The War of Immensities (29 page)

“I don’t see
any threats.”

“Immediately,
media and government interference are the concerns, but in the
future I expect us to be in danger of espionage by other research
outfits, direct threats by local authorities and individuals, maybe
even terrorist attacks. It will become very big and I want the
security system to grow with it, and with the growth, there will be
expanded profit for the security company involved. You follow
me?”

Wagner followed
him all right. He had been ahead of him, in fact. Riding the crest
of a rapidly growing organisation to a global level. Yes. It was a
great opportunity all right. But he liked to see Thyssen
squirm.

“Sure, I
understand all that, Prof,” Wagner said with false uncertainty.
“But you gotta understand the state of my life. All that is behind
me now. I don’t have to work anymore and I don’t think I want
to.”

If Thyssen had
been talking to Felicity—and you could bet he had—then he would
have known her belief that the sooner he, Wagner, ceased to take
such profound precautions against grief and arranging his life to
shore up his denial, the better he would be. Now he expected
Thyssen to indulge a plea along those lines.

Instead, the
big man nodded, smiled, and thumped his shoulder. “Fair enough.
It’s your life, buddy. It was just a thought.”

And he started
to walk away.

Shit! Kevin
Wagner thought. He was being outplayed at his own game. Or was it
that Thyssen truly meant everything he said. Just a dim scientist
who, in his essential honesty, didn’t realise how clever he was
being.

“Just a minute,
Prof,” he had to call and Thyssen paused on the tarmac and looked
back. Wagner had to try and shrug off the defeat. “I just need a
bit of time to think about it.”

“Twenty-four
hours enough?”

“Sure.”

“I want to fly
back to the States on Saturday. If you’re interested, you’ll need a
couple of hours briefing before I go.”

“I’ll let you
know.”

So he turned up
for the briefing on Friday, in this vacant shop near the hospital
that had been rented as the temporary headquarters of Project
Earthshaker. This office would be his, if he wanted the job. Brian
would be organising transport and logistics in the other upstairs
room, and downstairs Chrissie was office administrator and Lorna in
charge of PR.

When he learned
all that, he realised Thyssen’s intention of keeping the project in
the family.

“Apparently,
we’ve been superseded,” Brian explained. “The eight fit healthy
young people they picked up in Antarctica make much better subjects
than we do. They haven’t been contaminated by being exposed to
their former lives the way we have. So they become the control
group.”

“So we became
redundant,” Wagner said.

“Yes,” Chrissie
said. “But Harley didn’t want to lose track of us, so he’s given us
all jobs.”

“I didn’t
realise guinea pigs could be promoted,” Lorna smiled.

He hadn’t
troubled to mention that, which meant, to Wagner, that he had been
outplayed after all.

“I want you to
throw a net over the whole project and the idea is that the
security expands with the project, wherever and however necessary,”
Harley explained when he arrived for the briefing. “So you will
always need to be ready to move fast to cover any new
developments.”

“What sort of
equipment and manpower is available?”

“You obtain
whatever you think you need, whenever you think you need it. No
limit. I want a monthly report, but you have full responsibility
for all decisions.”

“And
budget?”

“Joe will
provide whatever funds you need and Chrissie will do the paperwork
and ordering.”

“Okay. It’s a
big ask, you know, Prof. I don’t know the local security scene at
all.”

“Talk to Joe
Solomon. He has his own security, a guy named Barney Touhey with a
nationwide security company and international contacts. He ought to
be a good man for you to get to know.”

“Can we be sure
of him, Prof?”

“I think so.
He’s the guy Joe employed to check up on me. His agents were asking
questions all over Washington.”

Wagner had to
laugh despite himself. “Joe Solomon has been spying on you?”

“That’s right.
I think he found out everything he wanted to know.”

“And you don’t
mind?”

“Never been one
to discourage healthy scepticism. And I don’t have any
secrets.”

It was,
finally, a challenge that could not be ignored.

