by Barry Klemm
The War of Immensities
by
Barry Klemm
ISBN 978-0-9807343-1-7
Smashwords edition
© copyright Barry Klemm 1996, 2002, 2011
http://www.barryklemm.com
Published by Rundog Publishing
in association with
Collingwood Gallery Publishing
http://collingwoodgallery.com.au
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CONTENTS
1 THE VOLCANOES OF TONGARIRO
2 UNCONSCIOUS COLLECTIVE
3 EXACTLY NOWHERE
4 THE LEMMINGS OF GRAN CANARIA
5 BEYOND COINCIDENCE
6 THE VOICE OF GAIA
7 NATURAL PROGRESSION
8 SLEEPERS AND PILGRIMS
9 CORE PROBLEMS
10 THE CHAMPAGNE FLOWS
11 ELECTROMAGNETIC RODENT GHOSTS
12 THE GRAVEYARD OF GALAXIES
13 GOODBYE CALIFORNIA
14 EVERLOVIN’ BOSONS
15 THE THIRD LAW OF THERMODYNAMICS
16 THE JAPANESE PIMPERNEL
17 THE MARGIN FOR ERROR
18 ATLAS STUMBLES
19 THE PLAIN OF CONFRONTATION
20 CLASH OF INFINITIES
1. THE VOLCANOES OF TONGARIRO
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 th
e 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.
The full array of sensing equipment had been installed years ago—seismometers to measure the shaking of the earth; geodometers to check for ground swelling; tilt meters; stream gauges to record water temperature, pH level and concentration of suspended minerals in the nearby waterways; gas sensors to search out changes in escaping hydrogen, CO2 and SO2 that might signal movement of magma below the surface.
Ruapehu had erupted briefly in 1995, Ngauruhoe not since 1975 when most of this equipment had been installed and Jami dreamed of being the one who was right there when the first minimal deviations began to occur in the instruments, to be the one to make the calculations that would confirm the oncoming eruption and—more deeply immersed in the same fantasy—be the one to make the predictions concerning what was about to happen.
It would be dark soon and she had a long drive back. She was wearily wandering from console to console, gathering paper, switching check-switches, when suddenly everything switched off. Or seemed to...
Nausea gripped her stomach as her head cleared from what seemed to be a moment of unconsciousness and she was sweating and shaking all over. In the room, for that vital second, everything remained quiet. She stood in utter disbelief—the moment had passed and it was as if it had never happened—and then suddenly the instruments went completely berserk.
Jami stared. There wasn’t any measurement of anything going on, just meters waving needles madly, digital numerals flickering incoherently and the chatter of the printers rushing to a crescendo. It was as if the whole system went crazy for a moment, rather than registering anything in particular.
She was a short, slim girl of twenty-eight with the honey-coloured skin and jet black hair that typified the Delhi region. She had initially escaped village life and the dead city of Agra with its hordes of beggars, one of which she might have been had she not won that scholarship that got her to school in New Delhi. Then she won the Jarayan Prize to university in America. She chose Geology because she had never seen a mountain, much less an interesting rock. The terrain of her childhood had been utterly flat and made entirely of dust. And people... far too many people. Geology offered the promise of eternal solitude.
Ten years later, it seemed that she had used up all her good luck in that initial burst. The solitude she found was not the type she wanted, and she was weary of rocks and mountains too. Nothing ever happened. Not when she was around. She had begun to believe that nothing ever would.
So she stared, unable to grasp the fact that she was right there, at the right time. It became even more unbelievable when everything returned to normal one second later. Like it had never happened, like an aberration, like maybe she was fantasizing. The consoles hummed on, almost apologetically.
Her slow reaction, her bewilderment, prevented her from taking the obvious step. The machines were meant to achieve their purpose without human intervention and did so. She was irrelevant. The obvious reaction occurred to her slower than it would have to a person who was not a trained researcher. Instead of continuing to try and make sense of readings that did not make sense, what she needed to do was go to the window and have a bloody look.
And she turned and ran through to the next room where a wide window faced toward the three peaks. What she saw took her breath away. An enormous black smoke plume was hurling itself thousands of feet into the sky from Ruapehu right above her. Similar palls were launched from the two smaller mountains beyond. It was really happening!
Already the ground ash cloud was sweeping toward her at terrific speed. One second after she witnessed the vision she had always dreamed of, it was gone. The dust and ash hit the window explosively, splattering night into the middle of the day. The impact caused the wall to abruptly tilt at the ceiling level, and the whole room, befogged with dust, seemed to move several feet to the South.
The building started to shake. A roar rose in her ears until it caused her such pain that she was forced to cl
amp her hands over them.
Jami staggered back toward a corner and huddled in it. Death, she knew, would have already occurred or it would not. She was still alive and therefore safe, but that knowledge did not make it any less terrifying.
She was a shivering bundle in the corner, trapped in a death-like night of thunder and lightning and heat, and yet her mind was still working. The lights began to flicker as the emergency power kicked in and the fluorescence drew her out of her state of shock. She shook her head, striving to overcome her fear, but frowning too, and beginning to think again.
Her glimpse of the eruption was only momentary but its impression was deeply burned into her memory. The hail of rocks on the roof began to rise toward a crescendo. It seemed that at any minute the structure might collapse but the building was reinforced and could stand up to this and a lot more. She was safe and there were things to do. Important things to do. She was on her feet and made her way unsteadily back into the console room.
The instruments hummed on as if nothing was happening when plainly everything was. The printers had stopped. All the dials were reading normally. Three volcanoes were in full eruption, one of them was massive and less than two kilometres away and the most sophisticated monitoring system in the world didn’t seem to know it. Ridiculous.
Jami forced her way to the table and chair at the centre where a yellow telephone reminded her of the next obvious step. She picked it up and was automatically connected to a switchboard. Right now, she knew, the alarms would be going off at the University, at the Bureau of Meteorology, at the National Parks Emergency Service, police, fire stations, hospitals, all around. The initial burst of activity in the equipment would have done that but now they would be waiting for some sort of confirmation, especially since everything had apparently returned to normal. Power surge, they would be thinking.
