‘It’s not music!’ said Connie in exasperation. ‘That isn’t music!’
There was no point in trying anything ridiculous this time: it could only end very badly. This time they walked back in the front door, together. Robinson the porter blinked twice when he saw them and glanced quickly at his phone. Connie nodded at the old man to let him know she didn’t think it was his fault that he had to do what he was going to do.
‘We don’t have much time,’ said Connie, knocking on Evelyn’s door. Evelyn opened up immediately. Evidently she wasn’t getting much sleep either. Connie woke the boys too; Arnold rubbing his eyes from too much time in front of the computer; Sé sombre in a pair of dark pyjamas. Only Ranjit had been fast asleep, his hair sticking up from his head.
‘Where were you, dude?’ said Arnold. ‘They think you killed that other dude.’
Luke didn’t say anything.
‘Did you?’
He shook his head wearily.
‘Do you know who did?’ said Sé. ‘Or, like, what?’
Luke hesitated as the others stared.
‘I think… I think it might be somebody just like me.’
‘What, an extraordinarily talented and really lazy mathematician who’s never heard of Bart Simpson? Or, like, cheese?’ said Arnold.
Luke shook his head.
‘Not exactly.’
Outside the sirens started up again. He glanced over at the window.
‘The thing is, I’m different.’
‘We noticed,’ said Evelyn.
‘We need to protect him,’ said Connie fiercely.
There was the sound of boots in the hallway, and a banging of doors in the other wing.
‘Why, because he killed the professor?’ said Sé, a shadow passing across his face.
‘Because he’s an alien, you twonks,’ burst out Connie in frustration. ‘It’s actually perfectly obvious when you think about it.’
There came a heavy knocking on the door. They all stood in a circle and stared at him. Luke rubbed the back of his neck, profoundly uncomfortable under the scrutiny.
‘Yay!’ said Ranjit. ‘But don’t death-ray drain me like you did the professor.’
‘I…’ Luke shook his head. The pounding came again.
‘Professor Prowtheroe? Are you there?’
Evelyn stood up and looked around.
‘Ah,’ she said quietly. ‘The knock on the door in the middle of the night. I know it so well. One reason I moved to Britain was that I thought that this was a country where the knock on the door in the middle of the night did not come. Apparently I was wrong.’
She looked at Luke.
‘They are coming for you.’
He nodded numbly.
‘Is it true what she says?’
He nodded again.
‘You look real enough to me,’ she said.
‘I am real,’ said Luke. ‘I keep saying.’
Arnold’s mouth was gaping.
‘Can you, like, make yourself invisible?’ said Ranjit excitedly. ‘Or beam yourself up? Or fly?’
‘We would never have met if I could,’ said Luke. Connie suddenly found herself glad, even though it was so very bad.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ shouted Evelyn to the door in a sleepy voice. She turned back to Luke.
‘Don’t tell them anything. Nothing. Don’t let them suspect. If they suspect – if ANYONE says anything…’
She glared round the room fiercely.
‘They’ll chop him up for parts, you understand?’
Arnold nodded dumbfoundedly. Ranjit bobbed up and down. Sé was impassive as ever.
‘Not a word. Not a word from you to them. Not a word from us to anyone until we figure out what to do.’
‘I have too many secrets to keep,’ said Ranjit wonderingly.
‘Well, welcome to adulthood.’
And Evelyn went and opened the great oak door before Nigel and his men splintered the four-hundred-year-old wood to pieces.
Nigel was as dapper as ever, even at 4 a.m. He nodded.
‘Bit of a conference going on?’ he said.
‘Well, seeing as we’re not allowed to talk to anybody except each other, it’s either this or sit in your room on your own in your underpants,’ said Arnold.
‘Do much of that, big man?’ said Nigel pleasantly. His gaze rested on Luke. ‘Ah. Doctor Beith. We just wondered if we could have a word?’
‘Of course,’ said Luke, looking at his shoes.
‘Did you really need to have all the sirens and heavies?’ said Connie. ‘We don’t live in a police state.’
Nigel looked at her.
‘Well, the Queen has taken it pretty well, all things considered. But I don’t think anybody quite knows what kind of a state we are living in,’ he remarked. ‘Not after what you chaps have come up with. Therefore we need to make sure everyone is safe.’
Everyone thought about Ben Hirati. It barely needed Nigel to add, ‘But they weren’t, were they?’
After the men had taken Luke away, they sat there in silence. Dawn was breaking outside the windows, but nobody could have slept in any case.
Evelyn, as always in times of emergency, went and put on some coffee. Then she took large amounts of dried fruit and grains from her small kitchen store cupboards and set about making homemade muesli. It was surprisingly reassuring to watch.
‘I can’t believe Luke is an alien!’ said Ranjit excitedly. ‘I can’t believe I’ve met a real-life alien! I wish I was an alien.’
