The Race Against Time

by Frank Cottrell Boyce

  “Those fat fingers,” snapped Mum, “rebuilt Chitty Chitty Bang Bang from scratch with no help from anyone.”

  “Actually I got a lot of help from Jem,” admitted Dad. “Not to mention Professor Tuk-Tuk . . .”

  “My husband took a rusty old engine stuck up a tree, and he turned it into the most beautiful car this world has ever seen.”

  “Stuck up a tree?” said Red.

  “Stuck up a tree,” repeated Mum, “in Basildon. That was just the engine. The headlights were in Paris. The bodywork was on the shores of the Indian Ocean. The wheels were in the Sahara Desert . . .”

  “Why?” asked Red. “How did that happen?”

  “That’s a mystery I’m always trying to solve,” said Jem. “You see, when you think about it . . .”

  “I knew it!” said Dad, who’d been examining the starter motor all this time. “The carbon brushes and the end plates don’t contact properly. If we can sort this out, we won’t need to get champagne whenever she doesn’t start. And there’s the rear end seal. I’ve always had my doubts about that. We should strip out the transmission while we are here. You know, this could be the ideal opportunity for us to make Chitty better than ever.”

  “Ga gooo ga!” went Chitty’s Klaxon, suddenly making everyone jump.

  “Chitty agrees!” said Mum.

  “What Chitty? There is no Chitty,” growled Red. “There’s a pile of parts.”

  “If there’s one thing we’ve learned,” said Jem, “it’s that Chitty is a lot more than the sum of her parts.”

  Dad offered to let Red help him and Jem rebuild the most beautiful and technologically advanced vehicle ever made.

  “How much will you give me?” said Red.

  “Nothing,” said Dad.

  “Then, no,” said Red.

  So Dad and Jem spent days classifying nuts and bolts and cogs and screws. Days that reminded them of last summer — or of a summer five hundred years in the future, depending on how you look at it — when they had first rebuilt a camper van together. Back then they had sometimes spent a whole morning discussing where one piece of tubing should go, sometimes a day in silence, slotting this part into the other. Back then, Mum had brought them snacks and drinks whenever they looked tired. She did the same now. The snacks were slightly different, though: instead of cakes and tea, they were mostly baked snakes or pan-fried tarantulas that she’d caught while out trekking in the jungle with Imogen and Eliza.

  “Food was so dull before Chitty came back,” said Imogen.

  “So very dull,” agreed Eliza.

  “Now we have baked snake in fudge sauce.”

  “And pan-fried tarantula in fudge sauce.”

  “And sometimes fudge in fudge sauce.”

  “And sometimes just fudge.”

  During the long misty days while Dad and Jem were rebuilding Chitty, Mum and Lucy (and Little Harry) questioned all the old people in town to see if they had any memory of where the Potts might have gone. They all said the same thing: “They went. They said they’d be back soon. But they never came back.”

  They searched the forest for some sign or clue. The Queen came with them to make sure they didn’t disappear like the Potts. But it was hopeless. The forest was so vast. And also so full of distractions. Every time they saw an anaconda, Mum felt she had to wrestle it.

  “I’m sorry, but I just had no idea I had such a natural talent for anaconda-wrestling.”

  “Don’t apologize,” said Eliza. “Nothing we like to watch more than a bit of anaconda-wrestling. Is there, Imogen?”

  “Unless it’s jaguar-punching,” said Imogen. “We love jaguar-punching, too.”

  “I must say, now that we know how good you are at wrestling them, we don’t feel so bad that we tried to kill you with anacondas.”

  “That does make it more forgivable,” said Mum.

  “Then, we are friends?”

  “I suppose we are.”

  Those days spent high in the cloud forest were the most magical of all their adventures. Every morning they woke to the sound of the happiest, noisiest dawn chorus that they had ever heard. The sun lavished its warmth and light upon them, but thanks to the spray from the waterfall, it was never too hot. In the evening, they would join the people in the square and watch the colours of sunset dancing in the facets of the Diamond As Big As Your Head.

  Red meanwhile taught all the children of El Dorado to play hide-and-seek.

