Another (as yet) untitled

THE BEGINNING
Chapter 1
Geoff Knoble walked through the silent, womblike tunnel between the two buildings, finding himself mindlessly, and comfortably, counting time slices as he walked between the pools of light. Gently it fell from the down lighters leaving pools of soft light spaced out unevenly and asymmetrically along the floor. The tunnels were not sound proofed but sound deadened and the walls and floors were covered in soft, sound absorbing, hard-wearing fabrics printed in soft pastel shades. Finally he passed through the security lock that guarded his laboratory.

The buildings, along with the tunnels and walkways joining them, had been created with the inhabitants, long term, and psychological welfare in mind. Pastel shades, background muzak mainly based on works by Bach and Mozart, and soft, durable fabrics were a part of the ambiance the designers planned in, cold, echoing corridors lead people to feel as if they are isolated and alone. Nobody, that lived underground with a handful of others ,wanted to admit that they felt lonely, even if they are. The people here were valuable and with so few of them, their mental and physical welfare was paramount. They could be living underground for a long time.

His team had the experiment set up and running. All that remained to do was to throw the final switch and wait for the bang.

Geoff had just left Lonnie, who had chosen to be the catcher for today, in the other building. ‘Catcher’ is a very poor definition of what Lonnie was to do. The building Geoff is heading for is sending and the building he has left, housing Lonnie, is ‘catching’. Geoff’s current line of enquiry is to try to find another means of traveling between two points, fast. Traveling across the surface in the open is not an option and present means of movement through the underground tunnels that link the work and living quarters across the continent could be slow if production demanded excess power.

* * * * * * * * *

Steven and Geoff Knoble were the products of 300 years selective breeding. The Knobles, their paternal grandparents could trace the family tree back before the landings at Plymouth Rock by the Founding Fathers. The family tree’s roots start before the Reformation in England under Henry the Eighth.

Their maternal grandparents can trace their lineage back to supporters of Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne. When George Edward Stephen Knoble married Jennifer Beuclaire Leveir there were great expectations on both sides and the newlyweds cheerfully destroyed them.

They were moving out to Middle America, George would practice law in a small town and Jennie was determined to be his wife. The wealth backing the couple ensured that, should they both spend like fools, there would be more in the bank after they had died than when they started.

The newlyweds crept into the unsuspecting town of Gilmore and set about building a life for themselves. As months past George and Jennie earned the respect of the locals and anyone who discovered more than the cover story was sworn to secrecy about the town’s latest residents.

By the time the cover story was blown, it no longer mattered. The Knobles were then as much a part of Gilmore as if they had both been born in the local hospital, educated in local schools and brought up inside the town never to venture outside.

Three years after their arrival in town George became a proud father. The Knobles had provided for a town party to celebrate Steven’s arrival into the peaceful and well ordered existence of the Knoble family. Three years later and Steven could stop carrying the family cat around with him everywhere he went. He had a baby brother to play with instead, Mum and Dad had called him Geoffrey.

Again the whole town celebrated at the family’s expense, George, and a true local called Oswald Baliker started an informal partnership. Ossie had struck up a friendship with George and Jennie within days of their arrival. He could talk Law to George and he would understand. Ossie worked in Corporate Law from a branch office of a large Chicago Partnership.

Around the town George and Ossie had become known as the two for one lawyers. You paid for one and the other came for free, as a part of the package. The Gilmore Law firm of ‘Baliker and Knoble’ was only the next logical step for both of them.

During those first few years George and Ossie assisted each other on the majority of cases each had. By the time of Geoff’s christening they had an office in town and a growing practice.

Their firm was used by the entire town, even the council. The fee lists looked odd at times with the occasional cow or flock of chickens appearing on the balance sheet when a client was short of cash. Nobody from Gilmore ever went without legal council’s representation or advice for shortage of funds.

Jennie and Anne, Ossie’s better half, his words every time he introduced her to someone new, filled in their days and early evenings, when George or Ossie or both were working either late or out of town, working for the Church or other local charities.

Summer follows spring and gives way to Autumn followed by winter. Schooldays, school friends and holidays lead inexorably to college days. Dark hair shows grey and silver, even Gilmore ages, but as slowly as the pace of the country life it is a part of.

Steven leaves for the California Institute of Technology, Geoff is away at college preparing for his three years at M.I.T.

The majority of Geoff’s ideas came from his year out between leaving M.I.T. and starting work in Los Angeles. The War started too soon for his ideas to be of any use, they were still too rough. The ideas were simple, making them work required only time and dedication. For this task his tutors at M.I.T. prepared him well. The extra time he put in on the Philosophy seminars soon proved their worth as he discovered that any problem had as many solutions as you had ideas. Some would work and others would prove to be another way of not making something work. The outcome was not good or bad, the outcome provided information.

* * * * * * * * *

Growing up in the pleasant environment of Gilmore had clouded Geoff’s vision. Most of the clouds had a kind of pink haze around them. Living, one generation removed, with their grandparents gave both Geoff and Steven a view on how simple and pleasant life can be. Geoff had spent his first five years in Palm Springs with his parents while Steven had been finding out if he enjoyed a settled schooling away from home. Both children chose their grandparent’s home over the luxury of five star hotel room service and rented, serviced properties that you just got settled into then you had to repack everything to move on.

Gilmore was tame, established walks through cultivated woodland, playing in the local stream that had to be really angry to raise the reputation of being sluggish. Summers were hot, sunny and dry. The autumnal colours, almost a New England autumn, in the vivid reds, oranges and browns of falling leaves. The late autumn mists gave way to grey skies pierced by the black fingers of leafless tree branches pointing toward the heavily snow laden clouds that would soon start to gently, over a period of days, bury all familiar landmarks in a deep, soft, white unspoiled blanket of snow often several feet deep. That was when farmers dragged out the old, brightly decked out horse draw sleighs and the sleigh ride season had begun.

The roads out of town to the turnpike were never blocked for more than an hour or so at a time each winter. Over the weeks prior to Christmas, carolers were out on street corners during the days. Of an evening they could be seen bringing cheer to the neighbour hoods with replica eighteenth century hand held lanterns on poles over some shoulders and others pushing brightly decorated handcarts selling hot chestnuts and baked potatoes.

Spring, summer and autumn were filled with healthy outdoor exercise and with community picnics every other weekend. Gilmore even had its own ‘summer camp’, hayrides and barn dances around harvest festival time, this spirit helped the community gain strength and fortitude over the years during which Gilmore had grown from a small settlement into the small town it grew into. Someone decided that the town had grown big enough and switched off the urge to grow anymore. So as a small town Gilmore stayed. It became the typical small town where everyone knew everyone else but normally kept themselves to themselves.

This was the environment that nurtured Steven and Geoff as they grew from boisterous children into young men well equipped for the journey through college and beyond.

Both Steven and Geoff gained their Masters Degrees, Steven from Cal Tec and Geoff from M.I.T. Steven, who found that he enjoyed big city life, stayed and worked in Los Angeles. Three years after Steven started work Geoff left M.I.T for his year out preferring the more rural aspect of Massachusetts and the wilder, more mountainous, areas of New England and beyond.

GEOFF
Chapter 2

Even though it is the dark, still, very early hours of Wednesday morning Geoff’s head jerks as the overused air around the vast L.A. conurbation drifts into his bedroom and hacks a sneeze from his overstressed sinuses that shocks him awake. This rebellion from his body forces him to submit to good sense and close his big bedroom window and to rely on air recirculation to keep him breathing, while he sleeps. At least until tomorrow and his interview. Well Geoff Knoble was under the self imposed, and probably correct, impression that he would be interviewing them. ‘They’ just hadn’t realized it yet.

Wednesday’s dawn arrives early. Geoff has been granted his opportunity to discuss his ideas and is running through the graphics of his presentation and making certain of his timing. Showering, shaving and breakfasting as he went. Satisfied with his, now well rehearsed, performance. With a final swift glance at the wall clock he collects his document case. Geoff gulps down half of his, still too hot, mug of coffee, he turns and runs out of the door slamming it shut with him, his document case and his coffee bowl on the outside, his house and car keys, jacket and wallet on the inside.

Not wasting his time cursing or blaming himself, he grabbed the handlebars of his mountain bike. He grins at himself, ‘Hay. Ever ready’ He strapped his document case, holding his palmtop, into the luggage pannier and donning the facemask. Again the grin and again ‘Hay. Ever ready.’ He always left it there, with a fresh filter, for such times of high atmospheric pollution, rode towards downtown L.A. and his appointment as if all the devils in hell were after him.

He peddled, weaving between grid locked Angelino’s cars, into downtown L.A. to attend his meeting. He knew there had to be a better way of organizing the journey to work. He was already late but there was nothing he could do to alter that. Once he had his chance for his ideas to be heard, his late arrival would be forgiven, if not completely forgotten. He knew what he had to say, his script has been worked on for years. Most ideas he had fitted into a view of the future. He feels that he has the whole package. Geoffrey Knoble, with the unbridled innocence and ‘wisdom’ of the young, is ready to take his moment.

With the upcoming meeting now placed to the back of his mind, instead he starts to plan on how to break back into his house in a few hours time. He decides against a full frontal assault on any of the windows or locks in his home, and decides instead to call on his older brother to collect his spare keys from him and bum a lift home. Steven’s four-wheel drive could easily carry Geoff’s bike on the rear carrier.

Four enormously enjoyable hours, for Geoffrey, later he left through the same glass, chrome and marble entrance to the skyscraper he had earlier entered through. Still carrying his palmtop and document case, except now he had his funding and with his free hand he held his phone and talked to Steven’s office organizing his trip home. “Ste’, they’ve swallowed it. Hook, line and sinker. Can I call down and see you, I locked my keys in the house and I’m on my bike.”

As he paused to take breath Steven took full advantage of his chance and spoke, “Geoff, slow down. Yes, come over. Congratulations on the grant. And yes, I’ll get you and your bike home. Hang up and come over, now.” Steven leaves his office carrying his keys and a huge smile that’s left over from his brother’s excited phone call. Heading towards his truck he tends his goodbyes to the street vendors around his office block.

Geoff is sat on Steven’s front stoop as the yellow four-wheel drive pulls into the front drive. From being sat at rest playing ‘five jacks’ on the top step with a handful of largish pale blue chippings carefully collected from the driveway Geoff appears before Steven at the drivers door of the pick up, his face almost split in half by a beaming smile.

“They sat politely and listened intently for an hour and a half. Then for the next 21/2 hours they took me on the royal tour and told me how I could spend their money. They want everything. Ste’ your young brother is a research scientist.”

The plans, for their futures, that the boys had when they were still living in Gilmore began to come about. Steven climbed the corporate ladder and Geoff collected research grants the way some people collect thimbles, milk jugs or porcelain.

This was the beginning of Geoff’s dreams coming about. The first of his dreams had been to help Mankind escaping from the envelope of air that surrounds the Earth. Human beings have traveled their solar system and had gone no further. There is nowhere close enough for man to travel to in one lifetime. Traveling faster than light had not yet been achieved.

Mankind stood on Pluto’s Moon and looked out. There was nothing there to see. For millions upon millions of miles in all directions lay black emptiness. Our closest neighbour lays five light years away. The distance that light covered in a year is immense. Mankind’s psyche stood on the edge of the universe and despaired. We withdrew to our own very small planet and feared. The more imaginative of us foresaw the future. Mankind was effectively sealed up on the one planet. People resented the fact that they were being contained and violence exploded.

This was the period of Geoff’s formative years, he was twelve years old when mankind returned to Earth. He enjoyed, and was grateful for still, living in Gilmore as his life continued untouched by the news he saw on the information channels.

He observed the slide into urban chaos, the pain lasted eight years before the general paranoia took over from the rule of law. He watched the vigilantes leaders rise to prominence and a strengthening of the Military on the mainland to control the American populace. Geoff, due to abilities, led a protected life of learning and teaching during his school years.

Educational facilities were well, if discreetly, protected. The majority of post graduate work was defense related. Both private companies and Government Departments had some form of defense projects running in the majority of higher educational establishments across the country. All this work had to be protected. Even from a non existent enemy. Everywhere Geoff went off campus, he went with the protection of an armoured car and two armed bodyguards. One private and one Government. The pair worked well together and kept him alive without really involving Geoff. He accepted the position he was in, he had never been asked if he wanted it, he was just expected to accept it. It was all for his safety. Sometimes, watching news items about riots in some downtown area, he appreciated the privileged position he held.

Ever since joining M.I.T. Geoff had inbuilt security. It lasted throughout his education and through into his work. Geoff could have worked twenty four hours a day and the work continued to pile up on him. Papers left unread, ideas not recorded. He could do whatever he wanted. With all the things he had to do he had no time to look at any new ideas.

Things were different now that there was War. Geoff had hived off all the things he had to do to other teams, and had taken the time and he had enough dedication in the team around him to make most of his ideas reality. Especially anything that would bring defeat to the enemy.

As he walked steadily along the tunnel toward his goal, a walled off segment of his brain calculated this series of experiments chances of success. On reaching the security lock, a glance at his reflection on the highly polished door showed him that, overriding his fear of failure, his image was smiling back at him.

His smile betrayed the confidence he felt as soon as he passed through the lock and looked at the team that he had built over the past three and a half years. All the team members, gathered in the control station, who saw him expected that evening to be celebrating another success for Geoff. As he approached the main console he adjusted the headset, he constantly wore these days, that kept him in touch with the other stations he had dragged into his dream.

Each station had a particular set of tasks to monitor. The object that sat on the platform set before the console resembled more an old twentieth century ‘Sputnik’ than anything else. All that the silvered sphere carried was telemetry equipment. Each instrument had been set to send a signal to each station it passed through until it arrived with Lonnie and his ‘catchers mitt’ in the building he had just left.

