The War of Immensities (26 page)

“Then you’ll be
delighted to know that Glen came up with the Indian Ocean in five
out of thirty-seven model runs.”

The girl
stopped beside Thyssen, who put his arm around her and dragged her
to open ground. “Folks, I want you to meet Jamila Shastri—the
discoverer of the Shastri Effect. You won’t see much of her because
she’s our volcano chaser. Always to be found where the eruptions
are hottest.”

“Why do I
suddenly feel so very insecure?” Lorna Simmons said in mock
horror.

“So these are
the sleepers,” Jami remarked, looking them over like specimens in a
bottle. “I’ve heard a lot about you guys.”

“Whereas we’ve
heard nothing about you, young lady?” Joe Solomon said

“That’s because
Harley always takes the credit for my work,” Jami said cutely.

“That’s because
I do all the paying and take all the flack,” Thyssen defended.
“Anyhow, since we’re all here, I have something to say. I’ll keep
this short,” he said amid their groans. “I just want to thank you
all for coming. And you ought to know that the project now
officially has a name. Project Earthshaker.”

“Wow man, talk
about originality,” Kevin Wagner sneered. “How many bureaucratic
geniuses did it take to come up with that one?”

“Came from the
US State Department, as a matter of fact,” Thyssen said. “I thought
it rather appropriate myself.”

“I thought
these names were supposed to obscure, rather than tell everything,”
Felicity said lightly.

“Maybe they’re
referring to Harley,” Jami grinned.

The next day
the patients were hooked up to the monitoring equipment and the
detailed observation of their physiology and mental states began.
Interest focused on a set of six small monitor screens that were
slaves to those placed individually beside each bed. These Felicity
positioned at the nurse’s station where they could be constantly
watched. The six bands of light darting with endless repetition
across the screens measured the alpha waves of the patients and
their names were tagged below each monitor. Their output was also
constantly recorded. As such they represented the only positive
external measure of the condition of the group.

“See how they
are all different,” Felicity pointed out to Thyssen.

“They all look
the same to me.”

“No. Observe
how no two blips are the same point at the same time.”

“I
suppose.”

“Please have a
bit of faith, Harley. Since I anticipate being able to show you
something that I know is medically impossible and don’t even really
believe myself, even though I witnessed it, I need just a small
degree of indulgence.”

“Okay. They’re
all different.”

Thyssen was
mostly busy with logistics. Air forces, both Australian and US,
were on stand-by with aircraft fitted out to his specifications.
Thyssen would have rather avoided involving the military, or even
governments, but there wasn’t time, nor available skills, to fit
out private aircraft. They had a USAF 707 fitted out to duplicate
most of the equipment in the ward, and although it would not be
completely ready for three months, still it had arrived and stood
on the tarmac at Tullamarine, just in case it was needed.

The RAAF was
standing by with an Orion, fitted out for weather observation and
hunting down lost yachtsmen in the Southern Ocean, which would fly
Jami and a vast array of equipment to the scene of the next
eruption. In addition, two buses had been fitted out as medical
laboratories, residing in the belly of a USAF C-130 Hercules, ready
to collect any new sleepers should they occur, and two further
wards had been made available in the Alfred to receive them. These
arrangements, coordinating the various authorities involved, were
what occupied most of Thyssen’s time. It was a great deal and all
of it based on Harley’s speculations. He tried as hard as he could
to shrug off the pressure.

His first
moment of relief came at ten minutes to eight on the morning the
18th of May, when suddenly Felicity summoned him urgently to the
nurse’s station.

“It happened
three minutes ago,” she said. “See how Chrissie and Joe have locked
together.”

Thyssen watched
the ongoing lines streak across the screens for some time before he
could see it. Yes, identical. The others were not... Though you
really needed an expert eye to detect it.

“Lorna says
Chrissie has always been more sensitive to it,” Felicity said.
Thyssen went with her through the ward. Everything was checked.
There was no other indication that anything had changed and even
the subjects themselves had not noticed anything.

