And if the police found the Indestructible or the Nihilator it certainly would be national news, though Gedrus thought there was no immediate danger of discovery. The Indestructible was safely out of sight in the outhouse, where Ivo had stored it to make room in the shed and, despite his injuries, he had managed to hide the Nihilator in some long grass before the ambulance men took him away. But the librarian did confirm that if the authorities found either the robot or the weapon, the consequences would be disastrous.
‘It's exactly the sort of clue the Guardians are looking for,’ he explained cheerily, sitting at his desk in the library, eating an ice cream. ‘Anyone gets to see either of those things in action and you'll have a squadron of Federation Special Forces round your ears before you can say oops!’
Since the whole purpose of building the robot and its weapon had been to let everyone see them in action on television, Douglas felt that the librarian might have warned them about this earlier. But it was an argument he thought he would save until later. The first thing to do was make sure the Indestructible was hidden somewhere safe. Gedrus said that an investigator from British Telecom would be round the next morning to try and find out why one of his telegraph poles had collapsed so mysteriously. He must not be allowed to stumble on the truth.
Gedrus thought Ivo would probably be released from hospital that evening, in which case he would be able to hide the robot, but there was a chance they might keep him in overnight, in which case Douglas would somehow have to do it himself.
Worried, Douglas was not in the mood to talk much when he got home. His mother was very quiet as well. She was already in the kitchen cooking supper when he got in but she said nothing about him being late, or about her meeting in school with Mr Linneker earlier that day. In fact she hardly spoke a word throughout the meal, even when Douglas told her about Ivo's accident.
Mr Paterson rang while they were doing the washing-up. He was calling from the airport, on his way to a car fair in Stuttgart, and said that he wanted a serious talk with Douglas when he got back on Sunday evening. He had a brief word with Mrs Paterson who came back to the kitchen looking as if she had been crying again. They finished the dishes in silence and then Douglas went up to his room.
Ivo phoned later in the evening to say he was home from the hospital. His right foot was in plaster, he had fourteen stitches in the cut on his head and he would be off school the next day – but otherwise he seemed very cheerful. When Douglas told him what Gedrus had said about not letting anyone find the robot or the Nihilator, he promised to make sure they were both safely hidden before the BT investigator arrived the next day. It was only when Douglas went on to explain why they would never be able to enter the Robot Wars that he went rather quiet. Douglas could tell how upset he was at the news. Much more upset about that than about breaking a bone in his ankle.
When Douglas finally got to bed that night he found it difficult to sleep. He was feeling thoroughly depressed and he lay there in the dark, listening to the sound of the rumba coming from the drawing room downstairs.
It went on for hours.
At school the next morning, it got worse. Miss Rattle asked Douglas to wait behind at the end of registration. She was Douglas's form tutor, but also took him for maths.
‘I've marked the test you did yesterday,’ she told him, ‘and you scored one out of twenty.’
She held out his exercise book and Douglas stared at it.
‘Are you sure?’
‘You can check to see if I've made any mistakes.’ Miss Rattle was reaching for a piece of paper on her desk. ‘Rather more serious is the fact that you only scored four per cent on the exam we did on Tuesday.’
‘Four per cent!’ Douglas looked at her in disbelief. All his answers had been provided by Gedrus, and it was hard to believe the galactic librarian had failed to cope with a maths exam for twelve year olds.
‘Mr Harris tells me you did equally badly in his science quiz on Wednesday.’
The science quiz was another test to which Gedrus had provided all the answers. Douglas couldn't understand it.
‘I know you've been having problems at home,’ Miss Rattle went on, ‘but I really can't accept this work. I've asked Mr Linneker to talk to you about it. He's waiting for you in his office.’
As he left the classroom Douglas reached for the Touchstone under his shirt. ‘What's happening?’ he demanded.
Gedrus was hitting a tennis ball against an empty section of the wall on one side of the library. ‘Happening? Where?’
