“Not quite. Supply trucks and rear echelon still to come through. As soon as they’re through, we’ll need to move to the next location to open a gate for the next regiment. Then, its off to the top of the pass for the third.”
DIMO(N) Briefing Room, Pentagon, Arlington V.A.
“You’re drunk.”
Dr Surlethe’s comment was half serious, half joking. Nevertheless, Dr. Kuroneko looked blearily up at him before taking another gulp out of a tumbler full of whisky. “So would you be if you’d been thinking what I’ve been thinking.”
“And what part of trans-dimensional mathematics with special relevance to Netherworlds had brought on this display of inebriation.” On reflection, Surlethe decided that inebriation was not a bad idea. It seemed as if it had been a long time since he’d been able to relax. More than 18 months in fact, ever since The Message had arrived and the Salvation War had started. He went over to the bar and got himself a drink, noticing with distaste that Red Label was the only Johnnie Walker it had in stock. By the time he’d got back, the level in Kuroneko’s glass had dropped notably.
“The bit that says we’re all doomed.”
“You think we’re going to lose this war? Surlethe was slightly shocked.
“No, course not. We’ll find a way into Heaven soon enough, and when we do we’ll blow the place apart. They’ve had it up there and we’ve had it down here, just going to take a bit more time for us that’s all.”
“How much more?”
“A few billion years give or take a decade or so.” Kuroneko made a visible effort to pull himself together. “You know we live in an expanding universe right? Well, one of the theories of cosmology is that our universe will keep on expanding until it’s in a state of heart death, when all the stars and planets are dead and there’s just an even distribution of energy everywhere.”
“So I’ve heard. Do you believe that?”
“Probably not. But doesn’t matter. When we’re in that state, then the universe starts contracting again and it keeps on contracting until it forms a singoor… strinlari… a point. Then it all blows up in another big bang. But now we’ve found the Hell dimensions and guess what, its contracting. And our early figures suggest that the whole Hell domemshun is contracting at the same rate as ours is expanding. Don’t you see?”
Surlethe leaned back in his seat and shook his head.
“It’s obvious. If all this is true, then our dimension and the hell dimension are opposed pairs. We expand until we reach heat-death and then start to collapse. At that exact moment, the hell dimension finishes its contraction and has the big bang, starting its expansion. That’s when we’re like Hell, all living in bubbleworlds, they’re like us, living on planets. And so it goes on forever and ever. Just going backwards and forwards, pointless, planless, without purpose. And if that thought doesn’t make you want to get drunk, I don’t know what will.”
“Why? We’ll all be dead by… Oh, I see what you mean. We have no idea how long creatures in the hell dimension live do we? We could be alive up there, for an eternity. We’re not doomed at all though. Now we know we can make portals, we could skip from one to the other and become eternal. Just like the gods we once believed in.”
“Excuse me, might I join in?” Norman Baines was standing behind them.
“Sure, pull up a pew. We’re just screwing the inscrutable.” Surlethe finished off his glass and got a replacement.
“So I heard. You’ve seen this of course.” Baines produced a black-and-white disk from his pocket, the circle divided by an S-shaped line that saw one half starting off at nothing and swelling out while the other collapsed the opposite way. One half was black, the other white and at the fullest point of each half was a small circle of the opposite color.
“Sure, its the Ying-Yang symbol. Hippies loved it.” And that comment ages me he thought.
“Well, I was listening to Dr. Kuroneko and what he was saying made me think of this. Look, if we hold it so the dividing line is vertical, then turn it through 180 degrees, it shows exactly what he’s been saying. One half forming and growing, then collapsing while the other does the same but in reverse phase. And the dots are the portals joining the two.” He put the disk on the table and started turn it backwards and forwards.
“He’s right you know. It does illustrate what you’ve been saying.”
Kuroneko finished his drink. “Makes you wonder of the old Chinese philosophers had this whole thing worked out, doesn’t it.”
“Taoist, but here’s a funny thing. The same symbol, its called a Tajitsu by the way, crops up a lot of places. For example, one of the Roman Legions used the same symbol and it predates the Taoist version by a couple of centuries or more. It’s believed some of Alexander’s units used it as well. So did the Thebans. And there’s stories that it turned up in ancient Egypt. Suppose the Tajitsu isn’t just a mystical symbol but is a descendent of something that was handed down from ancient civilizations to tell us what the universe is really like?”
Surlethe thought about that for a long, long time. Finally he looked at Baines. “I really wish you hadn’t said that. Now I want to get drunk.”
Council Chamber, Yamantau, Russia
“There is a major problem coming up, one that I believe this Council must address.”
The speaker looked around at the fifteen council members. Not all were physically present, but those that weren’t were on great viewscreens that lined the walls. Whether present as flesh-and-blood or electronic imagery, they all nodded. “Proceed.”
Doctor Samuel drew breath to deliver the bad news. “We have an impending energy crunch. The fact is that with what amounts to every army in the world fully mobilized and conducting military operations, they’re burning a mass of diesel fuel. It doesn’t matter whether its peace-keeping operations in Hell or the fighting going on in Thailand or the war that’s about to start in Korea, they all cost fuel. It doesn’t end there. Every factory on Earth is running flat out on triple-shifts, those that can are producing munitions ad those that can’t are making up for the facilities that have been converted to war production.
“We can’t change that. We’re still replacing the munitions we expended in the Curb Stomp War.”
“I know, but it takes energy and that means fuel. We’re shifting to nuclear power as fast as we can, but rebuilding the infrastructure takes time and building the plans takes more energy. We’re behind the curve and that situation is becoming terminal. Put simply, we’ve been pumping and refining oil so fast, we’re damaging the fields and the refineries are in desperate need of repair and renovation. That could get worse, we’re entering hurricane season and that means the weather attacks could start again. Refinery capacity was critical before the war started, now its far beyond that. We need more refineries and more oil resources. The former we can build if we’re given the go-ahead, but actually finding more oil reserves. Well, to give you an idea, the current levels of unexploited oil reserves are higher than at any time in recorded history, the figures are in Platt’s Oilgram, but they’re still not enough.”
“There may be a solution to this.” The spotlights switched to another figure standing in front of the great horseshoe of desks. “I’m Coogler, one of the geologists working in Hell. Do you all recognize this?”
He held up a bottle containing a black solid. The Council looked at it, shaking their heads.
“Well, you’ve all heard of the Lava River in Hell. The one we’re pulling our dead out of. Well, that was always a bit odd because if it was real lava, there wouldn’t be any bodies. They’d be flash-vaporized. So, we had a closer look at that river and it turns out, it wasn’t lava at all. It’s a mix of what amounts to a very heavy crude oil with extremely light fractions. It’s really strange from a geological point of view, in some ways, it’s a bit like shale oil but don’t push that comparison too far. Human crude is a mixture of fractions as well, some heavy, some light, some in between. Hell crude has nothing in between, its all either very light or very heavy. When it comes out of the ground, the light factions vaporize and burn, giving the appearance of a river of fire.