  “I’m not sure,” said Lucy, “that a trackless equatorial wilderness on the brink of an unbelievably high waterfall is the best place for a game of hide-and-seek. People could get hurt. Or horribly maimed. Or go missing for years on end. Or be eaten by jaguars. Or piranhas. Or plunge to their doom.”

  “That’s what makes it so good,” said Red. “It kind of gives it an edge.”

  “As soon as Chitty is back to her old self,” said Dad one evening when — yet again — Mum and Lucy had returned with no sign of the Potts, “we’ll fly all over the forest until we find them. Then we’ll go and deal with Tiny Jack and Nanny.”

  Next day, while Dad and Jem worked, Little Harry sat up on the seat in front of the steering wheel and pulled it this way and that. “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!” he yelled.

  He’s right, thought Jem. She is beginning to look like that unique Paragon Panther.

  “Ga gooo ga!” honked Chitty.

  “There are a few bits and pieces I don’t recognize,” said Dad. “This glass dome, for instance. And this metal cone. Also there seem to be two extra engines. Or maybe they’re not engines. They look more like atomic hair dryers. I never noticed them before. They must have been lodged under the back wheel arches, or maybe they’re from the village, and they just got . . .”

  “If only we could ask Chitty where they go,” said Jem. “Sometimes, when you drive her, don’t you feel like she’s trying to tell you something? When you talk to her, do you sometimes feel like she’s going to answer back?”

  “No,” said Dad. “Let’s just stick these things in wherever they fit and hope for the best. You know, I could live like this — just sitting around repairing classic motorcars in sixteenth-century El Dorado.”

  As the sun went down over the rain forest that evening, Dad and Jem fitted the last rivet. Jem cranked the engine, and Dad pressed the starter motor. Chitty started the first time.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “we’ll begin our aerial search for the Pott family. Now let’s get some food.”

  Dad went to cook supper, but Jem sat for a while, leaning against Chitty’s wheel arch as the bats skittered through the twilight. “Good night, Chitty,” he whispered. The car did not speak, but Jem could hear the metal of her pipes cooling in the chill night air, the oil and the water settling down, and he knew that she was restless to go. As he walked through the moonlit golden streets, he thought he heard the softest good-bye snuffle from her Klaxon. But it could have been a pangolin looking for ants.

  Next morning, when Jem woke up, Chitty had vanished.

  “Not again!” groaned Mum.

  “Don’t worry,” said Imogen, “it was us.”

  “It was you last time,” said Mum.

  “We thought she didn’t quite fit in with the town . . .”

  “All that green and silver — it clashed with the brickwork.”

  “So we sent her away . . .”

  “Where to?”

  “Oh. Not away away, just . . .”

  From somewhere behind them they heard “Ga gooo ga!”

  There was Chitty, a crowd of happy El Doradoan children pushing her toward them.

  “What have you done to her?” gasped Dad.

  “Can’t you tell?” said Imogen.

  “Isn’t it obvious?” said Eliza.

  Chitty did look different. Very different. Smarter. Shinier.

  “We’ve had her covered with gold,” said Imogen.

  “You gilded Chitty?”

  “What do you think?” asked Eliza.

  “Do y
ou like it?” said Imogen.

  “It’s very shiny,” said Mum. “Sort of, Chitty Chitty Bling Bling.”

  “At least like this, you will be taking a little piece of El Dorado with you, wherever you go. Good-bye. It’s very hard to say good-bye to such good friends.”

  “Oh, we’re not leaving yet,” said Dad. “We’re going to search the river and the jungle for signs of the Pott family.”

  “We have to find them,” said Mum. “We need their help. The whole planet could be in incredible danger.”

  “What’s wrong with incredible danger?” asked Imogen.

  “We love incredible danger, don’t we, Imogen?” said Eliza.

  “Chitty always has somewhere to go.” Imogen sighed.

  “One day she will leave you, too.”

  “I think,” gasped Jem, “she’s trying to leave us right now. Run!” Somehow Chitty had slipped her hand brake and was rolling toward the edge of the cliff. The Tootings ran after her and jumped on board.

  “Wait! Where’s Red?” yelled Jem.

