The Second Wave (15 page)

“I know! It was Max!” exclaimed Toby
suddenly, just as he was on his way to the door.

“What about Max?” Luke asked, merely
half-interested. Toby turned around on the spot and threw his head
back to look up at the professor. “He screamed loudest in the cave.
I just remembered. It was Max. He can yell
really
loud!”

Luke had lost track of who had played where
that day. “What cave?”

“The one behind the waterfall! I
told
you, Luke! There’s this awesome cave behind the waterfall, and even
though it’s
inside
the water, it’s all dry. Except where
it’s wet.”

With these words, Toby wanted to dash off,
but Luke grabbed hold of his pullover in time. Something just began
to make sense to him.

“Did all of you go into that cave?” he asked,
suddenly excited again. This could be the one vital information.
They didn’t take any readings from a cave this morning, because
they didn’t see any cave. But if for some reason something was in
there which could excess the human ageing process, they might be
close to solving this mystery.

But Toby nodded. “Yeah. Sure we all
went!”

“Oh.” So much for that theory. Luke felt his
shoulders sag.

“Except for Savannah,” continued Toby. “She’s
scared of dark places. But really, it wasn’t so dark in there, and
it was so much fun, because it gets really loud inside, what with
the water being all wet. At least that’s what Isabel said. Her
dad’s a teacher, so she knows stuff.”

Luke only listened to Toby’s strange
explanations with one ear, though. He sent the boy home, then went
straight back to the lab and to Peter, who was still quietly
despairing over the all but useless specimens they had taken.

* * * *

They had to wait until the next morning
before they could visit the waterfall again, but Peter and Luke
left at first daylight. Protector Timothy Niman accompanied them.
They wore protective suits and carried a case with measuring
instruments, as well as boxes to take more samples of whatever
they’d happen to find.

When they reached the entry to the cave,
Peter hesitated. “I just had an epiphany, I believe,” he said.
“What if it’s not in the earth? What if it’s the rocks? They could
emit some sort of radiation, altering our body chemistry.”

Timothy shrugged. “So what? Mud. Rock. What’s
the difference
where
it comes from?”

“Well, for example, young man, we would have
no way to know where such a field started. We might already be
standing in the middle of it, ageing as we speak.”

“Not to mention we’re not equipped to detect
radiation,” Luke pointed out.

“Oh, fantastic!” Timothy exclaimed. “How can
you just stand there and talk about that like it’s nothing?! I
can’t afford to lose a year of my youthfulness! I haven’t found the
right partner, yet!”

Peter looked at him with melodramatic
earnestness. “We have no idea how many years we are going to lose.
It might just as well be that we age even more rapidly than the
children.”

Timothy cursed explicitly until he saw Luke
chuckle and realized that Peter was teasing him. “Not funny, doc!”
he growled, his dignity gravely damaged.

Peter put a pair of goggles on and demanded,
“Luke, my boy, get me a melapple.”

Melapple trees were indigenous to
Alternearth. Their name derived from the fact that the fruits they
bore looked like apples, but their flesh tasted like watermelons.
It was one of the first discoveries Luke’s team had made when they
started testing the planet’s flora. The trees grew in abundance and
were fruitful at that time of year. They had seen a couple of them
down the river.

While Luke went harvesting, Peter approached
the cave’s entrance with caution. It was more of a notch than an
actual cave, barely spacious enough for eleven children. A small,
natural stairway of stones, hidden from view by a group of ferns,
led into it. Peter stepped as close as he thought was safe.
Squatted down to study the rocks and stones in this place. Nothing
suggested any form of radiation. The plants looked just like all
the other plants around the lake, just like plants on Earth, except
for the random oddity here and there – the leaves a shade of blue
rather than green in one species, the blossoms furry to the touch
in another. The fern that grew around the cave’s entrance looked
honey colored in the sunlight, and had long, claw-like leaves. It
was completely harmless, and it had the amazing ability to change
its color at night, to blend in with the deep, black shadows around
it. The ground showed no traces of spores of any kind to suggest
something had contaminated the air at the time the children were
around. Even Toby’s worn, old cowboy hat was still there. It lay at
the far end of the cavern, half buried under some gravel.

