The Portal (7 page)

‘I must say, it all sounds very odd.' Hippo followed William out to the lobby, pulling a small suitcase behind him. ‘Brin was telling me about it. Where've they gone, do you think?'

‘I don't know,' said William.

‘Well, not to worry. Larry'll track them down.' Hippo paused in the lobby and looked round. ‘Am I in the green suite?'

‘Yes,' said William. ‘If you'd like to follow me…'

‘It's all right, I know the way!' Hippo was already striding towards the door. ‘But if you could manage a pot of… um… what's it called…'

‘Tea?' suggested William.

‘That's the one!' said Hippo, and he disappeared into his room.

William made a pot of tea and took it, with a plate of sandwiches, across to the green suite. Inside, Hippo was dictating a series of messages
to Emma that he wanted sending out with the next brick and he gestured to William to leave the tray on the table.

William did as he was told and went back to sit in the pantry. He opened the
Station Manager's Manual
and settled down to read the chapter on ‘Defence of the Station: The Use of Small Arms', which gave all the rules prescribing how and when it was permissible to use which weapons from the armoury. He was still reading – and making the occasional trip to the weapons room so that Emma could show him which guns the book was talking about – when Hippo finally emerged from his room nearly three hours later.

‘Your father didn't leave anything for me, did he?' he asked as he walked round to the pantry and peered inside. ‘Flat… round… about this big?'

‘Dad didn't leave anything for anybody,' said William. ‘He just disappeared.' Then, seeing the look of disappointment on Hippo's face, he added, ‘Was it something important?'

‘Well, it was quite.' Hippo thrust his hands in his pockets. ‘He was making something for me, and he said he'd have it ready for the next time I came through. Byroid's the big market you see. That's where I need it for.'

‘Oh,' said William.

‘Have you checked his workshop?' asked Hippo. ‘I mean, do you know if he had a chance to finish it?'

‘Dad had a workshop?' said William.

‘Oh, yes! Down there!' Hippo pointed to the stairs in the centre of the lobby.

William had not explored the lower level of the station yet. Uncle Larry had told him there was nothing down there of any importance. ‘If I knew where the workshop was, I could look,' he said, ‘but…'

‘I know where it is!' Hippo was already heading for the stairs. ‘Let me show you!'

Lights came on automatically as they descended the spiral staircase and, at the bottom, William found himself in an area almost identical to the floor above, though with seven doors leading from the lobby instead of nine.

‘This is where the Old Portal used to be,' said Hippo, gesturing vaguely around him as he marched purposefully to a door on the right, ‘and your dad's workshop is in here.'

William followed him into a room that was about the same size as the kitchen on the floor above. Workbenches ran along the walls, there was a row of cupboards at the far end and, in the centre of the room, a large table contained a
variety of strange objects, most of them in pieces.

Halfway down the workbench on the right was a battered swivel chair, with photos pinned to the wall in front of it. As William looked at one of them, the image of his mother smiled and waved back at him.

‘Found it!' Hippo was standing at the table holding up a flat disc about half a metre in diameter. When he let go, it floated gently down and then hovered a few centimetres above the floor. ‘And it looks as if your father's worked his usual magic!'

‘What is it?' asked William.

‘Grav-sled,' said Hippo. ‘Any chance we could try it outside?'

The idea of a grav-sled, William discovered, was that you stood on it, leaned in a particular direction, and the grav-sled took you there. Quite fast.

‘They were
the
way to get to work a couple of years back,' said Hippo, stepping carefully on to the disc as it floated above the ground outside the back door. ‘They sold thousands of them until the accidents.' His face clouded for a moment. ‘Sales sort of petered out after that, but your dad reckoned he could put in a modified Tenebrian force field and the thing would be perfectly safe.' He balanced on the disc for a moment. ‘So, let's give it a try…'

He leaned to one side and the sled began moving down towards the barn, rapidly gathering speed as it went. By the time it hit the side of the barn, William thought, it was going fast enough for Hippo to kill himself, but nothing happened – to Hippo or to the side of the barn. Instead, something cushioned its stop and a quite unharmed Hippo waved cheerily back at William.

