The Chrysalid Conspiracy (31 page)

“I have a feeling that scenario you put together, about a holocaust and survival, may be nearer the truth than we thought. I think it’s what all this is about.” Amelia tried to explain. “I can’t really tell you what I mean because I don’t know myself yet. It’s just what my mum said, and the way she said she loved me.”

Rayn became quiet bewildered and tried to make light of it.

“Well,” she said, “I don’t suppose it’s a great leap of the imagination from a mother’s love to the end of the world, do you?” She laughed and the idea raised a laugh from Amelia as well.

“When you put it like that, it does sound pretty stupid. It’s just that…” she ran out of words.

“It’s just what, Amelia?” asked Rayn softly, in an effort to help her troubled friend get through this.

“It’s just that, before last night, this conspiracy thing was all a bit fanciful. You know, like make believe. I didn’t really believe it could be true. But now, I’m so scared. My mind’s been in a knot trying to make sense of it. You know, looking for the bigger picture? The White Slave Trade, Alien Abduction, World Domination. Any reason for why this might be happening. I’m afraid I’ve got a pretty vivid imagination, but the same thought kept popping up. All I can think of is that there will eventually be no modern society. I’m so frightened that I’ve been trying to deny everything we’ve found out and to pretend it’s not true. But now I’m even more scared because this end-of-the-world thing is the only thing that fits. And I think Professor Melkins was on the same track as well.”

All this came out in a rush and Rayn realised what Amelia had been going through. It explained her erratic behaviour and near panic. Rayn decided not to think about the implications of Amelia’s predictions and to concentrate instead on helping her back to reality. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s jog, or we’ll still be out here for breakfast tomorrow. It’s a beautiful day. Let’s enjoy it for a while, shall we?” They started off again at a more leisurely pace and both girls began to relax.

A clear blue sky and bright sunshine complemented the cold winter air. Leafless trees made the conifers look even more colourful. A family of grey squirrels watched them suspiciously from a nearby tree as they hunted for their hidden treasure hoard for breakfast. The ground mist made the distant trees appear to be growing from an island of clouds.

It wasn’t long before they reached Grabsum Moor and Rayn’s first thought was for their own version of the ‘Treasure Hoard’; breakfast. Finding a ‘greasy spoon’ cafe open by the railway station, they piled in.

“What are you having?” Rayn asked.

“Oh, just some toast and coffee. You’ve got me hooked on this stuff,” answered Amelia. “What do you want?”

“Anything with bacon,” she said.

“You certainly love your bacon for breakfast, don’t you?” Amelia laughed. “I do, but I couldn’t manage it right now.”

When Amelia returned with the food Rayn said “Ah, That’ll do nicely. Thanks. The trouble is I’m not allowed to cook bacon in the mornings at home. It makes Mum feel sick. It’s all right at your place, though, I’m glad to say.”

“Maybe because she doesn’t have to sleep in the kitchen at our place,” pointed out Amelia.

“Never mind,” answered Rayn. “To make sure I get bacon every morning when I’m grown up and independent, I’m going to sleep with half a pig.”

“Why don’t you get married?” said Amelia. “You can sleep with a whole one.”

Rayn choked on her sandwich, while Amelia spilled her coffee down her tracksuit. The return to laughter was a welcome relief.

When they’d stopped giggling and settled down, Rayn asked Amelia about the book.

“How are you getting on with it? Do you think it might have something to do with what we are supposed to be looking for?”

“Not good and maybe,” was Amelia’s short answer. “But I’m certainly going to give it a lot more attention, just in case.”

“So what’s it about? You must have some idea by now. You and I can whip through a book like that in no time,” said Rayn.

“I’m afraid speed reading doesn’t work. You run your eye down the page and you end up with a pile of loose words in your head. It’s down to the old method. Slow going. Some of the sentence and paragraph construction is pretty awful for a man of his ability.”

Rayn was disappointed at the answer. “Have you got anything for me at all?” she asked.

