The Portal

by Andrew Norriss

  Mrs Duggan grunted. ‘Your uncle around?’

  ‘He’s working,’ said William. ‘I could get him for you?’

  ‘No need,’ said Mrs Duggan. ‘Only wanted to ask about my money.’

  William remembered that Mrs Duggan usually came up to the house on a Saturday to receive her wages for the work she did on the farm. She had come up yesterday but, as there had been no Mrs Seward to give her the money, she had gone away again.

  ‘I’ll tell him,’ he said. ‘I’m sure he’ll sort it out.’

  Remembering the quantity of notes the old man had stuffed in his wallet, he thought there should be no problem finding enough to give her.

  ‘No rush.’ Mrs Duggan nodded in the direction of Daniel. ‘What’s he doing?’

  ‘He’s cooking a hedgehog,’ said William.

  ‘Don’t let him eat it,’ said Mrs Duggan, and William was about to promise that he wouldn’t, when he realized Mrs Duggan had been talking to the dog.

  ‘Money was one of the things I had to tell you about,’ said Uncle Larry, when William told him about Mrs Duggan needing her wages. ‘Any time you need any, it’s in here.’

  They were standing by the desk in the pantry, and Uncle Larry pulled open a drawer. It was filled to the brim with neat packets of ten, twenty and fifty pound notes. There had to be thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of pounds there, thought William.

  ‘If I need any money… I take it?’

  ‘Your dad always wrote down what he took in here.’ Uncle Larry pointed to a battered notebook lying on top of the money with Cash written on the front. ‘But the important thing is to make sure you let me know when you’re running out. So I can organize getting some more.’

  ‘More…’ said William. ‘Right…’

  ‘And you probably ought to have a look at this if you have a moment.’ Uncle Larry picked up a large grey book with no title on the front, and dropped it on the desk with a thump. ‘It’s the Station Manager’s Manual. Tells you all the things you should and shouldn’t do.’

  William picked up the book. It was large and heavy. ‘I have to read all this?’

  ‘Technically, yes,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘as you’re the temporary manager. But don’t panic. Most of it’s common sense. As long as you do the bricks, look after the passengers, and don’t let anyone outside know about all this…’ he gestured to the station around them, ‘…you can’t go far wrong. And if you’re stuck you can always ask Emma.’ He looked round the office. ‘Now, what else do I have to show you?’

  There were several things Uncle Larry had to show William. There were the translator pods, in case anyone came through the station without an implant and William couldn’t understand what they were saying. There was the code for the storage seals on the food and drink cabinets, and there were the medipacs.

  ‘I should have told you about these before,’ said Uncle Larry, pulling the box off the wall in the central lobby. ‘There’s half a dozen of them scattered over the station and they’re very easy to use.’ He explained how the patches worked out what was wrong and sent the information back to the box so that it could provide a cure.

  ‘It gets a bit more complicated if you’ve got an arm missing or you’re bleeding to death,’ he said, putting the medipac back on the wall and heading for the Portal, ‘but the principle’s still the same. You do whatever the box tells you. It’s very clever. Even gives you a couple of options if your patient’s already dead.’

  Standing by the Portal he began taking off his suit. ‘You’ve got the letter for Mrs Duggan?’

  ‘Yes,’ said William.

  ‘Well, don’t forget. If there’s any problems, ask Emma to send me a message on the bricks. If it’s an emergency, you can always send it to Brin on Q’vaar. He’s only a station away and he can be with you in a blink.’

  ‘OK,’ said William.

  ‘But you’ll be fine, I know you will. And I’ll be back on Wednesday.’ Uncle Larry stepped on to the floor of the Portal in his shorts. ‘And by then we’ll have this whole business sorted out. One way or another.’

  After he’d gone, William bent down to pick up the pile of clothes and took them through to the laundry, hoping as he did so that Uncle Larry was right.

  He wanted very much for everything to be sorted out.

  The envelope that William took down to Mrs Duggan contained her wages – Uncle Larry had put in a couple of extra twenty pound notes as a thank you for looking after William and Daniel the night their parents had ‘gone on holiday’ – and a letter to explain that William would not be going to school for the next three days.

