Uncle Larry’s sandwich was dripping butter on to the floor, and William put a plate under it.
‘A lot of people think managing a station is just a matter of pouring out drinks and making sure there’s clean sheets on the bed, but it’s a lot more than that – at least it is if you’re doing it right. We get some very important people coming through the Portals – planetary ambassadors, captains of industry, government officials – the sort of people who have to make big decisions, and it matters if they come out at the end of a journey feeling tired and bad-tempered. They need looking after.’
‘A good manager is someone who knows what a passenger needs almost before they’ve said it. He has this knack of making things easier for the people around him, he can get them to relax, he can make things… comfortable. Your dad could do it brilliantly. That’s why people liked him. That’s why they liked calling in at the Earth station, and that’s why they wrote all those letters when they heard he’d disappeared.’
‘I think it’s a gift some people are born with.’ Uncle Larry had noticed the butter on the floor and bent down to wipe it up with the sleeve of his jacket. ‘Like some people are good at sports or music, some people are born good at… at people. They know how to look after them. They seem to know… how they work. And in case you hadn’t noticed,’ Uncle Larry reached out and touched William lightly on the arm, ‘it’s a gift you have yourself.’
‘Me?’
‘I can’t tell you how worried I was at the thought of leaving you alone with your brother and Mrs Duggan and Amy!’ Uncle Larry chuckled. ‘I mean, no offence, but what a combination! Mrs Duggan is totally dysfunctional, your brother’s mad as a brush, and Amy is downright scary –’
‘They’re not that bad,’ said William.
‘Oh, yes they are!’ Uncle Larry disagreed cheerfully. ‘I told Brin I thought you’d all be killing each other inside a week, but you weren’t, were you? Things were a bit iffy for a while, but then you… you worked something out.’
‘And your family was only the start of it! I was here on Q’Vaar when Mr Forrester came through the other day. That man is the grumpiest individual in the quadrant but I watched him come up through the Portal, grinning like he’d won the lottery! I’ve had a dozen letters in the last month from passengers saying how much they enjoyed going through the Earth station, and I shouldn’t be surprised, should I? Because that’s what people like you can do. Even when you shoot them, passengers go home to their parents and say it was their own fault.’ There was a slight pause before Uncle Larry continued. ‘Which is why I’m hoping you’ll take the job.’
‘Job?’ said William. ‘What job?’
‘Station manager, of course!’ Uncle Larry’s eyes peered at William over the top of his glasses. ‘I mean, you’ve been doing it for the last six weeks anyway, so we all know you can. And you seem to enjoy it. So… what do you say?’
‘I… I…’ William was almost too surprised to answer. It might be true that he enjoyed looking after the passengers and the Portal, but… but he could never be station manager.
Never.
‘Looking after the station is Dad’s job,’ he said.
‘I think maybe it’s time we faced the truth here.’ Uncle Larry’s smile faded as he spoke. ‘You saw the last report from Federal Security. I know it’s difficult, but I think at some point we are going to have to accept the fact that we may never know what happened to your mother and father.’
Which just goes to show, as he often said later, how even the best of us can get it completely wrong.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Technically, Q’Vaar was not a planet or an asteroid, but a moon, a barren lump of rock with some five hundred or so inhabitants who mined the seams of zirconium and platinum that lay beneath the surface, then sent the refined ore back through the massive Trade Portals to the worlds that needed them.
Uncle Larry had assured William that there was nothing interesting about the place whatever, but the first thing he saw when he walked into the main reception room of the station was a view – a real view – of the surface of Q’Vaar with the vast circle of Blue, the gas giant around which Q’Vaar circled, hanging directly above him and filling most of the sky.
It was an astonishing sight and, seeing it, William understood for the first time what it must be like to come to Earth through the Portal and see a summer’s day in England or a rainstorm at night – to see a world where every plant and animal you saw was different from anything you’d experienced before.
