Who Goes Home? Page 4

  By the time Jacob reached his fourteenth birthday, at the end of the following October, visits to the computer room had become routine. There had been fewer visits to the spaceship – fewer were called for – but Jacob was by now less in awe of it. The isolation that continued to surround him in the outside world now became a positive asset. There was no friend with whom he would be tempted to share his great secret, or even regret being unable to share. No one knew what he did, and no one cared.

  Then, shortly before Christmas, things began to happen that were more than usually interesting.

  They first heard the news of it not through the usual channel, a small purple button flashing swiftly in the lower right-hand corner of the Brick, but on terrestrial television. An item at the end of the news told briefly of a strange accident that had happened earlier that day, somewhere in the North of England, leaving a mysterious aftermath. At first, the family were so little interested in it that not even the exact location registered. Casselton – wasn’t that some place in Scotland?

  If they had listened properly they would have known that it was a town in the North of England where a beer tanker had crashed into a post office van. The two men in the tanker sustained injuries that needed hospital treatment but were not life threatening. The driver of the post office van was badly injured and in the same hospital. A fourth casualty was a boy who was suffering from shock and could not be persuaded to talk.

  What drew Steven’s attention was the mystery of the disappearing victim. Apparently both men in the tanker were convinced that a pedestrian had been crushed between the tanker and the van. But there was no trace of any body, not even the fragment of a corpse. And the shocked boy’s father was, for the moment at least, a missing piece in this odd jigsaw.

  Steven felt a shiver run through him. He could not have defined exactly why, but somehow he felt connected to this accident. He came from a world where illusion was part of the system. The apparent disappearance of an accident victim was, for him, within the realms of possibility.

  He stretched his arms, stood up and said casually, ‘Work to do. Care to join me, Jacob?’

  Lydia gave him a curious look.

  ‘I thought you were finished for the day,’ she said.

  ‘Something I just thought of,’ said Steven. ‘Jacob might be interested.’

  Jacob got up from his armchair, smiled at his mother, and shrugged his shoulders, much as to say, You know what he’s like, Mum!

  Lydia said nothing more.

  Beth and Josie were sitting at the dining table, looking at catalogues of Christmas gifts, wondering what the big day would bring for them. There was just a week to go till Christmas. They were taking no notice of the television and were so used to Jacob and his father working together that their exit did not even break their concentration.

  Jacob followed his father up to the computer room. ‘What is it?’ he said as his father opened the door with his key: this room had to be kept locked at all times.

  ‘Something, maybe,’ said Steven. ‘Maybe nothing.’

  But when they went into the darkened room, the purple button on the Brick was flashing furiously.

  Steven pressed the button anxiously and pulled the switch that made the screen unfold. On it were just three words:

  GO TO SPACESHIP

  No more were needed. Clearly the communicator wanted to convey something that would require more discussion or more information than was usually displayed on the screen.

  Jacob looked eagerly at his father. ‘Do we go now?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Steven. ‘When our little friend there says that we must go to see our big friend, he means now, this minute! Get your coat.’

  ‘It’s awful weather,’ said Jacob. ‘Mum won’t like us going out in it, just for a walk like that. I mean, we can’t tell her anything, can we?’

  Steven smiled. ‘Sometimes I think your mother knows more than any of us and just keeps quiet!’

  ‘It’s not very nice out there,’ said Lydia when they looked into the living room all ready to go.

  ‘We won’t be long,’ said Steven, pulling on his gloves, ‘and we’re well wrapped up.’

  ‘But where are you going?’ said Lydia.

  ‘No further than the top of the hill,’ said Steven. ‘It’s just a simple experiment.’

  ‘That I wouldn’t understand?’ said Lydia.

  ‘I wouldn’t say that,’ said Steven quickly. ‘If you were interested, I am sure you would understand, but communications and such are not really your thing, are they?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Lydia, clearly deciding to make no further attempt to communicate.

  ‘There,’ said Steven as they closed the door behind them, ‘not so bad, was it? Your mother has tact beyond average!’

  ‘She might worry,’ said Jacob, still uncertain. He was still close enough to childhood to know how much trouble Lydia took to ensure that her children were always safe and clean and fed.

  ‘She won’t,’ said Steven, believing what he wanted to believe. ‘Your mother knows me better than to worry.’

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  I’ve Never Heard of Him

  Despite the weather, and the sense of urgency, they walked up to the cemetery. Their own car would have been an encumbrance, a taxi an embarrassment. They walked quickly and by the time they got there both were slightly out of breath, and very uncomfortable.

  The wind had blown a thin drizzle in their faces all the way up the hill. The night was dark and trees in the cemetery wept needlessly over silent graves. No ghost would come haunting. No one was even watching from a window. Lady Maudleigh had already closed her curtains. As for the fox, he was curled up beneath a shrub, licking a small wound he had collected earlier in the day, and feeling bedraggled and forlorn.

  Two living beings had the whole of Swains Lane entirely to themselves.

  Steven shivered as he took out the ruler and unfolded it with gloved fingers. To get into the ship, out of the rain’s and the wind’s way, would be a welcome transition.

