by Ray Hammond
Michael now had a straightforward choice. Either he accepted what he was being told at face value, or he had to contact the authorities. But all his instincts, training and long experience with witnesses told him that Robert Fivetrees, Emilia Knight and Steve Bardini were honest, decent people.
‘Look, do you think you can handle this, Mike?’ demanded Steve, now deadly serious. ‘If you can’t, let’s just forget that we had this conversation. You go back to San-Fran and I’ll get Em out of that hospital. One thing I’m certain of she hasn’t got radiation sickness.’
‘How do you intend to get her out?’ asked Michael.
Wall Street Journal
Monday, 18 September 2055
FIRST PRESIDENTIAL VISIT TO MOON IN OCTOBER
LIVE TV DEBATE TO BE BEAMED FROM LUNAR SURFACE
The White House has announced that President James T. Underwood will become the first serving US President to visit the moon. He will officially open the ERGIA Corporation’s new lunar facility on 21 October, following which he will give an address to open a live television debate on the future of climate management.
Other guests at the ceremony will include EU President Hollinger, Japan’s Prime Minister Kakehashi and Mr Lu Zen, China’s Minister for Extraterrestrial Investment.
Shares in LunaSun Inc., the corporation set up to run and manage the lunar-energy resource, will be offered in a NASDAQ IPO scheduled for 28 October.
An hour after Steve Bardini admitted to his membership of the PFO, there was a soft triple-knock on Michael Fairfax’s motel-room door.
‘That’s them,’ said Steve, rising from his chair. ‘I’ll get it.’
Three fit-looking men in dark clothes entered quickly, followed by a tall woman wearing jeans and a bottle-green T-shirt.
‘Tony, Ricky and Doc Cosmo,’ said Steve by way of introduction to the men. He nodded towards the woman. ‘And this is Doctor Val Cummings of the US Navy’s Oceanographic Academy. Her work first alerted us to early signs of the Hawaiian earthquake. And, most importantly, she has top-level security clearance for all areas of the naval station.’
The lawyer shook hands with all four new arrivals. Earlier, Steve had surprised Michael yet again, by producing by a high-security encryption phone and placing two short calls to set up this gathering.
‘Cosmo is our medical doctor for the San Diego region,’ explained Steve. ‘He’ll know whether Emilia is really sick or not.’
Then they spent an hour planning how best to extract Emilia Knight from the hospital. Val Cummings projected a map of the naval base onto the room’s wall-screen, and marked out what she considered the best routes in and out.
‘My lab’s on the base and I often have to work during the nights,’ she explained. ‘The oceans don’t observe social hours.’
Shortly before one a.m. Chief Oceanographer Dr Valerie Cummings pulled her large Chevrolet into the vehicle-inspection parking lot beside the guardhouse at the main entrance to the US naval base.
‘Hey, Jerome,’ she said to the young marine who greeted her. ‘What’s up?’
‘Not much, Doctor Cummings,’ he told her through her open window. ‘Night shift?’
There were three other soldiers in the guardhouse but none of them were stirring.
‘Got some more seismic bumps out in the Pacific,’ said Val. ‘This here is a colleague from Geohazard Labs.’
Steve Bardini leaned his body across from the passenger seat to hand his ident over, and so that he could be clearly seen. As Val had predicted, the guardhouse duty had been rotated since his earlier visit.
The marine glanced at the Geohazard identification.
In the roomy trunk of the large car Michael Fairfax and Dr Cosmo Mondadori waited, their bodies rigid in the blackness.
‘They never search my car,’ Val Cummings had assured them earlier. ‘They know me too well.’
‘Always a first time,’ the man introduced as Ricky had replied during their planning meeting. But it was a risk worth taking, they decided. If Emilia was well enough, they would smuggle her out.
‘We’ll need to get her out of the country,’ said Steve. Yet again he had surprised Michael by extracting Emilia’s passport from his jacket pocket and throwing it onto the low table. ‘I thought she might need it,’ he added by way of explanation. ‘And I also brought this – Em had left it in her house.’ He placed Professor Fivetrees’s miniature holo-theatre on the table top. ‘I presume she was intending to work on its data at home.’
