The Race Against Time

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  The tyrannosaurs, on the other hand, were disappointed. They’d come to see flashing lights and hear terrifying Klaxons, not just another obviously-edible-but-not-very-meaty mammal. Oh, well, thought thirteen tyrannosaurs at the same time, at least I get a snack out of it. And thirteen tyrannosaurus heads bent down to swallow Little Harry.

  The thing that saved him was that — unlike any other creature that has ever lived — he ran toward the tyrannosaurs. No one runs toward a hungry tyrannosaur. Even baby tyrannosaurs do not run toward Mummy when Mummy is hungry, because — horrible but true — family loyalty means very little when a tyrannosaur is hungry.

  Little Harry, however, ran forward. He ran right under the tyrannosaurs’ heads, hoping to get a better view of their funny little arms. Tyrannosaurs have many talents, but backing up is not one of them. When Little Harry ran out of reach of their mouths, some of them tried to turn to the right; some tried to turn to the left; some tried to go right round; some just stood there, bewildered. The result was a lot of tyrannosaurs banging heads. And the result of that was a lot of angry tyrannosaurs. Little Harry loved this more than anything. As giant killer lizards bit huge bloody chunks out of one another and clawed and bellowed in pain and fury, Little Harry clapped his hands and yelled, “Again!”

  This behaviour did slightly refocus the tyrannosaurs’ attention on Little Harry. The cleverer ones managed to get themselves into a good position to snatch him up in their jaws. But just then . . .

  “Ga gooo ga!”

  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang flew back into the clearing. Lights flashing. Klaxon sounding. No one had mentioned before that the mysterious object could fly. The only thing they’d ever heard of that could fly and flash light at the same time was a comet. And all they knew about comets was that they made you extinct. With all the grace and precision of a troupe of seven-ton ballerinas, the tyrannosaurs spun on their three-toed feet and fled from the scene.

  “Dinosaurs!” yelled Little Harry, as his mother swept him into her arms.

  “Yes,” she said, “we noticed them.”

  “Let’s get out of here and go home.” Dad grabbed the handle of the Chronojuster.

  “Whoa!” said Jem. “Not so fast! We don’t want to end up in some distant future where the whole world is flooded and everyone’s got gills.”

  “Good thinking, Jem,” said Dad. “That was a narrow escape. Gently does it.”

  “Although,” said Lucy, “a post-apocalyptic submarine future does sound quite interesting.”

  “Not as interesting as getting safely back to Basildon,” said Dad, moving the lever gently forward.

  The Tootings’ first time-trip had been so sudden and unexpected, they hadn’t really noticed what it felt like. This time, though, as the giant ferns around them trembled, blurred, and then vanished, they were able to enjoy the strange tingly sensation that time travel gives you. It’s like a cool breeze that seems to pass straight through your body, filtering through all your cells. A wide red desert unrolled beneath them like a carpet. The sky filled up with unexpected colours and towers of red and purple clouds. Lightning flickered, illuminating great piles of bleached bones.

  “I think we just passed through the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous,” said Lucy.

  “So nearly at Basildon, then?” said Dad.

  “Just another sixty-six million years,” said Lucy. “Oh!”

  Everyone said “Oh!” at the same time because all across the sky, the menacing clouds turned white and fluffy, and the dark sky turned bright blue. Blades of tall grass popped up from the sand like quick green fireworks, until the whole desert became a rippling savanna where the long necks of big birds rose up like feathery periscopes. Then, as if an invisible hand were wiping the whole landscape clean with a cloth, a strange blankness began to spread from east to west. The land was turning white, the sky grey.

  “The Ice Age is coming,” said Jem. “Do we have any antifreeze?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Dad. “Maybe the best thing is to speed up.”

  So the whole Ice Age rolled over them quick as a spring shower, leaving just a powdered-sugar dusting of frost on the bonnet. As soon as the glaciers had gone by, Dad slowed down again so that they could watch the mighty new rivers pouring over the land. A brown bubbling torrent ran by just a few hundred yards in front of the car, cutting deep into the soil. They watched as the river carved a steep valley around them.

