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

Some millimetres of dust have settled a gossamer blanket over the untidy bookshelves that spill their contents on the linoleum floor. On the wall opposite the window where he sits, behind Logan’s black slicked-back hair, some dark-background posters of metal rock bands ( Frog’s Head Easy) brood and curl away from the weakening blu-tac that holds them up. The single bed is cold and unmade. A thin cobweb stretches from lightshade to ceiling.
Unseen by Logan, the light from his window traverses the wall behind him as the day grows older. His window, high up in a Stirling tenement building offers a stirring view over Central Scotland. With the aid of binoculars Logan has, often, been able to scrutinise the alien ship in McIntyre’s field. And from this window, though he does not know it, Logan could glimpse the smoke still rising from the mysterious explosion in the respectable little town of Touch .
Beside the bed with its rumpled sheets stands a couple of B&Q workbenches surmounted by a variety of drills, sanders, a small lathe, moulds, plastic boxes containing a wide variety of tools. Next to this workshop area is a built-in wardrobe. The brown-painted, unobtrusive wardrobe door is closed. Its padlock is stout. What it contains, assembled under the instructions of the Chairman, is very dangerous.
Very dangerous indeed. Four men would struggle to lift that wardrobe now, and what it contains.


8 Flight

The Hyundai pulled in to park on the grassy verge of a little-used country road that crossed the Ochil Hills. The view to the Campsie Hills in the south-west, and the wilder Perthshire Hills in the north was dramatic. Stirling lay in the valley behind them, out of sight. But the scenery held no interest for Janette and Mark.
“What the hell is going on?” cried Janette. She banged the wheel as fear gave way to anger. “What the hell is going on, Mark? Do you have any idea?”
“I only know this has something to do with the Soros. I really don’t know what or why or how, but… somehow it all comes down to the aliens.”
“Right. Then let’s talk about the Soros,” Janette began. “Recap time. Let’s think - the Soros - what do we know about them? Their ship, now called the Museum, landed on Earth, in an ordinary field in Central Scotland, five years ago, in July 2013. People thought the world had either ended or was about to start afresh. They went wild. It was incredible. You were ten then, and you were very excited about it. Aliens! Wow!”
“I remember,” said Mark.
“But nothing happened for a whole year. The ship just sat there, an extra-terrestrial anti-climax, in McIntyre’s field, the most famous field in the world. Nothing came out, nothing went in. The Army cordoned it off. The scientists and experts had their say, but the ship stayed silent.
“Then, after a year, communication began. The aliens said they were called the Soros. They gave reasons why they had stayed silent for a year. They’d been analysing our atmosphere, our cultures, our languages. Anyway, they said they were trying to establish a means of communication, because their vocal structures were so different from ours that we would never be able to speak each other’s languages. And that year had also given the human race a chance to adjust to the fact that we were no longer alone in the universe. That really took some getting used to.
“You know, it’s funny, Mark. Your dad and I used to watch a lot of science fiction films. Towards the end of the last century there were a whole lot of them – Star Trek, Star Wars, the horrible Aliens series of films, Contact, the X-Files - a whole lot of them to do with alien contact with humans. We used to wonder if it meant some kind of conspiracy to get us ready for real contact. Lots of people thought the Millenium would herald in real aliens, you know.”
“I know.”
“All the cranks, the so-called abductees, they all had the time of their lives.” Janette smiled, but not a happy smile.
Mark saw behind the smile. “You’re thinking about dad,” said Mark. “Tell me.”
Janette regarded her son. “You’re so like him. Your eyes, they way you smile, the way you sometimes read my mind…”
Suddenly Mark sat upright in his seat. Images, impressions, insights had merged for one moment into another razor sharp realisation. “He was an abductee!” he breathed. “My dad was one of those who had been abducted. I never knew.”
Janette sat back in her seat, her hands limp in her lap. “Yes.” She sighed. “He was.”
“But no one believed him!” Mark seemed to be reading words on a page, figuring out their meaning with increasing skill. “You didn’t believe him.”
“No. That’s true. At first, I didn’t. Try to understand, Mark. The way John was… I loved him very much, but the things he said sometimes just didn’t make sense and there was no proof… No, I didn’t believe him.”
Fresh images were rapidly forming in Mark’s mind. Like disjointed scenes from a badly edited film, they flickered across the screen of his mind’s eye: his father walking rapidly across a hillside, coat flapping behind him, his mother calling to him to come back; in a car, rain falling, windscreen wipers making noise; his father’s face smiling tenderly; his blue, troubled eyes in close up, as Janette had seen them; snowfall on a dazzling blue day, and snowball fights with hands that tingled and later stung when their warmth returned… dozens, hundreds of images cascaded across his consciousness as he felt himself tap into a record of his parents’ life together. He wondered if he were reading his mother’s memories. Then rose the image of a needle, a syringe, coming closer, and Mark felt fear rise inside him and he thrust that image away. Mark felt instinctively that this was not one his mother’s memories. This one came from some inexplicable source. Mark had never liked needles and he suspected this fearful image might help to tell him why, but he was not ready for this. Not yet. He held that image of the approaching needle firmly at bay.
“I see a little of how it all fits… but I can’t see it whole,” he said. “Mum, it’s like I’m getting some kind of weird telepathy and there’s all this stuff being processed in here.” His left hand touched his left temple. “But there’s something missing. Dad believed aliens abducted him and took him up in their space ship… But he could not have known about the Soros because his abduction took place years before. No, that’s not it, that’s not it… I can kind of see… Wait! They took him to their mother ship, which was … which was… hiding somewhere. I can’t quite see where. Hiding in the sky? ”
“Whoah!” Mark’s mother gripped his shoulder as if to keep him in this world. “Those are the same words your father used when he talked about it. ‘Hiding in the sky’ he said. How can you possibly know that? No one ever mentioned that to you. I’ve never mentioned any of this to you! Where are you getting it all from?”
“I don’t know, mum! It’s like I’m tuned in to something, some creepy broken database, and I can understand stuff, but bits of it are all garbled.”
“Tuned into something? Tuned into what for God’s sake? Tuned into what?”
Eyes blue and blank turned to Janette. “The Soros,” Mark replied. “Don’t ask me to explain it, because I can’t, but I can hear the Soros again. This is what happened to me before – at the Soros ship, like I told you before.”