  Just in time, Red came tearing out of the forest, flung himself into the back of the car, and yelled, “I won!” He looked back at the woods to see if anyone was behind him. He was so happy to have won his one hundred and seventh consecutive game of Extreme Hide-and-Seek (with jaguars) that he barely noticed that Chitty had leaped from the ledge and was soaring above the waterfall. He barely heard the cheers and whoops of the El Doradoans as they waved and shouted their good-byes and their thank-yous.

  Chitty curved through the air above the abyss, and came round in a wide, lazy circle, bringing them face-to-face with the full force of the waterfall as it fell. Everyone caught their breath — partly because it was so amazing, partly because the spray from the fall was so fresh and so cold.

  “It looks like a lovely gold brooch,” cried Red. “Where are we going?”

  Hot air from the rain forest rises in great columns called thermals. Birds such as condors and vultures use these to lift them higher and higher into the air. Today — do as Dad might — Chitty rolled from thermal to thermal, like a huge mechanical condor, rising and rising in great circles as though she were climbing an invisible spiral staircase.

  “Look,” yelled Jem, as they finally rolled over the very top of the great waterfall. Below them was a vast, almost perfectly circular lake. There was nothing higher than it for miles around. It was like an eye looking straight into the sky.

  “Where’s El Dorado gone?” asked Red.

  “Over that way somewhere. Under the clouds.”

  “You mean we’re higher than the clouds?”

  “Yes. A lot higher . . . Look.”

  A flock of puffy white clouds passed far beneath them. Through a gap they glimpsed a tiny flicker of light, like the flash of a camera. It was all that could be seen of El Dorado.

  “I bet we’re the first people ever to see that lake,” said Lucy. “I bet no one will see it again for hundreds of years.”

  “We are way too high,” said Red. “Take us down! Take us down!” He reached over the front seat for one of the handles.

  “Red! Don’t touch anything. You don’t know which switch does what!”

  Too late. He had already grabbed the Chronojuster. El Dorado disappeared in a flicker of nights and days and weeks and months.

  No one who wasn’t born in El Dorado ever saw the City of Gold again.

  History rippled past the Tooting family like the pages in a flip book, until they found themselves gliding gently down into what seemed to be a waving green ocean.

  “Grass?” gasped Dad. “It’s grass. How can there be this much grass? Red, what have you done? This isn’t Basildon.”

  “It wasn’t Red’s fault,” said Jem.

  “What? He pulled the Chronojuster.”

  Dad had brought Chitty down gently on a dusty road that ran across a prairie. Small brown islands looked up as he landed. These turned out to be grazing buffalo. They watched Chitty, then carried on chewing as Dad drove her forward.

  “The Chronojuster was glowing,” said Jem. “Naturally, Red grabbed it. But who made it glow? Chitty did. Chitty brought us here. Why?”

  The moment he asked the question, a massive old car thundered past them, whipping up clouds of dust and belching smoke from its gleaming exhausts. Jem looked behind just in time to see another car racing up behind them.

  “That’s the answer to your question,” said Lucy. “The juxtaposition of fast cars and buffalo suggests to me that we are on the Kansas leg of the Prix d’Esmerelda’s Birthday Cake. Fasten your seat belts, everyone!”

  Chitty leaped forward and was soon alongside the car in front — a huge, royal-blue gondola with wheels that seemed to crush the stones beneath them. The driver scowled from behind a fabulously curly moustache as he pressed harder on the accelerator, trying to keep up with Chitty. But Chitty soon slipped past him and did what she often did when she overtook another car: cheekily waggled her back fender and gave him a triumphant blast of her deafening Klaxon.

  “Honestly, she’s so undignified.” Lucy sighed.

  The Kansas sunlight blazed off Chitty’s golden bodywork, so that they felt like they were travelling inside a comet.

  “What’s that?” yelled Jem.

  Far, far ahead they could just make out a tiny white dot in the middle of the road. No matter how fast Chitty went, the white dot did not seem to get any bigger. It was moving as fast as they were. It could only be one thing: Chitty the Second.

  “The Count!” said Lucy. “Are we going to catch up with him?”

