The game took a long time to play, partly because Lady Dubb took a break in the middle to go for a walk with Daniel, but mostly because, from the moment she arrived, Lady Dubb talked more or less continually. She talked about where she was going and why, about things that had happened to her in the past and that she hoped would happen in the future – and she asked a lot of questions.
‘There’s a story going round that you shot Aventa Barnes and her cousins,’ she said. ‘Is it true?’
William, blushing slightly, admitted that it was, and then had to describe what had happened.
‘You got an apology out of Silas, did you?’ said Lady Dubb with a chuckle when he’d finished. ‘That’s quite an achievement. But he was lucky you didn’t hand her straight over to Security. When I see him, I’ll tell him he got off lightly.’
‘You know him?’
‘Oh, everybody knows Silas!’ Lady Dubb threw the dice and landed in jail again. ‘Lovely man. Useless father, though. What Aventa needed was someone like your dad to sort her out. Where is he, by the way?’
William found himself telling her the whole story. He described the day he had come home and found the house empty, how Uncle Larry had arrived and searched everywhere and then how all the efforts to find out where his parents had gone had failed. As a result, four hours after she had arrived, they were still only halfway through the game when Lady Dubb leant back in her chair and asked for something to eat.
‘I’m feeling a bit light-headed,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could make me a sandwich? And something to drink,’ she added as William went off to the kitchen.
William made a toasted cheese sandwich and put it on a tray with a bottle of beer – according to Emma they were Lady Dubb’s favourites – and carried them back to the sitting room. But as soon as he walked through the door, he knew that Lady Dubb would not be needing any food or drink. She was lying back on the sofa, her eyes staring blankly at the ceiling, and she was, very obviously, dead.
William placed one of the patches from the medipac on Lady Dubb’s arm and another on her forehead.
‘Diagnosis: the patient has experienced myocardial infarction,’ said the voice from the box, ‘and is deceased. Please consult your surgeon immediately.’
‘There isn’t a surgeon,’ said William. ‘There’s only me.’
‘Do you require Life Support until a surgeon can be found?’ asked the medipac.
Life support… A memory stirred in William’s brain of Mrs Duggan describing how his father had used Life Support on Timber when he carried the dog through the Portal to the hospital on Q’Vaar.
‘Would Life Support mean she’d be OK till I got her to a hospital?’ he asked.
‘Reparative surgery would still be possible within the next hour,’ said the medipac.
An hour, William thought… Lady Dubb wouldn’t be able to travel through the Portal for two hours, but maybe Brin could send a doctor over from Q’Vaar who would know what to do. And it might be a good idea to have some help even before that…
‘Emma?’ he called to the station computer. ‘Could you ask Mrs Duggan to come down here? Tell her it’s an emergency.’
‘Placing the call now,’ said Emma.
‘And I need to get a message to Q’Vaar, to tell Brin what’s happened. Can you do that?’
‘Message sent,’ said Emma after a brief pause.
William turned back to the medipac. ‘So what do I have to do?’
The Life Support system was very simple. It was a silver rectangular box that William had to hang round his neck, and then he had to hold on to Lady Dubb.
‘Any skin contact will do,’ said the medipac, ‘but holding hands provides the simplest connection.’
William reached out to take Lady Dubb’s hands and what happened next took him completely by surprise. As he touched her skin, he found he was no longer in the sitting room at the station but standing on a hill, looking down along a valley covered in purple grass that swayed in a gentle breeze. In the distance, a range of turquoise mountains stretched up towards an orange sky, and he wondered where on earth he was.
‘This isn’t Earth,’ said a voice that he recognized as Lady Dubb’s. ‘It’s where I was born. I grew up in that house down there.’ She was standing beside him, and pointed down the valley to a farmhouse, surrounded by fields.
‘Why are we here?’ asked William.
‘Well, I’m here because I’m remembering my childhood,’ said Lady Dubb, ‘but I’ve no idea what you’re doing. You should be in your own memories, shouldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ said William. He thought for a moment. ‘I think I’m supposed to be giving you Life Support.’
