The Touchstone Read online

  As he let go of the Touchstone in his pocket, the image of Gedrus and the board game disappeared and he found himself facing Hannah Linneker.

  Hannah had arrived in Douglas's class at the start of the term. She was a small, fierce-looking girl, with short blonde hair that stuck out in spikes from her head. She wore black lipstick, had a ring through one side of her nose – both in total defiance of school regulations – and had already been suspended twice that term by the new headmaster, who happened to be her father.

  Douglas had not spoken to her before. Very few people spoke to Hannah as it was not something she encouraged. David Collins had tried to talk to her once but she had replied by pushing his head into a fire bucket and most people left Hannah alone after that. She was one of those people who always seem to be angry about something, even if all they're doing is walking down a corridor.

  She was looking angry now, as she repeated her question. ‘I said, do you know anything about glaciers?’

  ‘A bit.’ Douglas had done glaciers earlier in the term with Mr Phillips. ‘Why?’

  ‘I have to write this poxy essay.’ Hannah waved a blank piece of paper. ‘Two sides. By this afternoon.’

  She looked, Douglas suddenly realized, not so much angry as very unhappy.

  ‘I could tell you what to write,’ he said cautiously. ‘If you wanted.’

  Hannah looked at him suspiciously. ‘You could?’

  ‘I think so.’ Douglas's hand reached into his pocket and his fingers curled around the Touchstone. ‘Have you got a pen?’

  While Hannah retrieved a pen from her bag, he explained to Gedrus what he wanted and the librarian seemed as happy to provide an essay on glaciers as to solve algebraic equations or play a game of Monopoly.

  ‘A glacier is a slowly moving mass of ice originating in an accumulation of snow…’ he began.

  Hannah picked up her pen and started to write. In normal circumstances she did not have a lot of time for people like Douglas, who always did what they were told, always handed their work in on time and always looked so neat and clean… But as Douglas dictated a detailed account of the causes, origins and consequences of glaciers until she had covered exactly two sides of the paper – all without the slightest hesitation and in a little over ten minutes – she was forced to admit that, whatever else he might be, Douglas was seriously smart.

  It was Ivo, at the end of the school day, who asked what he was going to do with it.

  ‘Do with what?’ said Douglas.

  ‘The Touchstone,’ said Ivo. ‘If it can tell you how to get anything you want, I wondered what you were going to ask it to do.’

  Douglas frowned. He had not really thought of doing anything with the Touchstone beyond playing games and getting it to do his homework. It was true that Kai had said that Gedrus could tell them how to get anything they liked but, at the moment, there was nothing in particular that he wanted.

  ‘Only, if there wasn't anything urgent you needed to do, and you had the time,’ Ivo went on, ‘I was wondering if you could ask for some help with my robot.’

  Ivo's dream was to build a robot he could enter in a television programme called Robot Wars. In it, robots built by members of the public fought each other in an arena, battering each other with saws, spinning rotors or spring-loaded hammers until one or the other had ceased to move.

  ‘If Gedrus is as clever as Kai says he is,’ Ivo was saying, ‘I thought he might be able to help. It'd be worth asking, at least.’

  There was certainly no harm in asking, Douglas thought, and he reached his fingers into his pocket for the Touchstone.

  ‘Hi there!’ Gedrus was standing by his desk, juggling with five oranges. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘We were wondering,’ said Douglas, ‘if you could help Ivo build his robot. He wants to enter it in a television competition called Robot Wars.’

  ‘I could probably be of some modest assistance.’ Gedrus stopped juggling, letting the fruit fall neatly into the bowl on the desk. ‘He wants it to look exactly like this, does he?’

  To his surprise, Douglas could see that Gedrus was holding a copy of the drawing of the robot plans that Ivo had shown him on the bench at lunch break two days before.

  ‘What did he say?’ asked Ivo.

  ‘He's got a copy of your plans and he says do you want it to look exactly like them?’

