The War of Immensities (44 page)

“Get real?
Terra don’t swallow black holes. Black holes gulp galaxies.”

“A mini black
hole.”

“Singularity.
Oh yeah, I get it. Whacko idea.”

“Eating the
earth out from the middle, like a worm in an apple.”

“Heard it
before, Babe. Asimov. Sci Fi. That’s his gospel.”

“If it did
exist, and it was there, how would we know?”

“By noticing
our non-existence.”

“Before that.
Early stages.”

“X-ray. Wheel
the whole planet into radiology and zap her. It’d show as long
bright streaks with no apparent energy source.”

“Does such
technology exist?”

“No way, Babe.
Getoutahere!”

“Could it be
made to exist?”

“You bet. Fifty
satellites spaced evenly, shooting X-rays at each other. Cat scan
the whole planet. Can have it hot to trot in the millennium after
next.”

“How about next
week?”

“I got
appointments next week.”

“Can you do it
for me, Val?”

“Got a hundred
million Georgie Porgies and I’ll see what I can do. Hey Babe,
you’re talking post-Slartibartfast.”

“We need a way
of proving it’s there, and then a way of tracking it.”

“You’re talkin’
Earthshaker, Babe. You’re talkin’ Thyssen.”

“It’s just one
theory.”

“No way. Big
Harls won’t go for shit like that, Babe.”

“He’s mellowed
out. It was his idea.”

“He knows it
ain’t so.”

“But it is the
best he’s been able to come up with.”

“Make the
theory fit the data, huh?”

“Find it for
me, Val.”

“Hey Babe, for
you, anything. These guys on your tail—they wear white coats?”

“First time
you’ve ever been short of a plan, Val.”

“Can’t be
bigger than microbe size or the planet would have already
collapsed, Babe. Travelling at maybe half light speed. In 260
billion cubic miles of hot stuff. Hey Babe, that’s the ittiest
needle in the gargatuanest haystack.”

“There’s got to
be a way.”

“Drill a hole
to China and wait a million years for it to pass by.”

“Well that’s
something.”

“Build a moon
sized power station and shoot an X-ray bullet to a catcher on the
other side.”

“Go on.”

“Wait through a
thousand years of evolution until we can understand what it really
is.”

“Meaning?”

“I know, and
Big Man Harley knows, and you know if you use your greystuff—that
there ain’t nothin’ of the kind down there. Black holes are just a
best guess based on limited knowledge based on mathematics that are
meaningless.”

“God dammit,
Val. Don’t give up on me.”

“Babe, I can
die now. I’ve had my last idea.”

The continual
intrusiveness of the media had obliged the Campbell family to take
extreme defensive precautions. It was just too difficult to get in
and out of the house, even though Kevin had provided a roster of
security guards who stood permanently at the front and rear doors.
Wendell had taken to sleeping at his surgery, Gavin and Melissa
were both staying with friends and Megan had been sent on an
unscheduled holiday at Granny’s.

Eventually,
Felicity had offered to go elsewhere but her family saw their
absence as proof of their determination to stand behind her—as
contradictory as that sounded—and anyway, the officials pointed out
that there was a legal requirement that a person under house arrest
remain in their normal place of residence.

By turns, one
of her brood would stay in the house with her, prepared to run the
gauntlet of the microphones and lens to gain access to their normal
lives. She wanted, anyway, to be where she could be easily
contacted, especially as the time of the linkage drew nearer.

To her
surprise, at first, she found she was free to maintain
communication with the others of Project Earthshaker. It became
less of a surprise when Brian had pointed out that it was probably
because her telephone was tapped.

“I don’t care.
I don’t have any secrets,” she told him. But it still made her
flesh crawl, every time she picked up the receiver.

All of their
cell phones seemed to be off the air, but after a while, she began
to open lines of communication. She needed something to do
anyway—there was little hope of making arrangements to see patients
when they had that mob of jackals at the front gate to fight their
way through.

