brian?” she asked him with calm ruthlessness. “His job is done. He has no life. But he’s hanging on.”
“I don’t know,” he said distractedly. ““Maybe it’s because of you.”
She looked up then, managed a smile and closed her hand over his.
“They’re evacuating the hospital,” she said grimly. “But he’s too ill to move. This place is going to be blown to hell and we can’t get him out.”
“Maybe he’s trying to be ironic,” Brian said.
They weren’t really making much of an effort to evacuate the Hawaiian islands. People there knew how to live with volcanoes. The epicentre would be far to the north in the Pacific and every caldera could be expected to erupt at maximum force, but the locals knew how to stay away from them. Tidal waves would inundate the islands but most of the population knew to move to the southern areas and high ground where they would be safe. The buildings were designed to withstand earthquakes. All this Lorna knew, based on the idea that Harley’s corrected system predicted accurately.
But if the people were hard to move, there was also only a token effort on the part of the government to move them. The entire island group would fall within the Zone and they would add to the numbers of sleepers, ready for the counter attack in Africa next month.
She tried to explain all these things to Brian, but he already knew. And why not, she reasoned. It was probably he who held the clearest picture of these things in his mind. They both could see that the President had meant what he said when he declared they would go with the Thyssen plan. Hawaii would be the dress rehearsal for the final battle.
*
Glen Palenski had prepared himself well. He had diagrams, videos, overheads, the works. He needed to get it right. His audience was the President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the heads of Congress and the Senate, the CIA chief, NCA and all those other agencies. And he had ten eminent geologists and astronomers to back him up, seated in a row like targets in a shooting gallery, off to right of stage.
But it was Glen’s show, and he would introduce the argument, and then they would debate it. Hardly any of them agreed on any part of it, except on this one point, the one that he was about to make.
“Gentlemen, there is little doubt now that useless the circumstances change dramatically, our planet will be destroyed, and it will happen within a few months. Professor Thyssen offers us a possible solution—no one else does. Therefore the biggest problem that we have is what happens if Thyssen is right. If he is wrong, we are making a great effort for little or no gain, but if he is right, the consequences will be enormous.
“If he is right, several millions of pilgrims will be gathered on the plain near Lake Chad, at this location here. Already, an airstrip is under construction to receive them, on the assumption that Hawaii comes off as Thyssen predicted and we can then assume that his Lake Chad prediction is also right.
“If Thyssen
is right, the effect of the presence of these pilgrims will diminish, perhaps even destroy, the singularity. Again, the magnitude and position of the Hawaiian outcome will show us this. If the deflection is as Thyssen has calculated, then the focal point will be here, 270 kilometres northwest of the large island. If the diminishment of the effect is correct, then the impact will be lower on the scale than Iran, and perhaps even than Java.
“In each instance, the scale was increased, 9.6 in California, 10.1 in Java, 10.6 in Iran. But Brazil was only 8.9, and Thyssen proposes that the diminishment was the effect of the presence of the pilgrims.
“Professor Jordan, however, differs and will tell you that it is because the singularity itself is decaying. If so, Hawaii will be less than 8.9. If Thyssen is right, then since there will be no pilgrims present this time, it will increase again, to about 9.5.
“So what of Africa. If Thyssen is wrong, we will have expended a lot of time and energy and money for no gain except perhaps further knowledge. But if he is right, then at Lake Chad we will find all of the pilgrims freed of the Shastri Effect, and the impact will have been further diminished. Perhaps it will be deflected, but if so it will be far smaller. It may even be completely destroyed.
“But if so, it will be at a great cost. At this location, the earth’s crust is more even and generally thinner than anywhere else on the planet. There are no nearby volcanic regions, nor tectonic plate boundaries, nor other major faults. But the impact will be bigger that of California, about 10.0. And there will be nowhere for it to let off steam.
“The nearest major volcanic outlets are in Kenya, 1700 miles away, and some in the Cameroons, 600 miles away. We can expect these to erupt, but history has taught us that the Thyssen Bubble will find its own way out. We expect that at the Lake Chad location, the earth will crack open and be swallowed in a lava flood, much as previously happened at Lake Baikal.
“There will be a very great area of devastation. And all of the pilgrims will be, of necessity, at the centre of that area. Right now there are thirteen million pilgrims in total—4 million Americans in Bakersfield or Brazil, 4 million Indonesians mostly gathered in North Australia, 3 million Iranians now in the hands of United Nations forces, and one million others, mostly Africans, some Japanese, Italians, Tahitians and Brazilians, plus we are expecting around one million or more volunteers from around the world who are presently positioning themselves in the Hawaiian Islands with a view to becoming sleepers. We plan to gather all of them, or as many as possible, at the Lake Chad site. If all this is so, then we can expect that all or most of them will die at Lake Chad.
“The danger they face is great, therefore. As these eminent gentlemen will tell you, there is no certainty of the danger. But, I am here to tell you this. If Harley is right in every respect, then the singularity will be destroyed, the earth will be saved, but perhaps at the cost of the lives of all of the pilgrims.
“I believe the strain of that knowledge, and the fact that he needed to keep it secret and carry the burden of it alone, was the reason why Harley Thyssen collapsed. It was too much for one man to carry alone. Now, we must carry it for him.”
