The War of Immensities (10 page)

“We’ve had to
strap him down,” Turley was saying.

“Yes. He’s
obviously very agitated,” Felicity said. She didn’t need to read
any monitors or charts to see that. Kevin Wagner shook and squirmed
those parts of his body still capable of it.

“Poor man,”
Barbara Crane was saying. “He’s lost everything.”

Felicity
frowned. “And no one has claimed him?”

“We even had
the Minister for Foreign Affairs involved for a little while,
stirring up action in the States,” Barbara Crane said methodically.
“But so far, we haven’t been able to turn up anyone who wants to
take responsibility for him. He was an only child, both parents
dead, and his wife’s family had their own bereavements to contend
with. Three lovely little children, apparently, all gone.”

“Surely his
wife’s family has some responsibility...” Felicity murmured.

“I get the
impression they didn’t like our Kevin much,” Barbara said. “I
gather he was a bit of an adventurer and away from home a lot.”

“What sort of
adventurer?”

“Well, I
understand he was selling diving and salvage equipment...”

“What about his
employer?”

“He’d left his
job to come here.”

“So we’re stuck
with him.”

“For the
moment. Anyway, he seemed happy here, until this started
yesterday.”

“Yes,” Felicity
said. “But under the circumstances, an extensive traumatic reaction
to his tragedy and his condition is to be expected.”

“Agreed,” Dr
Turley said, and looked apologetically. “I’m sorry to have bothered
you.”

“Oh no, Dr
Turley,” Felicity smiled. “You did the right thing. But I can’t
offer any suggestions that you haven’t already tried. Nevertheless,
I am interested. Do let me know if his condition changes.”

The sign in the
foyer of The Golden Dolphin declared that Andromeda Starlight’s
performances were cancelled due to illness.

“I guess she
just ain’t recovered from that volcano that got her,” Joel Tierney
explained to the management. It was true in as many ways as it was
a lie. He kept her in her room where she sometimes thrashed so
violently that he feared she was suffering an OD. When he thought
about hospitals, he thought about cops. Joel sat at the bedside
mostly, sweating as much as she did.

First they took
his battery away, but that only meant he tried to roll himself away
by hand, which he was just simply not able to do at that stage of
his convalescence. He didn’t make it much further than out into the
corridor.

“Joe, where the
hell do you think you can go?” the nurse asked in exasperation.

“I can’t stay,”
he said. “I have to go.”

When they took
away the wheelchair as well, still he tried to get out of bed, and
presumably make his escape by rolling on the floor. In the end,
even Joe agreed that it might be for the best if they sedated
him.

The drive back
was a nightmare. Lorna fought her way forward, against nausea and
her every instinct insisting she turn the car around and go they
other way. But they had been the other way and there was only the
ocean. Now her wilfulness alone forced her onward.

“Please turn
around,” Chrissie had wept beside her. “Please go back the other
way.”

But Lorna
continued east, against every palpable sensation, every imaginable
omen, even a mortal dread, determined to make it to the airport. It
was only an hour’s drive and she was sure she could do it, but the
hour went on and on and Lorna leaned into the forces against her as
if they were a stiff wind, maintaining a white-knuckled grip on the
wheel.

“Not too much
further now,” Lorna continually told Chrissie, or perhaps herself,
again and again, through gritted teeth. Chrissie by then had given
into it and curled on the seat beside her, sobbing silently. It was
so cruel, to torture her best friend this way, but there was no
other alternative. They had to reach the airport—then it would be
fine.

They had been
friends for only a year but it seemed like forever. She and
Chrissie met at a ski lodge below the Remarkables in the South
Island. Lorna was born in New Zealand shortly after her father
arrived from Limerick—an engineer who came to work on a
hydro-electric scheme. But he had been invalided in an industrial
accident when she was fourteen and retired with mum to Norfolk
Island.

Lorna had never
really worked out whether she was Irish or a Kiwi—certainly her red
hair, freckled complexion, accent and determined preference for
green clothing, made her seem the former; in fact she had never
been to Ireland.

