Free The War of Immensities by Barry Klemm Page B

length and breakfasted in the cafe. This regime
existed seven days a week. Though it had not always been so. It was
just a phase he was going through. And going through.
    There was a
time when this house rang with joy and laughter and it would have
been the last place where he would have sought solitude. That was
before the cancer devoured Karla, and the kids were home. Now
Elmore who was doing transport systems at the University of London,
and Anna doing anthropology in the wilds of the Andes. All gone
now—not even their ghosts remained to haunt him.
    Thyssen sat at
his desk in what had become unfamiliar surroundings. The house was
bare—he had sold off everything he didn’t need. He didn’t even have
a computer and had brought this notepad home to work on. He turned
off the lights—Joanie wasn’t the only busybody in the street—and
the small screen became the only illumination by which he
worked.
    He did not
pause to read what he had been writing—that train of thought was
broken and he was sure he had not got where he was going anyway.
Although it was hard to tell, because he didn’t really know where
he was going, and wasn’t sure he would recognise it when he arrived
anyway.
    What he was
supposed to be doing was writing his funding submission to the
board, to get some money to pay for Jami Shastri’s research. But
every time he started he knew he was lying—telling them things they
might want to hear instead of the truth. That was common
enough—what occurred to him then was that he didn’t know what the
truth was.
    And so he began
to play this little game with himself—just sitting and writing
whatever came into his head and then seeing if there was anything
of interest there. It was a useful tool at such times, provided he
remembered to delete it later, before anyone saw it. It opened up
his thoughts, allowing them to bound freely, unrestrained by the
usual faculty politics and the need to maintain some credibility
amongst his colleagues.
    Where his
free-range thoughts took him was alarming.
    He found he was
thinking about impossibilities. About things that could not happen,
and could not be proven if they did. He was thinking about things
that men could not know.
    To comprehend
the incomprehensible. That was the challenge before him.
    How to research
into matters that lie beyond our ability to understand them, even
if we could detect them?
    It wasn’t the
simultaneous eruptions that bothered him. That was feasible. The
three volcanoes might have been three vents from a single magma
chamber—in fact probably were. Moreover, he discovered that two of
those three mountains had been in eruption at the same time in the
past. All quite likely.
    The lack of
forewarning was harder to explain. Volcanoes erupted as the
consequence of geological events. This time there was no evidence
of any such occurrence. No build up—and just the single blast,
albeit huge. There were aftershocks but they were minor surface
tremors—the earth resettling as a result of the disturbance, and
not actually part of the disturbance itself. The volcanoes had
erupted for no apparent reason. Or at least, none that anyone could
find.
    Still, if
unprecedented, it was imaginable. You could conceive how, in
certain extra-ordinary circumstances, something of the sort might
occur, however unlikely. He was okay with that.
    What really
bothered him was the shock-wave, or whatever it was, that had
preceded the eruption and produced a definite physiological episode
in those people near the zone. It had preceded everything—it had
made them ill—then the eruption had occurred.
    Now that was
inconceivable. But Jami had reported it and then the others,
independently. So it had to be real. But what could it be?
    It was rendered
ridiculous by the matter of scale. This force gave people a slight
attack of nausea, and could disturb a giant magma chamber under
their feet, and yet affect nothing else and be completely
undetectable by