And the World Changes

by A M Kirk

  Mark said, feebly indicating his lips.

  Later, Mark walked her home. The driveway and the street outside her house were lined with expensive new hydrocars belonging to her parents’ guests. As they said goodnight, Carrie said, “Look, Mark, talk to your mum. She’ll know what to do. She’s a doctor – uh-oh, I’m telling you what you already know. But promise me you’ll talk to her. Promise!”

  The sound of the front door opening interrupted them. “Carrie, is that you, darling?” cried a woman’s slurred voice. The silhouette framed in the doorway held a drink in one hand.

  “Oh God, it’s Bitter,” Carrie muttered to Mark under her breath.

  “Yes, mum! It’s me,” she called back.

  “Who’s that with you?” This was accompanied by the sound of raucous laughter escaping from the brightly lit hallway behind her.

  “The party’s in full swing, I see,” muttered Carrie. “It’s Mark, mum! You remember Mark.”

  “Oh.” A pause ensued during which Mrs Jenkins swayed a little, leaned against the doorjamb for support and called, “Well, don’t be long!” Upon which she turned back in and left the door to swing shut.

  “Your mum doesn’t like me much,” mused Mark ruefully.

  “My mother doesn’t like anybody much. Not me, not dad, not even herself, I would guess. And if we follow the usual pattern of party events this evening, they’ll be all sweetness and light until the last guests pour themselves into their cars and then they’ll launch into one another about who said what to whoever and blah blah blah – you don’t want to hear about it. But back to the important thing – promise me you’ll tell your mother and get her help!”

  “Okay, I promise,” answered Mark, smiling. He kissed her. The kissing went on for a while, very comfortably.

  Eventually Carrie pushed Mark back with a laugh. “That’s a good boy.” She kissed him one last time, a quick peck, pinched his cheek, touched his neck tenderly where the birthmark was, grinned and turned to go up her garden path.

  Mark smacked her backside before she could retreat too far towards her front door.

  He watched her pass inside into the brightly-lit, noisy hallway. How, he wondered, could he really explain to Carrie exactly how much she meant to him? He loved her. Of that he had absolutely no doubt, and had almost blurted it to her on several occasions. He could not understand why had not yet told her how he felt. Bloody teenage angst, he muttered to himself. Does this ever wear off?

  As he walked home alone, however, his attention was turned again to how he felt physically and as he neared his house he became increasingly certain that there was definitely something not quite right. He was experiencing a strange sensation in his head, in the place at the back of his mouth where the nasal passages appear to join the throat. The feeling produced the same dullness, the same sense of onset of illness that he supposed could mean the beginning of a head cold. He really would have to speak to his mother about it.

  He paused a moment before passing through his garden gate, his hand resting on the cool stone newel atop the low wall. The night was much darker now and, in this village removed from city glow, the stars formed a splendid spectacle overhead, from horizon to horizon. Nights as clear as this were rare. Mark took the time to drink in the breathtaking stellar panoply.

  A bright streak brightened over Ben Vorlich then winked out. It lasted less than a second. A shooting star, Mark mused. Make a wish. He made a wish.

  Then it occurred to him, in a half-amused reflection, that he had – as far as he could recollect - never actually had a head cold. In fact, he’d never really been ill in his life.

  6 Sunday 1 July, 2018

  The first Sunday of his holidays Mark lay in his single bed, hands clasped behind his head considering what he knew about his dad. More and more lately Mark had found himself thinking about his father. In the outside world the sun was only just beginning to push aside the morning cloud cover. Someone was clattering about in a garage along the road – undoubtedly Mr Jarvis initiating his Sunday morning gardening routine. A door banged opposite, setting wind chimes jangling – Dawn Greenwood across the road heading out to pound the pavement for her morning jog, still trying to lose the weight she had gained before the birth of her girl, Lucy. A dog away in the distance barked, twice, then stopped, abruptly.

  Mark’s father, John, had died in a car accident just before Mark’s birth. His mother, Janette, heavily pregnant, had been a passenger, asleep, in the car at the time as they journeyed to Janette’s parents house near Alloway. The car – a Vauxhall Cavalier well past its scrap-by date. A lonely Ayrshire road, a night of violent storm, a bend the wrong shape for the car’s speed and a beech tree fifty years in the growing patiently waiting to embrace this moment for John Daniels’ car to wrap itself around its grey, glistening bark. For an hour the rain continued to batter the roof of the smashed car before a passing farmer stopped his Land Rover to investigate the still gently smouldering wreck, check the casualties inside, find one still alive, and call the emergency services on his mobile phone.

  The impact hastened Mark’s entry into the world: Janette delivered him in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. At the moment when his lungs inhaled their first breath to utter his first cry, two firemen were delicately cutting his father’s body from around the steering column that held him impaled against the driver’s seat. A subsequent accident inquiry found that, for some reason, the driver’s airbag, which might have saved John Daniels’ life, had failed to open.

  Mark had grown up without knowing a father’s presence about the house. Later, at school, having listened to the stories some of his friends told about the behaviour of their fathers, it seemed to Mark that the admirable qualities of fatherhood were uneven in distribution. Mark was not even sure where his father was buried, and that - just lately – had been something he had been feeling he ought to know.

