The Portal

by Andrew Norriss

  Uncle Larry, when they got back to the car, made no protest about any of the purchases, or the price. His only concern, as they loaded the bags into the back of the Toyota, was whether they had enough to keep them from starving over the next few days.

  Fortunately, while they were shopping, he had found a copy of the Highway Code in the glove compartment and reminded himself of some of the rules of the road, so the journey home was a little more sedate but, once they got there, the boys were left to themselves again.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ he said as he marched off down the hall to answer Dad’s work-phone. ‘Looks like more work. You can sort out a meal for yourselves, can you?’

  ‘This is great, isn’t it!’ said Daniel delightedly. ‘We can eat whatever we want. He doesn’t care!’

  It was true that Uncle Larry didn’t worry about what the boys ate or, it later transpired, what they watched on television or when they went to bed. But it wasn’t that he didn’t care. He came out of Dad’s office several times in the course of the evening to check that they were all right and to ask if there was anything they needed. It was obvious that, if there had been a problem, Uncle Larry would have done his best to solve it, but he never told them what they should be doing. It was, William thought, as if he didn’t know.

  For Daniel, it was heaven, but William was less sure. He had a feeling they should not have been left to buy their own food, to leave it unpacked in bags around the kitchen or to choose what they would eat for supper. Someone should have been there to tell them that a box of chocolates was not a proper meal, that Friday evening was when you were supposed to make a start on your homework, and that ten o’clock was not the time to start watching Resident Evil on the television.

  Well, they should be telling Daniel, anyway…

  The following morning, there was a postcard lying on the mat by the front door. It was a picture of a mountain, its peak shrouded in clouds, and was addressed to William & Daniel Seward under a French stamp with a smudged postmark.

  William read the message, written in his father’s careful handwriting.

  Hi! Just arrived and settling in. Our tent is about a mile from this peak and we’ll be walking up it this morning. Everything’s wonderfully peaceful and calm – just what we needed! Don’t forget to help Uncle Larry as much as possible. See you soon! Love, Dad.

  It was the card that decided it for William, though he waited till Daniel had gone to see Amy before buzzing the intercom in the kitchen that connected to his father’s office.

  ‘Yes?’ Uncle Larry’s voice, when he eventually answered, sounded as if he had just woken up.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ said William.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Yes. Now.’

  ‘OK. I’ll be right up.’ There was a noise like someone yawning, then Uncle Larry broke the connection.

  William waited and, a minute or two later, heard the sound of footsteps coming from his father’s office, then Uncle Larry appeared in the kitchen. His suit looked more crumpled than ever, and there was a button missing from the jacket.

  ‘Is that from your father?’ he asked, pointing to the postcard on the table. ‘Are they having a good time?’

  ‘I’d like to know what’s really happened to them,’ said William.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Uncle Larry looked startled.

  ‘My parents,’ said William. ‘I want to know what’s happened to them.’

  ‘Well,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘if you read the postcard, I’m sure –’

  ‘The postcard’s a fake,’ William interrupted. ‘It takes more than a day to get a postcard from France and, even if they broke all the records, it still wouldn’t have arrived yet because the post doesn’t come till midday on a Saturday.’

  ‘Ah…’ Uncle Larry made a vague gesture with his hands. ‘Maybe today, the postman –’

  ‘Look, I know my parents haven’t gone on holiday,’ William interrupted firmly. ‘Apart from the postcard, all their clothes are still hanging in the cupboards. Dad’s walking shoes are in the porch. Mum’s got an essay due in on Monday which is still sitting on the dining-room table, half-finished. Their passports are both still in the drawer and, if they ever did decide to go on holiday, I can’t believe they’d leave us with someone who can’t drive, can’t shop and doesn’t even know how to turn on a tap. I’m not saying you’re a bad person, and Mrs Duggan says that Dad trusted you, but whatever’s going on, it’s not what you said and I want to know the truth.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘Well?’ said William eventually. ‘Where are they?’

  Uncle Larry gave a long sigh, pulled out a chair and sat down. When he finally spoke it was in a low, rather depressed voice. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’ve spent most of the last thirty-six hours trying to find out, and I still have no idea where your parents are. I wish I did, but I don’t.’

  Mrs Duggan stood halfway up the hill, staring thoughtfully down at the view. The big farmhouse where the Sewards lived was over to her left, her own cottage was directly below, and all the rest was fields and woodland, with the lane winding through it down to the main road.

  At the junction, she could see the tiny figures of Daniel and Amy crouching over something on the tarmac. Probably a dead animal of some sort, she thought. There wasn’t a lot of traffic on these roads, but enough to mow down the occasional rabbit or pigeon. It should keep them happy for an hour or two.

  Both the view and the children, however, occupied only a tiny part of her thoughts. The deeper worry, the one that nagged like a toothache at the back of her mind, was whether or not she should tell William what she knew about his parents.

  Part of her said that she should – she suspected he didn’t believe the story about them going on holiday anyway – but another part pointed out that she had promised not to say anything. And a promise to Jack Seward was not something she took lightly. Not after all he’d done for her.