At the time, however, there was little chance to stand and stare. Lady Dubb was already marching across the floor towards him, her arms outstretched.
‘Here he is! The young man who saved my life! Come along! I don’t care how embarrassed you are, I have to give you a hug!’
She looked, William couldn’t help thinking, remarkably well for someone who had had a new heart put in twelve hours before, though with Lady Dubb he wouldn’t have been entirely surprised to hear she had fitted the thing herself.
‘How are you?’ She held his face in her hands and looked closely at him. ‘Inside. Is everything all right?’
‘I’m fine, thanks.’
‘Yes, you don’t look too bad…’ Lady Dubb took his hand and led him over to the sofa. ‘The doctors told me you seem to have kept most of your marbles, which is encouraging. And I hope you know how grateful I am for what you did. It must have taken a great deal of courage.’
William suddenly felt the need to tell someone the truth. ‘I wasn’t really being brave,’ he said. ‘I didn’t even know it was dangerous until I saw them say it on the news. I just asked the medipac what to do and then did it.’
‘Very sensible of you,’ said Lady Dubb, ‘though I suspect you’re the sort of person who’d have done it anyway, even if you had known the risks.’
‘What were the risks exactly?’ asked William.
‘Well,’ Lady Dubb leant back thoughtfully, ‘sharing life energy means sharing minds and not everyone takes to that. Because sharing minds means sharing memories and after an hour in someone else’s head you can come out not quite sure which memories are yours and which are the other person’s. It’s not so bad if you knew each other before, but strangers can find it very confusing.’ She looked carefully at William. ‘I presume you can remember seeing things in my mind?’
‘Yes,’ said William. The picture of Lady Dubb standing beside him in the world with the orange sky and the house in the valley of purple grass was still particularly vivid.
‘Normally, of course, we’d both be far too polite to mention anything we saw, but I did catch something in your mind that I thought I should pass on…’ Lady Dubb paused. ‘I saw that you know your parents are all right.’
‘Oh,’ said William. ‘Well, it’s true that I’ve always had the feeling –’
‘I’m not talking about a feeling,’ Lady Dubb interrupted. ‘What I saw was that you know what happened to them.’
‘But I don’t,’ said William. ‘Nobody does.’
‘You do,’ said Lady Dubb calmly. ‘It’s a long way down and you’re not conscious of it yet, but the information is definitely there. I saw it.’
It took a moment for William to realize what she meant. ‘You’re saying… I know what happened to my parents but… I don’t know that I know?’
‘That’s about the sum of it,’ said Lady Dubb. ‘I expect the answer will trickle into your conscious mind eventually, or…’ She paused again. ‘…Or I could just tell you.’
William stared at her. ‘You know where they’ve gone?’
‘ You know where they’ve gone,’ Lady Dubb corrected him. ‘It’s a part of your mind I just happened to share.’
‘Where?’ said William urgently. ‘Where are they? Where have they gone? What happened?’
Lady Dubb opened her mouth to reply but, even before she had uttered a word, William suddenly knew what she was going to say. The answer popped into his mind as whole and complete as
if it had been there all along.
‘Ah…’ Lady Dubb smiled gently. ‘I don’t need to tell you after all, do I?’
‘No,’ said William.
And she didn’t. Because he now knew exactly what had happened to his parents.
‘You know?’ said Brin. ‘Are you sure?’
He was standing in the lobby of the station under the farmhouse with William and Uncle Larry, who had just stepped out of the Portal.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ said William.
‘He has a theory,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘but it does seem to explain all the facts.’
‘Well, that’s more than anyone else has been able to do.’ Brin combed his fingers through his beard. ‘And the theory is?’
William took a deep breath. ‘I think Mum had an accident,’ he said, ‘on the day she and Dad went missing. I think she was out looking for plants or something at the quarry, and then tripped or slipped.’
