Ripped Apart: Quantum Twins – Adventures On Two Worlds (18 page)

Offered contracts, the two doctors returned to America to hand in their resignations.

Romain had been right about Miki. Unlike with Tyler, there was a good connection at a deep level. Amongst many things she understood why, whatever important function to which all three were invited for the Solstice celebrations, Romain always carried a flask containing the local, illicit, hooch for them to drink their own, personal toast. And why it was special to Romain that the drink was obtained from Kaikane, their housekeeper’s husband who brewed his own.

Gently twirling his glass now drained of the Tesseron Lot No.65, Romain got up and took the glass into his small kitchen where he washed, dried and put it away before settling down to sleep: blissfully unaware that the next day was to start him on a trail to a discovery beyond his wildest imaginings.

A core of scientists at CERN had been working all through the Christmas holiday, trying to establish what had happened on the twentieth of December to cause the fields of two magnets to collapse and the circuits protecting the monitoring equipment to rupture as though submitted to a massive overload. The consequent damage requiring repair had been minimal, fuses blown and some wiring burnt out. When after exhaustive exploration, theories and tests they were still unable to explain what had happened, they decided to make a test run of the LHC.

Over the years CERN had run a variety of experiments with the Laboratories at Gran Sasso near Rome, MonKiw in Tasmania and Firmilab in Illinois, USA. They had asked for skeleton staff at all three to set up and run monitoring equipment in case anything went wrong and might show up on the monitors. The same had been asked of the institute at Jyväskylä as it lay to the North, whereas the others, although spread wide apart, were all situated to the South.

Using satellite links, a conference call was set up between all five with a scientist at CERN advising of progress. Late on the afternoon of twenty-seven December a very short test run was completed. The monitoring equipment in the Institute at Jyväskylä flickered momentarily at the same time as interference overrode all conversation on the call. Subsequent short test runs produced no interference anywhere.

Satisfied that all seemed well and glad that the long night was over, the four monitoring sites closed down and the staff returned to their homes to continue their interrupted holidays. Meanwhile, puzzled scientists at CERN shut down the LHC for another maintenance check. In due course that reported all was satisfactory and the planned series of runs was recommenced.

A small team was established to review unusual results and look for any clues to the two odd occurrences, especially that of the twentieth.

*

In an office on the third floor of the Lubyanka an elderly, bored clerk of the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service, was cross-indexing computer records with very old paper files. Working through the alphabet, Feodor Ivanovich Demidov opened the records of a famous operation by the then KGB where double agents had been working at the highest level of the British Secret Service for nearly twenty years. He became engrossed in his reading.

With a start, he realised how late it was. Not wanting to be locked in the building overnight, he rapidly finished the computer entries, closed down the case files and signed off with a nod and a muttered: ‘The good old days, eh, Comrade Colonel Philby.’ As he did so, a new file with the name Kwilby was created. An accidental mistake in his hurry, or the effect of the twins’ arrival? No-one would ever know.

Seeking to cross-index the new file, the computer searched databases. Finding nothing, it was classified as a new case and automatically flagged for attention on a low level circulation list.

Over in the Yasanevo District of Moscow it came to the attention of the SVR, the Foreign Intelligence Service. It was with a mixture of glee and derision at the failings of their hated rivals that a young agent, Andrei Petrovic Kurochkin, called to his colleagues: ‘FSB incompetence. Can you believe it? A new file and no source data. Nothing!’

Scornfully he made a brief note: “Novvy Chelovek.” Which simply meant “new man”, and was used by both agencies to indicate a new surveillance target.

Feodor and Andrei had nothing in common except their hatred of each other’s branch of State Security. That hatred was soon to turn personal when each was dismissed over their part in the creation of the Kwilby file. The first of the casualties of the twins’ sojourn on Earth.

Having closed the door to the bedroom where Qwelby was sleeping, Mr Rahkamo went down to the kitchen where his wife was preparing hot drinks. Working as a maintenance engineer on all the equipment at a large ski centre, his job required a methodical approach. The same applied now. Before he could decide what to do, he wanted to have all the facts.

