The Final Nexus – Chapter Five

The Final Nexus – Chapter Five

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Of course, if Stefan had been with me he would doubtless have been properly equipped with a compass, a set of supplies and a collection of maps. Naturally I had none of these things, so I didn’t even know in which direction we were heading – the sun was hidden behind cloud in this world, just as it was in the one we had just left. Okay, I could make the excuse that I hadn’t expected to be able to head off into a new world, but Stefan would have been properly equipped even if he’d just been going to the local shop.

“Any idea which way we’re going?” I asked.

“None at all,” said Declan, grinning. “But it doesn’t really matter, does it? This world is inhabited, so sooner of later we’ll find a road, and then we just have to follow it until we reach a town.”

“Yes, but there’s another problem,” I told him. “There’s a probe somewhere in this world, and if it comes anywhere near us it’ll pick up our chips, and then they’ll send someone after us to take us back. And if Aarnist thinks I was trying to do a bunk he’ll lock me up for the rest of the time I’m here. So we need to get as far away from the monument as quickly as we can before the probe comes back.”

“I don’t think the range of the instruments on those things is all that great,” he replied. “But it would still be a good idea to get away from here. Let’s hope it isn’t too far to a road.”

We kept going for about five minutes, and then we found a track. It wasn’t much of a track, just a couple of rut marks with a ridge of grass between them, but the ruts were wide enough that Declan’s chair was able to fit easily into one of them, and since it hadn’t rained for a while the ground was dry, which allowed him to move easily. I walked alongside him in the other rut, wondering how long it would be before the track led to a proper road.

We’d been going for around twenty minutes when the track ran into a forest, and at this point I was starting to have serious doubts about the wisdom of carrying on, given that we had no idea of where we were heading or what type of civilisation this might be: it was one thing to take a chance with a reasonably advanced civilisation that would have some means of getting me across the Channel and so provide me with an opportunity to get back to the Vosges, where there would at least be a chance of finding a portal to take me nearer home; it was another altogether to end up in a primitive society where there would be little or no chance of crossing the Channel. In that sort of world the likelihood was that, sooner or later, the Arvelans would find me, and if that happened I would be in real trouble.

But Declan seemed perfectly happy to keep going, and I didn’t really think I could just abandon him here.

“What’s the range of your chair?” I asked him.

“Don’t worry, the battery won’t need recharging for ages. Relax, Jake – this is a real chance to do something interesting for a change. And if Aarnist does try to lock you up when we get back I’ll tell him I made you come with me. That should get you off the hook.”

Well, I suppose that was fair enough, so I tried to put my worries to one side and kept on walking. It was a bit dark under the trees, but the track ran on clearly enough, and we made steady progress. And eventually the trees began to thin once more and we could see open country ahead of us. But before we were out of the wood we were ambushed: one moment we were walking along in a deserted wood, and the next a couple of boys jumped out onto the track ahead of us. And since the one on the left had a pistol in his hand it seemed like a good idea to stop.

I looked over my shoulder and saw that another pair of boys had stepped onto the track behind us, blocking any retreat, and now I noticed that there were more lurking off the track to the side. They were all dressed in olive shirts and black shorts, and three of them were wearing berets, too, which made me think we’d been captured by a scout troop.

“Who are you, and where are you going?” asked the one with the gun in English – and that was good news, because it would certainly help if I could communicate with them properly.

“My name’s Jake and this is Declan,” I told him. “We’re just out for a walk. We weren’t going anywhere in particular.”

“And which commune do you come from?”

That was a rather more difficult question. Of course by now I’d been asked this question, in one form or another, in several different worlds, but it was still not easy to answer.

“We live in a town called Sarutaale,” I told him. “I’m not completely sure, but I think the English name is Salisbury. It’s not far from here, so you probably know the place I mean. It’s got a cathedral with a very tall spire.”

“What’s a cathedral?”

Oh, dear, I thought, this isn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped.

“Well, it’s a big church,” I explained.

“What is a church?”

“It’s a sort of big building where people go to worship God.”

“There is no god – everyone knows that. Why would people build a special building for something that doesn’t exist?”

“Well, most of them were built several hundred years ago, and back then people did think God existed.”

“People were stupid in the past. Now we know a lot better… I didn’t know that there were actually buildings used for superstition, though. I suppose they would all have been pulled down long ago, including the tall one you mentioned… so, if it isn’t there – and I’m sure if it was I’d know about it – why did you mention it? You said ‘It’s got a cathedral’ – what were you talking about?”

“Well… we come from a different place… it’s a bit hard to explain. Do you think you could put the gun away? You don’t really need it – we seem to be outnumbered.”

“I suppose so.” He put his gun away in the holster on his belt, and then he turned to Declan.

“What’s the matter with you, then? What’s the chair all about – and how do you make it move, come to that?”

“He doesn’t speak English,” I said, when Declan just stared at him.

“No? Why not? Are you spies?” And he drew his gun again.

“No, we’re not spies,” I said. “We just come from another place, that’s all.”

“Where, then?”

“Well… here, only not here… I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a parallel interchange, have you?”