Around Geoff the tension rose as the countdown to automatic discharge neared zero. The system functioned as it should and at zero the sphere, grew an extra outer cover and vanished.

Geoff had fought the controller who, had the watching brief for Geoff’s projects, had insisted the team’s security and safety were paramount. He got most of what he wanted. Geoff’s small victory was that the team actually got to be in the same building. There was a great fear that the whole thing would explode taking half of the remaining North American continent along with it. So it was an holographic image that appeared to be just feet in front of him, but was actually sectioned off in the far end quarter of the large and otherwise empty building,

Geoff removed his headset for the first time in twenty four hours and laid it down beside the keypad he had been using. There was no sound at all in the laboratory. Not even the sound of breathing, seconds passed and the yell from Lonnie was heard telling Geoff that the sphere’s ten thousand kilometre journey around the North American continent was over, by all in the operations room through Geoff’s headset which was still lying on the console before him.

Geoff waited until all stations reported by a series of green light emitting diodes acknowledging that the sphere had passed through their detectors on its torturous journey around to the other laboratory. The reporting stations lights turned green one after the other. It was then that he knew he had finally cracked the last remaining problem on his way to his dream of free, unlimited transport. Providing there was a receiving station then any object sent to it would only take seconds to traverse thousands of miles and use millivolts of power.

The society the Knoble’s changed
THE WAR
Chapter 3

Individuality, the so called ‘Me’ society, became the God of the Western Democracies during the nineteen eighties. Governments heartily endorsed this attitude by removing national restrictions, both to assist in the globalisation of the economy, and relax the local laws restricting building outside towns. The thinking going:- fewer laws mean less authority and smaller pay bills due to far fewer employees. With less control to be exerted you don’t need to spend as much on social welfare programmes. The Government’s long sought after Holy Grail had been discovered. Smaller taxes. Everyone happy? No! Not quite everyone. O.K. So it’s tough on those who don’t make it.

Before the war in the early years of the twenty first century, with the downfall of genetically modified grain, caused in the third world because the bio-genetic companies tried increasing their profits by sterilising seed thereby forcing all farmers, rich and poor alike, to buy new seed every year. While in the west all the main food wholesaling and manufacturing concerns banned the use of ‘G.M.’ grain in any part of the food chain that could effect the food they sold. This food production impasse was finally solved due to the advent of commercial Hydroponics, allowing the people to live off cheap food grown in huge vats deep underground, the selling price for the then worthless farmland on the surface dropped like a lead balloon.

Farmers accused estate agents of selling their only asset off too cheaply. You were doing well if your land was being sold off at a top asking price of 50 cents an acre, and where land had less attractive views, some people had to pay to have their title deeds taken over. Even small towns and communities that had moved out west en-mass, and stuck together, during the gold rushes of the eighteen hundreds, were depopulated. Everyone wanted a leisure park to call their own.

The great majority of middle class Americans now owned two homes outright. One in town to work from that cost an arm and a leg to keep up and one for the weekends, and the kids, out in the country, one you could build any damned shape or style or size that you wanted. It was felt to be a far safer environment to raise children in than the sprawling suburbs, constantly under threat of drug crazed violence from the urban population.

Before the War, crime had been the greatest fear of the law abiding urban and suburban dwellers. Fear of violence or robbery seemed to threaten everyone. No matter how secure your property it seemed you felt vulnerable. Infra red cameras along with heat and motion detectors cover gardens with grids of light turning night into day.

The majority of senior pupils in high schools went armed. The bodyguards, that escorted the pupils to and fro, had a purpose built block at the school entrance so they could await their charges in relative comfort and safety.

With the destruction of land values that closely followed the advent of low cost, merchantable quality, hydroponically grown foods that changed the environment in which food was produced. A social underclass of poor homeless migrant workers grew around the hydroponics plants all seeking work. Hydroponics had removed the need to have land in the food production chain and moved the workers into the ghettos of the closest city. The telecommunication industry took full advantage of the paranoia that was an inbuilt part of big city life, and gave birth to the ‘teleworking’ revolution. This meant that for the majority of employees whose fears for their safety would not let them leave the security of their homes, could now work from them. Slowly but surely, commuting became a thing of the past and all the blocks of offices now lay empty.

Even the Federal Government was having trouble collecting taxes from the pliable middle classes. At this stage of the developing game an accident occurred and the entire world went to war. Then ten years later, and within weeks after the end of the War, Geoffrey Knoble’s invention opened the possibility of new worlds and it was like pulling the plug out of a full bath, the majority of the remaining people just waited to pour away.

The War lasted ten years and was caused, as already claimed, by an accident. A long abandoned biochemical test site cum research laboratory had its internal security breached by the unpredictable results of an earthquake.

The site’s power source, a small nuclear reactor, had been shut down and ‘made safe’, but never decommissioned. The small earthquake, with its epicentre over two hundred miles west, that set off the landslip also breached the containment vessel surrounding the core. The nearby laboratories clustered around the reactor, hermetically sealed but not yet fully decontaminated, were subject to comparatively large doses of hard radiation from the fractured reactor vessel. Had the floors and walls been as sterile as they should have been, there would still have been no War.

Due to the construction of the main buildings any passing breeze blowing through the external inlet vents restored the required negative pressure to the inside of any closed building. It had worked successfully for the past 50 years all round the world. The idea being any escaping germs cannot exit the room as all the air outside is trying to get in because of the lower air pressure. The movement caused by the earthquake buried the external vents.

Our attention, were we inside the building, should be focused on an abandoned piece of cotton waste that had, somehow, fallen out of the ‘Contaminated’ sack where it had been thrown. There had been just enough of the growth medium ‘Agar Agar’ jelly on the swab to give the plague a chance to survive.

The cotton waste came from the cleanup after the last experiment carried out in the laboratory. It had been used to clean up a spill left on the floor. That last experiment had also left a small splash of the same unnamed culture on a clean, white tile at the rear of the wash-up sink and as this area was kept permanently sterile, on an ongoing day to day basis, there was no alert issued about the contents of the lab. Tomorrow there would be another, equally thorough sterilising procedure. It didn’t happen because there will be no tomorrow for this Government facility. After today’s last cleanup shift the facility closes.

The spot of culture had been missed during the cleanup and had dried on the tile and as there was no air movement in the sealed laboratory it mummified within hours to a tiny speck that looked a little like dried albumin from a broken egg. The dried culture simply fell off the wall as its adhesion failed and happened to land on the discarded swab and after the quake started to grow in the now warm, moist radioactive atmosphere.

By the time the landslide caused the structure’s foundations to move slightly the laboratory was a red hot spot for contamination, the infection had already multiplied sufficiently to have fully populated the recirculating air. The plague escaped into the radioactive core through the microscopic breaches in mankind’s defenses.

The virus, even now, was still very small, at just over two microns in diameter it passed by the filters and sensors, without registering, less than two seconds after the landslip passed. The automated alarm system, although sounding on site, did not register on the watch so neither the virus’ escape or the breach in the containment vessel registered before the landslip severed the cables joining the site to the transmitter situated on a local peak.

So the alarm that should have created panic at Fort Detrick, Maryland, remained silent as the now radioactive plague seeped out, through the new fissures made by the earthquake, from its manmade tomb half way up a mountainside in the almost inaccessible area of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia.

A freak of nature, the granular structure of the rocks in the ground, formed as the rocks cooled, between the research centre and the epicentre passed the shockwaves without noticeably reducing the frequency. A building that should never have had to face an earthquake became breached by a landslide that should never have happened. The alarm that could not fail, did. And the plague that no one made killed hundreds of millions of people, worldwide, and left millions of unburied corpses in the abandoned cities.

First it infected the local wildlife then it entered the human food chain. One death, then two, four, eight and so on.

Because where the incident occurred was so isolated this fact alone created the disaster. Before anyone realised that there was a problem a possible 100,000 people had succumbed and all those corpses were rotting away forming yet more nutrient for the virus.

As the irradiated virus spread, it mutated. The original escapee had killed everyone it touched inside seconds. It was airborne, so breathed in to the body, it was also passed as an aerosol when a victim or carrier breathed or coughed or sneezed. It also passed directly into the body through skin contact, at long last a handshake could be construed as attempted murder.

The biggest change the virus underwent decreased the obvious danger initially and raised the eventual death toll exponentially. The virus had developed a time delay, an incubation period. The incubation time increased from seconds before death into days.

Within ten days not a town, city or country on our globe was safe or free from the disease. Everyone believed another country had declared war without telling anyone.

The paranoia, that was already high in the general population, intensified. After the European Trading block really got it together during the early years of the new millennium and America began to loose ground to the newcomer. The Dollar ceased to be the most traded currency.

Wall Street knew the NYSE had been overvalued for years and the rise of the Single European Currency the large scale, downward readjustment in the value of stock in American companies had been painful. Tens of millions of people holding small share portfolios watched with horror as their retirement pension funds vanished. Hundreds of thousands became suicidal after the plague arrived at the remaining urban centres and everyone thought we were being attacked from outside. You had no towns to bomb, so, destroy peoples savings to smash confidence and morale when introduce disease, and kill off the dispersed and demoralised population that way.

They had attacked us with plague so we dropped bombs. They dropped bombs, guns fired and missiles were launched. It took too many years but by the time the surviving Generals and politicians understood their opponent was not a human enemy at all, the surviving people, they were no longer armies, on all sides had fought themselves to a standstill and the real enemy was worldwide. Still killing indiscriminately. But by then the automated fighting machines took over followed closely by computers. For a full ten years mankind bled itself white.

Very few records are left from the end of the War. After the plague died out and the survivors realised they were all that was left, they set about disseminating their acquired knowledge on, firstly on how to continue to live. Secondly on how to move on from where we were.

A research scientist with the name of Geoffrey Knoble had proved himself to be a brilliant original thinker. During the final engagements of the War Knoble had found a way to interfere with the enemy’s control over its automated and computer-controlled weapons.

When a piece of equipment failed on the surface it was abandoned as broken, disconnected at base and forgotten about as if it were dead weight. New industries developed underground in vast automated complexes run by a few dozen people. Everyone grew accustomed to having as much, very comfortable, space as they wanted to live in. Small groups of people scattered around the landmasses in vast complexes buried deep underground to protect the inhabitants from any danger, cut off from each other physically by thousands of miles of solid rock but joined by tunnels.

During an experiment with a new type of self powered transporter Geoff and his team had a lucky escape. They operated the transporter by remote from across a large warehouse sized installation, empty except for their prototype and the secured section they occupied. They counted down along with the timer then the cycle started…to go wrong. The farthest quarter of the structure, the end that held the experimental transporter, disappeared. No flash, no explosion, no noise, no experiment, there was no experiment because there was no end to the building.

At a secured location not too many kilometres from Moscow a delicate experiment into nuclear fusion was taking place. As Geoffrey Knoble’s experiment tried, unsuccessfully, to occupy the same space at the same time, a three hundred kilometre wide crater appeared, Moscow and a large part of the lands surrounding it ceased to exist.

The War was over. Geoffrey Knoble and his team were heroes. It started by accident and ended the same way. This was the situation at the end of the War, a possible 500,000 survivors across the entire North American landmass, from arctic Canada down to the warm sunshine of Mexico, scattered in communities, the largest of which numbered less than a hundred. With similar numbers suspected on every other continental landmass, including Antarctica, Humanity was perilously close to not surviving as a distinctive race.

Geoffrey Knoble’s dreams as a juvenile finally found fertile soil in which to grow. He worked long and hard on communication and transportation systems he had first imagined fourteen years earlier and had shelved in order to concentrate of the War effort.

Private and public hospitals still held frozen embryos, eggs and sperm, there had been many millions that answered the call for egg and sperm donations at the very start of the new millennium. Not many people alive at the present, but that really didn’t matter. The human, undamaged, gene pool is larger by far than the last time we had a massive reduction in the human gene pool.

A long time in the past the most recent mass extinction that took place pushed mankind through a genetic bottleneck. This occurrence dramatically reduced the variety of forms within mankind’s genetic future and allowed nature to develop the current version of Man.

This present disaster left more genes surviving than people.

GILMORE
Chapter 4

Twenty years after the war in the town of Gilmore
The Town Treasurer had finished, finally, his latest doom-laden report to the Council. “If this situation continues on at its current rate then in a few months the town will have zero income and no citizens to spend it on anyway.”

Brian Connor, staying because he and his immediate family were the last branch of an old Irish family that had settled in Gilmore at the end of the Potato Famine. The entire Connor clan had fled Ireland during the Famine and dispersed to the four corners of the globe, now Brian was the last head of a Connor clan on Earth and his hope was to stay. “Look Dave, we have to do something. Things can’t continue. Over the past ten years, in fact ever since the Federal Government first started to restrict the Councils powers to collect taxes to within the town limits. Congress should never have allowed the revision of the Law. In the first three years our town lost over 90% of its population to the countryside where they have no need for town services, so pay no taxes. A town that took two hundred years to mature is depopulated in ten.”

Dave Fuller came back with the same complaints he had ever since he had returned after the War. “Cheap, reliable, family sized airplanes that replaced cars and the Federal Government was killing us off even before the War. I still can’t understand why we allowed it to happen.” Somehow Dave had managed to remain never endingly bitter against the people that chose to leave Earth for a distant future.

Brian came back at Tom by way of answering Dave’s points for the hundredth time, “Tom, we can not, I repeat, not, keep people prisoner in towns if they don’t want towns. People now buy off world from the Internet, we don’t need shops, roads, factories, yes, and even population centres are now redundant.” He looked sad as his ears heard the words coming out of his mouth.

