And the World Changes - A M Kirk (books to read fiction txt) 📗

outfit, and because of John’s weak connection with them, the police had a file on him as a potential terrorist, and that explained why they were so anxious to locate him. Anyway, to get back to the disappearance: John stayed missing for three weeks and there was absolutely no trace of him anywhere. I was just going to pieces. I was on tranquillisers, everything. Then one day, about three weeks later, I opened the door to the flat, just heading off to work in the morning, and there’s John, naked as a new-born, asleep on the door-mat.”
“Naked?”
“Yep. Naked. Well, I got him inside, and it was like he’d been drugged. He was very thin, like he’d been starved. I took samples of his blood, but there was nothing. And he had no idea where he’d been. He didn’t even know what day of the week it was. It was a mystery. So things settled down for a while and seemed to go back to normal, but he still couldn’t explain where he’d been. And I believed he was telling the truth when he said that. But then the nightmares started. Oh my God, they were terrible. He’d wake screaming – and I mean screaming – and he’d run around the flat banging on the walls as if they were a prison and holding his head. It went on for about three months. He said he kept seeing things, like visions, or waking dreams. Then, eventually, he said he thought he had been abducted by aliens. Of course, he did not call them the Soros. Like you said earlier, he couldn’t have known about them, but you know – as soon as they landed I wondered. I wondered if they’d been here, somewhere, around us, for years. It crossed my mind they might have been scouting around long before they made themselves known to us. Anyway, John used to spend hours on the Internet, as it was called then, searching for some explanation as to what had happened to him, and trying to find reason in accounts of others who had shared a similar experience. There were plenty of them! I didn’t really believe them, and I’m sorry to say I didn’t really believe your dad at that point either.
“Then, about a year after John’s abduction, he told me he thought the aliens had implanted something. Something in his head. He thought it was some kind of metallic bug that could read his mind and control his actions.”
“Did you ever do any tests on him?”
“Me? No, apart from the blood samples and they were pretty straightforward. I was just a junior doctor then. Despite what you see in films, doctors can’t just waltz into a hospital and start firing up the X-ray machines. But he did go for an X-ray. Nothing showed up. I really began to think he was going out of his mind, I really did.”
“But that wasn’t the end of it,” said Mark.
“Well no. Just before you were born, John was driving us all to see his parents in Ayrshire. Granma and Granpa Daniels. You were almost nine months grown and usually kicking like mad to get out, I remember. Anyway, it started out a stormy night and got worse as we drove. Rain was absolutely battering off the roof of the car. We should never have made that journey, but John, well, John had insisted. I’d not been getting much sleep, because of you kicking and performing your acrobatics inside me, and I was getting more and more worn out. He thought his parents would help to look after me better than he could. He was going to pieces himself – not sleeping, not eating properly… Anyway, I’d been asleep in the passenger seat and then woke up. He started to bleed from the nose. I hardly knew what was happening and this all happened so fast. The blood was very bad, and I was so scared I could hardly think straight.”
Janette was finding it hard to speak. Longer pauses separated her sentences as if she were examining each memory before telling of it.
“He was screaming and he must have been in terrible pain, but he’d had the presence of mind to try to slow and stop the car. But you know, Mark, I’d swear the car didn’t slow down. I seem to remember John banging the brake pedal with his foot in the seconds before… but nothing happened. He managed to say something about a pain in his eyes, and he – and he – “
“The car went off the road,” said Mark.
Janette pulled into a lay-by. Tears, even after all this time, still came, silent and unbidden. “I can still see his poor face, and his eyes, they… they seemed to be looking right at me, as if…”
Mark put his arm around his mother, who rested her head on his shoulder and wept as she had not wept in fifteen years.

