There was no answer.
Nobody came.
“HELLOOOOOOOOOO!”
“Ga gooo ga!!!” He sounded the horn of his golden Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
He sounded the ship’s foghorn.
He set off a fire alarm.
He screamed at the top of his voice.
Every one of these tremendous noises was lost in the muffling vastness of space.
On the deck of Château Bateau, more than three hundred thousand kilometres from home, Tiny Jack was all alone.
In fact it’s not really that difficult to get a car going on the moon if it’s got no petrol.
“I’ve just remembered something,” said Jemima.
“I remembered it first,” put in Lucy.
“The lack of friction in space . . .”
“. . . means that once a thing is set in motion . . .”
“Let’s say it together . . .”
The girls explained that once force is used to set an object in motion in space, it should, in theory, keep going. The moondust had rubbed off most of the antigravity paint, but there was still a little left, and besides, there was hardly any gravity on the moon. It should be a simple matter to get her moving. All she needed was a push. Once they were up in the air, that would give them the momentum they needed to get home.
All the adults got ready to push. Even the astronauts lent a hand. Jem sat in the driver’s seat, as he was the smallest person who could actually reach the pedals. They propelled Chitty over the rocky ground. She hit a rock. Bounced into the air and they were away. In the low-gravity conditions of the lunar surface it was easy enough to jump into the car before Jem engaged the sun dome and they slipped out of the bubble.
“Move over, then,” said Dad to Jem.
“I thought we agreed it would be best if I drove,” said the Commander.
“I thought we agreed it would be best if I drove,” said Mum.
“Jem should drive,” said Lucy. “He got us here. He can take us back. After all, he’s a renowned getaway driver.”
“That’s true,” agreed Jem. “But I need someone to read the map.”
“Map of what?” asked Dad. “We’re in space.”
“The constellations. Anyone got a map of the constellations?”
Jeremy looked in his pocket. “Yes!” he cried. “There’s one in the front of my diary.”
“Perfect. Sit up here.”
So Jem and Jeremy sat in the front, helmsman and navigator, steering that great green galleon of a car around the dark side of the moon.
“Thank you,” said Jeremy.
“What for?”
“For not saying ‘I told you so’ when Tiny Jack marooned us on the moon.”
In the backseat Dad and Commander Pott began discussing the finer points of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s inner workings. There was a lot of talk about the carburettor cooling flange. The Commander was astonished to hear that Dad had originally fitted Chitty’s giant engine to a VW camper van. “I couldn’t just leave a beautiful engine like that stuck up a tree, now, could I?”
“I’m surprised the van wasn’t shaken to pieces.”
“People did sometimes think we were an earthquake.”
“Where did you find her body in the end?”
“On an island in the Indian Ocean.”
“Good heavens! I wonder how it got there.”
The Commander reminisced about the old garage with the tin roof where Jeremy and Jemima had first found Chitty. Dad remembered the time the people of El Dorado took Chitty Chitty Bang Bang completely to pieces and he had to put her back together again like a jigsaw puzzle. “There were these things like atomic hair dryers.”
“Hair dryers are so useful. You can make practically anything out of a hair dryer. Those were supposed to be directable booster rockets. Never could get the blasted things to work.”
“I wired them in, but I never knew what they were for.”
“For landing safely after a spaceflight. You see, I always did plan to take the family for a spin in space. Just never expected it to be quite so dramatic. I was thinking of it more as a kind of scenic jaunt. That’s why I put the sun dome in and the oxygen fountain.”
“Well, we can make it into a picnic now, dear,” said Mimsie. “Look, Jemima found a bag of Crackpot’s Whistling Sweets in the glove compartment.”
“Hmmmm, thank you,” said the Commander, taking one of the musical sweets. “You know, it was inventing these that gave me the money to restore Chitty Chitty . . . peep-peep.”
“The word today,” said Dad, sucking on his sweet, “is toooooooooot.” Soon every one of them was tootling away on their Crackpot’s Whistler.
