The Last Christmas On Earth

EPISODE IV-6

"During the journey, I watched you one by one," he said, "and I read the concern on your faces. I saw that sooner or later each of you, thinking about what you have temporarily left behind, wondered if it was really worth it. And it is good that you have asked for it, because I do not like collaborating with reckless people... and anyway, the answer is yes, you can be sure that it is worth it! Fate has given us a truly unique privilege, because probably tomorrow we will begin to rewrite human history. Be proud of you and let's work hard."

"I'll drive you home," James suggested to Helen in a faint voice.

"I have to go back to town to retrieve the car."

"You're right, I hadn't thought of it. I take you back to the Country Hole »James agreed, turning instead to the short cut he took to Helen's house.

"Hey, where are you going?"

"Why?" James asked brusquely.

"I just told you I have to get back to town to get the car!"

"You're right, I'm sorry ..." he replied, reversing, then drove without saying a single word. He stopped not far from Mike's bar, from which the last drunk people were coming out, switched off the engine and started fiddling with the gear selector.

"James ..."

He turned to look at her.

"There are moments when everything seems to go wrong, where you think you're going to face a catastrophe without being able to do anything about it ... but then suddenly everything changes and things adjust themselves ..."

"I don't understand anything anymore ..." he murmured holding back his tears with difficulty. Helen put her hand on his thigh and in response, he felt his muscles flicking instinctively under the canvas of his jeans, then he immediately withdrew his hand and looked away.

"Maybe you should talk to Eve ..." Helen offered.

"For what purpose? Did you see those pictures too, whatever she tell me how I could believe her?"

"So what?"

"I don't know, I don't know ... I don't know a damn thing anymore, damn it!" He exclaimed, almost shouting. "Or rather, if we didn't have Harry, I'd know perfectly well what to do," he declared resolutely, and she looked at him in surprise.

"Now we have to go. Try to calm down and rest, tomorrow we will see to clarify this matter," said Helen after another couple of minutes of silence. Seeing that he made absolutely no mention of putting his nose out of the world in which he had temporarily taken refuge, she decided to leave him alone.

After the third LMJ cocktail, with his reason almost completely obscured by alcohol, Luke decided to stay a while longer on the bed, with his arms stretched out at his sides and his palms facing the ceiling. He kept one foot resting on the ground to prevent the room from starting to spin around him and he breathed deeply, concentrated in an attempt not to give in to nausea because his stomach had begun to rebel against the terrible mix of stuff he had ingested in the last two hours. Meanwhile, he tried to think, to see if it was the case or not to call his employer and announce that he had found what they were looking for. What he had seen and heard that night, together with the story that Sally had told him of the oddities that had happened in the past few days, had given him the certainty that he had finally arrived exactly where he had to arrive. Thinking about it, however, he realized that it was a bit scary to him, he wasn't stupid and, even if he was foggy, his mind was now traveling too fast. The hypothesis that he had not been commissioned by a simple capricious rich man broke through him in a moment, suddenly opening up different scary scenarios. He wondered if for all that time he hadn't worked without knowing it for some of the government or para governmental agencies that the country was full of. If this had been the case there would have to be much more secret and dangerous things at stake than those he had thought of at the beginning. So it was not excluded that revealing that he had found what he sought was tantamount to signing his own death sentence. So what was he supposed to do? Empty the ATM and disappear? In a few hours, he would have been a long way off, but he knew well that certain people and certain organizations are very touchy and, moreover, they have an elephant memory and octopus tentacles. It would have been much smarter to pretend to give up the job with an excuse, collect a small fee as a symbolic fee and spend it to go and rebuild life as far as possible. But probably the result would have been the same. And then, if behind the whole thing there was really some kind of organization that wanted to operate in the shadows, surely he wasn't the only one who had been hired. If it really was like that, who knows how many stupid naïves like him had been unleashed for a walk around the world in search of that woman. And most likely, in addition, he has had someone on his heels for all that time to control him. If he had discovered that at that point his employer already knew everything he would not be surprised that much, and in that case, any strategy he would have chosen to implement his escape would be short, useless and with no escape. Wherever he looked, the story always ended in the same way, that is, with him lying on the steel table of a morgue. In the midst of all that sea of hypotheses, he told himself then, there was another fundamental aspect that up until then he had not evaluated. That matter was turning out to be really curious, presumably soon unimaginable things would happen and he understood just at that moment that he wouldn't lose them for anything in the world. Not to mention the fact that nomadic life had come to his boredom and that in the end it had been enough a couple of days just to fall in love seriously with Sally and this was not a good sign, because it meant that something inside him was changing ... "getting older, maybe!" he suggested. Even though an inner voice kept telling him to make that phone call, he decided that the best thing was to play Helen and James's game and stall for a little longer, so as he continued to think and rethink, hypothesize and disavow, he finally fell asleep.

Like every Monday, Yuri showed up at work before the start of his shift, in order to have a chat with his elderly colleague about the last Zenith game in St. Petersburg. Shortly thereafter, Oleg left and Yuri took all his belongings out of his backpack, laid them on the desk and calmly carried out all the tried and tested operations to prepare himself for the long night on guard. He placed the basket containing the midnight snack at the right vertex, with the edges of the package perfectly parallel to those of the wooden shelf, placed the portable radio on the chest of drawers behind him and threw the phone and the gun into the drawer. Subsequently, he put in order his Applied Chemistry books on the left side of the counter in good order and finally turned the stive chair of ninety degrees and checked the monitor station and the central computer, to verify that all the alarms were in function and the sensors were working. He did a quick recap, nodded to his own image reflected on the glass of a bulletin board and took the torch to begin his usual round through the halls of the Leningrad Museum of Out of Time Objects. Unlike his colleagues, when Yuri had to work on the night shift, he was happy. At night there is no pain in the neck who annoyed him because they have lost their son in who knows what room, nor those who presume to acquire the right to take pictures by offering five rubles under the table. Not to mention foreigners who don't speak a word or those who are simply desperate to find a public telephone or a Crapper.

