Royston pulled the ticker-tape readout from the side of his radiation scanner, made a note, and scrolled backwards on the tape nearly three feet to another set of results. Briefly he wondered if the radiation machine was broken.
Or if he had tuned it too sensitive and it was reacting to just the movement of the air at this point.
Except, Gareth’s room was the only place where the readings changed. Royston looked around, but nothing was out of the ordinary. The place was as standard and regulation as they came, which was to be expected of Gareth. His pocketcomm was still sitting on the desk, next to a book the young man had apparently been reading when the emergency happened. The bed tucked tight, except where he had pulled the covers slightly while sitting on them.
Uniforms all arranged in the drawers and closet exactly according to specification.
Royston had even scanned both chester and closet, on the possible chance that Gareth had brought something home with him from a recent mission, but nothing reacted.
No, the only time the machine pinged at all was when he pointed the detector at the telephone’s handset, or at a spot in the middle of the floor, almost in the center of the triangle between bed, dresser, and closet. And in both of those, the radiation reading went off the charts. It made no sense at all.
Royston turned the machine off and moved to the door. He opened it and looked out at his daughter, patiently waiting on a chair just outside.
“Any news?” she asked as she looked up.
“No,” he replied. “Come inside, please, Pippa. I want to review what I’ve learned.”
She rose with all the grace of her mother and flowed past him, holding a book of Tacitus written in Latin that she had been reading while she waited.
Closing the door, he found her seated on the one chair.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, Pippa,” he began.
“I’m made of far sterner stuff than you think, Father,” she replied with a primness she inherited from dear Elizabeth.
“If I believed in angels and devils, I would have to only presume that one such opened the fabric of space/time itself and grabbed him,” Royston said. “But since we know that to be impossible, I’m at a loss.”
“Why do you presume the impossibility of such a thing, Father,” she asked, eyes glaring. “In science, you have always taught me that we use deduction to eliminate the obvious, and thus, what remains, no matter how far-fetched, must be the explanation.”
“Gareth Dankworth disappeared from this room in a way I cannot explain. And did so without opening any doors ,” Royston said. “The air vents are too small to admit anything larger than a mouse. But he is absolutely gone.”
“Then your understanding of physics are insufficient,” Pippa stated flatly.
“What?”
“As you said, science cannot explain it, and yet it happened,” she retorted. “Ergo, our knowledge of science is too rudimentary to explain that angel or devil and how they were able to open a portal through space and time to kidnap Gareth. Prior to Newton, we were still bound by the laws of gravity, even though we could not explain them. Gareth was here, and then he was not. The door did not open and there is no other method of egress. Therefore, something opened a different type of portal, one we do not understand. What did your radiation detector find?”
“Something my simple understanding of physics cannot explain,” Royston said, granting her the warmest smile the chills in his heart would allow.
Indeed, sterner stuff than he gave her credit. Stronger than many of the men he knew.
She was like Elizabeth in that. He missed his wife less, knowing how well their daughter had turned out.
“Tell me,” Pippa commanded, Queen of England facing down the Armada.
“There is a signal when I scan the handset,” Royston said, moving to the middle of the room. “The only other place I find it is here. I have scanned countless other places and rooms, and only here do I find that signature.”
“What does that tell us, Father?” Pippa continued. “It tells me that Gareth was talking on the telephone when this indescribable portal opened, right where you are standing. It pulled him through before he could resist, then the handset fell. The radiation only touched those two places, as you said.”
“But how did someone open a rift in space and time itself, in order to kidnap the man?” Royston asked.
“No,” Pippa stated flatly. “There is a more important question we should be asking. Namely, why did they want Gareth?”