  And how would telling William help anyway? It might just leave him more confused than he was already. Once again, she was forced to the conclusion that the best thing was to say nothing – at least for the moment – and see how things turned out. If it looked like they were going badly off the rails, then she might step in, but in the meantime she would wait. Keep an eye on things, obviously, but wait.

  Down in the valley, she could see Timber emerging from the workshop and beginning the long climb up the hill towards her. She’d sent him down to get a hammer, so they could do some fencing up by the quarry. She hoped he had the right tool this time. Yesterday, when she sent him off for a bucket of nails, he’d come back with a set of socket spanners…

  ‘You have no idea where they’ve gone?’ William followed Uncle Larry down the hall towards his father’s office. ‘No idea at all?’

  ‘Well, I have an idea,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘but even if it’s right, I don’t know why they’ve gone there without telling anyone.’ He pushed open the door and waited until William had followed him inside. ‘Have you been in here before?’

  William nodded. He had been in his father’s office on several occasions, though it was not something his parents encouraged. If Dad was making a business call, people bursting in and asking questions didn’t give the best impression of professionalism and efficiency. That was why they had the intercom from the kitchen.

  ‘Did your father ever tell you what he does for a living?’

  ‘He’s a shipping broker.’ William was a little vague on the details but he knew roughly what this meant. ‘If people want something shipped or flown anywhere, he’s the one who arranges it for them.’

  ‘Yes…’ Uncle Larry nodded. ‘That’s the cover story.’ He stepped across the office to the desk under the window, picked up the phone, and began tapping in a number. ‘And I’m afraid the truth is going to come as a bit of a shock. Normally, I’d take a bit of time to prepare you for this, but in the circumstances I think we just have to dive straight in…’

  As h
e pressed the final button, a section of wall on the right of the room disappeared. One moment there was a wall with a picture and a skirting board, and the next there was an opening to a space the size of a broom cupboard.

  ‘If you’d like to join me?’ Uncle Larry had replaced the phone on the desk and was already stepping into the space. ‘All perfectly safe, I promise.’

  William opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind and, after a moment’s hesitation, walked over to join him. As he stepped inside, the floor disappeared and he found himself dropping through empty space.

  ‘It’s a lift,’ said Uncle Larry, shouting so that he could be heard over the noise of William’s scream. ‘Takes us down a couple of hundred feet. Quite fun when you get used to it. There we are, you see?’

  The floor had reappeared and a dazed William looked out into a large circular room with a stairwell in the centre and a series of doors running round the outside.

  ‘This is William,’ said Uncle Larry, stepping out into the room. ‘I’m just going to show him around, OK?’

  ‘Yes, of course, Larry.’ The voice was a woman’s, soft and gentle. ‘Welcome to the station, William.’

  William looked round, but couldn’t see who was speaking. It was hard to tell, but the voice seemed to be coming from the ceiling.

  ‘If you could say something,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘so Emma can recognize your voice? She’s in charge of security, you see.’

  ‘Why… Where… What is this place?’ said William.

  ‘Thank you. Now…’ Uncle Larry pointed to the first door on their left. ‘That’s what your dad calls his pantry.’ He pointed to the other doors in turn. ‘Kitchen, wardrobe, recreation room, main reception and visitors’ suites, but the important bit… is over here.’

  He walked briskly to a doorway on the far side, pushed it open, and waited for William to follow him inside.

  The room was about ten metres long, wider at the far end than it was near the door, and entirely white. The walls, the floor and the ceiling all seemed to be of the same material, with no visible join where they met. It was brightly lit, though William could not see where the light was coming from, and the only furniture was a single, heavily upholstered chair by the wall on the right. Above it was a hook, on which hung a large white dressing gown of the sort provided by upmarket hotels.

  In the centre of the room was what looked like a pool, set into the middle of the floor. It was circular, about two metres in diameter and the lip, made of the same material as the walls and floor, was about fifteen centimetres high. Inside, there was a milky liquid that rippled and swirled, though the more he looked at it, the more William wondered if it was really a liquid at all, and then he found that staring at it made him slightly seasick.

  ‘That’s where your parents went.’ Uncle Larry pointed at the pool. ‘At least I think it is.’

  ‘What… what is it?’ asked William.

  ‘It’s a Portal,’ said Uncle Larry. ‘A Star Portal.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘The Portals,’ Uncle Larry explained, ‘are the glue that binds together the worlds of the Federation.’

  He was sitting on a swivel chair in the room he had described as Mr Seward’s ‘pantry’, pointing to a chart on the wall that was densely covered in lines and dots.

  ‘It’s a bit like a spider’s web, you see? The dots where these lines join are the Portals and if you jump into a Portal here,’ he tapped his finger on one of the dots, ‘the marvels of time-tunnel technology mean you will instantly come out here.’ He tapped at the next dot in the web. ‘You follow?’

  William nodded. There was no problem understanding what Uncle Larry was telling him. It was believing it that was the tricky bit.