Then — all together, in perfect time — they stopped, as if some great conductor had raised his baton at them. The name of that conductor was Earth. Jem and Lucy had seen the sun rise over El Dorado and set in the Indian Ocean. They had seen it shining down on the sands of the Arabian Desert and hiding below the horizon at the Pole. But they had never seen anything as beautiful as what they were seeing now. Earth was rising over the moon. A tiny blue marble with swirls of white at each Pole, it rolled up idly around the corner of the moon. From where they were sitting, Jem and Jeremy could see a hundred billion stars, but nothing in the whole shining sky was more beautiful than the little blue marble dawning over the white moon.
“That’s our destination,” said Jeremy, shutting his diary. “You really can’t miss it.”
“Château Bateau first,” said Jem. “We have to stop Tiny Jack from miniaturizing any more cities.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course,” said Jeremy. “I forgot.”
“Oh, bother.” Mimsie sighed. “I do wish we didn’t have to.”
“Couldn’t we go home and have a nice cup of tea first?” pleaded Dad.
“Maybe we could,” said Lucy. “Think about it. What’s the point of stopping Tiny Jack now, when he’s already created so much destruction? Why don’t we go back and stop him before he starts?”
“Of course!” said the Commander. “Clever girl.”
“Cleverer still,” said Jemima, “why doesn’t Daddy go back to the day he invented time travel and . . . not invent it.”
“Oh,” said Mum, “that is even cleverer.”
“If he doesn’t invent time travel,” said Lucy, “then we won’t be able to go home.”
“We could take you home first. Have a nice cup of tea. Then go back to 1966 in plenty of time to save the world.”
“But if you go back to 1966 and uninvent time travel,” said Jem, “that will mean time travel never existed. That will mean we will never have had our adventures. Never met Chitty.”
“You’ll wake up one morning and none of this will ever have happened,” said Jemima. “Tiny Jack will be just another little red-haired boy. History will be safe. Not to mention geography.”
“There is one problem with that . . .” said the Commander.
“We’ll wake up and not remember Chitty,” said Jem, squeezing her steering wheel as though it were a friend’s warm hand. He was steering a course high over the top of the bubble, hoping that Chitty’s oily black undercarriage would be more or less invisible in the darkness of space.
“There is that,” said the Commander, “and one other thing . . .” He looked uncomfortable, as though he were about to say something he had hoped never to say.
“Of course,” said Dad. “We can’t ask a great scientist to uninvent his greatest invention.”
“It’s not that,” said the Commander. “It’s only . . .”
“No,” said Mum. “Jem, stop the car.”
“What? But what if Tiny Jack —”
“We can’t just go home. We have work to do. Look down there. Look at everything he’s stolen.” The lacy white towers of the Taj Mahal, a car park full of cars, ancient monuments, secret weapons — when you looked down on Tiny Jack’s haul from a great height, it really was a lot of stuff.
“We did this,” said Mum.
“We found a little boy called Red. A sweet little boy with no family. All he wanted was to play. We abandoned him in New York with no one. He thought we were playing hide-and-seek. Imagine that. Imagine waiting for people to come and find you and they never come. Imagine looking for people and you never find them. He was a boy, a sweet little boy. We made him into a villain. We created Tiny Jack.”
“We gave him a lovely holiday in El Dorado,” said Dad. “As treats go, that’s quite a big one.”
“Yes, we showed him what happiness was and then we took it away from him. We showed him what a family is and then we left him alone. His life was bad and we made it worse. We took a little boy and we created a supervillain. We did it by abandoning him. I’m not going to abandon him again.”
“But he’s a supervillain. You just said so! We can’t go round giving lifts to supervillains.”
“You want to abandon him in space?” said Mum.
“Yes,” said Dad.
“Definitely,” said Caractacus.
“Sooner the better,” said Mimsie.
“We abandoned him once,” said Mum. “We’re not going to do it again. It’s just not right.”
