The War of Immensities (46 page)

“Are you sure.
That’s almost due north. They said...”

“It’s that
way,” Lorna assured him.

So they flew
north, to Anchorage in Alaska where they refuelled and wasted some
time then flew on over the ice cap and landed in Reykjavik,
Iceland, with Lorna furious because they had passed the spot. She
was pacified only when they flew again and as the deadline drew
near and were circling over a spot off Cape Richards, in the Queen
Elizabeth Islands, 700 kilometres from the North Pole when it was
agreed the journey ended.

“I’m glad we
didn’t have to walk,” Lorna snapped at the pilot. “Harley used to
organise it better than this.”

“Not all he
organised, apparently,” the pilot said grimly. “There’s been a big
earthquake right in the middle of Japan.”

The problem had
been Joe Solomon who, as he had expected, was arrested and handed
over to US Treasury Officials and eventually flown to New York
where gentlemen from the United Nations Investigative Committee
wanted to talk with him. No one realised the effect it would have.
When the link came, Joe raged and was hospitalised and sedated.

Not far away,
also in New York, Jami Shastri and Val Dennis were capturing
seismic waves and trying to get them to read out on a
spectroscope.

“So your man
was right, Jami-kins,” Val smiled. “Honshu, bang on, 8.2.
Outstanding.”

“I’m getting
nothing here,” Jami protested, offering the palms of her hands in
frustration to the computer screen.

“Don’t chill
me, Babe. It’s rock-a-billy right around the geosphere. We’re an
all shook up and shaking all over, shimmy-shimmy planet. You gotta
be gettin’ something.”

“Not a
sausage.”

“Well bite my
ass.”

“How can you be
picking them up and I’m not?”

“The spectros
fucked out.”

“It reads the
same on the back-ups.”

“Well, then, if
our hardware is fine and it reads weird, then it’s weird.”

“You are
picking up seismic waves coming around through the crust but I’m
not getting any coming through the mantle. How can that be?”

“A disco at the
Moho.”

“The
Mohorovicic Discontinuity can’t be a factor. Seismic waves have
always travelled through the mantle in the past. Why not this
time?”

“Core
distension.”

“Not to this
degree, surely.”

“Figure it
assupwards, dodo. Where can’t seismos go?”

“Where there’s
no solid matter.”

“Which means
somewhere between here and Japan, as the gopher burrows, there’s a
lack of solidarity.”

“Harley’s
bubble!” Jami shrieked.

“I guess it
ain’t burst after all, hey Babe?”

In his cell at
the Remand Centre in Melbourne, Brian Carrick emerged from a haze
of sedation. Outside he could hear excited voices.

“D’ya hear? Big
earthquake in Japan.”

He tried to
pick up the remote control and switched the television on but
discovered he was strapped to his bunk. He felt like hell.

“Hey, out
there,” he called throatily. “Bung the telly on, will ya. It’s
almost time for the six o’clock news.”

In the pouring
rain at the side of the road, Chrissie knelt in prayer. All along
the road behind her, the jumbled outlines of the stalled convoy
flashed as people walked past vehicles with shining headlights. But
most were no longer walking but also out on the road, and praying.
A police official had come down the line and explained to Fabrini
that about ten frozen bodies had been recovered from the passes
above and wanted to know how many more might be expected.

“They were wet
and not appropriately dressed. When their vehicles stopped, they
got out and walked. They died in a few minutes.”

“We have no
idea how many got past us. But most seem to be here,” Fabrini said,
shivering but not from the cold.

“It was lucky,”
the police chief said, “that the sister was able to stop them in
time.”

“I didn’t stop
them,” Chrissie said. “They just stopped.”

Harley Thyssen
sat quietly in his room, the curtains drawn, no lights on, quietly
waiting in the dimness. There was a knock at the door, but he
ignored it. They had keys and he did not but, being well trained in
politeness as all FBI men should be, they always knocked before
they let themselves in. This time, he noticed, the knocking lacked
its usual authoritative tone. He allowed himself a sad little
smile.