  Entry was as smooth as usual.

  Steven directed Jacob to the sofa and told him to sit quietly and just observe. ‘This is going to be tricky,’ he said grimly. ‘There are too many things I don’t know, and I am determined to be told.’

  Then he moved towards the green cube. On the panel beneath it there was one simple lever. He pulled it sharply to the right, into its loop. Before contact was made, Steven knew that this emergency must be connected with the missing accident victim. What puzzled him was that at no time had he been asked to provide help or protection for anyone in the North of England.

  Who was located there?

  What was this all about?

  Agents never met, of course, but it was part of Steven’s job to know who they were and to be ready to provide remote assistance. He had never heard of any agent living or working in Casselton.

  The green cube glowed and swivelled on its axis. Trouble. Great trouble.

  ‘Yes,’ said Steven tersely. He sat smouldering, waiting for what was coming next.

  One of our observers has diminished.

  ‘We all diminish to enter our spaceships,’ said Steven icily. ‘Diminution is part of our system.’

  One of our observers has diminished.

  ‘Which observer and where?’ said Steven, thinking that this question might work, might spur the sluggish equipment to get on with it.

  In Casselton. Vateelin is out of context.

  ‘I have never heard of an agent called Vateelin,’ said Steven in a voice that threatened subservience. ‘No warning has been given to me of his arrival. I have made no preparations.’

  The communicator did not reply. It simply repeated itself. In Casselton. Vateelin is out of context.

  Steven gave the communicator a baleful look. It was clearly necessary to try another tack. Query ‘context’? That might work. The communicator generated English that was near perfect. But, unlik
e the Ormingat agents, it remained a translator and sometimes its translations were less than clear.

  Out of context, thought Steven. Yes. This agent must have diminished at the wrong time, in the wrong place. And the wrong place would have to be outside the ship. Outside the ship!

  ‘How is this agent out of context?’ said Steven, not really expecting a coherent reply. Talking to the communicator could be a very uphill battle.

  But he got one.

  Vateelin’s Earth body was about to be crushed between two vehicles. We have not encountered this before. It is assumed that when the space between the two vehicles became too small for a human context, his body was informed to diminish.

  ‘But what was he doing there in the first place?’ said Steven. ‘Where should he have been?’

  Vateelin was thrown into the air and landed on the windscreen of a car travelling on the opposite side of the road. We must track him, find him and protect him until the current irregularity can be corrected. That is for you to do.

  ‘I haven’t a clue whom you’re talking about,’ said Steven. ‘You expect me to go and find someone I don’t know in a location that is unspecified and then do a job that I have never been called upon to do before. No, no, no!’

  Yes.

  Steven did not speak.

  Jacob was on the edge of his seat, waiting for his father to answer. This situation was fantastic, marvellous even. He wanted to know where it would lead. This surely was a very special mission. Yet there was his father, glaring at the cube and not giving an inch. Jacob had to bite his tongue to hold back his own questions.

  First to break the silence was the cube. It sounded almost conciliatory. You will be given directions.

  ‘Directions!’ stormed Steven. ‘I’ll need more than directions. I want to know who this character is and why he is here on my patch without my knowledge. Every agent in Western Europe should be known to me. Intelligence does not operate in a vacuum.’

  The cube ignored this outburst completely.

  The car is a blue Mercedes. It is now at rest in a town called Morpeth. Full details of its identification, exact location and plate numbers will appear on the screen of the protection module.

  Jacob looked at his father doubtfully. The cube was clearly directing their attention to this car, where presumably the hapless victim of the accident was still lodged. To go on saying no was impossible. The Brick was the protection module – he knew that. So they must return to the Brick.

  Steven was still enraged, but rapidly coming to the same conclusion. ‘Locating the car does not mean that I can locate the man,’ he said sulkily. ‘I have never had to find a diminished one on this Earth. It might be impossible.’

  The communicator ignored this.

  Go now.

  ‘I have the right to know more about Vateelin,’ said Steven in protest. ‘Who is he? What is he doing here?’

  Consult archives.

  ‘Archives?’ said Steven. ‘What is he doing in the archives? How long has this fellow been in my area, for goodness’ sake? Why do I know nothing about him? What sort of skulduggery is this?’

  Go now. Time is short.

  And so, thought Steven, is your information. And so, thought Steven irreverently, is this fellow Vateelin. Why did he have to go and get himself in such a mess? Could he not have watched where he was going?

  Jacob got up and clutched his father’s hand. If time were short, the spaceship would be swift to disgorge them. Just as he was thinking this, the doors opened and he and his father were catapulted out into the stormy night.

  They ran all the way home, heedless of the weather. The one was goaded on by irritation; the other was eager to see how the alien called Vateelin might be saved.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Looking After Vateelin

  Steven and Jacob worked all through the night. Steven tried to send his son to bed, but Jacob refused point-blank to go.

  ‘I want to see everything. You said I could. And it’s Saturday tomorrow; I can sleep late.’

  ‘Your mother–’ Steven began, but Jacob interrupted him.