  Mark and his mother lived in the little town of Touch; named after the nearby hills, Touch lay four miles west from Stirling and thirty-two miles from Glasgow. A new commuter town, built in the first years of the new century, the honey-brick houses were all of reasonable proportions, most having ample gardens, double garages, distance between them. The residents were middle class, professionals, affluent, and there was distance between them too. There was no local pub: this was gin-and-tonic, cocktail-cabinet land.

  The local comprehensive mirrored its middle-class catchment area clientele; its pupils, mostly, worked hard, caused little trouble and absorbed their parents’ values.

  Single parent families were rare here. Mark Daniels was somewhat unique among his circle of friends and acquaintances.

  His mother (the single parent) was the local GP. Her surgery, a small but well-equipped building, had been specially built in the gardens of her house. Unlike most of her neighbours, who shuttled daily to Glasgow or Edinburgh for their jobs, Janette Daniels had only a twenty second walk to get to work in the morning.

  Mark was one of those nondescript sort of boys who compose the majority in nearly every class in every school. He did not stand out from the crowd, and seemed not to hang out with any one group in particular, but he was popular and could move with ease between the various factions of school society: he had played football (substitute) for the school team and was a member of the computer games club; he had gained his share of knocks and scrapes running around the local hills and woods, but could retire from the great outdoors to spend a happy hour reading a book or digging through his old stamp collection. His bookshelf held some school text-books, a couple of volumes on computing (largely unread), books on the Net, trees and birds, and some fiction – the latest techno-novels, the Harry Potter stories, and some very old Dean Koontz and Stephen King “borrowed “ from his mother.

  Normal people in a normal environment? Perhaps they might have been – eighteen years ago, at the turn of the century, way back then in a time before the terror attacks, the scientific advances, the new technologies, the collapse
of certain economies. Yes, back then people could drive away in their petrol-driven cars to work in fluorolit offices in congested cities and spend their days happy in the thought that mankind’s eminent scientists and politicians were busily thinking up ways out of the difficulties the twentieth century had created. There was a kind of normality, as the quaintly sensational TV programmes of the time could reveal.

  But nothing seemed quite so normal anymore. Not after 2013.

  Mark tried to focus on some kind of image of his dad, but none would come.

  He frowned and closed his eyes. Still none would come. He could not even remember his face from the old photographs he had sometimes held, the ones his mum kept in the albums under the cine-cabinet. He tried to focus his thoughts… and a dull ache started again at the back of his throat, the same ache he had felt the night before.

  He pushed the thin woollen blanket back and got out of bed. He would have to ask his mum - that was all there was to it.

  **********

  Mark lay still on the softly padded examining couch, trying not to fiddle with the sensor wires stringing from his head. His mother was studying the magnetic imaging resonance results which should show whether or not there was any growth or obstruction at the back of his throat. The mini magnetic resonator, virtually a portable hand-held device, had largely replaced X-ray machines and the need for hospital X-ray wards because of its practicability in ordinary GP surgeries. Janette’s machine was transferring data from small sensors around Mark’s head to the large and very sophisticated Dell computer terminal on the work desk.

  His mother frowned at the images, deep in thought. “And it feels like a cold, you say?” Janette asked.

  “It feels like the start of a cold,” replied Mark. “But actually – I know this sounds daft - it also definitely feels like there’s some thing way back there.”

  In fact Mark had never had a day’s illness in all of his fifteen years. His mother had never enquired too deeply into this. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it was possibly her guiding principle in matters affecting her son. So when her son complained of feeling there was something at the back of his throat which shouldn’t be there, she was going to listen to him. “Okay,” she said, “it’s done. You can take those things off and get up.”

  Mark sat up looked at his mother. “Well?” he said at last. “Is there anything there?” He began to detach the sensors from his face and neck. One of them had covered the darker patch of his birthmark.

  Janette Daniels looked at Mark. He was more and more every day coming to resemble his father. The resemblance was uncanny, she sometimes thought. Like twins, or clones. Most bizarrely, Mark even had some of the same physical mannerisms John used to have, such as the habit of running his fingers through his hair when he was thinking.

  “What did you expect there to be?” she asked.

  “Answering a question with a question,” remarked Mark. “All right. I thought there would be a growth of some kind.”

  “Why?”

  “Just a feeling. You know?”

  “I see.” Janette knew the worth of Mark’s “feelings”. On numerous occasions, in a variety of circumstances Mark’s feelings had been correct. Like when he knew what was wrong with the car when it didn’t start that time last December; or when he predicted that their neighbour across the street, Dawn Greenwood’s child would be a girl and they would name her Lucy; or when…

  **********

  Positioned in geostationary orbit a hundred miles above the Atlantic, the Nordik IV Communications Satellite turned several degrees from its normal orientation. No one outside of the innermost defence circles in the US and the UK knew of the Nordik series of satellites or their prime purpose. Rumours of their existence circulated in defence journals but officially enquiries about the Nordik program were greeted with stony silence. In the US Defence Control Command in the heart of Cheyenne Mountain – the former home of the legendary NORAD – two terminals suddenly blanked out.

