The War of Immensities (20 page)

“He lost his
wife in the crash,” Chrissie said solemnly. “And he broke his back
or something. He was in a terrible way.”

“Well,” Wagner
continued. “We’re to have a search for him. They think he’s here
somewhere too.”

They rode to
town in the luxury of the limo, and booked a room in the pub in
which they put John the exhausted chauffeur to bed. There was a bus
due soon after and Lorna and Wagner met it. Indeed, a thick-set
swarthy man in a motorised wheelchair emerged down the ramp
provided by the bus company. Lorna went and knelt before the man,
taking his hands.

“It’s me, Lorna
Simmons. From New Zealand. Remember, Mr Solomon.”

Joe Solomon
peered at her and smiled.

“Yes, of
course, dear girl. But what are you doing here?”

“Same thing as
you, Mr Solomon,” Lorna smiled, rubbing his hands warmly. “Come on.
The others are waiting.”

“Mongolia! You
got any idea how difficult it is to get somewhere like that?”

Glen shook his
head as they walked across the campus in fading sunlight. Autumn
leaves lay all about. The air was orange with fine mist. Glen loped
along, Jami had to gallop to keep up with him.

“No magic
carpet from Harley, then.”

“No. Of course
the Russians don’t want us there. They think their own geologists
can handle it.”

“They have very
good geologists. Remember Tolbachik in 1975?”

“It was just a
lucky guess.”

“They predicted
the eruption, bang on.”

“Bully for
them.”

Glen laughed.
Plainly he was enjoying her frustration. She felt like a Pekinese
beside him, trying to scare a tiger. “Anyway,” he was saying. “Word
is that Russian geological pride isn’t the problem. The truth is
that they suspect they might have some sort of big ecological
disaster on their hands and don’t want to admit anything until they
figure it out.”

“It’s one of
mine. I know it is.”

“I know,” Glen
laughed. “Come to the lab. I’ve got something to show you.”

“Can’t. Got to
get to Mongolia, somehow.”

“You’ve got
plenty of time, Jamikins. The Geo Survey is assembling a team in
London to fly in as soon as the Russians permit it. You’ll be with
them. But they won’t be going anywhere for days. So play it
cool.”

“How can
I...”

“Come on. This
will amaze you.”

They made their
way down into the basement lab that had once been hers but now was
his. It made her feel all the more a displaced person. He sat her
before the screen and tapped the keys over her shoulder, but the
intimacy did nothing for her either.

“We got this
off the satellite,” he said proudly.

“Bloody hell.
What is it?”

“Infra-red.”

“But I
mean...”

What she meant
was that such images of erupting volcanoes showed up as white hot
spots, surrounded by a spectrum that indicated decreasing
temperatures away from the epicentre. But this was a long narrow
line running straight as an arrow. It looked like the flare at the
base of a rocket.

“Good god. What
is it? It must go for miles.”

“A single open
fissure in the valley floor, twenty kilometres long and just a few
metres wide.”

“A basalt
flood!”

“Looks like
it.”

“Hasn’t been
one of those for a hundred years.”

“Two
hundred.”

“No wonder
they’re confused.”

“It gets
better.”

Jami stared. A
whole valley had split open as if sliced with an axe and the lava
gushed all along the line, forming fiery rivers and lakes to right
and left. A truly stunning event and foolish nationalistic
suspicions prevented her from being there.

“How can it get
better?”

“Look at this.
I took the wrong satellite pictures at first—it was the sweep an
hour before the eruption and I couldn’t find it anywhere. See.”

She looked at
what she supposed was the same valley immediately prior to the
earth cracking wide open. There was no sign of what was to
come.

“Not even a hot
spot.”

“Nope. Which
kinda confirms your effect, doesn’t it.”

“It can’t be
right.”

“So I thought
at first. So I called up the pictures of Terra de Fuego. The
satellite passed over there four hours before it blew. Get onto
this.”

Again, no hot
spots.

“Are you sure
of these pictures, Glen?”

