Johnny and the Bomb

by Terry Pratchett

  They tried to work this out.

  ‘Huh, you’d have to be mad even to understand time travel,’ said Wobbler eventually.

  ‘Job opportunity for you there, Johnny,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Bigmac,’ said Yo-less, in a warning voice.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Johnny. ‘The doctor said I just worry about things too much.’

  ‘What kind of loony tests did you have?’ said Bigmac. ‘Big needles and electric shocks and that?’

  ‘No, Bigmac,’ sighed Johnny. ‘They don’t do that. They just ask you questions.’

  ‘What, like “are you a loony?”’

  ‘It’d be sound to go a long way back in time,’ said Wobbler. ‘Back to the dinosaurs. No chance of killing your grandad then, unless he’s really old. Dinosaurs’d be all right.’

  ‘Great!’ said Bigmac. ‘Then I could wipe ’em out with my plasma rifle! Oh, yes!’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Wobbler, rolling his eyes. ‘That’d explain a lot. Why did the dinosaurs die out sixty-five million years ago? Because Bigmac couldn’t get there any earlier.’

  ‘But you haven’t got a plasma rifle,’ said Johnny.

  ‘If Wobbler can have a time machine, then I can have a plasma rifle.’

  ‘Oh, all right.’

  ‘And a rocket launcher.’

  A time machine, thought Johnny. That would be something. You could get your life exactly as you wanted it. If something nasty turned up, you could just go back and make sure that it didn’t. You could go wherever you wanted and nothing bad would ever have to happen.

  Around him, the boys’ conversation, as their conversations did, took on its own peculiar style.

  ‘Anyway, no one’s proved the dinosaurs did die out.’

  ‘Oh, yeah, right, sure, they’re still around, are they?’

  ‘I mean p’raps they only come out at night, or are camouflaged or something …’

  ‘A brick-finished stegosaurus? A bright red Number 9 brontosaurus?’

  ‘Hey, neat idea. They’d go round pretending to be a bus, right, and people could get on – but they wouldn’t get off again. Oooo-Eee-Oooo …’

  ‘Nah. False noses. False noses and beards. Then just when people aren’t expecting it – UNK! Nothing on the pavement but a pair of shoes and a really big bloke in a mac, shuffling away …’

  Paradise Street, thought Johnny. Paradise Street was on his mind a lot, these days. Especially at night.

  I bet if you asked the people there if time travel was a good idea they’d say yes. I mean, no one knows what happened to the dinosaurs, but we know what happened to Paradise Street.

  I wish I could go back to Paradise Street.

  Something hissed.

  They looked around. There was an alleyway between the charity clothes shop and the video library. The hissing came from there, except now it had changed into a snarl.

  It wasn’t at all pleasant. It went right into his ears and right through Johnny’s modern brain and right down into the memories built into his very bones. When an early ape had cautiously got down out of its tree and wobbled awkwardly along the ground, trying out this new ‘standing upright’ idea all the younger apes were talking about, this was exactly the kind of snarl it hated to hear.

  It said to every muscle in the body: run away and climb something. And possibly throw down some coconuts, too.

  ‘There’s something in the alley,’ said Wobbler, looking around in case there were any trees handy.

  ‘A werewolf?’ said Bigmac.

  Wobbler stopped. ‘Why should it be a werewolf?’ he said.

  ‘I saw this film, Curse of the Revenge of the Werewolf,’ said Bigmac, ‘and someone heard a snarl like that and went into a dark alley, and next thing, he was lying there with all his special effects spilling out on the pavement.’

  ‘Huh,’ quavered Wobbler. ‘There’s no such things as werewolves.’

  ‘You go and tell it, then.’

  Johnny stepped forward.

  There was a shopping trolley lying on its side just inside the alley, but that wasn’t unusual. Herds of shopping trolleys roamed the streets of Blackbury. While he’d never seen one actually moving, he sometimes suspected that they trundled off as soon as his back was turned.

  Bulging carrier bags and black plastic dustbin liners lay around it, and there was a number of jars. One of them had broken open, and there was a smell of vinegar.

  One of the bundles was wearing trainers.

  You didn’t see that very often.