  “Goddam!” muttered Sam Webster. “Boss! I got nada on screens one and two.”

  “Route Nordik IV through to me,” said the “Boss”, Major Jack Bruce. Bruce was known was his unflappable coolness . “Do it now, Webby, not next Fourth of goddam July.”

  “Both terminals have gone AWOL on me, Major.”

  “Get that uplink back for me, please.”

  “I’m on it, Boss.”

  **********

  Janette passed the IMR results across to her son.

  He looked at the images intently for a moment. The hand ran through his hair.

  “Do you see it?” his mother asked.

  “Yes. I see something here, at the back of what I assume is my throat. So I was right.”

  “You were. Do you have any feelings about what it is?” Dr Daniels was concerned. It was no help to her to know that the latest surgical techniques could remove virtually anything from anywhere in the body without serious inconvenience to the patient. And this was not likely to be a malign tumour, not in a fifteen year old boy. And even it were, the genetic therapy techniques developed over the last ten years, since the completion of the human genome project in 2003, now ensured an almost 100% recovery rate for cancer victims.

  **********

  An iris door opened in the enormous barrel hull of Nordik IV. Huge solar panelled antennae shifted slightly to maximise solar exposure and maintain normal energy levels. But the secondary power source, a nuclear one, began to kick in - something which was not supposed to happen unless the United States, or its allies, were under attack from a nuclear missile. From the open portal in the barrel hull slid the apparatus which would enable “the weapon” to fire.

  Major Jack Bruce keyed commands into his console, to no effect.

  “Goddam flakey system!” muttered Webster. “This is the second time in about two weeks this has happened. It’s in the duty log.”

  Bruce’s left hand reached for the red phone at the side of the desk while his right continued to press “enter” to no effect.

  **********

  “Yes,” replied Mark, “I have a feeling about what it is. I think it’s organic.”

  “Yes, the IMR makes that clear. Something inorganic - metallic, say - would show up differently.”

  “But it has these strands, like wires, going up here… Where are they going?”

  “Your growth – if that’s what it is - is situated just below the frontal sinus and seems to project into the olfactory bulb…”

  “The bit that gives me a sense of smell? And from there, to the brain, right?”

  “Right. The olfactory bulb is actually a part of the brain, the only part you don’t need major surgery to reach.”

  “Mum – “ Mark put the MR image on the desk and stood up. “ -right now I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this.” Mark’s voice lost his warmth. Janette frowned. Mark had a way of communicating his bad feelings to others. She rose and went to the window, without knowing why.

  **********

  The beam weapon charged up in seconds. Nordik IV was absolute state of the art in particle beam technology. The “Grandson of Star Wars” had been given fresh impetus in the early twenty-first century and its development moved into high gear with the arrival of the Soros. Every possibility had to be explored to ensure Earth was not about to fall victim to an alien invasion. No fewer than seven beam weapons existed, three of them in perpetual geo-stationary orbit above McIntyre’s Field. Nordik IV was one of these. Electronic lenses aligned and focused and verified target.

  In Cheyenne Mountain control monitors remained blank. Phones were ringing now as back-up staff became alert to the condition. The red phone patched not to the President but to Allied Command in Stirling.

  “Get me General Miller,” said Jack Bruce, speaking words he had never wished to say. There was a three second delay and a voice five thousand miles away said, “Miller. What’s the problem?”

 
**********

  Early Sunday morning in her surgery. Janette Daniels looked out at the world from the white painted Georgian style surgery windows for the last time. Their house was just twenty metres away. The neighbourhood was invariably quiet at this time. She saw Mr Jarvis a couple of doors down moving to his garage to fetch his lawnmower, to continue his summer Sunday morning ritual. He was a decent sort, had been kind to Janette when she first moved here, and remained a good neighbour. Not the nosy sort.

  “My feelings,” said Mark, “have been getting … I don’t know how to describe it, Mum – sharper, clearer, but more varied. I don’t see things, like your usual clairvoyant might, I just sense them. I know them.”

  Dr Daniels had complete faith in her son.

  She looked out of the window at the quiet street. Images of John Daniels leapt unbidden to her mind – his flappy old overcoat, his disarming gee-shucks-folks smile, and she recalled, too, the unstructured, interminable debates which in the last year of his life had made Janette doubt her husband’s sanity.

  Mark went on: “This latest thing started – I mean, really started - when I went to the Soros Museum a couple of weeks ago.”

  Janette tensed. She looked sharply at her son. “The Museum? You went there?”

  She moved from the window. Mark met his mother’s concerned eyes. “I think I know now,” said Mark, “why the Museum makes you nervous. It has to do with dad, doesn’t it? Dad is connected to the Museum in some way.”

  Janette sighed. “Your father’s been dead for fifteen years, Mark.”

  “Yes, I know, but there is some connection. You felt it just then and I feel it too. He knew about the Soros! “ As he said the words he became convinced of their truth. “That’s it! He knew about the Soros before they came here. Before they even landed! But how could that be? How was that possible?”