“My friends,” He glanced round at the faces he knew so well that shared the real estate office with him, situated across the town square from the old town hall, now used to house the town council. The town hall had holes in the roof and broken windows in half the offices. This office had belonged to the only estate agent in town. Even he had long ago left for the Pegasus constellation. “We all know there is no more plague, nor radiation. Why did we rebuild our shattered cities? Just so everyone could up stakes and leave. Just look around our town.”

“We rebuilt to satisfy our own needs. Gentlemen it was we who chose to remain behind and set things up for the people who will return, or so we thought. At least until we found out that no one was coming back to town or city ever again. We rebuilt, or wasted money, depending on your point of view, for our vanity. So we could look out of our council office windows and say ‘well we kept our part of the bargain, we rebuilt. Our children let us down by not wanting what we wanted.’”

“Nobody who survived the war underground will be forced to live cheek by jowl again. We Town Dwellers are the last survivors of an archaic dying breed. Our town is decaying. No cars on the roads lead to no road repairs, where’s the need? When did we last employ a handy man to fix streetlights? Have any of you noticed how many streetlights are still working? In three weeks even ‘Old Man’ Knoble’s being collected by his son, so we loose their family income from the ‘Family Duty’ payable on the family home. No community tax, there is no community left to tax. No revenue from business taxes because we no longer have any business’s left in town to tax”.

Deek Jenkins, the fourth person to be heard at the meeting, not known for being liberal with words ‘The more we try to maintain our income level the more we have to charge fewer people to live here. Our ‘citizens’ are telling us this way of life is over. This, no, make that every town in this whole damned country, is finished. Dead! And we are refusing to bury the rotting corpse. Only question, and the last to be considered by this Council has to be ‘What do we do next?’”

“We have to close the town down. It’s easy, we just lock up our houses and go to the stars like everyone else.” Brian’s short pointed speech ends on a raised voice and a thump with the edge of his fist on the table to emphasise his displeasure.

Tom’s eyebrows dropped and hooded his eyes from view as he realised that within the next month the town would loose one of it’s last remaining permanent residential families. At the last count there had been twenty families still residing, legally, within the town limits. Include the illegals and Gilmore had more than one hundred families as residents living in homes others had long ago abandoned.

In the midst of decay, the town’s streets were kept free of litter by people who, before the exodus, had been homeless derelicts, drifters and misfits. These people were unable to fully fend for themselves. The town still had dependants. Not recognized by the local councils these people became known as ‘Scroungers’.

As those who left had abandoned everything, the ‘Scroungers’ had gained legally the right to, ‘scrounge’, claim all abandoned goods. No one else wanted, or needed, them so nobody objected. What government remained enacted ‘The Scroungers Law’.

Tom found himself with three weeks left if he wanted to save his town. He had been Treasurer here for four years. He left the same job in New York six weeks after the top ten stories of the Empire State Building fell into 5th Avenue due to neglect. He knew his trade was ending, and now he had to take the opportunity to fight for something he believed in.

He believed in his heart that some people needed to be sheltered and so towns and villages, some form of community, was still needed. His mind did not expand to globalisation he still held on to the idea that America was great. Except nobody lived there anymore. Even global villages were too small and confining. The old saying finally came true,
‘ All the lights on and nobody home.’

Nobody would live their lives in Gilmore anymore; it would be a frozen reminder of what all the people, who would come as tourists, had left behind. Gilmore would become a tourist attraction for when all those that had left came back ‘just to see the old place’.

As Earth’s future takes a change of direction, hopefully for the better. As always, not everyone has good fortune, some are always left behind. Out of all the countries, races, religions and skin hues on Earth only two types of people survived to inherit the Earth. Those remaining by choice or from a sense of ‘Duty’ that included a duty to care about the second type of person left on Earth. These people will starve in the midst of feasting, the misfits that just cannot fit in no matter how many concessions society makes. These people still exist as Tom heads in the direction of George Knoble’s.

Washington D.C. had rebuilt itself by offering free land for the offworlders to develop without restrictions. And the offworlders did just that. In five years Washington has grown, alongside the living crystal that was Geneva in Switzerland, to become Humanity’s main repository of knowledge and new learning.

War, as always, is the mother of invention. Some form of competition always seems to stimulate growth in things. Now peacetime applications had to be found for the machines of war. Mankind had the opportunity to remake the proverbial ploughshares into something completely different.

Away from the devastated and contaminated areas that had been other major centres of population around the world, the Returnees had laid claim to large swathes of abandoned land and developed vast Estates. Small towns crumbled back into the soil and their names were to disappear from maps and memories.

Tom vowed to save the town of Gilmore, even if it only existed as a snapshot of how life was in a small town, frozen in time, a museum. Tom remembered his history how Egypt had preserved the Royal Pyramids and the ancient Temples and buildings of Egypt and Rome were still, in part, standing. Temples and even full cities from South American Indian and Asian early civilizations had been preserved why couldn’t he preserve Middle America? Even if it was only the one town. In making this vow to himself, Tom, whose last name is, unfortunately, forever lost to us in time, was the real power behind Glanfar being created as an Estate on Earth. At this stage the Knoble family appeared to be abandoning Earth for good.

EXCERPTS FROM THE KNOBLE FAMILY CHRONICLE
Chapter 5

Geoffrey Knoble is justifiably credited as being the founder of the Knoble dynasty. His was the last remaining generation that grew up in the times before the War that so decimated the human race and creating a second genetic bottleneck. The War was followed by the concluding ‘peace for all time’ .

Radical though it was, the general idea that Government of countries was unnecessary, proliferated. There were so few people that, with instant communication to any corner of the globe, individual countries and races ceased to matter. Then the truth about who started the War was discovered. The real truth was it didn’t matter any more. None of the survivors cared about anything other than ‘What’s next.’

It was Geoffrey Knoble’s imagination that overcame the terror that the immensity of moving through interstellar space provoked. From its conception, the idea, took twenty-two years to bear fruit. The key to solving the challenge came from the last experiment of the War. Within five years a prototype of Geoffrey Knoble’s machine was due for testing.

Once people had the freedom to travel anywhere in a, comparative, very short time, they left earth by the thousands per month. As the Great Depopulation of Earth occurred once great countries of influence declined, Governments ceased to have anyone to govern, and nothing happened. The people left. Lights were left on all over the world, but no one was home, until eventually the bulbs burned out, or the automatic power generators died.

In the rebuilt high-rise buildings a tap left running in a bathroom on the top floor would flood the entire block, unless the power to the water pumping stations failed. A gas burner left on would, eventually, burn down a building and with no fire fighters; the fires kept burning until they reached a flooded building or area.

The end of that form of society took time and was, in places, painful.
But as with Gilmore in middle America, most were slowly collapsing of old age, deteriorating gracefully. Slowly falling into disuse.

By those, of his generation who remained, the blame for the fall of Earth was placed firmly at the feet of Geoffrey Knoble. By those who were first able to escape, he was hailed a hero.

All Geoffrey Knoble did was offer the remnants of mankind a small engine that could fit, for long comfortable journeys lasting longer than an hour or so, in your vehicle’s glove compartment, or in a convenient, multi-purpose carrier that strapped to your trouser belt and created a bubble that distorted time and space for shorter hops. It used no power, except that which it produced internally. It had no emissions. It had no working parts and therefore nothing to break or go wrong.

Originally the device had been made to transport things from sending station to receiving station. Geoff’s big trick was, apart from discovering the principals and creating prototypes during the War, finishing off the invention by making the final step of open ended travel possible two years after the end of the War and the working prototypes took a further five years to go into production to meet the demand.

Inside the bubble the air was always enough and always fresh. No matter how much was required. Journeys previously expected to last thousands of years were now over in days. All this Geoffrey Knoble gave away. His money became worthless as he charged for the spin-offs. Other scientists came to him with ideas that required his engine. He gave his engine away in return for a small royalty from every item sold.

But this was all to come. Seven years before the War, Geoff Knoble not yet ready to join M.I.T. as a first year student, taken a year out to ‘Think’. Having thought his thoughts and fed the end results into his palmtop, he starts mailing his results to large development companies.

GILMORE
Chapter 6
Twenty years after the war

Geoffrey touched his vehicle down in the road behind the old maple tree just outside the white picket fence. The trip back to Gilmore, from where his parents lived, to collect his grandparents had been uneventful. He climbed out and, a few seconds later, standing on his grandparents lawn again, closed his door. Just in time to watch as his Grandfather aimed a sly kick, which missed, at the automated grass cutter. The offending object was mindlessly traversing the only neat lawn left on the entire block. The houses of the people that left first had started falling to disrepair, the once proud, brilliantly white painted clapboard fronts and picket fences were flaking, sagging and slowly bleaching in the sun in summer, and then rotting from the rain, frost and snow in autumn and winter. Up and down the street none of the street lights worked.

Nature was overcoming the million year intrusion by Man in decades. The loudest sound Geoff could hear, apart from the soft clicking as the heat-sink plates of his craft cooled, turned out to be the local birds and insects that obviously and noisily repopulated the now abandoned neighborhood. No more cars or children. The background hum of the lawn cutter was interrupted by the sound of Geoff’s grandmother’s soft voice drifting on the still air from inside the house. “George. If that cutter gets damaged again, you get to take the old manual lawnmower for a walk.” The way she stressed the word ‘manual’ made it sound like a form of medieval torture. The elder of the two men within hearing distance winced.

“Damn that woman. I’ve lived with her too damned long and she knows me too damned well.” Geoff heard his Grandfather mumble. As George realised that someone else’s shadow was on his lawn He looked up. “It’s today is it?” Knowing very well it was. “Jennie, Geoff is here for us.” “Geoff,” the old screen door to the cool inside of the house on Oak Street, opened for possibly the last time and his Grandmother appeared. He still had difficulty telling his mother from her mother. Especially from any distance. In a good light both his grandparents could have easily passed for his parents. “Good genes.” He caught a passing thought as he looked at them both. As his wife overtook him. George delivered a final vengeful kick on the passing lawn cutter that actually connected. The lawn cutter traveled through the air across two overgrown gardens and landed right side up, to begin again, in a jungle, cheerfully humming away to itself.

* * * * * * * * * *

Tom’s decision on his timing as when to visit the last remaining occupied house on Oak Street, George Knoble’s house, had been a good one. He approached George’s house by rounding the corner at the end of Main Street, avoiding an ever expanding hole that now made half the pavement unsafe to walk on. He was pleased no pedestrians came down here anymore, with no insurance his relief was obvious that there could be no claims. The hole started off by the ongoing collapse of a dried out sewer, He took his eyes off the ground before him just in time to see ‘old’ George and his wife talking to, what appeared to be a much younger version of George himself. The thought crossed Tom's mind, had a laugh, then moved on. The thought was, “Who is liable if I fall down this sewer?”

“Ah. Tom, just the person I wanted to see. You know Geoff, George Jnr’s youngest.” Called George as he caught sight of Tom approaching.

“Geoffrey Knoble, not the inventor. Surely not, I knew the name but I never realised he was your grandson.” Tom’s head turned towards George. “I’ve not even met your father.” The man’s head turned again so his words were aimed directly at Geoff. “ He had left us long before I arrived.”

“Slow down Tom. ‘Yes’, ‘Yes’ and ‘Shame on you’. There, all answered in order. Now say ‘hello’ to Geoff, he’s come to carry his feeble old grandparents to live with his parents on a ‘brave new world’.”

Tom looked sideways at George. ‘Feeble’ was not an adjective you would choose to describe either George or his attractive wife should either of them be standing in front of you. Not even his full head of thick, unruly, pure white hair looked ‘feeble’. “Feeble? Yes George. O.K.” He takes a pause to breath and “Hello Geoff, I’m sorry but,” he turns once again to George. “George, I’ve got to talk to you. I know you want to get away, but I have an idea that I need your help with.” All came tumbling out. A bit like a box of kids bricks being upended into a tin basin.

As the sun went down behind the treetops, the four were still talking while sitting on the grass outside George’s porch drinking from a bottomless pitcher of iced tea brought by Jennie. The grass cutter was back in its garage at the end of the garden having hacked its way back through two gardens over the course of the evening to arrive home. There were now four manicured lawns on the block.

As the four chatted about the changes Tom had witnessed in Gilmore since his arrival and the change in attitude over the past five years. Those that remained fell into two distinct categories, those who pined for the past and regretted the exodus and the people who did not understand the opportunities, such as the scroungers.

The evening stars rose against the pink and apricot sky left behind by the setting sun and a chill settled over the town in the valley. The four accepted that it was time to part company as George and Tom finalised their resolve to make the scheme work and save Gilmore.

“Geoff, take Jennie with you but I’m going to stay around a short while. Tom’s idea sounds like something I will enjoy setting up. He thinks it will require about three weeks then come back for me. It’s been years since I had the opportunity for so much fun”.

Geoff and Jennie leave the clearing up to Tom and George. Geoff turns to Tom “Call me if you need anything and he’ glancing pointedly at his grandfather ‘is too proud to do it. You won’t let me down now will you. It’s a good idea and he’ll love sorting out the council. You may have noticed that he is the type that can always do it better.”

Jennie felt as if twenty years had fallen away. It was as if George was off on another trip instead of it being her that was going. Jennie held on to George’s hand as they walked together toward the craft sat in the road past the old maple tree. She found herself admonishing George to behave himself, again. There was nothing left in Gilmore to lead him astray. All her imagined competition for her George had helped keep her on her toes. She still kissed his forehead, both eyes and his mouth then climbed into the craft alongside Geoff. One quick wave and the door closed.