He shook his head.

“No, I knew it couldn’t be that easy. Well, there are places where it’s possible to move from one…” I’d been avoiding the word ‘world’ up to now because it always seemed to cause disbelief, but I didn’t see how I could avoid it much longer.

“… from one world to another,” I went on. “Declan and I come from different worlds: in mine this is still England, but I expect our history is rather different from yours. In my world the churches and cathedrals are still there, anyway. But in Declan’s world history was completely different: there this is part of a large confederation led by…”

Another word I was sure I had to avoid was ‘Atlantis’, because that would certainly have them sending for the men in white coats.

“… a country called Arvel,” I went on. “And they don’t speak English here – instead they speak a sort of Danish, because it was the Danes who ruled here about a thousand years ago.”

“And you expect us to believe that, do you?”

I sighed. “Nobody ever does, somehow. But don’t you think that if I wanted to lie to you I could have come up with something you’d be more likely to believe? Like saying we were from France, for example?”

He thought about that.

“I think you’d better come and see our director,” he said. “He’ll know what to do with you.”

“Is it far?” I asked.

“Not far, no. Come on.”

He put the gun away and headed on down the track in the direction we had been going, and we followed him, the remaining five boys clustering about us to make sure I didn’t make a run for it.

“So,” said the leader, over his shoulder, “if he can’t tell me, maybe you can: what makes his chair move? I’m sure they don’t make steam engines that small.”

“It’s electric,” I said. “There’s a battery under the seat. If you undo this panel you can see it.”

“Go on, then, show us.”

So I asked Declan to stop and undid the panel.

“Oh, it’s a sort of Volta pile,” said one of the boys. “I didn’t know you could use them for something like that. That’s really clever! Can I have a proper look at it when we get back to the commune?”

I did a quick translation for Declan.

“As long as they don’t damage it,” he replied. “Not that I think we have a lot of choice at the moment: there are too many for me to be able to shut down all at once. If you fancy trying to take on two of them I can probably keep the others quiet for a few minutes, but… well.”

I know what he meant: even if he left me the smallest two I would still probably be unable to deal with them. I remembered the way Godfrey and Peter had flattened me inside ten seconds.

“Sure, as long as you’re careful,” I told the inquisitive boy. “He won’t be able to move about if you damage his chair.”

“Don’t worry, I’m not stupid. Those things have acid in, and I don’t want to get burned. That’s why I was surprised to see it being used for moving a chair, because they’re a bit unstable usually. What’s the casing made of? Is that some sort of ceramic?”

“No, it’s plastic.”

“What’s plastic? Oh, hang on – it’s some sort of Belgian Shellac, is it?”

“I don’t think so.” I was getting out of my depth here – even before my education got interrupted by my various journeys I was no great shakes at science, and I had no idea how to make plastic. All I knew was that in my world it was absolutely everywhere, and the idea of a world without plastic was hard to grasp.

“I’m afraid I’m not a scientist,” I went on. “I’m happy to use things without knowing how they work.”

“Oh. Well, we’ll have a look when we get back to the commune. And I promise I’ll be careful! I’m Sam, by the way. What were your names again?”

“Sam!” called the leader, before I could reply. “Don’t fraternise! We don’t know who they are yet – they might still turn out to be spies!”

“We’re not, I promise,” I said. “My name’s Jake, and that’s Declan.”

Sam gave me a quick nod but then moved away – obviously he thought it would be sensible not to associate with a possible enemy. I suppose it’s hard to blame them – after all, if someone had approached me a couple of years earlier and claimed to be from a different world I would have thought he was cuckoo, too.

The track had been running gently downhill as we had followed it through the wood, and once we emerged into open country again it continued to do so, until finally it reached a river. There was a bridge across the river, wide enough for a car, and at the far side of the bridge the track became a proper street that was paved with those flat stones that, I vaguely remembered from school, are called ‘setts’. And a little way along the street I could see buildings, though we turned off before we reached the first one, following a slightly narrower road to a collection of buildings that, from the number of cows and chickens and pigs in the vicinity, I assumed was a farm, even though it didn’t look much like the one at Irtengarde where I had briefly worked a couple of years previously. Instead the buildings looked like something that had been lifted out of a nineteenth century city and dropped in the middle of the countryside: a couple of tenement blocks and a warehouse or two, together with a number of smaller outbuildings.

The leader took us into one of the tenements, along a corridor and into what looked very much like a classroom.

“We won’t get that chair upstairs,” he said to me, “so your friend will have to wait here while I take you up to see the director. You’d better explain that to him so he knows what’s happening. Sam, if you want to have a look at the chair, go ahead, but don’t damage anything.”

I told Declan what was happening and then allowed the leader to shepherd me back along the passage and up a couple of flights of stairs. He paused outside a door at the top of the stairs, took a deep breath, knocked once, opened the door and ushered me inside.

