The Portal (13 page)

‘I think it's all right,' William told him, ‘but I haven't tried it out yet.'

‘Well, let's do that now, shall we?' Porlock took the toy, twisted the lid, pressed each of the two green buttons on the bottom and placed it back on the floor. With a
zzzzip
sound it began to move, marching across the carpet, and then disappeared.

William was wondering where it had gone, when he heard a
brrrr
noise and spun round to find the toy chugging up from behind. For some reason the sight of it made him laugh.

‘Believe me,' said Porlock, ‘if you're two years old, you can't get enough of it! It's such a
marvellous little toy!' His face beamed with pleasure. ‘And I'm very grateful!'

‘Well, it wasn't really me,' said William. ‘Dad had done the tricky bit.'

‘Of course.' Porlock was still staring at the toy, moving around the floor. ‘I hope you'll let him know how much I appreciate it? When he gets back?'

‘Yes,' said William. ‘Yes, I will.'

After that, William started spending quite a lot of his time down at the workshop. In the hours when he had to be on call for a passenger, or in the evenings, when Timber was looking after Daniel and Amy, the workshop was where he could usually be found.

At first, he simply looked at things, and asked Emma to explain what they were. Amongst the items on the table, laid out for repair, he found a suitcase that made whatever you put in it weigh less, a machine that taught you maths by stimulating the pleasure centres in your brain when you got the right answer, and a buzzbot with a built-in shield, that could follow someone and send back pictures of whatever they were doing.

Almost as interesting as any of the objects he found were the tools William's father used to repair them. There were devices that could see inside
machines so that you didn't have to take them apart to find out what was wrong. There were saws that worked without noise or effort and that could cut with an accuracy measured in nanometres, and glues and welders that could join anything to anything with a bond that was both unbreakable and invisible.

In the shelves and cabinets on the walls on each side of the workshop were boxes and drawers containing thousands of components and parts that could be used to build or repair almost anything. William wondered where his father had acquired them all and it was Brin who told him they had mostly come from passengers. All the regulars knew of his father's passion for old machines and they would bring him odd items they knew might interest him.

From looking at the tools and finding out what they did, it was a short step for William to start using them. According to Emma, there were several items on his father's list which, like Porlock's marvellous little toy, were fairly simple to repair. He worked cautiously, only tackling jobs that the station computer thought were suitable and, in the course of the next two weeks, restored a working model of a Star Portal (including figures that would vanish and reappear) and a device called a Universal Coat, which apparently kept
you warm and dry in even the coldest and wettest weather.

The weather outside was in fact deliciously warm and sunny, but William found himself spending more and more time in the lower level of the station, and it was while he was down there that he found half a dozen shields in one of the drawers at the back of his father's workshop. He gave them to Daniel.

‘I thought if you had these when you took passengers out for a walk,' he said, passing Daniel the egg-shaped objects after explaining what they did, ‘you could get right up close to animals and things, and they'd never know you were there.'

He was nearly right. As Daniel pointed out, you still had to be careful about being upwind and not making any noise, but if his tours of the surrounding fields and woodland had been impressive before, the results when he and his party were invisible were truly extraordinary. Passengers came back having seen the most astonishing sights, and whenever any of them wrote afterwards to say thank you for their stay, Daniel's ‘tours' were almost always top of the list of things they had enjoyed.

Though not all Daniel's ‘trips' went as smoothly as he would have liked.

A venta and her two cousins arrived on a Tuesday evening and William knew they were going to be trouble even before the first of them floated up through the Portal. Brin had sent him a warning with the bricks two hours before.

‘Watch out for these three,' his message had said. ‘Lock up the alcohol, and
don't
let them out of the station.'

Not quite sure what to expect, William had cleared the drinks cupboard in the sitting room, told Emma not to let anyone up to the house unaccompanied, and locked the doors to all the rooms in the station that weren't for public access.

The girls were slightly older than William and, as they floated up in turn through the Portal, the
first thing he noticed was that they were all alarmingly beautiful. Derma was short, with dark curly hair and soft, full lips, Hermione was taller with long, straight hair that hung down her back, and Aventa, the last to arrive, had the biggest, brownest, shiniest eyes that William had ever seen.

As he tried to say a few words of welcome, the girls were already moving past him and out to the lobby. Derma walked straight across to the sitting room, saying she was thirsty. Hermione, after trying the handles on several doors, disappeared into the wardrobe room and William found himself standing in the lobby with Aventa.

‘What's your name?' she asked, standing rather closer to William than was comfortable.

‘William,' he said, ‘and if there's anything you'd like me to –'

‘What we'd like, William…' Aventa moved even closer, ‘…is a little trip outside. Do you think you could arrange that?'

‘I'm sorry.' William blushed. ‘But this is a restricted planet…'

‘We know it's restricted.' Derma had appeared from the clothes room with half a dozen dresses over one arm. ‘That's why we want to go outside.'

‘All those things that nobody's allowed to see!' Hermione emerged from the drawing room with a glass in one hand and a miniature bottle of
apricot brandy that William had somehow missed. ‘That's what makes it so exciting!'

‘We know you're not supposed to let people out,' said Aventa, ‘but you do, don't you?'

All three girls were standing very close to William. Hermione had taken his arm on one side and Derma was resting her head on his shoulder on the other.

‘We just want to see what it's like, you know?' Aventa's voice was low and husky. ‘It wouldn't be for long and we'd promise to do whatever you said.'

William found himself sweating slightly. ‘I'm sorry.' He tried to keep his voice low and calm. ‘But… it's not possible.'

‘No?' Aventa moved even closer and looked up at William with large, appealing eyes. ‘Are you sure? Not even for a few minutes?'