George and Tom stood side by side on the lawn in the shade of the maple tree as Geoff and Jennie stepped into Geoff’s craft. All four waved to each other and Geoff drove off with George’s wife into the slowly darkening night sky.

THE BATTLE FOR GILMORE
Chapter 7

Tom and George both saw the same future, Tom’s plan seemed to be good enough to go with until something better came along. They understood that if Gilmore failed to be ‘frozen in time’ then Gilmore was destined to fall into ruin.

After Jennie and Geoff left, Tom headed for his apartment back in town. George, having eaten and enjoyed the dinner Jennie had left for him, earlier that evening, to reheat. Having washed up George wandered off down the rutted track that, in the days when the petrol engine ruled, had once been a main thoroughfare out of town in the direction of his older ex-business partner Oswald Baliker.

As his steps drew him near to Ossie’s he realised that he could see Ossie who was outside working on his 1957 Plymouth ‘Fury’. The original owner would never have recognized the construct in the front drive gleaming under the floodlights. “Why are you still messing with that thing?” George asked as soon as he came within hailing distance of Ossie.

“Well, hell George, she still runs like a dream. Alright so I’m not a purist, it runs on methane not hydrocarbons and we have no rubber for pneumatic tyres but” And his voice fades with frustration. “I understand.” George muttered with feeling. “Anyway” Ossie begins to say as he hitches his stiffening leg up to bend his knee and rest his foot on the sill under the open front door of the car. “I thought your Geoff was due today. How come you’re still here pestering an old man at his pleasures, like me,”

“Break out a bottle, I’ve a challenge for you. You’re going to love the next half hour.”

Ossie entered the house almost at a lope, and returned in minutes with a dew laden, ice cold six pack in each hand. “Jump in the car and let’s drink in comfort while you ‘make me love the next half hour’. Your words, remember, not mine.” There speaks the lawyer, George thinks to himself. Always covering all the bases.

The number and the contents of the full bottles slowly grew less as the pile of empties grew larger, Ossie’s ideas became more impractical and anarchic. Before George had felt able to leave he dedicated five minutes to convincing Ossie that kidnapping the federal government, or blowing up the town council during a meeting, would serve no real purpose. It was, definitely, in Ossie’s best interests to empty the bottle he had in his hand and get a good night’s sleep before he drove to Washington. Having handed a drunken Ossie back to his wife to put safely to bed, George bounced his way from tree to fence post all the way home. The quick ‘half hour’ talk had seen the death of four of Ossie’s cold six packs of beer and three hours.

The next morning Tom and Ossie met in Georges’ kitchen for breakfast as Tom and George had arranged, while over fresh orange juice, cinnamon toast and coffee the three talked and the hours past. The opening gambit they decided upon had to be to talk to the ‘Scroungers’. George and Ossie appeared at ease with this idea leaving Tom, who had no real contact with the town’s unacknowledged citizens, feeling uncomfortably in the dark.

“Look Tom, you need our help, we in turn need Jeremiah’s. You may not approve our choices but until you come up with any of your own let ours run and see what happens.” Ossie leaves George speaking and goes to the kitchen, for the fourth time, to make fresh coffee as the flask is empty, yet again. Ozzie is still dehydrated from the previous night’s drinking with George.

“George, the council will never approve your proposal for this situation.” Tom had a downcast look, the kind you reserve to be hung on the face of an old bloodhound that has sat on a nail and is too lazy to move because its not hurting badly enough.

“We don’t need approval from a council that, only yesterday, voted themselves out of a job and decreed the town is to close down. As of one minute past midnight this morning the Town Council, and by implication the town itself, ceased to have any legal standing. We have found a use for the derelict property, if we need to I’m sure we can talk Geoff into funding the project. Make a ‘full and final settlement’ offer of between 10 to 15% of the total value of taxes due to the council offices for the entire town and with the ‘Scroungers’ help we will organize to make it happen in days”.

George made a call to Geoff from his cellphone, then strolled out to rejoin the other two co-conspirators who were soaking up the bright morning sunshine. It would work, he could feel it in his bones. All he had to do was convince Jeremiah that the town could work under his, Jeremiah’s, leadership.

Jeremiah stood tall, a little over six foot, the image his name invokes matched the solid person that Tom was talking to. Jeremiah was slim and grey, dressed in a frock coated, black suit of an old time preacher. He was also the first person, alive, that Tom had ever seen wearing a beard. His grey hair is both long and neat, his beard, still black on either side of his jaw, with two startling white, wide stripes that surround a third stripe of black running down the middle of his chin, trimmed to match.

Their relationship, both as friends and professionally, had started thirty years earlier when George and Ossie had been lawyers in town and in partnership and Jeri had worked for the prosecutors office. All three remained friends until Jeri had too much time on his hands and started to think. Ossie and George agreed that thinking was a serious flaw in the character of a person following law as a career. After all, Ossie’s flaw was his car and George took being cantankerous to a fine art. Both had as much fun from life as the advancing years would allow. Poor Jeri, he became serious when he started to think. He cut himself off to live with a clan of ‘scroungers’ that moved into Gilmore when tax paying residents owed that much in unpaid taxes to the council, that the council took possession of the property. People can run, property can’t.

“George, there are only ‘things’ my people need, every other need is met from the area around them.” Jeri addressed the three before him with the one name. To Tom, Jeri looked like artists impressions of Death. The visible skin on his face not hidden in the shade of the broad brimmed, round domed black hat that sat dead centre and perfectly horizontal on his head, was almost parchment yellow. He had his back to the sun and the deep black silhouette he presented to his three visitors was a study in how to look tall, stick thin, yet still awesome.

His height and build gave Jeri the appearance that he would snap in two if the wind blew any stronger than a breeze. His long hair fell straight and had been cut square with his shoulders. It framed his slender facial features as far as the end of his nose from where his beard took over. The beard grew in natural stripes alternating jet black and snow white. Jeri cultivated this image carefully. When he removed his hat the onlooker found himself presented with a pair of warm, caring chocolate brown eyes, that dragged you down into Jeremiah’s gentle soul.

He had chosen this persona very carefully before he accepted the role of forging a group identity out of the local ‘scroungers’. A pitiful collection of disparate individuals who, independently, were incapable of deciding to go indoors out of the rain for themselves. Jeri had prosecuted or defended, often both, but not at the same time, the majority of people that lived ‘the wrong side of the tracks’ in Gilmore and surrounding districts over the years. Jeri had always been fair. It didn’t matter, the right or wrong of it, and this had, grudgingly, earned him the kind of awe that passes, in some people, as respect.

Over the past few years Jeri had organized the more able scroungers into work teams to smarten up the worst of the abandoned houses and moved people into them with live in support. This ensured that fires were set only in hearths. Food cooked either outdoors on a barbeque or when indoors, on a cooker and a general, if basic, level of hygiene maintained.

He then had work teams established to supply food, assist with repairs to houses he wanted to use, clean up the area removing debris and litter. There was a lot of wood to collect to heat the houses for the winter. Water supplies had to be found, as most of the water pumps in the area had suffered damage from age during the War and were past repair. All this he did without any legitimate authority.

George, Ossie and Tom had a surge of hope when, having heard all the plans the three had, Jeri agreed to try. George called Geoff and arranged for the transfer to the town’s Tax account. Then he called Dave at the council offices.

George and Tom went to see Dave Fuller in his role as Ex-Mayor. As the town treasurer Tom had ensured that the offer being made met with all relevant regulations covering the ‘Full and Final Settlement’ clauses. After much ranting, raving and table thumping about how unjust the ‘Gilmore Museum and Preservation Society’ offer had been. How he could talk the rest of the council out of the idea of selling out. And on and on he pontificated until George reminded Dave that the town council had no legitimacy having closed the town down and the information was being given out of courtesy.

“Dave, the money is already in the town’s frozen asset account. Nobody can draw out from it. The sum paid conforms with the legal minimum percentages allowable and with all available deductions accounted for the town cannot refuse. Face it Dave, accept defeat with good grace. You no longer have a town, it now belongs to the Society, the public face you have to deal with is the face of Jeremiah Goodall. To the best of every intent he now owns the town. Every abandoned property, and every one to be abandoned in the future, yours included unless you intend to stay. I could see Jeri being a benevolent mayor. Can’t you? After all he now has beneficial ownership of every lock, stock and abandoned barrel in town”.

Tom turns slowly on his heel and leaves, reveling in his last view of Dave, ex-mayor, and would be despot, of Gilmore. George knew that right now, Dave, has only just begun to understand the implications of the Museum Society’s actions.

They knew Dave would twist and turn to try to usurp Jeri and the law of Beneficial Ownership. Jeri, George and Ossie had worked long into the night over the last two days and were pleased with their joint efforts. They knew the approach they had taken made the purchase watertight. At least ten current Acts of Congress saw to that.

A few days after the meeting with Dave in what had been the Mayor’s Office the two strolled back down a peaceful Main Street after visiting Deek, Charley Whipple came out from between two office fronts carrying his hand crafted flintlock by the barrel and sloped over his shoulder. If there ever was a modern version of ‘Davy Crockett’ Charley was it. At least from a distance. As you neared Charley, if he was walking around town, you could begin to notice the lost look around the eyes and on occasions Charley would become so absent minded he would forget to close his mouth and he would begin to drool.

Charley’s mental defects were far exceeded, as far as the scroungers were concerned, by his accuracy with his flintlock. He started to look the part of the hunter. In this one area he grew to meet the community’s expectations of him, and often exceeded them by a long way.

“Mr Tom, Mr George” Charley, who called everyone, even the dogs and cats around town, Mister, caught hold of Tom’s jacket sleeve to attract his attention. Charley’s child like innocence made it his most obvious means to get someone to listen while he talked. “I’m out on a squirrel shoot for Mr Jeri. I really could use more powder, I got lots of shot, not enough powder” Both George, for longer and Tom, for as long as he had lived in Gilmore, had supplied Charley with gunpowder so he could make his own charges to match the game he was hunting.
Each arrived at the same wrong conclusion at the same time. Charley only wanted powder. Even the best of us slip up at times, Charley was giving not getting. He wanted to give information. He had been out in the woods early setting up one of his hides around the edge of town when he saw Dave and Sheriff Peters talking as they walked along the animal track Charley was watching. Charley’s brain acted like a sponge. It soaked up anything he heard, whether it made sense or not to him.

His brain started recording the words his ears heard and stored them carefully. Charley did not like Mr Dave. He had never been given any reason not to like Dave, he just didn’t. “Look Greg the rains will be here soon. We need to start as soon as we can while the brush in tinder dry. We have the council’s approval, we just need you to start it. No fire Department left so there will be no one to stop the blaze once it gets hold. Especially if the wind keeps up.” Greg was still acting as if he was unsure about the rightness of what Dave was saying.

Charley was innocence incarnate. His life and language revolved around the only thing he did well, hunting. The words he passed on to Tom and George meant nothing to him, Tom and George led Charley out to George’s and gave him the gunpowder he asked for, then George and Tom let him go across George’s back lot to the woods for his squirrel shoot.

Within the hour the crisis meeting was underway in George’s kitchen. Ossie came up with the first solution. An old First World War cannon had been set on a concrete platform in front of the old Veterans of Foreign Wars Association. Tom did not believe that Greg would fire the town, George, Jeri and Ossie had no doubts that Greg will do as he is told as elections are due and Greg enjoys his job as Chief of Police.

Ossie also has held access to the now disused National Guard defense stores in the next town, for the past twenty years. When all the plans for the defense of Gilmore are in place George and Jeri go to find Dave Fuller to talk him out of his reckless plan of action.

Dave had been one of the first people to run home after the War. He found a town in mothballs. Gilmore’s evacuation had been calm and orderly, once abandoned, there had been no one left on the surface to vandalism any property. Gilmore, along with thousands of small towns worldwide, had survived untouched, other than by the genteel hand of time.

Dave Fuller had accessed the old records and reinstated the land rights to the original inhabitants of the town. Then he contacted all the families that had survived to invite them home. For the first year they came and gave life, and good fortune back to Gilmore.

All had agreed that his hard work should be rewarded. He had been re-elected year on year to, first the town council, then when someone suggested a Mayor be elected, Dave ran unopposed. He had no policies but everyone understood he had the best for the town at heart. Dave lived for Gilmore. He neither believed nor understood the willingness of ‘his towns folk’ to abandon the known comforts and security of Gilmore in favour of the unknown of new worlds. Since his return Dave Fuller had held Gilmore tight in his hands. Gilmore was his security blanket from childhood, and now it was no longer his. Dave Fuller could no longer be rational.

He and the town’s sheriff were talking over a draughting table covered with maps of the town and woods surrounding it. “Well Dave”, Greg was saying to Dave as George and Jeri walk into the Office. “I think if the rain holds off another three or four days, if the wind carries on turning, we should be able to burn the old grasses and the huts across from the goods yard and not have the fire go any further. The rail tracks and the old highway will act as fire breaks.”

George had his story set in mind before he walked through the door. The ‘Preservation’ side of the Society had been constituted to include for the re-enactment of various ‘high spots’ in the development of Gilmore through the past two hundred and fifty years history. One of the said events was due its hundred and seventy fifth birthday. They were to celebrate the Gilmore Fusiliers epic battle in the Mexican Civil War.

Dave was informed, in front of Greg, of the Museum plans for the re-enactment. The Society chosen site would be, where ever Greg and Dave wanted to set their fires. After an unpleasant meeting George had one parting shot. “Dave if one match is struck and accidentally thrown away, I shall have you sent off world. Only with Jeri’s approval can you now continue to live here. The choice is yours”.