  A terrible monster pulled itself over the top of the trolley and spat at Johnny.

  It was white, but with bits of brown and black as well. It was scrawny. It had three and a half legs but only one ear. Its face was a mask of absolute, determined evil. Its teeth were jagged and yellow, its breath as nasty as a pepper spray.

  Johnny knew it well. So did practically everyone else in Blackbury.

  ‘Hello, Guilty,’ he said, taking care to keep his hands by his sides.

  If Guilty was here, and the shopping trolley was here …

  He looked down at the bundle with the trainers.

  ‘I think something’s happened to Mrs Tachyon,’ he said.

  The others hurried up.

  It only looked like a bundle, because Mrs Tachyon tended to wear everything she owned, all at once. This was a woolly hat, about twelve jerseys and a pink ra-ra skirt, then bare pipe-cleaner legs down to several pairs of football socks and the huge trainers.

  ‘Is that blood?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Ur,’ said Bigmac. ‘Yuk.’

  ‘I think she’s alive,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m sure I heard a groan.’

  ‘Er … I know first aid,’ said Yo-less, uncertainly. ‘Kiss of life and stuff.’

  ‘Kiss of life? Mrs Tachyon? Yuk,’ said Bigmac.

  Yo-less looked very worried. What seemed simple when you did it in a nice warm hall with the instructor watching seemed a lot more complicated in an alleyway, especially with all the woolly jumpers involved. Whoever invented first aid hadn’t had Mrs Tachyon in mind.

  Yo-less knelt down gingerly. He patted Mrs Tachyon vaguely, and something fell out of one of her many pockets. It was fish and chips, wrapped in a piece of newspaper.

  ‘She’s always eating chips,’ said Bigmac. ‘My brother says she picks thrown-away papers out of the bin to see if there’s any chips still in ’em. Yuk.’

  ‘Er …’ said Yo-less desperately, as he tried to find, a way of administering first aid without actually touching anything.

  Finally Johnny came to his rescue and said, ‘I know how to dial 999.’

  Yo-less sagged with relief ‘Yes, yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure you mustn’t move people, on account of breaking bones.’

  ‘Or the crust,’ said Wobbler.

  Chapter 2

  Mrs Tachyon

  Mrs Tachyon had always been there, as long as Johnny could remember. She was a bag lady before people knew what bag ladies were, although strictly speaking she was a trolley woman.

  It wasn’t a normal supermarket trolley, either. It looked bigger, the wires looked thicker. And it hurt like mad when Mrs Tachyon pushed it into the small of your back, which she did quite a lot. It wasn’t that she did it out of nastiness – well, it probably wasn’t – but other people just didn’t exist on Planet Tachyon.

  Fortunately, one wheel squeaked. And if you didn’t get accustomed to moving away quickly when you heard the squee … squee … squee coming, the monologue was another warning.

  Mrs Tachyon talked all the time. You could never be quite certain who she was talking to.

  ‘… I sez, that’s what you sez, is it? That’s what you think. An’ I could get both hands in yer mouth and still wind wool, I sez. Oh, yes. Tell Sid! Yer so skinny yer can close one eye and yer’d look like a needle, I sez. Oh, yes. They done me out of it! Tell that to the boys in khaki! That’s a pelter or I don’t know what is!’

  But quite often it wa
s just a mumble, with occasional triumphant shouts of ‘I told ’em!’ and ‘That’s what you think!’

  The trolley with its squeaky wheel could turn up behind you at any hour of the day or night. No one knew when to expect it. Nor did anyone know what was in all those bags. Mrs Tachyon tended to rummage a lot, in bins and things. So no one wanted to find out.

  Sometimes she’d disappear for weeks on end. No one knew where she went. Then, just when everyone was beginning to relax, there’d be the squee … squee … squee behind them and the stabbing pain in the small of the back.

  Mrs Tachyon picked things out of the gutter. That was probably how she’d acquired Guilty, with his fur like carpet underlay, broken teeth, and boomerang-shaped backbone. When Guilty walked, which wasn’t often since he preferred to ride in the trolley, he tended to go around in circles. When he ran, usually because he was trying to fight something, the fact that he only had one and a half legs in front meant that sooner or later his back legs would overtake him, and by then he was always in such a rage that he’d bite his own tail.