Chrissie had
been confined to the convent in Italy, where she spent her time in
prayer. There was a continual problem of both reporters and
devotees jumping the convent wall and invading the grounds, but the
chapel door was kept locked and the nuns brought her food and
comfort through the secret passages that such places contained as a
matter of course. She sounded well and happy and naturally very
relaxed, even though she expressed genuine anxiety concerning how
the pilgrims would manage without her.

“They’ve done
it before,” Felicity assured her. “They can probably manage all
right by themselves.”

She didn’t want
to think of where they might go, without Thyssen rigging the focal
point. She had no idea whether the people who had taken charge knew
about that or not—she had tried explaining it to every official she
had spoken to but none seemed to grasp the idea.

The riots that
followed the last minute cancellation of Andromeda’s London concert
had led her to the singer, who was confined to a posh hotel in
Mayfair. She rang and left her number and, a day later, Andromeda
called back. She was still very distressed—the riots had led to
deaths and many injuries and she was condemned by the establishment
as a danger to society.

“The same
people said the same thing of the Beatles, Andromeda,” Felicity
assured her. Andromeda had called again several times, when she
needed a sane voice to talk to. Her hotel remained picketed by
thousands of her fans and there was on-going trouble.

Somehow too,
her colour had made it a racial issue and there had been other
riots in Memphis, Cape Town and other places in her support. She
might have been the first political prisoner in history that the
human rights movement wished to liberate from a luxury hotel.

With Brian,
contact was almost daily until it suddenly stopped, but she knew
why. He had been staying in a pub in Melbourne and trying to
arrange for a lawyer to set a case in motion for the custody of his
children but no one would help. A homeless man with a history of
violence and criminal acts, not long before released from a mental
institution, involved with undesirables and foreign radical fringe
groups—there really wasn’t any hope. It was amazing how these
things could be described.

In the end he
made the news as far away as New Zealand when he took the media on,
hospitalising two reporters and a cameraman. Under arrest in
Melbourne, he made his one permitted telephone call to Felicity.
“You can’t imagine how much better I feel,” Brian laughed.

Felicity could.
In the past month there had been many times when she might have
envied a violent nature. “You must have done wonders for your
custody case, Brian.”

“It was
hopeless anyway. And since the media invented the stories about my
violent nature, I decided to make it a wish fulfilling
prophecy.”

“Do you have a
history of violence?”

“Snotted one or
two blokes in pubs and on the footy field. Of course, the way they
say it, you’d reckon I’d been laying into Judy every night, but
I’ve never hit anyone that didn’t have a fair chance of fighting
back on equal terms.”

“Should I try
and get on to Joe, Brian?”

“You won’t be
able to. He’s dropped out of sight.”

“Yes. I know.
But someone from his office might be able to help.”

“No. I got
lawyers if I need them. Anyhow, it ain’t so bad here. The way
things were out there, a bloke’s better off in the slot.”

“I’d better go.
I suppose they’ll be annoyed if they realise you’ve made a long
distance call.”

“Fuck ‘em.”

“Take care of
yourself, Brian. Remember the next link is due on the evening of
the 29th.”

“Yeah. The
coppers here understand that and they know what to expect. She’ll
be right.”

Joe had dropped
out of sight. Kevin too. Rumour had it he was building a private
army on some secret base somewhere. Jami had vanished completely
but you could bet she was making her way to wherever the next
prediction suggested somehow. The surprise was one evening when
Lorna rang.

“I wish they’d
let the media get near me,” she protested. “I’m comfortable but
under close guard. They won’t let me out at all.”

“Have you seen
Thyssen?”

“No. But I know
they’ve got him here in this hotel somewhere. You know they changed
his prediction. He said it would be the middle of Honshu but
they’ve moved it...”

The call was
immediately cut off.