Jeri finally spoke, having stood over by the door like a shadow at the feast. “Dave, I’ve known you from boyhood. I know you need to be here, it’s your home, your family has been a part of this town for the past fifteen generations. Don’t hurt yourself or spoil your family’s proud tradition of service to this community. Dave, I still need Greg and yourself. It’s the town I want the monument to, not your dead body.”

George, being ever cautious, told Dave what he could expect to happen should a fire start. Even by accident. He told Dave that he and Ossie had been out to the National Guard State Armoury and borrowed a selection of explosives, weapons and shells. Should a fire start then the area it starts in will be blown off the map.

He has the written authority of the Trust that now owns Gilmore. The town is officially declared derelict and the property of the Gilmore Museum and Preservation Trust. Chairman being Mister Geoffrey Knoble, as Mr Knoble’s residence is such a vast distance away, Mr Jeremiah Goodall as Chairman, In Absentia, in perpetuity. Gilmore is tied up in ironclad velvet.

G.W. AND THE FINDING OF CYGNUS SETI 3
Chapter 8

‘Glanfar 2’ had been the Knoble family home from home for now uncountable generations back to the planet’s discovery. This garden world had been discovered by a distant ancestor and the Estate started to grow. The estate was created by George William Knoble, the explorer, or G.W. the pirate, depending on which side of him you had been on at the time. Grandson of Geoff the inventor, with the only actual clone of the family house in existence, a true first generation clone copied directly from the house on Earth, and George’s own family.

The Knoble’s voyage to Glanfar 2 had many stops and false starts along the way. Leapfrogging from star system to star system, generations of Knoble’s had built and lived in replicas of the Main House on Earth. Each replica had been hand crafted and constructed on site but none had satisfied in the same way as the original. On some worlds the family branch that found it had put down roots and flourished, on others trading posts were established that helped tie the dispersed family together.

Geoffrey, the inventor, had started the journey away from Earth. This was his right as he has invented the equipment, discovered the principles of timeless travel and, with him leading his team had done all the work to combine the two into a working tool.

George William Knoble, will become known, to all mankind and far beyond, simply as G.W., founder of Glanfar 2 and grandson of Geoffrey the inventor. G.W., and as the Great Man’s grandson, was kindly remembered as slightly eccentric and the epitome of the eighteenth century gentleman explorer / adventurer in the twenty second century.

G.W. himself loved being thought of as a pirate, there is no other description that better suits him. Not that he ever demeaned himself enough to wear a black eye patch or sail under the ‘Skull and Crossed Bones’ flag, not to say the idea hadn’t crossed his mind or didn’t amuse him. Nor did he have any eighteenth century Earth heroes, but he was a pirate none the less. He loved the deal. The greater majority of people he had dealings with would assure you of that fact at the same time as telling you to count your fingers after shaking hands with him.

Archaeology and anthropology had been G. W.’s favorite pastimes from childhood. As a young man, in his twenties, he already had a string of learned works published. Some even became the definitive work to be studied by students of that subject. By the age of thirty he was acting like a spoiled, bored and troublesome teenager, causing no small concern to his family at home until he chose to become an explorer.

As a juvenile G. W.’s imagination had been fired by the comparison of how religions had thrived or failed in different sectors of space and between cultures in the same quadrants. As he grew he became a collector. This landed the pirate in him in lots of hot water.

G. W. left the latest family home on Alorian three days after the World Founders Day celebrations, much to the relief of the family, to chart an unexplored quadrant across from the spiral arm of the galaxy he called home.

On his journey he came across a number of new lifeforms never previously catalogued. This occupied his mind with ‘First Contact Protocols’ and attempting to discover anything of value. His curiosity for history and religion were the first tools G. W. had in his arsenal. He sent back records, artefacts and icons from the civilizations he encountered.

It mattered not to G.W. if the civilization whose past he was plundering was still active or long dead. Information was information and available for collecting. That was until he found the monstrous remains of a civilization that had ‘gone away’ from Cygnus Seti 3. Not died out, just gone away.

C.S.3 was not a barren planet, just the opposite, it had never been barren now it was just devoid of higher lifeforms. It orbited an ‘M’ class star and held all the essentials for life. It supported a thriving bio-sphere rich in microscopic bacteria, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere and all the signs of having at one time sustained intelligent life.

G.W., in his wisdom, chose to land at the site, visible from space, of a ruined ‘something’. Huge slabs of rock had been left strewn about the landscape. There was not one slab left touching another. No slab left standing upright. Whatever it had been, it was no longer. All the slabs had been carefully dressed and some of the unbroken slabs were decorated with patterns that George’s eyes found mildly disturbing to look at.

The decoration was so unlike anything he had ever seen before. He had no words, in any language he knew, to describe the shapes the lines followed. There was a generally unwholesome feeling about this area. He had no concept of what the place had been used for or why.
Investing weeks of his time exploring, and charting, the planet’s surface he uncovered many more ruined sites. Each with the same strange, inside out, shapes and still no representations of the authors of the drawings, if that was what they were, or of the builders of the monuments. If that is what the stone slabs had represented. More disturbing was finding no trace of whoever had destroyed every building on the entire planetary surface. Or how.

G.W. applied all the technology that his craft had at his command on the planet spinning below his feet, and scanned the surface, subsurface and deep core. The subsurface scans revealed regular spaces, rather, vast empty caverns, inside the planetary crust starting from ten kilometres deep through solid rock.

The deep core scans revealed all that was expected and no more. Molten metals and magma generating the internal heat that keeps any planet going.

The underground chambers, for that was what, more and more, these caverns appeared to be. Even though they appeared not quite natural they seemed stable and very ancient. Anomalous readings came out from them at infrequent intervals, each cavern that George found was truly vast. The planet itself was almost ‘gas giant’ size but one atmosphere at ground level was still equivalent of 15 pounds per square inch. All the bubbles in the crust lessened the Planet’s weight dramatically.

A few days before his departure from C.S.3 G.W. discovered a stone ‘artifact’. He had originally suspected it to be a primitive sculpture. For the first time in his life, even to his knowledge the first time in anyone’s life, had an artifact been found that G.W. wished he could put back in the ground and forget about. Trying to look full on at the ‘thing’ gave G.W. a massive headache. The shape seemed to be pulling his eyes in a direction that human eyes had never been designed to go. He, deep in the very core of his being, was beginning to wish that C.S.3 had remained lost. He did not wish to be remembered for all time as this planet’s discoverer.

To his relief he received word that investigating parties of specialist archaeologists would land soon on C.S.3 and he now felt justified in leaving as he felt he had both passed on to incomers and left more than sufficient warnings on the surface.

He wanted to be gone. As fast as he could. He wanted, very much, to feel ‘clean’ again. He tried, but found it impossible, to explain away the feelings he was experiencing about this planet. He knew that washing and showering would do no good, only waste water, as he was not feeling physically dirty. He felt, somehow, unclean inside.

He left recorders in orbit to pass on information to those who would come later, and took off from orbiting the planet. As glad to be gone as he had been excited to arrive.

It will take many centuries before C.S.3’s secrets even to start to be uncovered. Arh Lam will be a great contributor to mankind’s store in this field of knowledge.

Many days and planets later and G.W. is still thinking, no, pondering, the mysteries surrounding Cygnus Seti 3. A world that had been hidden from, and not been told of on, any known planet, even in fables, before George Knoble found it. Not quite true, this modern version, but that is the story. For the moment.

Some race, somewhere, knew the story of C.S.3 and they are not talking. There was at least one race here that left no history on any other world. It felt, to George, as if at a point in time it had been decided that the world we know as Cygnus Seti 3 would be forgotten. That idea haunted him. As if the history of a planet could be erased. Someone had succeeded until the arrival of Man in the guise of George William Knoble.

All this work for nothing. No matter how long we have to look for. G.W. had intended to have this last thought on C.S.3 then pass it on to another to continue. We will solve the mystery. Eventually. This was George’s parting thought for Cygnus Seti 3 as his journey continued.

JANUS
Chapter 9

With his eyes closed and his craft on autopilot he took the opportunity of the few days quiet that the solitude of his voyage home from Arh Lam’s offered. To take stock of the situation that now existed and remember how it had all started. Janus had been away from the house visiting for the past few months. All his old, still close, colleges from the Academy had enjoyed a share of Janus’s available time.

It had all been very restful and a welcome break from his researches. All his friends had a different area of research, invention or creativity, culinary, artistic and musical to which they dedicated their lives. And all delighted in tantalizing Janus’ brain, eye, ear, body or pallet with their newest fads and sensations.

On his return route he called on Arh Lam responding to a message the house on Earth had received. He passed the next three hectic months with Arh Lam in his study and laboratory at home. There was much extra data that now needed to be added to the mathematical model Arh Lam had been working on all his adult life. Arh Lam’s father, Ishtar, and his father before him had carried on the work to create the model now being added to by Janus and Arh Lam. To Arh Lam the mathematic /philosophical model should come to fruition ‘soon’. How long Arh Lam’s ‘soon’ was no human could guess. After all the data manipulation had been completed the results still had to be extrapolated before they could be interpreted.

He was now fast approaching Glanfar, the family estate, and his home on Earth. Janus was now respected for his advanced years enough to be able to call these mental wanderings, reminiscences, and get away with it.

He had been the occupant of the house at Glanfar long enough to have found out most of the family secrets. One of the strangest was ongoing and concerned the link between the mutant anomalies throughout known space and G.W.’s discovery of the Cygnus Seti 3 and Glanfar 2 systems.

C.S.3 had been discovered on the same journey as Glanfar 2. That was an acknowledged historical fact. Although the planets were apparently as different as it is possible to be. There were similar questions surrounding both that had not yet been answered.

When G.W. took possession, full time, of the house on Glanfar 2 as the first occupant, He learned of the tasks before him, quickly, from the house. He instituted a set of rules that the house would not allow to be broken until a certain set of conditions, to be laid out in advance, were in place.

For safety, G.W. ensured the house knew the import of the information it was in possession of. The only parameters that had been set outside of the house, the house had controlled research in one, and only one, direction. The conditions that Arh Lam’s father and G.W. set in place to monitor the parameters were very situation specific.

Many of Janus’ predecessors had tried ways of persuading the house of G.W. to disclose the possible scenarios that ruled the conditions. The house on Glanfar 2 would not play. Until the right time and situation arose, or Arh Lam died, the house would remain quiet on this one issue.

The instructions did not preclude the House on either Earth or Glanfar 2 from undertaking their own research. Both houses acted in concert on this one issue. The houses took it upon themselves to keep the occupants informed but to act unanimously. They organized missions under the guise of other trade journeys. They reprogrammed probes that went ‘missing’. They shared data between themselves, the occupant of the time and Arh Lam. Arh Lam allowed for continuity and the cross checking of information between occupants of either Glanfar and to keep watch on the houses.

The archaeology on the surface of Cygnus Seti 3 provided gainful employment for generations of diggers and delvers. Arh Lam’s promotion to project leader after his father returned home through ill health, came as an unwelcome Greek baring gifts.

G.W. AND THE FOUNDING OF GLANFAR 2
including
A FURTHER EXTRACT FROM THE KNOBLE FAMILY CHRONICLES
Chapter 10

When a branch of the Knobles chose to move it was a planned campaign. Military strategy was used to the full. The first wave is the scouts. The scouts go out in search of unoccupied territory rich in whatever is required. Say a new cereal seed. Once found, reports are sent back to the second wave.

The second wave to move are the family’s foot soldiers. Their task is to ensure that any previous claimant or current owner of the seed, or its patent, is contacted and talked to about what the family can do to acquire permission for access.

Should the end product be land, then some form of purchase will be bargained for and negotiated to a satisfactory conclusion for all. Once, and only after, all titles, permissions or proof that it is a virgin find that had never been held by a previous owner, have been settled does word go back to the family that the move can begin.

It size can vary from a small caravan of a few craft to a full scale exodus, depending on the number of members the branch of the family has. A small exodus of fifty or so craft leave Alorian for Glanfar 2 one season after G.W.’s message arrived back.

G.W. has left C.S.3 many days behind and he finds he can reach a spiral arm of an uncharted mini galaxy less than half an AU across. He is less than a day’s journey away, he had to go see inside.

He headed in towards the heart of the galaxy and discovered, on his way in, an ‘M’ class sun with six planets in orbit that he had somehow missed with his primary scans. Initially he bypassed the system in favour of a close look at the centre of the cluster of stars ahead.

His craft wandered around the centre of the star system for less than a day then, bored with finding nothing new, moved out in the direction of the small ‘M’ class star he saw on his way in.

The primary star has a very similar spectrum to the sun, the star that old Earth moves around. As he is on approach to the system his sensors record that one of the planets has a blue green surface. Land and liquid approximately a third to two thirds. A similar ratio as Earth. All George needed now was to find the liquid was actually water.

G.W. looked closely. It was. Real, fresh H2O. It was then that he sent word back to Alorian and the second wave started out. Stopping off at all the same planets as George had and establishing trading links with the new races that he had met. Trade and diplomacy went hand in hand with the Knoble expansion.

The wave of fifty craft washed across the new frontier and swept on to where G.W. awaited them. The frontrunners of the wave were greeted as they entered the new system by a buoy broadcasting the directions to George in his choice of a new home for them, Glanfar 2. Thirty craft arrived having left the rest to start twenty trading posts between G.W.’s family home world and his own solar system of Glanfar 2.

No-one else had thought to name a planet after the Knoble’s spiritual home estate on Earth. Then again, G.W. thought that the landing place he had found would do until he found a better site. The gently rolling, green hills. Blue sky and white, fluffy clouds wandering along with the fresh smelling, warmly gentle breeze. The green growth on the ground looked and felt like the grass he had been told about, the version of ‘trees’ this world had evolved looked as if they had a trunk, branches, twigs and leaves. That impersonation would do for trees until something better came along.

