The Portal Read online

‘There’s only two places they could go.’ Uncle Larry carried his tea out to the central hall and back to the pantry, where he stood in front of the star chart on the wall. ‘Upline to Q’Vaar, or downine to Byroid V. Now, they can’t have gone up. The station manager on Q’Vaar was standing next to the Portal that entire afternoon as part of a practice medical emergency and he’d have seen them. However, it’s just possible they went to Byroid V.’ He pointed to the map. ‘It’s where three lines join, you see, and if your mum and dad snuck in at the right time, they might have been able to pose as ordinary passengers, and either carry on downline or get lost somewhere on Byroid V itself.’

  ‘Why would they have gone there?’ asked William.

  Uncle Larry spread out his hands in a gesture of ignorance. ‘The only way to answer that is to find them and ask. Which is where you come in.’ Uncle Larry looked directly at William.

  ‘Me? What can I do?’

  ‘I need to go to Byroid V and make some enquiries,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘and I need someone here to do the bricks while I’m gone. It won’t be for more than a day. Do you think you could cope?’

  ‘The bricks?’

  ‘Nothing too demanding, I promise.’ Uncle Larry took William by the arm and was leading him across the central hallway to the Portal, when he was stopped by a faint buzzing noise. He reached into his pocket and took out a mobile.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Uncle Larry?’ The voice on the phone was Daniel’s. ‘I’m hungry. What are we having for lunch?’

  Uncle Larry said he had to write a report, so William was the one who went up to sort out lunch.

  In the kitchen, he made some cheese on toast for Daniel and Amy, persuaded Daniel to put a dressing and some cream on the cut on his finger and tried to stop his brain from endlessly going over the impossible things it had absorbed that morning.

  While they were eating, Mrs Duggan appeared.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she asked.

  ‘Fine,’ said William. ‘Thank you.’

  Mrs Duggan nodded. ‘Your uncle around?’

  ‘He’s… working,’ said William. ‘Did you want him for something?’

  ‘Wasn’t urgent,’ said Mrs Duggan.

  There was a muffled bark from outside and she opened the door. Timber trotted in with a basket of eggs in his teeth.

  ‘Got him to check the henhouse for you,’ said Mrs Duggan, putting the basket on the table. She sniffed. ‘Need to be down in Bottom Field this afternoon. Wondered if Amy could stay here?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said William. Amy usually spent most of her time up at the farm anyway.

  Mrs Duggan looked round at the bags of shopping that littered the floor. ‘Make sure she helps you put this lot away.’

  ‘Right,’ said William. ‘I’ll do that.’

  ‘The bricks,’ Uncle Larry explained, ‘are how the Federation worlds communicate with each other.’

  Using a pair of oven gloves, he held up a black brick, slightly larger and smoother than the household variety, that had emerged from the Portal a few seconds before, like Arthur’s sword rising from the lake.

  ‘In fact, they’re what makes the Federation possible.’ Uncle Larry tossed the brick in the air and caught it as he walked over to the wall. ‘In here, we have dispatches, trade treaties, legislation, scientific journals, films, newspapers, books, music, poetry, letters, television programmes – there’ll be at least a billion separate items on this one brick… and your job is to put it in here. You see?’

  As he spoke, he dropped the brick into a chute set into the wall at the far end of the room.

  ‘You put it in there so Emma can look at it, download any information that’s specifically for this station, and upload any messages you might want to pass on to anyone else. And you do that every time the bricks come in, which is every ten hours and seventeen minutes.’

  There was a gentle grating sound as the brick reappeared on a ledge to the right of the chute. Uncle Larry picked it up and carried it back to the Portal.

  ‘You know how long it takes for a message to travel forty thousand light years from the core of the galaxy to out here on the Rim? Less than three days! Can you believe that?’

  William did his best to look impressed, and waited as Uncle Larry placed the brick in the centre of the Portal, then stood back as it silently sank from view.

  ‘Right.’ Uncle Larry took off the oven gloves and passed them to William. ‘That was the brick going upline, and in a minute or two we’ll get the one going down. Think you can manage?’