Hannu and Anita came into the kitchen clutching the book on the solar system and sheets of drawings which they started to spread over the table.

To Paavo, the drawings looked like the sort children did when still in nursery school. Right then he thought that nothing would surprise him. He was a big man in every sense of the word. His very stillness made the whole room feel calm and relaxed. He waited until everyone was settled, then leant forward, drawing them all together.

‘I will start by repeating what my wife has told me. Tell me whether I’ve got it right. Fill in any gaps if need be. At least then we will know that we are starting from the same place.’ He gestured to the drawings. ‘It looks as though you two have got a lot more you want to tell us?’

The two youngsters nodded, eyes bright with excitement.

Paavo then briefly summarised what he understood had happened from the time that Hannu had called out that he had seen a stranger, until the two boys had gone to Hannu’s room.

‘That’s it, Dad,’ Hannu said approvingly, as his father sat back in his chair.

Seija smiled and rested a hand on her husband’s much larger one.

Satisfied that he’d got the facts straight in his own mind, Paavo smiled at his wife, turned his hand over and gave hers a gentle squeeze.

‘Right. Your turn.’ He looked at the two youngsters, their faces full of eager anticipation.

‘He’s a nice boy,’ Anita said. ‘It’s a funny thing to say when we hardly know him.’ She looked at Hannu. ‘But he “feels” nice.’ She blushed.

‘You mean it’s like, sort of, you can feel his feelings, you mean?’ Hannu asked.

‘When we three hugged, I could feel his happiness, somehow as if it was me feeling happy,’ Anita confirmed.

‘Yeah. I had that, sort of, but different, when he showed me how much he liked the Portal. It was like, you know, there was power in his words. And I understood what he was saying. I felt, like a bond between us, as though we were space explorers. Together. That was weird.’ He laughed, feeling silly.

Anita put a reassuring hand on Hannu’s arm, looking at his parents. ‘He spoke a lot whilst he was doing all the drawings. His language sounds very musical. It carries you with it.’ She gave Hannu an encouraging glance.

Between them, Hannu and Anita explained what they understood of the drawings.

They saw Paavo nodding and heard the occasional grunt as they took him through step by step. The blue world of Earth. Qwelby’s red world. They thought it might be Mars, but Qwelby seemed to be saying that it was inside Earth. Then moving from one world to the other.

He had a sister named Tullia, almost certainly a twin. They laughed as they related that incident, repeating Qwelby’s gestures and seeing him nodding his confirmation. Then Qwelby’s uncertainty. Was Tullia on Earth or still at home?

Paavo had been leaning forward, looking at the drawings with obvious interest. As the youngsters stopped talking he sat back in his chair, shaking his head with a look of doubt on his face.

‘Dad! He is an Alien!’ Hannu said as he searched through the drawings. ‘Well not really, he doesn’t come from another planet, well, he does, because he doesn’t come from our planet but it’s not one that’s like out there, it’s like it’s out here, or in here, but I suppose that means he is a sort of an alien but he is not an alien-alien …’ Hannu had run out of breath.

‘We think he comes from an alternate reality,’ Anita said. Her words reminded Paavo that her father was a scientist.

Hannu presented the drawing of the two planets again: one in solid blue lines and the other in broken red ones. He took a deep breath and looked to Anita for support.

‘We think he is trying to tell us that his world occupies the same space as ours,’ he explained.

‘An alternate reality doesn’t have to be as solid as ours,’ Anita added rapidly. ‘It probably has to vibrate at a different frequency. That would allow it to occupy the same space.’

Paavo shook his head. He had followed every step, even the last one. It was all eminently logical. But. There was one big problem. He knew that what they were saying was totally impossible. Lovely theory, fun for the Science Fiction films he knew his son liked, but not here and now, in this world. No. Definitely, absolutely, not.

‘Like the waves for mobile phones. We don’t see them but they’re there, or here. Well you know, they go right through us, don’t they?’ added Hannu, desperate to convince his father.