Free water ran down the sides of hills cutting tracks for itself that looked and sounded just like streams. G.W. had set himself up at the closed end of the valley. It was far too wide to be a gully. At the lower end, furthest from the high ground and George, sat a small lake that the streams running off the hills fed into.

George William Knoble, who had never stood on the grass of Earth, never seen a real live tree, towering over a field, draped in its leaves, never heard, first hand, the sounds that fill the air on Earth. He had seen images and holograms, heard recordings and live broadcasts of the sounds of Earth, being on this world was the most awe inspiring time of his life to date.

G.W. had been in contact with Glanfar on Earth and, as well as telling him all the news of his journeys, he discussed with his Grandfather the idea of cloning the house and setting it up on Glanfar 2. The house and George’s Grandfather agreed that it would be an interesting experiment. It, also, had never been tried previously.

There was no sign of previous occupation on Glanfar 2, and there were no other lifeforms, or signs of there ever having been lifeforms, on any of the other five planets around this sun. Although each planet was habitable, none were or ever seem to have been. This system appeared designed to host life but had been forgotten or missed out. It was the first totally pristine system anyone knew about.

There were lots of places created that were too desolate or barren to host life. Here on Glanfar 2 conditions looked perfect for life and always had been as far as could be judged.

From the data G.W. sent back to Glanfar on the new find the more intrigued the house, and the people in Geneva, became. The planet, a little larger and lighter than Earth, seemed to be about the same age. The evolutionary path the planet had followed seemed to mirror Earth’s own and the plants were just different enough to be distinct species. There was nitrogen fixing bacteria in the soil, but none harmful to humans. Apart from plants and small sea animals there was no life on land or air. Apart from the wind passing through the plant life and the water over rocks there was no sound.

For the planet’s part, it ignored the people walking about on its crust. It continued to rotate and give pleasant summer days with infrequent showers. Nothing heavy enough that could be called rain, never mind a storm. There did not seem to be the conditions to cause high winds so the wind blew constantly, and softly, almost comfortingly, like your partner sleeping softly at your side.

The wind blew constantly to pollinate the plants, it had to do the job of the absent birds and insects. George had mapped the weather patterns even before he thought of landing. High and low pressures distributed themselves evenly around the planet and with only a few millibars of pressure difference meant that there were no extremes to face.

G.W. had founded a new starting place for the future adventures of the family in space. The house on Earth had, as promised, cloned itself and transported all its parts to G.W. on Glanfar 2.

The house liked the ‘feel’ of its new home. It felt the same as it felt back on Earth except here it was so much closer to C.S.3. Probably it would have realised it was too close for its own comfort had the house thought along ‘personal’ lines.

The house left G.W. in the dark about the knowledge that it had imported from the Home world. Not that the house could keep a secret from the occupant, there was just such a long time for the house to tell G.W. all it knew. The house could afford to take the long term view, and it would wait patiently for G.W. to settle down. They could have some interesting conversations together. Around the fire when all the rest of the hemisphere was asleep.

As G.W. settled down he began to discover the links the house kept up with all the branches of the family. The houses talked to each other, constantly. It was as it had been intended by Geoffrey the Inventor when he created the first house and called it Glanfar. That had been long ago on one of the first journeys Geoff had taken.

His first home had been on a planet that had two suns and five moons. The changes in the colour and hue of the sky fascinated him. He lived on that world for five years and he carried the memory with him in the colour schemes of every house he lived in apart from the House on Earth.

Glanfar was the name he gave the planet. It was carried to his Estate on Earth. Along with the original timber house. When Geoff built the house on Glanfar he shipped the lumber with him. Earth timbers in a totally alien environment. Over time the house took on the appearance of the air around it. The wooden timbers that formed the outside of the house added the strange hues in the sky around it until the outline of the house vanished into the landscape.

When Geoff returned to Earth to live he had to take the house along with him. Nowhere else had he seen a house that looked like Glanfar. While on Glanfar the house had grown. Not only in size to accommodate the growing number of Knobles, but in having to organize itself to care for them all.

The house felt Glanfar 2 could become home to it and the house could begin to feel itself putting down foundations deep into the planet.

Over the succeeding generations, as more members of the family stayed on at the house on Glanfar 2, more rooms then additional buildings were added. Slowly the boundaries of the estate became extended outwards until the main landmass of the planet had been absorbed by the family. Don’t get me wrong, there was never again to be overcrowding or excess populations. At it’s most densely populated there was a maximum of one person per hundred hectares.

The house had been improved, as well as added on to over the time and as microelectronics and local knowledge systems were added the house became ‘alive’. It created androids to carry out the maintenance work around the Estate, this way the house did not have to trouble the occupants with trivial matters. The house could cope, quite easily, by itself. It had learned to on Earth and in its first home, the planet Glanfar.

The family, and Glanfar 2, seemed to nurture the individual members. For many, many, generations no one had left Glanfar 2, apart from the scouts. There were no restrictions on anyone, each imposed their own restrictions on themselves and no one wanted to leave. There was nowhere better, or safer, to be. With the exception of Earth itself.

On the crown of a gently sloping hill to the rear of the main house a burial place was started when G.W. died. When a family member died, starting with G.W. himself, a simple hole was dug into the side of the hill and the body was entombed within. Returning to the soil what had came from the soil. With the passing of aeons branches of the family left Glanfar 2 to find their own way in the universe.

The family prospered and were kept safe from the trials of the outside worlds. News was fed back to the house from the family’s offshoots, that grew into strong branches, across the galaxies, which the house then disseminated to the remaining inhabitants

As times and populations changed members of the family moved further and further out but they still kept in touch with the occupant of Glanfar on Earth and so the house was kept abreast of the comings and goings of Empires and nomads, the house recorded the happenings and taught them on to the children.

JANUS
Chapter 11

For the past twenty or so generations the original Glanfar back on Earth had only one occupant at a time. The house had learned how to look after the one, very important, occupant. His vehicle had been detected while still far off and the house timed the heating of the preferred rooms to be at a preferred temperature for when the vehicle touched down before the main entrance.

The house cleared away any signs that it had just been carrying out maintenance as well as watering the plants. The clouds, that were being scurried away, made impressive and very showy, if inaccurate, watering cans and the house hated wet, muddy feet crossing the spotless wooden floors of the main entrance.

The vehicle was now assured to land on soft wet ground, Janus would then walk from the ship into the house without waiting the short time required for the house to grow a dry surface for him as far as the front entrance. The rear entrance was there to be made muddy; the house knew it and was always prepared to cheerfully clean this area.

The house felt content. The rooms were comfortably warm, food and liquid refreshment could be prepared in less time than it took to think about it, just by utilising the basic elements from the air surrounding the collectors.

The house could still recall times when it had catered for hundreds of people at a time. It didn’t wish for or long for a return to these times, it just recalled. “Welcome home Janus, we missed you”.

Janus had indeed walked mud from the garden to the main entrance. He seemed oblivious to the small objects that issued from the wainscoting and shot across the patinered wooden floor, following his feet trying to clean the mess from Janus’ footwear before he spread it too far.

“Thank you house, anything you feel I should know about”. He understood the house and knew if the house had a crack in its plasterwork, it would not bother telling him whereas if the planet were to fall into the sun, then it possibly would feel that he should know.

“All is well, here,” the house responded with a pregnant pause.

The thought flashed through Janus’ mind that he really must talk to the house and stop it being so dramatic. It was a trait of the very young or very old. Although the house was thousands of years old, neither alternate option suited the house.

Even as the question the house had wanted him to ask framed itself in his mouth, he knew it was an error of judgement to ask it but he went ahead anyway. “O.k. house where are things not well?”

“How far afield do you wish me to start?” Responded the house in a gently inquisitive tone.

“For the moment remain with the family”. Janus knew this gave him about five minutes before the house got to what was bothering it.

“And that Tinkerer is back.”

“Hold House. Go back one item.”

“Ahh. Your interest is peaked. Good. The Tinkerer is back.”

“How do you know he is the same one?” He had to be the grandson, at least, of the Tinkerer who called himself ‘Paul’. Five generations before ‘Paul’ had been last detected. Anakin, Janus’ great-great grandfather, had been the last to meet and talk with him.

Paul had been well known over thousands of square miles around. If anything broke within a house, the house replaced it. ‘Paul’ had been different. If he called and there were any broken artefacts laying around, out came ‘Paul’s’ tool case and he would repair it. Dependent on the season and ‘Paul’s’ mood some items he would mend, some ignore and other things would never be seen again. Not that any of the people ‘Paul’ visited ever objected or complained, everything he took was broken anyway. Nobody bothered him, when he wasn’t on your Estate then he would be somewhere else. Nobody showed any real interested in where that ‘somewhere else’ was.

Janus’ eyes drifted round his study at the portraits of his predecessors. All of them looked as if they had all been painted in the same room in the same studied pose. As if each new artist had taken the previous work as his template for the current portrait. Every male Knoble that had stayed behind with the house on Earth had his image on the study walls. Within seconds Janus had located, on the wall, the portrait of ‘John Knoble the Census Taker’. The first Knoble to meet a mutant.

JOHN KNOBLE THE CENSUS TAKER
Chapter 12

John was to be the third occupant to lay claim to the old House on Earth and seek solace from the hectic family and business life at ‘Glanfar 2’. Once a son comes Home to Earth it takes an enormous effort to make him move. The House exists for the ‘Occupant’, the House understands the pressures of being the ‘Occupant’ of the Knoble House, at Glanfar, on Earth. The House has a powerful hold over the occupying Knoble’s movements.

As the family history goes, John arrived Home in the late September of that year, with the intent of staying a few days to see his father then travel on. He arrived at the expected time only to have the House inform him that his father had left to visit an old friend from his younger days. The House suspected that it had been a necessary journey as Steven had left within minutes of the call.

Two weeks past and Steven’s appearance on his return from Geneva caused John some concern. His father did not look well. Sort of drawn and weary and very sad. ‘John,’ He called after he had been closeted in the study for two days. ‘I have a task for you that I would do but I have to be away soon. Ishtar is aging and growing weak. Much against my will I have to go out again should he get any worse.’

Ishtar Lam, Arh Lam’s father, had been postponing death by whatever means he could for the past fifteen years. Steven had been his physician for that entire period, not that Steven Knoble could have done anything about any ailments, he had no idea about Ishtar Lam’s peoples physiognomy. The position was purely honorary, and for one not of Ishtar’s world, a great distinction. When Arh Lam had introduced his new friend to his father and the two became three. The family model grew quickly toward completion and Steven learned more and more from Arh Lam and his father each day they worked together.

The model was intended to predict the future based on what was already known and extrapolating possible futures based on what could become scientifically probable. With vast amounts of known data available, the only answer for the anomalies had to be mutations in all the main genetic lines. The truth of the theory began to take root in Steven’s mind that the ‘tinkerers’ were the first signs of a new offshoot of mankind for a million years.

“Your task will be a census. We, the family, need to know just how many of us there are on Earth”.

John had his task. His father outlined it to him last year, it had been around late summer when father and son last spoke. Steven had finally asked him to begin to find out how many people were living ‘rough’ off this land surrounding what had been Geoff the Inventor’s museum town of Gilmore. As an addendum to his task he was to include the rest of Glanfar in the coming seasons.

In a ‘Knoble’ sort of way he was pleased the oldest known town on Knoble land had long since crumbled back into the soil that supported it for so long. Now he knew that if he walked as far as he could see, then the same distance again in the same direction he would not have wandered far from the centre of Knoble family land. Only the house knew the actual extent of Knoble land ownership.

On his journeys he had expected to see only people he had known, or heard of, for all his life. A few families had not left Earth but had cast off ‘civilization’ and gone back to farming. John had a few of these families on his range and generally visited them once or twice a year. He was nosey and wanted to keep up on all the gossip.

One sunny, warm morning in early October, when the insects were still humming and buzzing over the trees and meadowland surrounding the house, John tells the house that he is off on a hike. “I will be back but I don’t know when”.

Into his carrypack are thrown the few items he will need. Foodpacks, a heater and his bubble unit are all he needs to carry. Even a pair of swimming trunks will provide enough shelter and warmth to ensure comfort if you choose to swim then stay out overnight.

After four full and peaceful days hiking, having enjoyed talking to the families he decided that he needed to extend his census to include local flora and fauna. As the sun began to dip behind the treetops he found himself on the edge of a clearing when he decided that this would make an ideal sleeping place. Soft breezes gently stirred the topmost leaves of the trees around the warm still sun dappled glade that he occupied and almost as quietly a clean fresh water stream chuckled through its stony bed not two minutes away, just out of sight from where he set up his bubble and heater.

Before settling down for the night John went to drink from the stream and caught a glimpse of fish. As he had not packed any fish he thought ‘why not?’

The sun has gone and his glade is quiet, almost. The fish is caught, cleaned and spitted. The wood to smoke the fish as it cooks is collected in a neat pile with the fish filleted and spitted in place over it and his lighter will not work. His lighter is a flexible tool. It cuts, heats, causes things to ignite, melt and seal. It has a defensive roll as well.

John uses the final rays of the dying day to set up his heater and make a satisfying meal, not fish, but so what. John leans back using a long fallen moss covered log as a backrest.