  William took the gloves and, a minute and a half later, watched as the downline brick rose up through the milky surface of the Portal with a faint blup noise and sat there. He stepped forward and took it. It was lighter than he expected and he could feel the warmth even through the gloves as he carried it over to the chute and dropped it in. A moment later, it reappeared on a ledge to one side and he carried it back to the Portal.

  ‘On a station like this, most days, there won’t be anything specifically for us,’ said Uncle Larry, ‘but we give it to Emma all the same. One of the things she does is take a copy in case something goes wrong. Not that it ever does. But we don’t take chances with the bricks. Too important.’ He nodded happily as the brick disappeared below the surface of the Portal with the same ease with which it had arrived. ‘Now… You know when the next one gets here?’

  Uncle Larry had said that the time between bricks was ten hours and seventeen minutes, and William did a brief calculation in his head.

  ‘Twenty-four minutes past midnight,’ he said.

  ‘Well done.’ Uncle Larry took off his jacket, dropped it on the floor and began unbuttoning his shirt. ‘You don’t have to remember the exact time because Emma’ll give you a ring ten minutes beforehand. I gave you the phone, didn’t I?’

  William held up the mobile.

  ‘Good. And you remember the number?’

  ‘1066,’ said William.

  ‘Right.’ Uncle Larry threw his shirt on to his jacket and began taking off his trousers. ‘Make sure you don’t go too far from the house. You don’t want to be late. Any questions?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said William.

  ‘There’re no passengers booked in till Tuesday, so it’s only the bricks tonight you have to worry about. The next ones aren’t till eleven in the morning and I’ll be back long before then!’ Uncle Larry stood there, his wrinkled body clad only in a pair of shorts. ‘Don’t forget, any problems, you ask Emma.’

  William nodded.

  ‘But there won’t be any problems.’ Uncle Larry stepped forward to stand in the middle of the Portal. ‘You’ll be fine. And when you wake up in the morning, I’ll be here with news about your parents!’

  He gave a brief wave and, like a swimmer diving into a pool, sank straight into the floor and disappeared from sight.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  William stood there for a moment, staring at the empty surface of the Portal, before bending down to pick up the clothes that were scattered over the floor. Now he knew why Uncle Larry’s suit was always so crumpled, he thought, and wondered where would be the best place to put them.

  ‘I would suggest the laundry drawer,’ said Emma, from somewhere in the ceiling.

  The voice made William jump – he wasn’t aware that he’d spoken out loud – but the suggestion seemed reasonable. ‘Where’s the laundry drawer?’ he asked.

  ‘Third door on the right,’ said Emma.

  William made his way back out to the lobby, turned right, walked along to the third door and found the wedge-shaped room in front of him was filled almost entirely with clothes. There were literally hundreds of items – suits and jackets, trousers and skirts, coats and jeans – all hanging on racks that filled most of the floor space and with more suspended from the ceiling above.

  ‘The laundry drawer is on your left,’ said Emma. ‘You pull the handle under the red arrow and place any items that require cleaning inside.’
r />   William walked over to the wall, pulled the handle under the red arrow and pushed Uncle Larry’s clothes inside. Emma told him that cleaning would be complete in approximately ten minutes and, sure enough, the suit and shirt came out ten minutes later, not only pressed and cleaned but with the missing button replaced on the jacket.

  ‘Does Uncle Larry have a room down here?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s in the blue suite,’ said Emma. ‘Fourth door on the left.’

  William carried the clothes back out to the lobby and walked round to the fourth door on his left, just past the Portal. It led into a large, comfortable room with a bed on one side, a couple of armchairs and a table on the other, and a door at the far end that led through to the bathroom.

  The room was extremely untidy. The bed was unmade, there were towels and clothes scattered over the floor, and the table was littered with plates of half-eaten food and dirty cups. William hung Uncle Larry’s clothes in one of the cupboards and went back out to the lobby.

  It was time, he thought, to do a little exploring.