“I don’t even
feel it coming on yet,” Chrissie said uneasily.

“Well, don’t
force it. Let it happen of its own accord,” Felicity smiled.

There was
hardly room around either bedside for all the activity of the
nurses and technical equipment, much of which Joe Solomon tried to
fight off grumpily. Even while they were there, Andromeda Starlight
locked in.

“Did you feel
anything at all?” Felicity asked.

“Nothing,” the
black woman shrugged.

“I was taking
her pulse at the time,” a nurse added. “I’m sure there was no
physical indicator.”

The various
specialists and their teams busied themselves, each shaking their
heads negatively. Somehow, Felicity was not surprised.

Within two
hours, all six monitors were reading identical brain waves.
Thyssen, Jami and Felicity went to the cafeteria and relaxed over
coffee.

“Well, I’m glad
that’s over,” Felicity said, stretching her neck.

“Indeed. I can
only hope that I can match the precision of your observations,
Fee,” Thyssen said.

“What’s your
current guess?” Jami asked in mock awe.

“If my theory
is correct, the event will occur tomorrow evening at about five or
six, Melbourne time. You’d better be ready to go then.”

“I have such
faith in you, Harley, I’ll be sitting on the aeroplane with my
parachute strapped on.”

“Are you
kidding about the parachute?” Felicity asked.

“Yes.”

“But it
wouldn’t be a bad idea,” Thyssen mused.

“It’s a very
bad idea, Harley,” Jami said coldly.

Thyssen turned
to Felicity.

“At the
earliest possible time, I want you to move the group into the bus
and get them underway.”

“Underway
where?”

“Kyabram, we
have to assume.”

“What if the
story of there being sleepers in Mongolia is true?” Jami asked.

“Then the focal
point will lie in the Pacific west of the Philippines. But you’d
think we’d have heard something positive by now if there were. The
damned Ruskies are supposedly not keeping secrets these days.”

“Yeah. Like us
Americans,” Jami said dryly.

“So. Assume
Kyabram,” Felicity said.

“Well, the
airport lies in the same direction. So we can at least make a
start.”

“I’ll check
around my team and see how soon they can free the patients.”

By the time the
test procedures had reached a point where they could be temporarily
broken off, it was nearly noon. By then, each of the subjects was
beginning to feel seriously agitated.

“We ought to
let them sleep,” the psychologist said.

“They’ll be too
agitated,” Felicity was sure.

“Sedate
them.”

“No. Leave them
be,” Thyssen instructed. “Tell them to get what sleep they can.
We’ll move them this evening. That’ll still give us twenty-four
hours before the event. Ought to be enough.”

“You should
sleep too, Harley,” Felicity said.

“I’ll sleep on
Tuesday. Jami sleeps now.”

“Am I supposed
to be asleep?” Jami asked.

Thyssen and
Jami had been establishing a control room on the same floor as the
ward, in which they had installed a full array of monitors. Those
from the ward, and others by satellite from Glen, full seismic
equipment and monitors and videos from each of their transport
vehicles. In the end, it needed two technicians to run it.

“I think that
covers everything,” Thyssen said.

“We ought to be
able to tell if someone down there spills their coffee,” Jami
remarked.

The evening was
foggy and very cold as the group were wheeled in chairs with their
attending equipment onto the ambulance bus. Each had a technician,
a nurse and one specialist and Felicity overseeing it all. Thyssen
sat in his control room and watched them on monitors and
communicated directly with Felicity.

As the bus set
out along the Tullamarine freeway, Chrissie Rice said. “We’re going
the wrong way.”

“Kyabram is in
this direction.”

“This way.”

The direction
she indicated was ten degrees east. Each of the others indicated
agreement. Kyabram was slightly west of north—they indicated
somewhat east of north.

“Shit,” Thyssen
snapped. “That means the Russians have got sleepers in Mongolia.
The bastards and their fucking secrets.”

“So where does
that mean we are going?”

“We calculated
some place in the Pacific Ocean, just east of the Philippines.”

