The Portal (3 page)

‘Yes…' Uncle Larry nodded. ‘That's the cover story.' He stepped across the office to the desk under the window, picked up the phone, and began tapping in a number. ‘And I'm afraid the truth is going to come as a bit of a shock. Normally, I'd take a bit of time to prepare you for this, but in the circumstances I think we just have to dive straight in…'

As he pressed the final button, a section of wall on the right of the room disappeared. One moment there was a wall with a picture and a skirting board, and the next there was an opening to a space the size of a broom cupboard.

‘If you'd like to join me?' Uncle Larry had replaced the phone on the desk and was already stepping into the space. ‘All perfectly safe, I promise.'

William opened his mouth to speak, then changed his mind and, after a moment's hesitation, walked over to join him. As he stepped inside, the floor disappeared and he found himself dropping through empty space.

‘It's a lift,' said Uncle Larry, shouting so that
he could be heard over the noise of William's scream. ‘Takes us down a couple of hundred feet. Quite fun when you get used to it. There we are, you see?'

The floor had reappeared and a dazed William looked out into a large circular room with a stairwell in the centre and a series of doors running round the outside.

‘This is William,' said Uncle Larry, stepping out into the room. ‘I'm just going to show him around, OK?'

‘Yes, of course, Larry.' The voice was a woman's, soft and gentle. ‘Welcome to the station, William.'

William looked round, but couldn't see who was speaking. It was hard to tell, but the voice seemed to be coming from the ceiling.

‘If you could say something,' said Uncle Larry, ‘so Emma can recognize your voice? She's in charge of security, you see.'

‘Why… Where… What is this place?' said William.

‘Thank you. Now…' Uncle Larry pointed to the first door on their left. ‘That's what your dad calls his pantry.' He pointed to the other doors in turn. ‘Kitchen, wardrobe, recreation room, main reception and visitors' suites, but the important bit… is over here.'

He walked briskly to a doorway on the far side, pushed it open, and waited for William to follow him inside.

The room was about ten metres long, wider at the far end than it was near the door, and entirely white. The walls, the floor and the ceiling all seemed to be of the same material, with no visible join where they met. It was brightly lit, though William could not see where the light was coming from, and the only furniture was a single, heavily upholstered chair by the wall on the right. Above it was a hook, on which hung a large white dressing gown of the sort provided by upmarket hotels.

In the centre of the room was what looked like a pool, set into the middle of the floor. It was circular, about two metres in diameter and the lip, made of the same material as the walls and floor, was about fifteen centimetres high. Inside, there was a milky liquid that rippled and swirled, though the more he looked at it, the more William wondered if it was really a liquid at all, and then he found that staring at it made him slightly seasick.

‘That's where your parents went.' Uncle Larry pointed at the pool. ‘At least I think it is.'

‘What… what is it?' asked William.

‘It's a Portal,' said Uncle Larry. ‘A Star Portal.'

‘The Portals,' Uncle Larry explained, ‘are the glue that binds together the worlds of the Federation.'

He was sitting on a swivel chair in the room he had described as Mr Seward's ‘pantry', pointing to a chart on the wall that was densely covered in lines and dots.

‘It's a bit like a spider's web, you see? The dots where these lines join are the Portals and if you jump into a Portal here,' he tapped his finger on one of the dots, ‘the marvels of time-tunnel technology mean you will instantly come out here.' He tapped at the next dot in the web. ‘You follow?'

William nodded. There was no problem understanding what Uncle Larry was telling him. It was
believing
it that was the tricky bit.

‘The only limitation is that if you build a tunnel longer than three or four light years, what comes out this end may not be
exactly
what went in at the other, which can be a little discouraging for passengers. So out here on the Rim, where your Federation worlds might be anything up to twenty light years apart, every four parsecs, you have a booster station like this one, and your star traveller comes back into real space for six hours, lets his ankles get back to their proper size, rehydrates, and then… carries on.'

Alongside the chart on the wall, William noticed, was a cork board covered in photographs. There were dozens of them. Mostly pictures of his father with men and women that William had never met. No, that wasn't entirely true. Looking closer he found he did recognize some of the faces. They belonged to people who had visited his father on business, or shared his mother's interest in plants. She was in some of the pictures as well, standing in the garden or in the kitchen upstairs, laughing. You could actually
see
her laughing, because if you looked at any of the pictures long enough, the images began to move…

‘Near the Hub, of course,' Uncle Larry indicated a spot at the centre of the chart, ‘you've got these vast star gates throwing out capsules of half a million passengers at a time, but out here
on the Rim the Portals are mostly used for transporting bricks, and we don't get more than two or three passengers a week. But you still need someone to manage the place… and that's where your dad came in.'