‘Life Support?’ Lady Dubb frowned. ‘You mean I died?’
‘Yes,’ said William, ‘but the medipac says I can keep you alive till we get help from Q’Vaar.’
‘I see… Well… Thank you very much…’
‘That’s all right,’ said William, and wondered what he was supposed to do next.
‘You need to get back to your own body,’ said Lady Dubb.
‘Yes…’ William looked vaguely round the landscape for his body but there was no sign of it. ‘How do I do that?’
‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Lady Dubb, and the next thing William knew something was pushing him sideways and he was rushing through rooms, and places, and wars and towns, and great towering cities and crowds of people, and then suddenly he was back in his own mind, wading through a sea of memories. Memories of himself as a baby, memories of his father taking him swimming and his mother driving him to school, thousands of memories, and he wanted to stop and look at them but behind him Lady Dubb’s voice was urging him on, pushing him forwards, telling him to keep going, and somehow he forced himself to wade through the memories until, with a faint popping in his ears, he found he was back in the sitting room, back on the sofa, back in his body, holding the hands of a lifeless Lady Dubb.
In front of him, peering anxiously down, was Mrs Duggan, and beside her was Brin, the station manager from Q’Vaar, looking equally worried.
‘William?’ he was saying. ‘William, are you there? Can you hear me? William, are you all right?’
William managed to nod. It wasn’t easy. Any sort of movement seemed to take a lot of energy and most of his energy seemed to be somewhere else.
‘Thank goodness for that!’ Brin smiled with relief. ‘OK, first thing, you’ll notice I’ve tied your hands together…’
With an effort, William moved his head to look down and saw that a bandage had been wrapped round his hands, binding them to Lady Dubb’s.
‘It’s important not to break the connection, you see. We need to take you through the Portal. We have to get Lady Dubb to the med station on Q’Vaar. That’s where all the equipment is.’
‘Can’t…’ William’s tongue felt slightly too large for his mouth and speaking was even more difficult than moving. ‘Can’t go for two hours.’
‘It’s all right.’ Brin was smiling again. ‘The techies have worked it all out. She’ll be fine. You just sit there and let us do the work, OK?’
He didn’t have much choice about just sitting there, William thought. Even blinking seemed to take a great effort of will, and he waited while Brin and Mrs Duggan bustled around him with a stretcher. It was a clever device and Brin shortened it and widened it before lifting William’s legs and sliding it beneath him. The next thing he knew, the stretcher was floating both him and Lady Dubb gently upwards and all he had to do was sit there while Brin manoeuvred them carefully out into the lobby.
In the Portal room, the stretcher lowered them to the floor and Brin slid it out from beneath them. There was something behind his back, William could feel, to stop him falling over and he sat there, wondering how long he would have to wait.
Brin gave him a reassuring smile. ‘Everyone’s waiting for you at the other end, but we’re going to leave it as long as possible before we go, so there’s time for a
word with your brother – if you think you can manage it?’
Slowly, William managed to open his mouth and speak. ‘Why?’
‘He’s worried about you,’ said Mrs Duggan.
‘He knows something’s up,’ said Brin, ‘and although we keep telling him you’re all right, he thinks you’re going to disappear like your parents did. If you could tell him that’s not going to happen?’
William wondered how reassuring it would be to see your brother on a stretcher holding hands with someone who was dead, but then remembered this was Daniel. Someone dead would probably just make it more interesting. He nodded again and Mrs Duggan said she would go and get him.
‘Here.’ Brin was holding out a glass of something with a straw. ‘Have a drink of this.’
William wasn’t sure what the drink was but it helped. Almost immediately, he felt the energy coming back into his body. He felt more solid, more real, and by the time Mrs Duggan returned with Daniel and Amy he was able to turn his head and give them what he hoped was an encouraging smile.
Daniel stared at him, white-faced and worried. ‘Is she really dead?’