She was
exhausted in every part of her body. The Orion returned to risk a
second landing in the dark, and Jami abandoned the Erebus project
as impossible to establish before the end of the winter and made a
run for it.

They flew to
Dunedin and left her Orion and Antarctic crew there, and made her
way on domestic flights to the northern hemisphere and finally
Boston which seemed remarkably warm to her.

It was Spring,
coming on Summer, and slowly she began to thaw. She cursed the
Shastri Effect and all who sailed in her. It had taken her to all
the worst places in the world and she shuddered to think of what
bleak rat hole would be next. Had it not been for the heroism of
the Orion pilots, she would have been stuck in Antarctica for six
months. The thought depressed her beyond imagining.

Then Harley
arrived from Washington and they gathered in the basement
headquarters of Project Earthshaker, while Glen amused them for an
hour running his models. He had become very good at it but, like
Jami, he too was becoming convinced that there was nothing more to
be learned this way.

“There is
always more to be learned,” Harley said brightly.

“But none of
the data means anything,” Jami complained. “I froze my butt off
down there and I can tell you it was a complete waste of time. Not
one new scrap of information was gathered from Erebus.”

“I agree,” Glen
said wearily. “There just doesn’t seem to be anything new to find
out here.”

“Well,” Harley
said, eyeing them both malignantly. “If we have all the data, then
we must be able to find the truth. Okay? So… let’s brainstorm?”

“Oh, must we?”
Jami moaned with every weary bone in her body. “I need rest. My
entire physiology cries out for it.”

“I haven’t been
out of this dungeon for more than two days in the past month,” Glen
concurred.

Thyssen thought
about it for fully ten seconds. He looked fresh and bright and
sharp. Life, for him, was just one big vacation. That, at least,
put an idea in Jami’s head.

“I demand a
vacation, or I’ll make a complaint to whoever you complain to about
things like that,” she said as forcefully as she could manage.

“Me,” Harley
grinned. “You complain to me. And Jamila, my heroine—have I ever
denied you anything since the project began?”

“You mean
except freedom?”

“Freedom’s just
another word for not enough work to do,” Harley chuckled. “Okay. A
month in Hawaii, on the project.”

“Oh no. Too
many fucking volcanoes there.”

“Okay. Florida?
Bahamas? Bermuda? Anywhere you like. You take a month and then come
back here and work the models while Glen takes a month, wherever he
likes. Okay?”

Even though it
was perfectly okay, she hated agreeing with him. “What’s the
catch?”

“Brainstorm.
Now. As a final summation before easy times.”

“I hate you
Harley.”

If he looked
pleased with himself, it was only because he won all the arguments,
even when he lost.

“Glen,” he said
now with a wave of his hand. “Give me your wildest explanation.
Doesn’t matter how silly.”

“Harley, what
the hell do you think I’ve been sitting here doing all these
months? Any idea I have, no matter how ridiculous, and I come here
and model it furiously. I’ve tried everything,” Glen said
grimly.

“But have you
sat back and tried to grasp the overall?”

“It’s too big
to grasp that way.”

For Glen, it
probably was, but to her horror, Jami immediately found ideas
coming to mind. “Every so often, the earth changes the tilt of its
axis. Maybe something like that is going on.”

“No,” Glen
said. “I checked with the Geographic Survey. No change in
tilt.”

“Magnetic
field?”

“Done all
that.”

“What about
perturbations in the Earth’s orbit?”

“There are
always perturbations, and the Shastri Effect always causes a small
one. But nothing unusual, and nothing regular.”

“Collisions
with meteors?”

“Done all that.
Anyway, it’s the wrong side.”

Harley’s woolly
eyebrows raised with ponderous foreboding.

“Wrong side?”
he asked, with a profound upward inflection.

Glen gazed at
him bleakly. Jami thought furiously about wrong sides. Neither
dared speak, but Harley’s glare forced words into Glen’s
larynx.

“Umm... You
mean you haven’t noticed that the Shastri eruptions always occur
within an hour of sunset.”

