The Touchstone

by Andrew Norriss

  Gedrus showed Douglas how, three million years before, a race called the Yōb had discovered how to access the Great Memory, that place within the folds of time where everything that ever happened is held and stored. He showed him how the first Touchstones had been made, in a process that no other race had been able to repeat because making a Touchstone, like finding the Holy Grail, could only be achieved by being a particular sort of person.

  He showed how every Yōbian on a thousand planets had once owned a Touchstone and what it had meant to them and the glories that their civilization had achieved. He showed Douglas the great buildings in which they lived, the huge ships in which they travelled between the stars. And he told the story of how the Yōb had suddenly disappeared in a single night, all of them, no one knew where, leaving only empty cities and towns to crumble over the millennia into dust.

  He showed Douglas how a Denebian scout ship, exploring one of these ruins – at a time when humans on earth were hunting mammoths with bows and arrows – had found a cache of several hundred Touchstones, all unused. A member of the crew had picked one of them up and, like Douglas, discovered what they could do.

  Long and terrible wars had been fought for ownership of those stones and Gedrus showed them as well. He showed the story of the desperate search among the ruins of all the Yōbian worlds for other caches and more unused Touchstones. And then the story of how the Touchstones had gradually come under the control of the Guardians. Only the Guardians were allowed to possess a Touchstone. Only the Guardians could say how they should be used, and where. And once the Guardians controlled the stones, they came to control the Federation. Under their iron fist a peace had been restored throughout the galaxy and their power and authority had only grown over the millennia.

  Douglas listened to these stories whenever he could. In bed at night, in the evenings round at Ivo's shed and, most peacefully, in his lessons at school during the day. They were a lot more interesting than Mr Phillips droning on about beef production in the Argentine or Mr Campbell talking about the medieval wool trade, and it didn't matter if his teachers noticed that he wasn't really paying attention to the lesson. Looking as if he wasn't paying attention was part of the plan to get his parents back together anyway.

  In the evening after school, he would walk round to Ivo's house, where the robot they were building came together with astonishing speed. The boys worked on it every evening and most of the weekends. Ivo would have worked on it all through the night if he had been able to. Most of the time they had no idea how what they were building would work, but it didn't seem to matter. Gedrus knew what he was doing and that was enough.

  In a little over a fortnight they were ready to give the robot its first test run. They called it the Indestructible because Gedrus told them that's what it was and though it did not look particularly exciting – it was a steel box about a metre long and half a metre wide – it did not behave like any other robot they had seen.

  Surrounded by what Gedrus told them was a Tenebrian force field, you could have hit it with a ten-ton sledgehammer and not made it move a millimetre or even dented its surface. With the field turned on nothing could touch it. Yet when you set it going, as Ivo did, and ran it at a paving slab propped up on the grass by a couple of pegs, it smashed its way through the stone as if it were tissue paper. In the Robot Wars arena nothing was going to touch it. Nothing.

  Ivo was ecstatic, though he did ask for one change to the design. However unnecessary in the practical sense, he felt the Indestructible should have some sort of weapon, like the hammers, circular saws or flame-throwers of other robots. Gedrus, when Douglas asked if this would be possible, produced plans for a device called a Nihilator, that could be mounted on top of the robot. It would, he said, generate a plasma vortex that disrupted the molecular stability of anything it was aimed at. Neither of the boys had the least idea what this meant but it sounded, as Ivo said, pretty cool.

  The librarian warned the boys that building it would cost more money but by that time money was no longer a problem.

  These days, when Douglas climbed the five flights of stairs to Mr Parrot's office he was given a most enthusiastic welcome. Mr Parrot would heave his huge bulk up from his chair, shake Douglas warmly by the hand and show him to a seat. He made no mention of his young client's increasingly untidy appearance, but offered him a chocolate biscuit, a can of drink from the fridge, and then listened carefully and attentively while Douglas explained what shares he would like to buy next.