‘Only a bit,’ said William. ‘And no, you can’t have the skull.’
Daniel grinned. ‘You look really weird!’
‘I feel a bit odd,’ William admitted. ‘Try not to burn the house down while I’m gone.’
‘OK!’
William looked at Amy. ‘Nice outfit.’
‘Thank you!’ Amy smiled happily. ‘It’s a puff-skirt. I think they’re making a comeback because –’
‘Tell him later,’ Mrs Duggan interrupted. ‘Lad needs to save his strength.’
It was true that William needed all his strength over the next hour. Twice Brin gave him a drink from the mug with the straw, but it seemed to have slightly less effect each time and William was quietly relieved when he heard Emma announce from the ceiling that it was time to go.
A moment later he was falling through the Portal, falling and falling and… not falling at all, but rising, travelling up and up until he was back in the same room only it wasn’t the same room because Brin and Mrs Duggan weren’t there and this room was filled with people and they were reaching forward and one of them was undoing the bandage that tied his hands to Lady Dubb’s, and another woman with long, dark hair was lifting the silver box from round his neck and smiling and telling him it was OK, and suddenly Lady Dubb wasn’t there on the edges of his mind any more and he could move and talk quite normally again.
At least he could have done if he had wanted, but he was so tired that he had no inclination to do any of those things, and the woman with the long hair was smiling at him again and telling him it was all right, that everything was all right… and he could sleep.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
William wasn’t quite sure how long he slept, but when he woke he was extremely hungry.
‘Giving half your life energy to someone else can take it out of you,’ said Uncle Larry as he bustled in with a breakfast tray and placed it on William’s bed. ‘You’ll feel better once you’ve got this inside you.’
From the shape of the room, and the strange design of the furniture, William guessed he must be in one of the passenger suites on the Q’Vaar station, but the breakfast on the tray looked reassuringly normal. There was a bowl of porridge, a plate of what looked like bacon and eggs, and a very large pile of toast.
‘I tried to choose food that was close to what you’re used to,’ said Uncle Larry. ‘The bread’s not as good as yours but this stuff,’ he pointed to the bacon, ‘is amazing.’
‘Is Lady Dubb all right?’ asked William .
‘She most certainly is!’ Uncle Larry helped himself to one of the pieces of toast. ‘New heart, new set of arteries, and looking forward to thanking you.’ He took two bits of the bacon and folded them inside the bread. ‘Because if you hadn’t done what you did, she’d have died.’
‘I thought she had,’ said William.
‘I mean it would have been too late to revive her,’ said Uncle Larry. ‘If you leave it too long, even with Life Support, there’s nobody left inside to bring back.’ He took a bite of his sandwich. ‘As I’m sure you knew.’
‘No,’ said William. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Oh… Well, it’s simple enough.’ Uncle Larry took another bite. ‘Your soul leaves your body when you die, but there’s still a connection for ten or fifteen minutes, so if you do a quick enough repair, it can come back. What Life Support does is give you another hour or so, but after that the soul moves on anyway, and whatever you do to the body, you’ll never get back the person who was in it.’
Uncle Larry patted William’s arm, leaving a slight stain of grease on his sleeve. ‘You did exactly the right thing! In fact, you did the only thing that could have saved her and we’re all very proud of you! Now…’ He stood up. ‘I’ll let you concentrate on your breakfast, but when you’ve finished there’s a lot of people want to see you.’ He walked to the door. ‘Get Betty to show you the news feature while you’re eating. You’ll enjoy that!’
Betty turned out to be the Q’Vaar station computer. She had a voice exactly like Emma’s and she showed William the news item in a hologram that appeared at the end of his bed while he ate his porridge.
The report began with images of William and Lady Dubb arriving through the Portal, while a voice-over explained how Lady Dubb, ‘famous lone survivor of the Corinthian’, had had a heart attack and been given Life Support by ‘plucky young William Seward’, the manager of the Earth Portal.
