by A M Kirk
A conjuring trick. But that same ball of light could have been sent hurtling and smashing through matter with devastating force. The Soros had made him a weapon indeed. He could harness the forces that bound the universe – the nuclear forces, the electro-magnetic and the gravitic.
There was virtually nothing he could not do by manipulating these elemental forces: but he understood some things with the utmost clarity. Once a thing was destroyed it could not be restored. You can’t uncook a steak and turn it back into a cow. You can’t unkill a living thing once it’s dead.
His background, his upbringing and his mother had given him his sense of values and his ideas of right and wrong; and this Soros “computer” system had reinforced that strong vein of common sense he already possessed. Mark realized that this “evolution” had ramifications and consequences that could not be sorted out in a day or a month or a year. If he was going to be a superman he would have to think this through for a long while.
What would Carrie say? he wondered, and smiled that smile she loved so much.
He put his hands in the grooves again. The viewscreen lit up. Mark could sense the myriads of data accumulated and stored in vast memory banks. The ship had brilliantly detailed star charts and navigation programmes. It navigated by the detection and manipulation of gravitons as well as light particles and, protected by an electro-magnetic force-field, it could travel at virtually light speed without colliding with space rocks and meteors and all the debris that floated between planets and stars.
Mark wanted the ship to turn towards earth… and the ship turned towards earth, turned as smoothly as if had been floating in oil. The system had sensed or he had somehow transmitted his desire and the mighty ship had obeyed. A dark shape the size of an old penny appeared to cross the viewscreen as the massive ship tilted and turned: Mark knew that was the frozen planet Pluto. Beyond it, very small, and blending in with the millions of other stars, was the good old sun, a mere speck of light. The system helped him to instinctively identify it. He wanted to zoom in so he could see Earth, so the viewscreen re-aligned slightly and the magnification increased a thousandfold and there was Earth, sharply focused, blue and white and calling him back. It must have looked this way to the Soros, Mark reflected. They too must have seen their home planet with a fluttering feeling in their hearts. The viewscreen returned to normal magnification.
The pod in which Mark had been imprisoned still drifted off the bow. Mark brought it back aboard and stowed it in its proper place.
Right, he thought, let’s just see what this baby can do! The ship shot forward and Pluto vanished behind. The light from the stars changed colour and Mark knew that somehow this was part of the navigation programme. He slowed the ship after a few minutes and brought it to a standstill.
Pick up transmissions, he thought. The viewscreen became a cinescreen and he saw terrestrial television broadcasts of the Soros ship taking off – he was aboard it! - earlier that day. A BBC journalist he recognized, pictured with McIntyre’s Field in the background, was talking in an animated fashion about the sudden departure. Obviously that was the number one news item all over the planet.
This part of space was a clutter of jumbled signals, a hiss and yammer of transmissions, all from earth. The system under Mark’s direction filtered out the unwanted ones.
Mark realized he needed time to get to grips with all this. It was all so much! This system – he thought of it as a computer system but it was much, much more than that – seemed to be almost teaching him on some unconscious level. He was aware of it, but did not think it sinister in any way.
Then he understood that this system was what he had been listening to, tuned into, all along. Or rather, this had been tuned into him. He thought he had been listening to the Soros themselves but in fact, he now knew, that he had been listening to this system and this system had been telepathically connected to all the Soros minds.
And so… This raised many questions in Mark’s mind. And the one uppermost was:
Who controls who?
In some obscure brain cell the grammatical mistake in the question registered. But no answer was forthcoming. He sensed the system thinking.
Then the answer came: You control.
Mark nodded, and ran a hand through his hair. Hmmm.
He lifted his hands from the console. The viewscreen remained operational and his communion with the system was unbroken.
In dreams, he thought. My knowledge and power seemed to come in dreams. As if some timing switch regulating his bio-clock had gone off he was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of fatigue so numbing that he had to sink to the floor. He curled up like a baby, the lights in the command deck dimmed, the viewscreen went blank and Mark fell into a sleep, a sleep deeper than any he had ever known.
And in that sleep, what dreams did come…
He slept for four days.
33Sunday 8 July
Sunday morning in the high security environment of the complex under Stirling Castle was little different from the previous mornings.
They ate a desultory breakfast and Doctor Gold came in and spent an hour with her two patients. Roberts had returned to head the investigation into the League. Janette was moderately sedated still, Carrie less so. There was still some danger posed by the maverick members of the League, so Carrie and her family had been installed in the Castle complex as well until it could be established that the threat was over. Carrie’s parents came under protest, but the protest, Carrie perceived was insincere, for her parents were savouring the attention and fuss generated by the situation. Carrie ended up spending more time with Janette that with her parents. Martin and Ann did not seem to mind.
General Talbot called on the viewscreen, as he had several times every day, to see how his “charges” were bearing up, and to again bring no news of a return of the Soros or Janette’s son.
Neither Janette not Carrie had given up hope.