Sleep stealthily creeps up and takes John by surprise. He is fed, warm and comfortable falling asleep. Somehow he twitches as he falls asleep and falls off the log supporting his back. This rude awakening allows him to hear the sound of someone’s gentle amusement. The soft laughter drifts across the glade from the direction of the stream. Over by the makings of his fire, he realises as he fumbles in the dark for his lighter, “Damn. That’s where I left it.” As he inspects the ground he is crawling over with his fingertips to ensure he can find his lighter. He touches the cool plasteel case of his lighter and realises, that now it is in his hand, it’s glowing.

In the slight glow John can see a tousled head of hair thatching the top of a pale, soft skinned sharply pointed face. Holding the lighter in his hand John points it at the still dry firewood and starts to apply pressure to the trigger button. There is an intensity control on the lighter and somehow it got itself turned up full. Firewood, spit and fish all vanish in a blinding white flash of heat that starts the ground flaming.

As the afterburn images of the flash clear from his sight he realises he is alone again and that the visitor is gone. Relieved that his lighter is now working again he drifts off into a peaceful sleep.

Birdsong and the chuckling of the stream at the edge of the clearing softly stir John’s dreams into a meld with the reality of being awake. As he approaches the halfway stage between awake and asleep, his lighter is still clasped in his hand. His memory recalls the dream about the ground catching fire and a glance confirms it was no dream. He opens his eyes fully after a cursory inspection of his lighter provides the evidence that it has been interfered with. As he rotates the control through all its functions he realises that it has been ‘improved’. It simply worked better that it had even when new.

John tidies his campsite and heads off in the same direction he had been traveling the previous day. A few hours along the path he chose a crumbled wall and rotted fence posts bisected the direction he was traveling. He added this information to the database and followed the fence. Soon crossing the crest of a hill John smells smoke in the air. Was it a scrounger, John was fascinated and allowed the woodsmoke in the air to lead him.

He emerged from the trees half way down the hill to find a scene from an old western painting before him. A wooden farmstead sporting a stone built chimney with a thin trail of smoke issuing from the top. Three tidy fields were laid out in front of the building and a man was remotely controlling a grass cutter from a small panel round his wrist while sat on the top rail of a length of fence placed in front of the house.

As John approached the man eased himself off his fence and strolled through the field in John’s direction. ‘’Lo!’ followed a hand thrust forward so it ended almost parallel to the ground and about two feet out from John’s elbow. John took the proffered hand and replied with ‘Hello to you’. The man before John moved the joined hands up and down, in a repetitive motion, smiling.

‘Paul tol’ me to s’pect you.’ The man’s voice was soft and slow, it was as if he was not used to talking. ‘Wha’ you doin’ out ‘ere?’ Most of the words he used were incomplete, unfinished. His words sounded the way his home looked. Woodsmoke, John begun to notice, also issued from under the sides of the roof around, and from spaces between the stones that made up, the chimney. The door hung open and the space that could be seen inside was dark.

‘He called by us las’ dark to tell us ‘bout a stranger bin walkin’ ‘bout the countryside’. “Said you’r from the Ol’ House an’ as’d us to ask you why you’r out”

“Who is ‘Paul’?” John asked equally softly, as if conscious that too loud a sound would shatter the fragile, crystal silence around them.
‘Paul’s are Tinkerer. Anythin’ broke an’ ‘e fixes it’ He paused dramatically to take breath. “Faml’y’s from Washington D.C. long time back’ Was proudly announced. “Lots years passed we moved out ‘ere an’ bee’d here ever since.” He had a look of the wilderness about him yet his actions were kindly, and civil enough. ‘Paul was old ‘ere then an’ ‘e’s still old ‘ere now. That’s ‘Paul’”.

“Come in, come in. Food time. We eat, drink then later talk. After we talk then you sleep. All full and comfy like”. These were all thrown away comments as the farmsteader strolled through the open door and into the dark interior. “Come, come, we eat then talk. M’name’s Adam” said John’s host as they walked across the threshold and into the shelter.

What could be seen through the gloom all looked very Heath-Robinson in design as very little he could see could be recognize as anything that had been commercially made. Various, still recognizably, chassis had additional solar panels and other non-standard accessories strapped on in apparently haphazard fashion.

As John’s eyes grew accustomed to the low light level other things began to show themselves. Large deep, soft cushions and vast comfortable throw overs covered the seating and the floor had been made of richly oiled timbers tongue and grooved into floorboards that were straight and true.

For a moment John could not see Adam as he moved into a dark corner on the same wall as the door. As Adam re-emerged into the light he had a stone jug and some cups in his hands.

“Food soon but first a drink to wash the day away. Then we wash the dust off and eat. Then we talk. All night if you wish.”

The offered cup held a warm fragrant drink whose taste John could not recognise other than it contained alcohol. Having emptied his cup he found the alcohol was no small measure. Sitting in a heap of pillows and throw overs John was comfortable. After a very satisfying meal of local produce they settled back and conversation started.

Adam learned more about John than the opposite. Paul was a different matter; Adam was far more willing to tell John about the Tinkerer. Paul seemed to have a seasonal pattern to his appearances. He called, just before the snows set in, to see if anything had broken down so he had something to ‘tinker’ with. On occasions he had taken things away and when he brought them back the object would do entirely unexpected things that had never been a part of the original design. So the evening passed. It took John to realize he was tired before he caught on that Adam now had all the word power he needed. He no longer cut words short or fumbled over which word to use and how to use it.

The following morning saw John up and off on the trail soon after dawn. The air had the chill of late autumn and the leaves of the trees constantly dropped dew, from the previous night’s frost, on John as he brushed passed bushes that overgrew the not well-traveled trail.
Adam mentioned a ‘close’ neighbour that lived three to four days hike away. This was to be John’s next port of call. Adam let him leave only if he, Adam, was allowed to ensure John had food and drink for the journey. Inside his carrypack he had two flasks of the drink he enjoyed the previous evening and fresh bread and cheeses to be eaten after the meat was cooked and eaten. Having made his promises he was pointed in the right direction of Adam’s nearest company and he was released.

When he thought he was half way to his next port of call he again smelled smoke in the air. None of the animals were panicking so there was no immediate danger, where was the smell coming from?

As he followed the trail on the smoke became visible, hanging like mist in the still, cool air. As John stood a sound attracted his attention and he tried to concentrate locating it. In the forest, locating the direction a soft sound is coming from, can be difficult. The sound steadies down to a gentle, rhythmic thump, like an old-fashioned steam pump cycling.

The trail John is following crests a small brow to face a steep ‘V’ shaped gully crossing the trail and leading the trail down to where the two sides of the gully meet. He is paying more attention to his ears than eyes. An unexpected movement grabs John’s thoughts through his eyes. The movement follows a far away creaking sound reminding John of a wooden wheel on a wooden axle.

He slowly lowers his weight down the side of the gully careful not to fall. Just as well as he did take it easy as it allowed him time to avoid two ants, quite large ants to be sure, but none the less two ants, and they were pulling a small four wheeled wooden cart loaded with bright metal parts.

In the wild, ants either die off each winter or hibernate. All the knowledge the nest acquired during that year’s growing season is lost and the next generation has it all to relearn. Year after year. Ants did not move things round in carts. They had no appreciation of continuance or of the value of metal. Nor did ants have any metalworking knowledge at all. In fact all he saw before his eyes was impossible.

John turned off the path and followed the gully. The smoke was now heavy in the air and pungent. No longer the pleasant natural smell of woodsmoke but burning fossil fuels. Probably coal. John very much wanted to know who was burning coal out in the wilderness. That question was answered within five steps from where he now stands, but that just opens more questions this time with no answers.

As John pushes past a bush overgrowing the trail a factory chimney is the obvious culprit responsible for the smell of coal burning. The chimney is less than a metre high and the glass building it stands over is in excess of two metres long and a quarter metre high. He stands fascinated and watches cart after cart go in at one end and leave by the other. Even though the temperature is dropping outside, the factory’s operators inside show no signs of sleep or death.

The glass was impure and the building constructed as an ants nest but it was construction and manufacture by insects. John stayed for a few days he knew he could spare and set up camp a few hundred metres away from the factory and watched, made notes and recorded all he saw and as the mercury continued to drop he made his way to the next meeting knowing he would be back in the spring.

On his return circuit home he passed well to the south of the ant nest due to one of the passes he had cut through that previous autumn being blocked by unusually heavy early snows. Once back at Glanfar he filed his report on his census and enquired about ‘intelligent ants going in for construction’.

The response that he received at Glanfar was not along the lines John had expected. Paul had been the main topic of debate out of the entire report. ‘Paul’ it turned out was only one of many wandering ‘fixers’. Every landmass of any size held at least ten of these strange, silent wandering people.

Late October became November and the snows set in with a purpose. Glanfar was fed up being a thousand shades of green and wanted to be blond instead. As with most home dye jobs, Glanfar became snow white, and very cold. As the month of Christmas neared John joined his father in Geneva to celebrate the holiday month of December.

GENEVA
Chapter 13

Geneva had always been a pleasant place. From feudal times the city had a good reputation for fine living and it had been nurtured over the centuries. After the War the town fathers decreed that the reputation must be maintained, and if possible, enhanced. Geneva was rebuilt from crystal. Cruising in across the lake the sight was, at first, awesome.

Individual buildings fractured then refracted light into a vast rainbow that seemed to surround the entire place. Mile high decorative towers pierced the hues and impossibly fragile walkways interlaced the buildings, the city looked so light, airy and delicate it just may float away .

Vast, glass roofed areas between the buildings where fountains played and occasional people met to pass on the latest news while standing on marble faced pavements. People of all shapes and colours dressed and draped in as many, equally colourful, fabrics.

Over the past century Steven had been spending more and more time in the vast libraries and life science laboratories based in and around Geneva and Washington. The Population Census had initially been Geneva’s idea, although there were no secrets, there was nothing to hide from so few people, some things were investigated quietly; the census had been set up to discover the full extent of Earth’s population. The main fear being that nobody lived on Earth anymore and all the produce was created by systems run with artificial intelligence. Could the planet be inhabited solely by robots.

As with every venture undertaken by mankind to explore the unknown, some questions are always answered, and as always, more questions come to light leaving us with more knowledge and a further path of research to follow. As again the gap between what we know and what we know we don’t know, widens. So it was with ‘Paul’ and his ilk.

Going back to the first ‘leader’ of the Scroungers, Jeremiah Goodall, reports of ‘tinkerers’ had came to us through history and had been, up to now, ignored. The episodes had been recorded as odd items of gossip or third and forth hand accounts of someone having had a peculiar visitor. During the times when towns and cities all across the world were collapsing due to lack of interest, record keeping ceased to be a priority of any kind. Family folklore is really all that remains to pass on any knowledge of these times. So the census is taken along with the recordings of family histories.

The purpose was to be able to follow migration paths across the continental landmasses of the people that had remained. The families that had established the main Estates travels were well documented and the truth had been long established. The interest lay in the people that moved back to Earth in small numbers to take up farming.

Throughout the world over every local census, anomalies appeared. These were caused by having identified a number of people that moved around the landmasses without having any place to live and were not part of the populace. They only seemed to exist when other people could validate their existence.

Arh Lam, the house at Glanfar on Earth and the house on Glanfar 2 all had their, equally valuable, if different, contributions to make in the answering of this question. John’s curiosity and G.W.’s stubbornness both assisted in solving the problem of the ‘People with No Forwarding Address’. The late inhabitants of Cygnus Seti 3. All would help to complete the Lam family work. Arh Lam’s formulae would eventually put a time limit on Mankind’s existence.

JOHN KNOBLE THE CENSUS TAKER (Pt 2)
Chapter 14

Having spent the worst of the winter in the comfortable surroundings of Glanfar, John was able to catch up on the news from both the House and his father.

While John was out on his census the House always knew of his whereabouts and there was no carnivorous wildlife big or vicious enough to do any harm to a grown man on the entire continent. The only dangers left were a part of the environment.

The house tended to shield the occupants from any upset or stress if it could. The House would introduce comforting smells such as warm yeast and fresh baked bread on cooler days and spring flowers and new mown hay as the weather warmed.

For the occupant the house was a security blanket. The house enjoyed the position it held in the hearts of any Knoble everywhere. As the generations passed the house acquired knowledge about how best to serve the family it housed, the effect it had was insidious. When the family shrank to just one occupant the house took upon itself to nurture that occupant, to the house the occupant was the most important thing in the universe and prided itself on keeping the occupant safe while he was within its sphere of influence.

When the occupant was away the house lavished the care, for which it had been designed and built to give to the family, on the surrounding wildlife. As seasons turned into years and the years into centuries the animals in the area looked to the house to help them prosper. The house offered food, in hard times, and safety from natural disasters. In return the house had learned to interpret the sounds that they made into a ‘language’ the house could understand and use.

The animals, once the house had developed its linguistic skills sufficiently, were gently coaxed into bring news to the house of any unusual occurrences around the estate. The generations of occupants neither knew nor guessed anything of this part of the house’s existence. The house kept no secrets, there were some things the occupant did not need to know about. After all, part of the house’s programming included not bothering the occupant with trivial or mundane items. For the house newsgathering from local animals fell nicely into this category.

None of the occupants had ever guessed that the house had undisclosed sources of information. It was never thought important enough, by the house, to bother the occupant with, so the house passed on the data in the same way as all other news.

While John was resident at the house, Steven took advantage of his son wintering over and spent more of the wintertime in Geneva on his researches and analyzing the census data that came in from every estate on Earth. As he grew older Steven had felt less inclined to leave Glanfar year on year. Somehow he felt that this attitude toward the house was not right, the lure of the house in the peaceful green valley on Earth grew stronger and loomed larger the more time he spent away.

Steven had friends in Geneva and, during his visits, he saw them regularly. He also met many off worlder scientists who visited the twin libraries there and in Washington. And he in turn visited them learning first hand about their worlds and cultures. Among them was an old family friend. Arh Lam and his father, Ishtar, had known every occupant of Glanfar back to Steven, Geoffrey’s grandson and the father of John Knoble.