“It’s long and complicated and very dull so far. There are loads of diagrams, photos, graphs and statistics that are way beyond me. He’s got reams of data going back millions of years. I couldn’t understand it at first. Then I realised he was trying to explain the vast timescale of human evolution. Once I saw that, it gave me an insight into the way he worked. Honestly, he details every important anthropological find for the last one hundred and fifty years. He lists who found it, where it was tested it, what method was used to date it, who wrote what books about it, where it is now… Every conceivable piece of information just to say he mapped out human evolution over the last few million years. Very thorough, our professor.”

Rayn returned after buying more coffee and slumped into her chair. “Not only is this uninteresting, you haven’t told me anything, yet,” she complained.

“You’re going to have to listen to it the way I understand it, or else read it yourself,” retorted Amelia.

“Okay, I submit,” said Rayn. “I’ve got it so far. Keep going.”

“Please only interrupt when you have an intelligent question to ask,” Amelia said, in her best schoolteacher’s tone.

“Why?” said Rayn. “Would you be able to recognise one?”

Both girls laughed, attracting the attention of other customers in the cafe, but only for a moment. Amelia continued. “Apparently, there were quite a few humanoid species over the last two or three million years. Homo Sapien, early us, arrived as long ago as two or three hundred thousand years ago. Before that there was Neanderthal and before them Homo Erectus.”

“Homo what?” interrupted Rayn.

“Homo Erectus,” repeated Amelia.

“I like the sound of him,” said Rayn with a giggle.

“It means he walked upright, not what you’re thinking,”

“I know,” said Rayn, “but it’s an interesting concept.”

“So much for intelligent questions,” said Amelia. “Shall I continue?”

“Yes please. This is starting to get interesting.”

“Well, once again I spotted what he was up to. He did all this detailed history to make the point that this was a gradual adaptivity over several million years. These species didn’t just turn up and then disappear in the manner that most books on the subject seem to imply. Those are his words. Each minor change took thousands of years. Some species took a wrong turn somewhere and died out, but only in favour of stronger ones.”

“Couldn’t he have just said that evolution takes a long time?” said Rayn.

“No. This guy was out to prove what he was saying. It was the only way he knew how,” corrected Amelia.

“Poor guy. And this is all that’s left of him,” Rayn sympathised.

“Well, it suddenly gets boring again.” Amelia warned her. “He completely changes the subject to climate change and the most recent ice age.”

“You’d better carry on. I couldn’t read this. Did he have academic indigestion, or what?” Rayn moaned.

“Hey,” said Amelia. “We’d better start back. I’m just going to the loo, then we’ll get going.”

***

Back on the road both girls were pleasantly surprised to find they didn’t feel at all tired. This made them feel good about themselves and how well their general fitness was progressing. Rayn was pleased,

Amelia had shaken off her depression from the outward run. Now she felt free to run as they should do.

“It’ll take longer to get back. You really pushed those first five or six miles,” Rayn remarked.

“That’s okay. If we’ve got anything left we’ll save it till the end.”

“Deal,” said Rayn finally, as they settled into a rhythm.

“Where were we!” asked Amelia after a while.

“Ice age,” answered Rayn.

“Oh yeah. Well, apparently, Ice Ages don’t just turn up and hang around for a few millions of years. The main ice sheets stay pretty much the same, but the bit round the middle has variations. They’re called Glacials.”

“Now don’t sulk Rayn, I have to explain this.” Amelia said in response to the expression on her friend’s face. “Glacials are when all the mountain regions on and around the equator freeze up and become huge glaciers. Then the weather gets warmer and they melt it’s called an interglacial. He put in an incredible amount of technical detail, but this is what it came down to. During the interglacials, the deserts become habitable. It seems that the more ice, the less evaporation. Ergo, less rain. Once the ice melts – wallop! Wet deserts. He says the process is cyclic and forces all species of life to constantly adapt to the ever-changing conditions, so driving evolution”

“I hope we’re going to get to the point that these two fascinating lines of enquiry meet, and some sort of story emerges?” Rayn was impatient and the sarcasm was showing. Amelia ignored her and continued.