“So, what do you want with a melapple, doc?
Hungry?” Timothy asked when Luke returned, arms full of the fruit
in question. Peter took one, held it up for all of them to behold
and said, “Science at work, son. Watch and marvel.” Then he flung
the melapple into the cave.

It flew across the small room, formed a
perfect curve before it hit the opposite wall and got smashed to
pieces. The leftover parts fell to the ground, a sad, soggy
mess.

“Now you see it, now you, well, you still see
it, but it’s not the same, really.” Peter said, satisfied with this
result. He began taking off the protection suit.

“What are you doing, doc? What about the
radiation?”

Peter grinned. “No radiation, protector
Niman. And whatever made those kids age is restricted to that
specific area. Watch the melapple closely this time.”

He discarded the suit, then took another
piece of fruit. This time he set it on the ground carefully and
only nudged it so it gently rolled into the cavern. Nothing
happened the first few inches, but as soon as the melapple passed
an invisible mark, its skin began to shrivel, and its color changed
from green to mouldy brown. It decomposed in front of their eyes
within two seconds. No radiation, no contaminated water, no toxic
pollen. Realization dawned on Peter so quickly that he needed to
sit down on the ground for a moment. All he could mumble was,
“Duncan was right.”

“Who’s Duncan?” Timothy asked. He was still
trying to wrap his mind around the melapple thing.

“My husband,” Peter replied absentmindedly.
He was already trying to put all the data together to make sense of
this incident, but all it essentially boiled down to was: Duncan
had been right.

“More melapples!” he suddenly ordered. “And
take off your suits, boys! We are not going to age. Well, we are,
but not prematurely so, rest assured.”

More testing was commenced—all in all, they
used up over a dozen melapples. Speared on sticks, rolled into the
cave, thrown through the curtain of water that shielded the cavern
from view.

“There we are,” Peter synopsised when he
fancied they were finished. “Time pocket.”

Timothy gave a grunt. “Time pocket?”

While they packed up their gear, Peter lapsed
into a detailed explanation. “My dear late husband was a member of
the R.U.T.E. Historian Society. R.U.T.E. stands for random
unrelated time events. Time pockets, if you will.

“They theorize that the reason our culture
never touched the culture of the lost world of Atlantis was because
the whole city prospered and declined in a time pocket of its own
inside our regular time zone. A pocket where time went infinitely
faster. We have remnants of Atlantian artefacts—archaeological
finds, fossilized plants, and so on. But we have no historical
recollection of Atlantis, because it appeared and vanished in the
blink of an eye.

“Duncan even believed there were still very
few time pockets in existence today, but that theory is not one the
R.U.T.E. Historian Society supported. Duncan’s views were a bit out
there, even by their standards—he believed a lot of things, may
Persephone bless his undying soul.”

Luke coughed. “This from a man who believes
mime artists are really normal people imprisoned in invisible
boxes.”

Peter shot him an odd glance, but continued
with his monologue uninterruptedly, “Alternearth is essentially the
same planet than Earth, merely in a different reality. It is
entirely possible that, if time pockets are possible on Earth, they
are possible here. In any case, I think this is what we’re dealing
with in this case. A random unrelated time event. Locally
restricted to a cavernous notch behind a waterfall.”

“That is now filled with rotten melapples,”
Timothy added.

“Does the R.U.T.E. society have any theories
as to where these time pockets come from?” Luke wanted to know. But
Peter had to admit he didn’t know. He hadn’t been terribly
interested in their speculations; now he regretted his ignorant
behavior. Then he remembered something. “I saw a man with the
society’s insignia pin at the agora. Maybe he can help.”

“Who was it?” asked Luke, knowing full well
Peter probably didn’t even remember the guy’s hair color.

