Who Goes Home? Read online

Jacob switched off.

  A text message from Steven said curtly: ‘COME HOME, NOW.’

  Jacob’s reply said equally curtly: ‘LET ME KNOW WHEN I CAN PULL THE HANDLE OUT OF THE SOIL.’

  Steven gave a sigh and turned to the job in hand. He could not spend any longer arguing with a bolshie teenager. He had never thought of Jacob in that light before, but now thoughts that encompassed ‘I don’t know where he gets it from’ rumbled through his mind!

  Jacob was standing in the rain with dirty hands, suffering a measure of discomfort that would have made a warm bus and a comfortable train really attractive. But he had decided that he wanted to spend more time around this house. He wanted to see its occupants, especially the girl who was fully Ormingat but had been born here on Earth.

  He knew that his father would no longer be actively watching him. The shield would remain, but Steven would be busy adjusting the space clock.

  Jacob wiped his hands on his coat and made his way towards the house. There was a back porch where he could shelter from the rain but he was not interested in that. What he wanted was a window he could look through. On this side of the house the curtains were closed. Chinks of light showed through the kitchen window, but there was no chance of seeing inside. Jacob walked round to the front and was rewarded with the sight of a window where the light was on but no one had yet bothered to draw the curtains.

  The girl was there – a slightly built girl with mousy hair, sitting curled up on the sofa talking to a cat and stroking the fur between its ears. A year younger than himself? Yes, possibly. So this was Nesta. Had she been told where her parents came from?

  As he watched her, it seemed to him that she was prettier than he had thought at first glance; quietly and peacefully pretty. She also looked vulnerable: the thick jumper she was wearing was about two sizes too big, which probably made her look slighter than she actually was. Seeing her, and knowing a little of what the future held for her, Jacob felt concerned. How much did she know? How would she cope with the journey to Ormingat? He had already heard her telling her mother her plans for Saturday: but by then the family would have been told the devastating news. What would her friend’s hockey boots matter then?

  Suddenly, Nesta got up and the cat tumbled off her knee, complaining briefly before digging its paws into the side of the sofa.

  ‘Charlie,’ said Nesta, loudly enough to be heard by Jacob, who was standing with his forehead pressed against the glass. ‘You know you’re not supposed to do that.’

  She then walked right up to the window and raised her hands to close the curtains. She was standing right in front of him. He gazed at her. She looked out into his eyes. For no more than a split-second the shield failed, and then it was intact again. But Nesta felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. It was too brief a glimpse to be assimilated. It was no more than a shiver, as if someone had walked over her grave. Hastily she finished closing the curtains.

  Jacob’s heart leapt with the awareness that she had noticed him. ‘Nesta,’ he whispered. He rested hands and head against the pane of glass. After many minutes, a noise in the garden disturbed him. He turned away from the darkened window and was caught in the headlamps of a car turning into the drive. The lights dazzled him, but the man in the car saw nothing of the figure in front of him. Jacob stood to one side and watched the driver put the car away before going into the house. This must be Nesta’s father.

  Jacob returned to the back garden and stood in the shelter of the porch. He waited with the mobile in his hand, hoping his father would ring to say all was ready. The rain rattled on the roof. Jacob was so miserably cold that he could last out no longer. He used the mobile again.

  ‘I think I should come home now, Dad,’ he said. ‘You’re right. We can buy another carpet sweeper for Mum.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ said Steven with a yawn. ‘I was just about to ring you. You can bring the handle back. I’ve done better than I thought. All it took was concentration.’

  ‘I might not be able to get the handle out of the ground,’ Jacob confessed. ‘There’s not much of it left above the surface.’

  ‘Put on your gloves again,’ said his father. ‘Push your forefinger into the top of the handle then heave. My guess is that the ship will release it when it feels you pulling. They know what I have done. They know I have no further need of it.’

  Jacob did as he was told and found himself sitting heavily on the grass as the handle flew out at an unexpectedly high speed. When he recovered, he collapsed the handle into its four small parts and placed it in his sports bag beside the trowel.