But if she
thought she was of confused origins, it was nothing compared to
Chrissie who, apparently, had first appeared on Planet Earth in an
orphanage in Lyon. Nothing was known of her parentage except that
they were probably Vietnamese refugees. She was called Christine
because a crucifix was her only worldly good, and Rice because that
was all they could get her to eat at first.

Chrissie’s
aptitude for languages got her through and spoke several fluently.
French, English, Italian, several Germanic variants and Old French
but oddly—perhaps because she had never experienced nor felt her
Asian origins—she had never bothered with oriental languages. She
did not know a single word of Vietnamese.

Chrissie had
come to New Zealand for a ski-ing holiday and met John Burton and
decided to stay. She soon got a job with a Government Interpreter
Agency and was fully prepared to settle down to married life when
she took the fateful trip to Ruapehu.

But it was
actually Lorna and Chrissie who were the instant mix, for they
found they had everything in common—except anything in particular,
Chrissie liked to joke. Sisters of contradiction, was the way Lorna
put it. Anyhow, they had done everything together since—did the
rounds of pubs and parties together, met for lunch most days, they
experienced a volcanic eruption and a helicopter crash together,
died together and came back to life together. Together they
originally met John Burton who worked in Lorna’s office. They were
getting married together, Lorna joked.

And now sharing
an abominable nightmare together, although it was plain that
Chrissie was getting the worst of it. Finally the airport signs
swept overhead and they were there when it seemed they never would
be, and Lorna dragged Chrissie from the car, gasping with anxiety
as much as effort. But—fortunately—the car park lay to the east of
the terminal and almost as soon as they started to walk toward the
welcoming lights, both began to be restored.

“God, what are
we doing to ourselves?” Chrissie murmured. She looked a wreck and
no doubt Lorna did too.

“It’s okay,”
Lorna breathed. “We made it.”

But she knew it
wasn’t over yet.

Inside the
terminal, they were recovered enough to go to the loo and wash the
awfulness they felt away, hide their pallid faces behind make-up,
brush their hair and generally make themselves presentable
again.

“This is
crazy,” Chrissie was saying, fiddling with her hair, chewing the
end. “Maybe we should have stayed at the beach,”

“No. It wasn’t
far enough,” Lorna insisted.

“But we can’t
just fly off anywhere.”

“Why not?
Where’s your spontaneity? Just bung it on the plastic fantastic and
it’ll be terrific.”

“I was saving
for the honeymoon.”

“If you don’t
take a holiday right now, there won’t be any honeymoon.”

Out on the
concourse, Lorna was all charm and sweetness as she boldly
approached a man in a uniform that suggested he was a pilot. The
man immediately forgot whatever he was rushing off to. “Can you
tell me which direction—exactly—in degrees—this is.”

She indicated
the direction very precisely. The man frowned playfully as he
consulted his mental compass. “Oooo, that looks like about
275—maybe 280 to me.”

“Good. Real
good. Can you show us on the map?”

There was a map
of the world over the cocktail bar and they looked that way.

“Over to
Australia. Towards Melbourne, I should think. Maybe a little above
Melbourne but below Canberra. Yes, definitely below Canberra.”

“Good. That’s
wonderful,” Lorna radiated.

The man knew
how to handle flirts. “Do you mind if I ask why you want to
know?”

“We don’t
know...” Lorna said dubiously.

“It was a bet,”
Chrissie came up with in desperation.

“Yes, that’s
right. A bet. I thought maybe Sydney but Chrissie said...”

The maybe pilot
remembered where he was hurrying to and hurried off toward it.

Lorna stood
before the Departures Board. “Qantas 505. Leaving in fifty minutes.
Direct to Melbourne. That’ll be perfect.”

“What do we do
when we get to Melbourne, Lorna?”

“Beats me. Know
anyone there?”

“John has
friends at Bondi.”

“Half the
population of New Zealand lives at Bondi. That isn’t
Melbourne.”

