Trust Page 0,21

the purple-black sky met the sea I could see hundreds of tiny lights which pinpricked the bulkhead of the ship and shone out into the night like the countless stars above me. A steady stream of busy shuttles poured out from deep within the bowels of the ship. Each one of them swooped down towards the surface of the water, unloaded their cargo onto the decks of a fleet of waiting boats, and then quickly disappeared back up into the dark safety of the cavernous ship again. Then, after I had been watching for a minute or two, they suddenly stopped.

Conscious that the man next to me was keen to get his binoculars back, I deliberately ignored him and turned my attention below to the gently rolling waves in the shadows of the colossal ship. I could see a long line of boats which were now travelling back towards land. The flotilla virtually stretched from the ship to the shore.

'Looks like something might be happening,' I said under my breath.

'What can you see?' Rob asked.

I put the glasses down for a second and they were immediately snatched back by their owner. He quickly lifted them up to his own eyes and stared out to sea.

'The ships are moving back towards the shore,' I answered, 'and the shuttles have stopped flying. Looks like they've finished packing!'

The sudden change in the behaviour of the aliens was also noticed by some of the many other people in the vast crowd who were also using binoculars or, in one or two extreme cases, telescopes. Once again an unstoppable wave of contagious excitement and interest swept through the massive gathering with the deadly speed of a bush fire tearing through a tinder-dry forest.

'They must be taking everything to their new base,' the man who still perched between my brother and I said under his breath. He watched transfixed as the line of ships snaked away from the shadows of the belly of the alien craft. 'Did you know that they've constructed a safe area near here for them?'

'I had heard something,' I replied, suddenly a little more interested in the conversation. 'I was wondering where they were going to go. You'd have thought they'd have been carted off and hidden somewhere well away from...'

'Not at all,' he interrupted. 'There's a disused holiday camp near here...'

'Brymer Sands,' Rob piped up.

The man continued.

'That's right. It's been refurbished and security has been tightened so that they can stay there.'

'But will they stay there?' I wondered.

'Why should they?' Rob snapped, sounding strangely defensive. 'Bloody hell, it's not their fault they're stuck here, is it? Christ, remember when Mum and Dad took us to Brymer Sands when we were little? We were hard pushed to spend a week there. You can't expect bloody interplanetary travellers to be locked up there for a few months, can you? No, they said on the news this morning that they were going to be free to travel.'

Was there anything that my brother and the irritating, annoying little man who had joined us didn't know about the aliens? They seemed to know everything about their needs and their plans, far more than I would have expected them to. But then information didn't seem to be very hard to come by. Every time I turned on the television or logged onto the Internet I saw nothing but alien news and updates. I guess my problem was that I didn't have the same rabid interest as everyone else seemed to. Their arrival was interesting and had changed the course of human history for sure, but my life was still the same. Nothing much had altered.

'Is it a good idea to give them freedom?' I asked.

'Why not?' questioned Rob. 'We all know so much that there's nothing left to hide. And if the authorities did an about face and closed ranks on us now, what would it achieve? If people don't get told the truth, they'll invent their own version, won't they? If the flow of information was cut-off now it would only be a matter of hours before the papers would be full of stories about little green men and ray guns and crap like that...'

I understood what he was saying but something didn't ring true. I couldn't quite put my finger on it, and I couldn't begin to explain how I felt because I wasn't really sure myself. Something was definitely eating at me. Everything seemed inexplicably simple and uncomplicated. In a sense it felt as