That really was too much for Paavo. His world revolved around solid mechanisms, ski lifts, cables, drums. Electricity.
Which can’t be seen. No-one knows why it works. We know how it works, but not why the electrons stream through the cables.
He was glad to have that train of thought broken as his wife returned to the room, having slipped upstairs to check that their guest was still sleeping peacefully.

Paavo had never believed in UFO’s, and was convinced that there always was a rational explanation for any claimed “sighting”. Yet there was a strange boy asleep in his house who didn’t speak any language the children had been able to recognise. Then: why was he wearing summer clothes in winter, and: how had he arrived on the slope opposite their house? He liked that thought. It told him there was something practical he could do.

‘Right. There’s one way of solving this. I’m going over there and find out just where he came from.’

‘Dad, can we come as well?’ asked Hannu.

‘Why not. Then you can see for yourselves he’s no alien from outer space.’

All three wrapped up in warm clothes, picked up torches, and took stout walking sticks to help with the ice that had formed over the surface of the snow.

They got to the top of the bank on the far side of the road and looked out over the crisp snow. The almost full moon shining from a clear sky made everything so bright it was easy to see that a fresh trail had been made through the trees. It led to a fallen one where it was clear that someone had brushed snow from part of the trunk. From there, more tracks led back into the forest. They followed them to the foot of a snowdrift where the snow was all messed up by a large hole.

‘That looks just like that hole I made that day when I went out skiing before the ice crust had melted,’ Hannu said, more excited at what he thought it meant than the embarrassment of that morning. He turned to Anita. ‘I couldn’t stop and went head first into the bank at the side of the road.

‘That was deliberate, rather than shoot over the bank and across the road!’ he added, defensively, as Anita smiled.

‘And you think that’s where he landed,’ she said.

All three of them looked around the whole area very carefully. They could find no other marks of any kind.

‘Look, Dad, it’s like this,’ Hannu was sure he could explain. ‘We agree that he arrived just here, in this hole, slid out and walked to that fallen tree. All the other marks are him going downhill. I saw him.’

‘Yes,’ Paavo said reluctantly.

‘Right. If he had arrived by parachute, either we would find it caught in the trees or footprints showing where he landed or buried it. There are no marks. So, no parachute.’ He waited.

‘All right, no parachute,’ his father agreed.

‘If a helicopter had landed, there would be marks in the snow. There aren’t any. If instead of landing, he had been lowered from it, jumped or whatever, again there would be marks in the snow. The downwind from the chopper blades would have swept snow from the branches. If he had fallen through the trees then snow would have been knocked off the branches. Look.’ Pointing his torch up, he shone it all around the trees.

‘That hasn’t happened. And he would have scratches all over his body and his clothes. Mum says there are bruises but no scratches.’ He glanced at Anita, impressed with his own clarity for once, then looked at his father.

‘So. How did he get here?’ he asked. ‘Not by any natural means, that’s for sure,’ he finished with a sound of triumph in his voice.

‘If he lives in another dimension he could have arrived here by stepping through a space-time warp or a wormhole,’ Anita said, offering a logical explanation.

There was a long silence.

‘Let’s get back,’ Paavo said. He was feeling worse than he had before. He had been so certain that he would find a logical explanation and would not have to worry any more about the strange ideas that had been put into his mind. He led the way home, too many thoughts rushing through his mind for him to pay any attention to the excited chatter between the two youngsters as they continued to debate just how ‘Their Alien’, as they were thinking of Qwelby, really had arrived.

Entering the house through the back door, they stamped the last remains of snow from their boots, hung up their coats and went into the kitchen to stand around the stove and warm themselves.

Hannu excitedly told his mother what they had found, or rather, hadn’t found, proving that their visitor was an alien.

She didn’t seem to be particularly concerned.

‘Qwelby’s still sleeping soundly. The best thing for him is to have a good, long night in bed. Besides which, we haven’t had dinner and it is about time we all sat down and ate. We can talk about everything again in the morning. I’ve telephoned Anita’s father and he said she can stay for the night. He’ll bring some clothes around for her.’