  The home journey was straightforward. It was his father who met him at King’s Cross. Jacob was still muddy and his hands were grazed.

  ‘Nice work,’ said Steven, barely noticing the mess his son was in.

  ‘I suppose you could call it that,’ said Jacob sourly, employing his father’s usual turn of phrase. ‘I’ll be happier when I’m home and out of this wet coat.’

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  What Next?

  ‘So what happens next?’ asked Jacob on Wednesday evening as they sat once more in the computer room.

  Steven was puzzled for an instant. Life had contained a whole day of varied activity. The observer in Marseilles had needed attention yet again – a minor problem but quite time-consuming; the insurance company had phoned twice about their digitization; the twins had needed help with their maths homework; and dinner had been an exceptionally nice spaghetti bolognese.

  ‘Happens next?’ he said. ‘Oh – in York, d’you mean?’

  ‘Yes, Dad, where else?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Steven. ‘At least, I don’t know what is happening now or will happen in the next few days. It is no concern of mine. A week come Saturday I shall, purely as a matter of interest, set the observation module ready to watch the Gwynns’ departure and, as it were, to close the book on it.’

  ‘Like we did with Vateelin and Tonitheen?’

  Steven smiled, proud of his son’s ability to remember and pronounce the names so correctly. ‘You might be Ormingat born and bred to hear you, Javayl ban,’ he said affectionately.

  ‘But I’m not, am I?’ said Jacob in a sharp tone that his father failed to understand. I want to be one thing, he thought bitterly, not a mixture.

  ‘What will they think about returning to Ormingat?’ he went on, before his father could think of any follow on to the rhetorical question. ‘I mean, will they want to go?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Steven, weighing his words carefully. ‘Any of us without ties on Earth would be delighted to leave early. Earth duty is interesting and important, but – and I know you won’t understand this – it is somehow divorced from reality. Ormingat for Ormingatriga is always the real world.’

  ‘What about Nesta?’ said Jacob harshly. ‘She was born here in this second-class world.’

  ‘I didn’t say that,’ said Steven hastily. ‘Earth is not second class. It is just different, and some of the differences are not good. You should know that. God forbid that I should not know how lucky I am. To be married to your mother is a privilege. To be father to such a wonderful Earth family makes up for any sense of loss. That’s what I mean about “ties on Earth”.’

  ‘But what about Nesta?’ persisted Jacob. He remembered so well the girl he had seen through the window. He had looked into her eyes, and for just a moment she, he was sure, had looked into his. In that brief second she had noticed him, and he was oh so used to being unnoticed.

  ‘She will know of her Ormingat lineage. She will have learnt of it gradually from infancy. She too will be ready and eager to leave,’ said Steven.

  ‘I learnt nothing of my Ormingat lineage, as you call it, till I was thirteen,’ said Jacob. ‘How do you know that her parents don’t have as little sense as you did in this matter?’

  ‘That,’ said Steven indignantly, ‘is a completely different situation. You are Lydia’s son as well as mine.’

  There
it rested for another couple of days. But Jacob brooded on it and kept seeing the eyes of the girl at the window. He longed to see her again and to know if she would show any sign of recognition. It was a tantalizing thought.

  On Friday afternoon he came home from school and went straight to the computer room, where Steven was engaged in producing some complicated graph on his ordinary Earth computer.

  ‘One minute,’ he said, not looking away from the screen. ‘Just got to work this out.’

  Jacob sat down on the stool and waited impatiently.

  ‘Well,’ said Steven at last, ‘what is it?’

  ‘I think we should check on the family in York,’ said Jacob. ‘I have a hunch that something could go wrong. I’ve been thinking about it all day.’

  Steven sighed. ‘Waste of time,’ he said. ‘Nothing can go wrong. Matthew knows what he’s doing. He and Alison need no further help from me. They have never needed my help in all the time they have been here.’

