by Louise Moss
“Gerald’s right. We’ve behaved badly,” Christine said.
“What you were saying about needing us to breed …” June began. Nobody voiced the question that was uppermost in their mind.
“That is correct. That was the Leaders’ plan.”
“They’re not taking my baby away!” Emma screamed.
“Take some deep breaths,” Christine urged.
“Before they died, the Leaders instructed me to allow you to live together with your offspring, provided you did not present any threat.”
Gerald heaved a sigh of relief. He knew that Hagan would not go against the Leaders’ instructions. “I don’t think we should question Hagan’s motives too much,” he said. “We don’t understand his ways. That doesn’t mean he’s a bad person.” The group nodded uncertainly.
“Look here, all we’re trying to do is survive, like you” Pete said. “If we fight, we’re all doomed.”
“He’s right. We must all work together,” Christine said.
“They’re not going to take my baby away, are they?” Emma said, holding tightly onto Aurora.
Hagan recalled to mind what Zorina had taught him about the Primitives’ body language and did something that was alien to his nature. He looked directly into Emma’ eyes, disguising his feelings of revulsion. “You have my word that they will not,” he said solemnly.
“It’s going to be all right,” Christine reassured her.
“I require to know before you sleep which items Primitive Michael require for the departure. I will load the trailer during the night, and in the morning he will leave. My people will come on the third Earth revolution.”
“When’s that?” Pete asked.
“Three days,” Christine whispered.
Hagan thanked his people and felt them withdraw, all except Helkos, who remained with him. It was a good feeling. He was no longer alone.
When Hagan had gone, Michael said, “I’m not going to put up with this. If we all act together, he can’t do anything.”
“You saw what he did.”
“That? That wasn’t him. It was just some trick.”
“Don’t be foolish. You said you wanted to leave anyway.”
“Not like this. He won’t even be here when the baby’s born. It’s so unfair,” Susan said.
“When is it due?” Emma asked.
“In about five months. That’s too long for Michael to be on his own out there.”
“Michael can get things ready for you and the baby. He’ll be able to set up the hydroponics system inside the dome and get it working. And sort out a nice place for you to live,” Gerald said.
Susan looked defeated.
“Let’s think about the list of things you need.”
“He can’t wait to get rid of me, can he?” Michael said.
“I’m afraid he was never going to tolerate you shouting at him.”
“He needs to toughen up a bit.”
“He’s a man from a different time.”
“All right. Let’s start with the hydroponic system. It will give us a start while we prepare the soil.”
“How much do you need?”
“All of it.”
“I’ll write it down.”
When he had finished compiling the list, Gerald sat in front of the cottage to wait for Hagan.
One by one, the lights inside the cottages went off. In the gloom, Gerald saw Hagan’s outline leaving the dome and walk over to him. It was hard to believe it was just an image, he looked so real.
“I think you will find that when Michael has gone, things will be better. Unfortunately, there were always people who wanted power and would use force if they had to.”
Hagan glanced at the list. “All things are one, joined by the life force that flows through all of us,” he said and walked back to the dome, leaving Gerald holding the piece of paper.
As promised, the pod and trailer were waiting outside in the morning with supplies. There was only a fraction of the hydroponics system.
Michael banged the side of the trailer. “There’s hardly anything here.”
“They’ll soon grow,” Gerald said.
Michael gave the trailer a kick and climbed into the pod. It slid easily through the flat, barren landscape and eventually stopped in front of a courtyard with a large stone pool in the centre. From here, roads radiated outwards in several directions. A brief search of the houses showed that many had a working well.
As soon as he had unloaded the trailer, it moved off, back the way it had come, leaving him alone in a vast desert.
The houses surrounding the courtyard were quite compact. Further up the hill, they were more spacious, some with an outside space. If there had been plants or ornaments here, they had long gone. There was no indication of how these people had lived. Everything had been removed and only the dust that had swept in from the plains remained.
Michael spent the afternoon setting up the hydroponics system. As it grew dark, he ate a couple of slices of bread with a few tomatoes and chicory leaves and wondered if he could survive. If there were ways of keeping warm or cooking a meal, he did not know what they were. At least Susan was spared.
As night fell, he lay down on the floor in one of the houses. When he woke, his body was stiff and painful.
After a meagre breakfast, he went outside. He had formed a plan. In this dry, dusty land, whoever controlled the water supply was in a position power. If he could find source of the underground streams that fed the houses, Hagan would no longer have any power over him. If Hagan tried to humiliate him again, he would cut off the water to the dome.
He had no compass or map to help him. The landscape on all sides was featureless, but as he walked, his footprints tracked across the dry, dusty earth. After an hour, he had found no stream or river. When a cold wind blew from the East, he decided to turn back.
After half a mile, he could no longer see his footprints. The wind had swept the ground clean. He walked for more than an hour, without any sign of the dome. He might have been going around in circles. It was impossible to tell in a landscape that looked the same in all directions.
