The Portal (6 page)

‘He got here about an hour ago. He's in the sitting room having a…' but William found he was speaking to an empty space. Still buttoning his trousers, Uncle Larry was already out the door.

‘I am
so
sorry I wasn't here to meet you, General.' Uncle Larry pushed open the door to the sitting room. ‘And I do apologize for there being no one here to look after you, but…' He stopped, taking in the General sitting on the sofa, his mug of tea in one hand and the last of the sandwiches in the other. ‘Is… is everything all right?'

‘Everything's fine with me,' said the General cheerfully. ‘Have you found Jack and Lois yet?'

‘Good… No… Well, I've been to Byroid V,'
Uncle Larry sat on the sofa opposite, his eyes still darting round to check that everything was as it should be, ‘but there's no sign of them.'

‘Ah.' The General nodded thoughtfully. ‘So where are they?'

‘I'm not sure,' said Uncle Larry, ‘but we'll sort it out eventually… Have you got everything? I mean… is there anything you need?'

William appeared with the box of chocolates, which he placed on the table between the sofas.

‘Don't worry about me,' said the General. ‘I've been looked after very well.'

‘So what happens next?' William asked Uncle Larry the following morning. ‘About my parents?'

‘Well, I've been thinking about that.' Uncle Larry was sitting in the kitchen with a large mug of tea, some of which he had already managed to spill down the front of his suit. ‘And I think the next thing is for me to get back to Byroid V.' He stood up and walked over to the window. ‘If your parents have gone through the Portals to another world, the sooner I catch up with them and find out why, the better.'

‘You can do that, can you?' asked William. ‘Catch up with them, I mean?'

‘Oh, yes!' Uncle Larry nodded confidently. ‘You can't travel round the Federation without leaving
some sort of trace. I'll go to the next worlds down the line, you see, root around a bit… I'll find them all right!' He turned to William. ‘The only snag is I can't look after things here while I'm doing it. Can you manage without me a bit longer?'

‘You mean… do the bricks?'

‘There'll be a couple of passengers to look after as well, but I'll run over the routine with you before I go.'

‘It's Monday tomorrow,' said William. ‘I'm supposed to be at school.'

‘Yes…' Uncle Larry frowned. ‘I'm afraid you'll have to miss that. But it's only a few days. I'll be back Wednesday. Wednesday evening at the latest.'

‘Oh,' said William. ‘OK.'

It didn't feel as if he had a great deal of choice.

‘Good!' Uncle Larry smiled. ‘Now, how about you have some breakfast and then join me in the station. We'll go over the details down there.' He marched briskly to the door, spilling tea on the floor as he went, but stopped in the doorway.

‘By the way,' he said, ‘thank you for looking after things last night. General Ghool is an important man in the Federation. I wouldn't like him to have got the impression that the Portal Service wasn't coping with a little crisis and… well, thank you.'

*

William had his breakfast, and went to make sure Daniel was all right before going down to Uncle Larry. He found his brother on the terrace outside the sitting room with Amy, busily feeding sticks into a fire he had lit in the base of the barbecue. Beside him on the ground was a ball of earth about the size of a large grapefruit.

‘He's cooking a hedgehog,' said Amy when William appeared. ‘You have to wrap it in clay first and then put it in a fire.'

‘It says in the book that you cook it for a couple of hours, then when you peel off the clay all the spikes come off.' Daniel looked suspiciously at his brother. ‘I suppose you've come to tell me I can't do it.'

‘Well…' said William.

‘Hedgehogs aren't poisonous!' protested Daniel. ‘People have been eating them since forever.'

‘Yes,' said William, ‘but I just wondered if it was dead when you found it.'

Daniel looked at him. ‘Why?'

‘Because I remember Dad saying once that you should never eat anything without knowing how it died. If it had some disease, then you'd get it as well, wouldn't you?'

Daniel was still thinking about this when Mrs Duggan and Timber appeared. She came over to stand by William.

‘Heard your brother was a bit poorly last night,' she said.