‘You are to him,’ pointed out Arnold. Sé frowned.
‘Do you think…’ he said. ‘Do you think what’s happened… I mean he’s always been a little peculiar. Do you think he might be… catastrophically mentally ill? I mean, if he’s had some sort of psychotic break, some kind of episode… the way Hirati was killed was really unpleasant.’
‘Luke didn’t kill him,’ said Connie fiercely. ‘I think… I looked into his eyes. I believe him.’
‘Maybe they’re not eyes,’ said Ranjit thoughtfully. ‘Maybe they’re tiny feelers painted to look like eyes.’
‘Oh God, it’s such a mess,’ said Connie.
Evelyn brought over five bowls of muesli and set them down with spoons tidily placed at right angles.
‘A mathematical truth,’ she said, ‘is neither complicated nor simple in itself. It simply is.’
‘Well, Occam’s razor says he’s a homicidal nut-job.’ Arnold frowned. ‘Which is annoying, because I really liked him.’
And it went on. It did not stop: not for sleep; not for the chance to take the implications in; not for a break; not even to mourn the man they barely knew. They were servants of a government power now, and it went on, and on, and on.
There was more information sputtering out, great screeds that needed decoding, worked up, laboriously unravelled. Arnold had tracked down the hidden microphones in their room, and had sat next to one of them an iPod playing continuous Justin Bieber straight down it, so they could talk quietly, reasonably confident they wouldn’t be overheard, and also it would make whoever was spying on them want to kill themselves.
Connie’s head was spinning; she was a constant mix of feeling utterly on edge and entirely exhausted, and was terribly worried about Luke. She didn’t see him all day, and wondered whether they were holding him up in the SCIF. She worried about DNA. Did he have any? Would it help or not help? Would he tell them? Surely not. Would they believe him? It was a stretch: from some distant signals from another galaxy, to an alien walking among them.
And of course, if they did, the consequences would be even worse.
Instead she buried her head in the numbers. It was slow going, very slow. Something round was emerging, but very tentatively. She could only imagine there was some way to communicate and codify within it: an internal key that would make her read more fluently, but she couldn’t sense what it was.
And it was hard to concentrate anyway, when all her thoughts were of Luke – who he was an
d what was happening, but it was more that, and she knew it. The way he had wound her hair around his fingers as he stood so close, as she gazed into his deep eyes.
‘Oh crap,’ she thought, getting herself another cup of coffee. ‘This is worse than that time with Sé.’
‘Hmm?’ said Sé who was in the way. She looked at him, startled.
‘Sorry, was I talking out loud? Sleep-deprived.’
‘Oh no,’ he said, filling her cup for her. ‘No, you just looked a million miles away.’
Connie inadvertently let a half-smile cross her lips, her gaze out the window and far across the field. Sé watched her, but she didn’t even notice he was there.
It was like a mirage when Luke re-appeared two days later, Connie thought through her exhaustion: her dream become reality when he appeared back in the room at five in the evening after two days where they had got no further than the endless waves and the curves of a shoreline and something that appeared to be a line. It was a huge map. But to where? What of? Why?
When Luke walked in, alone, everybody froze at first. Then Arnold’s face broke into a huge smile.
‘Seriously, dude, no handcuffs?’
Luke held up his hands.
‘They couldn’t hold me,’ he said, looking down. ‘Apparently the DNA machine isn’t working.’
‘That’s weird,’ said Ranjit. They gave him a second to get it.
‘Seriously, dude, you broke the DNA machine?!’ said Arnold. ‘Whoa!’
‘I’m not allowed to travel anywhere. But they didn’t find any evidence that I was there, I don’t think. That Nigel, he asked and he asked and he asked, over and over again, the same things, all the time.’
‘But they can’t prove you weren’t?’ said Sé. Connie looked at him in surprise. His tone was hostile.
‘Sé?’
‘What?’ said Sé. ‘I can tell you that I didn’t kill him. But it certainly looked like somebody did.’
Luke blinked.
‘I don’t have any interest in trying to change your mind,’ he said, and turned away. Connie walked over with a pile of printouts and cleared her throat.
‘Um’ she said. ‘I was thinking.’
Arnold watched her out of the corner of his eye.
‘I mean, obviously… you can read these, right? If they’re from your people.’
Everyone was watching openly now. Luke bit his lip.
‘Mmm,’ he said.
‘Well, can you or can’t you?’ said Connie. ‘Because it’s going to take us for bloody ever.’
‘If he just translates it straightaway, they’re going to suspect something’s up,’ said Arnold.
‘Rightly,’ said Evelyn.
‘Well, we’ll just pretend it took a bit longer and play Jenga,’ said Connie.
Luke nodded sadly.
‘Don’t you want to read it?’ said Ranjit.
