The War of Immensities (14 page)

He rummaged and
came up with a can and threw it to her. She caught it deftly—it was
remarkably cold. Plainly he had an Esky full of ice in there beside
him. She opened it, took a gulp, and rewarded him with her best
smile.

“Thanks, Lover.
What do I owe you?”

“Nuthin. Where
you going?”

She indicated a
point directly behind her, at right-angles to the road.

“I wanna go
that way.”

The driver
looked that way, as if to assure himself that the nothing that was
out there was out there. It was.

“Can’t go that
way, luv. You either gotta go where I’m goin’ or back where I come
from.”

“Where in
tarnation am I anyway?”

“Ooo, ‘bout
halfway between Bogantungan and Withersfield.”

“Sorry I asked,
Sugar. What’s that way?”

“Bugger
all.”

“Well maybe so,
that’s the way I gotta go.”

The driver
thought about it.

“South, hey?
Well, yer better come with me to the next town. About a hundred
kay. There’s a turn-off south there, takes yer down through
Springsure and Taroom to Brisbane.”

She was
thinking about it, but she stood and was gathering her things while
she did so.

“Brisbane ain’t
south,” she was sure.

“It’s where
people usually mean when they say south.”

“Ain’t south
enough.”

“You wanna
really go south, you can turn off at Springsure and the highway
runs down through Charleville and Cunnamulla and into New South,
through Bourke and then on to everything south.”

“Bourke, you
say, my man. Ain’t that where the Black Stump is?’

“Sure is.”

“Somewhere
thataway then, I guess.”

Police were
called to a disturbance inside the Riverdale shopping mall and
found a small crowd gathered about a man in a motorised wheelchair.
The man was barely conscious, soaked in sweat, breathless and
certainly unable to make an account of himself.

An ambulance
had already been called and the police would have moved on, had not
Senior Constable Belinda Grey decided to check the man’s identity.
She quickly determined that he was a lawyer named Joseph
Solomon.

“I’ve heard of
him,” she murmured. “Gets all the fat cats off corruption
charges.”

She also found
a card referring to Fairhaven Hospital and mentioned it when she
put the call through to dispatch.

“That’s
interesting,” the dispatcher said thoughtfully. “We had a report of
an escaped inmate from Fairhaven a couple of hours ago. Hang on,
Belinda, I’ll check.”

Moments later,
the dispatcher informed Senior Grey that Fairhaven were coming to
collect him.

“Apparently he
has a history of unauthorised departures,” the dispatcher added.
“But the only risk is to his own health.”

By then, the
ambulance had arrived and the crew were examining the patient.
There were no dangerous signs, but Belinda Grey remained
dissatisfied.

“Fairhaven is
over ten kilometres away,” she frowned. “How the hell did he get
here?”

A tourist with
a video camera had been on hand to film the scene when the Human
Lemmings of Gran Canaria made their final plunge. The video was
just a few shots of indistinct figures falling down the cliff face
while others waited their turn at the top, followed by many views
of a number of bodies floating in the sea, and it was all out of
focus and rather shaky, but it was enough to propel it to headline
status by the world’s television news producers.

As the shadow
line that divided night from day travelled about the circumference
of the earth, so those amateur pictures flashed around the world—a
tantalising glimpse before the evening news credits, a more
detailed showing later in the bulletin depending of the state of
local politics and catastrophes.

At twilight in
Melbourne, Judy Carrick remarked that the Canary Islanders were
plainly as silly as her husband, who had gone walkabout again and
stolen a truck to do it. But she was only joking, trying to humour
herself out of her shattered nerves.

Lorna and
Chrissie saw the same video images as they sat in the bar of the
Savoy Hotel in Melbourne, as they waited for the departure of their
train north from Spencer Street station following another frantic
flight from New Zealand. The video images appeared on the TV screen
at the end of the bar. Since the sound was turned down, no
explanation of the strange scenes was possible, but Lorna was
spluttering into her Harvey Wallbanger and pointing. “Hey. That’s
what I did!” she cried.