The room proved to be an office, though one that had only Spartan furnishings: a couple of basic bookcases along one wall, a big table with half a dozen upright chairs around it, and at the far end, in front of the window, a large desk. There was a man sitting at the desk, writing something. He glanced up as we came in but then went on with what he was doing, which gave me a chance to have a proper look at him: I guessed he was around fifty, with grey hair cut fairly short and a pair of round metal-framed glasses of the sort that you see people wearing in photos from the nineteen-forties. And he was wearing some sort of brown uniform.

“Well, Jack,” he asked, still not looking up. “Who’s this?”

“We found him and another boy in the West Wood,” the leader reported. “They gave us some story about coming from a different world.”

“Really? Where’s the other boy, then?”

“He’s a cripple. He uses a chair on wheels to get about, but it can’t get up the stairs.”

“A cripple?” asked the director, and now he did put down his pen and look up. “Now that is interesting. You – where do you come from?”

“I was born in London, but I’ve lived in several places since,” I told him. “At the moment I’m living in Salisbury.”

“That doesn’t sound too far-fetched.”

“No, but my Salisbury isn’t the same as yours. I live in a different version of this world.”

“Oh, really? How is that possible?”

“There are some scientists in the world I left this morning who have found a way to open a sort of gateway between their world and this one. And my friend and I sort of sneaked through when nobody was looking, just to see what things were like on the other side. We weren’t trying to cause trouble or anything.”

“I’m sure you weren’t. Now why don’t you stop lying and tell me the truth?”

I sighed. For once I wished there was a Konjässi present to confirm that I was telling the truth.

“I’m not lying,” I said. “If you have a look at my friend’s chair you’ll see it’s powered by something that apparently doesn’t exist in this world, and if you get a language expert in he’ll be able to confirm that the language my friend speaks doesn’t exist in your world either.”

“So how are you able to speak English?”

“Because the world I come from is closer to yours – I would guess your history broke away from ours much more recently. Let’s see, do you know who Adolf Hitler was?”

“Who?”

“Okay, how about Napoleon?”

“Of course! Everyone knows about him – he was the French revolutionary who conquered Europe.”

“But not this country?”

“No – our soldiers and sailors were stronger than his, and he wasn’t able to cross the Channel.”

“Good, so that narrows it down: your history was the same as ours at least until 1815. Probably if we sat down for an hour or so and asked each other questions we could work out exactly where your world and mine went in different directions.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. Certainly we’ll talk some more, but only to find out who you really are and why you’re here. But perhaps I should come and look at this chair first.”

He came out from behind his desk and ushered us back towards the door, and that allowed me to see that there was a large portrait on either side of it. On the left – appropriately – was a stern-looking man with a huge beard, and I recognised him from my history book at school. On the right was a man I didn’t recognise at all.

“I know that one’s Karl Marx,” I said to the director, “but who’s the other one?”

“That’s Sir Aubrey,” said Jack, sounding shocked. “He’s the People’s Champion – surely you recognise him?”

“I’m not from round here, remember?” I said. “And why is Karl Marx on your wall?”

“Because he’s the man who showed us the way to the future,” said the director. “He was the first to show how the working people of our country were being exploited and what to do about it. And of course in the end we did – as I’m sure you know perfectly well.”

“I promise you, I don’t. So there was a Communist revolution in this country? When did that happen?”

“In 1916. An entire generation of young men were dying to ensure that a few rich people could continue to steal the resources of a lot of other countries, and eventually a few brave men said that enough was enough. The same thing happened in Russia, and then it spread to Germany and France, and eventually the whole of Europe overthrew the parasites who were sucking the lifeblood from the working man. It took a long time to overthrow the last of the tyrants, but there hasn’t been a war in Europe since: now every country works in fraternal co-operation with its neighbours.”

“Well, that’s probably where the history changed, then, because in my world the revolution only happened in Russia – all the other countries kept their ruling class, and my England still has a queen. But… if this is a Communist country, how on earth can Sir Aubrey be tolerated? Surely he’s part of the old nobility?”

“Of course not! In the old days if there was a dispute each party would choose a champion from among them, and the champions would fight each other instead of calling on hundreds of young men to fight a war. The person chosen was called a knight and was given the title ‘Sir’ to show that he was a champion of his people. Sir Aubrey is our champion. He doesn’t actually have to fight in single combat any more, of course, but he guides and leads us and makes sure that we are kept safe.”

That didn’t sound like anything I’d heard before about knighthood, but I supposed I wasn’t really an expert. I looked at Sir Aubrey’s portrait and realised that it looked familiar: if High Captain Aarnist looked like Reinhard Heydrich as portrayed by Kenneth Branagh, so Sir Aubrey looked disconcertingly like Peter Cushing playing Grand Moff Tarkin in the first Star Wars film - he had the same gaunt, hollow-cheeked look, the same receding grey hair, and the same steely glare. The one major difference was that Sir Aubrey wasn’t wearing a military uniform, or a suit of armour, either: he was dressed in a pinstriped suit.

We went back downstairs to the classroom and found Declan sitting in his chair looking out of the window, while Sam and his friends were examining the battery from Declan’s chair, which they had disconnected and put on one of the desks.