“Remember, Professor Melkins put a lot of work into this. He’s taken great pains to establish the relationship between the geological time-line and evolution. Although, I must admit, I feel like I’m reading two books at once. In the next bit, which I haven’t read in any detail yet, he says that about a hundred thousand years ago Homo Sapien dominated the skyline as Neanderthal began to die out. Then, somewhere in the last forty or fifty thousand years a new species appeared. Stronger, healthier, fitter and more intelligent than Modern man. Melkins is trying to prove that this couldn’t happen within the normal evolutionary time line, which he’s already proved. His claim is that something happened that changed the evolutionary process. I don’t know, but I think the rest of the book tells us what he thinks caused it. He also thought it has a profound effect on our lives today. I just need the time to get through it.”

Amelia stopped running and looked over the edge of a bridge to watch a sluggish river meandering along. Rayn stopped beside her and gave a desperate sigh.

“Oh Amelia. I’m so sorry I unloaded all that stuff about being special on you last night. What with all this on your mind, then that business with your mother, you certainly didn’t need me trying to help.”

“No, don’t apologise, Rayn. Reading that book gave me something else to think about, fanciful though it was. I went to sleep imagining us leaping tall buildings in a single bound.” They both laughed.

“Oh no,” said Rayn suddenly, “look at that, Amelia.” She said pointing to a clump of weeds that had the wheels of a supermarket trolley protruding up like a shipwreck. Together they took in the carrier bags caught in the reeds, along with plastic cups and food containers.

“How can they do this? Aren’t there laws against it?” she exclaimed.

“Oh yes,” said Amelia. “The trouble is that the people who make the laws are the same ones who contribute to all this.”

“Is it too late to change anything, Amelia? Who’s responsible?”

“We are, or rather those of us who are products of a throwaway society. As for cleaning it up, that’s the local council. The problem there seems to be that council officials have lost the plot. They’ve forgotten that they don’t actually own anything. They’re there to administer to the needs of the community. I think they now believe that to give in to public pressure weakens their authority. So nothing gets done,”

“Where are we by the way?” Amelia brought them back to their original objective. “We must have passed the Moonraker, Are we ready to push things along yet?” and with a nod from Rayn they stepped up the pace.

As the week slipped by and Christmas was dismantled both physically and emotionally, Amelia became more and more concerned about the impending rock concert. She really didn’t want to go. Her problem was that she needed a cast iron excuse. Unable to tell her friend she couldn’t bring herself to share her greatest moment she could feel an inevitable tsunami of ‘Fun’ rushing towards her.

A glimmer of an idea came to her when she was over at Molly’s flat, helping with the boys. There wasn’t much room and Molly chattered on about them finding something larger.

“Poor old Nigel,” Molly was saying, “He really wants to go to this Chain Saw gig, but we can’t get a sitter at this late date. So he’s doing it so that I won’t miss it. Isn’t he a fabulous guy?”

“Surely you can find somebody?” asked Amelia, after agreeing with her about Nigel.

“No. Everyone is already booked. It is New Year’s Eve don’t forget, and double time,” she explained.

Molly’s friend Lorraine turned up at that moment. She was a slim, pretty girl, about the same age as Molly, and just as humorous and bubbly. She took off her coat to reveal an immaculate white uniform, like a nurse. “Sorry,” she said as she saw Amelia looking. “I’m just on my way to work.”

“I hope they supply those outfits?” said Amelia.

“Unlimited,” answered Lorraine. “A room full of them. All on racks, like a shop. You can go and change as many times as you need to. Don’t see why, really. We’re basically cleaners so we never see the guests and they never see us.”

As they chatted on, Amelia tried to get Lorraine to talk about her work, but she went on about how envious she was about Molly’s ‘gig’.

“Poor Nigel,” she said. “You know I’d have the boys if I wasn’t working, don’t you Molly?”

It was then that an idea began to formulate in Amelia’s mind. There were a lot of loose ends and ifs and buts, but it might be enough. She wasn’t very well off for options, after all.

“Would you go if you could?” she asked Lorraine.

“Course I would,” she said, pouncing on the very idea. “Wouldn’t everyone?”

Amelia made her excuses and left. She knew she couldn’t pull this off without telling Rayn something. But not everything.

As she walked down to the water meadows, she organised her thoughts and worked out a plan of action. Finding Bridie crafting leather in the caravan she called “Hi, Bridie, Is Rayn around?”

“She’s gone shopping.”

“I’ve just come from the village, I didn’t see her,” queried Amelia.