  ‘Look anyway,’ said Jacob, ‘just to satisfy me.’

  Steven moved over to the Brick, drew out its keyboard and unfurled its screen.

  ‘Just a short look,’ he said, ‘but I’m telling you now, all we’ll see is a twilit garden and that ugly great frog. I can’t and won’t probe inside the house. It is none of my business. It is against all etiquette, if you understand what I mean.’

  What they saw was not what Steven had expected. For a start the twilit garden was partly illuminated by the porch light. Coming out of the porch were Nesta and her mother; Matthew was ahead of them. Then all three surrounded the frog in the pond.

  ‘They’re moving the frog,’ whispered Jacob, almost as if he feared they might hear him.

  ‘They must have to enter the ship for some reason,’ said Steven, ‘although this is a few days earlier than I would have expected.’

  Then it became clearer to him. They were not all entering the ship. Just one. Just Matthew. With breathtaking speed he disappeared into the centre of the pond – he simply vanished.

  Jacob had seen this sort of thing happen before: with Vateelin and his son outside the hospital. He had experienced it himself several times in the cemetery at Highgate. But the wonder of it never decreased. On this occasion, the event was so unexpected that Jacob blinked hard. His eyelids clenched out the scene just long enough for him to miss Nesta’s startling reaction.

  ‘She’s collapsed,’ cried Steven in alarm. ‘She’s gone into a dead faint.’

  Jacob jumped. He looked at the screen and saw that Nesta’s mother was struggling to support her daughter and was half-carrying her towards the house.

  ‘What a stupid way to let her know!’ said Steven in anger.

  ‘What do you mean, Dad?’ said Jacob anxiously. He wanted to follow Nesta into the house. He wanted to know that she was recovering.

  ‘I’ll tell you what I mean,’ said Steven angrily. ‘Those two paragons in York have failed to tell their daughter anything till now. And they have demonstrated diminishing to a total innocent.’

  ‘You demonstrated diminishing to me,’ said Jacob resentfully. ‘So what’s the difference?’

  ‘I guided you through the experience,’ said Steven self-righteously. ‘I didn’t just diminish before your eyes and leave you to stand watching. It was utter folly. I don’t envy them the next few hours.’

  ‘So what happens next?’ said Jacob for the second time that week.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Steven tersely. ‘I don’t care. And it’s not my job. Let them get on with it.’

  As he spoke, he made the screen go dead and furled it back into the Brick.

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  The Next Day

  ‘It’s getting stuck in an infinite loop,’ said Steven patiently. ‘That’s because you’ve forgotten to increment the counter.’

  The program was failing to respond and Jacob didn’t know what to do next.

  They had been working on the computer for about an hour – the Earth computer, that is. Steven was teaching his son some programming of a rather more complex nature than that offered by the school curriculum.

  Jacob was undeniably interested in these computing lessons, but today he was finding it difficult to concentrate. His attention kept straying to the Brick on the desk, hoping that a message would appear on screen or that the purple button would begin to flash. But nothing happened.

  Steven leant over him and added the missing instruction. The program was successfully restarted. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That fixes it.’

  Jacob was paying little attention. His mind was definitely elsewhere. He tried hard to turn his thoughts to the work in hand. But it was no use. He could hold back no longer.

  ‘Can we look in on York again, Dad?’ he said. ‘To see how they are doing, to check how Nesta is?’

  ‘No,’ said his father. ‘We can’t. We are not here as spectators. We watch only when required and we watch only what we are meant to see. It is not a game.’

  ‘We looked yesterday, without any summons,’ said Jacob.

  ‘There are rules,’ said Steven loftily. ‘I do break them occasionally, but that doesn’t mean I don’t respect them. Yesterday was, I know now, a mistake.’

  ‘So when do we next watch what happens there?’ said Jacob.

  ‘Unless I hear to the contrary,’ said Steven, ‘I shall be watching out for the departure of their ship one week today. It is scheduled to leave at two a.m. on Sunday the twenty-fourth. I shall settle down to inspect some time before midnight on Saturday. It will be a tedious couple of hours, no doubt, but we are meant to err on the side of safety.’