*
It was a testament to the power of make-up artists that the television persona of Lorna Simmons could be created so perfectly. Only hours ago, Brian had seen the wraith that haunted Green Palms Hospital when he arrived in Honolulu the evening before. It shocked him, rather more than did the comatose figure of Harley Thyssen.
In the studio, as she came by him, Brian was astonished. There was no trance of the distraught and bedraggled person of a few hours earlier. The cosmeticians and hairdressers had been given the opportunity to show their talents to be limitless. Lorna was every bit her radiant self. They must have clipped her ears together behind her head to so completely rid her of the black bags that had been under her eyes.
Still, as she came by, he asked her. “Are you all right?”
“Of course. Come on. Something just came in on the satellite that you ought to see.”
They went to the editing suite when the tape was set running immediately. There was the figure of Kevin Wagner, in something more like a safari suit than his usual military garb but the style was still the same. He stood at a rostrum, addressing a room full of people, but it was plainly the television cameras to which his words were directed.
“Man is not the final outcome of evolution. Evolution is a process, ongoing, for all time, and humanity is only the most recent stage of that process. There will be higher beings in the future, evolved from our primitive selves, beings more appropriate to the tasks that lie before us.”
“What the hell is this?” Brian asked.
“I thought you might be interested,” Lorna said obliquely.
“What tasks lie before us? Once man believed it impossible to sail across the oceans. They believed that the horizon was the edge of the world and if they sailed beyond it, they would fall off. But really, the limitation was that they did not have ships capable of open ocean voyage, and, more importantly, they didn’t have sufficient belief in themselves to try.”
They talked over the top of him, but that didn’t mean they weren’t listening to what he said.
“Do we know where he is?” Brian asked, still incredulous.
“He’s on my turf. Addressing the pilgrims that still remain in Bakersfield. But I understand he gave the same address to the pilgrims in Brazil two days ago. And it went out to all other pilgrim locations, translated into the appropriate languages.”
“Eventually, the ships evolved from the minds of more advanced men and they did conquer the open oceans and find the great continents beyond.
“And now we confront the universe, and the impossibilities of travel to the worlds out there. Voyages in time beyond the span of human life, voyages impossible with our present technology. But if we know anything about science and technology it is that they will find a way. The spaceships that make these voyages possible will be created, just as the unimaginable aeroplane of the time of Columbus would make spanning the continents an everyday event.”
“This isn’t Wagner. Someone else must have written the speech for him,” Lorna said dismissively.
“All very inspirational, isn’t it,” Brian replied grimly.
“But there are other problems barring our exploration of the universe. The prolonged time periods for such journeys, and the fact that zero gravity and other aspects of that hostile environment inflict deterioration upon the bodies of astronauts to an unacceptable level. After just a few months in space, a man must be taught to walk again, and build up his deteriorated bones and muscles in normal gravity.
“New great star voyaging space ships will evolve, perhaps using the time distortions of near light speed, perhaps seeking out worm holes, but more likely by some means presently unimaginable to us, our ships will sail to the stars. But to do so, new men will have to evolve as well, men better equipped for such journeys. And more.”
“I wonder where he got it all from?”
“Yes, Brian. I wonder,” Lorna said, eyeing him ironically.
“We will not just voyage to the stars and come back and say, that was fine. No more than Columbus and the other great explorers did. We will go there and inhabit these places permanently, and make our homes there, and live our lives out there. And when, millions of years hence—or perhaps much sooner if the environmentalists are right—the earth is destroyed or rendered uninhabitable for us, it won’t matter, for we must by then be denizens of the galaxy, and eventually the entire universe.
“Don’t smile and say it won’t happen. It is the smile of the flat-earther. It is our nature to go forth and multiply and we will. Of that there is no doubt.”
“Now that you mention it,” Brian admitted reluctantly. “It does sound familiar at times.”
“Men look at this small planet and say, why have we wondrous creatures evolved on this small out of the way place, this tiny speck of dust in the vast cosmos. The answer is becaus
e the centre of anywhere in the cosmos is so hot that nothing can evolve. Life can only be nurtured in the quieter corners of the galaxy.
“But all that is to look at it the wrong way around. It doesn’t matter where you came from. That’s history. That is past. It’s where we’re going that counts.
“Civilisation did not evolve on Manhattan Island, nor in London nor Paris. That was where we carried it from the insignificant places of our origins. The plains of southern Africa, if the prevailing guesses are correct, is the place where humanity first arose. But those savannas are insignificant in terms of modern civilisation—still the domain of the chimpanzees and baboons that we were there before we evolved. We have moved on, and made our great societies at journey’s end, not at the place where we began.”
“I knew this would happen,” Lorna murmured.
“But of course that lies thousands, maybe millions of years in the future. It won’t be humans like us who will do these things, any more than it was a Neanderthal who went to the River Thames and established London. It will be the beings into which we will eventually evolve. Beings appropriate to life in space, on other worlds, adapted to light speed travel, whatever it needs.”
“I think he’s got a roo loose in the top paddock,” Brian declared.
“But it sounds good,” Lorna said.
“Too bloody good,” Brian replied.
“For that’s the way that evolution works. The needs arise, and the creatures that will survive are those that adapt to meet those needs.
“Oh yes, but it all lies in the impossible future and will take care of itself, you say. Evolution doesn’t work like that either. Just as the roots of modern humanity and modern civilisation lie millions of years in the past, so the roots of the future lie in the present.”