“Ice cream!” yelled Little Harry.
“But what about his helicopters, and his alligators, and his sabre-toothed tigers . . .” said Dad.
“Dinosaurs!” whooped Little Harry.
Mum looked at Dad and then at Commander Pott. “When you found this car,” she said, “what was she like?”
“She was a rusting pile of junk,” said the Commander.
“She was in pieces, scattered across the planet,” said Dad, looking across the wastes of space at the planet in question.
“But you fixed her. You fixed this car. You made it so that she could fly, go through the ocean, travel through time.”
“That’s true.”
“I believe that nice little boy — Red — is still alive somewhere, even though he later turned into Tiny Jack. Just like this lovely racing-green Chitty Chitty Bang Bang still exists, even though she later turned into the flashy gold-plated Chitty.” She turned to Dad and put her hand against his cheek. “You fixed this great car — couldn’t you at least try to fix that little boy?”
An eerie silence descended over Château Bateau. Birthday balloons, streamers, and paper party plates drifted — weightless and restless — in the air as though some ghosts were having a party.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang herself seemed to be afraid as Jem brought her in to land on the racetrack. Her carburettor quivered. Her suspension squeaked nervously.
“It’s because we’re so near the other Chitty, which is actually the same Chitty,” said Lucy.
“Yes,” said Jemima. “It’s as though the atoms know they shouldn’t be in two places at once, so they’re trying to decide where they should be.”
“If they get too near to each other,” said Lucy, “they will actually merge . . .”
“But that might cause a nuclear explosion,” added Jemima. “We crocheted a diagram, if you’d like to see.”
“Shhh,” said Jeremy. “He surely knows that we’re here. Where is he?”
Silence.
“We have to go and find him.”
“We can’t leave the car. He’ll steal it.”
“That’s all right,” said Jem, unscrewing the Zborowski Lightning and popping it in his pocket. “As long as we keep this with us, he can’t take her away from here.”
They tiptoed through the palm grove, past the empty swimming pool and the deserted colonnades. There was a bang. They all jumped. But it was just the inflatable lobster bursting. It had collided with a piece of broken glass and burst.
“It’s possible that we’ll never get out of here,” said Lucy, “and we’ll be found, centuries from now, a bunch of corpses in an empty swimming pool in space.”
Somebody laughed. No, it was the sound of water trickling.
“That’s the car wash,” said Jem. He looked at the others. Was Tiny Jack in there? Should they go in after him? What if it was a sabre-toothed tiger taking a shower?
They were walking past the lovely filigree gates of the Taj Mahal now. Suddenly those gates burst into a hundred pieces. Curls and handles and locks flew about their heads like frightened birds. The air was filled with the whir and rumble of engines and the laughter of Tiny Jack.
The moon buggy ploughed through the gates and juddered to a halt in front of them. Tiny Jack was standing on its seat, his hands on his hips, a party hat on his head, grinning down at them.
“Anyone wanna take a picture?” he said.
“Oh, my goodness,” Jemima gasped. “You just broke the Taj Mahal!”
Tiny Jack launched into the speech he had been rehearsing. “Yes, I, Tiny Jack, have excelled even my own excellence . . . You see before you . . . no, wait. That’s not right. Look! I stole the moon buggy!! The most expensive car ever made. While they were building it they had troops of soldiers guarding it. No one ever dreamed that someone would go all the way to the moon to steal it. Ha-ha-ha!!!”
“When you’re this close up to it,” said Lucy, “it looks even more like a big shopping cart.”
“I’m the most famous, most successful, most feared, most stylish car thief in history. Now I’m going to celebrate.”
“Ice cream?” suggested Little Harry.
“I’m going to celebrate by having fun, fun, fun.”
“Oh,” said Mimsie, “that’ll be nice.”
“The most fun I ever had was in the Amazon rain forest. I was playing with some people I trusted. All right, I should never have trusted them. But it was fun at the time.”