He walked until it was dark, disorientated and dehydrated. There was no shelter, nothing but barren soil, so he curled up on the ground like an animal and tried to sleep.
21
Pete had renovated the end cottage to use as a recovery room. Emma found a hollowed out stone which she filled with earth, planted it with marigolds and stood it on the windowsill. It was the best she could do to make the place more welcoming.
Hagan had released two more people from the vault and she was waiting with Gerald for the couple to wake up. They made a point of talking about ordinary things, in case the couple could hear them.
“I’m glad we’ve got raspberries now,” Emma said. “But I didn’t like the lima beans very much.”
“I’d never even heard of some of the things we’re growing when I was a child: yams, okra, coconuts and limes, avocados and blueberries,” Gerald said, ticking them off on his fingers.
It was a lot easier for these new people when they came out of the vault now than it was back in the beginning. Back then, he and Emma had been locked in the clinic, along with hundreds of others, at the mercy of the workers. Now, people were brought out into a community of people just like them and were free to go where they liked. The cottages, the stream and the farm made everything look normal. The sun wasn’t very bright, the air was a bit grubby and there was the dome that they couldn’t enter, but that was the only clue that things weren’t the same as they remembered.
Emma stood in the doorway looking up at the clear blue sky. There was nothing to be seen, not even a bird, but there was a faint humming noise, so quiet she could almost think she was imagining it.
“My Dad used to take me up East Lane on Sundays,” she said. “He bought a bag of winkles and we’d eat them when we got home. Do you think - ”
She stopped. Gerald was staring fixedly at a point on the wa
ll saying, “I don’t know, I think they used to get them out of the sea.”
Emma ploughed on, trying to ignore the strange noise in her head. “Do you remember Hagan saying there are salt plains somewhere because the sea dried up?”
Gerald rubbed his ear. “We could maybe find make a salt lake nearby and see if we can farm some shellfish. We’ll have to look into it.” It had been a difficult speech, with his head feeling as if it were in a medieval torture instrument and he wasn’t sure if he’d made any sense.
Emma’s head was hurting and black flakes floated in front of her eyes. Derek and Janice could wake up at any time and it was really important that things looked normal. “I always wanted to taste a lobster but I never went anywhere posh like that,” she said, blinking rapidly to try to clear her vision.
“I’ll ask Hagan when I next see him.”
The bodies began to stir, and Gerald went through the speech in his mind that he always gave the newcomers.
Derek and Janice opened their eyes. Emma forced a smile of greeting onto her face and Gerald launched into his speech. He almost made it sound as if they were on holiday, on an experimental farm somewhere. He didn’t mention the pollution or the empty landscape beyond the farm or the lack of people until the newcomers started asking questions. Then, he would tell them the truth, but play down the extent of the problems. Usually, people looked serious when he had finished, but the new couple looked at each other and smiled. Smiled!
“I’m so glad I made the decision back then,” Derek said. “I carried a card with me at all times saying my body was to be frozen if anything happened to me. I wanted to go on for ever, and it looks as if I might!”
“Me too. There was so much to do – so many things to put right,” Janice said.
“The last thing I remember is collecting cockles in Morecambe Bay. I can hear someone saying we’re cut off. I don’t remember anything after that.”
Gerald and Emma looked at each other. Hagan had read their thoughts again – even before they had them! He was getting very good at choosing just the right person for the task ahead.
Janice talked about how she had worked for a few years in Africa delivering babies. “We didn’t even have electric light. We had to deliver at night by candlelight.”
Gerald did not tell her that although there was light, there was no equipment yet.
Derek and Janice left the recovery room and wandered around the farm. They seemed happy to have each other, even though they had only just met.
Pete came out of his cottage carrying a ball. Of all the things they needed, the one thing Hagan had let them have was the ball.
“Come on, we’re going to play football.”
“Rob used to watch football every week. He sometimes went around the country on his bike, but my parents didn’t like me going. I wasn’t keen on football anyway.”
Gerald wondered if she would ever stop thinking about Rob. He didn’t mind really. He rarely thought of Margaret, his dead wife, now. He did not belong to that world anymore, not since the drug Hagan had given him in the clinic had also removed the liver spots on his hands and the wrinkles on his face. He looked like a 30-year old but in his memories of Margaret, his children and grandson, he saw an old man that he no longer recognised
They placed two straight lines of stones some distance apart to represent the goal posts. “June and Richard against Christine and Pete,” Gerald said. “I’ll be the referee.”
Emma and Susan sat on the sidelines with the children. “At least the children are safe,” Susan said. “No deadly plants or insects, no cars, nobody who wanted to hard them or kidnap them.”
Hagan’s skin tingled and the room appeared to shift on its axis, as if he had left it and returned by another door. The bottles, the table, the shelves were no longer solid objects, but a mass of light and shadows. It had been a long time since his training to become a Superior, but he had not forgotten what it meant. It was something so rare, he never expected to experience it. Someone was sending out signals on the Sigma channel.
