And the World Changes by A M Kirk (i like reading books txt) 📖

a bit like that. The cloud is not as thick as it was, but I’m still not getting a good picture.”
“But it’s getting clearer, you mean?”
“Definitely.”
“Then we must keep you safe until the cloud clears.”
Suddenly Janette yawned, a huge jaw-cracker. “Oh my God! I need a sleep. I can’t drive any more just yet. This is the reaction setting in.”
Mark nodded. He had read about people in intensely stressful situations, how they need sleep and can pass out with swift suddenness.
Janette looked around her. “This place is bursting with bed and breakfast places. Let’s see if we can find one.”
“Okay. But I have to brush my teeth after that coffee.”
And that reminded them that they had come away with nothing but the clothes they stood up in. The joined the tourist throng of shoppers.


10 Logan #2

Logan powers down his interface into standby mode. His face glows with inner satisfaction as the light of the screen blanks out. He stands, stretches, tightens his buttocks and legs to increase blood flow and as he rolls his head the ligaments in his neck click and crack. He breathes deep; his purpose in renewed. At last!
Underpants, a couple of pairs of old socks, one of his favourite black t-shirts, a change of jeans and running shoes, and finally his toiletry assortment are flung into a small black overnight bag. Into one of the side pockets he stuffs a small atlas and his G5 phone. This will enable him to access his home interface should the need arise. He unwraps some gum to take away the taste cold coffee always leaves in his mouth. He sits on the bed and pulls on his ultra-lightweight Scarpa walking boots, a kilogram a piece, to enable fast coverage of difficult terrain. His dark blue blue knee-length trail jacket he folds over his arm and takes his bag down to his battered 08 Jeep to throw the items in the boot. This had been pre-owned so many times he had picked it up for next to nothing at a car auction, using knowledge gained from the interface of course. There was virtually nothing members of the League could not find access to. The Chairman, whoever he was, had certainly performed miracles in data assembly, organisation and dissemination techniques.
Overhead the Sunday afternoon sky is blue and clear. Contrails cross the sky. He stretches languidly, muscles still tight from hours in one position at the interface screen. Mrs Hartley is waddling up the road, a bag of shopping in her hand. She is one of those old souls who stoutly refuse to let an interface into their lives and stick to the old-fashioned way of actually walking to the shops for provisions instead of simply ordering them from a computer. Hardly a day goes by without her needing to make a trip to the New Galleries market in the Thistle Centre. Well, Logan has often mused, if that gives her a purpose in life… Old fool. Logan does not see himself ever being old.
Madge Hartley slows her steps a little, partly to get her breath, for it’s a long trudge for her from the Thistle Centre up the hill to her little flat; but also partly in the hope that the strange young man from downstairs will drive off before she reaches the tenement door and so she won’t have to speak to him. His flat is the top flat, directly above hers. Some weeks ago she had to complain about the constant drilling and tapping and banging that had carried on into the early hours on several occasions. He had listened to her complaint with obvious – what’s the word? – disdain. Yes, that’s it – disdain. Oh, he was polite enough, and had said he was sorry, but his eyes told a different story.
She sees Logan turn and go back into the building. She hurries on, now, the shopping bag awkward in her hand. She will try to get inside her flat before he comes out again. It’s not that she’s in any way afraid of him. She’s had too much experience for that. It’s just that… well… it’s nearly time for the Sunday afternoon wrestling on the home-cine, and Madge never misses that.

Logan returns to his flat. The padlock key is on a chain round his neck. He takes out and disconnects the padlock from the door. He opens the door carefully just a little and unhooks the booby-trap wire by reaching a finger round the edge of the door. The wire falls free, harmlessly, and he opens the door wide.
Inside sit two plastic boxes bought from B&Q, one larger than the other. The smaller box is what Logan wants now. It is the size of a shoe box. He takes it out and opens it. He has cut and shaped a section of foam so that the pistol’s components fit snugly into their places and will not be jostled or rattle in transit. It is a work of art, the product of drilling, tapping and banging in the early hours of several mornings, following instructions from another interface site supplied by the Chairman. It fires 9mm ammunition from a magazine containing 10 rounds and its 17cm long barrel gives it an accuracy of four hundred metres. A work of art, which he quickly assembles. Logan puts on a specially made shoulder holster and inserts the completed loaded pistol. It feels snug, comfortable, reassuring. Ammunition he stashes in a belt pouch and then conceals everything with a dark, breathable waterproof jacket. He checks his appearance in the mirror.
He closes and locks up the wardrobe, having reset the booby-trap. He lifts a pair of dark glasses from the desk to complete his look. At last! The League is about to go into action!
With a last glance at the wardrobe door he leaves and locks his flat. He feels strong.
Logan does not like to think too closely about what the second, larger box in the wardrobe contains.