‘This maths exam!’ Douglas waved his exam paper. ‘I got four per cent! You told me what to write and I got four per cent! You gave me the wrong answers!’
‘I know.’ Gedrus flicked the ball with a neat backhand pass. ‘It was the next part of the plan.’
‘What plan?’
‘The plan to get your parents worried about you, so that your father would move back into the house. The last couple of days I've been letting your work get worse to show you didn't care about it.’
‘And you didn't tell me?’
‘If you remember,’ said Gedrus, pulling a large ring binder from a drawer in the desk, ‘I asked at the beginning if you wanted to be informed of all the details of the plan but you said no. You only wanted to be told what you had to do next.’
Douglas remembered that two weeks before, he had said exactly this, but it didn't stop him feeling distinctly aggrieved. Grimly he walked down the corridor to the headmaster's office wondering as he went, how someone with all the knowledge in the universe could be so incredibly stupid.
When he arrived at Mr Linneker's office, he found the headmaster sitting at his desk, staring out of the window. He seemed to have some difficulty remembering who Douglas was.
‘Yes?’ he said eventually. ‘What is it?’
‘Miss Rattle told me to come and see you,’ said. ‘About my maths.’
‘Oh yes.’ Mr Linneker nodded vaguely. ‘You didn't do very well, did you?’
‘No,’ said Douglas.
Mr Linneker picked up a teaspoon, took a spoonful of paperclips and slowly stirred them into a cup of tea on his desk. ‘Perhaps you could… try and do a bit better next time.’
Douglas said that he would, Mr Linneker nodded, and silence descended again.
‘Is that all?’ said Douglas, eventually.
‘What?’ Mr Linneker seemed to be surprised he was still there. ‘Oh, yes, that's all.’ As Douglas got up and walked to the door, the headmaster suddenly added, ‘You haven't seen Hannah, have you? Today, I mean?’
‘Hannah?’ Douglas shook his head. ‘No.’
‘No.’ The headmaster nodded. ‘It was just a thought. I know you've been quite friendly with her recently. For which I'm very grateful.’
‘Is something wrong?’ said Douglas but Mr Linneker did not seem to hear. He was staring out of the window again, lost in thought.
Out in the corridor Douglas asked Gedrus why the headmaster was behaving so strangely.
‘It's Hannah,’ said Gedrus. ‘She's run away from home.’
‘Run away? Why? Where did she go?’
‘She's trying to get to Norwich.’ Gedrus was standing by his desk, pointing at a large map of Britain pinned up on a board. ‘She left home last night after a big row with her father, got a train to London this morning and, at the moment, she's sitting on a bench at Paddington Station.’
‘What was the row about?’ asked Douglas. He had a nasty feeling that he already knew, but he had to be sure.
‘Her father said she could go to Norwich at half term,’ said Gedrus, ‘as long as her schoolwork was satisfactory. But her marks in some recent tests have been so bad that he said she couldn't go.’
And Douglas knew exactly why Hannah's marks had been so bad. Sitting together at the back of the class, she had copied all her answers from him.
It had all gone wrong. Everything had gone terribly wrong. He had wanted to bring his parents back together and only succeeded in maki
ng both of them miserable. He had helped his best friend build a machine that not only destroyed his precious workshop, but very nearly got him killed. He had thought he was helping Hannah with her work by letting her copy his answers but all he had done was get her into even more trouble, and now she had run away from home.
He had wanted to make everything better – and he could hardly have made things worse if he'd tried.
The only thing that had gone right since Kai gave him the Touchstone was the money, and it looked for a moment as if he had lost that as well.
Douglas called in on Mr Parrot on his way home from school the next day and found the financial advisor on the landing outside his office talking to a man in white overalls who was fitting a new lock to the door.
‘We had a burglary at lunch time,’ Mr Parrot told Douglas, a worried look on his normally smiling face. ‘I must say, I'll be glad when I get to the new office. Proper security there.’
