The boys from Belteguese : mf fantasy

He tipped the envelope over the middle of the table. One end had already been ripped off and the photos of Ms X spilled out over the place mats and the cutlery. The photos, but not the tissues. The German girls are trying to understand what is happening. Each of them picks up one of the photos and Muni says something in her own language which indicates astonishment as she recognizes the female face on the pictures.

Hanna answers: "Ja, Hollywood gruppenfick!"

Then she points to a male face on the photo she holding and tilts it over so Muni can see. It is the Hispanic guy. He grins, bows slightly, then sits down beside her. Hanna's face began to look as startled as Ms X's. My own must have been very much the same as the Caucasian sat down beside me, squeezing me up against Muni.

"What are your friends' names, Judith?" he asked me. His voice is almost quiet, no sign of any emotions. As though we're not worth any.

"Hanna and Muni. We've just met."

"Are you telling me they weren't with you this afternoon on your little fact finding expedition?"

It's like an old man talking to a slightly naughty child, a bored old man inside a young boy's body. My skin creeps.

"That's right."

"From the way they're staring at those snap shots I can believe they've never seen them before. Hey, Hanna, Muni."

The Deutsch Madchen were comparing photos and giggling. Then they looked at the guys with obvious respect. "Ladies, hi. I'm Alpha and this is Delta. Over there are the rest of the gang; Beta, Gamma and Epsilon."

We all look. It's true. From different directions three other boys are slowly making their way towards us. Boys with faces we can see on the photos dropped across the table. Faces suckling on one of the biggest pair of tits ever to get squashed against a casting couch. Muni and Hanna exchanged sentences in words I didn't understand but which I can easily translate -- what the fuck is going on here? It's about as far as my mental processes have gotten as well.

"Alpha, Delta?" Muni asked. "Is that not Greek letters -- the Greek alphabet?"

"You're a smart girl, Muni. But I think we can do without you two for a little while."

He nodded over the table to his friend again and suddenly I was slumping sideways, into the empty space where Muni was -- were Muni had been. I'm sitting in the booth with two guys and nobody else. No Muni, no Hanna, but a picture that Hanna was holding in her hand flutters down onto the table. And now I know for sure I've gone mad. Especially when I hear the slap of imploding air as it rushes in to fill the empty voids where the girls' bodies had been. Alpha smiled at me.

"Nice to meet you, Judith." He picks up two or three of the photos on the table and pushes them down between the cleavage at the top of my halter as if he was dropping postcards into a mail box. "You're right. We do need a real woman -- again. And now we've found her we can put on a real show with her, right here, right now."

I didn't know for a fact that I was in deeper shit than I could ever imagine -- but that's the way I'd have bet.

"Who -- who are you guys?"

It's dark skinned Delta who answered -- with a grin: "Us? We're the boys from Belteguese."

By now some of diners have totally lost interest in the big game on the two giant TV screens. They're staring at the boys with the oddly alike faces and feeling the tension in the air. There are also a couple of tables nearby where the occupants are desperately trying to believe that somehow they weren't watching when Hanna and Muni got up and walked out. Even though they know they saw two human beings suddenly and quietly stop existing, their minds refuse to accept it -- and I know exactly how they feel.

"Belteguese?"

"It's a star -- Alpha Orionis. In the Orion nebula. An orange supergiant. One of the brightest stars in the sky. Four hundred and twenty five light years away. The Arabs call it the hand of al-jauza -- we call it home."

"Home? You're aliens!"

Delta was enjoying himself: "Well, personally I was born and raised in Nebraska, which is pretty well off the planet, I admit."

He waves his hand around to indicate the other boys sitting down at the booth. They're taking up all the seating space on the three benches around the table, pushing me into the middle of the center one, Alpha beside me on one side, Delta on the other. I suddenly realize one of the white dudes has a face I haven't seen before: he must have been the one pointing the camera at Ms X. There's always one in every group, the poor schmuck who does the chores first and gets to the fun last. Even when you're a superman you can still be small potatoes. But this is no time for philosophy.

"Nebraska? Then what the hell is this talk about Belteguese?"

"Well, we think that's where Dad came from. You've heard all the talk about crashed alien space ships?"

I nodded, dumbly.

"It's a load of crap. All the government has ever found is one alien body underneath a moving glacier on Ross island in the Antarctic. A body that had been under the ice for maybe a hundred and sixty thousand years. Nobody would ever have known it was there except for a huge magnetic anomaly it was throwing off."