The human brain was incapable of receiving such transmissions, but he was not 100% human. To understand the message, he must suppress his human mind and allow the Kudlu part to rise to the surface. He knew of the dangers – he might not survive - but it was an opportunity that would not come again in his lifetime.
He lay down on the floor and imagined himself drilling down through the thick layers of brain, peeling back layers to reveal the pineal gland. Blood gushed and surged like a fast flowing river. He stepped into the torrent and allowed himself to be carried along, feeling his pulse slowing and his breathing deepening as if he were falling asleep. When he was near the point of unconsciousness, when he was no longer aware that he was laying on the floor, his mind began to drift, to separate from his body. It was his last chance to turn back. Beyond here was a place where all awareness of himself as an individual would cease.
Before letting go of his body and floating into the unknown territory beyond, he created a rope of flesh to link his medulla oblongata to his astral body. It was some protection, although he knew it did not guarantee his return. Allowing his body to separate and his astral body to rise, he drifted into a dark passageway filled with ghostly figures, spirits of the recently dead, waiting to continue their journey. They touched him, pulled him towards the doorway of death that lay straight ahead but there were other spirits here, reaching out, lifting his body and turning him away from the doorway. In the distant waves broke on shingle. He moved towards the cove and came out on a beach at the edge of a purple sea.
A column of light appeared far out to sea, moving towards the shore, the ethereal figure of a woman.
Do not be afraid. My name is Lepish. We have fled our home to seek sanctuary on the Earth like our ancestors many centuries ago.
You are Kudlu?
Yes, we come to seek our brethren but we can find no trace of them.
History records that when they arrived, they merged with the humans and founded a new race.”
There are so few of us now.
What happened to you?
Lepish pointed out to sea to where a mist hung in the distance. As Hagan watched, it parted to reveal bright orange flames, several miles high. Mountains appeared, purple and blue crags which began to crack and split. Many miles beneath the surface of our planet lays a vast ocean, 1,000 Earth miles long and 500 Earth miles deep. A nuclear explosion at the core of the planet caused the lake to heat rapidly, turning it to steam and splitting the rock.
The flames out to sea died down, revealing black mountains with rivers of melted rock running down the crevices. We fled to the safety of our ship. When we returned, the atmosphere was full of harmful gases. We could no longer survive there.
I am sorry for what has happened to your people.
I see now that your planet is not capable of supporting us. We will continue our search but need to carry out essential maintenance to our ship. Will you permit us to stay here for a few days?
“Of course, you must stay as long as you need.”
Unseen hands were pulling Hagan backwards, back the way he had come, through the passageway, empty of spirits now. He was tired but knew that if he rested, he would never return to his body. He skirted around the doorway of death, passed the pineal gland, said to be named because it is shaped like a pine cone (he had never seen one), and entered his body. He felt heavy now, trapped inside an outer shell. The laboratory floor was hard beneath him and he could hear the whirrs and clicks of the ancient mechanism that kept the vault at a constant temperature.
On the Kudlu ship, eight-year-old Hibo listened to the conversation between his mother and Hagan and decided he would like to visit the planet before they continued on their journey. While his mother was occupied, he positioned himself in front of the Flek Condenser. It was going to be no different from when he slipped into the landscapes created by the Mirage machine.
He had never used the condenser before, but he had oft
en watched the adults. Copying what they did, he watched, amazed, as a silver cord formed between his body and the place below. He took hold of the Flek booster and positioned his image at the top of the cord. Suddenly he was moving too fast. Pulling back on the booster, he came to a juddering halt.
He eased the booster forward again. It was difficult to get it just right: either his image went too fast, knocking against the edges of the cord, or he hardly moved at all. The further away his body went, the more difficult it was to control.
He was relieved when he finally bumped out of the end of the tunnel and landed onto bare earth. The light was dim but he could just make out ahead of him strange plants and creatures running up and down, shouting. They took no notice of him, for his image existed on a wavelength far above gamma rays.
He reached out to touch the small creature who lay on the ground, but he did not know that he must compensate for distortions caused by the atmosphere. His hand missed. After a few tries, he managed to touch her. The flesh was strange, hard and solid.
He laughed. He could do what he wanted. The Earth people couldn’t see him! He tickled Shapsu again.
Tiring of the game, he watched the group of earth people. They were playing a version of his favourite game, although the ball did not move in the same way as at home or on the ship. When he saw it was going to miss the line of stones, he reached out to divert it.
Suddenly his mother was by his side. Hibo, you should not be here.
I like playing. It’s fun.
She took hold of the controls and brought his image back to the ship.
As Emma reached out to draw Aurora and Shapsu to her, a flash of electricity sparked along her hand, like the time she had touched a metal door handle. On the pitch, the ball suddenly changed direction.
She shuddered. The last few months had been good but strange things were happening again.
“Who touched it with their hands?” Gerald called out, although nobody had been near the ball when it had changed course.
“It must be the wind,” Pete said.
“There isn’t any. Anyway, it suddenly veered off in the other direction.”