The marine handed the identity card back to Steve. ‘Thanks, sir.’ Then he slapped his hand twice on the roof of the car. ‘Have a nice night, Dr Cummings.’
Thirty minutes later the four conspirators were running up the back stairs of the Naval Hospital block. Val Cummings had used her access card to open a rear-entrance door, and Steve Bardini had deployed a data-signal repeater – a PFO-developed wireless device that read and then looped video streams – to render the hospital’s network of security cameras ineffective. An alert human monitoring the feeds might realize that something was wrong, as the displays repeated every thirty seconds, but the loop was seamless and there was normally very little movement in the hospital at this time of night.
All four insurgents were panting heavily as they arrived on the fourteenth floor. There were very few lights on as they stepped out of a stairwell door beside the elevator shaft. At the far end of the corridor they could see one lighted window, in what they assumed was a nursing station, but there seemed to be nobody else around.
Emilia Knight herself was still sleeping. Steve Bardini held up a flashlight while Dr Mondadori took the patient’s pulse and then started quickly checking her other vital signs.
‘What – who?’ groaned Emilia.
‘Shussh, it’s me, Em,’ hissed Steve, shining the torch on his own face.
‘I don’t—’
‘Shussh,’ repeated Steve. ‘This is Doctor Mondadori – a friend. We’re going to get you out of here. Just keep quiet!’
Having completed the basic physical checks, Michael and Steve watched as the doctor ran two different scanners along the length of Emilia’s body. As soon as he had examined the data read-outs, he stooped and lifted the entire side of the tent away from the patient’s bed.
‘Well, there’s no sign of any radioactivity,’ Doc Cosmo hissed. ‘And all her vital signs are normal. From her pupils and the way her eyes respond to light, I’d say she’s been sedated.’
Emilia’s feet hardly touched the floor as Michael and Steve hustled her down fourteen flights of steps. Val Cummings had brought a raincoat for her to wear, and five minutes later Emilia too was crammed into the large trunk of the car, along with Michael Fairfax and Dr Cosmo Mondadori.
Chapter Seventeen
‘You mean these people aren’t really controlling the weather when they’re calling out to each other?’ asked Perdita Curtis angrily, rounding on her guide.
‘No, I’m sorry, they’re just for show – for our visitors,’ explained Hanoch Biran, ERGIA’s director of corporate communications. ‘Our perception consultants advised us that tourists don’t really want to look at computers, they want to see real people. So we hire actors to play the parts. All weather trades on the daily spot market have been automated for over twenty years.’
The BBC producer had brought her director and a twelve-strong film crew up to the ERGIA Space Station specifically to film the weather brokers shouting and calling out to each other as they traded future rainfall in one part of the planet for a future day’s sun in another – just as she herself had witnessed during her first trip into space. She had committed a significant part of her non-moon budget to this part of the shoot and now she felt foolish for not checking out the details of the broking operation more thoroughly in advance.
Perdy, Torrance Olds and the ERGIA publicity executive were standing in the space station’s viewing chamber, gazing up at the banked tiers of male and female ‘weather controllers’, the nearest of whom, hav
ing overheard this heated exchange, were now looking distinctly embarrassed.
‘I suppose we could just film them going through their routine, without comment,’ suggested Olds.
‘You mean dupe our viewers by omission,’ snapped Perdy. She felt like swearing out loud. Her TV crew had already spent three hours getting amusing zero-gravity fill-in shots of the off-duty space station crew as well as footage of their living quarters and recreational areas, but what she had really relied on was an exciting segment to show weather trading in action. As these ‘climate brokers’ shouted out the destinations for the weather patterns on offer, she had intended to cut in real-time shots of the actual regions, allowing viewers to understand how the decisions taken up here on the space station directly affected people on the ground below.
‘So what do the computers that really do all of this trading actually look like?’ Perdy asked Biran.