‘I don’t really have to,’ said Luke. But he picked up the first of the printouts and read it intently; then the next and the next. He sat down heavily, ignoring the rest of them, even as Evelyn demanded, ‘What does it say?’
Ranjit, meanwhile, was behind Luke’s back, surreptitiously sniffing him.
‘Stop it,’ hissed Connie as she saw him lean in.
‘He smells like the sea,’ whispered back Ranjit. ‘Like the sea that you saw in the designs.’
Connie didn’t want to say that she already knew that. Luke didn’t notice at all: he ran his hands through his thick, curly hair, his expression intent and very serious.
‘Have you got feet? Have you got toes?’ Ranjit was saying. ‘Does your hand turn into a gun? What are the ladies like on your planet? Are you actually blue?’
‘Shut up, Ranjit,’ said Sé, who had taken up another pile of the paperwork and had started to work on it after Connie and Evelyn had given them a quick seminar on how Connie had solved the signal two days before. But he was only pretending to work, Connie could tell. She was surprised he was so hostile. She ignored the little voice inside her telling her that Sé perhaps had very good reasons to be afraid that someone from another world might be walking among them.
‘Yeah, shut… Hang on, are you actually blue? And what about the ladies? Are there ladies? Are you a lady? Oh. That would be disappointing. Because you’re quite good-looking,’ said Ranjit. ‘But not for a lady.’
Arnold looked down at his pen and paper.
‘I shall now prepare a four-hundred-point questionnaire of all the things I want to know about aliens, alien planets, alien ladies and there’s another bit about alien ladies, which you can either read, or mind-meld with me later. But no probes. But if you own a probe, I would really like to see it.’
Sé tutted loudly.
‘I want a probe,’ said Ranjit. ‘But to probe other people with, I mean. As a noun. I don’t want, like, “a quick probe”.’
Luke was still ignoring all of them and instead picked up another printout, but was saying something under his breath. When he finally turned around, his face was grave.
‘What does it say?’ said Arnold. ‘Are they going to blow us up in, like, four minutes? Because if they are…’
He looked sorrowfully at Evelyn and Connie and batted his eyelashes.
‘Don’t even think it, big man,’ said Evelyn.
‘Are they going to make us their slaves and force us to do things with their ladies?’ said Ranjit.
‘I need to get out of this bunker,’ said Evelyn, putting her hand over her eyes, ‘before you all turn into sex pests. Also, I can’t believe there’s the existence of an entire, new, intelligent species in the galaxy and all you think about is rubbing your groins up against it.’
‘Or a ton of shit getting blown up,’ said Arnold. ‘Also we think about that.’
Luke shook his head. ‘No, nothing like that,’ he said. ‘No. It’s just what I thought. They’re coming for me.’
Chapter Eleven
There was silence.
‘Oh, it’s all about you,’ said Sé, not pleasantly. ‘Is that nice?’
Luke stared at him, blinking repeatedly. ‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘Not at all, in fact.’
‘He’s being sarcastic,’ said Connie. ‘And he’s going to stop it right now. Seeing as we are looking at the first ever translatable signals from the other side of space, maybe you could put down the scepticism and aggression for two seconds?’
Sé stood up. His face was drawn and furious.
‘Prove it.’ he said. ‘Prove it to us. We’re all sitting here, in fear of our lives either from some… some… sky-ray gun or from some psycho loose in the facility, so it might be helpful if we knew a little bit about what we were dealing with rather than taking Luke’s airy-fairy word for it.’
Everyone was very tense now, looking at each other. Finally Luke sighed. ‘This is why I had to move from Belarus. I don’t do well with wild temperature fluctuations. And I can’t be too near the sea. Too tempting. So here was by far the best option…’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Ranjit. ‘Do you melt?’
‘Does anyone know where to get some ice water?’ said Luke quietly. They thought for a second.
‘Biology lab,’ said Evelyn. ‘Ninth floor. I’ll defrost one of the rat biopsies. The animal cryogenics girl fancies me bad.’
‘Well, you’re a lot more attractive than what she spends most of her day looking at,’ pointed out Arnold.
‘That’ll do it,’ said Luke, as she left the room at high speed.
‘Where are those cameras?’ said Arnold. ‘I saw them in the SCIF.’
He screwed up his eyes and marched around the room.
‘Here,’ he said finally, glancing down an angle. He pivoted up. Sure enough, there was a slightly larger hole in the pinboard tiles that covered the walls. ‘And the same on the other side…’
‘Or we could just go out to the cupboard,’ offered Ranjit. ‘Get cosy.’
‘No, if we all disappear, they’ll get suspicious,’ said A
rnold. ‘We’ll have to just find a blind spot for Luke then pretend we’re doing something else.’
He moved up to the mike and switched off Justin Bieber.
‘Okay, you guys, time to discuss the cleaning rota once again. Evelyn’s going to show us how to scrub everything down properly to stop all that mould stuff getting about…’
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