Kallandra switched from her cellphone to view her larger laptop computer screen.
Claude had directed her to CNN broadcasts of mountain shaking in other countries.
“Derek, come and look at this.”
He turned from the kitchenette, holding an empty mug. “You said you wanted hot chocolate so that’s what— What the hell? Is that Sugar Loaf Mountain?”
“It sure is. In Rio. Apparently Rob put him on to it.”
“Our Rob? The Aussi shrink at NASA? Don’t tell me he was having a picnic on top of Sugar Loaf?”
“No, but he’s addicted to news reports.”
“So, is Sugar Loaf lifting like Glastonbury?”
“Difficult to say. The images are too indistinct—like our problem with the shaking ground.”
“Isn’t that giant statue of Jesus on top? There’ll be panic if that’s fallen.”
“No, Christ’s on top of Corcovado Mountain. On Sugar Loaf the two cable cars have broken.”
The kettle called Derek to the kitchenette. “You do realise that Sugar Loaf could be a real volcano about to blow?”
“That’s what the authorities believe. They’re evacuating millions—my God, where are they all going to go?”
Kallandra hungered for more information and clicked from CNN to Reuters, the BBC, and Earthquake Watch in an endless cycle until something new happened.
“Ayers Rock seems to be splitting in two!”
“Ah, you mean Uluru,” he said, pleased to score a minor one-up, but then her announcement reached a consequences brain cell. “That’s got all the aborigines buggered. And they’ll blame the whites. Hey, that can’t be volcanic surely?”
“Not sure, hang on, I’ve asked Claude. He said he’ll be right back. Where’s that hot chocolate?”
He pulled up a chair so they slurped and watched the screen together. Kallandra found a live webcam for Sugar Loaf Mountain but it appeared as blurred as their Glastonbury. Ayers Rock would be at night so she didn’t try searching for a webcam.
Claude sent her laptop a link to the geology of Ayers Rock.
“Hey, Uluru is like the tip of an iceberg. Only it has a sandstone root six kilometres deep.”
“There’s an interesting bit,” Derek said. “The aborigines believed there was a sacred hollow inside the rock below ground.”
“Maybe their ancient folklore knew something after all. Now what? CNN is reporting quake activity in the Yosemite Valley. But…” She switched to the Earthquake Watch site. “It’s not being picked up by live seismic centres—oh, yes it is, but not deep.
No epicentre as such so not a fault movement. More a local disturbance, like when an avalanche occurs.”
“I didn’t realise you knew so much about interpreting P and S waves,” Derek said, rubbing his ear.
“I’ve always had an interest.”
“Um, especially since we met Claude.”
“You know we have to have more than one or two high level interests on the astronaut training course. Besides piloting I dabble in Artificial Intelligence and—”
“Language, especially bad language, so why geology except that the dashing Claude…”
“Linguistics, true, but that’s kinda part of the AI work I do. Anyway geology would be useful on Mars. Except it shouldn’t really be called geology there—that’s the study of the Earth’s structure. It’s called Areography, from the Greek God of Mars.” She glanced at Derek to see if she’d sufficiently diverted his attention from Claude. “It’s El Capitan in Yosemite. It’s cracking up. Whoa, and there’s a big landslide from Tabletop mountain in South Africa. There is a pattern here.”
Derek sipped his drink, and then said, “They’re all monuments, important to people?”
“Well, they are and possibly all sacred to ancients, maybe ‘cos they’re individual lumps that are different from their surroundings.”
“If the Earth is shaking up for some tectonic reason, maybe those more isolated features would be the first to crumble. Something you could have sweet words with Claude about.”
“You could ask him yourself,” she said, wishing he’d give his jealousy a rest.
Claude, who once came second in a Denzel Washington look-alike contest, came onto women and they back to him like butterflies to a Buddleia. But at the letting-our-hair-down party last fall, a vodka too many allowed Derek to spy her and Claude in a smoochy close body-contact dance. She’d explained how it was the fault of alcohol, and that she’d no romantic intentions a thousand times to the nth power, but…
A knock at the door brought Blake shuffling into the room. “Have you heard?”
Derek nodded. “We know about the other mountains if that’s what you mean.”
“What other mountains? No, I meant the Festival has been relocated to Bath.
Will you take me tonight?”
Derek looked at him with his mouth open but nothing came out. He walked over to the window and cleaned his glasses with the curtain.
“No, is the word he’s struggling for,” Kallandra said. “We’re tired. Try again at breakfast.”