‘We know something happened at the quarry,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘because of the bag with the blood that the vet found. William thinks she had a fall. A very bad fall.’ He paused. ‘Bad enough to kill her.’
‘Ah.’ Brin’s face fell.
‘Dad must have realized something bad had happened,’ said William. ‘I don’t know how – maybe Mum didn’t answer the phone when he called her – but whatever it was, he went out to look for her, and took a medipac.’
‘So he finds Lois out by the quarry.’ Uncle Larry had taken up the story again. ‘He climbs down, and the medipac tells him that she needs real doctors to mend whatever’s broken. If he wants to save her, somehow he has to get her back to the Portal – but time’s running out. The medipac tells him Lois has been dead for ten, maybe fifteen minutes, so he has to do something quickly or it’ll be too late.’
‘That’s why he used the Life Support,’ said William. ‘And then he carried Mum out of the quarry and back to the house and down to the station…’
‘But if he brought her back to the station, why didn’t he take her through the Portal?’ asked Brin.
‘Because he couldn’t,’ said Uncle Larry.
‘What? Why not?’
‘He couldn’t take her to Byroid V, because the line was down for maintenance.’
‘Was it?’
‘It was going to be back up in a couple of hours, but he didn’t have a couple of hours, did he? Life Support only works for an hour or so at the most and it would have taken him nearly that long to carry her back from the quarry.’
William thought how difficult it had been simply to move his head while giving someone Life Support, and wondered what strength it must have taken for his father to carry someone the mile or so from the quarry to the house.
Brin gave a low whistle. ‘That would not have been an easy journey.’
‘No,’ Uncle Larry agreed, ‘but let’s say he managed it. Let’s say he got her back to the house and down to the station. Once he gets there, he knows he can’t go through the Portal to Byroid V –’
‘So he has to come to me on Q’Vaar,’ said Brin, ‘but he didn’t! If he had, I’d have had a med team with him in less than two minutes! Lois would have been in surgery within…’ Brin frowned. ‘No… wait a minute… Our med team were doing a simulation of an emergency mining accident that day, weren’t they?’
Uncle Larry nodded. ‘They were round on the other side of Q’Vaar.’
‘I could have called them back!’ said Brin. ‘As soon as I called, they’d have dropped everything else and come back!’
‘And how long would that have taken?’
‘They’d have been back within…’ Brin’s voice trailed off, ‘…within thirty minutes.’
There was a silence.
‘Poor devil.’ It was Brin speaking again. ‘There was nowhere he could go, was there?’
‘There was one place,’ said William.
Brin turned to face him. ‘Where?’
‘The Old Star Portal.’
‘The Old…’ Brin frowned, then shook his head. ‘No… no, that hasn’t been used for three hundred years! Your dad wouldn’t even know if it was still working…’
‘I think he did,’ said William. ‘Because Mr Forrester had asked him to find out. He had this idea that you could make a lot of money using the Old Portals and asked Dad to check it out. You know how Dad loved old machines. So if he had looked at it, found all the bits were there and still working…’
‘If it was still working,’ said Brin excitedly, ‘it would solve his problem, wouldn’t it?’ He had suddenly realized where this idea was going. ‘If he went through the Old Portal, no time at all would pass for him, but he wouldn’t get to Q’Vaar for three and a half years. And by then we’d be waiting for him and…’ He looked uncertainly at Uncle Larry. ‘You really think it’s what he did?’
‘That’s what we’re here to find out,’ said Uncle Larry, and he led the way across the lobby to the stairs.
*
The Old Star Portal was both larger and smaller than the one on the floor above. The Portal itself was barely a metre across, but the wall that ran round it was not the gentle lip that enclosed the Portal upstairs. It was a massive construction, nearly two metres thick, waist high, and William wondered how you were supposed to get inside. Huge cables, half buried in the floor, ran out from the Portal wall, and above it, suspended from the ceiling, was another circle the same shape hanging down like the top half of a particularly heavy tin can. There was no immediate sign that anyone had used it in the last three hundred years, but of course there was station machinery that would have kept the place free of dust and dirt.