He shook his head. ‘I’m afraid there’s nothing much to see, Miss Curtis – some screens, a few numbers flashing by. Every weather transaction is carried out through one form or other of automated auction. Some systems bid up, some count down. Others use pre-empt. But it’s just computers talking to computers, I’m afraid – virtually invisible.’
‘And they never break down?’ asked Perdita, an idea suddenly occurring to her. Perhaps if they briefly switched the trading to these humans . . .
‘No, they never break down,’ said Biran. ‘If they did, there would be chaos on the planet below. Millions of weather trades are made each hour, so there are back-up systems down on Earth, just in case.’
‘What about if we filmed these people doing their thing and called it a dramatized sequence?’ suggested Torrance Olds quietly. ‘Just by showing a screen caption?’
Perdy glanced up at the now-silent rows of thespian weather-controllers.
‘That’s brilliant, Torry,’ she exclaimed. ‘“Dramatized on board the ERGIA Weather Control-Space Station.” That’ll do it.’
Perdy turned back to the corporate communications director. ‘Could you ask them to do a run-through again, please?’
Biran glanced up at the men and women sitting in their banked rows. ‘From the top, please, people.’
‘I’ve got a bid of eleven million dollars for a one-hour Volume Six rain storm in Marrakesh,’ yelled one of the controllers suddenly.
‘I’ve got thirteen million two for that rain – if we can send it on to Cairo,’ called another.
Then there was another shout, followed by a further bid from Marrakesh for the rainfall. Then a voice asked if anyone had two hours of late-night sunshine available for a film shoot in Seattle which had overrun on its schedule.
Perdy nodded and held up her hand to stop them. ‘Excellent. Thank you, everybody. If you’d all like to take a break now, we’ll get our cameras and lights set up.’
*
‘Giorgio!’ exclaimed Emilia Knight with a whoop, as she threw her small body into the arms of the big, curly-haired, dark-bearded, bearlike man and kissed him on both cheeks. Slightly embarrassed by this extravagant display of affection, Michael Fairfax and Steve Bardini hung back a little, hovering at the rear of the European Geohazard Simulation Theater.
‘It’s been too long, far too long!’ Emilia planted yet another kiss on the big man’s cheek. ‘Come here and meet my very good friend Giorgio,’ she told her companions excitedly. ‘Giorgio, this is Steve Bardini, he works with me in Oakland. And this is Mike Fairfax, he’s my attorney.’ But she realized that didn’t sound quite right. ‘And my friend,’ she added.
Doctor Giorgio Zaoskoufis, Geohazard’s Senior Risk Assessment Seismologist for the European, Middle East and African regions, shook his visitors’ hands warmly.
‘Welcome to Athens,’ he told them in good if Greek-accented English. ‘And also to what we hope will be a quiet night shift.’
It seemed that the resources and tendrils of the Planet First Organization stretched further than either Michael Fairfax or Emilia Knight could have imagined. As soon as she had been extracted safely from the US Navy base, Emilia had been driven to Dr Cosmo Mondadori’s home on the outskirts of Lemon Grove, a satellite residential community ten miles east of San Diego.
Here the doctor had submitted the still-woozy geophysicist to two hours of further tests in his home consulting room before returning to make his report to Valerie Cummings and the two male visitors from San Francisco.
By then it was almost five a.m. and the group in the doctor’s lounge was staying alert only by swallowing copious quantities of black coffee. While Dr Mondadori had been checking the patient over, Steve Bardini had driven back to the Shoreline Motel and collected the small amount of luggage that he and Michael had left behind. Lanky Val Cummings had used the opportunity to disappear in the hope of finding some clothes that might fit petite Emilia.
‘She’s perfectly healthy,’ announced the doctor. ‘Nothing wrong with her blood at all. In fact, she’s just getting dressed now.’
‘What about her blisters?’ asked Steve.
‘Some sort of acidic agent rubbed onto her skin to make their story look good, I would think,’ said Mondadori. ‘It neutralizes instantly with an alkali.’
‘So they had sedated her?’ asked the lawyer.