“But it’ll be a blast—bound to go on all night.” He was fondling a walnut-sized metal ball, and then threw it in the air. Derek snatched it.
“No it won’t,” Derek said. “It’ll take them all night to set everything up. What’s this, a Chinese stress ball? I didn’t know you were into Tai Chi.”
“Then I’ll help them. Oh, please uncle Derek. I’ll tell everyone what a great uncle you are—”
Blake had to stop to answer his cellphone. Derek grabbed it, giving back the ball.
“Ah, so that’s the hidden agenda. Who’s Amanda?”
Kallandra smiled and stroked Blake’s arm. “Aren’t stress balls supposed to tinkle, and come in pairs? Where did you find it? So, you have some totty lusting after you in a tent. Derek, you remember those days?”
“On the tor, it was rolling down. You two in a tent? Ugh, I’m glad you aren’t my parents.” Blake grabbed his phone and stomped out.
In a rare moment of dry wit, Derek called after him: “So are we!”
* * *
The lumps in Kallandra’s half of the bed didn’t stop her weary body lapsing into grateful unconsciousness, but her active brain woke her moments before the dawn made a spectacle of itself.
While Derek snored she showered with the bathroom door open to glimpse breakfast news. Sadly, for her, a prince had allegedly had an affair, so most of the airtime on British TV gave it undue importance. She switched on her iPaq while checking her cellphone messages. One from Claude referred her Ayers Rock enquiries to Rob Summers, the NASA psychiatrist, who’d returned on vacation to his Australian homeland.
“E-mail: to Claude Lapointe
CC: Kallandra Harvard
Hello, Claude. Having a barbeque fest here since I arrived. Ayers Rock—hey buddy, we call it Uluru these days. I’ve not been there for years. Your alert made me look at some news, and it does seem like something weird is happening—the bloody thing’s split—allegedly. My guess is that some existing cracks have opened up. The strata are vertical so it’s not so far-fetched. However, what you see isn’t what you get.
LOL. There’s over five more kilometres of upended strata buried. I can’t see the crack going all the way.
I wonder if it’s the same kind of thing that’s happening to Huashan Mountain in China?
I’d go and investigate Uluru myself but I promised Rosie I’d spend this leave with her, and I’m due back at JSC with you guys in a few days.
Kal, sorry to hear Glastonbury Fest has been interrupted. Brings back memories—can’t remember the music tho.
Maybe the planet’s having a wobble, Vic?
Cya both next week.
Rob.”
Useless man, Kallandra thought, but replied with thanks and pleas to go to Uluru to check it personally. The Huashan Mountain news interested her. A scrambled whiz around the web found nothing except tourist information about the mountain being a Buddhist and Taoist sacred place with shrines strategically placed to assist the faithful.
Maybe the authorities have their scientists all over it but have hushed it up.
Could be there’d been developments at El Capitan and Tabletop on CNN.
Before she could click, a rap at the door startled her.
“Good grief, Blake,” she called as she tightened her dressing gown. “It’s only six in the morning. Derek, get your ass out of bed, your nephew wants his lift.”
But the door opened to two uniforms. One policewoman, late thirties, stern, a couple of shoulder silver studs meant she’d worked her way up the ranks. The other was undoubtedly male, khaki army uniform with impressive and thus high ranking moustache, which twitched as he spoke.
“Major Harvard?”
Before she could deny the fact on the grounds she didn’t reveal such intimacies to strange men, he continued. “We need you and Mr Stone on a matter of urgent National Security.”
“Really? You know we’re on leave?” she said, then yelled: “Derek!”
“Indeed, but NASA has permitted us to request your assistance.” Bizarrely, a steward wheeled a breakfast trolley into the room from behind the Colonel. “But how did NASA know where we were staying?”
Derek coughed as he emerged from the bathroom. “Let them in, Kal.”
“You told JSC where we were. Traitor. I’d told them we were in London.”
“I had to, they might have needed us in an emergency—and it seems I was right.”
Frowning at being thwarted she waved in their visitors. “What’s all this about?
Have you been parking illegally, Derek…again?”
The policewoman shook her head, but remained unamused. “I’m Inspector Scrivens, and this is Colonel Dean. One of my officers reported that a couple bearing NASA credentials—”
“Glastonbury? Why, what’s happened overnight? I haven’t felt any earthquakes.”
“You need to make your own observations.”
“Oh, come on,” Derek said, offering a cup of coffee to Kallandra. “Has the tor sunk again, or split apart like Uluru?”
The Colonel looked puzzled.