Felicity sat
for a long time with her arms locked between her knees and her head
down. The location of the next eruption had been announced a week
ago and the public was assured that all the affected populations
had been moved to safer ground. They had said it would occur in the
Pacific Ocean, at the northern extremity of the Marianas Trench, a
thousand kilometres south of Japan. In the region there were just a
few small islands that had been evacuated. But that wasn’t Harley’s
prediction apparently.

She felt ill.
Then her head cleared and she knew what she had to do. She found an
atlas in Gavin’s room and quickly looked it up, got her geography
straight and rehearsed the names.

Then she walked
straight out of the house, signalling the security man to follow
and strode down the driveway to where the media folk, caught
completely off guard, dived for their cameras and tape recorders.
She stood patiently while they gathered before her, the guard
thrusting them back a pace. They babbled a thousand questions but
she said nothing, raising her hands above her head in a gesture
demanding silence.

Finally they
fell silent and allowed her to speak. “The location of the next
eruption is not Professor Thyssen’s prediction. Apparently, he
placed the event a thousand kilometres from the one officially
released. It will be right in the middle of Honshu—the main island
of Japan.” As their questions assailed her, she turned on her heel
and walked back into the house.

Still, she was
surprised to see herself dominating the images that made up the
television news that evening. She stood tall and proud, her hand
pushing at her windswept hair, once more speaking the gospel
according to Harley Thyssen. Once more she had found herself coming
down on his side. Her loyalty, she suspected by then, was almost an
obsession.

“How on earth
could you do that?” Wendell demanded of her when he saw his wife’s
picture dominating the front pages of the newspapers. He was
speaking by phone from his surgery, of course. “What in the name of
all that is holy do you owe this man?”

“I owe him
nothing. But he’s been right every time. My loyalty is to truth,
Wendell.”

“You can’t know
this is truth. You can’t know he’s right.”

“If he ever
fails me, Wennie, I’ll agree with you. But he hasn’t yet. They
suppressed that information, Wen. If he’s right, thousands of lives
will be lost that could have been saved if they’d listened to
him.”

“Some of the
world’s top geophysicists dispute his ideas. It is to these
eminences that you are according error. Certainty cannot be
possible?”

She had seen
it. Every current affairs program had offered its experts
discussing the controversy. The sensible, eloquent scientists were
all the ones that disagreed with Harley—his supporters, who
received far less time and were always placed between the opinions
of the sages, all looked like ratbags and spoke poorly. If it
hadn’t happened every time, she might have doubted it herself. But
she knew a PR job when she saw one.

That every
media outlet used the same format and images and style of expert
was the clue. “Professor Thyssen seeks to sensationalise his
prediction and has chosen a location designed to draw the biggest
media impact,” they said. How likely was it that four different
scientists from four different countries would say precisely
that?

“I’m sorry,
Wen. If he is right and I had not spoken up, I’d never have been
able to live with myself. I had to do it.”

“If I might
venture to say so, your sense of obligation seems seriously
misplaced. As I understand it, your project has been
discontinued.”

“Sadly, it
isn’t.”

“It becomes
increasingly difficult to proceed.”

“Please, Wen,
don’t say that.”

“So… my threats
and protestations are to no avail, hmm?”

“I’m afraid
not.”

After a long
pause, Wendell said softly. “Well, such being the case, best I
swallow my pride and displace my jealousy and show my heroic but
foolish wife some absolute blind loyalty, as a good husband
should.”

“Are you
jealous of Thyssen, Wennie?”

“I despise him
with every microbe in my body. I’m so green I’m surprised that some
horticulturalist hasn’t potted me.”

“You don’t need
to worry about that.”

“Still, I
perceive my rightful action is to come home this evening and show
some family solidarity.”

“I don’t give a
damn about solidarity, Wen. But I’d love to see you.”

At some time
she was unaware of, a man came and knelt beside her. He knelt too
close, and slowly she emerged from her transcendental state to
glance toward him nervously. The air of tension he had brought with
him was palpable.

“Come with me,
Sister,” Fabrini said softly. “You are needed.”

“There is
nothing I can do that God has not already decided,” she replied
serenely.