  Even DSS, the rabid dog owned by Syd the Crusty, which once ate a police Alsatian, would run away at the sight of Guilty spinning towards him, frantically biting himself.

  The ambulance drove off, blue light flashing.

  Guilty watched Johnny from the trolley, going cross-eyed with hatred.

  ‘The ambulance man said she looked as if she’d been hit by something,’ said Wobbler, who was also watching the cat. It was never a good idea to take your eye off Guilty.

  ‘What’re we going to do with all this stuff?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Yeah, can’t leave it,’ said Bigmac. ‘That’d be littering.’

  ‘But it’s her stuff,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Don’t look at me,’ said Bigmac. ‘Some of those bags squelch.’

  ‘And there’s the cat,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Yeah, we ought to kill the cat,’ said Bigmac. ‘It took all the skin off my hand last week.’

  Johnny cautiously pulled the trolley upright. Guilty clung to it, hissing.

  ‘He likes you,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘You’ve still got both eyes.’

  ‘You could take it along to the RSPCA in the morning,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Johnny, ‘but what about the trolley? We can’t just leave it here.’

  ‘Yeah, let’s push it off the top of the multistorey,’ said Bigmac.

  Johnny prodded a bag. It moved a bit, and then flowed back, with an unpleasant oozing noise.

  ‘Y’know, my brother said Mrs Tachyon killed her husband years ago and then went mental and they never found his body,’ said Bigmac.

  They looked at the bags.

  ‘None of them is big enough for a dead body,’ said Yo-less, who wasn’t allowed to watch horror movies.

  ‘Not a whole one, no,’ said Bigmac.

  Yo-less took a step back.

  ‘I heard she stuck his head in the oven,’ said Wobbler. ‘Very messy.’

  ‘Messy?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘It was a microwave oven. Get it? If you put a—’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘I heard she’s really, really rich,’ said Bigmac.

  ‘Stinking rich,’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Look, I’ll just … I’ll just put in it in my grandad’s garage,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I don’t see why we have to do it,’ said Yo-less. ‘There’s supposed to be Care in the Community or something.’

  ‘He doesn’t keep much in there now. And then in the morning …’

  Oh, well. The morning was another day.

  ‘And while you’ve got it you could have a rummage to see if there’s any money,’ said Bigmac.

  Johnny glanced at Guilty, who snarled.

  ‘No, I like a hand with all its fingers on,’ he said. ‘You lot come with me. I’d feel a right clod pushing this by myself.’

  The fourth wheel squeaked and bounced as he pushed the trolley down the street.

  ‘Looks heavy,’ said Yo-less.

  There was a snigger from beside him.

  ‘Well, they say Mr Tachyon was a very big man—’

  ‘Just shut up, Bigmac.’

  It’s me, he thought, as the procession went down the street. It’s like on the Lottery, only it’s the opposite. There’s this big finger in the sky and it comes through your window and flicks you on the ear and says ‘It’s YOU – har har har’. And you get up and think you’re going to have a normal day and suddenly you‘re in charge of a trolley with one squeaky wheel and an insane cat.

  ‘Here,’ said Wobbler. ‘These fish and chips are still warm.’

  ‘What?’ said Johnny. ‘You picked up her actual fish and chips?’

  Wobbler backed away. ‘Well, yeah, why not, shame to let them go to waste—’

  ‘They might have got her spit on ’em,’ said Bigmac. ‘Yuk.’

  ‘They haven’t even been unwrapped, actually,’ said Wobbler, but he did stop unwrapping them.

  ‘Put them in the trolley, Wobbler,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Dunno who wraps fish and chips in newspaper round here,’ said Wobbler, tossing the package onto the pile in the trolley. ‘Hong Kong Henry doesn’t. Where’d she get them?’

  Sir John was normally awakened at half past eight every morning by a butler who brought him his breakfast, another butler who brought him his clothes, a third butler whose job it was to feed Adolf and Stalin if necessary, and a fourth butler who was basically a spare.

  At nine o’clock his secretary came and read him his appointments for today.

  When he did so this morning, though, he found him still staring at his plate with a strange expression. Adolf and Stalin swam contentedly in the tank by his desk.