Dr Keskinen was a scientist working at the nearby Institute in Jyväskylä. Although the family had only moved into the village from Helsinki that summer, Viljo had met Paavo on the ski slopes and they had quickly struck up a friendship, which extended to their wives. Both Anita’s parents were happy that their daughter had found a friend who shared her mixture of interests.

‘Mum…’ Hannu started, afraid she might have explained what had happened.

‘All I said was that you two were having so much fun with some science stuff, you’d probably want to stay up late. He wasn’t surprised. After all, there’s no school tomorrow so…’

The fact that Mrs Rahkamo was taking everything in her stride as though nothing unusual had happened at all, and they just had a new friend staying overnight, eased all the tensions. A few minutes later she put dinner on the table. They all sat down and ate quietly, each lost in their own thoughts.

*

Some time later Dr Keskinen telephoned and asked if it was convenient to call round at that moment. Seija suggested that Taimi should also come along, saying it would save telling the story twice. Seija did not allow herself to be drawn on the nature of the story.

The Keskinens arrived, kissed Anita goodnight, and said good night to Hannu as the two children went upstairs.

‘Make yourselves comfortable,’ Paavo said, as Seija headed into the lobby, followed by the Keskinens to divest themselves of their outdoor clothing and put on the guest slippers every Finnish house kept. The Keskinens looked like the typical image for Scandinavians. Tall, slim, blonde hair and rosy cheeks from the cold. Taimi was wearing a rainbow coloured sweatshirt over black trousers, Viljo a more conservative dark green shirt over brown trousers.

A few moments later all four were settled comfortably in the living room, beers to hand. Paavo threw on more logs and soon there was a blazing fire for them to sit around whilst they sipped their drinks. The Keskinens had seen their daughter and knew there was nothing wrong with her. So, whatever it was, they waited patiently, puzzled looks on their faces.

Twenty minutes later they were no longer puzzled but totally taken aback by the story that had just been told. They had to agree with the sense that the children had made of the drawings done by the visitor. Viljo could understand the logic and he certainly understood the science that could show the logic was true. But to accept that it actually was true and that the boy was the proof? That was something else.

To discover that this strange boy had escaped from a hospital would be a nice easy solution. But even that would not explain how he had arrived in the middle of the forest.

Viljo accepted the mathematics of String Theory that showed that in order to have a planet like Earth with its three dimensions plus time there had to be at least ten dimensions, some scientists argued for twenty-six. He knew that photons, and it was assumed other weightless particles, could travel across the universe, slipping through other dimensions before arriving at their destination. But to accept that a person, a humanoid, living in one of those other dimensions had travelled to Earth? That was too much to accept in one evening.

There was a long silence. Viljo could feel the growing tension. Surely, he thought, we should contact “the authorities”. He put quotation marks around that in his mind. Exactly who should they contact?

He looked at Paavo and raised an eyebrow, tilted his head to one side, saw Paavo grimace and guessed he was having similar thoughts.

Spreading his big hands out in front of him, Paavo looked at them, recalling what he had experienced when he had picked up Qwelby. ‘He placed all his trust in me,’ he said to no one in particular.

‘He asked you to trust him?’ Viljo queried.

‘No,’ Paavo replied. ‘As he put his arm around my shoulder I felt him giving me his trust. Much like that time when Hannu was eleven, fell over and hit his knee on a large stone I was using to prop the gate open. He couldn’t walk right away. I picked him up and carried him indoors.’ He smiled at the memory.

Paavo turned to look at his wife. She was nodding. A practical man not much given to displaying his emotions, Seija knew that was one of her husband’s precious memories. ‘But this was stronger,’ he added.

‘I had to help him take off his tank top, it was so tight and slippery,’ Seija said. ‘You saw how badly bruised he is.’ She looked at her husband who nodded. ‘When his top was off I rested my fingers on his back.’ She gave a little embarrassed smile. ‘It’s what I would do with Hannu,’ she added defensively. ‘His skin. It felt like velvet. I felt him relax… and more than that.’ She turned to Viljo, ‘It wasn’t trust he was giving me. But it was like a cry for help, to be protected, looked after. It reminded of a kitten I had when a child. It had had a terrible fright. When I picked it up it was mewing pitifully and shivering, I could feel its little claws through my sweater. I know it sounds stupid, but he felt like that. All trembling inside and wanting to be reassured that everything was okay.’