“I have no idea. I think he was one of the
parents. The librarian.”

“Mrs. Moralez?”

Peter beamed. “Yes.”

He was sure she could at least shed some
light on the question of the origin of the R.U.T.E.s.

* * * *

The hospital was not perfectly equipped. It
contained everything that was needed to keep the villagers healthy,
everything needed to deal with all kinds of illnesses, not to
mention accidents. But it was still a very small hospital with few
staff and only one scarcely stocked research lab. In it sat Summer
Paige. She was not getting anywhere with the children’s blood
samples. She took yet another look at the test results. It was
impossible, and yet here was the proof. If that wasn’t sufficient,
the children were evidence enough.

Paige had run every test she could think of,
not that there were any standard check-ups and procedures to follow
in the first place. But she had done what she could and the result
was that the kids’ mysterious ageing was irreversible. There was no
cure for age. She tried to take solace in the fact that it was
merely a year and that it might have been much worse. Still, she
wasn’t looking forward to giving the news to the parents.

The hospital chamber was where Dr. Paige and
Captain Eleven usually met, as neither of them was comfortable with
allowing Eugenia to go outside. So John visited her in the fish
tank every morning.

She was sitting on the table the first time
he came by. Legs crossed, arms folded, a warm look on her face. She
was expecting him. The first weeks she barely spoke, except when
she asked him to talk to her. John had no idea what was expected of
him, so he began by telling her some old stories; he was surprised
to find they were slowly morphing into his own tale. When he
realized that he stopped telling them.

“Enough now,” he stated one day. “I have met
with you for many days and every time I do most of the talking. It
is your turn now.”

This time she stood at the window. She turned
to look at him.

“Your mind is not like everybody else’s,” she
said after a while. “You have many thoughts, but they are clear and
sharp. I like that.”

“Okay.” He nodded. “Let’s go with that. You
can read other people’s minds, then?”

Eugenia shook her head. “No. But what they
think is part of me. I am connected with everything.”

“Everything or everyone?”

“I don’t know.” She looked at him with
rekindled interest. “It used to be simple. I was one with
everything, and everything happened at once. I felt what they felt
and heard what they thought. But that was before. Such a long time
before.”

John walked up to her to join her at the
window. He didn’t want anyone to overhear what they were talking
about next. If he had to do this job to prevent his going to
prison, he would, but he would take hold of as many cards as he
could.

“What do you mean by before, woman?” he
asked.

“When I was in the darkness. I only heard and
felt then. Now I can see it all and it is beautiful, but it is so
very,” for a moment she searched for the right expression,
“confusing.”

She lifted her head to meet his gaze, now
that he stood close to her. “I want it to be like before again. I
want to go home, John.”

“And I will get you there, like I said. But
we have to stay here for a little while longer.”

He needed Eugenia to stay on this planet,
away from both the police and the Chinese and probably the
Turks—Celem’s death might have stirred them enough to look for him,
too. When the coast was clear again, he’d get her where she wanted
to go. Then he’d leave this place as well.

* * * *

John was home when Peter and Luke returned
from their trip to the waterfall. The experiments had taken up
nearly the whole day, the sun was beginning to set now.

Peter flung the useless protection suits on
the ground and Luke picked them up instantly with much practised
patience, folding them while he followed Peter into the living
room, then placed them on the sofa’s armrest. John sat in the
recliner and watched the scientists’ return.

Peter was ecstatic. “Unbelievable, John!
Quite, quite extraordinary!” He gesticulated excitedly, walking in
circles first around the sofa, then around the chair John was
sitting in. John didn’t reply, he merely watched in amusement.
Peter needed no prompting, though. “I never would have believed it
myself, were it not for the R.U.T.E. Historian Society. Which
reminds me to speak to our librarian right away.” He stopped in his
tracks to whirl around and addressed Luke, who still stood in the
middle of the room like a nervous first grader waiting for the
school bus, “Luke, my boy, where
is
the library?”