by Bowring, S D
The scanner allowed them to both watch and listen. The hideout was clearly a base. The Scouts rested and ate, being reminded of their stomachs when they overheard two Outsiders discussing the contents of their food wraps.
The Outsiders’ conversation allowed the Scouts to confirm that the pair were concerned about being followed. The concern shown by the older one for the younger Outsider, who they now confirmed as being named Keller, was protective in its nature. This highlighted again that any later action against Keller would likely cause a strong reaction from the older one.
They also determined that two of the dwellings at the far end of the same block were being used for toilet purposes, and furthermore that they had chosen one each. Thus a refinement to the Scouts’ plan was possible, particularly as the pair appeared to be settling down for an overnight rest.
The four Scouts now broke up into pairs. They decided to act before the light faded. Two of them moved towards the far end of the large ruin that had become the Outsiders base. The ruin had a second exit stair on the far side. It was in a collapsed state and covered in ivy but, with some care, they felt they could move up this to the second level at least.
The two who remained behind entered a ground floor room and waited. They had left the scanner in the opposite ruin, but kept the monitor so they could be alerted to any movement from the Outsiders.
The second pair of Scouts quietly entered the dwellings apparently being used as toilets. They clearly were. They had determined which of these was used by the younger one from scanned conversation. The sole purpose of this visit was to gather several samples and make their way to the ground floor of the structure. They took care in their approach. They ensured no sign of their visit was left to the alert the Outsiders when they returned to these ‘toilet’ areas. Underfoot, they had to take great care to avoid making a significant sound whilst stepping around the long rested debris that was lying around.
An hour later they returned to the other pair. To test the samples, the Scouts had a basic health analysis tool in which tiny samples could be placed to analyse the health of a person. These then produced various results over a period of 10 minutes. It also had a DNA analysis function as a by-product. The apparatus required two samples be placed in two small vials which were then connected to the apparatus for mixing with a solution. The readings were displayed on the same general purpose monitor that was used for the scanning.
The health analysis of the first sample showed, amongst other expected dietary information, that the subject had high levels of Salmonella bacteria, but no signs of the subject being obviously affected by this. A Londoner would have suffered illness quite severely with this level of Salmonella in their body.
There was also a small amount of blood which could be symptomatic of colorectal cancer, something unfortunately not uncommon in Outsiders. Finally, the DNA Analysis showed that the DNA had signs of permanent damage in several forms of gene mutation. This was something the Outsiders had to contend with as a result of their exposure to radiation, mainly in previous generations. By its very nature this was passed down from one generation to another. This mutation confirmed that the older of the subjects was an Outsider and so were his birth parents.
The second pair of samples showed some evidence of roundworm, again not uncommon in Outsider communities. However, there were also traces of Vermox which indicated that the subject was taking preventative measures. Medicines, such as Vermox, would have been supplied by Londoners at trade areas such as the Arpo. Other than the dietary information indicating both subjects shared the same diet, there was nothing of note in the otherwise healthy sample.
They then examined the DNA Analysis. The DNA of the second subject was perfect.
The Scouts looked at this in silence for a few seconds, it was a rare thing. Many Londoners, despite the host of precautions over the last few generations still carried certain DNA defects. The subject was either the offspring of an off-world community and/or the offspring of wealthy parents.
In London at the time of the devastation subsequent occasional winds from the north or the east had bought gradually lowering levels of contamination. Those in power had been able to protect against this. The healthy became the wealthy over time having become the most likely to produce viable offspring.
The taller Scout moved his hand around the screen tapping rapidly, then looked at the others. “I’ve transmitted this back to London. They’ll want to see this.”
He then switched the monitor back to the hidden screen which was still scanning for heat and sound, to alert them to any significant movement.
“Pack up the equipment. We have to take this Keller back with us and I think we need to act tonight. We will need to have a mediheli authorised – it will be the quietest and quickest way to return him to where he originally came from.”
Cormic woke up with a blinding headache and his body ached all over. He presumed this may have been because he had worked too long in the airless environment yesterday, whilst recovering the weapons they had found. However, something didn’t feel right. He pulled himself up and could see that Keller wasn’t asleep beside him and he had cleared away his mat. It was light, and he was hungry.
He called out to Keller as he climbed from his sleeping position but there was no response. He presumed he was visiting the toilet. Cormic sat on the edge of the bath and rubbed his temples. He felt like he had drunk a bellyful of Ida’s gooseberry wine. He was cold but saw the sun’s rays hit the top of the wall facing the room he was in. This made him suddenly panic as he could see by the sun that he had missed half the morning. Keller may have let him sleep on, but where was he?
Keller’s backpack was missing. Cormic moved suddenly to look over the walls which once held the windows. He couldn’t see movement. He ran to look east and then he crossed through the doorway opposite and did the same. He glanced towards the toilet areas as he crossed the walkway but would look into those in due course.
