A Tale of Time City (32 page)

“History’s gone critical,” said Jonathan. “We ought to have thought. It’s all changed. But my father and the other people from Chronologue must be here somewhere, because they
did
come here. And I told the egg to get us here a moment before the train comes in, so there’s got to be a train too.”

“Let’s ask,” said Vivian.

So, quite forgetting the way they were all dressed, they hauled Sam to his feet and hurried up the platform to the exit. A surprised porter stood there, staring at them through a transparent face-piece under his peaked hood. Vivian could tell he was a porter because his uniform was navy-blue, but it was a strange bulky all-over suit with navy-blue gloves to it. “Please, is there going to be an evacuee train?” Vivian asked breathlessly.

“Due any moment,” said the porter. His voice came out of a
transparent grid on the front of his mask. Behind the mask, his eyes wonderingly looked at Jonathan’s pigtail embalmed in Jonathan’s mind-suit and then went to the flicker over Jonathan’s eyes. “Is this the new issue protective clothing then?” he said.

“The very latest Government issue,” Vivian said hastily. “Where are all the other people meeting the train?”

“Down in the bunker in the forecourt of course,” said the porter, “where you should be too. But you might as well stay as you’re all suited-up. Stand well back. Over there.” While they were obediently backing towards the Waiting Room, he looked sideways at them. A chuckle came out of his mask. “What will the Government dream up next?” he said. “That rig makes you look as if you come from Heaven. Could have put in a halo or so while they were at it, though!”

Bunkers? Vivian thought. Protective clothing? This war has gone very strange! But the railway lines still looked like railway lines. And a train
was
coming. She could hear the metal rails thrumming with the train moving on them.

“Just coming!” the porter called over to them.

Almost as soon as he said it the train was there. It came in a sort of yelling thunder that had Vivian covering her ears. It was no steam train and there was no smell and no smoke. It was a huge dark green pointed monster. As the engine howled past and stopped some way down the platform, Vivian caught sight of red letters on it against a white background. RADIO ACTIVE FUEL KEEP CLEAR. She stared bemusedly at rows of hooded windows rattling by.

“Oh no!” said Jonathan and pointed down the platform.

Time Patrol had traced them. The Patrollers who had chased them to the time-booths were appearing near the engine in twos and threes. Most of them had been in too much haste to put on Twenty Century costume. Probably history was changing so fast now that they had not had time. Two of them were in mind-suits and two more in hooped skirts. Vivian saw short kilts, gauzy robes, Patrol uniforms, and a person in red feathers. But there was no time to do anything about it. A recorded voice spoke overhead and all the train’s hooded doors opened at once as if they were mechanically controlled. Evacuees came pouring out, hundreds of them.

Sam, Jonathan, and Vivian were instantly surrounded in a horde of milling children. The world seemed nothing but grey shorts, school blazers, plastic boxes labelled RADIATION SUIT WAR OFFICE ISSUE, striped caps, gym tunics, pale faces, straw hats, labels, thin legs, and shrill London voices. At the other end of the platform, the Patrollers were fighting through the throng towards them. But more and more evacuees kept coming off the train, pushing them backwards. The green monster must have held twice as many children as the train Vivian remembered.

Don’t we all look sickly! Vivian thought, as she searched frantically in the swelling crowd for the face of the boy thief. She caught a glimpse of her own face in the distance under a blue felt hat, looking pale and worried, and she supposed Jonathan’s former self must have been there too, but she did not see him. And nowhere could she see the thin ratlike face of the thief. “We’re never going to find him in all these!” she shouted to Jonathan.

“We
must
!” Jonathan shouted back. “Keep looki—Great Time! What’s
that
?”

It was a noise like the sky tearing apart. It made the thunder of the train sound puny. Vivian looked up to see where it was coming from and saw a great dark thing diving from the sky towards the train. She never saw it clearly. All she knew was that it came down at the train and then screamed up over the station out of sight, tearing the sky open as it went. It left the train on fire. Flames leapt high, instantly and fiercely. The glass in the hooded windows went
spung
and fell out on to the platform, and clouds of dark yellow smoke rolled over everything, smelling sharp and choking. There was a lot of screaming. A siren started somewhere and yowled up and down the scale like a hoarse and seasick cat. The porter was bellowing too.