“Tiny Jack . . .” said Mum. “Red —”
“DON’T CALL ME THAT NAME!!! I AM TINY JACK. I CAN DO WHAT I LIKE!!!” He calmed down a little. “I liked the rain forest. I want the rain forest. See that continent down there . . . ?” He pointed at South America, four hundred thousand kilometres away. “See that big dark patch at the top?”
“The Amazon rain forest,” said Lucy. “Why do supervillains talk so much? Couldn’t you just tell us what you’re going to do?”
“I’m going to miniaturize the rain forest.”
“No, Jack, you can’t do that . . .”
“Can so do that. I’ve got the Miniaturizer . . .” He held it up for her to see. “And I’ve got this powerful transmitter . . .” He pointed to the radio dish on top of the moon buggy. “Going to miniaturize the whole forest and use it for the Orient Express — or, as I like to call it, my train set.”
The Miniaturizer was hooked up to the moon buggy’s radio telescope. Now he aimed it at South America.
“Tiny Jack! No!” pleaded Mum. “The rain forest is actually the lungs of the Earth. If you destroy it, the whole planet will die.”
“Destruction,” said Tiny Jack, “is my very favourite game.”
Jem signalled to Jeremy. Together they leaped forward, ready to overpower Tiny Jack. But Tiny Jack had slammed the moon buggy into reverse. It lurched away from them as Tiny Jack laughed. He raised the Miniaturizer. He squeezed the trigger. “Ow!” He twitched. He winced. He looked at his own fingers in shock.
“Are you all right?” asked Mum.
“My fingers,” he gasped. “They’ve gone fat!”
“Nothing wrong with fat fingers,” said Dad.
“They don’t fit in the trigger. I can’t pull the . . . Ow!!!” It wasn’t just his fingers that were swelling up. His feet inflated like tyres.
“That,” said Lucy, “is strangely unpleasant.”
“Ow!!!”
Now his legs were growing. His face puffed up, filled out, swelled, and lengthened. His chest expanded. His shoulders broadened. Tiny Jack was growing bigger in front of their eyes.
“Make it stop!!” he wailed.
His spine telescoped. His eyes bulged.
Tiny Jack was no longer tiny.
Tiny Jack was in fact a big, big man.
“Do you mind if I film this?” asked Lucy.
“It’s just so . . . unusual. Unless you’re going to keep going until you explode? In which case we should find somewhere to shelter.”
“He’s just getting back to his normal size,” said the Commander. “Tiny Jack wasn’t tiny until he used the Miniaturizer on himself.”
“That’s why I stole it. Shrinking towns and buildings was fun. All I wanted was to stay small. I had huge furniture made so that I looked small when I sat on it. I learned a trick with mirrors that could make me look small. I thought the Miniaturizer would make me tiny forever . . .”
“No, its effect is only temporary,” said the Commander.
“Nobody told me that! WHY DOES NOBODY TELL ME ANYTHING!!!?” wailed Tiny Jack. “WHY CAN’T I JUST STAY TINY??? EVERYTHING WAS SO NICE WHEN I WAS SMALL. WHY IS NOTHING EVER FAIR!???”
“It was in the instructions,” said Mimsie. “Why do men never read the instructions?”
He was redder than ever. Furious tears were boiling over from his eyes.
“Red,” whispered Mum.
“DON’T CALL ME THAT!!!! You called me that when you were pretending to be my friend . . . Everyone pretends. Even Nanny is gone!”
“Nanny is gone? Really?” said Jem.
“We weren’t pretending,” said Mum. “We really were your friends. We had fun — real fun.”
“You left me in New York. I thought we were playing hide-and-seek. I hid behind a lamppost. I thought you would come back. No one came back. I stayed behind that lamppost all day. No one came looking for me. Only Nanny.”
“But today,” said Mum, “we came back. We came looking for you. We’re going to take you home with us.” She looked around. “Aren’t we?”
“Well,” muttered Dad, “we could give you a lift to Earth.”
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon Page 14