On the morning
of the day following the Japanese event, Lorna discovered that the
guard was gone from the door. There had been three of them on a
rostered shift, and the morning chap was a rather cute guy named
Elmer whom she had several times tried to lure into her room for
coffee... and whatever...

“Sorry Miss
Simmons. Against regulations.”

Elmer and each
of his colleagues were required to stand at her door for eight
hours, and they were all young and very polite in their nice suits
with the bulge of the gun in the shoulder holster. Secret
Service—the same lads who guarded the President. She was very
impressed by that.

That morning,
she was too hung-over to bother with seduction and gathered her
breakfast and the paper from the hall in her green-with-shamrocks
flannel pyjamas and it was only when she decided to shoot Elmer a
smile anyway that she noticed he was gone. Maybe he went somewhere
for a pee? No. Such desertion of their post for any reason had not
occurred before. She suspected Elmer and his associates had perfect
control over their bladders and every other bodily function.

She considered
immediate escape. Perhaps this was only a momentary window of
opportunity. But no—not a chance. The image of the front page of
the popular press, with photo of Lorna Simmons, fleeing through the
streets of Washington in her pyjamas, barefoot, hair like a
Condor’s nest. No way. She went back in, nibbled toast and drank
the coffee and then peeked out the door again. Elmer was nowhere to
be seen. Okay—so if it was to be an escape, let’s do it with a bit
of style. Lorna headed for the shower.

Forty-five
minutes later, she was dressed to face the rainy November weather
in Washington, sporting a long yellow scarf overflowed by her red
hair, a green beret, an ankle-length black coat from which her
black-nylon legs protruded below the mini-skirt as she walked on
her highest heels. Classiest jailbreak in history, she murmured to
her mirror-image. Handbag swinging from her shoulder, she strode
the corridor to the lift and went up to the thirty-third floor.
Although she had never been there before, the number was easy to
remember—3333—and she saw there were no Secret Service men there
either and knocked. A ruffled, weary Thyssen answered the door,
walking away with a motion for her to enter.

“Has all been
forgiven?” she asked as she wandered in.

“The arrest
order has been withdrawn, if that’s what you mean,” Thyssen said in
a thick grumble as he flopped into the chair before the computer
screen.

Five floors
lower, Lorna had been occupying a room that would have been
identical to this one a month ago, but now there was hardly any
point of comparison. Once she collected her suitcase, there would
be as little trace of her occupation as any other relatively tidy
guest, but Thyssen’s room had been utterly engulfed in Harleyness.
Gutted computers and other machines with exposed wires hanging all
around, dozens of books with pages marked with scraps of paper,
every newspaper published in the world during the last month, each
left open at relative pages or dumped in disorderly heaps, many
pizza and other takeaway containers, innumerable Styrofoam coffee
mugs. Maps and charts were plastered all over the walls. Harley’s
clothes and personal belongings were jumbled into the midst of
it—it all stank to high heaven. Harley himself looked ill and
unwashed, as much a wreck as the room. It was perhaps the shaggy
toothbrush protruding from a Coke bottle, standing in the middle of
the coffee table like a misguided flower arrangement, that stuck in
her mind most.

“How’d you get
all this stuff in here?” Lorna gasped. She had been confined to
videos and newspapers and her request to visit a library or
bookshop had been denied.

“They let me
have anything I wanted. All properly fitted with bugs and homing
devices no doubt. I bet they even go through my garbage every
night. I know they had people in here going through stuff when I
was sleeping. I got to play with every pet project that crossed my
mind over the last decade. It was great fun. And it’ll take them
years to figure out what it all means.”

“You’re going
to leave it all?”

“You bet,” and
he walked over and addressed a mirror behind which you could only
assume there was a hidden camera. “And yes, you guys, what you want
to know is in here somewhere.”