Harley was
aghast. He began whistling and put his hands in his pockets as if
he intended to go for a stroll all over the campus. But he only
went three paces, and then turned back. His voice was barely a
murmur. “You mean we missed something as obvious as that?”

“I’m sure I
pointed it out several times.”

“Glen, you’ve
pointed out ten million bits of data in the last few months. Was it
underlined and asterixed and whatever?”

“Why should it
be? It can’t mean anything.”

Harley advanced
and leaned until his nose was a millimetre from Glen’s. “It has to
mean something.”

Jami thought
about sundown. It was ridiculous. Millions of dollars of state of
the art technology and they had failed to notice something that
would have been obvious to any peasant farmer. Yes, yes, always at
sunset.

Admittedly, it
had been some time other than sunset in whatever place they were in
at the time and you needed to notice that the local times of the
eruptions always started with a one. But because it was impossible
for volcanic eruptions to be related to the time of day, no one had
looked. She even remembered noticing all the ones and thinking
nothing of it herself. She was alive now, and looking at Harley
Thyssen.

“Yes, it must.
But what?”

“Glen said it,”
Harley said and even gave him a thump on the shoulder. “Never
occurred to me because we were looking at it the wrong way. We’ve
been looking into the earth to try and see what’s in there.
Instead, we’ve forgotten to look outward.”

“You do mean
meteors,” Jami said.

“Not at all,”
Harley said, unusually serious now. “Consider the Earth as a
planet, orbiting the sun, rotating. What is sunset?”

“The trailing
edge,” Glen pointed out.

“That’s
right.”

“If it was the
leading edge,” Glen went on, “then we could think about collisions
with whatever might lay in the Earth’s path as it travels around
the sun. But it’s the trailing edge.”

“The most
protected part of the planet,” Jami thought.

“Exactly.”
Harley demanded. “So how come it always occurs at what is
theoretically the least probable time?”

Jami tried to
think. There had to be something.

“The
slipstream,” she said.

“Explain.”

“Consider a
sonic boom. The air is forced above and below the aircraft’s wing
and collides with itself on the trailing side. Suppose we were
hitting unusually intense cosmic rays or something that was divided
and did not go through to the surface. The impact would flow around
the planet, in the magnetic field or troposphere or wherever, and
then all meet up exactly on the other side of the planet and impact
with the other half of itself.”

“Not bad,”
Harley said. “But the older less aero-dynamically sound aircraft
were always destabilised by the build-up of air in front of the
wing before it broke the sound barrier. Similarly, although the
real impact might be behind the earth as it travels in its orbit,
still there would have to be some indication of the leading side.
There must surely be a point of impact at the front initially.”

He was pointing
at her, like trying to move information by means of a cattle prod.
She felt herself clutching furiously, desperate for answers now.
“Maybe it’s because of something gathering at the rear, like an
exhaust. It builds up and then blows.”

“Better. But
Shastri comes from within. The eruptions are outward, not inward.
And with all those satellites up there, someone would be detecting
something.”

“And none of
them are,” Glen said bitterly. “Because I’ve checked the data from
every fucking one of them.”

“So it has to
be in the mantle.”

“Yes,” Jami was
saying. “Some force strikes the leading edge of the planet, affects
the Asthenosphere, the impact flows through the mantle around the
core and meets at the back side and it blasts out through the
nearest available weak spot in the lithosphere.”

“I’m liking
that better,” Harley was saying. “But I still don’t like the idea
of the planet running into something that can affect the mantle but
have no discernible effect on the crust. We have too much detection
stuff out there for that to be possible.”

“So, whatever
it is must already be in the mantle,” Jami realised. “And somehow
accumulates at the back and reaches bursting point, egressing on
the trailing edge.”

“Just like any
conventional rocket,” Harley said.

Glen was
already tapping the keyboard. “Let me run that through all the
existing models.”

“We’re getting
somewhere now,” Harley was saying. “But we still need to figure out
what it is that could affect the mantle this way.”

“How are you on
fluid dynamics?” Jami asked innocently.