“Don’t you
believe your own research, girl? The effect occurs without warning.
A single blast, a few aftershocks, and then all over. But no
preliminaries. And no particular type of tectonic movement. Ruapehu
was a subduction zone; the Canaries is a hot spot and there can’t
be any tectonic link between them.”

“But still
there ought to be some sort of indication...”

“None. As you
see.”

“But even
extinct volcanoes have some infra-red signature.”

“This mountain
wasn’t a volcano, extinct or otherwise. There was no history of
vulcanism in the region at any time.”

“I don’t
believe it.”

“And the same
is true of Lake Baikal. No history. Ever.”

“So these
things just come out of the blue?”

“No. Ruapehu
was already active, Gran Canaria was dormant, and these two,
nothing. So what it means is that, geologically, there is no
connection between them whatsoever.”

“Baikal is a
rift valley—I’m sure of it.”

“Yes. And the
innocent mountain in Terra de Fuego lies right at the tip of the
Scotia Plate—the very point where the fracture in the South
American Plate dwindles to nothing.”

“So they are
all weak points.”

“Yes, but not
always the same kind of weak point.”

Jami leaned
back in the chair, studying it all grimly.

“What the hell
is going on?” she asked the world in general.

The Kyabram pub
was able to offer them a sizable conference room where they sat
about a large table in their various attitudes.

Joe Solomon
wheeled his chair to what might have been the chairman’s position
and looked completely in his element in his blue suit and red
tie.

Kevin Wagner
sat at his right hand and even produced a notebook as if to take
the minutes, but in fact it was the log book from the helicopter
and he was making his fuel calculations.

By contrast,
Lorna Simmons seemed to think she was at a cocktail party, having
supplied herself with a long glass of exotic pink stuff which she
sipped through a straw while perched on a barstool that ensured her
thighs were in clear view above the level of the tabletop.

Chrissie Rice,
looking small and skinny even for an Asian, nursed a cup of tea and
sat with her chair back against the wall away from the table and
would have to be invited to draw it forward when the conference
began.

On the other
hand, no serious meeting had ever experienced the likes of Brian
Carrick and Andromeda Starlight. They sat at the opposite far
corners of the table, both smoking furiously, sharing a jug of
beer. Brian, big and weather-beaten, and in his shirt with the
sleeves hacked off roughly, was sweating and too loud and would
have dominated the room had it not been for Andromeda’s plunging
neckline which insisted on being the focal point.

Which failed
only because Harley Thyssen was there, a man made to intimidate
mountains, with his great body, great beard and thundering
authoritative voice. Thyssen had placed a smaller table adjacent to
the end of the main one, and then sat on it, adopting the high
ground.

And, finally,
Felicity Campbell who did not sit, but stood in a corner making
these observations. She would continually shift to a different part
of the room in order to study her patients in detail, although she
later admitted that the one she studied most was Harley Thyssen. He
had spent a little time interrogating his subjects and now
undertook to summarise the results.

“You are all
participants in an unexplained phenomenon,” Thyssen said loudly,
“about which there are some things we know, and a few more things
we can guess at, and a great deal that we have no idea of. Let’s
deal with the things we know first. Each of you, simultaneously,
experienced a comatose state for a period of eight days, from which
you have apparently recovered. The implication is that the coma was
brought on by exposure to a volcanic eruption of an unusual kind
which, for the present, we will call the Shastri Effect. There has
never been a previous instance of that effect that we know of, but
there have been three instances since—one in the Canary Islands,
one in Terra de Fuego and one in Russian Mongolia. The events were
placed roughly three months apart. The volcanic activity in each
instance was entirely dissimilar except that the Shastri Effect was
present on each occasion.

“The Canary
Islands event produced sixty-three victims who, like you,
experienced an eight day coma and then completely recovered.
However, three months later, the sixty-three rose as one and walked
in a zombie like state and fell from the cliffs into the sea. All
were killed. Miss Simmons has reported doing something similar.
Miss Starlight too. Thirty-four hours later, the Terra de Fuego
event occurred.