  “The word today,” said Dad, “is highly informative and completely memorable geography lesson.” He pressed harder on the Chronojuster, speeding time up just a little. Soft round hills rose up as though someone were inflating huge balloons beneath the soil.

  Dad pulled the Chronojuster back, and time slowed down. Meadows spread out around them. A massive creature with a shaggy golden pelt shambled by without looking at them.

  “Doggy! Doggy!” yelled Little Harry.

  “In fact, it’s Megatherium,” said Lucy. “We’re in the age of the mammals, the Cenozoic. We’re back in our own era.”

  “Not far from home, then,” said Dad.

  “About another million years,” said Lucy.

  Time flies when you’re enjoying yourself, and the Tootings certainly enjoyed watching the river snuggle down among the new-made hills, and the thick deciduous forest gathering on their slopes. Herds of deer and buffalo thundered back and forth as the seasons flew by.

  “I have to admit,” said Dad, “I’m seeing a very different side to Basildon. Whoa! What was that?”

  Somewhere above the forest, he had glimpsed something amazing. He brought Chitty to a halt. Immediately everyone covered their ears. While they had been travelling through time, everything was silent. Once they were still, they were bombarded with clattering, twittering birdsong.

  “Look,” shouted Dad, “I just spotted it out of the corner of my eye.”

  A thin column of smoke was rising from a clearing somewhere down the valley.

  “That’s not a forest fire — that must be someone’s bonfire. That’s humans.”

  “We can’t be more than a couple of hundred thousand years from home,” said Lucy.

  “We should go and say hello,” said Mum. “It’s only polite. After all, they are relatives.”

  “No!” said Lucy. “Think about it. What if we accidentally left a penknife or a box of matches behind? That could alter the course of human history. We might come home and find that the whole world had changed. Basildon might be full of people performing human sacrifice.”

  “Or talking newts,” said Dad.

  “What?”

  “Newts that talk. It could happen. Anything could happen.”

  Lucy’s phone rang, playing an annoyingly perky tune.

  “How can the phone be ringing?” gasped Lucy. “Phones won’t be invented for a couple hundred thousand years. Electricity hasn’t been invented yet. I’m not even sure that talking’s been invented.”

  But the phone kept ringing. Louder and louder.

  “Hello?” said Lucy.

  “Hellllllooooooo,” purred a female voice. “We seem to have missed you in traffic. But we don’t want you to worry.”

  Lucy froze. It was the voice of Nanny. The Nanny of notorious international supervillain Tiny Jack. The Nanny who just a few days ago had tried to steal Chitty and feed the children to Tiny Jack’s hungry piranhas.

  “Nanny?” said Lucy, trying to be polite but almost choking in the process. “How on earth —”

  “These jelly phones — aren’t they just marvellous?” cooed Nanny. “You can call them wherever and whenever.”

  “We’re a couple hundred thousand years in the past,” said Lucy, amazed, putting her on speaker phone.

  “Are you really? Well, don’t worry. We can wait. We’re quite comfortable where we are. Your front door very kindly put the kettle on the moment we opened it.” (Dad had done some DIY that caused the front door to greet guests and boil the kettle for tea.)

  “Our front door?
” hissed Mum. “Where is she?”

  “Thirteen Zborowski Terrace,” purred Nanny. “It’s soooo cosy. Jem, can you hear me? Tiny Jack is utterly delighted by your Scalextric race track. Oh, and Mr. Tooting, I must say I’m very impressed by your collection of punctuality certificates . . .”

  “My punctuality certificates were in my special box,” gasped Dad, “under the bed.”

  “That’s right,” cooed Nanny. “You’re too modest. We’re going to put them all on the wall for you, aren’t we, Tiny Jack? We’re going to decorate your room for you too, Lucy. It’s so gloomy! We’re going to brighten it up, aren’t we, Tiny Jack?” She lowered her voice. “The poor mite. He’s so bored. I’m trying to keep him cheerful, but what he really needs is someone to play with. Come home soon! We’ll make sure the kettle is on!”

  She hung up.