  He no longer made any attempt to dissuade him from buying into companies that looked, on paper, to be incapable of making a profit. If Douglas said shares were worth buying then they were. There was no argument.

  Shares in the Travers Mining Company had gone up to six pounds before Mr Parrot sold them the following day. Douglas had then invested the money in a dot.com company that helped people find the cheapest travel fares. Those shares had quadrupled in value before the end of the week. After that there had been a Swiss pharmaceutical company and a firm of Cambridge software designers - both turning in huge profits within a day or two of Douglas buying their shares.

  It seemed that whatever Douglas touched made a profit and after only two weeks, the value of his investments stood at a little over a quarter of a million pounds. Mr Parrot, to judge by his new suit and the news that he was planning to move to a suite of larger offices in the centre of town, had made a fair amount of money for himself as well. So it was not surprising that he smiled when he saw Douglas arrive, though on one occasion he did express a certain concern.

  ‘I hope you won't mind,’ he said after Douglas had told him he wanted to invest in the Swiss company working on a pill that could make people thin, ‘but I have to ask. How do you know which shares are worth buying?’ He looked apologetically at Douglas before going on. ‘I'm legally obliged, you see, to take all reasonable precautions to ensure that you're not breaking the law and your success is not the result of inside information.’

  Douglas said he didn't know what inside information was.

  ‘It's when you know someone inside the company,’ Mr Parrot explained, ‘who tells you something that the rest of the public don't know. Has anyone been doing anything like that?'

  Douglas thought about it and decided he could honestly say that no one in any of the companies in which he had bought shares had ever told him anything.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘So how do you know which companies are going to be successful?’

  ‘Well,’ said Douglas carefully, ‘I get these sort of pictures in my head. They tell me what shares to buy, and I tell you.’

  Mr Parrot gave a big sigh of relief. It was exactly the answer he had been hoping for. He had read a story once about a boy who had been able to predict the winners in horse races by seeing their names in his head while he was sitting on a rocking horse. Douglas obviously had a similar ability.

  ‘Is that all right?’ asked Douglas. ‘It's not breaking the law or anything?’

  ‘It's not breaking the law,’ said Mr Parrot firmly, ‘and it's very all right. You feel free to come and tell me about your pictures any time. Any time at all.’

  It was all was going better than Douglas could ever have imagined. His days passed in a glorious routine of watching the vast spectacle of galactic history provided by Gedrus, and robot building with Ivo. And as if all that were not enough, Gedrus was at the same time telling him how to achieve the only other thing he wanted – how to bring his parents back together.

  Putting Gedrus's plan into practice had, at first, been rather more difficult than Douglas had expected. When Gedrus told him that over the coming days he should let his appearance become increasingly untidy, it sounded simple enough – but unfortunately Douglas was the sort of person who straightened his tie and tucked his shirt in several times a day without thinking. He would carefully disarrange his clothes before he left for school and then find he had unconsciously combed his hair and brushed the dirt from his bla
zer before he even arrived.

  Again, Gedrus told Douglas that when teachers spoke to him he was not to reply directly but stare at his feet, mumble his answers and occasionally not answer at all. The trouble was that Douglas liked most of his teachers, and when they put a hand on his shoulder and asked how things were going, he would find himself smiling back and saying a polite, ‘Not too bad, thank you’, before he could stop himself.

  He did manage to be late for class occasionally but even this did not have the effect he expected. Douglas had never been any trouble in the past and teachers presumed, as Mr Linneker had, that when he was late there was probably some good reason. Most of them knew about his parents and when he walked in the door, they would nod understandingly and tell him to go and sit down.

  Help came, in the end, from a quite unexpected quarter. Hannah Linneker knew a lot about behaving badly at school. Hannah could annoy teachers just by being in the same room, and it was when she began telling Douglas what to do that things really started to happen.