So far the military had succeeded in fending off press enquiries about the whereabouts of the “miracle boy’s” mother, but with every passing day it was getting harder to keep it secret. Someone was bound to talk sooner or later. The world would have to be faced.
“A week ago today it all started,” said Janette to Carrie. She had come to view Carrie as a combination cell-mate, refugee, good friend and surrogate daughter. “Just one week. Eight days ago I had a reasonably normal life. And now this!”
Carrie put an arm around her. “I know. How much longer can they keep us here?”
The Sunday papers were full of the Soros story. Endless pointless and ignorant debate about their true identities and purposes, why they had been so mysterious, why they had abducted a fifteen-year-old boy, the role one of the Directors of the CIS had played in it all - endless, endless. Roberts and his family had gone into hiding, so pestered had they been by reporters. It was assumed that hospital or police personnel had talked to the media and given away his identity and his connection with the “boy the aliens took to the stars”.
“They don’t know anything,” said Carrie. “They haven’t a clue.”
Roberts rang at midday. Janette smiled with more warmth than she had shown in days at his image in the viewscreen.
“Chris,” she said, “What news? How’s your family.”
“Oh, Jackie and Sally are fine now, thanks. Janette - I thought I’d fill you in on latest developments.”
The detectives working on the case had identified the owner of the flat where Janette and Carrie had been held prisoner as Simon Logan. His interface had yielded up a valuable list of members of the Human Freedom League all over the world and these were being tracked down. The helicopter pilot who had kidnapped Janette from Glen Lyon had been arrested at his brother’s house in Dundee. Others connected with that incident were now in police custody in Fort William. Logan’s Jeep had been located at a service station on the M6. It was thought he had hired a car thereafter but so far the trail had gone cold. Roberts had strong reason to believe that
he was now firmly embedded in a new identity that might take some time to trace. The records of every car hire firm within a fifty kilometer radius of the service station were being combed for any point of similarity in description of license holder or signature samples on hire agreements. Traffic control DVD records were being scrutinized for any sign of the Jeep in transit or being parked.
The G5 left behind by the League member killed in the fall from the train – Cameron – had provided more useful contact, numbers and addresses and so, bit by bit, many more pieces were being added to the CIS’s overall picture of the League and its activities.
“There is one thing I have to ask you, Janette,” said Roberts.
“Fire away.”
“It concerns the notes Mark made in the Bridge of Orchy Hotel.”
“What about them?”
“The map he drew.”
“What about it?”
Carrie drifted over to the viewscreen, peering over Janette’s shoulder. Janette took her had affectionately.
Roberts held the map up to the viewscreen so they could see it. “Do you recognize that?”
“No,” said Janette.
“Good God, yes,” said Carrie. “That’s Pango… Panga… Pangia.”
“Yes,” replied Roberts. “Pangeia… “
“It’s earth about a hundred million years ago,” explained Carrie for Janette’s benefit. “I read a book…”
“Mark drew this map after being linked with the Soros,” pursued Roberts. “Why would he do something like that?”
Janette shrugged. “He said they like to play games…”
“No,” interrupted Carrie. “It’s not that, I think. Mark said one time that ‘we knew them’. Could it be that the map is a map showing the… Soros world? So the Soros came…”
“From Earth,” finished Roberts. “That would mean the Soros are not aliens at all. And if that’s true, it means that there’s a good chance they will come back. If this is their home world they’ll surely want to come back… And bring Mark back too, perhaps. The point is, Janette, we mustn’t give up hope.”
“I’ve not,” replied Janette, quietly. “I never will. And what you’ve said could very well be right.”
**********
In McIntyre’s Field the security fence and the armed guards enclosed a vacant lot. The grass grew as it always had. The wind rattled the links in the fence. The soldiers chased away hippies and ET freaks that wanted to build a new Stonehenge on the spot. Tourists and UFO fans clustered in sullen groups at various points around the perimeter fence – they had booked their visits in advance and had been dismayed in the extreme when the sole object of their visit had flown off into the wild blue yonder, leaving only bare patches in the field where its legs had rested or, more accurately, floated.
But a week had gone by since the Museum had disappeared and of the tourists in their buses and hotels or the soldiers on the ground very few really thought or it would return.
Lance-Corporal George of the Scots Guards was therefore more than a little taken aback when, at oh-five-hundred hours on the morning of the second Wednesday in July, one week after its departure, the Soros space ship returned.
Equally surprised, and even frightened, were the satellite radar monitor operators around the country who had been warned of the approach from space of a space craft. The approach was slow, compared to departure, but steady.
The Soros ship touched down in McIntyre’s Field with a gentle bump. The legs extended and occupied grassy circles. Even at that hour of the morning the news had been communicated around the hundred encamped officially and unofficially around the site. A great cheer went up from the New Age quarter.
News reporters, within minutes of their mobile phones rousing them from sleep, rushed to their cars to get to the Stirling area as fast as they could.
General Talbot, who was still in the Stirling Command Centre, rushed to wake Janette personally.
“They’re back!” he said. “Get dressed and come with me. Quickly now!” Janette would never forget those words as long as she lived.