‘Yes,' said William, ‘but he's OK now.'

Mrs Duggan grunted. ‘Your uncle around?'

‘He's working,' said William. ‘I could get him for you?'

‘No need,' said Mrs Duggan. ‘Only wanted to ask about my money.'

William remembered that Mrs Duggan usually came up to the house on a Saturday to receive her wages for the work she did on the farm. She had come up yesterday but, as there had been no Mrs Seward to give her the money, she had gone away again.

‘I'll tell him,' he said. ‘I'm sure he'll sort it out.'

Remembering the quantity of notes the old man had stuffed in his wallet, he thought there should be no problem finding enough to give her.

‘No rush.' Mrs Duggan nodded in the direction of Daniel. ‘What's he doing?'

‘He's cooking a hedgehog,' said William.

‘Don't let him eat it,' said Mrs Duggan, and William was about to promise that he wouldn't, when he realized Mrs Duggan had been talking to the dog.

‘Money was one of the things I had to tell you about,' said Uncle Larry, when William told him
about Mrs Duggan needing her wages. ‘Any time you need any, it's in here.'

They were standing by the desk in the pantry, and Uncle Larry pulled open a drawer. It was filled to the brim with neat packets of ten, twenty and fifty pound notes. There had to be thousands, no,
hundreds
of thousands of pounds there, thought William.

‘If I need any money… I take it?'

‘Your dad always wrote down what he took in here.' Uncle Larry pointed to a battered notebook lying on top of the money with
Cash
written on the front. ‘But the important thing is to make sure you let me know when you're running out. So I can organize getting some more.'

‘More…' said William. ‘Right…'

‘And you probably ought to have a look at this if you have a moment.' Uncle Larry picked up a large grey book with no title on the front, and dropped it on the desk with a thump. ‘It's the
Station Manager's Manual
. Tells you all the things you should and shouldn't do.'

William picked up the book. It was large and heavy. ‘I have to read all this?'

‘Technically, yes,' said Uncle Larry, ‘as you're the temporary manager. But don't panic. Most of it's common sense. As long as you do the bricks, look after the passengers, and don't let anyone
outside know about all this…' he gestured to the station around them, ‘…you can't go far wrong. And if you're stuck you can always ask Emma.' He looked round the office. ‘Now, what else do I have to show you?'

There were several things Uncle Larry had to show William. There were the translator pods, in case anyone came through the station without an implant and William couldn't understand what they were saying. There was the code for the storage seals on the food and drink cabinets, and there were the medipacs.

‘I should have told you about these before,' said Uncle Larry, pulling the box off the wall in the central lobby. ‘There's half a dozen of them scattered over the station and they're very easy to use.' He explained how the patches worked out what was wrong and sent the information back to the box so that it could provide a cure.

‘It gets a bit more complicated if you've got an arm missing or you're bleeding to death,' he said, putting the medipac back on the wall and heading for the Portal, ‘but the principle's still the same. You do whatever the box tells you. It's very clever. Even gives you a couple of options if your patient's already dead.'

Standing by the Portal he began taking off his suit. ‘You've got the letter for Mrs Duggan?'

‘Yes,' said William.

‘Well, don't forget. If there's any problems, ask Emma to send me a message on the bricks. If it's an emergency, you can always send it to Brin on Q'vaar. He's only a station away and he can be with you in a blink.'

‘OK,' said William.

‘But you'll be fine, I know you will. And I'll be back on Wednesday.' Uncle Larry stepped on to the floor of the Portal in his shorts. ‘And by then we'll have this whole business sorted out. One way or another.'

After he'd gone, William bent down to pick up the pile of clothes and took them through to the laundry, hoping as he did so that Uncle Larry was right.

He wanted very much for everything to be sorted out.

The envelope that William took down to Mrs Duggan contained her wages – Uncle Larry had put in a couple of extra twenty pound notes as a thank you for looking after William and Daniel the night their parents had ‘gone on holiday' – and a letter to explain that William would not be going to school for the next three days.