There was no sign of Keller. Cormic ran down towards the toilet areas. He could tell these hadn’t been used since the night before and doubted Keller would have gone elsewhere. Keller was certainly not going to have wandered off with his heavy backpack to casually investigate the area whilst Cormic slept.
Keller had disappeared.
Cormic returned to the dwelling deciding to get some things together and go and look for Keller. He gathered his fish knife, plas light and harness, two food wraps and a drink. He stopped suddenly and then it occurred to him that one of the weapons had gone from the bathroom. He then noticed that all four green bottles that came with the weapons were gone. He paused, not understanding this. Had Keller really taken a weapon and the means to make them lethal?
With a grim look on his face, he again rubbed his temples as though to massage away the pain in his head, but it seemed worse now. He drank, and then ate some food as he thought about where he was going to start looking for Keller.
The Dispersal
Claudius Ptolemy (Born AD 90, Died AD 168) was a Roman citizen who lived in Egypt. Amongst his other interests, he was an astronomer and one of his many achievements involved listing 48 constellations which became the standard for the next 1800 years. One of those constellations was Ursa Major (the Great Bear), which is visible all year round in the northern hemisphere. The seven brightest stars form what is known variously as the Plough or the Big Dipper and sometimes the Saucepan.
The Plough is also a useful pointer towards north (it points to the North Star). If you then imagine that it is indeed a saucepan we can identify the second star of the handle as being Mizar. In the same line of sight of Mizar is another star, known as Alcor. In the 21st Century a fifth new planet in the area was identified and named Rayleigh. This is the only habitable planet in this region and, by 2090, the planet had indeed been visited several times. It was targeted by the United Nations as the third habitable planet for colonising. This being to ensure the Earth’s population could be re-distributed in the hope that
peace, tranquillity and wealth were not impacted by the alarming growth in population on the home planet.
For the next eighty years there was constant migration to seven of the main habitable planets, including Rayleigh. There was a never-ending search for more planets. This lead to a dozen satellite populations working on viability projects on other candidate planets. If it didn’t work out they would shut-up shop and move on when these proved too hostile an environment. Some of the satellite populations were, indeed, clinging on by their fingertips and very dependent on supply visits in order to continue. Where these populations were sometimes moved on, they occasionally left mining communities in situ so that precious metals or other riches were available for extraction and export to a more hospitable environment elsewhere.
All in all, the United Nations had achieved a safety net for the survival and prosperity of the human race by 2260. The sacrifices were deemed worth it. Several population centres on some candidate planets had perished or had been abandoned. This was as a result of disasters caused by unforeseen events such as quakes or catastrophic storms, volcanic activity, or in one case when an unstoppable viral disease reduced the population to an unsustainable level.
Speed-of-travel innovations meant that Rayleigh could be reached in just under four months, and sure enough a relatively slow growing population was established over the next century. Craft from the home planet were now meeting halfway on a regular basis for lucrative trading with any merchant who was happy to send his or her traders away for the four month round trip. This meeting point was now an established space station whose sole purpose was to act as a huge marketplace. This enormous hub station was known as New Exeter. Several other colonised planets would send delegations to New Exeter for the same reasons.
Keller sat on a chair in a small room. The chair was made from a material that was unfamiliar to him, but was warm to the touch. The room had clean white walls, a raised bed, table, mirror, two chairs and a storage area in which his backpack was visible. The floor was concrete but a plas mat was laid over the bulk of it and he noticed it was much warmer to stand on in his bare feet. There were no windows, just a dim light in the centre of the room.
The door to this room was solid and slid open to the side quietly whenever anyone came in. When he was on his own, Keller tried to slide this open but he was unable to. There was a plas curtain in one corner of the room behind which was a pedestal with a lid. This was a toilet. They showed him how to use it as soon as they brought him in. He felt embarrassed but they didn’t humiliate him, which was some consolation. In the same area as the toilet was a shower which they had made him wash in. It wasn’t, however, a successful wash, as afterwards they told him his hair was still ‘matted and unkempt’ and his fingernails were still as dirty as they always were.
A woman came in. He had seen her before with another man just outside the room when he was brought in. Both wore white tunics. She smiled at him.
“Come with me, please”, she indicated the door.
“Where are you taking me?”
The woman seemed to be some sort of servant to the man, but he felt that she was at least sympathetic, whereas the man had appeared to view Keller as though he was a nuisance.
“You have been designated for transport to Rayleigh – it says so on the door out front and I believe they have already told you this, Keller.” She looked at him with mild disapproval. Like a child, he thought.
“You are going to need to be cleaned up properly before anything else happens. You will not be treated with dignity until you at least look civilised. Do you know how to shave?”
“Not with one of those,” said Keller, eyeing the small contraption that the woman held up.
“I’ll help you, Keller. I am going to need to help you with your hair and nails. I promise you the attitude of senior staff here will improve once you no longer look like you live in a bush.” She saw his angry frown and added more softly “Keller, it’s a different way of life here. You will receive vastly improved treatment when I have finished with you - and you will have more control over your future. You will be granted more independence and treated as a returning foundling rather than an Outsider – it’s how we do things here. Be patient and calm - watch how people act and learn from them.”