“Well, don’t
tell everybody, Lorna,” Chrissie hushed her.

Andromeda
Starlight saw them in a motel room in Charters Towers to where her
erratic hitch-hiking had eventually delivered her. She was so
stoned by that stage that that a bunch of humans leaping to their
deaths for no reason did not seem at all strange to her.

“I know how
they felt,” she told the vodka bottle, raising it in a toast and
taking the final swig. She threw the bottle aimlessly over her
shoulder, and then fell off the bed and was asleep before she hit
the floor.

Joe Solomon had
seen them sitting in the lounge at Fairhaven, an instant in which
television wasn’t quite as dull as usual, but he thought nothing of
it.

The penumbra
passed right across Asia and Europe and reached the United States
where there was a scandal in the Senate, riots in the Bronx and a
train wreck in Alabama and the Canary Islands story was committed
to the weird and wonderful segment of the news, along with the new
baby Panda at Chicago Zoo and the latest shots of modifications to
the Hubble Telescope by the space shuttle crew.

The Lemmings
item had little story to go with the pictures but the location was
enough to draw the attention of Jami Shastri, who almost choked on
her veggie burger when she heard it. She was on the telephone to
Harley Thyssen before she had fully recovered from her coughing
fit.

“It’s exactly
the same place as the previous eruption occurred, Harley,” she was
gasping.

“You think
there’s a connection,” he wondered.

“I’m sure there
is.”

“Well, that
oughta up our funding submission.”

By the time New
Zealand descended into the gloaming, the wild speculation that
these unfortunate suicidal souls had been apparently affected by a
volcanic eruption three months earlier was included with the
pictures. A cold chill passed through the body of Felicity Campbell
when she heard two nurses talking about the Canary Islands, but she
was on her way to an emergency and had no time to ask questions.
When she passed the patient through to theatre, the surgeon
remarked to his intern about the silly buggers that walked straight
off the cliff.

“Which silly
buggers?” she asked, trying to keep her voice even.

“Some island
off the coast of Africa,” he said. “Whole villages of them, just up
and walked over the edge and fell into the sea. You oughta see the
pictures.”

“Which
islands?” she demanded. But no one remembered.

As soon as she
was sure her patient was settled, she went looking for Kevin
Wagner. She found him the first place she looked, on his crutches
at reception, arguing frantically with the charge sister as he
tried to discharge himself.

“I’m sorry, Mr
Wagner. I can’t do anything until Dr Campbell signs the
release.”

“Which I will
do at the first available opportunity,” Felicity smiled as she
walked up. “But that’s still a few months away yet, Kevin.”

Looking at
Kevin Wagner, she could see he had once been a handsome, rugged,
well built man, and all the signs suggested that he would be again,
but the present figure before her was a grey faced, hunched object
that swayed unsteadily on the crutches. The tragedy that his life
had become still glazed his eyes and deepened the lines on his
face. His hair had turned completely white.

Nevertheless,
she knew his rehabilitation results had been excellent so far and
the grief and trauma counsellors declared that he was coming to
terms with the annihilation of his family. She wondered. She
searched his face for pain from non-clinical sources but found
none.

A hard man,
tough and strong, beaten down but rising again like a phoenix from
the ashes of his former life. Such recoveries gave doctors like
Felicity the strength to go on.

Even now, when
she knew that added to his daily pain and the effects of the drugs
was that nerve-shattering agitation that had caused his previous
mysterious convulsions—convulsions that had continued for days
unabated and then subsided completely. Now, although conscious and
more or less ambulatory, he was showing clear signs of that
agitation again. He was shaking like a scared rabbit, unable to
raise his head properly, plainly near the point of collapse, and
yet he could smile and reply in his cool West coast accent. “No
chance, hey, Doctor C?”

“No chance,
Kev.”

“You sure are a
tough lady to deal with, Doc.”

“With patients
like you, I need to be Kev.”

“Waal, here’s
your big chance to get me offa your hands, Felicity my sweet.”

