Herbie Brennan - Ruler of the Realm

Pyrgus blinked. They’d been replaced by Mr Fogarty’s shed! Pyrgus remembered it from the time poor old Hodge mistook him for a mouse. But this was the original writ large. There was enough junk to fill a merchant’s store and the workbench in the centre was enormous. Pieces of machinery were strewn all over it.

‘It’s something I’ve been working on,’ Mr Fogarty said with enthusiasm. ‘Any of you lot ever seen Star Trek?’ He shook his head. ‘No, of course you haven’t – must be getting senile.’ He ushered them inside and closed the door. ‘It’s a television programme we have back home. You can explain television to them, Pyrgus – you’ve seen that. Star Trek ’s about space travel. They have a star ship and a thing called a transporter. It’s just fiction, but that transporter got me thinking.’ He moved towards the bench. ‘The way it works is you beam people about the place, down to the planet, back to the ship, whatever, and the thing is, if you’re on the ship, you can lock on to them down on the planet and beam them aboard.’ He looked from one to the other. ‘You see what I’m getting at?’

Pyrgus shook his head.

Madame Cardui said, ‘No…’

Kitterick said, ‘I presume, sir, you feel there may be something in the process analogous to our portal technology, but possibly improved.’

Pyrgus blinked.

‘Exactly!’ exclaimed Fogarty. He focused on Kitterick. ‘It’s matter transmission, of course. You scan somebody down to his constituent pattern and beam the information to the destination where he can be reassembled using local atoms. The problem’s always been what to do with the body.’

‘What body?’

‘The body you scanned at this end. And you have to do something about the body, otherwise you’d be in two places at once. You can see why matter transmission never became a commercial proposition. Imagine an airline that had to kill off each of its passengers to get them to their destination. You’d be ceiling deep in corpses by the end of the first week.’

‘And no one else would wish to travel because of the smell,’ Kitterick said blandly.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ Fogarty frowned.

‘Indeed not, sir. Please go on.’

Fogarty relaxed his frown as the earlier enthusiasm flooded back. ‘Thing is, if you introduce a portal you solve the body problem. You don’t have to beam information any more, you can beam the actual atoms. With the portal in place, that doesn’t require any more energy.’

‘Mr Fogarty,’ said Pyrgus, who hadn’t understood a word, ‘what does this have to do with Henry?’

Fogarty nodded towards a small box on his workbench. ‘That thing there’s a prototype of a Mark II portable transporter. It doesn’t just open a portal like the ones I made before, it lets you lock in on a target and pull them through it.’

‘To here?’

Fogarty frowned. ‘In theory.’

‘Does it work?’

‘I haven’t tested it yet.’

After a moment, Pyrgus said, ‘You mean you could lock in on Henry and translate him to your ornither-to your shed? Here and now?’

‘Could give it a try,’ said Mr Fogarty.

Henry’s legs were aching by the time he got to the end of his road, but his troubles didn’t really start until he reached home. His mother must have heard the sound of the key in the door, for she met him in the hall. She was dressed for work in one of her hideous tweedy suits, but her blouse was rumpled and there were dark circles under her eyes. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in months, but that did nothing to dampen her fury.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ she demanded. ‘We were worried sick. Anais rang round all the hospitals and I’ve just reported you missing to the police. For heaven’s sake, Henry, couldn’t you just have rung? Why on earth do you think we got you a mobile phone? Don’t you ever, for a minute, think about anybody else but yourself in your whole… selfish… life?’ Then, to his intense embarrassment, she threw her arms around him and burst into tears. ‘Oh, Henry, we thought you’d been killed!’

He’d never seen his mother cry before and he didn’t know how to cope with it. She was holding him so tightly he could hardly breathe and he could feel her tears dripping from his jaw to run down the side of his neck.

‘Where were you?’ she sobbed. ‘Where have you been?’

He couldn’t answer that one either. At least not any way that was going to satisfy her. Where had he been? Walking all night and most of the morning, by the look of it. She was going to ask him why and he didn’t know why. He might have been hit by a car, but he didn’t feel like he’d been hit by a car. No bones broken, no headache, not so much as a bruise. His mind went back to an earlier thought. Maybe this blank in his memory was all part of his nervous breakdown, the business about seeing fairies and visiting fairyland.

‘Mum…’ Henry said.

He’d been talking to Charlie about his nervous breakdown. And Charlie had said something about it, but he couldn’t remember what.

‘Mum…’ Henry said again, struggling a little.

Actually he didn’t know why she was going on like this. He’d stayed out overnight before. Usually at Charlie’s, where arrangements were often last-minute. He’d always rung, of course, but there’d been times when Mum and Dad had gone to bed – how worried could they be? – and he’d had to leave a message on the answerphone, for cripe’s sake!

Henry suddenly remembered he had left a message on the answerphone the night before. He hadn’t planned to stay out – he’d wanted a lift home. But nobody took his call, so he left a message. He could remember that quite clearly. Mum, I’ve missed my bus. Any chance you could come and get me? If you don’t pick up this message I’ll be walking home.

It suddenly occurred to him why she was so upset! She hadn’t picked up the message. Not until this morning. And then she’d checked his bed and found he still wasn’t home. She wasn’t worried, she was guilty! That was so typical. She could never admit anything was actually her fault. She hadn’t been worried about him at all. She’d gone to bed and didn’t even think of him until this morning. Now she was making a fuss to cover up.

‘Mum,’ Henry said. He took her arms firmly and pulled away. ‘Mum, you don’t give a damn where I was.’

Then, with his own welling tears, he ran upstairs to his room and locked the door.

In its own small way, Henry’s room looked much like Mr Fogarty’s shed, except that strewn clothes took the place of tools and models of one sort or another stood in for the machinery. Henry sat on the edge of the bed thinking how childish those models looked. More than half the ships he’d made were plastic, could you believe that? And then there was that stupid cardboard model of a flying pig. Incredible to think that was the last model he’d made, and just a few weeks ago. Incredible to think how proud he’d been of it.

She knocked on his door almost at once.

‘Go away, Mum,’ Henry said dully.

A voice said, ‘It’s not Martha, Henry – it’s Anais.’

After a long moment, Henry got up and unlocked the door.

‘May I come in?’ Anais asked quietly. She was dressed in sweater and jeans and designer runners. Henry shrugged and turned away. He walked back to sit on the bed, not looking at her.

Anais closed the door and stood just inside the room. Out of the corner of his eye he could see she looked concerned, maybe even a bit frightened. But her voice was steady enough as she said, ‘Henry, we need to talk.’

He could imagine his mother saying the same thing. What it usually meant was Henry, you need to listen. After which his mother would tell what he’d done wrong, why he should never do it again and how he could do a lot better in the future. But, of course, this wasn’t his mum. This was the other woman in the house.