“Get back! Get clear! Everybody get clear before the engine blows!”

“Back to the City!” Jonathan screamed. “We’ll have to get back!” He seized Sam by the arm and dragged him down the platform among the murk and flames and milling children, coughing and shouting instructions to the time-egg as he went. But it was clear that the egg was only going to work somewhere near the place where they had arrived. Vivian got behind Sam and pushed. They fought their way down the platform for a nightmare age and, like a nightmare, Vivian saw another set of their former selves calmly walking the other way: Sam in a striped cap and huge boots, herself with a shrunk navy cardigan not quite hiding violet and yellow stripes, and Jonathan loftily stepping out with a thing like a gas
mask box on his shoulder. But they’ll get killed! she thought, as the three people vanished into the yellow smoke.

“Come on! This way!” Jonathan shouted while she was trying to see where the three went.

Ahead of them, the Patrollers were shouting too. “This way! This way! Get back before that thing blows!”

Most of the evacuees began to run towards the Patrollers’ shouts. They thought they were being told to go that way. This made it much easier for Jonathan to drag Sam along and for Vivian to push him. For a long moment, they were all running and running, part of a grey mob in the thick smoke. Then the time-egg worked. They were rushing forward into the hall of Time Patrol, coughing, frightened, their mind-suits dingy from the smoke, with the sound of some kind of explosion hammering in their ears.

“Come here, you three!” Mr. Donegal shouted at them. His voice seemed thin and far away compared with the sounds they had just been hearing. He was beckoning angrily from beside the kiosk. Elio was standing there between two Patrollers. His head was hanging and he looked so dejected that Vivian was fairly sure that the diversion had been a demonstration of Elio’s true feelings.

“We’ve made things worse again,” Sam said as they trudged towards the kiosk.

“Cor!” said a high London voice from behind them. “I didn’t know it looked like
this
out in the country! Take a look at that dirty great escalator!”

All three of them jumped and turned round. An evacuee boy had come out of the booth behind them and was staring at the
moving stairs. Beside him, his smaller sister was pointing at Sam. “Are you sure we ain’t in Hevving?” she said doubtfully. “Them lot look like angels.” As she said it, she was pushed aside by a crowd of other evacuees who were fighting to get out of the booth behind her. More evacuees were pushing out of the next booth along. In fact, now they looked, every single time-booth in the semicircle was open and evacuees were flooding out of them all, pausing to gape at the hall, and then being pushed forwards by others crowding out behind.

“I think we’ve only made things about a hundred times worse,” Jonathan said as the Patroller in red feathers struggled out of a booth in the distance among a mob of little girls in blazers.

By now a klaxon was sounding from the kiosk—a sort of gentle
crake-crake
that sounded very mild after the siren at the station. “Time-booth misfunction,” announced a mechanical voice. “Time-booth misfunction. Everyone stand clear except for armed personnel and medical teams.”

Mr. Donegal came striding over. “Look what you’ve done
now
!” he shouted. “I shall larrup the lot of you for this!”

“That’s not fair,” said Sam. “Those children would be dead if we hadn’t been there. Their train blew up.”

“What’s that got to do with it? These children are
history
!” Mr. Donegal shouted, waving his arm round the crowding evacuees. All of them heard him. They stood and looked at him wonderingly.

“Is he an Air Raid Warden?” one of them asked.

Vivian found herself shouting back at Mr. Donegal. “They are
not
history! They’re real people! You people in Time City make me
sick
the way you sit here studying things. You never raise a finger to
help
anyone! This is all Time City’s fault anyway! It was
you
that tinkered with history. And now it’s gone critical and people like these kids are getting hurt all over time, and all
you
think about is getting your beastly Observers out!”

“What do you expect me to do about that?” Mr. Donegal roared back. “There must be over five hundred damn children here!”

The evacuees were now in a ring all round them, staring and listening, but Vivian was too angry to feel shy. “Then look
after
them!” she screamed in Mr. Donegal’s face. “You’ve got things in Time City to help the whole human race! It won’t hurt you to help just these few. There are far too few children in this City anyway. It’s a disgrace!”