“Oh, sure. Just
exactly where were you planning to go?”

“Beats me.
Ain’t got nowhere to go, actually. But I sure as hell wanna go
there, and right now.”

“Come on. Come
with me. Let’s talk about this.”

“You don’t know
how badly I want outa here, Doc. Just go. Get movin’.”

“Can you manage
on the crutches or should I get a wheelchair?”

“Better walk
while I can. I know you guys are gonna slip me a mickey at the
first available opportunity and then strap me down again so I don’t
make a run for it.”

“Sure we will.
For your own good, of course.”

“Of course. But
Doc, you don’t know how badly I wanna get moving.”

“I think I do,
Kevin. Let’s go somewhere quiet and talk about this.”

“Hey, is that a
pass?”

“Save that
stuff for the nurses, okay?”

She must have
dozed off—when the telephone rang, it startled her. Or perhaps she
jumped because she knew it would be Harley. At this stage, no one
else would have known the number of the dungeon where he kept her.
His voice boomed down the line at her without any greeting or even
verification that it was her who had answered. But then, no one
else could have.

“You’ll be
delighted to know that you are now a funded research project. The
Board of Governors have approved.”

Her heart sank.
Had the funding been denied, maybe she could have escaped back into
the real world. Now she was trapped forever. “How did you manage
that?”

“Swamped them
with BS about the possible far-reaching effects of the Shastri
Effect and the duty of the university to pursue the project to its
ultimate point.”

The Shastri
Effect—she cringed to hear her own name used that way—it was as if,
like certain deities, she had become a swear-word. “We don’t even
know if there is any such thing as the Shastri Effect, Harley.”

“There is now.
It says so on the budget documents. The Governors believe it. So
you just better get down to work and prove it.”

“Harley, you
have me trying to prove something that doesn’t exist. Just exactly
how do you do that?”

“There is a
story they tell of how the great Ernest Rutherford postulated that
there was more to the atom than had been previously realised. There
had to be, he was sure, a neutron, a negatively charged,
undetectable particle in there somewhere. But how to find it? To
prove it? He went and asked H. G. Wells.”

“Yes, I’ve
heard the story, Harley.”

He went on,
completely undeterred. Once one of his stories began, there was no
stopping it. “‘Imagine an invisible man walking in Trafalgar
Square,’ Wells answered, no doubt sublimely. ‘How would you know he
was there?’ Rutherford had little chance to point out that it was,
indeed, the very question, for Wells immediately answered it
himself. ‘Why, by the reactions of the people he bumped into of
course? And the scattering of the pigeons before his feet.’”

“All of my
sources assure me the story is apocryphal, Harley.” Jami
interrupted wearily.

Even that would
not stop him. “And so it was done. HG wrote an immortal novel
called The Invisible Man, while Ernest hurried away to discover the
neutron.”

“I don’t see
how that is of the slightest help, Harley.”

“I just thought
it might inspire you in your search for the impossible.”

“As I recall,
Harley, the discovery of the neutron would which would prove to be
the means by which the atom could be split and a whole new age of
power and horrors would be born, was one that Wells had also
predicted in The Shape of Things to Come. And meanwhile your
beloved Rutherford went on the record declaring that anyone who
imagined great amounts of energy might be released by splitting the
atom was talking moonshine.”

“I like my
version better.”

“You would.
Yours is fiction and mine is fact.”

“Slippery
notions, fact and fiction, Jamila. I’d be more careful with them if
I were you.”

“The fact is
that we don’t know anything about this, Harley. Not a damned
provable thing.”

“As Socrates
pointed out, true wisdom is to understand your own fallibility. The
measure of a worthwhile person is not in terms of what they know,
but instead in their awareness of what they don’t know. The more
you know, the more you discover you need to know. True ignorance is
thinking that you know all about it. And the really dangerous
people are those who are determined that they are right.”

“Okay, so our
ignorance puts us on the side of the angels. But no closer to the
truth.”