  It was Hannah who taught Douglas how to walk with that sort of scuffling slouch that drives all adults mad. How to keep his face a mask and never show any emotion, in particular never to smile. And it was Hannah who put gel in his hair to make it stick up at funny angles and explained about making sure he never had the right pencil or the right book for a class.

  It was Hannah who told him how to wear his tie with the knot too tight and out of place but not quite out of place enough for a teacher to complain. She told him how to look as if he was thinking of an answer when he was asked a question, but then let the silence grow and never actually say anything. The two of them sat together at the back of the class, carefully practising the sort of bored disinterested look that was guaranteed to annoy even the most sympathetic and supportive teacher.

  And in return for her help Douglas did most of Hannah's schoolwork – either asking Gedrus to dictate the answers she needed or simply letting her copy the answers from his own exercise books.

  It was an arrangement that benefited both of them. Douglas had been puzzled at first, since Hannah cared so little about school, that she bothered to do the work at all, but it turned out there was a reason. Before becoming headmaster, Mr Linneker had been deputy head of a school in Norwich. That was where Hannah had left all her friends and her father had said he would allow her to go back and see them over half term, but only if her schoolwork was satisfactory. And with Douglas's help, her schoolwork was proving to be very satisfactory indeed.

  At the same time reports were filtering back to Mr Linneker that Douglas Paterson had changed, that he was no longer the tidy, attentive pupil he used to be, and that his attitude in class had become a cause for concern. It was only a matter of time, Gedrus said happily, before the news got back to his parents.

  Mrs Paterson was worried about Douglas long before she heard reports of his behaviour at school. In the last two weeks her son seemed to have become a recluse. He never saw any of his old friends. If he wasn't round at Ivo's he would sit for hours in his bedroom, staring at the wall in front of him without uttering a word. He hardly spoke to her at all. What had happened to the serene and sunny child who had delighted her life for the last twelve years, she had no idea, nor what she should do about it.

  She rang Mr Paterson, who told her she was exaggerating, and then she rang the school, who arranged for both parents to come in and talk to the headmaster. It was not a comfortable meeting. Mr Linneker began by telling them, in some detail, how Douglas's behaviour, attitude and appearance had become a cause for serious concern. Mrs Paterson was soon crying. Mr Paterson said he couldn't understand why his son's personality had changed so dramatically, and Mr Linneker said you didn't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that a twelve-year-old boy is bound to be unsettled when his parents decide to get divorced.

  It had, said Gedrus, gone better than he thought possible, and he calculated it was only a question of time before Mr Paterson moved back into the house in Western Avenue.

  Douglas ought to have been delighted at the news but somehow he wasn't. Gedrus had shown him the entire meeting as he walked home from school and the more he saw of his mother's distress and his father's pale, strained face, the more he wondered if the whole thing had been quite such a good idea.

  The librarian had no such reservations. ‘You couldn't have asked for it to go better than that,’ he said as he hopped up and down the library on a pogo stick. ‘I'm telling you, we've got them on the run now.’

  ‘But they looked so unhappy,’ said Douglas. ‘I didn't want to make them unhappy.’

  ‘Unhappy was the whole point of the plan, Doug!’ Gedrus bounced enthusiastically round his desk. ‘We had to make your dad feel so bad about leaving that he'd change his mind and come back.’

  ‘I didn't want to make him feel bad either.’

  ‘Douglas! The plan was to make him feel bad. I told you that at the start.’

  This was, Douglas had to admit, quite true.

  ‘And it's working brilliantly,’ Gedrus went on. ‘Another couple of weeks and we'll have him back in the house, I promise.’

  That thought, at least, made Douglas feel a bit better. ‘Well, I suppose it's worth it. If it means they'll be happy in the long run.’

  ‘Happy?’ Gedrus paused in mid-bounce.

  ‘Yes. When we're all back in the same house, happy together, it won't matter that…’

  ‘My memory,’ Gedrus did not often interrupt when Douglas was talking, but he did now, ‘is that the point of this operation was to get things back to the way they were before. No one said anything to me about people being happy.’

