The War of Immensities

CONTENTS

20 CLASH OF
INFINITIES

For Andromeda
Starlight, as she chose to call herself, there was an amazing
sensation that she was flying. What was remarkable about it was
that she was both straight and sober at the time and sitting in her
bath which, she was absolutely certain, was firmly bolted to the
floor of the bathroom. In that she was quite mistaken—it was really
flying through the air. Andromeda had dropped enough tabs and
sniffed sufficient lines to recognise the sensation immediately—the
only trouble was that there had been no tabs for a year, no coke
for a month and no booze since last night. Nevertheless, it was one
hell of a trip.

She had been
lying back, wallowing in the self-indulgence of the hot, steaming
water laced with lavender and patchouli, when suddenly she noticed
that the water was rippling—the surface was quivering slightly. She
frowned. Had she made some movement she would have understood, but
she was quite inactive at the time. Then her buttocks informed her
that this was because the bath itself was vibrating, and at a
rapidly increasing rate.

Even that was
not really surprising—the whole north island of New Zealand was
prone to shaking frequently and here, near Mt Ruapehu, more so than
anywhere. But it would be so bloody inconvenient for there to be a
major earthquake right now; just when she was settled into her
bath... then the lights went out.

Now she knew
that was definitely strange, because the light that went out so
suddenly was daylight, provided entirely by the sun, shining
brightly through the opaque window to her right. It was as if she
suddenly went blind... not quite blind. There were all sorts of
spots and ghost images floating in the blackness that said she was
still seeing—there just wasn’t anything to see anymore. And it was
in that time, when she knew she was still conscious, that she had
the very distinct impression that the bathtub had sprouted wings
and taken to the sky.

Someone struck
Chrissie Rice with a rabbit-chop to the back of the neck. In the
last instant before unconsciousness enveloped her, she realised
that no one could have because there was no one back there, for she
was sitting in the rearmost seat of the helicopter. What had
actually happened was that her head, thrust back by the impact, hit
the bulkhead and knocked her out. She remembered that she had just
heard Lorna saying urgently. “Shit, look at that!” and was turning
to look when the blow occurred.

Lorna Simmons,
sitting beside Chrissie, had a moment longer. She had been looking
out the window at the plateau below, trying to catch a prospect of
the three snow-capped volcanoes in a line as the helicopter banked
around the slopes of Mount Ruapehu.

They had flown
up to the crater rim of Ruapehu three days earlier and then ski-ed
down—Chrissie, who boasted that she had skied everywhere, regarded
it as one of her best experiences. Now, they were returning from a
sight-seeing flight across Tongariro National Park—this chap from
Western Australia named Joe Solomon was footing the bill for the
helicopter so the girls went along for the ride.

Lorna tried to
pinpoint the Mt Ruapehu Chateau which, she was sure, had to be at
the foot of the volcanic cone over which they flew. It wasn’t
there, and neither was the rest of the snowfield over which they
had just passed. What she saw instead was a huge grey cloud
billowing toward them from behind. She spoke and then immediately
felt the helicopter jerk violently as the cloud overtook it.
Everything went black and then even blacker as she too lost all
sensibility.

For Joe
Solomon, sitting beside his wife Melina in the forward seats, there
was just a little more time still, for when he heard Lorna’s cry,
he turned and saw the towering black billows of ash overtake the
helicopter and engulf it completely and there was a sense of the
helicopter flipping onto its back before his vision vanished. Joe
Solomon, lawyer and union man, was fifty and overweight and tired
of life, of his wife, of conferences and briefs and boozy lunches
and scowling judges. He was a Rumpole-like man with no poetry and
he came to New Zealand for a holiday that Melina and his high blood
pressure insisted upon. Only to be killed in a freak helicopter
crash, he thought, before there was nothing else.

In the same
instant that Andromeda Starlight’s bathtub flew, the tourist
helicopter hired by the Solomons of Perth and the two young women
from Auckland fell out of the sky with melting rotors, ploughed
into a snow drift, and began to skid down the slopes of the
mountain.

Kevin Wagner
was another flyer and in even more improbable circumstances since
he was three fathoms underwater at the time. At the edge of the
plateau between the peaks was a small pond filling an old volcanic
vent. Supposedly bottomless, the pool was a strangely intense blue
coloration that changed at this time every year to a sort of murky
green. No one knew why—certainly geologists and chemists had long
since given up trying to explain it.

Wagner, an avid
fisherman from San Diego, came up to dive and try to enjoy the good
fortune of catching the change from under the water. He had left
Sally and the kids at the Chateau and made his way down to the
pond. At this time of the year, the surface ice was melted but the
water was still freezing and Wagner had insulated every part of his
body against the cold.