A lot of the pictures, William noticed, had been signed. ‘Thanks for everything, Jack!' ‘To Jack and Lois, with all best wishes, Ambassador B'Wwath.' ‘Good luck, Jack! And thanks for all the fish!'

‘I mean, you
could
build a station in deep space, bring in all the raw materials and supplies, then try and find someone who doesn't mind living there on his own for thirty years…' Uncle Larry gave a dismissive snort. ‘But it's a lot simpler if you can find a planet that already has most of the things you need and someone who already lives there.'

At the bottom, William noticed, there was a picture of himself on his last birthday, sitting at the kitchen table with his mother. And another of Daniel, with the sheep's skull that had started his latest obsession, and others, more faded and creased, that dated right back to when they were both toddlers and learning to walk.

‘And the customers love it, of course! It gives them a glimpse of a native culture that under normal circumstances they'd never be allowed to visit. So everyone's happy and the only thing a
supervisor like me has to do is call in occasionally to sort out any problems.' Uncle Larry paused and looked thoughtfully at his feet. ‘Like this one.'

To Daniel's delight, the dead bird was a magpie. He didn't have a magpie skull and the head was quite undamaged. He'd cut it from the body with his penknife, and was now burying it in an ants' nest. When he came back in a week or so, the bones and beak would have been picked clean and he could take it home.

Amy watched from a safe distance. She was wearing new jeans with her favourite top, and was anxious not to get blood on either of them. Daniel carefully marked the spot where he had buried the head, wiped his hands on his trousers and they began walking back up the lane.

‘Do you know when your parents are coming back?' asked Amy.

‘No,' said Daniel, but privately he hoped it would not be too soon. He was having far too much fun. It was a Saturday morning, and no one had said a word yet about schoolwork, or tidying his room, or cleaning out the henhouse. Life was a lot simpler with no parents.

‘You're bleeding,' said Amy.

Daniel looked down and saw there was blood dripping from a finger of his left hand. He must
have cut himself when he was cutting up the magpie, he thought, and wondered what he should do.

Amy took a tissue from the sleeve of her T-shirt – it was the purple one with
Bad Attitude
written in black across the front – and wrapped it round Daniel's finger. Then she took the scrunchie from her hair and used it to hold the tissue in place.

‘You'll need to wash it when we get home,' she said, ‘or it'll get infected.'

If he did fall ill, she thought, she would have to nurse him, and she wondered what she would wear. Uniforms could be quite attractive if they fitted properly. Maybe her mother could make one of those blue tunics, and the white hat thing would be interesting…

‘When I came over after getting your message,' said Uncle Larry, ‘I realized there were only three places your parents could have gone.'

He was standing in the kitchen area of the station, next door to the pantry. It was large and well-equipped, though a little cluttered at the moment as no one had done the washing-up for a couple of days.

‘My first thought was that they'd gone outside somewhere. They're not supposed to both leave the farm at the same time but we all bend the
rules occasionally, and I thought maybe they fancied a trip out or something.' Uncle Larry chose a mug that seemed slightly less dirty than the others and held it under the spout of a machine that, with a great deal of hissing, produced a trickle of hot water on to a tea bag. ‘Except they hadn't.'

‘How do you know?' asked William.

‘There's a perimeter fence round the farm,' said Uncle Larry. ‘Part of the security system. It tracks anyone coming in and out. Emma says neither of them left the farm bounds, and I've searched the house and the grounds and there's not a trace of them.' He sipped his tea and grimaced. ‘So… the second possibility was that they were somewhere in the station – maybe they'd had an accident and were lying somewhere, injured. But I've searched both floors, all the engine rooms, storerooms, access shafts – and they're not here either. Which only leaves option three.'

‘They've gone through the Portal?'

‘Exactly.' Uncle Larry frowned. ‘Though I still can't believe it. I mean, why? And your dad of all people…'

‘If they did go through the Portal,' said William, ‘where would they have gone?'

‘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.