The War of Immensities (49 page)

“Isn’t that
everyone?”

“No. Only the
undeluded. You got it?”

“Yep.”

“Okay. Dump it
into the models.”

“Just like
that?”

“Indeed. Set
‘em running.”

“How long will
it take?”

“About ten
minutes.”

“And it’ll come
up with the answer?”

“It will come
up with an array of statistical possibilities that will need to be
analysed.”

“What answer
are we expecting?”

“Indian
Ocean.”

“You always say
that, Harley, and you’re always wrong.”

“African
side.”

“But hang on.
If we can do it this easily, why can’t they?”

“We’re smarter
than they are.”

“Getoutahere!
This is really simple.”

“If you get the
right answer. It will require my magic touch afterwards.”

“What now?”

“Delete
Drongo.”

“But it hasn’t
done anything yet.”

Jami watched
the models flashing on the screen and the columns of figures
building in the window in the corner. And suddenly she knew.

“You’ve done
something to it.”

“Oh?”

“Drongo is
readjusting the figures. I can see it happening.”

“What a sharp
eyed little student you are.”

“You’ve put a
virus in the models so that they’ll always come up with the wrong
answer unless they run Drongo.”

“The data must
be safeguarded.”

“You
bastard!”

“You seem to
hang that descriptive on all the men in your life, Jami.”

They walked out
into the sunlight, the first that Brian Carrick had enjoyed for
some time.

“I seem to be
making a habit of being rescued from these places by beautiful
women,” Brian mused.

Lorna’s eyes
darted brightly. “It’s hard to know which of your bad habits to
criticise first, Brian.”

“Still, it was
good of you to think of me,” Brian grinned.

“I was ordered
to come and fetch you. I didn’t realise you were still in
gaol.”

“It was the
best way of keeping myself out of trouble.”

They walked
across the road and into the Flagstaff Gardens, both of them
absorbing the fabulous Melbourne sunshine through their pores. It
was an equal delight—after a gaol cell or a Northern Hemisphere
winter.

“That’s the
worry, Brian. The rest of us are all going from strength to
strength while you go down and down. We all feel a bit guilty.”

“Life’s a
bitch, then you die.”

“Life can
improve, if you let it.”

“Is it too
early for a beer?” Brian asked.

“Far too late,
I suspect.”

“There’s a nice
pub down the hill with a beer garden.”

“Lead me. But
please, no more trouble.”

“I
promise.”

They found the
beer garden and sat, he with a beer and she a frightening
cocktail.

“So the Harley
Thyssen show is on again,” Brian said. “You just can’t keep a good
man down.”

“As far as I
know, we are very unofficial. Almost covert. But yes. You’re needed
in Japan. The Japanese government even asked especially for you.
That’s the only reason we’ll be able to get you out of the country
with all these charges pending.”

“But he sure
showed ‘em, our Harley. Didn’t he?”

“He surely did.
Tell me, what’s Entropy?”

That raised his
eyebrows. He knew the answer—he was simply surprised that someone
like Lorna might bother to ask the question. Usually she was the
first to glaze over when he went into one of his raves.

“Heat death of
the Universe,” he said as if it occurred every day.

“Yeah,” Lorna
said with a roll of her eyeballs. “Harley said something like that.
Now explain it so a dumb bum like me can understand.”

“Not so easy.
Tell me why you want to know?”

“Aren’t I
allowed to know?”

“Usually, when
I talk about such things, you nod off in five seconds.”

“This time I’m
interested.”

“Which makes me
wonder why?”

“Something that
caught my eye amongst Harley’s papers. He was evasive about it.
Harley is never evasive about anything.”

Wasn’t he?
Brian could not agree. If he read the right books for a thousand
years, he would never know as much as Thyssen, but millimetre by
millimetre he was gaining ground. He knew enough now to be sure
that Harley Thyssen had all the answers. He was only telling people
what they needed to know. For there were things that were obvious
that he seemed surprised by, and it was impossible to believe that
Thyssen’s surprise at anything was genuine.

