The War of Immensities (72 page)

Brian, watching
it happen, could almost have figured out the rest himself.

“And this is
the model you ran?” Glen said grimly. “This is your... your...
Drain-o.”

“Drongo,” Brian
corrected. “It means someone who ain’t as smart as he oughta
be.”

“Yes. That’s
it,” Thyssen said grimly.

“But how did
you know?”

“I knew because
it worked. My early predictions were just guesses and they were all
hopelessly wrong. It wasn’t until after I theorised on Tunguska
that I came up with this and found it got the right answers.”

“But how come,”
Brian asked. “The Shastri Events grew larger and more
frequent?”

“Because,
despite losing potential material, it was still generally growing
larger, travelling shorter orbits, and making a bigger tunnel and
therefore a bigger impact, each time.”

“It’s a great
theory, Harley,” Brian said. “You think it’s true.”

“I’m sure it
isn’t,” Thyssen said. “It’s just the best anyone can come up with,
given the enormous immaturity of our present knowledge. In a few
thousand years, maybe, someone will figure out the right answer.
Right now, this is the best we can do.”

Glen looked
forlorn. “I hoped there’d be more. You realise I have to try and
explain this to the President.”

“You just tell
Grayson I sent you,” Thyssen grinned.

“You yelled at
him, Harley. The President of the United States. Right there in the
Oval Office, you yelled at him. They say he still hasn’t fully
recovered from it.”

“I wouldn’t
like it if everyone loved me,” Thyssen grinned.

Katsumi Sukurai
was the most wanted man in Japan. In the newspapers and public
places, his picture smiled at the population, teasing them with his
wry grin, challenging them to spot him. He was a young man, a
student of accounting, unemployed, the rest of his family was
already in Brazil, and Katsumi had escaped from them three times
already, and now had gone into smoke. And time was running out.

The final day
had dawned and he was not to hand. By midnight, he needed to be on
a plane and inside the circle before the link occurred or else
everything was wasted.

Kevin Wagner
spent most of his time pacing the floor, roaring at the latest
group of searchers as they came in, policeman, guardsman, soldiers,
volunteers, whoever they were they met with Wagner’s rage.

“Fifteen
thousand eight hundred and twenty-two people and we found them all
and moved them all. Except this one elusive bastard.”

“And the old
man in the temple,” Tamiko said sweetly.

“He said he
would die and he’ll die.”

What bothered
Wagner most was that, as he said it, he fingered the imaginary butt
of the pistol he wasn’t wearing on his hip. Had it really come to
this?

Tamiko saw the
gesture and frowned at it, because she saw everything he did and
frowned at a good deal of it. She was in love with him, Wagner
knew, and very efficient and decorative besides. She was completely
devoted to his needs.

Wagner realised
in that moment that, if it came to that, he found himself unwilling
to commit murder to satisfy Harley’s needs, Tamiko most certainly
would oblige.

He made a
fierce effort to calm himself.

“Let’s think
about it.”

“You have done
nothing other than think about it, for weeks,” Tamiko said. “You
must rest now. What is one man, more or less?”

“You don’t
understand. It’s all of them or the whole thing is wasted.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know
why. That’s just the way it is. Bring me the file.”

“You already
have the file. That’s it there.”

“Oh.”

He’d been
reading it not an hour before. “Three times we had him and three
times he vanished. How? And why?”

“Is why
important? Maybe he just doesn’t want to go.”

“His family has
gone. All his friends have gone. Why stay?”

“Maybe he sees
it as a challenge.”

“Challenge?”

“Yes. It’s
become a game. Read the file. Each time the escaped, he didn’t go
anywhere.”

Wagner did not
want to read the bloody file again. “Explain what you mean?”

Tamiko shrugged
her beautiful shoulders and smiled benignly.

“Okay. Please
consider. First time, his is in airport, ready to board plane. Then
he disappears.”

“True.”

“He hid in a
baggage locker for two days. Then he went to a party at some
friend’s place.”

