The War of Immensities (71 page)

He watched
Brian Carrick become a separate dot from his Italian pilgrims in
Rio—presumably having his usual difficulty with Brazilian
Immigration as he did with all officialdom—and saw him move at such
a rate that he had to be flying, and land in Washington and then
tracked him on a city grid map right to this very building so he
knew who his visitor was before he entered.

“Welcome to
Harleyworld,” he said.

Brian, who
showed every sign of having been physically shoved into the room,
stood with his mouth open for some time. It crossed Thyssen’s mind
that most probably, in that instant, Brian’s worst suspicions about
the leader of Project Earthshaker were confirmed. Perhaps that was
why they troubled to drag him across two continents to get him
here.

“What’s fuckin’
goin’ on, Harley?”

“Come here and
I’ll show you.”

The guileless
Brian Carrick slowly made his way through the rows of computers and
sat at the terminal beside Thyssen. Feeling not unlike the villain
in a James Bond movie, Thyssen quietly explained everything Brian
saw.

“So we’re
prisoners here?” he said at the end of it.

“Shouldn’t
bother you, Brian. I understand it’s almost your natural
state.”

“The sort of
prisons I frequent don’t look like this.”

“No,” Thyssen
said. “What you see is a wonderful, fantastic, glorious, ingenious,
state-of-the-art technological bribe.”

“They bribed
you with this?”

“I’m Eve and
everything you see is the apple.”

“Where’s the
snake?”

“The snake is
my own self-created Frankensteinian monster, Glen Palenski.”

“I never knew
him.”

“Neither did
I,” Thyssen said ruefully.

Brian looked
around, shaking his head in bewilderment. “Now, you wouldn’t
bullshit me, would you Harley?”

“I bullshit
thee not. All I have to do is press the right buttons and show them
how I make my predictions and we’ll both be free to walk out of
here.”

“Simple as
that?”

“Simple as
that. Isn’t that right Glen?” he called over his shoulder.

There was no
reply.

“Glen said,
simple as that,” Thyssen smiled.

“Yeah. I heard
him.”

“Sadly, that’s
all it will take.”

“So why don’t
you do it.”

It seemed like
a silly question, until Thyssen took a moment to think about it.
Maybe they chosen wisely indeed, sending Brian Carrick for him to
talk to.

“I think you
just fulfilled your purpose, Brian.”

“You mean, they
actually imagine I might talk you into it?”

“That’s right.
After five humanless days, maybe anyone could talk me into
anything.”

“So why don’t
you do it, and we can get out of here and start doing something
useful.”

Again, Thyssen
thought about it. Brian was such a persistent fellow.

“I don’t know,
Brian. Maybe I’m just pig-headed.”

“You’re that
all right. Look, Harley. Time is running out. Give them what they
want. What harm can it do at this stage?”

“I don’t know.
But I just can’t get it out of my head that if I give them what
they want, these bastards will take it away from us and make it top
secret and then start figuring out how to turn it into a
weapon.”

“Yeah. They’ll
do that for sure.”

“And I just
don’t like losing.”

“I know how you
feel. But I think they got you fucked, mate.”

“I really don’t
want to admit that.”

“We gotta have
the accurate prediction. We need it now. Where else are you going
to find a system that you can do it on except this one?”

“Are you sure
you’re still on our side, Brian?”

“I’m on our
side. It’s you who’s loyalties are all fucked up. We’ve done
everything we did in spite of these people, regardless of how much
they lied and cheated and fiddled and regardless of how much they
knew. Now, you can use them to get what you want. So use them.”

“I feel too
ornery to do that.”

“Then be
ornery. Let’s make them an offer.”

Thyssen looked
at him in puzzlement. “You lost me. I’ve only had machines to talk
to for five days. Human beings are much harder.”

“Since we seem
to have no choice but to give them what they want, so we trade. For
something we want.”

“They don’t
have anything we want.”

“They must have
something we want.”