“In those hours
prior to each event, we understand that each of you were drawn by
unknown forces to gather in the paddock outside town. Mr Carrick
made it each time. Others variously. Terra de Fuego produced no
casualties and we have no information about Mongolia as yet. But Dr
Campbell reports that while comatose in Wellington Hospital, there
was some sort of linkage between your individual brain wave
patterns. A biological impossibility but that doesn’t seem to have
prevented it from happening anyway. This is something we need to
know a great deal more about. Any questions so far?”

“Why us?” Joe
Solomon asked.

Thyssen stood
up and went to a large folder he had brought with him. He produced
the chart he wanted and laid it on the table before them. It showed
the Ruapehu site. The three calderas were evident, but wide of
them, there was a circle drawn with a diameter of roughly a
kilometre from the epicentre of the blast.

“Consider this
circle. Everyone inside the circle died at the time of the
eruption. Outside it, many casualties survived but none of them
suffered the effect. You, Mr Solomon, and the two young ladies,
were flying in an aircraft inside the circle, but which crashed
outside the circle. Similarly, Mr Wagner was diving in the pond
inside the circle but the cascade carried him outside. And Miss
Starlight’s very exciting ride in her bathtub also took her from
inside to outside the circle. Mr Carrick is the exception to the
theory, being stationary at the time, but he was right on the line
and underground. There was considerable slippage along the fault
line at that point, away from the crater. The best theory we can
come up with is that the ground movement was just sufficient to
carry him too, from inside to outside the zone.”

“My gawd,
Professor,” Kevin Wagner was very impressed. “Whatever made you
think of that?”

Even Thyssen
looked impressed with himself. “The fishing-boats in Gran Canaria.
The shock wave from the underwater eruption pushed the boats
outward in a wide circle—we assume that the coma victims drifted
from inside to outside the circle.”

“So you think
that was it,” Felicity asked. “Moving from inside to outside the
circle.”

“I think so,
yes. Anyone inside the circle probably suffered the effect but they
all died. Survivors outside the circle, whether injured or not, did
not suffer the effect.”

“So it was just
a fluke,” Chrissie said in disappointment.

“I think so.
The miraculous circumstances under which each of you survived was
also why you have suffered the effect. It is interesting to note
that a lot of people who were just outside the circle at the time
felt a shockwave and experienced nausea and headaches immediately
prior to the eruption, but they did not sustain the Shastri Effect.
So yes, it is confined to a very finite group.”

“Sounds like
the same thing that happens when the effect goes away,” Lorna said
quietly.

“Indeed it
does, but we’ll come to that in a moment.”

“So why here,
in that paddock in the middle of nowhere?” Brian Carrick wanted to
know.

Thyssen had a
chart for that one too—this time encompassing all of
Australasia.

“That was much
easier to figure out. In fact I’m a little disappointed that you
didn’t work it out for yourselves. Your paddock in the middle of
nowhere is in fact the exact midpoint between Perth and Wellington.
Indeed, precisely between Wellington Hospital where Mr Wagner has
been residing and Mr Solomon’s convalescent home at Fairhaven. All
of the rest of you were closer to the midpoint than those two and
therefore, apparently, irrelevant.”

“Hey, man. I
was way up in Queensland,” Andromeda Starlight protested.

“True, but
nevertheless closer to the midpoint than either Mr Wagner or Mr
Solomon.”

“Only those
people furtherest away count,” Wagner considered.

“So it seems.
Now, this is interesting. In the second instance, Mr Carrick and
Miss Starlight report heading off in a different direction and then
suddenly reverting back to the original one. I believe that is
because the midpoint then lay between Wellington and the Canary
Islands, somewhere in the middle of the Bay of Bengal. But when the
Canary Island victims—the so-called lemmings—all died, Mr Solomon
once more became the westward limit and the midpoint reverted back
here.”

“So we can
expect to do this every three months?” Lorna was saying. “I’m
sorry. My funds aren’t up to it.”

Thyssen smiled
warmly. “This project has a substantial budget. You can expect all
further costs to be met by us. You may also make application for
compensation for your past costs. We may even extend to providing
Mr Carrick with a hire car to curb his disposition toward vehicle
larceny.”