‘All this was in your minds?’ Viljo said, more as a statement than a question as he switched his gaze between husband and wife.

‘No,’ Paavo and Seija replied together, switching their gazes between their two friends.

‘Feelings,’ Paavo said.

‘Strong feelings,’ Seija added, looking to Taimi for understanding.

Viljo had said that Anita could stay the night, but that had been before he knew the full story, now he was concerned. Having received Seija’s permission to examine Qwelby, Taimi went upstairs.

The others sat in silence. Viljo was turning over in his mind what he had felt when he had shaken the boy’s hand. It was as though Qwelby was pleased to meet him. His wife was a Yoga teacher. Exercise and relaxing by breathing: he accepted that was good. Meditation. Well, it kept her group of friends happy. But a Transpersonal Psychotherapist. ‘Transpersonal.’ His wife was an intelligent woman, he did not see how she could believe in all that mumbo jumbo. They avoided discussing that as much as possible.

Taimi returned after several minutes. ‘I checked on Anita first. She said that if I hugged Qwelby I’d understand.’ Taimi smiled. ‘I didn’t go that far, but I did sit on the bed and rest my fingers on his temples. That boy is full of one big hurt. Yet there was also a sense of a deep core of serenity under that. In all the years I’ve been practising Reiki I’ve never experienced anything like that.’ She was confident of what she had felt, and knew Seija would accept her opinion.

‘That boy was dead to the world. I don’t see him waking before any of us,’ Seija said, reassured by her friend’s professional expertise.

‘Lock him in?’ Viljo asked, realising he was the odd one out and feeling it was the least he could do to protect Anita.

When that had been done and the key placed on a hook in the kitchen, although still not entirely reassured, Viljo gave Paavo a half smile. ‘Time we went,’ he said, gesturing to his wife who followed him thought to the lobby.

The Rahkamos followed. As they said their goodnights, Paavo added ‘See you tomorrow?’

‘Yes. I would like to meet this “alien” you’ve found.’ Viljo’s smile faded as his gaze switched between his two friends and his wife. ‘There’s got to be a logical explanation. We just haven’t found it yet.’

Being also a Reiki Master, Taimi was the only one to think she might have an understanding of what had happened. Alien or not, the boy had so strong an aura that she had sensed it as she sat on his bedside. And physical contact had made deciphering his strong feelings surprisingly easy. But only because she was aware of the process. The overwhelming impression she had received on gently touching his head was that underneath his surface feelings there was an old soul. A powerful old soul. She wanted to talk with him, when the time was right.

*

Anita lay awake for a long time wondering what it would be like if she were in Qwelby’s situation. And where Tullia might be. With “Their Alien” sleeping in the spare bedroom, she was tucked up in a snug, loft room. She decided she liked that more than the guest room she had used before. It felt cosy and reminded her of fun times in the summer, camping. For a time she imagined that the sloping sides of the roof made the walls of a tent, and tried to imagine what it would be like to be in a country where they lived in tents.

That night she dreamed of a desert where small, dark-skinned people lived. It wasn’t a desert like she had seen in films with deep sand, piled by the wind into great big dunes, and an oasis with wild tribesmen charging around on beautiful horses. This was very different. Fairly flat, with the sand looking more like hard earth and lots of small bushes and spindly trees.

She could not make out clearly what clothes the people were wearing. Brown bodies wearing almost nothing seemed to elide into the same people wearing ordinary clothes. There were bows and spears. She could not make out which people were carrying them. What she was sure about was that none of them were wearing flowing robes and turbans, and there was no oasis. In her dream she said to herself that it wasn’t a real desert. But the brown figures dancing around a big fire said it was.

Meanwhile, Qwelby slept on, whatever else was disturbing him, and being without Tullia was his biggest problem, he knew from the energy responses of the three Rahkamos and Anita, that he was being looked after.