  ‘Seriously?’ A huge grin split Ivo's face. ‘Tell him yes. And tell him I want… no!’ He grabbed Douglas's arm. ‘No, tell him…’ He paused for a moment. ‘Tell him I don't mind what it looks like. I just want a machine that I can build, that doesn't cost much money and that'll win. OK?’

  Douglas turned to Gedrus. ‘Did you hear all that?’

  Gedrus nodded. ‘Loud and clear.’ He pulled open a drawer in the centre of his desk and took out a large roll of paper. ‘I have a design here that I think might fit your needs.’ He unrolled the paper on the desk, weighing down each of the corners with an orange. ‘Not too expensive. You should be able to get most of the pieces from scrap and you could build it in about sixty to seventy hours. What do you think?’

  The drawing on Gedrus's desk was of a rectangular box-like object on four wheels. It was complete in every detail, with some sections blown up for easier viewing and diagrams to show how the parts fitted together.

  ‘Well?’ Ivo was nudging Douglas's arm.

  ‘He's already done it,’ said Douglas. ‘He's got the plans right there.’

  ‘Already?’

  ‘He just took them out of his desk.’

  ‘And will it win?’ asked Ivo. ‘Will it win the competition?’

  ‘I can't predict the future,’ said Gedrus when Douglas relayed the question to him, ‘but I've checked it against the three hundred and forty-three possible rivals and, frankly, it should wipe the floor with any of them.’

  Ivo was delighted – his only frustration was that he couldn't see the plans for himself. But it turned out Gedrus had a solution to that problem as well.

  If he wanted, he said, Douglas could copy them out.

  When he got home Douglas spread out a large sheet of paper on the dining room table. On top of it Gedrus was able to produce a picture of the plans. The picture was only in Douglas's head of course, like the picture of the library itself, but all Douglas had to do was trace over the lines with a pen.

  The plans were complicated and it was a job that would take some time, but Douglas did not mind. It was a way of saying thank you to Ivo for his help in looking after Kai and anyway, he thought, it might be quite fun to help build a robot that appeared on television and won the Robot Wars.

  Mrs Paterson made no comment on the drawing when she finally arrived home from work at nearly six o'clock. It had been a long day at the supermarket and she was very tired. For some reason, the money in her till had not added up correctly at the end of the day and the supervisor had made her stay behind to count it again. Then, leaving the car park in a hurry, she had reversed into a bollard and broken a tail light on the car.

  She was too tired to cook a proper meal and she decided they would have something very simple for supper, like baked beans on toast. Except that somehow they had run out of bread and there were no baked beans…

  It was getting worse, she thought. Every day, it was getting worse.

  Lying in bed that night Douglas reached for the Touchstone hanging round his neck under his pyjamas, and the picture of the library formed in the air above his bed.

  The lighting in the library was mostly turned off and Gedrus was lying in a sleeping bag on the floor by his desk.

  ‘Hi there!’ He opened an eye to look at Douglas and yawned. ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘I've been thinking,’ said Douglas. ‘You know Kai said the Guardians thought they were the only people who should have a Touchstone?’

  ‘Yes,’ Gedrus nodded.

  ‘And you know they're trying to find anyone, like me, who's got one when they shouldn't have?’

 
; ‘Mmm,’ Gedrus nodded again.

  ‘Why don't they use their Touchstones to ask where I am, and come and get me?’

  ‘Well, they can ask,’ Gedrus had propped himself up on one arm, ‘but I'm not allowed to tell them. It's a privacy thing, you see. I'm not allowed to reveal anything about anyone who's got a Touchstone, unless they've told me to.’

  Douglas let out a sigh of relief. If Gedrus was not allowed to tell the Guardians anything about his whereabouts, then they would not be able to find him - but there was, he realized, still a problem. Suppose a Guardian were to ask Gedrus a question like, ‘Is there anyone who knows where any of the stolen Touchstones are?’ What was to stop Gedrus answering, ‘Yes, there is, there's Ivo Radomir and he lives at number 17 Raglan Road’? And what was to stop the Guardians from coming to interrogate him and finding Douglas that way?