  ‘The only limitation is that if you build a tunnel longer than three or four light years, what comes out this end may not be exactly what went in at the other, which can be a little discouraging for passengers. So out here on the Rim, where your Federation worlds might be anything up to twenty light years apart, every four parsecs, you have a booster station like this one, and your star traveller comes back into real space for six hours, lets his ankles get back to their proper size, rehydrates, and then… carries on.’

  Alongside the chart on the wall, William noticed, was a cork board covered in photographs. There were dozens of them. Mostly pictures of his father with men and women that William had never met. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Looking closer he found he did recognize some of the faces. They belonged to people who had visited his father on business, or shared his mother’s interest in plants. She was in some of the pictures as well, standing in the garden or in the kitchen upstairs, laughing. You could actually see her laughing, because if you looked at any of the pictures long enough, the images began to move…

  ‘Near the Hub, of course,’ Uncle Larry indicated a spot at the centre of the chart, ‘you’ve got these vast star gates throwing out capsules of half a million passengers at a time, but out here on the Rim the Portals are mostly used for transporting bricks, and we don’t get more than two or three passengers a week. But you still need someone to manage the place… and that’s where your dad came in.’

  A lot of the pictures, William noticed, had been signed. ‘Thanks for everything, Jack!’ ‘To Jack and Lois, with all best wishes, Ambassador B’Wwath.’ ‘Good luck, Jack! And thanks for all the fish!’

  ‘I mean, you could build a station in deep space, bring in all the raw materials and supplies, then try and find someone who doesn’t mind living there on his own for thirty years…’ Uncle Larry gave a dismissive snort. ‘But it’s a lot simpler if you can find a planet that already has most of the things you need and someone who already lives there.’

  At the bottom, William noticed, there was a picture of himself on his last birthday, sitting at the kitchen table with his mother. And another of Daniel, with the sheep’s skull that had started his latest obsession, and others, more faded and creased, that dated right back to when they were both toddlers and learning to walk.

  ‘And the customers love it, of course! It gives them a glimpse of a native culture that under normal circumstances they’d never be allowed to visit. So everyone’s happy and the only thing a supervisor like me has to do is call in occasionally to sort out any problems.’ Uncle Larry paused and looked thoughtfully at his feet. ‘Like this one.’

  To Daniel’s delight, the dead bird was a magpie. He didn’t have a magpie skull and the head was quite undamaged. He’d cut it from the body with his penknife, and was now burying it in an ants’ nest. When he came back in a week or so, the bones and beak would have been picked clean and he could take it home.

  Amy watched from a safe distance. She was wearing new jeans with her favourite top, and was anxious not to get blood on either of them. Daniel carefully marked the spot where he had buried the head, wiped his hands on his trousers and they began walking back up the lane.

  ‘Do you know when your parents are coming back?’ asked Amy.

  ‘No,’ said Daniel, but privately he hoped it would not be too soon. He was having far too much fun. It was a Saturday morning, and no one had said a word yet about schoolwork, or tidying his room, or cleaning out the henhouse. Life was a lot simpler with no parents.

  ‘You’re bleeding,’ said Amy.

  Daniel looked down and saw there was blood dripping from a finger of his left hand. He must have cut himself when he was cutting up the magpie, he thought, and wondered what he should do.

  Amy took a tissue from the sleeve of her T-shirt – it was the purple one with Bad Attitude written in black across the front – and wrapped it round Daniel’s finger. Then she took the scrunchie from her hair and used it to hold the tissue in place.

  ‘You’ll need to wash it when we get home,’ she said, ‘or it’ll get infected.’

  If he did fall ill, she thought, she would have to nurse him, and she wondered what she would wear. Uniforms could be quite attractive if they fitted properly. Maybe her moth
er could make one of those blue tunics, and the white hat thing would be interesting…

  ‘When I came over after getting your message,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘I realized there were only three places your parents could have gone.’

  He was standing in the kitchen area of the station, next door to the pantry. It was large and well-equipped, though a little cluttered at the moment as no one had done the washing-up for a couple of days.

  ‘My first thought was that they’d gone outside somewhere. They’re not supposed to both leave the farm at the same time but we all bend the rules occasionally, and I thought maybe they fancied a trip out or something.’ Uncle Larry chose a mug that seemed slightly less dirty than the others and held it under the spout of a machine that, with a great deal of hissing, produced a trickle of hot water on to a tea bag. ‘Except they hadn’t.’

  ‘How do you know?’ asked William.

  ‘There’s a perimeter fence round the farm,’ said Uncle Larry. ‘Part of the security system. It tracks anyone coming in and out. Emma says neither of them left the farm bounds, and I’ve searched the house and the grounds and there’s not a trace of them.’ He sipped his tea and grimaced. ‘So… the second possibility was that they were somewhere in the station – maybe they’d had an accident and were lying somewhere, injured. But I’ve searched both floors, all the engine rooms, storerooms, access shafts – and they’re not here either. Which only leaves option three.’

  ‘They’ve gone through the Portal?’

  ‘Exactly.’ Uncle Larry frowned. ‘Though I still can’t believe it. I mean, why? And your dad of all people…’

  ‘If they did go through the Portal,’ said William, ‘where would they have gone?’