He went as deep
as he could, peering through the special coating on his visor that
prevented the condensation caused by his body temperature. The
water was clear and the impression of intense blueness diminished
unless you looked upward toward the sunlit surface, and Wagner was
doing that at the time.

Suddenly, it
went completely dark, as if someone had switched off the sun. Then,
oddly, he started to sweat inside his wetsuit in the moment before
a fierce turbulence gripped him. He knew nothing else, which he
later found regrettable.

Boiling water
surged up out of the vent and spilled over the edge of the plateau,
creating a new waterfall into the Whakapapa River below. It bore
the unconscious Kevin Wagner along with it, straight out over the
cataract. It was a thrilling ride that he would have loved to have
experienced conscious.

There was a
group of four trout fishermen working the river in the valley
below. They heard the deep roar above them and looked up in time to
see the waterfall come cascading over the rim and with it a flying
object that seemed to be a man. He hit the water fifty metres away
from them and two of the men plunged over to rescue him. They were
astonished to find he was still alive—in fact had they not rescued
him so promptly he would certainly have drowned—a doubly miraculous
survival.

The two men
dragged him ashore amid the violent surging of that normally
tranquil waterway and they, in turn, had to be rescued by their
companions. Although no one complained about the dousing—the men
discovered that they were being engulfed by a fine stinging hot ash
that was billowing down upon them from the sky. Their eardrums were
still ringing from the roar and the earth shook under their feet
and then settled. In the forest trees fell, leaves floated in the
ashen atmosphere everywhere. The men grabbed their gear and the
rescued man, jumped in their Land cruisers and wildly took to the
road, adding a storm of gravel to the drifting fog of ash.

“What’s
happening?” they asked each other frantically.

One of them had
experienced something similar before and was able to guess
accurately.

“The friggin’
volcano’s gone up,” he declared.

They raced down
the road through the valley, dodging falling trees and flying
debris, peering through the sudden premature night, pursued by a
massive black cloud of seething superheated ash.

Brian Carrick,
a truck driver from Melbourne, had a mate down the footy club whose
brother had made a packet and bought this Chateau at the base of Mt
Ruapehu. A skiing holiday at the lodge was first prize in the footy
sweep that year and Brian had won.

He did the
right thing and offered to take the wife, but Judy opted to remain
at home and look after the kids. Although they were getting along
as well as usual, each was probably equally pleased to be free of
the other. Brian undoubtedly got the better end of the deal but he
worked very hard, Judy knew, and needed a holiday far more than she
did. So Brian went alone, to try his hand at skiing.

The result was,
as he put it in the one scrawled letter he wrote the family, that
he’d never fallen over so many times in his life, not even when
pissed to the eyeballs. But Lou and Terri, who owned the place,
welcomed him and made him feel at home. It seemed like a nice place
and the view was terrific although Brian had already begun to
wonder just how he would fill in the time for two weeks. After all,
once you learned to ski and got used to the spectacular views,
there didn’t seem to be much else to do.

It might not
have been so bad if the Kiwi beer wasn’t weak as piss. Lou politely
suggested that they explore the wine cellar before dinner and Brian
was about to say how he never drank plonk when he remembered how to
be polite and said. “Sure. Love ta.”

Still, he took
a can of beer with him as they went down to the cellar and Lou
proudly took him amidst the rows of bottles on the cobwebbed
shelves in the dim musky interior and Brian tried to appear to be
fascinated by the gabble about vintages and bouquets.

Suddenly, the
walls shifted by about thirty degrees and all the racks fell over.
Everything shook and dust blinded him. The room became a blizzard
of broken glass raining with red wine.

At that moment,
Brian was standing against the wall and, with Lou facing him, was
shielded from most of the glass and debris, but that did not
prevent the effect of someone belting him with a hammer in both ear
holes simultaneously. He remembered the showers of sparks as the
light bulbs exploded in the last moment before everything
disappeared.

Jami Shastri
had a dream—it was the dream of all volcanologists—to be right
there at the instant an eruption began. But you needed to know the
right people to get that sort of opportunity.

She had applied
for innumerable field research projects, in those places where
volcanoes grumbled threateningly, but she had never been
successful. Instead she was put on loan to Auckland University,
doing modelling on Mt Tongariro.

There were
three active volcanoes in the group, Tongariro to the north,
Ngauruhoe in the middle and Ruapehu to the south, all within 5 km
of each other. Once a month, she visited the remote station on the
plateau below Mt Ruapehu to collect the data and check the
maintenance of the monitoring equipment.