  The reason, when Gedrus explained it, was an interesting one, if a little complicated.

  ‘It's an access thing,’ the librarian said, sitting up in bed with his arms round his knees. ‘Although everything that ever happened is held in the Great Memory, an event has to have been held in the mind of at least two conscious entities before the matrix is large enough for me to retrieve.’

  What this meant, Douglas eventually understood, was that if two people witnessed an event Gedrus could describe it as if he'd been there himself, but if it was something only one person had seen the memory was too small for him to recover. As long as Ivo was the only one who knew that Douglas had a Touchstone, there was no way that Gedrus could tell the Guardians about him. Or about Ivo. It was very reassuring.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ asked Gedrus, stifling a yawn.

  ‘One thing.’ Douglas lay back on his pillow. ‘I know you said building the robot wouldn't be too expensive, but how much is it going to cost exactly? Altogether?’

  ‘Altogether…’ Gedrus reached for a notebook on the floor beside him and opened it. ‘Well, there's only a few things you'll have to buy – you'll get most of the parts from scrap – so the total outlay shouldn't be more than…’ he ran his fingers down the page, ‘… about three hundred pounds.’

  ‘Three hundred!’ Douglas found he was speaking out loud and went back to ‘talking’ without moving his lips in case his mother heard. ‘Where am I going to get hold of that sort of money?’

  But of course Gedrus had an answer to that question as well, and Douglas was beginning to realize that was the whole point.

  Gedrus had the answer to everything.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Mrs Paterson had taken the job at the supermarket because, now that she and Archie were separating, it didn't seem right to sit at home and do nothing. She had thought a job might give her some useful extra money, a chance to meet people and be fun, but the amount of money she earned was very small, no one she met had time to talk and the work had been no fun at all.

  She had asked at the employment agency if they had any jobs that were more interesting, but the woman said no. Not for people without any exams or qualifications. At school, when her friends had been doing their GCSEs, Mrs Paterson had been ballroom dancing. In the living room she had a cabinet full of the trophies and medals she had won – including three for being Home Counties Latin American champion – but trophies in a cupboard did not count for much when it came to getting a job.

  And now on top of everything else, she was increasingly worried about Douglas. He had spent all of Friday evening on his own again. First he had been in the dining room, working for almost two hours on the plans for a robot, and then he went up to his bedroom. When she went up to collect his washing, she had found him lying on his bed, his hands in his pockets, staring at the ceiling. Something was definitely wrong.

  Today was Saturday and as she had the day off she had suggested they go out somewhere together, but Douglas said he wanted to finish the plans for the robot. He had been in the dining room since breakfast, sitting at the table, working busily at his drawing.

  Mrs Paterson spent the morning doing housework, and was polishing the brass fittings on the front door when Hannah Linneker arrived.

  She was wearing a very short black skirt, and a black T-shirt with slashes in each side that looked as if they had been made with a carving knife. As well as the black lipstick and the ring in her nose, she had a barbed wire tattoo round her upper arm and a studded leather collar round her neck.

  ‘I've come to see Douglas,’ she said.

  Mrs Paterson had heard about the headmaster's daughter. Her friend, Amy Collins, said her son David had tried to speak to her once and had his face pushed into a fire bucket. The thought that this girl had somehow become a friend of Douglas was distinctly alarming.

  It was always like this, she thought bitterly, as she invited Hannah inside and led her across the hall to the dining room. Just when you thought things couldn't get worse, they did.

  ‘You've got a visitor,’ she announced, before going back to her polishing.

  She was careful to leave the door open as she left, in case Douglas needed to call for help.

  ‘Do you know anything about the Black Death?’ Hannah was reaching into a black plastic bag as she spoke, and taking out some papers and a pencil.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The Black Death,’ Hannah repeated. ‘My poxy father says I have to do this poxy homework.’ She sat herself the other side of the table from Douglas and spread out the paper in front of her. ‘After what you did with the glaciers, I thought you could help.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Douglas. ‘Right.’