Lorna was
looking over everything, the staggering clutter about her, and
something caught her eye. Under the circumstances, something had
to. It was a sheet of paper on the table on which Harley had
scrawled in large red letters—everything else was output from the
printer. She picked it up and looked at it aimlessly—CONSIDER
ENTROPY, it said. Immediately, Harley was standing before her,
extracting the sheet from her fingers and balling it up, throwing
it onto the heap of similar balled papers on the corner buried
under which, she supposed, there was probably a waste paper
bin.

“Mustn’t pry,”
he said, giving her fingers a playful slap.

“What, exactly,
is Entropy?”

“The graveyard
of the galaxies,” Thyssen replied as he collected his wallet and
cigarettes and herded her toward the door. She supposed it was a
silly question.

“Come on. Let’s
walk,” Harley said. “There’s a lot to do.”

They went
through the lobby to the elevator, and still Lorna was thinking
that perhaps they ought to be making a run for it, just in case
someone changed their mind and decided they ought to be confined
again. As it happened, she was very nearly running to keep up with
Harley’s long strides—it was just so hard for a girl to be elegant
beside such a rough and rampant man.

“Can we pause
for a moment to enjoy our freedom or are we making a fast getaway?”
she asked as they waited before the lifts.

“Neither. But
they have, for the most part, admitted that they were wrong and I
was right, and the pilgrimages fucked up completely without the
rest of you guys organising them.”

“So is the
project to be restored?”

“No. Not yet,
anyway.”

“Not yet?”

“They’ve
offered me a consultancy, which I declined.”

“Why?”

The elevator
arrived and they entered, and Lorna was wondering if they should be
talking so frankly in places that could harbour listening devices.
But that was just her being paranoid, she realised, since they
weren’t saying anything Harley didn’t want them to hear.

“Their trouble
is, they think I know something they don’t, but they don’t realise
that I get it right and they don’t for the same reason the rest of
you do your jobs better than anyone else can. Because we were all
in on the ground floor and learned how to do these things when it
was simple and easy to learn. Now everything’s become too complex
to comprehend properly. But for all of us, our best guess is better
than anything they can learn from the data.”

“Not very
scientific, Harley.”

The truth was,
she didn’t believe him. She had been there when he had worked alone
for an hour to come up with his prediction. It was a strange
moment. She waited for a sense of betrayal or disloyalty to hit her
but it didn’t. Apparently, it was quite natural to distrust him.
She’d never thought of that.

“Not everything
is scientific, Lorna.”

“Heresy,
surely.”

“Computers, and
mathematics, suffer as perceptions do, from occasional distortions.
In any case, I have told them that its no deal unless Project
Earthshaker is fully restored.”

“And what did
they say to that?”

“No one has
dared answer at this stage.”

“Are we all
reinstated?”

“Project
Earthshaker continues, with or without official sanction. Okay,
let’s walk. Joe is here in Washington. Apparently he’s secreted all
our funds in mysterious investments and they have been trying to
persuade him to tell them where.” He handed her a business card.
“He’s been turned over to my lawyer at this address. You go fetch
him and deliver him to Wagner at San Carboni. Felicity is in San
Diego, dealing with the Navy. Andromeda is in London, hitting the
big time and moving on to Paris next week. Chrissie is at San
Carboni, in the convent playing nuns. They all know the situation
well enough that they’ll know what to do without help from me. I
know where Jami is and you don’t want to know. Fuck knows where
Brian is—find him and tell him I want him in Japan. He is going to
have to figure out how to move 16,000 people and he only has six
weeks to do it. Got all that?”

“Yep. What
about the prediction?”

“I don’t know
yet. But Jami has set up a secret lab somewhere and that’s where
I’ll be.”

“So now we are
some sort of underground movement.”

“If you must be
romantic about it. The truth is, we have to go on. We will do what
we can, and governments can help or hinder as is their wont. But
the Project continues.”

“Long live the
Project.”

“I’d forgotten
your weird sense of humour. You’ll be calling me King Harley
next.”

“I can’t
imagine how I avoided it so long.”

Suddenly he
rushed into the street and hailed a cab. As it squealed to a halt
beside them, he smiled briefly.