**********

A coffee bar in Crieff High Street. The window looked to the north so the room was in shadow. The menu was simple, traditional: tea, coffee, scones, cakes, filled rolls. The waitress was in her mid-forties and couldn’t really be bothered working on a Sunday morning. Mark and Janette were the only customers.
“It’s funny,” Mark remarked.
“I don’t see anything funny right now, given our situation.” Janette held her coffee cup in both hands as if the warmth could somehow impart a sense of security.
Mark went on: “Here we are, the human race, in the third millenium, or after four million years or so of evolution. We can fly in space, we can cure most diseases, we understand almost completely how life works, we have the most amazing, magical gadgets, we work miracles every day: we do all this and yet there always have to be people who work in coffee bars.”
Janette looked at her son curiously. “John used to say similar things. ‘The poor are always with us’.”
“But have you noticed how much we take all these things for granted?”
Janette nodded. “I’ve had all this conversation with your father, Mark. A hundred years ago the majority of the world lived in the most appalling squalor. Measles, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, polio were all serious killing diseases. If someone had said back then ‘Hey everybody, I can rid the world of these things’, he would have been hailed as a saviour. Well, hey everybody, we damn near did, and no one really thinks anything about it. No one really gives it a second thought.”
The waitress approached. “Is everything all right?” She was only making polite enquiries, part of the shop’s customer service plan.
“Everything’s fine,” Janette replied, and then was conscious of the enormity of her lie.
The waitress smiled. Her overall tag identified her as Laura. “Some more coffee? Second cup’s free.”
Mark and Janette nodded and Laura refilled their cups. Laura returned to the counter and busied herself with restocking some shelves.
Mark looked at the window displays. Pictures of the Soros space ship were on nearly everything. “Look at that,” he said. “I’ve never really noticed it before, but the Soros have even entered our Scottish culture. Someone is making money out of them.”
“Just about everybody seems to be making money out of them!”
Alongside gift ideas like shortbread tins, tartan dolls and miniatures of whisky, the shop sold models of the Museum, maps showing how to get to McIntyre’s Field, books and DVD discs on the aliens and the impact their arrival had made on the world.
“I wonder what they really look like,” mused Janette. “Do you know?”
In recent communications from the Soros space ship, it had emerged that Earth’s air was unsuitable for them, and they did not want to take any chances on being contaminated by the many microbes that hover in our air. They were familiar with H.G. Wells and the War of the Worlds. This comment was interpreted by many as a sign that the aliens had a sense of ironic humour, and were therefore like us and were therefore good.
World leaders had been invited to meet with the Soros, to come aboard their space ship, but always the Soros wore protective space suits that made them look stocky and clumsy. Experts had made a lot of money analysing the shapes and bulges of the Soros suits, and many of the details looked similar to human space suits. But no one really knew what the bulges signified, if anything. They may have been merely decorative.
Some people thought they were the spindly almond-headed, large-eyed aliens of popular fiction, and the suits were to make them look stronger.
“No,” replied Mark. “But I have the feeling that the Soros are certainly not weak, gangly creatures,” replied Mark after a thoughtful pause. Then, slowly, he added, “I have the feeling that we… know them.” He frowned. “ And I have a feeling that they… how can I explain this? They like to play.”
“Play?”
“Play games.”
“What sort of games?”
“Ah. I’m not sure. Yet.”
Janette shivered. “God, I still can’t believe what’s happening to us. My house, our home. All our things… just like that. And now it looks like these things were responsible for your father’s death? That’s no game.” She shivered, although the day was not cold. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go for a walk.”
Janette paid at the counter and smiled weakly in return when Laura wished her a nice day.


9 Crieff


Church bells were summoning the faithful. The High Street was beginning to fill with tourists. The Woollen Mills and Souvenir Shops displayed their goods. The Soros items were becoming very popular. One shop advertised a new brand of whisky, the Soros Single Malt.
Janette said, “We are going to go into shock in a little while, I think. I’m amazed we haven’t already.”
Mark understood. People as a general rule need time to adapt to traumatic experience. Three hours ago their lives had seemed to be as normal as anyone else’s, whatever “normal” meant. Now it seemed they were on the run, hunted by aliens intent on killing them, for reasons unclear.
They found a little park and sat down.
“It was the magnetic imaging that helped to start all this going,” said Mark. “I think this thing in my head connects me to the Soros. When you used the magnetic imager it somehow jump-started it. I think we’re right about them being around a lot longer than it seemed. They were experimenting long before they made themselves known. This “thing” is like the thing they inserted into dad’s head, only… “
“But you’ve never been abducted,” Janette pointed out.
“No, but… I got this from dad.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m sorry. This is like looking at something through a cloud. You know those satellite images the weather forecasters use? Sometimes you can’t make out if you’re looking at the coast of America or Europe or whatever? Then other times the cloud is gone and it’s perfectly clear? Well, what I’m feeling is that my mind’s eye is