‘Seems to work,' he shouted. ‘Didn't feel a thing!'

For nearly half an hour, Hippo flung the grav-sled around the sky with an ever increasing confidence. He ran it into walls and trees, he tried looping the loop to see if he could fall off and he flew the sled around the house and across the fields with an awesome speed.

‘That is
excellent!
' he said, a little breathlessly, when he finally came to a halt. ‘Couldn't be better. Want to give it a try?'

William gave it a try. He moved a little more cautiously than Hippo, and it was a while before he got the knack of how far to lean and for how long, but after a few trips round the house and down the valley to the river he had to admit that it was seriously good fun.

‘Let's hope they agree with you on Byroid,' said Hippo, ‘because if they do I'm going to be a very rich man. Now,' he tucked the disc under his arm,
‘the one thing we need to do before I go is find out how much I owe your dad and settle up.'

William looked rather blank.

‘It'll be in the book in his workshop,' said Hippo confidently. ‘Your dad always wrote everything down.'

The two of them returned to the station and, sure enough, lying on the desk in the workshop, William found a large blue notebook.
Item 639
, said his father's careful hand-writing, was
Hippo's grav-sled,
and there followed a list of the things he had done to it. At the end, under the heading
Cost
, were the words
No charge
.

‘It says there's no charge,' said William.

‘That sounds like your dad all right,' said Hippo. ‘I keep telling him he ought to make people pay for what he does, but he says he enjoys it too much to…' He stopped. ‘Are you all right?'

William had gone very pale. He had just noticed the time and date of his father's last entry. Alterations to the sled, it said, had been completed at two o'clock in the afternoon of 17 July. That was the day he and Mum had disappeared, and two o'clock was almost exactly two hours before William and Daniel had come home and found the house empty.

At two o'clock, his father had carefully made a note of what he'd done in the workshop and then
…and then what? It made no sense. None of it made any sense at all.

‘I'll tell you one thing,' said Hippo, ‘and I say this as someone who's known your dad for a good many years…' He was standing in the green suite, packing the grav-sled into his case while William watched from the door. ‘Wherever your dad's gone, he'll have had a very good reason for going there.'

William nodded politely. He wanted to believe it was true, but it wasn't easy. Why should Dad have left without leaving a word? Left just an hour or two after he was writing in a notebook that he had finished rebuilding the sled? How could anyone disappear for five days without saying where they were going?

‘Not only will he have had a good reason,' said Hippo firmly, ‘but I'm quite sure he'll be back,
with
your mother and, when he is, I want you to tell him how grateful I am for his fixing the sled and give him this as a little thank-you present.'

‘What is it?' asked William. The object Hippo had passed him looked rather like a torch.

‘It's a torch,' said Hippo. ‘Got all the usual gadgets – wide beam, infra-red, low-glo and so on, but it also lights up anyone who's wearing a shield.'

‘Oh,' said William.

‘You don't know what a shield is, do you?' said Hippo.

‘No,' said William.

‘Well, it's a very useful device that –'

‘The Portal is now ready,' Emma's voice interrupted from the ceiling. ‘Departure time is set for sixty seconds.'

‘You'd better get Emma to tell you.' Hippo picked up his case and headed for the door. ‘And don't worry about your father! Like I said, there'll be a perfectly simple explanation for where he's gone. Send me a message when he gets back, will you? Emma's got the address.'

‘OK,' said William, and after he had watched the trader disappear through the Portal, he tried very hard to believe what Hippo had told him.

That there was no need to worry.

That there was a perfectly simple explanation for everything that had happened.

And that all he had to do was wait until Uncle Larry came back and told him what it was.