  “Probably not,” said Dad. “The brand-new Chitty seems to be faster than the dear old Chitty.” As if in answer to this slight, Chitty’s engine revved furiously and a switch on her dashboard glowed like an angry fairy light. “I’ve never noticed that switch before,” said Dad. “I wonder what it is.”

  “Chitty is trying to tell us something,” said Jem.

  “Shall I flip the switch?”

  “What if it’s that ejector-seat thing again?” asked Red.

  But before anyone had time to consider this possibility, Dad flipped the switch. Everything happened so fast that at first everyone thought it really was the ejector seat.

  The horizon rushed toward them. They felt like they were falling. Kansas was a blur of green. Sheer speed shoved all of them back into their seats. The tiny white dot became a white marble, then a white tennis ball, then a white football.

  “I think we’ve just discovered what those funny little extra engine things were for,” said Dad, through gritted teeth.

  Seconds later, the white football-size object had become a gleaming white racing car. They were slipping past the elegant, aerodynamic form of Chitty the Second. Chitty herself (the Original and Best Chitty) slowed right down, as though to allow her rival to get a good look at her new gleaming gold bodywork.

  “I say!” yelled the Count. But before he could say anything specific, Chitty thundered past, waggled her fender, and sounded her victory Klaxon.

  “So embarrassing.” Lucy sighed.

  On they raced toward the finishing line, leaving Chitty the Second far, far behind.

  Fifty-six minutes and thirty-seven seconds later, Red was basking in the sunlight reflected in Chitty’s bodywork. “Look at my arm,” he said. “It’s like I’m made of gold.”

  Then all at once, the sun was snuffed out. Jem looked up and saw the undercarriage of a plane, just a few feet above their heads, keeping perfect pace with Chitty, who had slowed down now that she had an insurmountable lead. As they watched, a ladder was lowered and down it came the elegant figure of Count Zborowski’s butler, Crackitt. He hung from the ladder, just alongside Chitty, and, with a smooth nod of the head, passed Mum a letter before climbing back up to the cockpit.

  Mum opened the letter.

  “Stop for a picnic? Are you nuts?” cried Red. “We can win this race.”

  “Actually, I am quite hungry,” admitted Dad.

  “And a
picnic could be really nice,” said Lucy.

  “Lucy, you hate picnics,” said Mum. “You always say sunshine and laughter are the two most depressing things in the world.”

  But just after they drove through the next town, they saw Crackitt’s lovely yellow biplane parked in the shade of a copse of trees. Crackitt was standing at attention, a crisp white cloth draped over his arm and, at his feet, a wide gingham tablecloth spread out over the grass. On it was the most fabulous picnic that any of them had ever seen. No one could have driven past a picnic like that. There was a pie almost a foot deep. Its pastry shone like glass. Steam drifted lazily from a hole in its crust. There were piles of crusty bread, huge chunks of cheese, jugs of lemonade, and a bucket full of grapes.

  “His Lordship insists that you start without him,” said Crackitt, as the Tootings clambered out of Chitty.

  “Oh, we couldn’t do that,” said Mum. “We’ll just enjoy the view until he comes.”

  The others all agreed. But the view that most interested them was not the one of the waterfall but the one of that beautiful pie. It was a view that filled them with anxiety. What if someone stole it? What if there was an earthquake and the earth itself swallowed it?

  “His Lordship really was most insistent that you start,” said Crackitt.

  “Oh, if he insists,” said Dad. He dived on that pie, sliced it up, and passed it round so quickly that lightning itself would not have got a look in.

  “Save some for the Count!” said Lucy.

  But she needn’t have worried. Each slice was so densely packed with meat, so bursting with flavour, that a mouthful was enough to keep their taste buds busy for hours. They savoured their slices while the sun slid over the horizon. Dusk was turning into night when Chitty the Second finally rolled up.

  “I say,” said the Count. “This is something! What a lovely spot. Pop a couple of tents up, Crackitt, and we’ll pass the night here.”

  A yellow moon was high in the sky by the time they finished the picnic. The Count gave them all the news about the Prix d’Esmerelda.

  “It’s gone marvellously well. We’re on for a record-breaking time.”