She looked down on the mat and added “And I suggest you don’t spit on the floors here – use the toilet if you really need to spit.” She looked at him again, “Spitting spreads disease.”
The woman told him she was a nurse and looked after people whose health needed to be ‘assessed’. He guessed she was in her forty-fifth year or thereabouts. He felt trapped in this room. The nurse thought he looked uncomfortable and furtive, so she tried a less informal approach.
“You can call me Sophia, she said with a warm smile.
After Sophia starting shaving him in front of the mirror, he asked if he could take over and shave himself. This operation took several passes but eventually his skin was smooth. Sophia stood him in front of the mirror.
“Say hello to Keller,” she said admiring her work, but he only looked in the mirror at her, as though re-assessing her.
Next, Sophia helped him shower again with a proper hair wash. He didn’t seem coy, she noticed, but then the Outsiders lived in a single common room together so she didn’t expect him to be shy. Afterwards, she passed him a lightweight gown. “Until we have some clothes sorted out for you,” she said, by way of explanation.
His nails were cleaned and cut. Sophia then asked him to wait at the table for a minute or two. She left the room taking his discarded clothes. She later returned with a plas tray that smelled good. The tray had four larger sunken sections and a cup with a handle in a fifth smaller section. Each of the larger sections of the tray had a different food in it.
“Eat this. I will return shortly with some clothing,” she said.
“What about my other clothing,” he asked.
“Keller, if we didn’t cremate your other clothing I fear it would have walked out on its’ own. Your new clothes will be more comfortable and will have the same clean smell as ours.”
“You all smell like flowers, even the men,” he observed calmly.
Sophia appeared to want to respond to this but she didn’t. “Eat please,” was all she said as she left the room again.
Keller watched the door slide back. He looked down at the food. Some of it looked alien to him but he identified carrots and pear in two of the sections.
He ate, but his chewing was laboured as he tried to keep a rising feeling of panic to himself. He blinked away tears. He had never felt so lost in his life. The relative kindness showed by Sophia just served to confuse him.
He wouldn’t show them that he was suffering. He thought of his Uncle again – he would be in a bad way if he had no idea where his Nephew was. His poor mother Nola would be devastated. He thought about the events of last night.
It had been like a bad dream. He had woken in the early hours of the morning in some form of a restraint, on a plas stretcher, and was unable to speak. His mouth felt numb. His Uncle lay motionless nearby - he was breathing heavily but steadily. Keller couldn’t move his head very far but could tell that there were at least three men moving purposefully around him and moving some of his belongings out of the room. Keller was moved silently out of the dwelling by four men and taken to a relatively flat part of the old highway nearby.
A strange vehicle was waiting for them. The vehicle already had two occupants sat in the front. Two of the men climbed into the vehicle with him and secured his stretcher on the floor of the vehicle. The other two men passed over two black plas sacks to one of those inside. Keller realised that one of the sacks seemed to be the shape of his backpack and the other seemed to contain at least one of the weapons they had found. One of the men leaned over him.
“Keller, don’t be alarmed. We are taking care of you. Your Uncle is fine, but he will wake up with a headache. That’s all. Neither of you will come to any harm. You a
re inside a mediheli. This vehicle is going to lift into the air and take us to a safe place so that we can talk to you. No harm will come to you. We are about to lift off now.” Then the man’s face moved away and he gave a hand signal to someone outside of the craft. He then nodded at the two men in the front who seemed to be awaiting instructions.
The mediheli lifted silently and then a gentle hum began as it moved upwards into the night. Keller still couldn’t speak. His stomach lurched but he controlled himself. The craft moved off into the darkness. They would surely hit something, he thought. The other occupants’ body language suggested that they may have well been relaxing by a fire on a winter’s night; such was their lack of concern.
The face leaned over him again. “You will be able to speak again as soon as we have landed and have taken you inside. We will be back on land in about 15 minutes. We are now going to speed up and you will feel some pressure on your body.” The face moved away and this time when he sat down behind the men in front, he applied restraints across his body and tapped twice on the back of one of their seats. They shouted some instructions. Various voices around him shouted “Yes” back and then the man in front counted down from five to one.
There followed a dozen or so minutes where Keller felt he was hurtling through the air, but the men around him seemed unconcerned and he relaxed his body a little. He wondered how far and how fast he was going and where to.
Eventually the craft landed. Keller was lying in a pool of sweat on the plas stretcher that they had kept him on. More voices and more orders. The two men in front moved away. Keller was lifted out on the stretcher and taken across a perfect flat surface that reminded him of the Arpo. He was moved on to a stretcher with wheels and the two men who had taken him from the ruins handed him over to several people in white tunics. Before they left, the face who had leaned over him several times in the last hour, put his hand on his head saying “Keller, I am now handing you over to these two doctors. They are not a threat to you. Cooperate with them. You will be fine. Goodbye and Good luck.”