‘A type of pentothal,’ confirmed the doctor, nodding. ‘But most of it has now worn off. They obviously wanted very much to keep her out of circulation.’
Or perhaps her condition might have deteriorated, thought Michael. Perhaps after a few more days of confinement she might have caught an infection, something her impaired immune system would have been unable to resist – and she too would have died, just like Robert Fivetrees and Carole Gonzaga.
During that long night, Michael had also thought very carefully about what his own next move should be. He now considered himself to be at risk of imminent arrest by US government agents – or possibly something worse. Their murderous overreaction to the PFO and their fears of plutonium being in circulation had shocked him profoundly. Like most American citizens, he had had little idea how ruthless his government’s agencies could be when faced with a potential combination of terrorist groups and the components for building nuclear weapons.
For himself, the course became clear. He would return to Brussels and ask the court in The Hague for a Writ of Protection. His European legal colleagues had assured him that despite the threats made against him, such a writ would offer immunity from arrest so long as he remained safely outside the USA. Then he would pursue his case for all he was worth.
But what about Dr Emilia Knight? What would she want?
Two hours later – after Michael had explained to her what he feared were the security agencies’ suspicions – Emilia had provided her answer in the clearest way possible. Travelling together in his BMW, Michael Fairfax, Stephano Bardini and Dr Emilia Knight crossed over the US border into Mexico at Tijuana. Nobody tried to stop them.
At the Abelardo L. Rodriguez International Airport they boarded a non-stop Air Mexico flight to Madrid. Once in Spain, they each bought a change of clothing and then caught a connecting flight on to Athens in order to visit Geohazard Laboratories’ European HQ. They wanted to run Professor Fivetrees’s data in the company’s Simulation Theater. Michael had no compunction about paying for all their travel costs out of his case-preparation budget; this seismic data and Emilia’s testimony would form a vital part of his evidence.
‘Giorgio Zaoskoufis is a wonderful man,’ Emilia had told her travelling companions. Only twelve hours after leaving the hospital, the blotches on her face and arms had faded to mere pale pink marks. ‘He’ll be more than pleased to help us – unofficially, of course.’
Two hours after their midnight arrival at Geohazard Laboratories in the Athens suburb of Piraeus – a facility almost identical to the Oakland complex – Emilia Knight, Steve Bardini and their host Giorgio Zaoskoufis had completed loading all of Professor Fivetrees’s data into the Simulation Theater computers, created the necessar
y interfacing scripts and declared themselves ready to run the first modelling exercise.
‘We’ve linked the data Bob Fivetrees extracted from the Jesuit monasteries to all of our own historical climate data,’ explained Steve for Michael’s benefit. ‘And we’ve cross-referenced all the available data for climate-management energy output with all recorded seismic events above two-point-oh in the last sixty years. Then, as an overlay, we’ll be running Fivetrees’s model of the magnetic force fields.’
Michael nodded, but he hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was really being told. He wondered if it was his tiredness that was preventing him from understanding fully. He felt both emotionally drained by recent events and sledgehammered by jet lag.
Giorgio ushered Emilia into the holo-pit observation chair and then joined Steve Bardini at one of the control workstations. Michael took a seat in the viewing gallery.
‘OK, let’s go.’ Emilia gunned her chair round to the zero-degree longitude.
The large central holo-pit suddenly lit up and Michael saw a large model of the globe, tilted at an acute angle and turning very slowly. It was covered in swirling white, grey and black cloud patterns.
‘Start date and location?’ asked Emilia.
The numerals ad 1737 appeared, floating in space on a laser overlay. Then the word PORTUGAL.
Abruptly, huge purple rings and ovals appeared, swirling around the planet.
MAGNETIC FLUX DENSITY 1.0, read a data overlay.
Michael thought how beautiful the image was. The hoops of wavering light oscillated closer and further away from the planet’s surface. The rings themselves grew and shrunk as the force field changed in strength.
‘Go to ten times actual speed,’ ordered Emilia.
A red line of light shot between one outer group of magnetic rings and what looked like the coastline of Western Europe on the globe’s surface.