  The Tootings looked at one another. The thought of Nanny and Tiny Jack poking around their house made them feel ill and angry and frightened all at the same time.

  “The evil supervillain Tiny Jack!” exclaimed Mum. “I was so busy escaping from stampeding dinosaurs, I forgot all about the evil supervillain Tiny Jack!”

  “And now he’s got my punctuality certificates,” said Dad.

  “My perfectly matte-very-black wallpaper.” Lucy sighed. “Just when I’d got the room exactly how I like it.”

  “Let’s go straight home and throw them out,” said Mum.

  “We can’t just throw them out,” said Jem. “They’re evil supervillains. We’re just an ordinary family from Basildon.”

  “Ordinary family from Basildon!” snorted Mum. “We just defeated a herd of ravenous dinosaurs. We are the Mighty Tootings. And this is Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.”

  “Exactly,” said Lucy. “We’ve got Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Imagine what will happen if Tiny Jack gets her again, now that he knows she has a Chronojuster? If Tiny Jack had a time machine, he could . . .”

  “Steal all the gold in El Dorado,” said Mum.

  “El Dorado is a myth,” said Lucy.

  “The Crown jewels, then,” said Jem, “or the secret plans for the atomic bomb, or moon rockets, or fighter planes or . . . anything. If he gets Chitty, he could travel back and forth through time doing anything he wants. Nobody would be safe. He could change the course of history. In the wrong hands, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is not just a fantastic car — she’s a superweapon. Maybe we should stay here in the Stone Age.”

  “We haven’t packed for the Stone Age, though,” said Dad. “We’ve got no toothpaste. No soap. We’d probably need spears to catch our food . . .” He sighed. “The word today is it’s all my fault. If only I’d been content with the standard air-cooled flat-four 1.5-litre camper van. Why couldn’t I have left Chitty’s twenty-three-litre Maybach aero engine in the tree where I found it?”

  “But then we wouldn’t have had all this fun,” said Mum. “Don’t worry about it. Tiny Jack is just a little boy. All we have to do is go back to our time, and I’ll give him a good talking-to.”

  “Will that really work?” asked Lucy. “Last time we met, he tried to feed us to piranhas.”

  “Everyone has their off days,” said Mum.

  “Maybe we could travel through time,” said Jem, “and gather a band of heroes — Sherlock Holmes and Superman and maybe Sir Lancelot — and come back and defeat him.”

  Lucy pointed out the one small problem with this plan. “All of those people are fictional. Tiny Jack is real.”

  “OK. What about Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi?”

  “Both so busy. Also, they didn’t really get on.”

  “Plus the Chronojuster is quite sticky and hard to control. You might set out for 1945 and end up in 1845. Or we might set out to get Winston Churchill and end up with Hitler.”

  “Surely you can fix that,” said Mum. “You’re so good at fixing things.”

  “I don’t know anything about how Chronojusters work. I’m not sure anyone does.”

  “The Potts!” cried Jem. “That’s it. All we have to do is find the Potts.”

  “What Potts?” said Mum.

  “The Pott family. Commander Pott,” said Jem. “Look, it’s all here . . . in the logbook.”

  The logbook of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was bound in soft, dark leather, inlaid with the Zborowski coat of arms (a dashing moustache sable on a field azure). Ever since Professor Tuk-Tuk gave it to him — thousands of miles away and thousands of years in the future — Jem had been carrying it around. He’d been so busy with dinosaur chases and the Ice Age that he hadn’t really had time to share it with the others. Now he turned the pages carefully so the others could appreciate it. “It’s the whole story of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s life. Look. Here are the races she won with Count Zborowski — the 1921 Lightning Short Handicap at Brooklands, the 1922 Lightning Short Handicap . . . then there’s a burnt page. The book must have been in the car when she crashed. Then there’s a gap. All these pages are damp and mouldy. That must be when she was left in the scrapyard. Then look. New people. The Pott family. The dad — Commander Pott of the Royal Navy. His wife, Mimsie. Their children, Jeremy and Jemima. And these pages are full of postcards and stamps from their travels — Calais, Egypt, South America, India. And look — in the back, all these drawings and diagrams. These are the plans for what they did to Chitty. Look, here’s how the wings work. This one must be the time machine. This —‘Monsieur Bon Bon’s Secret Fooj Formula’— that must be to do with fuel. ‘Fooj’ must be some kind of fuel.”