  There were nine doors opening from the central lobby. Moving clockwise, the two doors after the Portal and Uncle Larry’s bedroom led to two more guest rooms, one decorated mostly in green and the other in yellow. After that, there was the lift and Dad’s ‘pantry’, and then the kitchen which, William discovered, had a storeroom at the back containing an impressive range of food and drink.

  Along from the kitchen was the room with all the clothes and the laundry drawer. Next to that was a recreation room with a full-sized snooker table, a small gymnasium and some pinball machines, and the last door before William was back at the Portal opened into a room that was at least twice the size of any of the others he had seen.

  It was a sitting room, with two enormous sofas facing each other in the centre, a set of dining chairs grouped round a table in one corner, and a circle of armchairs in another. Around the walls there was a drinks cabinet, several bookcases, a television, and a vast collection of DVDs – but the real surprise for William was what he saw through the windows that ran along the back. They looked out on exactly the view you would get from the sitting room of the farmhouse above.

  Standing in front of them, he could see the lawn and flower beds directly ahead, the barn over to the left and the field that ran down to the river on the right. The whole picture looked completely real. The trees were swaying in the breeze, the sheep in the fields on the other side of the valley bent their heads as they grazed and, when he asked, Emma explained that he was seeing a real time image of exactly what you would see if you were upstairs in the farmhouse, transferred to the screen below.

  Not that it looked like a screen. Even right up close the illusion was complete. There was a slight haze on the field over to the right, you could see every detail in the swirls of the dust the chickens were kicking up in their pen and you could even see the little drips of oil coming from the chainsaw Daniel was carrying across to the barn…

  William paused.

  A chainsaw.

  Daniel had a chainsaw…

  William’s brother did not like being told that he couldn’t use the saw.

  ‘I need it,’ he protested, ‘to cut up this wood.’

  ‘It’s a chainsaw,’ said William, ‘and you’re eight. You know perfectly well you can’t use it. I’m five years older than you and I’m not allowed to touch it.’

  ‘Uncle Larry said I could.’

  ‘Uncle Larry would let you set fire to your bedroom if he thought it would keep you quiet,’ said William. ‘What were you trying to do with it anyway?’

  ‘I’m making shelves.’ Daniel kicked at the dirt with his feet. ‘And I can’t cut up the planks without a saw, can I?’

  Amy appeared at the barn door with Timber, carrying an overnight bag.

  ‘Is it all right then?’ she asked.

  William turned to her. ‘Is what all right?’

  ‘Daniel was supposed to be asking if I could sleep over again tonight,’ said Amy. ‘Mum says she’s going to be out lambing.’

  ‘There’s no point asking him,’ said Daniel crossly. ‘He won’t let anybody do anything.’

  ‘Yes, of course you can stay,’ said William.

  ‘Great!’ Amy smiled. ‘And she says did she leave her tool-belt here the other night?’

  ‘I think it’s in the kitchen,’ said William, and he was about to walk back to the house to get it, when Timber trotted past him and pushed open the back door. He came back out a moment later with the tool-belt in his mouth and William thought, not for the first time, that there was something a bit creepy about a dog that understood quite so much of what people said.

  It turned out Daniel wanted a set of shelves so that he would have somewhere to display his collection of skulls and William suggested that, instead of making them, he use the bookshelves from the spare bedroom. He and Amy helped Daniel carry them through to his room, and William left him setting out the skulls while Amy printed labels to go on the front of each item.

  He would have liked to go back to the station, but decided it would not be wise to leave Daniel alone for too long. Instead, he went down to the kitchen and began putting away the shopping. It seemed to take a very long time and he couldn’t help thinking that this was not how he normally spent a Saturday afternoon.

  On a normal Saturday, he would probably have gone over to Craig’s house, or Craig would have come over to the farm. They would have taken the canoe down to the river, or played a game on the computer, or gone to the cinema… He wondered if Uncle Larry had found his parents yet. He hoped he had, and that Saturdays would soon be normal again.

  William had liked normal.