"A magnetic anomaly. Like in . . . "

All the boys around the table grinned at me. "That's right. If the geophysicists at McMurdo base had never read '2001' they might not have taken much notice of that anomaly. I think Mr Clarke would be very pleased to know his story was a direct lead in to the discovery of an alien artifact. Even if it was only some kind of bracelet with the ability to twist magnetic lines of force and an engraved star chart with Belteguese in the center of it."

"But . . . ?"

"Oh yes, and there was the body I mentioned. Wearing the bracelet. One well preserved body that certainly wasn't homo sapiens but wasn't so far away that cloning was impossible. Our father."

"You were cloned?"

"I told you, Judith, we're the boys from Belteguese. The ice boys."

I was stunned, I was blown away -- and I'd been thinking I was maybe onto a big story! Jesus Christ!

A very tall guy with lots of muscle underneath his casual shirt came over from the nearest table across the walkway.

"Who are you guys, and where the hell are the two girls that were just here? What's going on?"

He was staring at the photos stuck halfway down my cleavage. The guy knows they've been put there to humiliate me and he can't understand why I'm so frightened that I'm afraid to touch them.

The Afro boy sitting at the end of the table looks up at the intruder and points a finger at him: "You've heard of David Copperfield? Well, we do a magic show like his. The girls are part of our act and they're rehearsing right now. But you can have a sneak preview of what we do."

The big guy gasped and grabbed at the top of his pants as they started to slip down. The belt loops were empty. A key ring that was hanging from his belt fell down, hit his knee and dropped to the floor. As suddenly as it had disappeared the belt was back again. The guy's hands jerked away from it as if it might give him an electric shock. The Afro boy picks up the keys and hands them back politely to the big guy.

"Here, stick around and watch the rest of the show. It's real cool, I promise."

The guy took the keys as though he'd never seen them before, then shook his head and backed away like a dog that had run into a rattlesnake. Whatever happened to me from now on I knew this was one knight in shining armor who wouldn't be coming back on another rescue mission.

"How can this be?" I wanted to know. I was asking anybody who was willing to answer me and I desperately need some kind of an answer.

"You want to write our story, Judith?" Delta responded. "You really want to know it all? Because you must have figured out by now that we're government property. All that shit about Priscillian studies was only a front for the organization that's been hand rearing us ever since we were born. Hell, our mothers are on bigger pensions than the President gets when he retires. And we're supposed to be the biggest secret there ever has been."

That statement knocked me flat: "A secret! Is this the way you keep things secret?" With one hand I held up a photo of the Queen of the rednecks getting it up her big red ass and the other hand I waved towards the crowd of people staring into our booth.

Delta grinned: "I guess we've finally decided to come out of the closet. There's a time in a guy's life when he needs to cut loose and there isn't much in the way of good looking girls on Hyde's Island. See, what the government geeks never really understood was that dear old Dad might have looked halfway human but he must surely have had some abilities that you humans don't."

'You humans' -- I didn't like the way Delta had said that.

"They've spent billions of dollars looking for his ship but we're beginning to think that maybe Dad somehow got here without one. We've been thinking that ever since we found that the five of us could play with quantum mechanic rules up here in the big world. We don't exactly know how we do it, but we can, and that's good enough."

"Yeah," Delta said. "They raised us separately, then decided to put us all together in one place to see what happened. But they didn't realize we could talk to each other in a way their bugs couldn't pick up."

I scrabbled for my bag and pulled out my notebook and pencil: God, it was like being caught in a shower of gold bricks -- I'd probably get hit on the head real soon but look at what riches were lying around waiting to be picked up!

"You only found out about each other recently?"

"Yeah, a couple of months ago. When they brought us all here," Alpha explained. "We've each of us lived like choirboys ever since we can remember. No contact with outsiders: it was the same here. Locked up and treated like rats in a lab experiment. But when we came together things began happening that those government assholes didn't know about. We found out things from each other. Like that we could just switch things on and off when we wanted to."

"Like Hanna and Muni you mean? And like the fence? You could make it disappear and then come back? How is that possible?"

Delta chuckled as he watched me scribbling frantically in shorthand. "You know anything about quantum mechanics, Judith?"

I shook my head: "I don't even read Popular Mechanics." It didn't get a laugh.

"OK, imagine a radioactive atom decays and emits an electron. Down at the quantum level a wave representing the electron spreads out in all directions, like ripple in a pond. As a quantum effect the electron can be considered to be anywhere on that wave, although up here in the real world it's impossible to have something in more than one place at any one time. But when the wave reaches an atom which is hit by the electron the quantum effect wave collapses like a pricked soap bubble and all the other possibilities of the electron's existence disappear at the same time."