Mr. Donegal’s hand went up to hit her. Vivian winced and waited. But before his hand came down, a great voice shouted, “Bravo!” Mr. Donegal stepped back, looking rather deflated, and Vivian looked up to find Dr. Wilander towering over her in his shabby purple gown. His clever little eyes were laughing at her as usual, but she could tell that he was on her side.

“He must be the vicar,” one of the evacuees told a friend. “And the others must be bishops and things,” he added, as Sempitern Walker came up beside Dr. Wilander and gave Vivian a truly agonised stare from under a flat silver hat. She could see they had both come straight from the ceremony.

The Patroller in red feathers pushed up beside Mr. Donegal. “Sir, I’m sorry about all this. An explosion in history seems to have blown all the time-booths open and now they’ve stopped working—”

“Then we can take it that Time City has gone critical like the rest of history,” Dr. Wilander said. “Come with me and help organise something for these children.” He took hold of the Patroller by one feathered shoulder and pushed her in front of him as he limped away booming, “Come with me. All you children come with me.” Most of the evacuees obediently followed, so that Dr. Wilander and the Patroller departed in a crowd of children, like two ill-assorted Pied Pipers. But a number of evacuees remained, staring.

“Some people are lucky, having their mums to meet them,” one of them said wistfully.

This was because Jenny and Ramona, both in robes from the ceremony, had arrived with the Sempitern. Ramona was hugging Sam, then shaking him, then hugging him again. Jenny had her arms wrapped, round Jonathan. “We’ve been so worried!” she kept saying. Vivian looked up to find Jonathan giving her a shamed look over Jenny’s shoulder. She thought it was because he was being hugged, until he said, “You were quite right about Time City. We never help anyone.”

Then the blow fell. Mr. Donegal pushed his way through to them in quite a different mood, smiling widely. “Ramona! Look who’s here!” He brought with him three smiling people. They were the three Observers who had been in the time-booth when Jonathan had rushed through it to 1939. The man was tall, with the same eyefolds as Jonathan, Jenny, and Sam, and he wore a baggy tweed suit and carried a trilby hat. The woman was in a square-shouldered dress. Her lipstick was a very bright red and she had her fair hair in a contraption that was not unlike Vivian’s string-bag.
Vivian knew it was very fashionable and she found it quite hideous—though not as hideous as the girl’s short puffed sleeves and shiny, ankle-strap shoes. “Viv and Inga Lee!” Mr. Donegal said. “They got here at last! Sam, this is your cousin Vivian.”

Vivian backed quietly away, through the watching evacuees, hoping they would hide her. She did not know what to do. The circle of time-booths was standing empty and open on both sides of the hall and she could see they had stopped working, just as the Patroller with red feathers had said. She thought Dr. Wilander might have helped her, but she could not see him anywhere in the hall. She looked for Elio and saw him being led away by two Patrollers. The Lees were laughing and being embraced and welcomed by the rest of their family, but it was only going to be moments before someone turned towards Vivian and asked, “Then who is
she
?”

But it was worse than that. She knew the face of the man whom Jenny was hugging so delightedly. It had looked out at her from a helmet when he had tried to kill Jonathan in the Golden Age. Sempitern Walker was clasping the woman’s hand, and Vivian knew it was the same hand that had passed them the plastic egg in the Age of Silver. She remembered that colour lipstick under the layers of mind-suit. As for the girl Ramona was kissing, Vivian thought she would know that face anywhere. Though it was wreathed in smiles, with a big baby blue bow in the hair above it, she could remember it vividly, glaring like a cornered rat, when Jonathan tried to rescue the Iron Casket. She wondered what the Lees had been doing since they got out of that time-booth so hurriedly. Getting their bearings and waiting for the right moment, she supposed.

Jonathan and Sam had recognised the thieves too. Sam, being
the smallest, ducked out of the hugging and hand-clasping almost at once and edged through to Vivian. They stared at one another. There seemed nothing to say. A moment later, Jonathan slithered away from beside his uncle. He was white. “I don’t believe this!” he whispered. “Do you think perhaps they did it for the sake of Time City after all?”

“No!” Vivian and Sam said together.

As they said it, the whole group—Mr. Donegal, Sempitern Walker, Jenny, Ramona, and all three Lees—turned and came smilingly towards them. Vivian braced herself. Sam and Jonathan took deep breaths.