  “Actually that’s a recipe for fudge,” said Mum, reading over his shoulder. “They just spelled it wrong.”

  “The point is, it was the Potts who changed Chitty from a racing car into a submarine time machine that flies. They’re geniuses. If anyone can help us defeat Tiny Jack, it’s them.”

  “This makes everything very simple,” said Lucy. “Let’s go.”

  “Go where?” said Dad.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Lucy. “We have to do three things. Number One: Find the Pott family. Jem, when was their last reported whereabouts?”

  “1966.”

  “1966,” mused Mum. “The year that England won the football World Cup. Your dad would love to go there. Let’s go.”

  “Number Two: Explain to Mr. Pott —”

  “Commander Pott,” put in Jem. “He was in the Navy.”

  “We explain to Commander Pott that his great invention — Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — is in danger of falling into the hands of an evil supervillain who could use it to destroy the whole world.”

  “Oh, he’ll be so annoyed about that.”

  “Number Three: Ask him to give us one last ride in Chitty — back to our own time and our own house. And Number Four: Make him promise to go back to 1966 and uninvent Chitty.”

  “Uninvent Chitty? You mean, let him take her away and never bring her back?” gasped Mum. “But that means we can’t have any more adventures! I was hoping to meet Marie Antoinette and the Queen of Sheba.”

  “We should probably prioritize saving the world.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Jem. “If Commander Pott goes back to 1966 and uninvents Chitty, won’t that mean Chitty never existed? And if she never existed, won’t that mean that we don’t just not have any more adventures, but we won’t have had the ones that we’ve had?”

  “Say that again,” said Dad.

  “If we get back to our own time and he goes back to 1966 and uninvents Chitty, it will be impossible for us to have had our adventures, because we had them in Chitty and she will never have existed.”

  “Interesting thought,” said Lucy.

  “You’re making my brain hurt,” said Dad.

  “For instance, will Lucy still have video of the tyrannosaurs on her jelly-baby phone?”

  “Please stop,” said Dad.

  “Are you saying we’ll forget all about Chitty?” said Mum. “Because I don’t think I could stand that. With Chitty we’re the Mighty Tootings, but without her we
’re just some people from Basildon.”

  “Some people from Basildon who saved the world,” said Dad. “Ready, Tootings?”

  “Ready, Dad,” said Lucy and Jem.

  “I suppose.” Mum shrugged.

  “Setting the course for 1966! Time for the Tootings to save the world.”

  Dad slid the Chronojuster forward. The wind of time breeze whistled through the Tootings’ bodies as they hurtled through history.

  Dad’s thought was: Will we have time to see the World Cup before we go off and save the world?

  Mum’s thought was: It’ll be really interesting to see all those 1960s fashions — the short skirts, the long legs, the bright colours.

  Lucy’s thought was: It’ll be really horrible looking at those 1960s fashions — the short skirts, the long legs, the bright colours.

  Little Harry’s thought was: Dinosaurs?

  Jem’s thought was: You can set a course for 1966, Dad, but in the end Chitty will take us wherever she wants to go. She’s up to something, and we need to know what.

  All around them forests disappeared. Muddy tracks hardened into roads. Tall buildings rose up. The air filled with the sound of car horns and engines. Not the sweet, almost musical horns you find on modern cars but brash, deafening Klaxons, like Chitty’s. The engines were not quiet and efficient. They roared and growled in fury. Because Chitty had stalled in the middle of a road, snarling up the traffic. And what a road — a road that ran long and straight between buildings that were cliffs of glass and concrete. And what traffic — not boxy, tinny modern cars but great curving monsters gleaming with brass and steel and glossy leather. Cars with names like Packard, Pierce-Arrow, and Cadillac. The drivers were not busy people with mobile phones and children, but men in fabulous suits with trilbies, women in cloche hats and fur coats, and chauffeurs in uniform.