  Hannah had noticed before that Douglas seemed to take everything that happened to him very calmly. She had been half expecting him to say that he had better things to do than someone else's homework, but all he did was sit there and say, ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘There's five questions and the first one is what was the poxy Black Death and how did it start.’ She looked expectantly across the table.

  ‘OK…’ Douglas stared thoughtfully ahead of him for a moment, his hands in his pockets. ‘The Black Death was an outbreak of bubonic plague that began in 1348 and is believed to have been imported to England by fleas carried on black rats…’

  Hannah wrote down the answer as Douglas dictated it. When he had finished that question, he moved effortlessly on to saying how long the Black Death had lasted, the physical symptoms involved, how people tried to cure it and the main economic consequences.

  Each answer he gave filled exactly the right amount of space on the page, he never hesitated, he never changed any words as he spoke and again, the whole thing took barely ten minutes. Hannah, though she didn't say so, was deeply impressed.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said as she stood up and put the papers and pencil back in her bag. She pointed to the plans spread out on the table. ‘What's this?’

  ‘It's the plans for a robot,’ said Douglas. ‘I'm building it with Ivo.’

  The plans were, Hannah could see, extremely complicated. There was a mass of intricate detail and a good deal of writing, very little of which she could understand. There was an arrow pointing to one section that was ‘the immodium mobilizer’, there was a detailed blow-up of something called a ‘linear agitator unit’ and careful instructions on precautions needed to put together the ‘registered pulse annotator’.

  ‘You did all this yourself?’ she asked.

  ‘Ivo did the main design,’ Douglas said modestly. ‘I've just been putting in the details.’

  ‘And you're going to build it?’

  ‘We're starting it today,’ said Douglas. ‘Ivo's out at the moment getting the things we'll need, and we'll begin putting it together this afternoon.’ He paused. ‘You could join us if you like.’

  For a brief moment Hannah was almost tempted to say yes. It was not easy, always being on her own. But then she remembered that she already had plenty of friends. They just happened to live a hundred and fifty miles away.

  ‘I'm not really interested in robots,’ she said, and she pic
ked up her bag and left.

  Ivo had had a very successful morning. Douglas had given him a list from Gedrus, of the things they would need to build the robot, with a little map of where to find them, and the mission had been more successful than he could have believed.

  Pushing a wheelbarrow he had taken from home, he walked to the addresses on the list and found everything exactly where Gedrus had said it would be. The barrow was now filled with the starter motor from an abandoned car, the framework of an old go-kart he had found in a dustbin, some coils of wire that had been dumped under a hedge by the dual carriageway, and a huge assortment of scrap metal mostly taken from skips. Along with the stuff he already had in his shed, Ivo now had almost everything they would need.

  He came back to Western Avenue to collect Douglas and the plans, and then the two boys pushed the wheelbarrow back to Ivo's house. The things that Gedrus said they would not need for a few days, they stored in an outhouse that had once been a coal store. Everything else, they put in the little shed at the bottom of the garden that Ivo used as a workshop.

  ‘I suppose this is what Kai is doing,’ Ivo said as he gazed happily around at the mountain of loose metal and electrical parts that covered the floor. ‘Gedrus will have told her what to get and where from, and she'll be going round collecting the stuff just like we did.’

  ‘Except she's building a spaceship,’ said Douglas.

  ‘Yes…’ For a moment Ivo wondered if they shouldn't have been more ambitious themselves, but then realized a spaceship probably wouldn't fit in his shed. The robot was a good start, he decided. There would be time for all the other things later.

  ‘How's she getting on?’ Ivo was looking for somewhere to pin up the plans. ‘Have you heard? From Gedrus?’

  ‘He's not allowed to tell me about Kai,’ said Douglas. ‘It's a privacy thing. He can't reveal information about anyone who's got a Touchstone.’

  ‘Oh.’ Ivo was standing on an oil drum and pointed to length of copper tubing on the floor. ‘Could you pass up that piping?’

  Douglas passed it up and Ivo stacked it neatly on a shelf.