Arh Lam’s society was founded on the ability of leading a long, active life. He was a philosopher from a family of philosophers / mathematicians how lived on a planet around a star in the Tao Cygnus system. He was a frequent visitor to the libraries of Earth in Washington and Geneva and, over time as his friendship grew with the Knobles starting from Steven. He grew close to Steven when he became the occupant of the house, and each succeeding occupant, Arh Lam eventually allowed Glanfar itself to host him when the occupant was away.

For as the last five occupants had learned more about Arh Lam, and Arh Lam, in turn, had learned to trust the absolute honesty of the house and it’s occupant. It became known to the occupant, that Arh Lam had a theory that the known universe was facing a challenge from outside. Something unknown had a tendency to cause minor inconsistencies in his maths that he used to validate his theory.

As he and Steven worked a wave pattern appeared to track the flow of inconsistencies that ran irregularly through Arh Lam’s figures. It appeared, from the test surveys already undertaken and now with the early results in, that something not yet uncovered, and falling outside the parameters already built in for the unknown, was having a significant effect on the way things were happening in the world outside. Whether for good or bad none could yet say.

Steven needed to talk the results through with John before he started out again in the spring. Back at Glanfar John was collecting his pack to go back to the ants nest as the snows in front of the house melted to give way to the upcoming fields of spring flowers. Curious and eager to see the changes the winter had brought John decided to move out at the first opportunity. This was it.

Steven missed his opportunity. He felt almost relieved. Lately he had been dreaming of sitting before the open grate in his study in the house at Glanfar. Sitting in the large, comfortable wing backed chair that had held the posteriors of so many men who had previously stayed on at the house to become occupants. The dream was that vivid and real he never knew if he was asleep or awake. At times he thought he was hallucinating.

In his crystal tower in Geneva Steven thought back over the lives of his forefathers. He knew the last twenty as well as he knew his own, As he remembered he realised that his past could very well become his future.

It now appeared to him that there had come a time in all of those past lives when it had been right for that person to take up residence in the house and become the house’s occupant. Somehow over all that time there had only ever been one occupant at a time since the family moved out to Glanfar 2.

He would, he knew, sooner or later take his place in a portrait on the wall alongside his predecessors. Spend some portion of each day sat for the rest of his life in a thousand year old chair before a five thousand year old fireplace and be the centre of a vast family network. Did the occupant become part of the house, or the opposite? The comfort and ease with which he adapted to the idea mortified him.

He knew he could work just as well at home, but he preferred to keep some independence. He knew he missed his office if he were at home. He could travel as quickly or slowly as he fancied. If he wanted to watch the scenery, he could fly. Or he could teleport. It all depended on his mood.

John had made good time heading back out to the ants nest. As he knew where he was going his determined stride had him arrive before all the snow had melted from the floor of the ‘v’ shaped valley. It was drawing to dusk of the third day that John arrived and saw the glow in the canopy of leaves covering the factory site. Smoke filtered through the branches and dispersed. The smell was different, sharper on the back of the nostrils. The only thing that John had experienced that had that smell was coke. The ants were now producing coke to make steel with. The glow came from a coal coking plant some fifty metres behind the now larger foundry.

Over the next few days John watched and studied the movements along the network of cart tracks that had developed over the winter while John had been at Glanfar. There was much toing and froing and the valley was becoming an industrial centre.

After staying four days John had to move on. He laid one last experiment down before he left. He placed a foil food wrapper on the trail for the ants to find. He wanted to know what the ants would make of it. He would check up on them the next time he passed.

John took his time over the count and wandered the countryside enjoying the changes of the seasons over six months. He never came across any physical evidence of Paul, lots of stories of what he had fixed or done. He moved across the face of the countryside like a wraith. Leaving no footprints, no signs of his passing other than the time he spent with each person he visited. He touched the Earth but lightly.

John arrived back at Glanfar early September and fed his observations through to his father in Geneva. Three days later the house announced that Steven was due home. John called Steven from the study and the face in the middle of the room spoke. “John set up a multi-contact from the study for me.” The screen died abruptly. John did not take offence and set the scene as requested.

Two minutes later Steven arrived and started to tell John a story. Arh Lam was at home organizing a similar multi-contact setup. They both had a lot to say to a lot of people. There were still many variables to try and account for but the theory had to be tested in the public arena.

It appeared that there was a new force at work in the remaining population on the planet. Paul and his associates, it appeared, were mutants. Where did they live? How had they evolved? How did they survive? They seemed to posses nothing other that the clothes they wore, and never changed, and the tool kits that they each carried in a pocket. Nor need anything more. More and more questions to be answered all the time.

But before he called the other people on the schedule, Steven called Arh Lam. “I must talk to you and John, I have come to a realization and I need to warn you about it. You see the Knoble family have a trait that I appear to have caught. I think it has a lot to do with the house and our history here.” While he had been talking he had unthinkingly, almost as if doodling while he talked, moved round to sit in the large, comfortable wing backed chair in front of the now roaring wood fire in the stone fireplace.

“I don’t think I shall be able to leave this house in a few years time. John, do you yet begin to notice just how comfortable the house is? How attuned it is to your needs? Do you ever want for anything while you are here?” This gave John pause for thought. He could never recall a time while he lived in the house when he had not found what he needed, or just wanted, where he thought it would be.

Steven started to speak again. “I see you begin to detect the house John, don’t worry it is not a bad life. No, not at all, I am sure the house will make me very comfortable, remember I will not want to leave. Arh Lam, we, my friend, present different challenges. I enjoy meeting with you in person. I fear that will have to stop, even now your image appears to be in the other half of my room.”

Where each was calling from was surprisingly similar. Steven Knoble and Arh Lam, separated by the vastness of space, were both surrounded by wood of a great age. Arh Lam’s wood though was still growing.

“John, both your father and I are convinced that someone must talk to Paul or one of his kind to ask what it is that they want. Hopefully then they will let slip any deficiencies they may have. We know nothing at all about them other than they exist. That is not enough.”

“If I may interrupt?” The house put the enquiry forward softly. “John, I am aware that this news will not be what you want to hear, but it will be of interest to you, I fear Paul may have destroyed the ants nest that you have been watching.”
“How do you know?” Steven wanted to know how the house came by this information.

“From time to time I receive news telling me of sightings of Paul. The animals do not like the smell of him, but they will not tell me why.” The house sounded almost perturbed by the animals lack of communication. It seemed as if the house had no secrets from the animals and expected none. That there was any communication at all had astounded the three listeners in the room. This was the first time that they had heard of animals initiating communications with houses.

“Most of the animals avoid that area because they do not like the smells around those ants that do not sleep during winter and build things. I am told Paul spent a lot of time there twelve seasons ago and returned a few days ago. Saw what his ants had done and he must have disapproved because he pointed one of his tools at it and it just fell apart. But that news, I have been told, came from a fox. He is usually a reliable source over game, but you never know. I would have been more confident had it been from one of the larger birds.” The older the house grew, its occupants noticed over time, a hardening of the ideas. It seemed to be the house’s version of hardening of the arteries. Then again, being sentient as long as the house that gave its name to the estate on Earth, there was little new left to amaze one.

The house ran back over the last three years reports on Paul’s progress bringing the ant colony on to where it could work over the winter. The house had allowed the animals to keep watch over the strange goings on in the ‘v’ shaped valley. Had anything untoward have occurred the house was more than ready to send out androids and get the truth that way.

On Paul, the house had, long ago, become suspicious of the idea that ‘If Paul isn’t here, then he’s somewhere else’. Meant as ‘if he is not on my property then he is on the property next door, or next door to them. He is around somewhere.” Over the centuries spent wondering, the house came up with the same answer, Paul definitely went ‘Somewhere else’. The house began to ask around, “Where is somewhere else? Is it a place? If so, where?” None of the house’s questions were ever answered by family, whom the house trusted, or visitors whom the house for the most part, didn’t. It was as if the questions just hung in sub-space, unheard. Which, to the house was an answer in itself.

The house passed on to the three others he was in touch with, the two humans on Earth, and the creature from far across the time and distance of space, Arh Lam, the carefully and painstakingly gathered information. Paul and his kind were mutations ahead of their time who had found another way across space. Not only was this way another way, it was totally different.

Having reviewed all the available evidence the houses drew the inescapable conclusion that the mutants could move, not through time and space, which was why no-one had seen them appearing elsewhere other than on Earth, but through into parallel dimensions or different universes of Earth.

JANUS
Chapter 15

The house had a call from Ishtar Lam’s home waiting when Janus walked in through the rear door. This in itself surprised Janus as he had never, personally, known the now very frail and aged philosopher leave his home, and to receive a call from Ishtar Lam’s home without at least talking to Arh Lam was unheard of in itself.

Janus had been Ishtar’s son, Arh Lam’s guest many times and had often sought to return the hospitality. Ishtar, Arh Lam’s father, had never again been strong enough to leave the comfort of his home since his last trip when he visited Glanfar 2 to chasten G.W. over his ‘misinformation’ Cygnus Seti 3 all those centuries ago.

Ishtar Lam was already old when he first met Stephen Knoble, second son of Geoffrey and the Census Taker’s father’s, Grandfather, when he had been the first human to be allowed to find Tao Cygnus. Ishtar Lam’s people had called on his services to assist in communication with this young upstart ‘civilization’.

As was later disclosed by Ishtar Lam, his people used a very loose interpretation of the idea of humans being ‘civilized’. It had been Ishtar Lam’s opinion that these Humans could be helped to their destiny. His society accepted his word that these people fitted into his plan. Ishtar Lam’s people knew of his plan as it was the basis for his family’s world renowned theory.

The main thrust of the generations of effort given to the project by Arh Lam’s predecessors led to Arh Lam actually theorising that there had been a great life force here prior to the arrival of the current life forms.
It had left for parts unknown, at an undeterminable time and by means unknown. It seemed as it they had just uprooted their entire civilization, removing almost every last trace of their existence, and just gone. There was no other explanation. Some species’ myths and legends tell of times, in their pre-history of being created in other universes and other races tell of being created here. Who but the victor tells all the truth about history. It is purely subjective and dependent on your standpoint.

The Lam family curse had always been a lack of solid proof to support the theory. G.W.’s discovery of Cygnus Seti 3 provided all the proof that you could want. The evidence in the remaining pieces of dressed masonry proved the existence of considerable skill that had, for some reason, been the only real evidence not removed.

Ishtar arrived first to begin the investigation of the surface artefacts, stayed a little longer than his strength allowed. Then he had to hand over to his son to continue the more demanding work of uncovering the truth that had been buried far in the past. Arh Lam began where his father left off.

Arh Lam’s father had worked many years accumulating information from the visible evidence of the artefacts that had been left strewn over the landscape. Arh Lam went over his father’s maps and diagrams and decided that his first new task would be to establish the age of the rock that had been so carefully dressed. The dating information that came back to him he did not understand. The rocks appeared to be saying they were, at least, one billion years older than the universe in which they were found. More disturbing were the results on the origin of the designs in the blocks of stone. The patterns, although artificial, had been imposed on the rock when / as the rock cooled. Arh Lam returned a report to his father that seemed to suggest that the rocks had been twisted in on themselves while still semi-molten. It was the only way that the warped stress dynamics in the rock’s crystalline structure could be accounted for. If it were possible, then it would be a new trick and possible new direction for molecular physics to take.

Arh Lam took time to ensure that his research results could have no ambiguous meaning.

It had been Arh Lam’s idea to transport a projector into one of the smaller caverns below the surface. He wanted to see if the inside was actually how it looked. The cavern, although completely devoid of material artefacts but was far from empty, was found to be covered in the odd art forms, walls, floor as well as the domed roof.

G.W.’s guess, after he interpreted the results of his scans, that the caverns were hollowed out by someone, and not natural, seemed to fit the apparent facts. The surface of the cavern looked smooth, not a polished surface, but more an eggshell finish. Arh Lam moved as much life support systems in as would fit and still allow room to move. After he was happy with his personal security he transported in. The first living being to enter that cavern for, if the dating techniques were accurate for the date it had been abandoned, was in excess of one hundred million years.

Although vast quantities of examples of these ‘art forms’ were now available for observation, no study could be carried out. Nothing made any sense as no key had yet been found. To understand anything there must be some point of reference, a point of understanding where a cup from one culture becomes a sacred drinking vessel to a second.

At one stage, about one hundred years after their first discovery, the artefacts were so common that every home had one on a table or ledge, shelf or window sill. Yet no-one could say what one was. Aesthetics said it was ‘high art’, while some of those with a religious bent suggested that they were blasphemous icons and linked to some black arts that had been at work.

These two views of the artefacts were the extremes. The majority found them ‘odd’ to look at and that was part of the charm. Cygnus Seti 3 still held on to its greatest mystery, where was the ‘Rosetta Stone’ to provide the key that would unravel the language, history and fate of this race we know existed and had vanished, and know nothing else about?

Arh Lam finally found the key to the translation of this ancient language. It had been found hundreds of years earlier in the ruins of a primitive telepathic society who had all died out after a plague had laid waste to the entire bio-sphere of their world. As historians found where this race fits into the overall scheme of things they found that a religious offshoot founded a colony on a distant world. All, at first, that could be discovered was that these priests were to be feared and the priests hierarchy not only expelled these renegades from their faith but also marooned them on a distant world to die out.

Arh Lam gathered from the surviving data that the renegades were thought as heretics by their own faith. Arh Lam had a long pause for thought here. Was this something that he wanted to uncover?