  Mrs Duggan read it carefully while sitting on the footplate of the tractor parked outside her cottage.

  ‘Says here you’re going to be off sick,’ she said when she’d finished.

  ‘Yes,’ said William, ‘but I won’t really be ill. It’s just that Uncle Larry needs me to help with his work for a few days.’

  Mrs Duggan nodded, counted her money and tucked it carefully into a pocket of her dungarees before standing up.

  ‘Thought I might ask you all to lunch,’ she said.

  ‘Lunch?’

  Mrs Duggan gestured to the kitchen door. ‘Got a chicken in the oven. Thought you might appreciate someone else doing the cooking.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said William. ‘Yes, we would.’

  Mrs Duggan’s lunch, he realized later, was the first real meal he and Daniel had eaten since Mum and Dad had disappeared. Mrs Duggan had done proper vegetables and gravy to go with the roast chicken, and there was an apple pie and ice cream for afters. It tasted very good, and sitting round the table in the tiny kitchen was very warm and pleasant. When the meal was over, and Daniel and Amy had disappeared upstairs and Mrs Duggan said she had to get back to cleaning out the fuel line on the tractor, William found a part of himself didn’t want to leave.

  ‘Shame your uncle couldn’t join us,’ said Mrs Duggan as she walked him to the door.

  ‘Yes,’ William agreed. He couldn’t say that Uncle Larry was by now on a planet nearly four light years away, so he had simply said that he was ‘working’ and couldn’t come.

  ‘Next time, eh?’ said Mrs Duggan.

  ‘Next time,’ William agreed. He thanked her again for the lunch, and set off back up the track to the farmhouse.

  As he left, he heard Mrs Duggan quietly asking Timber to get her a screwdriver – a flathead this time, not a Phillips.

  The farmhouse, when he got back, seemed empty and cold. He thought of doing his homework but, as he wasn’t going into school on Monday, decided there wasn’t much point and sat on a sunlounger on the terrace instead, trying to read the Station Manager’s Manual.

  Looking out over the valley, he realized that he was worried about his parents in a way that he hadn’t been since the day he and Daniel had come home to find them gone. Somehow, Uncle Larry had always made it seem that finding them was just a minor inconvenience that would soon be sorted out – annoying but not the sort of thing to cause any real anxiety. Now, he wasn’t so sure. The feeling was growing inside him that whatever had happened was more serious than Uncle Larry was letting on.

  The house still felt empty, even when Daniel came home at six o’clock for supper. Not that Daniel himself seemed to notice. Mrs Duggan had given him the feet of the chicken they had eaten and he sat at the kitchen table, picking open the muscles with a knife and sorting out which ones you had to pull to make the toes move. Then, when he’d finished with that, he began cleaning the hedgehog’s skull with the sharpened end of a matchstick.

  As the evening wore on, William found he was becoming more worried rather than less and he was quite glad, after doing the bricks at a quarter to nine, when it was time for bed. For some reason, the words Larry had spoken as he left kept repeating themselves in his head.

  ‘I’ll be back on Wednesday,’ he had said, ‘And by then we’ll have this whole business sorted out. One way or another.’

  It was that
phrase ‘one way or another’ that bothered him.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The next morning William was too busy to do much worrying. There were the bricks at a quarter past seven – he had set three alarm clocks to make sure he woke up in time. There was Daniel to wake up and get ready for school – he thought he should be allowed to stay home as well, but William persuaded him that it wasn’t fair to let Amy go on her own. And there were all the preparations for the passenger who would be arriving that morning – towels and soap to lay out, food to prepare, and cleaning machines to order into action.

  The passenger was a round, cheerful-looking man called Hippo White. William had no idea if that was his real name or a translation of it, but Emma said he was a trader who made his living buying items in one part of the Federation and selling them in another. Dressed in a blue tunic and a pair of soft, baggy trousers that tucked into his boots, he came shooting up through the Portal a little after nine.