“Come and look at this, Director,” invited Sam as we entered the room. “I’ve never seen anything like this material. I thought it was a form of Belgian Shellac, but now I can see it properly I’m not so sure. And look at the way the acid is contained – it’s a far better design than the usual Volta pile. And it’s strong, too – I should think you could use this even on a rough surface without any risk of the acid escaping.”

The director examined the battery with interest, apparently taking note of the label on the top, which was of course written in Arvelan. Then he turned his attention to the chair.

“This isn’t leather,” he said, examining the backrest. “In fact I don’t think it’s any type of hide. What is it?”

“It’s called plastic,” I said. “It’s the same material as the battery, more or less – plastic comes in lots of different types. Don’t you have plastic at all, then?”

“I don’t know what that word means. And what does the writing on the… battery? … say?”

“It says ‘’Lightning 250 – made in Japan’,” I told him. “And here it says ’Check level regularly. Top up with distilled water only. Do not overfill.’”

“Distilled water?” queried Sam. “Oh, come on – it can’t possibly work using water!”

“No, it uses acid, like you said. But when the level drops you’re supposed to use distilled water to top it up, not more acid. I don’t know why.”

“Do you know how long it lasts?”

“Sorry. But if it’s like the one in our car it only needs changing every three or four years, I think.”

He gaped at me. “This lasts four years? They must cost the earth!”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know what financial system you use here, but I think you can buy a new one for about the cost of a day’s labour at basic wages.”

The director was by this point looking much less sure of himself than he had been upstairs, so I decided to push a bit harder.

“Why don’t you ask Declan some questions?” I suggested. “Then you can hear that it’s a different language. I can interpret for you.”

“Yes, alright. Ask him why he’s in that chair. Did he have an accident?”

Declan wasn’t in the mood – he told me he was having problems making any sort of proper contact with the kids here because of the lack of a common language. He could see basic ideas, but he hadn’t had Harlan’s training in dealing with other cultures and so he was making heavy weather of seeing what the boys were thinking beyond the basics: Sam was enthusiastically interested in the battery, a couple of the others were clearly bored, but that was about all he could tell. And he thought it would be hard for him to control them properly, too: shutting them down would be easy enough, but anything else might be a problem.

“Well, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” I replied. “I think they’re halfway to believing us, anyway, so if you answer the boss’s questions it should just about complete the job. And then, with a bit of luck, they’ll let us go.”

I turned to the director. “No, it wasn’t an accident,” I told him. “Declan was born with damage to the left side of his body.”

“But how can he contribute to the work of his commune like that?”

“Well, he wouldn’t be expected to yet anyway: in my culture children don’t start work until they’re sixteen. Before that they’re usually in full-time education. Hold on and I’ll check to see how things are in Declan’s world.”

I asked the question and relayed the answer: “In his world the minimum age for work is fifteen, but if you’re talking about the sort of manual work that gets done on a farm, that’s mostly done by slaves anyway, so boys like Declan wouldn’t take part in it.”

“Slaves? That’s barbaric!”

“To be honest, I agree with you – my world abolished slavery a hundred and fifty years ago.”

“So did ours. And it could never happen now: one of our most important tenets is that the working man deserves a fair reward for his labour. It’s hard to believe that slavery could still exist anywhere. Does he condone it?”

I asked Declan what he thought about slavery and he just shrugged. “It’s always existed, and as a system it works. It helps to keep crime to a minimum, and it frees up the rest of the population from the more menial tasks so that they can work in more interesting jobs. I don’t think you’d even find too many slaves who are against the system: it’s better than being executed or just locked up and forgotten about. Slavery gives them a purpose, and generally slaves are well cared for: slaves work best when they are healthy and decently-fed. Ask the ones at the monument when we get back, and I’m sure they’ll tell you the same thing.”

“I can tell you from personal experience that not all slaves are well cared for,” I said, darkly.

“Yes, I know. But what happened to you wasn’t at all typical. Of course some slaves are going to be unlucky and get put to work in difficult or dangerous activities, but for most of them it’s a fairly safe and peaceful life in a factory or on a farm. Yes, they have to work hard, but then plenty of free people work hard, too.”

I relayed the first part of the answer to the director, who said that it still sounded primitive to him.

“What happens to criminals here, then?” I asked.

“If it’s a minor offence, they are imprisoned for a set period and then, once they are released, they are welcomed back to their commune and are able to resume a normal life. If it’s for a major offence they are executed, of course.”

“And what is a major offence?”

“What you would expect: murder, theft, sabotage, undermining progress, that sort of thing. Anyway, I’ve heard enough: I doubt if anyone would make up that stuff about slavery, and it does seem clear to me that what you and he are speaking to each other is a proper language, even though it is one I don’t know personally.

“This is an unusual situation, and I’m going to have to ask for guidance from a higher level. You’ll have to stay with us until I get instructions on what to do with you, but I hope that won’t be long, and in the meantime you should consider yourself our guests. I’ll ask Jack to show you to the eating hall shortly – it’s almost time for the midday meal. You’re free to ask him anything you like: we’re proud of our commune, and we’re ahead of production schedules, too.”

He turned and left, and as soon as he was out of the door Sam started on about the battery again.