Mrs Duggan read it carefully while sitting on the footplate of the tractor parked outside her cottage.

‘Says here you're going to be off sick,' she said when she'd finished.

‘Yes,' said William, ‘but I won't really be ill. It's just that Uncle Larry needs me to help with his work for a few days.'

Mrs Duggan nodded, counted her money and tucked it carefully into a pocket of her dungarees before standing up.

‘Thought I might ask you all to lunch,' she said.

‘Lunch?'

Mrs Duggan gestured to the kitchen door. ‘Got a chicken in the oven. Thought you might appreciate someone else doing the cooking.'

‘Thank you,' said William. ‘Yes, we would.'

Mrs Duggan's lunch, he realized later, was the first real meal he and Daniel had eaten since Mum and Dad had disappeared. Mrs Duggan had done proper vegetables and gravy to go with the roast chicken, and there was an apple pie and ice cream for afters. It tasted very good, and sitting round the table in the tiny kitchen was very warm and pleasant. When the meal was over, and Daniel and Amy had disappeared upstairs and Mrs Duggan said she had to get back to cleaning out the fuel line on the tractor, William found a part of himself didn't want to leave.

‘Shame your uncle couldn't join us,' said Mrs Duggan as she walked him to the door.

‘Yes,' William agreed. He couldn't say that Uncle Larry was by now on a planet nearly four light years away, so he had simply said that he was ‘working' and couldn't come.

‘Next time, eh?' said Mrs Duggan.

‘Next time,' William agreed. He thanked her again for the lunch, and set off back up the track to the farmhouse.

As he left, he heard Mrs Duggan quietly asking Timber to get her a screwdriver – a flathead this time, not a Phillips.

The farmhouse, when he got back, seemed empty and cold. He thought of doing his homework but, as he wasn't going into school on Monday, decided there wasn't much point and sat on a sunlounger on the terrace instead, trying to read the
Station Manager's Manual
.

Looking out over the valley, he realized that he was worried about his parents in a way that he hadn't been since the day he and Daniel had come home to find them gone. Somehow, Uncle Larry had always made it seem that finding them was just a minor inconvenience that would soon be sorted out – annoying but not the sort of thing to cause any real anxiety. Now, he wasn't so sure. The feeling was growing inside him that whatever had happened was more serious than Uncle Larry was letting on.

The house still felt empty, even when Daniel came home at six o'clock for supper. Not that Daniel himself seemed to notice. Mrs Duggan had given him the feet of the chicken they had eaten and he sat at the kitchen table, picking open the muscles with a knife and sorting out which ones you had to pull to make the toes move. Then, when he'd finished with that, he began cleaning the hedgehog's skull with the sharpened end of a matchstick.

As the evening wore on, William found he was becoming more worried rather than less and he was quite glad, after doing the bricks at a quarter to nine, when it was time for bed. For some reason, the words Larry had spoken as he left kept repeating themselves in his head.

‘I'll be back on Wednesday,' he had said, ‘And by then we'll have this whole business sorted out. One way or another.'

It was that phrase ‘one way or another' that bothered him.

The next morning William was too busy to do much worrying. There were the bricks at a quarter past seven – he had set three alarm clocks to make sure he woke up in time. There was Daniel to wake up and get ready for school – he thought he should be allowed to stay home as well, but William persuaded him that it wasn't fair to let Amy go on her own. And there were all the preparations for the passenger who would be arriving that morning – towels and soap to lay out, food to prepare, and cleaning machines to order into action.

The passenger was a round, cheerful-looking man called Hippo White. William had no idea if that was his real name or a translation of it, but Emma said he was a trader who made his living
buying items in one part of the Federation and selling them in another. Dressed in a blue tunic and a pair of soft, baggy trousers that tucked into his boots, he came shooting up through the Portal a little after nine.

‘Hi there! You must be William!' He held out a hand in greeting as he stepped over the lip of the Portal. ‘Any news of your parents yet?'

‘Not yet,' said William.