“We’ve got all
those places covered.”

“But don’t you
see. He didn’t really try to escape or else he’d have stayed away
from the party. But he was willing to spend what must have been two
very uncomfortable days in a baggage locker to do so.”

“Must have been
a hell of a party.”

“It was an
ordinary party.”

“So?”

“Forget the
party. Think about the locker.”

“I don’t
understand how a man can do something like that.”

“It was a
reasonably large locker and he is a very small man.”

“Okay. I don’t
see what it proves.”

Tamiko was
pacing, warming to the task. Wagner watched her. Maybe they should
just have sex and forget it.

“Next time, he
escapes from police during transfer from police station to
here.”

“He hid in the
trunk of the police car.”

“That’s right.
They again search far and wide but he is right under their noses.
Still in the car that he was supposed to have escaped from.”

“Go on.”

“He slips away
later, and goes home to his family and is picked up with them.
Brought here again, but then vanishes.”

Wagner thought
about it. He was beginning to get the point.

“Go on.”

“He escapes
from here. This place is on top of a hill and heavily guarded.
There is no way to escape from here. Yet he does...”

“Or did
he?”

“Precisely.”

“You mean he’s
been here...”

“Yesterday, the
cook is very angry. He accuses us girls of stealing from his
kitchen. As if we would...”

Wagner smiled,
picking up the telephone. “Captain. I want two dozen men here
immediately with jemmies and picks and saws.”

He winked at
Tamiko while he listened to the usual protests concerning the
shortage of available men.

“We’re going to
demolish this house. He is hiding here somewhere.”

In a room
opposite the Project Earthshaker Control Room, as it had become
called, Thyssen slept for fifteen hours and when he awoke the time
for the link was drawing near. By then the control room was flooded
with people, many of whom Thyssen recognised as former students,
all of whom he treated that way. Four major scientists and three
military officers, a senator and a number of bureaucratic figures,
all bowed to Thyssen’s authority with varying degrees of
reluctance, as he took them through the procedure before them.

In fact the man
in charge of the control room was not Glen Palenski, but a rather
dour man named Cornelius, whom Joe Solomon would have immediately
recognised. He was a long thin man, bald and white haired, bent in
the middle and with a shuffling gait. But despite that there was an
elegance about him, and his voice seemed to assume that he would
always be obeyed instantly.

He was
appointed to command of the project directly by the President, but
his actual credentials remained dubious. Certainly, he shut up and
listened whenever Thyssen spoke, and if there was doubt, confirmed
orders with a slight jerk of his head and silenced protests with a
fractional lowering of his eyebrows.

Brian watched
all this with growing concern, but that he realised was possibly
only because he knew the link was coming on.

“That dude is
going to get rid of you, Harley, as soon as he reckons he’s got
everything he needs from you.”

“Yeah, I know.
But they’re listening to me now. I can’t ask more than that.”

“Do you know
who he is?”

“Nobody knows
who he is.”

It was time for
Brian to be elsewhere. A good testing time. He proposed to
Cornelius that he ought to be given a jet and flown to the focal
point since that was where he was going anyway. When Brian expected
his request to be denied, Cornelius emphatically agreed. But he was
reluctant to leave Harley alone here.

“If they were
going to dump me, they would have as soon as I gave them Drongo,”
Harley assessed.

“Maybe they
don’t trust you still, Harley. Maybe they think you gave them the
wrong data.”

“It doesn’t
matter, Brian,” Harley said. “It’s their problem to get it right
from now on. It’s possible. I wanted no more than this.”

On the huge
global board, the course of the others was continually plotted.
Andromeda’s pilgrims would turn west when the link came and they
were excellently positioned for it, for before them in that
direction was a broad lightly forested plain. A problem in The
Congo Republic was the many tributaries of the Congo which had
generally kept them to the road—now they would leave it for a time
but calculations suggested that they would be able to reach another
road before they encountered the next river.