“This material is amazing!” he said. “It seems really strong – I bet I could even drop it on the floor without damaging it! The early Volta piles were made of glass, and obviously you have to be really careful with that, but even the modern ones that use ceramic have to be handled carefully. If we could find out how to make this stuff it would make a massive difference to everything we do… if your friend doesn’t mind I’d like to try to find a way to take a small sample so that we can try to analyse it.”

“As long as he’s careful and doesn’t damage it I don’t care,” said Declan, when I put the question to him.

“Great!”

Clearly we’d made at least one friend here, because Sam made sure he was next to me when we sat down for the midday meal.

“I hope you’re not going to get into trouble for being here,” he said to me quietly as we queued up to be served. “I believe you, anyway – about coming from somewhere else, I mean. I’m sure if that substance existed here I’d know about it. You’re… Jake, is that right?”

“Right,” I confirmed. “Jake Stone – or sometimes Stone Jake, or I suppose in Declan’s world I’d be called something like Jake of Myllytalo – I think that’s how my home town translates into his language. And you’re Sam, aren’t you? Sam what?”

He gave me a funny look. “Sam Amesbury Two, of course,” he replied. “This is Communal Farm Two of the Amesbury Council Zone. Everyone here is called by the name of his commune. Doesn’t that happen where you come from?”

“No – and doesn’t that get confusing? What happens if there is more than one Sam in the commune?”

“There can’t be, silly! When a new baby is born and comes to his Name Day the commune director gives him or her the next free name in the rota. Nobody else in this commune will be called Sam until I’m dead. This is quite a small commune, so we don’t need too many names, but I’ve heard some very strange names given to people on bigger communes in the cities – after all, if there are two thousand males in the commune you have to have two thousand different names. Actually, I think they cheat a bit and allow a Sam A to exist at the same time as a Sam B. I think if it was me I’d sooner be Sam B than Heliogabalus or Artaxerxes or something weird like that.”

“Well, I hope you haven’t already got a Jake here, then,” I said, “because I don’t want my name changed.”

“Don’t worry, we haven’t – at least, I’m fairly sure we haven’t. So how old are you?”

“I’m fourteen. So’s Declan. What about you?”

“I’m thirteen, but I’m in the class above where I should be, so if you have to stay here we’ll probably be studying together. I’d like that – I think you could teach me heaps of new stuff.”

The food wasn’t bad, though it was a little bland: if you’re going to serve mutton you really need a decent sauce to go with it. And boiling potatoes isn’t very imaginative, either, although the other vegetables tasted good. I wasn’t sure that I really wanted to stay here, though it was definitely a step up from Aarnist’s portacabin cell, which is where I’d probably end up if we had to go back. Anyway, I thought if we did have to stay I might offer my services in the kitchen.

After we had eaten Jack and his patrol gave us a guided tour of the farm. It didn’t look quite as primitive as the one at Irtengarde, but neither was it a model of gleaming modernity. Still, the animals seemed contented enough and the fields looked well tended, even though there was nothing growing at this time of year.

One thing I did notice was the lack of heavy machinery, other than a large traction-engine in a shed next to the main building, and I thought that was simply a museum-piece.

“Don’t you have any tractors?” I asked.

“What’s a tractor?”

“It’s a machine you use to pull carts, or a plough, or a baling machine, or…” That just about exhausted what I knew about farms. “Well, other machinery.”

“We’ve got several, only in our world they’re called ‘horses’, said Jack.

“What, you mean you’re still using horse-drawn wagons and ploughs?”

“And you don’t? What do you use, then?”

“Well, tractors… that’s a sort of car but with a powerful engine and big wheels designed to be used in fields.”

“There’s that word ‘car’ again,” said Sam. “You said something about a car before when we were talking about the Volta pile in Declan’s chair. What’s a car?”

I stared at him. “What year is this?” I asked.

“The Year 94, under the new calendar. If we were still using the old one it would be...” He closed his eyes and did some quick mental arithmetic. “2011, I think.”

“And nobody has invented the internal combustion engine?”

“Apparently not, because I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about,” said Jack. “What’s one of those?”

Apparently I’d been wrong to assume that this world’s history departed from mine in 1916 – clearly it was earlier than that. I wasn’t exactly sure when the internal combustion engine had been developed – I’d have guessed during the eighteen-seventies. But it was definitely before 1916.

“A car is a vehicle that moves under its own power, like your traction engine but a lot faster, and it uses petrol rather than steam. The internal combustion engine is what makes it go. I don’t know the details, but basically it’s a machine that burns petrol to drive a number of pistons. In my world they are everywhere – almost every adult has a car – and every farm uses tractors and other petrol-driven machines like combine harvesters to do most of the work.”

“I would definitely like to see your world, then,” said Sam. “It sounds amazing.”

“It isn’t as good as all that, because those engines throw out exhaust gases that can cause problems. Right now everyone is trying to find a clean sort of engine that doesn’t cause pollution.”

“If that’s true, I should think the director is going to want to find out as much as you know about it,” said Jack. “Something like that would certainly offer us a giant step forwards.”