‘How do we find out if Mum and Dad were here?’ said William.
‘We ask,’ said Uncle Larry, and he stepped forward and banged on the desk to his right. There was a cheerful ping sound and a young woman in a closely fitting orange jumpsuit blinked into view.
‘Hi there!’ said the hologram cheerfully. ‘Welcome to the entry gate of Star Portal Darius! I am the Portal assistant and may I begin by explaining the safety procedures that –’
‘We don’t want you to explain anything,’ said Larry briskly. ‘We just want to know who was the last person to use this Portal.’
The Portal assistant’s smile did not waver. ‘Information about other passengers is restricted under Federation law,’ she said, ‘and explaining the safety procedures is a legal requirement. If I could ask you to be patient while I –’
‘I am Lawrence Kingston,’ Uncle Larry interrupted. ‘I am in charge of all Portals in the fourteenth quadrant and I demand to know –’
‘You are Lawrence Kingston?’ said the assistant.
‘Yes. And I want to know –’
‘I have a message for you, Mr Kingston,’ said the assistant. ‘From Jack Seward.’
‘You have a message?’
‘I do indeed!’ The girl smiled helpfully. ‘Would you like to see it?’
‘Well, of course I want to see it!’
‘If there is anything else you require, please ask for a –’
‘Just get on and give us the message, will you!’ said Uncle Larry. ‘Now!’
The orange-uniformed assistant disappeared and was replaced a moment later by William’s mother and father.
Seeing them after so long took William’s breath away. They were standing just outside the Portal – at least, his father was standing. The silver box of the Life Support was hanging round his neck and he was holding his wife in his arms. She didn’t look too bad for someone who was dead, William thought. She was rather pale and she wasn’t moving, but her head lay very peacefully against her husband’s chest. Her hair fell back from her face and she… she just looked like Mum.
If anything, Dad was the one who seemed to be in trouble. His shirt was streaked with sweat and blood and there was perspiration dripping from his face, but William didn’t care how either of them looked. They were there! They were standing there in front of him and they hadn’t run away and they h
adn’t been murdered by a psychopath and Mum had had an accident and Dad had taken her to the only place where he could get help…
Looking at him, seeing the strain on his face, seeing Mum with her eyes closed as if she were asleep, he wanted to go over and hug them.
But you can’t hug a hologram.
‘Larry…’William’s father made a brave attempt at a smile as he spoke. ‘There’s been an accident. Lois had a fall – in the quarry – her neck’s broken. I’ve got her on Life Support – I got there in time for that – and the medipac says it’s a clean break, so the surgeons won’t have any trouble fixing it, but… but I can’t take her to Byroid and there’s no med team on Q’Vaar… This is all I could think of…’
Mr Seward paused. You could see him straining to gather his thoughts and William knew better than anyone how he was feeling. How the fog was swirling in his mind and making every word and thought an effort that required huge concentration.
‘Sorry to land you in it like this, but… I couldn’t think of anything else. I know the Portal’s working fine this end. You might need to check the one on Q’Vaar…’ There was a green light flashing to one side and a section of the Portal wall opened out like a gate.
‘Time to go.’ Mr Seward carried his wife into the centre of the circle and waited as the wall slid back into place. ‘Look after the boys, will you? Explain what happened… And tell them…’ The flashing light changed from green to blue and William watched as the image of his parents began sinking through the base of the Portal. ‘Tell them we love them… Tell them we love them very much!’
For a while, after the image had faded, nobody spoke.
‘He forgot,’ said Brin quietly.
‘Can’t blame him for that,’ said Uncle Larry. ‘In the circumstances.’
‘Forgot what?’ asked William.
‘When he recorded the message,’ said Brin, ‘he should have asked for it to be passed to Emma. So she knew what had happened.’
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