She woke Carrie, sleeping in adjacent quarters with her parents. “Come on,” she said. “I think he’s back. I think Mark’s back.”
Fast army cars, Jaguars again, raced them to McIntyre’s Field. McIntyre himself had appeared on his verandah to welcome back prosperity with the new day.
As Talbot’s car drew to a halt inside the compound, and he, Carrie and Janette got out, the familiar door opened in the hull of the space ship and slid soundlessly to the ground.
Into the hushed expectancy of the morning Mark stepped. He raised an arm in a shaky wave and Carrie’s heart soared as his eyes found her in the crowd and flashed her his gee-shucks smile. He began to walk down the slipway, but before he could set foot on planet Earth again, his mother was racing across the grass to grab him in her arms. Carrie was at her side and not the least embarrassed at showing her emotions.
Mark said, laughing, “I think I’m meant to say something like ‘Gee, hi, mom, hi honey’.”
“Yeah,” said Carrie, “and we little stay-at-homes are meant to say ‘Gol-dang it, you must be plum tuckered out after yore little jaunt an’all.”
“But do you know what? I’m bloody starving. I’ve been asleep for four bloody days! Even a Big Mac would be welcome! Two Big Macs!”
“Ah Mark,” said Janette.
All three began to cry and laugh together, and the gathering crowd, not piercing at all the privacy of the moment, began to clap and cheer.
34Afterwards…
Days of debriefing by military, scientific and political people followed - questions after questions after questions.
Mark told the truth. The Soros had given him a power and used him as a weapon. He explained who and what the Soros were, how they had encountered those mysterious creatures known as “the Enemy”, and how they had returned to Earth expecting help but finding it populated by a new, technologically inferior species.
He told of how they had loathed us, how they had used us in horrible experiments, and how, in the end, they had died to save us. And he did not fail to mention how one, known as Striped Arm, had given his life to preserve Mark Daniels. He explained that “the Enemy” had been killed by massive explosions in the second Soros ship. He did not try to explain the sub-atomic nature of “the Enemy” or the precise details of his part in their destruction. When pressed, he confessed that events at the time had been so frightening that he had great difficulty recollecting them clearly now.
The Soros bodies, he explained, he had ejected from the ship - his idea of a “space funeral”, the most fitting thing he could think of to do with their mutilated remains. They had, after all, spent millions of years in space, so it seemed appropriate. The scientists were very unhappy to hear this.
Then the scientists asked him about his wonderful gift – his power. They had seen the recorded evidence of it from the hospital and from his passing through the fence around the perimeter. Yes, Mark said, the Soros had given him a power, but unfortunately the source of that power had died with the annihilation of the enemy and the deaths of the last of the Soros. The power had depended on Soros telepathy, he supposed. The “growth” in his head that had apparently been his link with the Soros seemed to have withered shortly after the battle. His tremendous power had gone with it. Mark could no longer put his hands through tables, walk through walls or cause strange behaviour in mobile phones. For him that was the worst part, he said. Just when he was getting the hang of it, it was taken away from him. He’d been really looking forward to being Superman. But when all was said and done, he was just glad to be back with his mum and happy to be able to see his girl-friend again. All he wanted now was a normal life.
The scientists nodded and made their notes, leaving out the part about his gladness, his mother and his girl-friend.
Naturally tests were carried out. But no device could show the faintest trace of any growth in Mark’s head. Results
showed it had indeed disappeared.
It had taken him a long time to figure out the controls of the ship, he said, and that explained why it had taken four days to return to Earth, given the incredible speeds the ship was capable of. He thought it might be useful to us here on Earth. The scientists wanted to know what had happened to the bigger ship, the mother ship, as it was clear now that the craft Mark had used to return to Earth was only a landing craft.
The bigger ship had been just too complicated, Mark explained. He had abandoned it in favour of the smaller, easier-to-fly landing craft. The scientists’ eyes lit up. So the bigger ship is still out there? Mark admitted that it was. It is still out there, somewhere in the solar system, waiting to be found. Mark couldn’t tell them where, exactly – he was only a fifteen year old boy, not an astronaut. But he could willingly show them what little he knew about the controls of the landing craft.
The scientists wasted no time in lengthy expressions of gratitude. They could not wait to get their hands on this alien technology that had been like a barb in their sides ever since the aliens’ arrival in 2013.
Mark pointed out, to no avail, that the Soros had not been aliens. And in the next few days he was not surprised to see that his advice was not really considered valuable.
“Just show us what buttons to press, son,” seemed to be the standard scientist’s attitude, “then run along back to your computer games. Leave this to people who really know what they’re doing.”
“Computer games?” replied Mark. “Okay.”
So he did as he was told.
The search for the mother ship would begin at once, however: the Holy Grail of the twenty-first century.
The search was also on to find those others who had been implanted by Soros devices. Medical researchers were desperate to find out how those things worked. Janette was invited to take part in the track-down operation, but she remembered her husband, John, and declined. She had had enough of such matters.