We were heading back towards the main building when a younger boy ran up to us and told Jack that the director wanted to see us by the telegraph room. Jack led us around the side of the building, where we found the director standing outside a small room at the corner of the building.

“Tomorrow you’re going on a journey,” he told us. “The Supreme Council wants to talk to you. It’s a great honour – you might even get to meet Sir Aubrey, and not too many people manage that.”

I thought it was an honour I could probably do without: being noticed by important people was likely to be dangerous. I wondered if we’d be able to slip away overnight.

“And where are they?” I asked.

“In London, of course.”

“Do we really have to go all that way? Couldn’t we just answer their questions on the phone?”

“On the what?”

“On the telephone – you do have telephones?”

“We have a telegraph, but I’ve never heard of a telephone. What’s one of those?”

“It’s a way of speaking to someone a long way away,” I said. “This is a phone.”

I was still carrying both my Elsass chipfone and my English mobile, which I’d picked up at my parents’ house. It was pure habit, because of course neither worked in Declan’s world. I pulled the mobile, which was a fairly old model of the clam type, from my pocket and handed it to him.

“It won’t work here, obviously, but this is the sort of thing everyone carries in my world,” I told him. “Everyone has a number. You punch out that number using the keys and it makes the other person’s phone ring, and when he opens his phone up you can talk to each other.”

“Oh, come on – there aren’t even any wires!” said the director.

I turned the phone on. “Look how it’s lit up now,” I said. “It’s got a small battery – a sort of Volta pile – inside. Here, I’ll show you.”

I turned the phone off, slid the back cover off and indicated the battery.

“That’s never a Volta pile!” exclaimed Sam. “How can there be any acid inside that?”

“Well, it’s not acid – at least, not a liquid,” I said. “I’m not sure exactly how it works, but it does. But before they invented these we used large telephones connected to wires, like your telegraph, except that you can speak through them. They were invented by a man called Bell. He was a Scot, but he worked in America. He lived over a hundred years ago, so I’m surprised you don’t have them here.”

“We have nothing to do with America,” said the director, firmly. “They have a system of government that exploits the masses for the benefit of a small rich elite class. Here in Europe we view them as criminals. So we would have no knowledge of anything that might happen there.”

“What, not even if they invent something useful?”

“If that should happen, I have no doubt that someone here would also make the discovery sooner or later. But this is irrelevant. What is important is that you will be travelling to London tomorrow. Jack, I want you to find a place in the dormitories for our guests, and then keep them entertained until supper-time. I’ll speak to you in the morning.”

The director walked away and the rest of us followed Jack back into the main building. This time he led us through a different door, one that led directly to a staircase.

“You and I can help your friend upstairs,” Jack told me. “Sam and Ron can bring the chair up. The rest of you are dismissed until supper time.”

So we manoeuvred Declan up the stairs. On the second floor was a dormitory containing around twenty beds. It would be fair to describe it as ‘basic’ – in fact it looked a lot like the slave dormitories at the Konjässi Academy in Laztaale – but I found that the beds were comfortable enough, and there was ample room in the locker beside it for everything I was carrying.

“What do you do in the evenings round here?” I asked. I strongly suspected that the answer wouldn’t be ‘watching TV’, and I was right.

“Whatever you want,” Jack said. “We play cards or board games, or we have a library, or you can go for a walk, though this isn’t the best time of year for that. Or we’ve got a phonograph, though that really needs a new needle. In fact, that’s a good point – perhaps you can get us some while you’re in London? There aren’t any places in Amesbury that sell them.”

It’s a pity I’d never got around to updating my mobile to one with a decent mp3 player, I thought. I wondered what this lot would make of Dizzee Rascal…

So after supper I got Sam to show me the library – I thought I might want something to read on the journey next day, which I expected to be very long and very slow. I was still only halfway through From a dusty basement, but if it took as long to get to London as I thought it might I’d be finished before we got there, and then I’d need something else to read on the way back.

“What sort of books do you like?” he asked me.

“Got any thrillers? Or perhaps detective stories – I’m sort of collecting those.”

I half expected him to say that the only books approved for reading were books on Marxist dialectic or something, but instead I found that there was plenty of fiction on the shelves, too – including what looked like the complete works of Dickens. He went and ferreted about and presented me with something called Street of the Dead, by an author called Jeremy Fielding, of whom I had never heard.

“This is quite good,” he told me. “Or, if you want a detective story, you could try this. It’s a translation - the original is in German – but I still liked it, even if I don’t know any of the places he writes about. Fielding’s stories take place south of London, so it’s a bit easier to envisage that area.”

He handed me a book entitled Straight down the line, by…

“Hey, I know this author,” I said. “I’ve read a couple of his before – except… hang on, he can’t possibly be writing in this world, because he was a Na…I mean, he was writing in a completely different world.”

“Really? I didn’t even know he’d written any others,” said Sam, taking the book back from me and opening it to the biographical blurb at the back. “No, I thought not – listen to this: ‘Theodor Köninger worked until Year 92 as an administrator for the Bavarian Central Council. He has written a number of non-fiction books about the history of law enforcement in his native Bavaria, but this is his first work of fiction.’ And it only came out this year, so I don’t think he can have written any others yet. Are you sure it’s the same man?”