  At supper, Daniel did not eat a great deal – possibly because of the six chocolate cupcakes he had had for tea – and then announced that he and Amy were going upstairs to watch a film on television. William suggested that he had a bath first.

  ‘I don’t want a bath,’ said Daniel. ‘I don’t need a bath.’

  William pointed to the chocolate smears around his brother’s face, the bloodstains on his arms and the sheep dropping that had somehow got caught in his hair.

  ‘Have a bath,’ he said, ‘before Amy refuses to share a room with you.’

  The door to Dad’s office opened when he turned the handle, just as Uncle Larry had said it would, and when William tapped 1066 into the phone on the desk, the wall to the right of the window disappeared, revealing the space that led down to the station. He stood in it, the floor disappeared, and a few seconds later he was stepping into the central lobby of the station and being greeted by Emma, who asked if there was anything he needed.

  ‘Not at the moment, thanks,’ William told her. ‘I’m just going to look around for a bit.’

  For almost an hour he wandered in and out of the nine rooms around the lobby. He stood in the wardrobe room, staring at all the clothes and wondering what they were for. He lay on the bed in the green bedroom and stared thoughtfully at the ceiling. He stared at the map of the Federation Star Portals above Dad’s desk and then the photos on the cork board beside it. He stared at the surface of the Portal itself until it made him feel queasy again, and then he stood in the sitting room and stared through the window at the sun going down behind the trees on the far side of the valley.

  He did a lot of staring.

  At eight o’clock, he went back upstairs to see what Daniel and Amy were doing, and found that his brother was already in bed and asleep. Amy was still watching the film, while repainting her toenails, and William made her promise to go to bed when it finished, but said to call him on the intercom if she needed anything.

  Back down in the station, there were still nearly four hours before the bricks were due to arrive and he began exploring the station in a little more detail, going through all the rooms again, peering into cupboards and opening hatches. One of his first finds, at the back of Dad’s pantry, was a large cupboard with two rows of guns stacked neatly along the wall, and
he asked Emma what they were for.

  ‘The weapons are to defend the station in the event of an attack,’ she told him.

  ‘Attack?’ said William. ‘We get attacked?’

  ‘This station has never been the victim of aggression,’ said Emma, ‘but it is considered wise to be prepared.’

  ‘Can I touch them?’ William asked.

  The station computer assured him he could take and use any gun he wanted, but in the end he decided not to. It felt a bit like letting Daniel play with a chainsaw.

  In an area off the kitchen, William found the machines that were responsible for keeping the station clean – they weren’t as exciting as the guns but still interesting – and in the sitting room there was a collection of books on Federation history, with pictures like the photographs on Dad’s wall, that moved when you looked at them. Then, in a booth at the back of the recreation room, he discovered what turned out to be the station’s equivalent of a games console.

  Sitting in the chair, William found himself in the middle, literally, of a battle of epic proportions in which he was the commander of a battlecruiser whose task was to take and hold the fourteen worlds and thirty-seven moons of a star system near the Hub. He was still fighting, two hours later, when Emma told him he was needed at the Portal.

  The brick from Byroid V appeared at exactly twenty-four minutes past midnight and William, standing ready with the oven gloves, watched it rise to the surface, before picking it up and placing it carefully in the chute. When it reappeared on the ledge, he carried it back to the Portal and placed it in the centre. Shortly after it had disappeared, the brick from Q’Vaar arrived and William carried that over to the chute as well.

  It was all as simple as Uncle Larry had said it would be and he was just stepping into the lift to go upstairs to bed, when Emma announced that there was a message for him. It was from the station manager on Q’Vaar and came in the form of a hologram of a man with black curly hair whose head and shoulders appeared in midair above the staircase in the centre of the lobby.

  ‘Hi, Larry!’ said the figure. ‘Just to let you know General Ghool’s coming through a bit earlier than expected. I’ve told him about Jack and Lois – I hope that’s all right – and he’s hoping you’ll have better news by the time he gets to you at…’ the figure paused to consult a notepad, ‘…01.09. OK?’