  ‘Five different kinds of pill, some biscuits made of cardboard and a glass of orange juice with all the excitement removed,’ said Sir John. ‘What’s the point of being the richest man in the world – I am still the richest man in the world, aren’t I?’

  ‘Yes, Sir John.’

  ‘Well, what’s the point if it all boils down to pills for breakfast?’ He drummed his fingers on the table. ‘Well … I’ve had enough, d’y’hear? Tell Hickson to get the car out.’

  ‘Which car, Sir John?’

  ‘The Bentley.’

  ‘Which Bentley, Sir John?’

  ‘Oh, one I haven’t used lately. He can choose. And find Blackbury on the map. We own a burger bar there, don’t we?’

  ‘Er … I think so, Sir John. Wasn’t that the one where you personally chose the site? You said you just knew it would be a good one. Er … but today you’ve got appointments to see the chairman of—’

  ‘Cancel ’em all. I’m going to Blackbury. Don’t tell ’em I’m coming. Call it … a lightning inspection. The secret of success in business is to pay attention to the little details, am I right? People get underdone burgers or the fries turn out to be too soggy and before you know where you are the entire business is down around your ears.’

  ‘Er … if you say so, Sir John.’

  ‘Right. I’ll be ready in twenty minutes.’

  ‘Er … you could, perhaps, leave it until tomorrow? Only the committee did ask that—’

  ‘No!’ The old man slapped the table. ‘It’s got to be today! Today’s when it all happens, you see. Mrs Tachyon. The trolley. Johnny and the rest of them. It’s got to be today. Otherwise …’ He pushed away the dull yet healthy breakfast. ‘Otherwise it’s this for the rest of my life.’

  The secretary was used to Sir John’s moods, and tried to lighten things a little.

  ‘Blackbury …’ he said. ‘That’s where you were evacuated during the war, wasn’t it? And you were the only person to escape when one of the streets got bombed?’

  ‘Me and two goldfish called Adolf and Stalin. That’s right. That’s where it all started,’ said Sir John, getting up and going over to the window. ‘Go on, jump to it.’
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  The secretary didn’t go straightaway. One of his jobs was to keep an eye on Sir John. The old boy was acting a bit odd, people had said. He’d taken to reading very old newspapers and books with words like ‘Time’ and ‘Physics’ in the title, and sometimes he even wrote angry letters to very important scientists. When you’re the richest man in the world, people watch you very closely.

  ‘Adolf and Stalin,’ said Sir John, to the whole world in general. ‘Of course, these two are only their descendants. It turned out that Adolf was female. Or was it Stalin?’

  Outside the window, the gardens stretched all the way to some rolling hills that Sir John’s landscape gardener had imported specially.

  ‘Blackbury,’ said Sir John, staring at them. ‘That’s where it all started. The whole thing. There was a boy called Johnny Maxwell. And Mrs Tachyon. And a cat, I think.’

  He turned.

  ‘Are you still here?’

  ‘Sorry, Sir John,’ said the secretary, backing out and shutting the door behind him.

  ‘That’s where it all started,’ said Sir John. ‘And that’s where it’s all going to end.’

  Johnny always enjoyed those first few moments in the morning before the day leapt out at him. His head was peacefully full of flowers, clouds, kittens—

  His hand still hurt.

  Horrible bits of last night rushed out from hiding and bounced and gibbered in front of him.

  There was a shopping trolley full of unspeakable bags in the garage. There was also a spray of milk across the wall and ceiling where Guilty had showed what he thought of people who tried to give him an unprovoked meal. Johnny had had to use the biggest Elastoplast in the medicine tin afterwards.

  He got up, dressed, and went downstairs. His mother wouldn’t be up yet and his grandad was definitely in the front room watching Saturday morning TV.

  Johnny opened the garage door and stepped back hurriedly, in case a ball of maddened fur came spinning out.

  Nothing happened.

  The dreadful trolley stood in the middle of the floor. There was no sign of Guilty.

  It was, Johnny thought, just like those scenes in films where you know the monster is in the room somewhere …

  He jumped sideways, just in case Guilty was about to drop out of the ceiling.