At four o'clock, when Daniel got back from school, William had tea ready for him in the kitchen, with bread and butter on the table and eggs boiling in the pan. He had the idea that, if things were as normal as possible, it might help his brother not to worry about what had happened to their parents and why they had apparently been left to look after themselves.

Not that Daniel looked worried – except possibly by the fact that he had to go to school while William stayed at home. After wolfing down his tea, he went straight outside and sat happily on the back step to dissect the body of a dead mole he had found on the playing field at school.

He looked as if he hadn't a care in the world, thought William, and he realized with a start that
his brother had never once asked why their parents had left so suddenly or when they might get back. Daniel seemed able to accept everything that had happened and simply get on with life – and William rather envied him.

At half past five, he went down to the station to do the bricks and found there was a message for him from Brin, the station manager on Q'Vaar.

‘Hi there!' The burly, bearded figure was displayed this time above the desk in the pantry. ‘Larry tells me you're looking after the station on your own until Wednesday, and I just wondered if you wanted a hand. I can come right over if you do. Let me know, eh?'

William briefly considered accepting this offer, but decided in the end to say no. There was another passenger due the next day but he thought he could manage her quite easily on his own, so he recorded a message for Emma to send out with the next bricks, saying thank you, but he was fine.

Back upstairs, he found Daniel sitting at the kitchen table with a straw.

‘I've got to do a “How it Works” in class on Wednesday and I thought I'd do lungs,' he explained, when William asked what he was doing. He blew through the straw and the tiny viscous sacs he had taken from the mole inflated on the table. ‘What do you think?'

William remembered Daniel's teacher as a small, nervous woman who was frightened of spiders.

‘Looks like a winner to me,' he said. ‘Go for it.'

The bricks came through at 3.49 a.m. and afterwards, when William went back to bed, he found it difficult to sleep. It was nearly seven before he finally nodded off and the alarm rang twenty minutes later to wake him up to get Daniel ready for school. After his brother had left, he thought of going back to bed, but instead went down to the station to check that all was ready for his second passenger when she arrived that afternoon.

Checking everything was ready took most of the morning, but this was mainly because, halfway through it, William found the torch that Hippo had left on the desk in his room and asked Emma what the trader had meant when he said that it ‘lit up' shields.

‘A shield,' Emma explained, ‘is a device that renders the carrier invisible to the normal band-width of radiation. Shining the torch on them, however, will give a reflection that enables you to see them.'

What this meant was that if you were carrying a ‘shield' you were invisible, but that if someone
shone the torch at you, they could still see where you were. Intriguingly, it turned out that there were several ‘shields' in one of the drawers of his father's desk in the pantry. They were green, egg-shaped objects, rattling around amongst the pens, the paperclips and a roll of sticky tape – and when you held one in your hand you became invisible.

William thought the shields were more interesting than the torch, and he took one upstairs so that he could try it outside. Even though there was no one around, it was an oddly exciting sensation to walk through the farmyard knowing that he couldn't be seen. Birds flew round and ignored him and he got close enough to a pigeon on the ground to touch its back.

Daniel, he thought, would kill to get his hands on one of these.

Mrs Hepworth, William's second passenger, was supposed to arrive at three o'clock that afternoon, but a message with the bricks that arrived shortly after two said she had been delayed and would not be arriving until ten o'clock that night.

When she did arrive, it was not a happy visit. She was a tall, elderly woman and almost the first thing she asked was that William take her outside.

‘I know it's night-time,' she said, ‘but you've probably got some night goggles around the place,
haven't you? I'm particularly anxious to see an owl.'

William, however, had been reading the
Station Manager's Manual
that afternoon and discovered that it was strictly against the rules for any passenger through the Portal to leave the station and go outside. Why no one had mentioned this before he did not know, but the manual was very definite that, on a restricted planet, nothing must be allowed to give even the slightest hint of the existence of the Federation. Anyone allowing this to happen was liable to the severest penalties.