Even if he had to get eight kilometers by bicycle in the dark, plunged into the terrible cold and sometimes even under a heavy snowfall, going to work at night was a real joy for him. At night absolute silence reigns and for him, who wanted to graduate quickly, that was the ideal situation. Yuri passed slowly from one room to the other, observing with the same usual curious wonder the objects that had been lying there for years, found practically everywhere on the planet and deliberately abandoned to oblivion by official scientists. "When they faced with something that defeats their theories - he reflected as he went around and continued to observe fantastic and mysterious works - the Academicians have the bad habit of ignoring it, or worse, of shouting to falsehood and try every way possible to delete it from the face of Earth. This is simply because admitting that you are facing something you are unable to explain is tantamount to admitting that you are not smart enough, or you have spent your life studying the wrong books." For this Yuri was happy to have chosen Chemistry and not Archeology, "because Chemistry is a science constantly evolving. In the world of Chemistry, if you face something unexpected or that in theory should not even exist in nature, you simply have two options: you have just made a huge mistake, or you have just made a great discovery. And so you don't have to defend your obsolete theories in a brutal and unorthodox way" he said to himself. He paused to examine some very ancient copper pipes found in China when, suddenly, something distracted him from his thoughts. Rationalizing, he realized that he thought he heard a noise and listened carefully. He paid attention for a few moments but nothing happened, then he concluded that probably that noise had been the result of his suggestion. He roused himself and resumed the inspection tour, he wanted to finish as soon as possible because he had already spent too much time to admire the objects and was anxious to reach the books and study. But he had taken just a few steps when he clearly heard a creaking sound from the last room at the end of the corridor, the one dedicated to the Ancient Astronautics. He wondered what the cause might be and he replied that it could not be some intruder: in that case, the alarms would have started to sound for a long time. It could perhaps be an animal looking for shelter from the terrible cold, but even then the alarms would have been triggered. He thought that it must surely have been a draft that made something slam, the building was old and shabby and it wouldn't have been the first time. The noise stopped just as he formulated this further hypothesis, but at that point, instead of calming down, Yuri had the distinct feeling of not being alone. He cursed himself, because as always he had left his weapon in the drawer and wondered if it was not the case to go back and get it, but then he repeated to himself once more that, although he was continuing to feel observed, it must surely be his suggestion. After all, who could have had an interest in stealing objects that were ten thousand years old and unusable? Nobody knows what they are and what they are for.

Thinking about it, he came to the conclusion that in any case, in the hypothesis in which in the museum there had really been someone besides him, the thieves who steal in museums are indeed thieves and not murderers. The worst risk he was running was, therefore, to end tied up like a salami, as long as he hadn't managed to surprise the thief first. He shrugged his shoulders and went in the corridor trying to get some courage because although he tried to reassure himself in every way, something unknown awaited him in that room anyway. When he reached the door he took a deep breath and entered with the purpose of scaring off any intruders, but the room was empty. He found out that some display cases had been opened, with a single glance he ascertained that some semispherical porcelain devices containing mercury were missing from the appeal. They had been discovered a few years earlier in some caves of Turkestan and given an approximate age of twelve thousand years. After an initial investigation, they were cataloged by Soviet scientists as "ancient instruments used in cosmic navigating vehicles". Yuri wondered who the hell could care about similar things, and immediately replied angrily that it wasn't so important, the important thing was that the theft would make him lose his job and with it the chance to graduate. He then tried to figure out a way to conceal the disappearance, but he knew of being too honest to do such a thing, so he walked sadly towards the control room, intending to call the police and follow the practice hoping for the indulgence of the Museum Director. He had already begun to wonder how else he could have paid for his studies when he heard a new noise and this rekindled a little hope in him. If he could have saved the hemispheres, his degree would have been saved too, so he hastened to press the nearest emergency button and held the torch. He ran towards the exit to block the thief, the locks had locked just an instant before the intruder could cross the threshold and the latter was now waiting for him in front of the exit. When the boy saw him he felt all his self-confidence vanishing instantly: waiting for him at the door there was a very tall woman wearing tight black overalls in Gore-Tex with a hood; on her shoulder, she held a canvas bag containing the just stolen devices. Yuri calculated that the bag had to weigh at least sixty kilos, but she stood in front of him with her back and shoulders perfectly straight without showing the slightest fatigue, as if she was carrying a bag filled with polystyrene. Yuri looked away, but he immediately felt a sort of instinct and against his will he brought his eyes back to hers, a sparkling blue color, which was looking at him coldly. Suddenly he felt himself and his determination slowly sliding into an abyss, he managed to free himself from that impalpable grip only thanks to an incredible effort and ran to the desk to take his Beretta Parabellum purchased on the black market. He returned to the woman pointing the weapon at her and he was amazed that she had not moved an inch. She was just standing there, still and silent, clearly waiting for him to finally decide to open the door.