And the World Changes by A M Kirk (classic books for 12 year olds .TXT) 📕

He had, in fact, been crying. He was tired, worn-down, feeling ill and mad with frustration and despair. His wife, Jacqueline, still ill and exhausted herself from her sick-bed vigil over Sally, held her husband’s head against her chest and encouraged him. But he could hardly get words out. His hands gripped her fleecy top at her shoulder blades.
A phone call had told him Miller had been killed, his entourage massacred, his body found in a deserted lane somewhere to the North of Glasgow. And the boy, Mark Daniels, this strange-sounding boy that Chris had plucked off a mountainside in the wilds of Scotland that afternoon, this somehow terribly important boy, had vanished into thin air. Jacqueline stroked her husband’s hair and said hush.
Sally slept the convalescent sleep in her cot and smiled and twitched mysteriously as babies do.

**********

Eight o’clock in the evening and Logan was triumphant. He looked up from his interface. The Chairman had given him cause for great hope, and the final wheels – literally, Logan mused – were about to be set in motion. The two females in the other room were secure. Their ropes would hold, their gags were back in place. He had removed blindfolds, however. They could see, but they must not speak. The mission, the Chairman had just assured him, had been a success. Miller, (“the arch-traitor”) was dead – it was on all the news programmes. Never mind that it had cost League lives – those lives had been willingly sacrificed in the greatest cause the world had ever known. And Logan, Commander Logan, had played the pivotal role in developments.
Logan felt the same rush of pride a child might feel at a father’s sought-after praise.
The League members had all now been instructed to stand down. They were no longer to concern themselves with the boy, Mark Daniels. He was more than likely as good as dead anyway. And after this night, as a consequence of these finishing touches being made my Logan, the Soros would cease to trouble mankind.
Logan was at the front door of the flat. He had switched off the interface for the last time; he had loaded his few belongings into the Jeep waiting downstairs; he took a last look round and smiled. He was proud of all that he had achieved here, in secret, unknown and un-trumpeted. But the human race might one day discover his identity and might one day come to understand why he had done what he was now about to do. He might one day be thanked!
A metal plate was attached to the lowest point of the door. Ten centimetres from where this plate would be if the door were closed, Logan had placed a magnetic block, a twelve-centimetre cube. When the door is opened the attraction of the magnet will force the plate at the foot of the door to come into contact with it. A firmly secured wire leads from the magnetic block; another wire, equally secure, leads from the door-plate. Both wires cross the room, in which the light is now fading, and lead to the wardrobe, still strongly padlocked. The wires enter the wardrobe and enter a sealed container that contains a small, but powerful explosive device. Attached to the explosive device is a larger, much heavier container, fashioned chiefly of grey lead. Inside this is what the CIS and MI5 have been frantically searching for since its disappearance from the former Sellafield plant in Cumbria: twenty grams of weapons-grade plutonium, and the primer all ready to smash it to atoms.
With tools from the local DIY warehouse, materials supplied by other clandestine members of the League from different parts of the country, and detailed instructions supplied from the Chairman via the Supernet, Logan has fashioned a nuclear bomb.
He fits the last contact in place on the door-plate and the preparations are complete. He closes the door and locks it. When it is next opened, and that will probably be a forced entry, the door will act as a giant switch. The circuit will be complete, the explosives will detonate, the primer will be thrust into the plutonium and the chain reaction that will ensue will be of sufficient power to take out a wide swathe of Central Scotland, from Glasgow in the west to Edinburgh in the east.
Stirling Command, the ancient rock the castle occupies, and the Soros ship a few miles away, will be no more than floating dust.
“And goodbye to you too, Mrs Hartley,” Logan whispers as he passes her door downstairs. Then he is in his Jeep and away, and will be many safe kilometers to the south by the time the sun rises.