“Pretty sure. Is the central character a man called Gustav Leine?”

‘Yes, that’s right… Wow, you mean he exists in your world, too? How is that possible?”

“Not in my world, no, but in another one I’ve been to. I really have to read this one – and I’ll take the other one, too, if I can, just in case the journey is really slow.”

“I don’t see why not. We’re allowed three at a time, and even if you don’t live here I expect it would be alright. I’ll put them in my name, just to make sure.”

He opened a big book on the desk by the door and copied the details into it, while I thought about the ubiquitous Theodor Köninger. I supposed that there was no logical reason why someone couldn’t exist in two different worlds – after all, I supposed that my grandparents would probably exist in both my world and Stefan’s, because the two worlds split away from each other in their lifetime… though probably, I thought sombrely, they wouldn’t have existed in Stefan’s world for very long. But if Köninger could exist in different worlds, why shouldn’t I? What if there was another Jake living in this world? Could I find him – and what would happen when we met?

Of course in this world it would be almost impossible to find out, since the usual methods of finding someone – Google, Facebook, telephone directories and electoral rolls – wouldn’t exist here. I supposed that if I applied to the local Council they might be able to trace him, but I had no way of knowing whether this Jake lived in Edgware, or Abingdon, or somewhere else altogether. But I decided I would definitely have to try next time I found myself in a modern world, especially if it wasn’t too different from the one I was born in.

Sam finished filling in the details in the book register and we went back to the dormitory, but before I could start reading Jack asked me if Declan and I fancied a game of cards.

“What do you want to play?” I asked, half expecting him to name some local game I’d never heard of, like ‘Support the Proletariat!’ or ‘Hunt the counter-revolutionary’, but instead he suggested playing bridge. I can play bridge a bit, but I’m not very good, and to be honest I think I’d have preferred to learn how to play ‘Support the Proletariat!’ - in fact I liked the idea of a game called that so much that I decided I'd have to invent it if it didn't already exist. Although to be honest I'm not completely sure of what exactly is meant by 'proletariat' – I'd got the impression it meant 'the workers' or something like that... anyway, then I thought that if I was playing with Declan as my partner I’d be highly unlikely to lose, so I asked him if he played bridge, and when he said no I said we’d teach him.

So Jack and I gave Declan a quick course in how to play bridge. He knew some whist games, so the actual playing part was straightforward, but it took a while to explain the bidding. I didn’t bother with all the bidding conventions – come to that, I didn’t know half of them myself – but I gave him enough to be going on with. And then we sat down at the table with Jack and Ron and started to play.

I had to translate everyone’s bids into Arvelan, of course, but apart from that Declan was able to manage on his own. And of course he could manage extremely well, given that he could read everyone’s minds well enough to see what cards they had – since this was largely a visual thing the language problem was a lot less important. I’m sure Jack had expected to win comfortably, and he was so confident that he suggested playing for a halfpenny a point. I tried to protect him from his own ignorance by saying that we didn’t have any money, but he simply said he would lend us the money, and that if we lost we could pay him back from our allowance in the weeks ahead, or by some other method if it turned out we weren’t going to be staying.

“What sort of method?” I asked.

“Oh, I expect we can think up some way for you to entertain us,” he replied, grinning.

Sam was standing behind Jack, and when Jack said that Sam shook his head at me, clearly telling me not to accept. And if I’d been on my own, or playing with any other partner, I’d have heeded his advice. But, even though my own ability was pretty poor, I was certain that Declan could carry the partnership on his own with no trouble. And so I said yes, and Jack’s grin got even wider.

Thirty minutes later the grin had disappeared, because by that time we’d already won the first rubber. And although the second rubber took a bit longer, I was never in any real doubt that we would win. Perhaps I should have felt bad about cheating, and for about two minutes I did, until Declan sent me the thought that I should watch what Jack was doing with his hands. And once I saw that Jack was giving signals to his partner I was happy to sit back and let Declan run things, allowing him to send me instructions as to which card to play when we were defending and pretty much allowing him to take complete control when we had won the bidding, even if he was supposed to be dummy.

When Jack finally ran up the white flag at the end of the second rubber we added up the scores and found that we had won by 2,850 points.

“Wow,” commented Sam. “At a halfpenny a point, that’s five pounds, eighteen shillings and ninepence each. I hope you’ve both been saving up.”

From the looks on their faces it was pretty clear that they hadn’t, at least not to that extent.

“So,” I asked, “how much have you got?”

“A couple of pounds, I think,” said Jack.

“About seventeen and six,” mumbled Ron.

“Oh, dear,” I said. “What were you saying earlier about ‘other methods’, Jack?”

He hesitated, but then said, “We’d have made you strip and snog each other, and if you’d lost badly enough we’d have made you toss each other off. That’s what we do to all the new kids.”

“Why did you tell him that, you moron?” cried Ron.