11 The Museum


Evening light subdued the colours in their little bed and breakfast room when Janette awoke. The sense of catastrophe immediately overwhelmed her. She knew now that her old safe life had gone for good. There could be no going back. No returning to her home and the surgery and saying “I’m back, it’s okay, it was just a gas explosion, I left the cooker on and overcooked the Sunday roast. Sorry folks.” All that had changed.
Now she realised that she had been preparing on some unconscious level for this moment for a long time, certainly since the Soros had landed; but even before that her life with John had been a mental gearing up for disaster. His convictions that the world would change in some immensely significant way, his complete belief in his abduction experience, even all the media hype about the turn of the Millenium – all contributed to shape her feeling that her life had been heading towards this moment.
“What rough beast is this that slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” she spoke to herself as she lay looking at the ceiling with her hands linked on the pillow behind her head. Yeats’ words came to her, a distant memory from a distant sunny schoolroom long ago.
Mark was already awake. He had always been an early riser. He was fiddling with the kettle on the dressing table. “I’m trying to make you a cup of tea, madam,” he said.
He smiled at her and Janette smiled back and their resilience was guaranteed. “I have to brush my teeth,” she said, swinging her legs off the bed. Earlier, she had bought two small bags, of the most subdued tartan she could find from a gift shop, and filled them with some still-wrapped underwear, changes of clothes, toiletries.
“We cannot be beaten as long as we have dental hygiene,” said Mark.
“Humour in times of stress – a human characteristic, I suppose,” mused Janette. “Our world falls apart and we make jokes.”
Later they sat in two easy chairs by the window and sipped extremely strong and foul cups of tea. The view looked on to a small car park and some gardens beyond, and past the compact traditional houses the gentle wooded hills of Perthshire rolled away to the south.
“You left the tea bags in the cups too long,” observed Janette. “And these chairs are specially designed to create back problems, you realise that, don’t you?”
“We need help, mum,” Mark said, “and I’m not talking about tea and back-rests.”
“Are your feelings any clearer?”
“Yes. I saw things in my dreams, but things that make sense, unlike most of the stuff you see in dreams.”
“Like some prophet of old,” his mother remarked. She curled her legs under her in the chair and sipped the tea, grimacing. “Tell me.”
“There’s something about magnetic fields. I don’t think we really understand about them. They can affect things, animals, people.”
Janette nodded. “Magnets have been known to assist in healing. Some birds use the earth’s magnetic field to navigate over the globe, but no one knows exactly how it’s done. Obviously it’s to do with –“
“Something in the brain,” Mark finished for her. “It’s two weeks since I visited the Museum and every day the feelings have been getting stronger. There’s obviously some connection.”
“Did you go to the Museum on your own?” asked Janette.
“No, Carrie came with me.”
Janette arched an eyebrow ironically. “Oh?”
“Never mind my love life. I know what you’re thinking, you dirty old woman.”
Janette laughed softly.
Mark continued, more sombrely now. “As we passed through the entrance to the field… ”

**********

As Carrie and Mark disembarked from the coach that had brought them to McIntyre’s Field, Mark was struck again by the technology of the craft. Neither he nor Carrie paid any attention to the toffee apple vendors, souvenir sellers or the smells from the hamburger and hot-dog stalls that proliferated in McIntyre’s Field. Each of them paid the owner a franchise fee, naturally.
Visitors passed through a visitors’ centre and paid their entrance money at the set of turnstiles. The area of the field was completely fenced off by strong tungsten wire barriers twelve feet high topped by barbed wire. Armed military guards patrolled the fence. It was felt a military presence had to be maintained, even though no harm had ever come to anyone from the craft or its crew. A barracks and a Command Centre had been set up nearby and the occasional buzz of military helicopters came and went in the background.
Road links to the farm had been drastically improved to cope with the huge volume of traffic bringing the curious to gawp at “The Ship from Across the Universe”. A rail link from Falkirk was being built; hotels were springing up; property values had increased by more than a hundred per cent.
The ship itself was a smooth, flattened spherical structure, like an enormous discus. It had to be smooth, because anything fixed to the outside could be a problem with the friction caused by entering a planet’s atmosphere; only in human science-fiction films did space craft