‘They haven't stolen my money, have they?’ asked Douglas.
‘No, no, nothing to worry about on that score.’ Mr Parrot sat his young client down with a plate of Jaffa cakes and then squeezed behind the desk to his own chair. ‘Nothing stolen as far as we can see, not even the computer. Which is rather odd.’
On a happier note, Mr Parrot went on to say that Douglas's shares in the Malawi automobile company had doubled overnight with the announcement of a takeover bid. And when Douglas told him to sell them and buy stock in a Chinese company that made X-ray machines for hospitals, his whole body shook as he chuckled with pleasure.
‘Your father's going to find all this as hard to believe as I do,’ he said, carefully noting down the name of the company.
‘I… I thought we weren't going to tell him,’ said Douglas.
‘Not at the moment, certainly,’ Mr Parrot gave Douglas an encouraging smile, ‘but I promised to give him a report every three months. I don't think it's something you have to worry about. I promise you, he's going to be very pleased!’
But Douglas did worry. As he walked home, the thought of explaining to his parents how he had come by half a million pounds suddenly seemed rather daunting. Mr Parrot might have been happy with the story about Douglas getting pictures in his head, but he was not sure his parents would believe it so easily. They would want to know the truth, and the truth was the one thing he couldn't tell them. He had thought that having Gedrus would make everything so simple but, wherever he looked, it only seemed to make things more complicated.
At home he noticed a strange car parked in the drive and wondered if someone had brought his mother home early from the supermarket.
‘Mum?’ he called as he let himself in the front door. ‘Are you home?’
There was no answer, but he could hear someone moving in the living room. There was the clink of china, followed by the noise of someone clearing their throat. Douglas crossed the hall to the living room and pushed open the door.
On the far side of the room, standing with his back to the fireplace, was a short, round man with a shiny round head that was almost entirely bald. He wore a dark three-piece suit, small rimless glasses under white, bushy eyebrows, and was holding a cup of tea in one hand. He frowned slightly as Douglas came into the room.
‘Ah, Douglas.’ He put down the cup and saucer on the mantelpiece. ‘At last.’
‘Who are you?’ asked Douglas, but of course he already knew. He had known as soon as he had seen the green stone that the man was lightly fingering as it hung on a silver chain around his neck.
It had happened.
Somehow, in a little less than three weeks, the Guardians had found him.
CHAPTER TEN
The Guardian was not, at first glance, a particularly frightening figure. His suit was crumpled, his glasses had slipped down his nose and he had the sort of tired, harassed look that teachers get when they're trying to check everyone is back on the coach at the end of a long school trip.
None of which stopped Douglas feeling more frightened than he had ever been in his life. He knew a little about the Guardians from Gedrus. Under galactic law, the man in front of him had the right to turn him into a protein fluid and drink him as soup.
‘My name is Quomp,’ said the man. ‘I am a Guardian from the Federation's Seventeenth Quadrant and I believe you have something that doesn't belong to you.’
He held out his hand and waited while Douglas took the chain from round his neck and dropped the Touchstone into his outstretched palm.
‘Thank you.’ The Guardian put the stone into the pocket of his jacket. ‘Now, we have a lot to talk about so I suggest you sit down.’ He motioned Douglas to chair. ‘First I need to know who gave this to you, when, and everything that's happened since. Start at the beginning and don't miss anything out.’
Douglas would have liked to reply but he found when he opened his mouth to speak, that no sound came out.
‘All right, all right…’ the Guardian did not seem too upset by the silence, ‘… we'll try it a different way. I'll tell you what I think happened and you tell me if I've got it right.’ His hands clasped behind his back, he began pacing up and down in front of the fireplace. ‘Three weeks ago four Touchstones were stolen from a Federation Survey vessel on Patka by a Vangarian warrior named Kai Akka Kahkousi. She escaped, but in the process both she and her ship were so badly damaged that she was forced to make an emergency landing on a prohibited planet and hide while her body regenerated.