As Lady Dubb was swept away by the medical team and William was placed on a stretcher, the reporter explained how William, who had recently taken over the station after the ‘mysterious disappearance’ of his parents, had ‘without hesitation and with no regard for his own personal safety’ courageously used his life energy to keep her alive for the hour it took to get her to Q’Vaar.
After that, there was an interview with Lady Dubb, sitting up in bed at the medical centre, saying what a remarkable young man William was and how she looked forward to seeing him and thanking him for what he had done. Finally, there was an interview with Uncle Larry who said that he was delighted that everything had turned out so well, though he did want to point out that all his staff were carefully trained to cope with exactly this sort of emergency.
When the report was finished, Betty asked if he wanted to see any of his messages, and it was these that made William realize that the news report must have been shown, quite literally, around the galaxy. There were hundreds of them, and more coming in, Betty told him, with every brick.
A few of the messages were from people he knew. There was a cheery greeting saying well done from Hippo White, a kind note of congratulations from General Ghool, and a rather nice hologram from Aventa which said simply, ‘You toerag! How come you treat old ladies better than you did me?’
But most of the messages were from men and women living on planets light years from Earth, whom William had never met. Some wanted to say how brave they thought he had been. Some wanted to say they had been in similar situations themselves and knew how he must have felt, and some just wanted to say that Lady Dubb was a very special person and anyone who kept her alive and kicking deserved a seriously big thank you. They all had their own reasons for writing but a large number of them, William noticed, were from people who had known his father.
Somewhere in their letters, after they’d congratulated him on ignoring the risks involved in giving anyone Life Support, they would mention that they had met William’s father while travelling through the Portals – sometimes years before – and remembered the kindness he had shown in looking after them. It was the first most of them had heard of Mr and Mrs Seward’s disappearance, and they would go on to say that they hoped there would soon be news of their safe return.
A message from a man called Napier, on a world even closer to the Rim than Earth, was fairly typical. The hologram showed a man sitting at a desk with a tantaliz
ing glimpse of an alien landscape partly visible through the window behind him.
‘Hi William,’ the message began. ‘You don’t know me but I just wanted to say how moved I was to hear what you did for Lady Dubb. The Federation needs people like her, particularly in these troubled times, so… well done. We all know how dangerous giving Life Support can be, but you went straight in there. Good for you!’
Uncle Larry came back in at that point, and William was about to turn the message off when Uncle Larry waved for him to carry on, pulling up a chair to sit by the bed and watch.
‘The news report said,’ the figure in the hologram continued, ‘that your parents had “mysteriously disappeared”. I’m not sure what that means but I hope they’re all right. Your father and I saw quite a bit of each other back in the sixties. I was doing a lot of travelling then and I remember how I always looked forward to calling in at the Earth station. It didn’t matter what time you got there, your father would be waiting, ready to greet you, and however tired and grouchy you were when you arrived, a few hours with your dad and you’d be thinking maybe things weren’t quite so bad after all. He could do that, your dad! I never knew how. Anyway, I hope he gets back all right – and your mother – and when they do, give them my best wishes, will you?’
The hologram flicked out.
‘There’s a lot of them like that,’ said William. ‘From people who knew Dad.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Uncle Larry. ‘Very popular man your father. Twenty years in the business. He made a lot of friends. Are you going to have that last bit of bacon?’
William shook his head, and Uncle Larry took the bacon and a piece of toast and made himself another sandwich. He chewed thoughtfully for a minute and, when he finally spoke, it was in a quieter, gentler voice than the one he normally used.
‘Did I ever tell you why I chose your dad to be station manager?’ he asked.
‘No,’ said William.
‘Well, when old Donald Peterson finally decided to retire and I had to find a replacement,’ Uncle Larry said, settling back in his chair, ‘I knew I needed someone who was honest, reliable, trustworthy and so on – but there was one other quality I was looking for that was at least as important as any of those.’
The Portal Page 12