**********

The shrew has overcome its natural timidity and has approached to within a few dangerous centimetres of Mark’s face. Its whiskers continue to twitch and test the air for the least sensation of danger. The smell from the metal object on the ground near the sleeping figure is certainly not pleasant. It stands on hind legs, and rubs its forepaws together. Realising that this enormous incomprehensible intruder in its domain is harmless – at least while it sleeps – the shrew scampers off to scavenge some grains from the floor of the barn before venturing out into the night.
Now, however, the images are beginning again…

**********

Mark sees his father, panic-stricken, desperate, one dark November night. (But it’s not the November night – that will come later.) Mark seems to be looking through his father’s own eyes. What he sees is a reflection in the mirror in a bathroom. Green, flower-patterned tiles surround the metallic mirror-frame; behind, a string light-cord swings to and fro in a gentle rhythm; water runs quietly from the cold tap into the white sink below. The face in the mirror is lined with worry, tired, the eyes glittering with near-madness. A syringe is in his hand. It floats slowly up to eye-level, and there are two syringes – the real and the mirror image. John carefully and slowly begins to insert the long point – in his imagination Mark grimaces at this, but the image is unavoidable - into the opening of his right nostril.
Mark feels sick. He is unsure if the feeling is his own or his father’s. Mark watches through his father’s eyes as the needle is pushed further and further up towards the brain. Although Mark can see, he cannot guess the motive, and he cannot influence the action.
The face in the mirror grimaces in pain and disgust as the needle makes contact with something. Perspiration runs down his father’s face. John’s eyes have the glassy look of total fear, but his expression is set in lines of courage driven by sheer will power. Mark feels his father brace himself: he moves his feet slightly more apart and presses his upper thighs against the cool porcelain sink edge; he takes a deep breath… holds it. Then the hands jab upwards, there is a sickening soft crack, as of an egg shell gently breaking, and the needle slides in.
Into what, for God’s sake? What made that sickening, hypnotic, satisfying sound?
But the needle is not for injecting. It is to extract.
John is making a low wailing sound now. He is forcing himself to continue. Holding the syringe firmly with one hand, and closing his eyes, Mark’s father gently pulls the plunger back. A thin, yellowish syrupy liquid trickles down the sides of the container.
The abduction story his father told was true. He had been implanted with some sort of … what? An organic device?
Another room: his mother sleeping. She is heavily pregnant, unable to lie on her side now, but apparently getting the rest that only a deep sleep might bring. But Mark’s father has drugged her with a concoction of tranquillisers he has once been prescribed. He has held on to the unused pills because he is the kind of person for whom throwing things away is like tearing out hair. Janette is sleeping soundly, for the first time in weeks.
I’m alive inside there, Mark thinks. How young his mother looks. Her hair is cut in a different style. The room is not one he recognises.
The syringe appears, and it seems as if it is in his own hand. Mark instantly guesses the purpose: his father is going to use the material from the implant against those who have implanted him. But this is not what the implant was for. He is taking it outside of its intended purpose. The liquid in the syringe should act like antibodies, he has reasoned, and it will make his son, his unborn son, immune to anything the aliens try on him. Such is his father’s reasoning. Mark is appalled at what his father is about to do.
His mother’s exposed stomach is there, its skin stretched tight with the growth of the unconscious baby within. Mark feels a strange disorientation. His father is crying now, silently, his mind raging with the implications and the risks of what he is doing. It is madness, he knows; he is mad; but he has no choice.
In a moment he has ever so gently inserted the needle. Janette stirs slightly, but is too drugged to register this pain. John cannot know what precisely he is inserting the needle into; for all he knows this could kill the child; but he has gone far beyond that point of reason at which he would hesitate over anything that could hit back at his tormentors. They are playing games with him, he knows. Well, now he will break their rules. What the real effects of his actions could be, he only hopes – he hopes for a son who would one day hit back not just for him but for all those who have been taken and experimented on. A lunatic act, a lunatic risk, but one he is prepared to take. One he is taking… now. Gently the plunger moved down the barrel of the syringe, pushing the liquid through the needle.
His mother, drugged, sleeps through the act of madness.

**********
On the barn floor, stirring uneasily in his own sleep, Mark fingers the little brown birthmark on his neck. That, some part of his mind is now aware, was where the point of the needle went in.
**********

Suddenly it is a wild night and they are driving through darkness. This is the night, the night Mark would avoid having to experience if he could, but there is no way he can escape this insane replay.
Mark’s father is in great pain. It throbs and balloons inside his skull, and the implant, or whatever is oozing from it now since he has punctured it those few days ago, is forming a blockage at the back of his throat that makes swallowing difficult, like some horrible out-of-control infection. Lightning outside and lightning inside, huge bolts of it slashing through his head. He can hardly keep the car on the road now. His hands grip the wheel with cold white fingers. Mark’s mother is asleep in the passenger seat.
Then the pain, so searingly intense that John cries out, and the