‘My guess would be,’ the Guardian paused to pick up his tea from the mantelpiece, ‘that she came here, told you she was an alien from another planet and asked for your help. To convince you she was who she said she was and to make sure you knew how to look after her during regeneration, she gave you one of the Touchstones. You looked after her, she recovered and, when she left to organize some means of getting back to her home planet, she let you keep the stone, probably as a way of making sure you didn't tell anyone what had happened.’
He lowered his nose into his tea, took a deep breath and sucked up the entire contents of the cup with a deep gurgling noise. Then he Quomp took out a handkerchief, mopped the end of his nose and looked across at Douglas. ‘Would that be a fair summary?’
Douglas nodded.
‘Well…’ Guardian put down his cup. ‘What we have to do now is catch her and get the other stones back before she gets home and starts a major war. It's not going to be easy but Gedrus says we have a chance, if you'll help.’
‘Help?’ Douglas finally managed to speak, though his voice sounded thin and high.
‘I can't promise it won't be dangerous,’ Quomp looked at Douglas over the top of his glasses, ‘but as long as you do exactly as I tell you, you should be all right.’
‘You want me to help you catch Kai?’
‘I think in the circumstances it's the least you can do.’ The Guardian gave Douglas a reproving look. ‘I mean, if you hadn't agreed to hide her we wouldn't have this problem in the first place, would we? She'd be safely under lock and key and we could all be at home with our feet up watching television.’
‘But…’ Douglas hesitated. The conversation was not going quite as he had expected. ‘But Kai was trying to win a war to free her people.’
The Guardian frowned. ‘Yes?’
‘Her planet is ruled by a tyrant and she needed the Touchstone to overthrow him. She told me.’
Quomp gave a little sigh. ‘Oh dear.’ He sat down in an armchair. ‘You're telling me you decided to help her because what she was doing was right?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Douglas. ‘I checked with Gedrus. He said everything she told me was the truth.’
‘I'm sure he did.’ The Guardian took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. There was a pause while he fingered the Touchstone round his neck before he went on. ‘Perhaps I could persuade you that there is another way of looking at this. May I try?’
‘Do I have a choice?’ asked Douglas.
The Guardian of the Federation's Seventee
nth Quadrant considered this for a moment, then shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not really.’
Ivo had not had an easy day. His head was throbbing from the cut on his temple, his ribs ached and his foot, encased in plaster, hurt whenever he moved it – but these were not the things that bothered him most.
That morning the engineer from British Telecom had arrived at the house and he told Mrs Radomir it was his job to discover exactly why the telegraph pole had fallen down the day before. Ivo watched from the bedroom window as the man poked carefully through the remains of the shed, examined the stump of the telegraph pole and then searched the long grass that surrounded it. He took measurements and collected samples as he did so, and it took him most of the day.
The night before, Ivo had, with some difficulty, limped out to the garden and moved the Nihilator to the old outhouse, where he had hidden it with the robot under some plastic sheeting. He had thought this was enough to keep them safe but, before he left, the engineer came to the house to ask Mrs Radomir if she had kept any strange chemicals in the shed, anything that might have caught fire or exploded. When she told him the shed had mostly been used by to to build a robot, he was very interested. He had done some work on robots himself, he said, and hoped Ivo would be kind enough to show it to him when he came back the following day.
Clearly the Indestructible and the Nihilator had to be hidden somewhere else before he returned, and the obvious place to take them was Douglas's house. Ivo could not take them there himself – with his foot in plaster and his crutches, he could barely walk the length of the garden – so Douglas would have to come and get them. If he put them in the barrow he would be able to wheel them home and hide them, either in his garage or in the annexe.
Ivo rang Douglas at four o'clock to suggest this, but there was no reply. He had rung again every ten minutes for the next hour and a half, but there was still no answer.
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