William hesitated, but only for a moment. He had come across girls like Aventa before. In his tutor group at school there had been a girl called Zara, who had been able to persuade boys to do almost anything. Even male members of staff had been known to melt under her gaze and calmly agree that, yes, it would be fine if her coursework was handed in a month late. He knew that if he once let these girls outside, he would be lost.

‘I'm sorry,' he repeated firmly, ‘but no.'

‘Ah, well…' Aventa smiled, and tapped gently with her forefinger on her lower lip. ‘If we can't go outside, we'll have to think of something else to do, won't we?' The eyes grew even bigger and rounder. ‘Do you have any suggestions… William?'

William showed the girls the kitchen. There were, he explained, several items of Earth food that were usually popular with visitors and, if they wished, he would be happy to provide them. It was with a certain amount of relief – and a tinge of disappointment – that he watched them go off to their rooms, and he was left alone with the cooking.

His cooking was rather good these days, and he was busy for almost an hour, making a ham and mushroom pizza and a chocolate cake before coming back out to the lobby, where the first thing that struck him was the quiet.

‘Where are they?' he asked Emma. ‘Is everything all right?'

‘The passengers,' Emma told him, ‘have left the station and –'

‘What?' A wave of panic went through William's body. ‘What do you mean they've left? How did they get out without the password?'

‘Your brother came down to see if they would like to take a trip outside,' said Emma, ‘and the girls accepted. I think you'll find…'

William was not listening. He was already striding to the lift and, once upstairs in the house, calling for his brother. It was no good. Walking through to the kitchen, he knew the house was empty. The girls had gone.

As William stood outside the back door of the farmhouse, kicking himself for not keeping a closer eye on them and wondering what to do next, Daniel and Amy appeared, running up the path from the valley.

‘What happened?' demanded William. ‘Where are they?'

‘They've gone,' said Daniel, his face white and scared. ‘I took them down to the river and they… disappeared.'

The story came out in bits and pieces, with Amy chipping in the odd detail. Daniel had come down to the station to ask William if his passengers might be interested in a trip outside and Aventa had met him in the central lobby. She had told him they were definitely interested and that William had told them all about his brother and the amazing trips that he organized, and the sooner they started the better.

‘She told us you didn't want to be disturbed as you were busy in the kitchen,' said Amy, ‘so Daniel took them upstairs.'

‘Down by the river, I gave them the shields,'
said Daniel miserably, ‘so we could get close to a swan's nest and they… disappeared.'

‘You don't think the same thing's happened to them as to your parents, do you?' asked Amy.

‘No,' said William. ‘This is quite different. Call your mother, will you? We may need Timber to help track them down.'

In fact, William found the girls without Timber. On a still summer's evening sound travels for miles, and the noise of three giggling, whooping girls gave William a fair indication of where they were.

They were on the road past the junction at the bottom of the hill, playing a game with passing cars. When William arrived he was in time to see Aventa, in a long white dress, standing in the middle of the road, waving her hands to stop a large, silver Mercedes. As the car slowed to a stop and the elderly woman inside wound down her window to ask if she could help, Aventa's answer was to stare at her for a moment, then disappear. At the same time, the other girls, also holding shields that made them invisible, opened and closed the side doors on the car, while Aventa suddenly reappeared with her face only inches from the terrified driver who screamed, slammed the car into gear and drove off as fast as she could,
leaving the three girls doubled up with laughter in the road.

‘All right,' said William. ‘We're going back to the station now.'

The girls spun round to face him.

‘We will come back when we're ready,' said Hermione haughtily.

‘No,' said William. ‘You have to come back now.'

‘He doesn't seem to understand, does he,' said Derma, ‘that we tell him what to do, not the other way round?'

‘Ignore him,' said Aventa. ‘Come on!' And she blinked out of view. An instant later the other girls did the same.

William turned on the torch that he had been given by Hippo White and the figures of the three girls showed up as green-glowing silhouettes, standing in the middle of the road.

‘You've got thirty seconds,' he said. ‘If you don't turn round and start walking back to the station in that time I'm going to use this.'

There was a moment's silence as the three girls looked at the torch William was holding in one hand, and the gun he carried in the other. Derma took a step towards the woods on her right.

‘If you try and run off into the trees,' said William, ‘you don't even get the thirty seconds.'

Derma stopped moving.

‘How dare you! How
dare
you point that thing at me!' Aventa's huge eyes were filled with anger. ‘Do you know who I am? Do you know who my father is?'

‘Twenty seconds,' said William. ‘And I really would advise you to start walking.'

‘We are not walking anywhere!' said Aventa proudly. ‘My father is the fourth richest man in the Federation, and when he hears that someone threatened me with a gun, you will wish you had never been born. We will come back to the station when we want to and when we do you had better be ready with an apology.'

‘Ten seconds,' said William.

‘You're bluffing,' said Aventa. ‘You'd never dare!' As the last seconds ticked away, William could see the dawning realization in Aventa's eyes that she might have made a mistake. But none of them were moving back to the farmhouse by then, so he shot them.

The PS
11
, commonly known as a wham-gun, acts directly on the motor signals from the brain, cutting off all orders that might move any of the body's major muscle groups. Rather cleverly, organs, like the heart, lungs and even the eyelids are not affected, so that anyone shot by a PS
11
is still able to see, think and breathe. They just can't do anything else.

William was pulling the last of the three bodies to the side of the road when Timber appeared, followed by Mrs Duggan on a tractor.

‘Need any help?' she said as she turned off the engine and climbed down.

‘I could do with a hand getting them back to the house,' said William.

‘No problem.' Mrs Duggan bent down to lift the body of Derma and slung it briskly over her shoulder. ‘Plenty of room on the floor of the cab.'