  ‘My mother won’t even know, unless you tell her,’ he said. ‘We’ve had our supper. She knows you’re working – but she’ll think I’m already in bed by now.’

  ‘Well sit down,’ said Steven, ‘but stay out of the way. I haven’t time to argue.’

  Jacob brought the stool as close as he dared to the desk. He watched as Steven looked into the archives that the Brick – or perhaps one should say ‘the protection module’ – carried under the control of the blue button. His father soon found all he wanted to know about Vateelin.

  The script on screen was even smaller than usual. Or maybe Steven had thrown some sort of haze around it. However hard he tried, Jacob could not make out the words. All he knew was that Steven nodded his head from time to time as if it all made sense to him.

  Vateelin was, as Steven had suspected, an observer working in isolation, not only from other observers but also from the home planet. He had brought with him his young son, a boy called Tonitheen. Their Earth names were Patrick and Thomas Derwent. What was the purpose of their time on Earth? It was unusual, unheard of, to fetch along a child. It appeared to be some sort of experiment. Thomas Tonitheen, unlike Javayl, had been born on Ormingat and had left there with his father at the age of three. By the time they reached Earth, the child was six years old. Now he would be eleven.

  Steven quickly consulted the archive’s calendar. The deadline for the Derwents’ spaceship to leave Earth was midnight on Saturday, the twenty-sixth of December. Then their ship would leave, with or without its passengers. That was how the system worked. No allowance was made for failure: no failure had ever occurred and so none was ever expected.

  ‘Hard,’ said Steven musingly to himself. Then, as he thought of where the spaceship was, he sighed and murmured, ‘Practically impossible. What have I done to deserve this?’ For he knew, only too well he knew, that the whole job was his, whether he liked it or not.

  He found himself wondering if this experiment had anything to do with his own unheard-of effort – entwining an Earthborn child, of mixed origin, with Ormingat. It would go some way towards explaining why he had never been informed of their presence.

  The only other Ormingatrig child Steven knew of was a girl in York whose parents were both from Ormingat. Steven had been notified when she was born. It was a unique event, which had to be entered on his records because it was in his area.

  The accident in Casselton, it soon appeared, was in no way caused by any carelessness on Vateelin’s part – he had been the victim of a runaway beer tanker whose brakes had failed on a steep hill. It was a horrific thing to happen, and it could have happened to anybody.

  ‘Well,’ said Jacob impatiently, ‘are you going to tell me anything?’

  Steven paused in his work and told his son all about the accident. It would not do to say too much about Tonitheen, and to mention the girl in York was out of the question.

  ‘Now,’ he said in conclusion, ‘we can get on with the real work.’

  He pushed a yellow button and this produced a map of the North of England. A green button homed in on the very car in Morpeth that had provided Vateelin with a landing place. Then the screen changed from map to picture. Steven could see the car, but wondered if it were at all possible to zoom in enough to find the man he was searching for.

  ‘We’ll never find him,’ said Jacob. ‘He’ll be much too small.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said his father, frowning.

  Working very, very slowly, he zoomed towards the windscreen and as he got there he perceived a movement, as if some insect were crawling over the bonnet. In further, in further, and there he was, a tiny creature in the shape of a man.

  ‘Wow!’ said Jacob. ‘What is he doing? Where is he going?’

  In his hands the tiny man was holding some sort of thread and he was inching towards the side of the bonnet. Steven quickly
split the screen so that he could see what was happening in two different dimensions. Then it became clear. Vateelin was trying to lower himself to the ground!

  Suddenly he let go of the thread, which did not reach the ground, and went hurtling down into the gutter. Hastily, Steven pushed the scarlet button, the most important button on the Brick. In time to keep breath in the tiny body, but not to save that body from pain, the scarlet button surrounded him with a protective shield. It wafted him away from a grating that could have been the end of him: it would have been impossible to retrieve such a small being from a deep drain.

  ‘See what I saved him from?’ said Steven to Jacob. ‘A split-second slower, and our man would have been a goner. It’s all skill, you know. Nothing’s done by magic. I don’t pull rabbits out of hats!’

  He looked at Jacob ruefully. ‘I’ve got to admit a bit of magic would come in handy right now. We’ve got to find some way to get that speck all the way to Edinburgh.’

  ‘Why Edinburgh?’ asked Jacob. ‘Isn’t that miles away from Morpeth?’

  ‘For someone his size, the other side of the road is miles away. But he has to be in Edinburgh because that is where his spaceship is. Bad navigation – even worse than mine. At least our ship is reasonably close to home!’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ said Jacob.

  ‘We watch and we study,’ said Steven, ‘and we tell ourselves that it can be done!’

  Vateelin at this point began to make his way to the rear of the car.

  ‘Stay still,’ snapped Steven, as if the manikin could hear him. ‘Stay still and let me think, can’t you?’

  Jacob looked at his father a little dubiously but concluded that he was not talking to him.

  Vateelin paused to rest and Steven was relieved. He turned his attention to the Brick itself – to each of its buttons. The grey HELP button seemed the best option. Unfortunately its index did not include instructions on how to return a diminished being to his normal size for the space he is occupying.