“No need to be
evasive about this. It ain’t no sort of secret. And I can’t imagine
what it has to do with anything. And I can’t imagine you’ll last
more than twenty seconds before you switch off anyway.”

“Try me. And
I’ll reward you with the hottest send-off to Japan in history.”

Brian got
himself another beer and lit a cigarette and when he was settled,
gave it his best shot. “The driving force of the universe is
energy, and the most basic law of nature is the Law of Conservation
of Energy. What that means is that the reason why the universe is
not a stagnant solid ball of dead matter is because bits of energy
flow from one place to another, sometimes changing in form as they
do so.”

“I haven’t
glazed over yet. Is there an English translation?”

“It’s all about
electrons and other elementary particles. The particles move from
atom to atom, always tryin’ to simplify things. Inside you. Inside
stars. Everywhere. No energy moving and all you got is dead
matter.”

“Like my brain,
huh?”

“Okay, so all
this to-ing and fro-ing of subatomic particles all over the
universe is called energy. The movement gives off heat and light
and radiation and that is the engine that runs everything.”

“Why does it
move?”

“The energy is
unevenly distributed throughout the universe—because it began
randomly with a big explosion, you see? Ever since, its been
flowin’ to try and even up the distribution. Light, nuclear
reactions, electricity, the neurons firing in your brain, is all
transferred between elementary particles in their various forms,
and that movement increasingly occurs spontaneously, they reckon,
and always from uneven distribution toward even distribution. Still
with me?”

“Hanging in
there.”

“This
transformation of particles creates heat and energy, and as they
even out and slow down and eventually stop, energy, and therefore
life, is no longer possible.”

“They get a
nice rest at the end of the day.”

“Right. Almost
all studies of energy involve heat flow and temperature change, and
this science of energy change, energy flow and conversation of
energy into work is described by the Greek word for ‘heat
movement’—Thermodynamics.”

“I am almost
understanding this. Go on.”

“Somewhere
around 1850, a German Physicist named Rudolf Clausius came up with
a Second Law of Thermodynamics, which necessarily lead to the
invention of the First Law of Thermodynamics: the first law stated
that the universe is immortal, the second that it is doomed.”

“I’m sure I
detected a contradiction in that.”

“Absolutely.
Black and white. Listen: The First Law of Thermodynamics says the
energy content of the universe is constant. The Second Law of
Thermodynamics says the energy flow of the universe is steadily
decreasing.”

“Really?”

“Really. Big
contradiction. Big trouble for Physics. So, they get themselves out
of it like this. The First Law says that the universe will last
forever—everything that exists will continue to exist in some form
or other constantly and ceaselessly.”

“A comforting
thought.”

“The Second Law
states that the universe is dying, that because the energy flow is
always from uneven to even distribution and that it can only
spontaneously flow that way, eventually everything will be evened
out. The energy will still be there, locked up in dead matter, and
motion, life, work and change will cease to be possible.”

“I’ve known
blokes like that...”

“When it
reaches that point, when everything in the universe is at exactly
the same temperature and no further activity is possible, it is the
Heat Death of the universe. And the process by which it occurs
is Entropy.”

“Right.”

“You got all
that?”

“I think
so.”

“Does it
help?”

“Well, how
could that possibly be of immediate interest to Harley?”

“I can’t
imagine. But it’ll be interesting to try and find out.”

Give a man too
much money and too much power and too high an opinion of himself,
and the result was inevitable. Joe Solomon watched in dismay as
Kevin Wagner gave his briefing for the next Shastri Event. There
wasn’t any problem with the briefing—it was clear and lucid and a
spectacular bit of showmanship, only it wasn’t about earth bound
disasters. It was just another petty king of just another Fiefdom,
strutting his self-importance. Joe supposed they should have seen
it coming.