  ‘Hi there! You must be William!’ He held out a hand in greeting as he stepped over the lip of the Portal. ‘Any news of your parents yet?’

  ‘Not yet,’ said William.

  ‘I must say, it all sounds very odd.’ Hippo followed William out to the lobby, pulling a small suitcase behind him. ‘Brin was telling me about it. Where’ve they gone, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said William.

  ‘Well, not to worry. Larry’ll track them down.’ Hippo paused in the lobby and looked round. ‘Am I in the green suite?’

  ‘Yes,’ said William. ‘If you’d like to follow me…’

  ‘It’s all right, I know the way!’ Hippo was already striding towards the door. ‘But if you could manage a pot of… um… what’s it called…’

  ‘Tea?’ suggested William.

  ‘That’s the one!’ said Hippo, and he disappeared into his room.

  William made a pot of tea and took it, with a plate of sandwiches, across to the green suite. Inside, Hippo was dictating a series of messages to Emma that he wanted sending out with the next brick and he gestured to William to leave the tray on the table.

  William did as he was told and went back to sit in the pantry. He opened the Station Manager’s Manual and settled down to read the chapter on ‘Defence of the Station: The Use of Small Arms’, which gave all the rules prescribing how and when it was permissible to use which weapons from the armoury. He was still reading – and making the occasional trip to the weapons room so that Emma could show him which guns the book was talking about – when Hippo finally emerged from his room nearly three hours later.

  ‘Your father didn’t leave anything for me, did he?’ he asked as he walked round to the pantry and peered inside. ‘Flat… round… about this big?’

  ‘Dad didn’t leave anything for anybody,’ said William. ‘He just disappeared.’ Then, seeing the look of disappointment on Hippo’s face, he added, ‘Was it something important?’

  ‘Well, it was quite.’ Hippo thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘He was making something for me, and he said he’d have it ready for the next time I came through. Byroid’s the big market you see. That’s where I need it for.’

  ‘Oh,’ said William.

  ‘Have you checked his workshop?’ asked Hippo. ‘I mean, do you know if he had a chance to finish it?’

  ‘Dad had a workshop?’ said William.

  ‘Oh, yes! Down there!’ Hippo pointed to the stairs in the centre of the lobby.

  William had not explored the lower level of the station yet. Uncle Larry had told him there was nothing down there of any importance. ‘If I knew where the workshop was, I could look,’ he said, ‘but…’

  ‘I know where it is!’ Hippo was already heading for the stairs. ‘Let me show you!’

  Lights came on automatically as they descended the spiral staircase and, at the bottom, William found himself in an area almost identical to the floor above, though with seven doors leading from the lobby instead of nine.

  ‘This is where the Old Portal used to be,’ said Hippo, gesturing vaguely around him as he marched purposefully to a door on the right, ‘and your dad’s workshop is in here.’

  William followed him into a room that was about the same size as the kitchen on the floor above. Workbenches ran along the walls, there was a row of cupboards at the far end and, in the centre of the room, a large table contained a variety of strange objects, most of them in pieces.

  Halfway down the workbench on the right was a battered swivel chair, with photos pinned to the wall in front of it. As William looked at one of them, the image of his mother smiled and waved back at him.

  ‘Found it!’ Hippo was standing at the table holding up a flat disc about half a metre in diameter. When he let go, it floated gently down and then hovered a few centimetres above the floor. ‘And it looks as if your father’s worked his usual magic!’

  ‘What is it?’ asked William.

  ‘Grav-sled,’ said Hippo. ‘Any chance we could try it outside?’

  The idea of a grav-sled, William discovered, was that you stood on it, leaned in a particular direction, and the grav-sled took you there. Quite fast.

  ‘They were the way to get to work a couple of years back,’ said Hippo, stepping carefully on to the disc as it floated above the ground outside the back door. ‘They sold thousands of them until the accidents.’ His face clouded for a moment. ‘Sales sort of petered out after that, but your dad reckoned he could put in a modified Tenebrian force field and the thing would be perfectly safe.’ He balanced on the disc for a moment. ‘So, let’s give it a try…’

  He leaned to one side and the sled began moving down towards the barn, rapidly gathering speed as it went. By the time it hit the side of the barn, William thought, it was going fast enough for Hippo to kill himself, but nothing happened – to Hippo or to the side of the barn. Instead, something cushioned its stop and a quite unharmed Hippo waved cheerily back at William.