**********

After a moment Mark grew anxious and Janette drove on. They headed north, keeping to quiet B-roads where possible.
After a few minutes Mark went on: “They’re using satellites to track us. In the cities and main roads they can use CCTV and traffic control systems. The Soros are wired in to just about everything electronic. Don’t switch on our SatNav system in the car or they’ll find us straight away. They used some kind of new American beam weapon satellite to destroy our house. The beam ignited the gas main and that was what caused the explosion. They did it on purpose. They were trying to kill me. They still are.”
“This is just incredible. I can hardly believe this, Mark.” After a moment in which Janette considered what Mark had said, she had to ask, “Why would the aliens be concerned about a fifteen year old boy living in a village in the middle of Scotland? I love you more than anything, Mark, but you are just a fifteen-year-old boy! Jesus!”
Mark thought for a while. He tapped his head with a finger. “Because of this. Whatever is growing inside my head.”
Mark looked out of the car window as Perthshire trees and fields sped by, and they sat in thoughtful silence until Janette slowed for a tractor in front.
She said, suddenly, “Okay. I’ll tell you. I’ll tell you about John. I met your father in 1998. We were both students at Glasgow University. He was studying biology and went on to teach it in schools for a while. Anyway, we met, and fell in love… He was clever, witty, and utterly charming. I remember my knees used to just go weak the first couple of times we started meeting. Funny. He was a bit taller than you are now. You’ll grow yet; you’ll be about his height soon, I think. Anyway, in 2001, a few months after we got married, something happened that changed everything for us.”
“What was it? The abduction?”
“Yes,” sighed Janette. “John was working in a school in the east end of Glasgow, teaching biology and maths. He left the school one Thursday afternoon and started to drive home. His colleagues saw him get into his car – it was a beat-up old Ford Sierra, I remember – and he was all right, there was nothing untoward or odd about his behaviour. Well, that was it. He got as far as a set of traffic lights in Springburn and he just vanished off the face of the planet. And he stayed vanished for three weeks.”
“Three weeks!”
“Yep. I just about went off my head. The police investigated very thoroughly. I believe they did. You see, John had briefly been a member of a stupid organization called the ‘Tartan Liberation Army’, when he was a first-year student. It was nothing serious, of course, and he thought they were a bunch of dope-heads eventually. But they’d had this scheme to blow up the new Scottish Parliament building in Edinburgh – its costs were going through the roof, and this group thought that doing a fifth of November would be a just way of saving taxpayers’ money. But the point is the police classed them as a terrorist