Jack looked as if he couldn’t believe he’d actually said what he had, but I knew why: Declan had been compelling him to tell the truth. Even though there were linguistic barriers I knew Declan was capable of that.

“How much money do you get a week?” I asked Ron.

“We get an allowance of five shillings, but we sometimes get a bit more if we do extra work.”

“Then give us ten shillings each,” I said. “That’ll be plenty. But I think you ought to use the ‘other method’, too – it would be a pity if everyone missed out on the entertainment.”

Neither of them looked very enthusiastic, but after a few seconds Jack shrugged.

“Come on, then, Ron,” he said. “After all, we’ve made enough other people do this.” And he started to undo his shirt.

“Yes, but…” protested Ron. But there was obviously no way out, and so in the end he started to undress, too.

Once they were both naked I told them to stand in the middle of the room and kiss each other. It was obvious that neither really wanted to do this because neither had an erection. Jack was fifteen and quite well-equipped – well, he was bigger than me, anyway; Ron was fourteen and a bit smaller than me, with very little hair. But when they actually started to kiss – and I made them do it properly, with their arms around each other – Ron’s body betrayed him and he started to get an erection. He gave a strangled gasp, broke free and fled to the washroom at the end of the dormitory, pursued by laughter.

“Ron thinks Jack’s sexy!” commented Sam, once he managed to stop laughing.

“I doubt it,” said Jack. “It just happens – and before you lot laugh too much, I bet if I paired you off and made you do it, at least half of you would go stiff. When you’re kissing someone your body gets confused sometimes.”

“It didn’t happen to you, though,” pointed out Sam.

“No, but then Ron is such an ugly sod it would take more than that to confuse my body. There’s no way it could think he’s a girl. Anyway, Jake, can I get dressed, or are you really going to make us… you know?”

The rest of the boys started clamouring for the full penalty to be applied, but I thought it might be better not to annoy Jack too much: he was the senior boy in the dormitory, and if we were going to be stuck here for a while it would be better to have him on my side than bearing a grudge, so I told him to get dressed, to groans of disappointment.

“He wouldn’t have let you off,” said Sam.

“Maybe not, but I’m not him.”

Jack got dressed, someone went and told Ron it was safe to come out and he returned to the dormitory and got dressed too, though not without a certain amount of mockery. And then I settled down with Straight down the line to find out how similar this might be to the books Köninger had written in the other world. The dormitory was well-lit with gas lights, which had surprised me a bit, but apparently there was a small gasworks in Amesbury that supplied gas for lighting for the whole commune.

By the end of the first chapter it was clear that this was the same writer: the style was the same and Detective Leine had the same distrust of his superiors, the same dislike of paperwork and even the same hat, a battered, stained grey trilby. The only difference was that he was now working for the Bureau of State Security instead of the Gestapo, but there didn’t seem to be a lot of difference between the two organisations.

By the time Jack told us all to get ready for bed I had read fifty pages, which was enough to demonstrate that there was in fact virtually no difference between the Marxist police in this story and the Nazi police in the other two. And that made the proposed journey to London even less attractive: I’d already seen what happened when powerful people found out about portal technology, and I didn’t think the Central Council would be able to resist the lure of all that advanced technology available beyond the portals. Of course, if it simply led to the Marxists and the Arvelans knocking lumps off each other it wouldn’t worry me at all, but I didn’t think it would work out like that: it was far more likely that once people started fighting over portals other worlds would get drawn in or attacked – including mine.

So when Jack put the lights out I didn’t go to sleep straight away: first I set the alarm on my wristwatch for two o’clock, since I was fairly sure the entire commune would be asleep by then. If I could get Declan and his chair downstairs on my own without waking anyone up, that should give us at least three hours before anyone discovered that we had gone, and that should give us plenty of time to get back to Stonehenge and out through another portal – or at the very worst, if none of the other portals was open, most of the way back to the children’s home. With any luck we wouldn’t even have been missed, and even if we had I thought we could talk our way out of it if we were clearly still in the world I was meant to be in. Yes, it was a bit of a risk, but it would be a lot less dangerous than what might happen to us in London.

So when the alarm went off at two o’clock I got quietly out of bed and got dressed. I thought it would be best to have a quick scout around before I woke Declan up, and so I tiptoed to the dormitory door…

…and found it locked. There was no sign of a key, and this was a big solid door that couldn’t be forced without waking up everyone in the building. I swore under my breath and cursed myself for not taking lessons in lock-picking from Tibor or Radu.

I checked around the room as best I could in the dark but, as I had thought, there was no other way out. The windows were too small to offer a way out even for me, let alone for Declan and his chair. So it looked as if we were stuck here.

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So Jake is looking at an uncertain future yet again. By now you'd think he'd be used to that. In the next chapter he and Declan will be travelling to London, though the journey turns out to be a bit different from what Jake was expecting...

The mail address is still gothmog@nyms.net so if you want to tell me what you think of the story so far, just click on the link.

Copyright 2011: all rights reserved. Please do not reprint, repost or otherwise reproduce this or any part of it anywhere without my written permission.

David Clarke