Meanwhile, a
vast flood of Americans was flowing into Brazil from Bakersfield,
as the Air Force stepped up it operations. Those who could not
leave immediately or did not wish to had generally moved northward
to Fresno for their journey would be another convoy, heading almost
directly south.

Of greater
concern were the millions in Indonesia, where all available boats
were being provided, under the direction of the US and Indonesia
navies. The shortest route to the focal point for them was the
south polar one, which was completely impracticable, but the plan
was to transport all those that reached the south coast of Sulawesi
under their own steam across the Timor Sea to the north coast of
Western Australia where camps could be set up in more accessible
circumstances than in their own ruined country.

Iran had even
greater problems, where little assistance could be offered the
pilgrims and their path lay due west, toward Iraq, and Turkey,
where they would be most unwelcome, and therefore the less distance
they were able to cover, the better. Since their movement would be
primarily on foot over rugged mountain terrain, it could be
reasonably hoped that they could care for themselves. Information
from the region remained slight, but although all three countries
had made troop movements to control the pilgrimage, there had been
no word of massacres at this stage.

In Russia, the
Buryats would do whatever they usually did, for still there was no
information and in fact denial of their existence.

The base in
Brazil presented its own problems, were a vast tent city was
growing up on a huge plain in the middle of nowhere. There were two
great Ranchos that they had taken over and one of these possessed a
reasonable airstrip, good enough for C-130s but not for jets. The
nearest International Airport was Brasilia, over a thousand
kilometres away and the pilgrims from America and elsewhere were
transferred into smaller aircraft there to complete the trip. Fuel
was a continual problem, as was food although there was abundant
water, but the promise of a cure for their condition allowed the
pilgrims to endure the temporary hardship with a minimum of
complaint. The difficulty was getting enough of them to the focal
point in time.

But most of the
agitation surrounded The Yellow Pimpernel, who had been discovered
resident under the floorboards of the House of the Golden Carp with
only hours to spare. Without him, the base camp in Brazil would
have been more than a thousand kilometres from the focal point and
outside the Zone and Harley’s plan would have completely
unravelled. Tranquillised and strapped down to a stretcher, the
little man was rushed to the airport and into the air. Time was by
then so short that, although east was the shortest route to Brazil,
they flew west and therefore into the circle formed by the
extremities of the linkage, and therefore secured Harley’s
predicted location.

“Are you sure
you got them all?” Harley asked Wagner by radio.

“Yes. There was
an old man who said he would die and he died—we don’t know how. So
there’s just me and Katsumi and we passed over Lake Baykal a few
minutes ago. So we’re inside the circle.”

“Thanks
Kevin.”

“No problem,
Harley.”

Then the link
occurred. At first it seemed as expected, but within half an hour,
a message came through by telephone to one of the control room
silent numbers.

“Professor
Thyssen, there’s a call for you... I think.”

“You
think?”

“The line is
terrible and he’s very hard to understand.”

Thyssen hurried
over to the girl who had taken the call and spoke into the
receiver.

“Thyssen.”

“Ah, Professor.
It is Fabrini.”

“Yes. What is
it?”

“They all want
to go. They want to pick up and leave here.”

The line was
bad and Fabrini’s state of agitation didn’t help, but Thyssen did
not need to ask him to repeat this message, he simply turned and
considered the board.

“Which way,
Fabrini. Which way are they going?”

He spoke every
word individually and clearly and a silence had fallen upon the
room.

“West. They
want to go west. At least, this is what I think. You want a compass
bearing?”

“If you can do
it.”

“I think,
maybe, 240 degree. Maybe more. Is west by south west, I think.”

“Shit,” Thyssen
said.

He stood for a
time with his hand over the mouthpiece and his head bowed, deep in
thought. Even so, those near him could hear Fabrini chattering. The
trance broke after fifteen almost unendurable seconds. Thyssen hit
the conference phone button to allow everyone in the room to
hear.