  ‘But…’ for a moment Douglas suddenly felt his whole world slipping sideways, ‘but that was the whole reason I was doing it.’

  ‘You never said anything about making anyone happy,’ Gedrus repeated stubbornly. ‘You said you wanted to make things like they were before and that's what I've been telling you how to do.’

  There was an empty feeling in Douglas's stomach. What the librarian said was perfectly true. That was exactly what he had said, and it was no good complaining that he had meant something different. Gedrus had answered exactly the question he had been asked, and Douglas had only himself to blame if he had asked the wrong question.

  ‘You're saying my parents were unhappy before?’ he said, his voice no more than a whisper.

  ‘Of course they were unhappy before!’ Gedrus had resumed his bouncing. ‘That's why they were getting divorced.’

  ‘And if Dad moves back in, they're going to be unhappy again?’

  ‘Absolutely miserable, I'd say,’ said Gedrus.

  And it was after that, that all sorts of things started going seriously pear-shaped.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Douglas wanted to tell to how the plan to bring his parents together had gone wrong – but when he walked round to Ivo's house he found the street filled with an ambulance, two police cars, an electricity van and a fire engine.

  A small crowd had gathered on the pavement and, while everyone knew there had been some sort of accident, nobody was quite sure what it was. One woman said she'd heard a young boy had been electrocuted by a falling power line, someone else thought Mrs Radomir had been crushed by a falling tree, but the policeman standing outside the door to number 17 would not say if either of these stories was true. Nor would he let Douglas inside to find out.

  A few minutes later, however, to Douglas's great relief, Ivo was wheeled out of the house by two ambulance men, with a large dressing on the side of his head, but smiling and looking very much alive. He had a chance for a quick word with Douglas before he was put into the ambulance.

  ‘It was all my fault.’ He spoke in a low voice, so that no one else could hear. ‘I got the range wrong.’

  ‘The range? What range?’

  ‘On the Nihilator.’ Ivo looked slightly embarrassed. ‘I hit a telegraph pole. I should have waited for you.’

  ‘Are you all right?�
�

  ‘I'm fine.’ The men were lifting Ivo into the ambulance and he gave Douglas a wave. ‘I'll call you this evening. Tell you all about it…’

  In fact Douglas did not have to wait for Ivo's call to find out what had happened. He got the story from Gedrus while he was walking home, though the librarian was careful to say he was only deducing what had probably happened as Ivo had been on his own at the time.

  Using the plans Douglas had made for him, Ivo had finished the Nihilator when he got home from school and, instead of waiting for Douglas to join him, had decided to try out the weapon on his own. He set up a tin can at one end of the workbench in his shed and fired at it. The can was destroyed in a very satisfying manner – it simply disappeared – but so was half the shed wall and the base of the telegraph pole two metres behind it. Meanwhile, the recoil from firing the weapon sent Ivo flying backwards through the door. Though painful, it was this that saved his life. A moment later, the top ten metres of the telegraph pole fell directly on to the shed, smashing it to matchwood. If Ivo had been inside he would have been killed outright.

  It had been a narrow escape but, Douglas realized, there was now a fresh danger facing them both. The authorities would want to know why the telegraph pole had fallen down. They would investigate, they would ask questions, and if they found the accident had been caused by two twelve year olds building a plasma vortex generator, the consequences would be more serious than a slapped wrist and stopped pocket money.

  He remembered Kai's warning that he should guard his secret carefully, and how Gedrus had told him on more than one occasion that it was only if no one else knew about the Touchstone that he would be able to keep it. The Guardians wanted it back. They had been searching for it ever since it was stolen. They might not be able to ask Gedrus directly where it was but there were other questions they could ask.

  They could ask if anyone knew of someone who had displayed unusual abilities recently… or shown an exceptional knowledge of technology. An item in the national news about two twelve-year-old boys with a Nihilator and a Tenebrian force field would be like a beacon telling them where to find at least one of the missing Touchstones.