Negotiators !
Was she sick of them? Almost every day, a committee of some kind
came to speak with the infamous Lorna Simmons. They had all sorts
of origins, and were led by all sorts of notables—congressmen,
senators, movie stars, religious groups, business people, media
anchors, mysterious people from the White House—but all of them
contained negotiators, siege-breakers from the law enforcement
agencies. And it was always the negotiators who did the talking,
and what they tried to talk her into was submission.

Which wasn’t
easy, because there wasn’t anything to submit to. They wanted her
to say that the sleepers did not exist, that she or Harley or
someone had used psychological techniques to cause these people to
think they wanted to go walkabout, that there was no such thing as
linkage of minds. That Harley Thyssen was a fake and Project
Earthshaker was a confidence trick.

“For what
purpose?” she demanded.

“You tell us,
Miss Simmons.”

They wanted to
know by what right she spoke of the people of the affected region.
She was obliged to hold a popular election and the people, who knew
she was the answer to their problems, voted her their
representative with a majority of over eighty percent.

“Are you
considering running for president?”

“How can I? I’m
not a bloody American.”

“President of
New Zealand then?”

“New Zealand
doesn’t have a President.”

“But just what
do you want, Miss Simmons?”

So many times
had she explained. On the morning of the eleventh, these people
would set off on their journey. The National Guard and the FBI had
them hemmed in and they will have nowhere to go. There would be
chaos.

“Are you
threatening violence, Miss Simmons?”

It didn’t help
that previously they had gone north, for absolutely no reason
whatsoever. This time they would go south, for the same nonexistent
reason.

“Why are they
going south?”

“Because
Professor Thyssen arranged it that way.”

“Oh yes,
Professor Thyssen.”

Again and
again, she had tried to get through to them.

“He has
arranged the neutral ground in Brazil by moving the Japanese
sleepers there. Those people who are in the zone on the 13th will
be cured.”

“Cured from
what?”

“The Shastri
Effect.”

“But, Miss
Simmons. Independent medical examiners have agreed unanimously that
there is no such condition as the Shastri Effect.”

“The condition
only occurs at the time of the linkage.”

“Miss Simmons,
surely it is obvious, even to you, that such conditions do not and
cannot exist.”

Around and
around they went and it was endless. And then, on the morning of
the 6th, without warning, President Grayson appeared on
television.

He admitted the
existence of the Shastri Effect.

He admitted the
validity of Project Earthshaker.

He admitted
that Professor Thyssen had been maligned in the media.

He agreed to
the transportation of the Bakersfield pilgrims to Brazil.

Anyone who
wanted to go could do so. The US Air Force would be providing
aircraft, as of that very morning. Lorna watched in awe. Somehow,
someway, Harley had talked them into it. She could only wonder what
it had cost him in return.

That morning,
there were scenes of jubilation in Bakersfield and Fresno and all
points in between. Lorna was their hero, although she could not
exactly see what she had done. All she wanted was to find one of
those bloody negotiators and let them ask their cynical questions
again. But they were nowhere to be seen.

“So,” Thyssen
said. “Drongo.”

Brian put up
his fists pugilistically. “You talkin’ to me, buddy?”

Because their
bar-room humour went nowhere with Glen and his team, they shrugged
at each other. Every seat in the control room had been filled, and
the technicians were poised to transfer Thyssen’s wisdom into their
respective systems.

Thyssen
continued. “It begins with an assumption. An object formed in the
intense heat of the big bang. It’s tiny—no bigger than just a few
atoms, maybe. Maybe much smaller than that. But it’s dense, very,
very dense. The elementary particles of which it’s made are
compressed so close together that if you could catch it you could
weigh it on a butcher’s scale. It might weigh a kilogram, probably
less. And it travels the universe for 15 million million years or
however long you reckon it is since the beginning of time.”

“I remember
this lecture,” Glen said with groan. “It was the one you always
gave new students.”

“Oh no. This
one I’m making up on the spot. It just sounds similar.”

