Space Race
Page 17
Thomas clasped his hands together. His face was pale and his eyes were black as the night.
“You are my father,” he said. “I will go wherever you go. Tell me what to do, Vateelin mesht.”
“One thing at a time,” said Patrick. “Do you have your own clothes?”
Thomas nodded toward the locker.
“They're in there,” he said.
“Well, get dressed quickly and then we'll go.
#x201D; After Thomas was dressed he straightened the blankets on his bed, wanting somehow to signify a voluntary departure. He was worrying about what the nurses would think and what Stella would believe when they told her he was gone.
Patrick smiled as he watched him. Then on an impulse he removed the sheepskin coat, still with its tattered edge, and laid it across the bed.
“Why?” said Thomas.
“A message,” said Patrick. “Better than simply leaving a tidy bed. A message for everyone, but especially for Stella. I don't know how much she'll understand, but she will at least know that you are with me.”
Patrick held Thomas's hand; it was safer that way, to make sure that the illusion would cover both of them.
“Where are we going?” said Thomas. “How will we get there?”
“First we leave the hospital,” said his father. “After that, you'll see.”
As they walked along the corridor they passed a glass door that looked out onto a shrubbery. Snow was beginning to fall.
“You'll be cold,” said Thomas with some concern. Patrick, his sweater long gone and his coat left behind him, was now in shirtsleeves. He was cold and they were not even outside yet.
“It won't be for long,” he said.
They walked out through the waiting room, where the late-night patients were still waiting and the latenight television was giving them news from all around the world.
The outer doors opened and Patrick and Thomas found themselves walking into the grounds through a layer of snow, their shoes and trainers leaving distinctive footprints. Page and monarch forth they went!
They were on the edge of the drive that swept down from the hospital gates to the emergency and accident entrance. Before they could cross, an ambulance came down out of the darkness, its headlights illuminating the fall of snowflakes.
Thomas blinked.
Patrick brought them both to a sharp halt, holding his son's hand tighter.
“We are unnoticeable,” he said, “but we aren't indestructible. One accident is quite enough!”
When the ambulance had passed, Patrick continued, leading Thomas across to the car park. It was a tarmacked area surrounded by a dwarf shrubbery. Snow was fast covering everything. The flakes were coming down thicker and faster.
“Not long now,” said Patrick, gritting his teeth against the cold as the snow soaked his shirt. Thomas was better-clad but still distressed by the inclement weather. He clung to his father's hand and worried that Patrick would “catch his death of cold,” a phrase he had heard Stella use many and many a time.
Patrick looked down at his son anxiously, misinterpreting the serious expression on his face.
“You are quite sure you want to come?” he said through shivers.
Thomas nodded but did not speak.
“I don't own you,” said Patrick, remembering an earlier, foolish conversation. “I should never, ever have said that I did. You do honestly have a choice, even now.”
“I've chosen,” said Thomas clearly, sounding quite grown-up.
Then he added, childlike, hesitant, “What will we be in Ormingat?”
Patrick smiled down at him, taking a second to realize what he meant.
“Recognizable,” he said with a laugh. “Different, but recognizable. There is no form under which we would not know each other.”
“But different?” said Thomas, thinking of all the comics he had read, all of the alien characters he had seen in programs on the television. To turn into a sixlegged lizard with crumpled skin and curling fangs was not a pleasant prospect!
“Not completely different,” said his father, remembering the monsters in the film he himself had seen just days before. “Not grotesque.”
They had come to the far edge of the car park, nearly to the outer gate.
“Are you ready?” said Patrick. “Very soon we will be going into the spaceship and setting out on our course for home. We will diminish. And for a while it will feel very strange.”
“Where is it?” said Thomas.
“Over there, to the right of the gate.”
Patrick pointed, and in the gloom Thomas could see a bluish glow that, as they drew nearer, he identified as the facet of a crystal. The snow around it reflected a bluish light. The ship itself gleamed like a sapphire, but with an aura of rosiness that promised warmth. This, then, was the thing he had long thought of as dimpled like a golf ball.
“It's more beautiful,” he said, and Patrick knew at once what he meant.
“And much more useful, Tonitheen.”
The look Thomas gave his father was one of total confidence. Suddenly this was a wonderful adventure just about to begin.
“What do you know about them, Mrs. Dalrymple?” asked the reporter, following up the story of the disappearing Derwents and the mysterious coat left draped across the hospital bed.
The coat had been matched with the torn strip. That no one had seen the man or the boy was a mystery still being investigated, explanations unsuccessfully sought. There had been a false trail leading to Scotland, but the Patrick Derwent who had used his credit card there proved to be someone completely different, with an address in Birmingham. In cases like this, as Inspector Galway was beginning to realize, false trails are only too numerous. Incredible coincidences are rife.
Shaun Trevelyan, half-fledged reporter on a London newspaper, thrived on false trails and incredible coincidences. To come to the village and question the neighbors was just the latest of many angles he was trying, a way perhaps of unearthing something the police had missed. Or at least finding a human-interest story, fleshing out the facts, arousing the intimate, personal concern of a million readers.
“They were my neighbors for five years,” said Stella, holding her front door not too far open. She was not about to invite this inquisitive young man across the threshold. “I was very fond of them.”
“But you can shed no light on the mystery?”
Stella smiled.
“Starlight, perhaps,” she said, “nothing more.”
Before the reporter could question this cryptic remark, Stella gently closed the door on him, leaving him standing out in the snow.
Don't miss the companion to
Nesta Gwynn has always known that her parents are different. She thinks it's because they're from Boston instead of the litde town in England where Nesta was born and where she's always lived. But at the age of twelve, Nesta discovers that her parents aren't really from Boston. In fact, they're not from Earth. They're aliens from a planet named Ormingat, and even though she was born on Earth, Nesta is an alien too. To make matters worse, her parents' mission on Earth has come to an abrupt end because of a boy named Thomas Derwent. They will have one chance to return to Ormingat, and that opening is only seven days away.
Nesta quickly devises a plan to miss the deadline. But if she stays behind on Earth, will her parents choose to stay too, or will they go back to Ormingat without her?
Sylvia Waugh's first book, The Mennyms, was published in England in 1993 and was an immediate success with reviewers and teachers. It won the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize and was short-listed for England's highest literary award, the Carnegie Medal. Sylvia Waugh's other books include Mennyms in the Wilderness and Mennyms Alive. A retired teacher, she lives in the North of England with her three grown-up children.
Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children's Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Text copyright © 2000 by Sylvia Waugh
First American Ed
ition 2000 First published in Great Britain by the Bodley Head Children's Books, an imprint of the Random House Group, Ltd, 2000
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eISBN: 978-0-307-55990-6
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