  This was news to Jacob. He had assumed the work was finished and that all they would be doing was watching that two a.m. take-off. What safety was his father talking about?

  ‘Something could go wrong?’ asked Jacob anxiously.

  ‘Unlikely,’ said his father. ‘Ninety-nine point nine per cent unlikely. But we shall watch, nevertheless.’

  ‘If anything did go wrong, could you help?’ said Jacob. He thought anxiously about Nesta needing to be rescued from a ship running out of control.

  ‘Nothing will go wrong,’ said Steven adamantly.

  ‘But if it did?’

  ‘It would have to go in my report,’ said his father irritably. ‘How much power do you think we have?’

  Steven did not tell Jacob about the call he had the following Thursday, late at night. He had been filing a report on an action in Oxford where his intervention had been necessary – and successful. Suddenly, just as he was thinking of retiring for the night, the purple button began to flash. On screen came the words:

  NESTA HAS DISAPPEARED

  That was all. Steven gave a yawn and slipped the lever that permitted speech.

  ‘What do you mean? Disappeared?’

  In his tired state, he was thinking that Nesta had somehow shrunk ‘out of context’. He found himself hoping that it would not all turn too complicated, especially if it should involve an immediate visit to the spaceship. He didn’t relish the thought of trekking up Swains Lane so late at night in weather that was far from clement.

  NESTA’S PARENTS ARE UNABLE TO FIND HER

  ‘Why can’t they find her?’ said Steven. ‘She’s probably hiding somewhere. Kids are like that. They think it’s fun. Tell them to check the cupboard under the stairs. That’s a favourite place.’

  SHE HAS LEFT A MESSAGE. SHE HAS RUN AWAY

  ‘That’s serious,’ said Steven more soberly, ‘but it doesn’t sound like work for me. I have never been asked to deal with a runaway before. I wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  DO WHATEVER YOU CAN

  Steven sighed. He made a fruitless attempt to set up some sort of trace on her. He knew from the start that it would be futile. Nesta did not want to be found and no one knew where she had gone. Even terrestrial sources gave no clues at all. Compared with this search, finding Vateelin on the bonnet of that car in Morpeth had been a piece of cake. />
  ‘It can’t be done!’ he said angrily to the screen, after he had played around with the controls for over an hour. There was simply nothing to go by, nothing to hold on to.

  IT CAN’T BE DONE

  ‘That’s what I’ve just said.’

  NOT ENOUGH DATA

  ‘Precisely. And the girl does not want to be found.’

  THE GIRL DOES NOT WANT TO BE FOUND

  Steven drew a breath of frustration. The communicator was being even more obtuse than usual.

  ‘And if she does not return in time,’ said Steven firmly, ‘then the Gwynns must return without her. The clock cannot be reset again.’

  PRECISELY

  In the days that followed, Steven avoided talking about the Gwynns. Whenever Jacob mentioned them, he took evasive measures and changed the subject. If his son was so concerned about the well-being of that girl in York it would be cruel to tell him that Nesta had run away from home rather than face the journey to Ormingat.

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  Spies

  The village of Belthorp, where Thomas and his father had lived for five years, had been the focus of attention at the time of their disappearance. But, for now, things were settling back to normal. On the Saturday after Nesta’s disappearance, life there was going on as usual.

  In the flat above the newsagent’s shop, which was also the proprietor’s family home, Mrs Swanson stood glaring at her two sons, the elder of whom had just smashed the training tower his younger brother had spent the last half hour building up. A bivouac tent had collapsed in the middle of the floor and half a dozen Action Men were impeding access to the window.

  ‘This room looks as if a bomb’s hit it!’ said Mrs Swanson. ‘Get those toys cleared away – and close the curtains before you put the light on. If everything’s not back in place by the time I come up here again there’ll be no video and no pizza for you two tonight.’