“Well how about
cutting to the chase.”

“No point
telling a story if you don’t tell it all. I’m just reminding you
Glen, of what I taught you but you forgot.”

“How do you
know I forgot?”

“Because if you
hadn’t, you’d have figured this out for yourself.”

Glen bowed his
head and listened with a humble expression. Brian, who thought it
all fascinating, was only too well aware that he was hearing the
first astrophysics lecture of his life, and from its greatest
living exponent, even if he was really a Vulcanologist.

“So it travels
throughout the vacuum of space, picks up a few stray particles here
and there and absorbs them, maybe doubles in size but increases
tenfold or more in weight, until, on the morning of June 30, 1908,
it finally hits something—the atmosphere above Tunguska. Food! It
is instantly insatiable and begins to devour. As it passes through
the atmosphere, it sets off a chain reaction that flattens the
surrounding forest and then ploughs into the earth and drops right
through to the core. It passes through the centre, but it is
captured and slowed by the earth’s gravitational pull, loses
momentum, and before it can escape the core, it’s turned and goes
into orbit.”

“I did all
this,” Glen said. “I modelled it, like you said.”

But it was
Thyssen who pressed the keyboard and brought the images up on the
screen.

“Yeah, and your
model was right.”

“So what are
you calling this... this object? Mini black hole? Antimatter?
What?”

“I call it
death. Doesn’t matter what it is, or how theoretically possible and
impossible it might be, it exists. Maybe it’s made from some kind
of elementary particle we haven’t discovered yet. There’s bound to
be more. And this thing is primal. It could only have been created
in the first millionth of a second or so of the universe, and never
again. It doesn’t matter what we call it. The Palenski Particle if
you like. But there it is.”

Brian could
watch it, fascinated. The earth was on screen in cross-section, the
core, the mantle, the crust each delineated, and with it the object
traced out it course at blinding speed, each orbit about the centre
a different course to that before.

“From there,
all I needed to do was slip in the recent Shastri events and we had
the whole course of its life plotted.”

“I did all
that. So what?”

“What you
forgot was the immense speed at which this thing travelled, and the
fact that it was growing in size all the time. It burrowed through
the matter in the core, gulping it in, constantly accumulating, and
as it gained size and lost momentum, its orbit was always decaying
toward the centre of the earth, where, eventually, it would come to
rest. But not yet. Something else happened.”

Thyssen ran up
a new model, one that Glen plainly had not seen before if the way
his eyebrows raised was any guide. The model showed the singularity
closer, in animation, creating a brief tunnel through the core that
the molten rock gradually filled behind it. And as it orbited, it
turned back on itself.

“Once it
attained a certain size, and its orbit a certain configuration, it
went around so fast and so tightly that the tunnel of matter it had
created in its wake had not had time to heal yet. And so, suddenly,
it hit a vacuum of its own creation as it crossed its own prior
course—and the effect would be shattering. Material crushed to
elementary particles at the fringe would be blasted off by the
impact as it hit the other side, and in an instant those particles,
mostly fermions, would radiate outward to the surface of the earth.
And that was the Shastri Effect. Out there, on the surface, were
living intelligences, us, with brains full of bosons, and when the
added fermions hit, those bosons would immediately attack the
onslaught. At the point where the particles reached the surface,
any available bosons would align in defence and strike back. And
that created the mind link.”

“You can’t
prove any of this.”

“If you’ve got
a better explanation—that works as well as mine—I’m
interested.”

Glen’s dark
eyes glowed. Thyssen continued with cool certainty.

“Following on
the heels of the particle burst would be a shock-wave—arriving
thirty-three hours later at the point directly ahead of the impact.
But, because of the rotation of the earth, that impact would always
be at the trailing edge of the planet at the time. Once it hit the
surface, it would dissipate over an increasingly wider area,
pouring in more fermions creating more boson defences, creating new
sleepers. And setting off any volcanoes that happened to be in the
vicinity.”