“This is really
silly, Lorna. I’ve never heard of anyone who just up and offed to
Australia.”

“We’ll be the
first. Wait until everyone hears about it. They’ll all say
‘wow!”

“What a pair of
loonies, you mean.”

After he put
the billy on the campfire, Brian Carrick rolled a cigarette and
squatted by the fire, smoking it to the end and throwing it down.
The wide brim hat and squatting posture made him look like a
character from a Lawson story, the ultimate bushman. For a night
and a full day he had camped here, sleeping overnight in the cabin
of the truck. Nothing had happened. No one had come. Not even a
farmer to inquire about this stranger camped in the middle of his
paddock.

It was silly
really. He had waited because there was nothing to do but
wait—patient, wandering about, taking great time over his meals,
reading from a browned and tattered paperback book one of which he
always carried in his back pocket—usually science fiction. The
truck had a full array of camping gear and the casual observer
might have thought he planned his stay carefully—no such thing had
happened and there was no casual observer either. From time to
time, he had felt another presence, he suspected, and would shiver
and study the horizon and the sky. Nothing at all. He settled down
to wait it out, sure that sooner or later, something must
happen.

He sat with his
back propped up against the only tree in this section of the
paddock—not really a tree but the ghost of a dead gum, its only
branches two snapped limbs that rose out of the top of the leaning
trunk in the shape of a man who had just been shot.

He was reading
what had somehow become his favourite book—not science fiction
although Isaac Asimov wrote it. A Choice of Catastrophes, it was
called, describing and assessing the likelihood of all the possible
disasters the planet faced, starting with the gigantic—cosmic
catastrophes like entropy and Armageddon, ranging downward through
lesser disasters like the death of the Sun or the collapse of the
galaxy, through collisions with asteroids or other free-range
malevolencies, to man-made disasters like Global Warming and
Nuclear Winters. There was something in this that fascinated him
and it was the third time he had read it since his rehabilitation
began. There was something about it that continually enticed him
back to its pages—something that perhaps he had missed or
forgotten—something that mattered.

He settled down
to read, knowing that it would come eventually, that it was just a
matter of being patient, that he had all the time in the world.

It had come
down to the cockroach—a creature so simple in its anatomy and
habits that even nuclear war would not affect it. Jami was
beginning to feel a bit like one herself, scuttling into the
shadows when the light came on, hiding forever in dark corners and
basements.

Well, they had
put her in a corner of the basement in the Earth Sciences Building
which, Harley had said, would keep her nice and inconspicuous for a
while. He didn’t want anyone asking her what she was doing until
the funding came through.

She broke the
task down. The effect, she knew, happened in advance of the
eruption and therefore the first body of research she needed to
explore was the business of predicting volcanoes and earthquakes.
And, as Harley punned, a shaky business it was.

The interesting
thing was that volcanoes and quakes were always predictable, the
movement of tectonic plates in subduction zones effected the
volcanoes along the andesite line and told geologists what to
expect. When the water suddenly disappeared from the wells, the
peasants in earthquake prone regions knew it was time to pack up
and get out. Volcanoes invariably bubbled and shook for months
before they erupted.

Satellites
scanned with infra-red and could detect new hot spots below the
surface of the earth. The presence of changes in regional magnetic
fields or radioactivity or chemicals in the lakes and rivers warned
that trouble was on the way.

The only time
that volcanoes ever erupted unexpectedly was as a result of a
massive earthquake, one momentous enough to disturb their magma
chambers. But even then, the changes in the geostructure that
precipitated such a huge quake was sure to activate any nearby
volcanoes in advance as the internal pressures and tensions built
toward their climax.

Upheavals had
been successfully predicted, but more often scientists had failed
to do so when in fact there had been sufficient evidence to say,
with hindsight, that they should have known. The most persistent
and reliable predictions were made not by humans but animals, who,
folklore at least had it, seemed to know disaster was impending
when none of the other signs were present.