I'd stopped writing because I was totally confused. The Afro guy cut in: "It's like throwing a brick in the Atlantic ocean at New York and the brick disappears, but there's a wave made in the sea which keeps going. Someplace, maybe in Spain, the wave hits the beach and the same brick re-appears on the sand over there on the other side of the ocean. When it does the wave disappears. What we're saying is that everything at all exists because the probability wave around it stays collapsed. We've found a way of recreating any object's wave and then just shunting that object out of existence, until we bring it back again -- if we want it back, of course."

His hands held up a knife and fork, crossed. "See, I'm going to shove these back in the sea." He tapped the implements together and before the noise had died away the knife and fork were gone. Not in a shimmer of light, not like in a Startrek transporter, but just plain gone. My stomach felt like a vat of acid.

"And the government guys who are supposed to be looking after you. They don't know anything about this?"

Delta grinned, displaying pure white teeth: "How could they know? They're not around anymore."

Somebody had started churning that pool of acid in my guts with an egg beater: "You mean . . . you pushed them back into the sea as well?"

Alpha shrugged his shoulders: "It's cool -- we feed the guard dogs and wash our own dishes. But I guess we won't want to stick around in those woods much longer."

I began scribbling again, and asking questions: "So what happened once you'd got rid of the guards?"

"We found aa FBI security map of the area. The ice house was on it, together with a note that a bunch of local kids went there sometimes. Seeing as the scientists used to call us the ice boys as a joke we thought we'd take a look at it as soon as we were free to go for a walk. We sure got a surprise when we found out what the kids had stashed away in there. We read the magazines and looked at the fucking and suddenly we realized there was a lot more interesting ways to have sex than cloning. So we took the ice house over for our own use."

"Oh God! The kids?"

"Are fine. All we did is to frighten them off with a few harmless little tricks. They won't come back again."

All of the boys around the table smiled briefly. It was uncanny, like a collection of puppets all being worked off the same switch. I wonder if they've got genuine telepathic powers. Another of the white ones taps the back of my hand. "What are you thinking, Judith? That when any of us is fucking you the others will be along for the ride?"

I'm dumbfounded, stunned, my throat was as dry as centuries old dust, and the guy who's just spoken handed me a glass of water as though he knew about my thirst as well as I did: "I'm Beta, in case you're getting confused."

The black one grinned: "I'm Epsilon, and I've got the biggest cock here, but you'll have to wait for it, Ms Reporter. Gamma was the last one to get his turn with our star turn, so he goes first with you." He pointed at the guy with the face that wasn't on the pictures. The boy was looking me over as if I was a second hand auto with a bad paint job and a 'Dirt Cheap Today!' sale sticker.

I swallowed the glass of water in one gulp and saw that the big guy and his girl are whispering to each other, heads close together over their half eaten food on their plates. They both appear very nervous and keep glancing at our table.

"Not taking notes, now Judith?" Alpha mockingly asked. "Well, we'll save you some research time in case you're wondering about these snapshots. Our Hollywood celebrity has a little private hideaway on the other side of the lake where she gets away from it all. Just her and a boyfriend and a couple of bodyguards. It was all written up on the security zone map because her place was near to Hyde's Island. So we went and paid her a neighborly visit last weekend. Just her though -- she sure didn't need her boyfriend while we were there and we certainly didn't want her body being guarded. I guess there was a lot of confusion afterwards though, when we brought her guys back. They didn't know any time had passed at all, not until they saw the mess we'd made of their very own rich and famous and looked at their watches."

"But . . . but the government still doesn't know that you've started busting loose?"

Alpha shook his head: "We bring the head honcho back every day to make his regular phone calls to his bosses. The day he tries anything funny we'll pop him like a soap bubble and don't bring him back again, not ever. And he knows it -- it's a kind of difficult situation to be in. Like yours, Judith."

"Mine?"

"Well hell, we've told you a lot of our little secrets. Maybe we'd be smart to send you where your friends have gone -- into limboland."

"No! Please!," I begged: I knew now for sure now that these guys could snuff me out like a candle flame if they wanted to. God, it would be even worse than dying.

"Well, you have been a naughty girl. And that remark you left on the newspaper, that wasn't really nice. You're a tease, young Judith." Alpha's fingers tapped the scattered photos on the table top. "A tease, just like this big titted show off was. But it's time the world found out about us and you may as well tell the story as anyone else. But there's a price to pay. I guess you know by now what it is?"