From the bus,
there came a collective groan.

“Do we really
want to go there?” Felicity asked.

“The plane’s
waiting. So we just fly you out there and back again. Aim to be
over the location at an hour before sunset and you should be right.
And your exact location ought to give us a precise location for the
Mongolian sleepers. Who, we must assume, are presently heading
south.”

“Do you suppose
we’ll meet them?”

“Beats me.
Depends on whether the Russians have been taking any notice of me.
If not and the poor buggers are on their own, they have to cross
the Gobi Desert and all of China from north to south.”

“I think I’m
just beginning to appreciate you, Thyssen,” Brian Carrick
chuckled.

Thyssen leaned
back and smiled. It wasn’t every day that someone said that.

The snow-cat
ran out across the white land, trundling over flat terrain, beneath
an amazing sky. The winter night had just begun and the Aurora
Australis—unusually for this time of the year—danced across the
entire heavens in every known colour. Great swirls drifted back and
forth, the size of the milky way, looking like the bottom of a
gaudy curtain rippling in the breeze, intermingled with blinding
flashes of light and darting streams of iridescence. The greatest
fireworks show in history was underway and the polished orange skin
of the cat reflected such an array of colour that it might have
been driving under the neon lights of Las Vegas.

And back
behind, in the direction that the twin caterpillar tracks had
scoured across the snow, another display of pyrotechnics was
underway. There a black cloud that thundered skyward, illuminated
constantly from underneath by a brilliant red glow. Great bolts of
lightning burst continually from the cloud, cracking downward into
the white steam cloud beneath. From back that way, bone-rattling
roars were heard, as if the clouds hid a gigantic dinosaur, and
there were other, deafening cracking sounds as massive fissures
opened in the Ross Ice Shelf. It might have been that the cat was
fleeing this ice bound inferno, except that it made no haste,
rumbling on its way at just twenty kilometres an hour. And never at
any time did it deviate from its course.

The cat had
trundled on for five hours by the time they located it. True, the
terrain here was flat as a table top, yet still it was surprising
that it had come so far without dropping into a crevasse and being
overturned by one of the upthrusts that dotted the landscape. And
still it might, before it ran out of fuel and ground to a halt. The
helicopter followed it through the dazzling night, helpless,
keeping it under the eye of its landing light, praying that the
cat’s engine died before the helicopter reached its own maximum
fuel range.

Earlier that
evening, at 1727 hours, they had felt the earth shake and a few
minutes later, the seismic station at Oates confirmed what they
already guessed—that the region had been hit by a massive
earthquake. From then on, reports came through every few minutes;
that the single shock measured 7.1 on the scale—by far the most
powerful quake in the admittedly limited recorded history of the
Antarctic continent—that the epicentre was located twenty-eight
kilometres east of McMurdo Sound; that whereas all of the bases in
the Ross Ice Shelf region had suffered damage, there were no
casualties. Almost immediately, they were informed that an Orion
aircraft was on the way from Australia, bringing a team of
geologists and prepared to return any casualties to Melbourne, even
though none had been reported. Throughout the Summer, the Americans
flew back and forth from New Zealand to their bases all the time,
but the Orion was on its way and seeking permission for a risky
night landing on the nearest US runway when already in the air.

Then they
remembered the survival group. They had been forgotten because they
were not part of any particular scientific team, but instead
sponsored by an oil company for a promotional television program.
They were camped near McMurdo, and last reported fifteen kilometres
from Mt Erebus, which, they had every reason to believe, was
probably in full eruption.

The helicopter
came out of Roosevelt Base, and Kim Ah Cheung went along as
observer. Being a climatologist, she was as near to a geologist as
was available at the time, and if able to constantly report on the
remarkable aurora, was a little out of her depth with more
terrestrial matters.

“There are huge
cracks running all over the ice shelf, and colossal ice bergs
breaking off. Gee, I think the whole shelf is going to
collapse.”

A trained
geologist would have known better than to say that—still, the
largest icebergs in known history were already beginning their long
diminishing journey north.