“Ayers Rock,” Derek said, as if scoring a point.
“I know it’s called Uluru, but didn’t know it had anything to do with Glastonbury Tor.”
“And,” said the Inspector, “we’d rather you see for yourself. We have pictures but…”
“I completely understand,” Kallandra said. “We’ll be there as soon as we’ve dressed and breakfasted.”
“We’ll give you fifteen minutes and take you in my helicopter,” said the Colonel.
“The roads are pretty much impassable this side of the cordon.”
“Really?” Kallandra said, “have the Festival people returned…” Her left eyebrow lifted to emphasise the question, but the visitors had left. “I bet they have guards on the fire escape in case we make a break for it.”
“I thought you wanted to investigate the damn Tor.”
“I do, but I don’t like being ordered about. Especially by foreign authorities.”
“Hey, you’re the foreigner here,” Derek said, then he unwisely head-butted a jam-loaded croissant she threw at him.
* * *
As soon as they rose above the roofs of Weston-Super-Mare they could see the M5 motorway had become a linear car park.
“I’ve known it to be like that on Bank Holiday weekends,” Derek said.
The inspector cleared her throat, something she shouldn’t do into a headset, resulting in pained expressions from the others. “Oh, sorry. The traffic thins once past the Glastonbury turn off. It seems they’re mostly rubbernecks, and added to by New Earth neo-paganists.”
“No festival goers returning?” Kallandra said.
“Oh my God, I’ve forgotten about Blake,” Derek said. “He must still be in bed.”
His left finger rose towards his ear. Kallandra intercepted it and held his hand in hers.
“Let him stay there,” Kallandra said, “the rest will do him good. Inspector, I’ve been trying to find information and images on what’s been happening and failing. How did all these people know that the Tor is disintegrating?”
The Colonel laughed. “Not the Internet, nor television, my dear. Eddie Wear on Radio Weird. He broadcasted from Glastonbury Festival for the New Age folk, and then got wind of the strange happenings. His Campervan turned over when it was struck by a landslide. He called every hippy and music lover in the country to pay homage to the Glastonbury Devil that must have caused it.”
“Derek, make a note—we’ll have to a create a list of causation hypotheses—oh, my, there it is. What the hell’s happening to it?”
The top half of the tor appeared to float. Rubble was all that remained of St Michael’s Tower. Soil—mostly clay and turf—clung on, but Kallandra swore she could see sunlight glinting off the rock beneath.
The Colonel talked into his headset to them. “It was three metres clear of the ground at six o’clock.”
Her earlier photographs had disappointed her with insufficient detail, but now there was daylight beneath, easily seen as the helicopter sought ground level to land.
All the passengers were so intent gawping at the bizarre view of a hill suspended in the air, that unlike the pilot, they hadn’t noticed a tractor pulling a muck-spreader into their landing spot. The helicopter lurched upward, tilting violently to the right.
“Sorry. But we have a suicidal farmer trying to stop me landing. Where are your troops, Sir? I thought they secured this field.”
“So did I. Land in the next field before that madman gets there—I’ll radio my people.”
Cattle scattered as the chopper landed.
Embarrassed soldiers with feeble excuses reached them moments before the red-faced farmer drove up in his spluttering tractor. “What right have you to land on my land? And look at what you military people have done to it.” The man was in tears, while waving his brown hairy arm at the tor.
“It’s got nothing to do with the military, Sir,” said the Colonel, bristling at the accusation of making the world’s slowest ballistic missile out of a national heritage.
“Who else could do it? This land has been my family’s since William the Conqueror. Why did you have to ruin it all?”
“We are here to investigate this phenomenon,” said the policewoman. “Kindly let us get on with our job. I’ll have you arrested if you obstruct us.”
“That’s a bit harsh,” Kallandra said. She walked over to console the farmer, but took a step back when his border collie growled. “Sir, I know it must be hard, but something strange is going on and we—”
“Ah, the Yanks. I might have guessed your lot would be behind it. Doing experiments you wouldn’t dare in America. Anyway, I’ve sent for my solicitor. I’ll be suing the army, the government, America. Anyone responsible.” Two men were running from the farm buildings shouting. A woman walked rapidly behind them. The farmer’s family were on their way to stop him having a heart attack.
“Derek,” Kallandra whispered, “add military experiments to the list of hypotheses.” He looked at her as if to think she was joking, and then wrote it anyway.
The Colonel waved his men to secure the helicopter landing area before leading them through a gate in the tree-lined hedge to the tor.