The Second Wave Read online

  It was a beautiful spectacle: the water jumped off the rocks like a cliff diver, cascaded down for what seemed a mile, until it plunged into a small lake with a deafening splash, then it whirled around rocks and pebbles, tiring itself out. The little lake was surrounded by blooming flowers and thick, green grass. A row of saffron colored petals blossomed where the lake became the river. The sunlight was refracted by the myriads of water droplets, thus creating an almost sheer rainbow around the falls.

  The whole scenery was, alas, completely lost on the children. They had no appreciation for the beauty of it whatsoever. They enjoyed the fine mist of moisture that surrounded the place where the waterfall met the lake; here, they stood until their clothes were soaked. The older kids took off their shirts and dove headfirst into the lake; the younger ones merely slipped off their sandals to enjoy the feel of mud between their toes. It took no more than ten minutes until they began splashing each other, doing underwater somersaults. They even held a contest to find out who could scream the loudest whilst standing inside the small cavern behind the cascade.

  They didn’t notice anything wrong until they came home that afternoon and their mothers broke into sobs on seeing them.

  Isabel was a skinny ten-year-old with short cut hair and small feet. She was the daughter of Selena, the village’s librarian, and Eliseo, a primary school teacher.

  At the lake she raced Emma and Louis underwater, hence her clothes were still dripping when she came home almost in time for dinner. The family lived in house number eighty, close to the south gate, one of the few houses that was completely finished when they moved in.

  Isabel, sandals and socks in her hand, pitter-pattered across the kitchen and into the living room, where her father was setting the dinner table and her mother was talking about her workday. She didn’t wait for them to notice her, but shouted, still breathless with excitement, “Mum! Dad! Guess how long I can hold my breath!”

  Selena gave a gut-wrenching screech. Eliseo, a strong hearted man, who, having worked in a ghetto school for the last years, claimed to have seen it all, dropped the plate he was carrying when he laid eyes on their only child. Isabel didn’t know what was wrong with them. Her mother threw herself on her knees in front of her, repeatedly touching her hair, patting her down. Her father raced to the library to fetch a book on curses and black magic, or so he yelled over his shoulder as he left the house. It was curious, Isabel noticed just now, that her hair seemed longer than this morning. And the reason she wasn’t wearing her sandals was because they had apparently shrunk—or maybe she just accidentally swapped shoes with Emma, whose feet were smaller.

  Eliseo and Selena were not the only parents who dragged their child to see Dr. Paige that night. No less than eleven kids sat in the waiting room at the hospital, their fathers and mothers in various states of horror and denial.

  Summer examined them all, listened to what the parents had to say, then listened to the stories the children told her. Her conclusion was, as she repeated that night at the agora, that something, probably in the water or around the waterfalls, had made all eleven children age approximately one year in less than a few hours.

  An uproar followed—the afflicted families wanted explanations, or for someone to reverse the process, or demanded to at least be allowed to go back to Earth this very instant. It was a delicate situation, one which Mayor Rochester only just succeeded to calm down. He promised he’d find out what was happening, whether it was indeed the water that had been poisoned in a way. Eliseo was one of four people who volunteered to help with that.

  The next morning, Eliseo and the other volunteers met with Peter and three protectors, Sophie, Gavin, and Carl. They met at the entrance to the colony, the south gate. Equipped with rucksacks and an iron will to find out what had happened, they headed to where the kids said the waterfalls were. Peter took soil and water samples along the way and from around the lake. Luke filled several dozen small containers with specimen of flora.

  “I can’t find anything wrong with it,” Peter told Luke later that day. Back in the bio/geo lab complex, all his samples were scattered across a large worktop. They had examined everything under the microscope, had run several tests on them, but could find nothing.

  “The frustrating thing is,” he explained as Luke stood hunched over one of the microscopes to look at some mud from the bottom of the lake, “we can only test the samples for known substances! But what if it is something new, something unique to this planet? We wouldn’t even register it. This is not only frustrating, it is also quite futile.”

  “Or maybe,” returned Luke, “nothing is wrong with either soil or water.”

  “Or that, yes.”

  “Maybe we should look at the whole picture.” Luke stepped away from the microscope to look at Peter, who shot him a quizzical glance. Tousling his hair as if it helped him think, Luke theorized, “Eleven children aged roughly a year. Twelve children played at the waterfall. The question we should probably be asking ourselves is: what did little Savannah do that the others didn’t do? Or perhaps even: what did everybody else do that Savannah didn’t do?”

  A good question to which nobody had an answer, certainly not the parents. So Mayor Rochester invited all twelve children into his home, handed out chocolate and lemonade, and asked Luke to handle it, who was, albeit childless himself, a favorite among the kids for his pancake faces at lunch.

  “I can hold my breath for really long!” said Isabel, when he asked her if she could remember anything out of the ordinary from that day.

  George declared, “I swallowed a wriggly worm by accident, but it’s okay, I got sick right after and the worm was all right, too!”

  Emma demanded a princess face the next time they served pancakes at the canteen. Toby said he had lost his cowboy hat behind the water but he didn’t remember who won the screaming contest. Savannah was scared of dark spaces, Astrid proudly wore a bra now, Pavel got water up his nose when he had attempted an underwater handstand. Julian was only three years old and didn’t know what was going on. Max had cut his toe on something, but admitted that it could have happened on any other day as well, he didn’t keep track of his injuries; he was an accident-prone boy. Zinna especially liked the flowers on the bottom of the lake, and Rose didn’t say anything, she broke into tears because Max accidentally knocked over her glass of lemonade when he tried to sneak some more chocolate from across the table. As far as interrogations went, this was easily the most interesting Luke had ever had the fortune to be part of.

  The sun set and he still didn’t have any usable information, so he sent the kids home. They were probably in a lot of trouble already for having no more appetite for dinner; he didn’t want to make them late on top of that.

  “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 place
s. 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.

  * * * *

  Chapter 22: R.U.T.E.

  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.”