“The target
area is the African state of Malawi,” Wagner was saying from the
rostrum, resplendent in military green, and he carried a pointer
although he didn’t need it for high over his head, video images
projected on a huge screen indicated the location on the map of
South East Africa. “Here, right along the western shore of Lake
Nyasa, where about 6 million people live an almost entirely
subsistence existence. It is the highest population density in
Africa and they’ve had a miserable time of it—no external economy
whatsoever, subject to continual droughts and flood, and their only
claim to fame is that they were a rich source of raw materials for
the slave trade, and their land is the home of the tsetse fly. The
place is run by a dictator named Banda who sold out to South Africa
and developed the most one sided capitalist system in the world.
But, believe it or not, their luck is about to get worse.”

You might have
thought he cared, but Wagner showed no emotion. The speech, anyway,
was written for him by Joe himself, based on raw material that came
by e-mail from Thyssen with no return address.

“The zone of
influence is expected to be about 100 square kilometres in the
region at the middle western edge of the lake where it’s all dense
forest, thousands of tiny villages, unbearable heat, poverty and
disease. And the lake is full of crocodiles, the jungle has Black
Mambas and the region boasts the fattest vultures in the world.
Nasty place. There are no volcanoes in the immediate vicinity but
there’s a big dormant one at the north end of the lake called
Mbeya, about a two hundred kilometres away and it may erupt, and
dozens more volcanoes a thousand kilometres away in Kenya that
probably won’t be effected, but might. In any case, we will have
two hot spots, but the lake itself sits between two fault lines
which may break open. Whatever happens, it’s gonna be one hell of a
mess.”

They were in
the main dining hall of the convent, and Wagner’s audience—only two
hundred when plainly the occasion justified several hundred
more—sat at the long tables. Stained-glass windows which, primarily
depicting the heroisms of the crusades, looked far more appropriate
to the occasion that they might have to dinnertime. Joe had wheeled
himself into a position behind, where he could survey the entire
scene. Wagner strutted, chest thrust out, king of the convent,
although his American accent fitted badly with the circumstances.
It needed British officer class, or perhaps German, to give proper
weight to the event.

“The
restrictions placed on Professor Thyssen by various authorities
have caused the data to come through too late to be of any use.
There is no hope of getting these people out of the area in time,
and nowhere to take them anyway. Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania
have been receiving refugees and work gangs from the region for
decades and resent them, and we could start a war if we tried to
get them out. But in any case, it’s too late for that.”

Wagner’s
mini-army, most of them mercenaries primarily recruited during his
Italian operations, had busied themselves for the past two months
repairing the airstrip and one of the hangars in which the two old
C-130’s were housed. Joe had been able to secure a team and deploy
them to the task of building ramps all about the convent and his
possible range of movement expanded daily. He could see all about
him how the money was being spent and had to admit that there were
few luxury items. The mercenaries had been divided into teams long
before, and trained as well as they could be for their role in the
forthcoming event, and almost all expenditure had been devoted to
that.

“The official
prediction, by the way, is here, north of Malagasy, in the Indian
Ocean almost on the equator. They expect little damage and few
serious effects. But we will proceed with the unofficial version.
Thyssen has been right every time in the past and there’s no reason
to think it will be different this time. We will establish our main
base in Salisbury, which I know is a long way away, but Zimbabwe is
about the only place where we can expect reasonably modern
facilities and cooperation from the government. A task force base
will be established at either Lilongwe or Zomba, which are the main
population centres near the zone. In fact, either but not both are
likely to be inside the zone. That will be decided immediately we
know how it comes down.

“We turn now to
the focal point of the pilgrimages,” Wagner said and on the screen
above his head, the earth rotated to what might have been a space
ship view, observed from some point over the Arctic Circle and
rotating slowly around its line. Red indicators showed the
locations of the pilgrims. Their own position in Italy, Chrissie
thankfully still in Rome where she could not see this going down,
Andromeda in Paris, the USS Barton sailors in the brig in San
Diego, the Japanese back in their fields but apparently all tagged
by Brian Carrick.