  ‘Seems to work,’ he shouted. ‘Didn’t feel a thing!’

  For nearly half an hour, Hippo flung the grav-sled around the sky with an ever increasing confidence. He ran it into walls and trees, he tried looping the loop to see if he could fall off and he flew the sled around the house and across the fields with an awesome speed.

  ‘That is excellent!’ he said, a little breathlessly, when he finally came to a halt. ‘Couldn’t be better. Want to give it a try?’

  William gave it a try. He moved a little more cautiously than Hippo, and it was a while before he got the knack of how far to lean and for how long, but after a few trips round the house and down the valley to the river he had to admit that it was seriously good fun.

  ‘Let’s hope they agree with you on Byroid,’ said Hippo, ‘because if they do I’m going to be a very rich man. Now,’ he tucked the disc under his arm, ‘the one thing we need to do before I go is find out how much I owe your dad and settle up.’

  William looked rather blank.

  ‘It’ll be in the book in his workshop,’ said Hippo confidently. ‘Your dad always wrote everything down.’

  The two of them returned to the station and, sure enough, lying on the desk in the workshop, William found a large blue notebook. Item 639, said his father’s careful hand-writing, was Hippo’s grav-sled, and there followed a list of the things he had done to it. At the end, under the heading Cost, were the words No charge.

  ‘It says there’s no charge,’ said William.

  ‘That sounds like your dad all right,’ said Hippo. ‘I keep telling him he ought to make people pay for what he does, but he says he enjoys it too much to…’ He stopped. ‘Are you all right?’

  William had gone very pale. He had just noticed the time and date of his father’s last entry. Alterations to the sled, it said, had been completed at two o’clock in the afternoon of 17 July. That was the day he and Mum had disappeared, and two o’clock was almost exactly two hours before William and Daniel had come home and found the house empty.

  At two o’clock, his father had
carefully made a note of what he’d done in the workshop and then …and then what? It made no sense. None of it made any sense at all.

  ‘I’ll tell you one thing,’ said Hippo, ‘and I say this as someone who’s known your dad for a good many years…’ He was standing in the green suite, packing the grav-sled into his case while William watched from the door. ‘Wherever your dad’s gone, he’ll have had a very good reason for going there.’

  William nodded politely. He wanted to believe it was true, but it wasn’t easy. Why should Dad have left without leaving a word? Left just an hour or two after he was writing in a notebook that he had finished rebuilding the sled? How could anyone disappear for five days without saying where they were going?

  ‘Not only will he have had a good reason,’ said Hippo firmly, ‘but I’m quite sure he’ll be back, with your mother and, when he is, I want you to tell him how grateful I am for his fixing the sled and give him this as a little thank-you present.’

  ‘What is it?’ asked William. The object Hippo had passed him looked rather like a torch.

  ‘It’s a torch,’ said Hippo. ‘Got all the usual gadgets – wide beam, infra-red, low-glo and so on, but it also lights up anyone who’s wearing a shield.’

  ‘Oh,’ said William.

  ‘You don’t know what a shield is, do you?’ said Hippo.

  ‘No,’ said William.

  ‘Well, it’s a very useful device that –’

  ‘The Portal is now ready,’ Emma’s voice interrupted from the ceiling. ‘Departure time is set for sixty seconds.’

  ‘You’d better get Emma to tell you.’ Hippo picked up his case and headed for the door. ‘And don’t worry about your father! Like I said, there’ll be a perfectly simple explanation for where he’s gone. Send me a message when he gets back, will you? Emma’s got the address.’

  ‘OK,’ said William, and after he had watched the trader disappear through the Portal, he tried very hard to believe what Hippo had told him.

  That there was no need to worry.

  That there was a perfectly simple explanation for everything that had happened.