Johnny and the Bomb

by Terry Pratchett

‘I’ve read books and books about that sort of thing, and they’re full of unintelligent children who go around saying “gosh”. They just drift along having an adventure, for goodness’ sake. They never seem to think of it as any kind of opportunity. They’re never prepared. Well, I am.’

  Johnny tried to imagine what’d happen if Kirsty was ever kidnapped by aliens. You’d probably end up with a galactic empire where everyone had sharp pencils and always carried a small torch in case of emergencies. Or they’d make a million robot copies who’d fly around the universe telling everyone not to be stupid and forcing them to be sensible.

  ‘This is obviously something very odd,’ she said. ‘Possibly mystic. Possibly a time machine of some sort.’

  And that was the thing about her. She arrived at an explanation. She didn’t mess around with uncertainty.

  ‘Didn’t you think that?’ she said.

  ‘A time machine? A time shopping trolley?’

  ‘Well, what other explanation fits the facts? Apart from possibly she was kidnapped by aliens and brought here at the speed of light, which is something they do a lot for some reason. But there might be something else, I’m sure you’ve thought of it.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘No hurry,’ she added sarcastically. ‘Take your time.’

  ‘Well …’

  ‘No rush.’

  ‘Well … a time machine’d have flashing lights …’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You’ve got to have flashing lights.’

  ‘What for?’

  Johnny wasn’t going to give in.

  ‘To flash,’ he said.

  ‘Really? Well, who says a time machine has to look like anything?’ said Kasandra in a superior tone of voice, or at least an even more superior voice than the one she usually used. ‘Or has to be powered by electricity?’

  ‘Yo-less says you can’t have time machines because everyone’d keep changing the future,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Oh? So what’s the alternative? How come she turned up with this new old newspaper and all these new old pickle jars?’

  ‘All right, but I don’t go leaping to great big conclusions!’

  In fact he did. He knew he did. All the time. But there was something about the way Kasandra argued that automatically made you take the other side.

  He waved a hand at the trolley.

  ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘do you really think something could just press the … oh, the handle, or the bags or something, and suddenly it’s hello, Norman the Conqueror?’

  He thumped his hand down on a black bag.

  The world flashed in front of his eyes.

  There was concrete under his feet, but there were no walls. At least, not much in the way of walls. They were one brick high.

  A man cementing the new row looked up very slowly.

  ‘Blimey,’ he said, ‘how did you get there?’ Then he seemed to get a grip on himself ‘Hey, that concrete’s still— Fred! You come here!’

  A spaniel sitting by the man barked at Johnny and rushed forward, jumping up at Johnny and knocking him back against the trolley.

  There was another flash. It was red and blue and it seemed to Johnny that he was squashed very flat and then pulled out again.

  There were walls, and the shopping trolley was still in the middle of the floor, as was Kasandra, staring at him.

  ‘You vanished for a moment,’ she said, as if he’d done something wrong. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I … I don’t know, how should I know?’ said Johnny.

  ‘Move your feet,’ she said. ‘Very slowly.’

  He did. They met a very slight obstacle, a tiny ridge in the floor. He looked down.

  ‘Oh, they’re just the footprints in the cement,’ he said. ‘They’ve been … there … ages …’

  Kasandra knelt down to look at the footprints he’d been standing in. They were ingrained with dust and dirt, but she made him take off his trainer and held it upside down by the print.

  It matched exactly.

  ‘See?’ she said triumphantly. ‘You’re standing in your own footprints.’

  Johnny stepped gingerly aside and looked at the footprints where he’d been standing. There was no doubt they’d been there a long time.

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Back in time … I think. There was a man building this place, and a dog.’

  ‘A dog,’ said Kasandra. Her voice suggested that she would have seen something much more interesting. ‘Oh, well. It’s a start.’

  She shifted the trolley. It was standing in four small grooves in the concrete. They were dirty and oily. They’d been there a long time, too.

  ‘This,’ said Kirsty, ‘is no ordinary shopping trolley.’

  ‘It’s got Tesco written on it,’ Johnny pointed out, hopping up and down as he replaced his shoe. ‘And a squeaky wheel.’

  ‘Obviously it’s still switched on or something,’ Kirsty went on, ignoring him.

  ‘And that’s time travel, is it?’ said Johnny. ‘I thought it’d be more exciting. You know – battles and monsters and things? And it’s not much fun if all we can do is— don’t touch it!’

  Kasandra prodded a bag.

  The air flickered and changed.

  Kasandra looked around her. The garage hadn’t changed in any way. Except—

  ‘Who repaired your bike?’ she said. Johnny turned. His bike was no longer upside down with a wheel off, but leaning against the wall, both tyres quite full.

  ‘You see, I notice things,’ said Kasandra. ‘I am remarkably observant. We must have gone into the future, when you’ve mended it.’

  Johnny wasn’t sure. He’d torn three inner tubes already, plus he’d also lost the thingy from the inside of the valve. Probably no time machine could ever go so far into the future that he’d be good at cycle repair.

  ‘Let’s have a look round,’ said Kirsty. ‘Obviously where we go is controlled by some factor I haven’t discovered yet. If we’re in the future, the important thing is to find out which horses are going to win races, and so on.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘So we can bet money on them and become rich, of course.’

  ‘I don’t know how to bet!’

  ‘One problem at a time.’

  Johnny looked though the grimy window. The weather didn’t look very different. There were no flying cars or other definite signs of futurosity. But Guilty was no longer under the bench.

  ‘Grandad has a racing paper,’ he said, feeling a bit light-headed.

  ‘Let’s go, then.’

  ‘What? Into my house?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Supposing I meet me?’

  ‘Well, you’ve always been good at making friends.’

  Reluctantly, Johnny led the way out of the garage. Garden paths in the future, he noted, were made of some gritty grey substance which was amazingly like cracked concrete. Back doors were an excitingly futuristic faded blue colour, with little dried flakes where the paint had bubbled up. It was locked, but his ancient key still fitted.

  There was a rectangle on the floor consisting of spiky brown hairs. He wiped his feet on it, and looked at the time measurement module on the wall. It said ten past three.

  The future was amazingly like the present.

  ‘Now we’ve got to find a newspaper,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘It won’t be a lot of help,’ said Johnny. ‘Grandad keeps them around until he’s got time to read them. They go back months. Anyway, everything’s normal. This doesn’t look very futuristic to me.’

  ‘Don’t you even have a calendar?’

  ‘Yes. There’s one on my bedside clock. I just hope I’m at school, that’s all.’

  According to the clock, it was the third of October.

  ‘The day before yesterday,’ said Johnny. ‘Mind you, it could be the clock. It doesn’t work very well.’

  ‘Yuk. You sleep in here?’ said Kirsty, looking around with an expression like a vegetarian in a sausage factory.

 
‘Yes. It’s my room.’

  Kirsty ran her hand over his desk, which was fairly crowded at the moment.

  ‘What’re all these photocopies and photos and things?’

  ‘That’s the project I’m doing in history. We’re doing the Second World War. So I’m doing Blackbury in the war.’

  He tried to get between her and the desk, but Kirsty was always interested in things people didn’t want her to see.

  ‘Hey, this is you, isn’t it?’ she said, grabbing a sepia photograph. ‘Since when did you wear a uniform and a pudding-basin haircut?’

  Johnny tried to grab it. ‘And that’s Grandad when he was a bit older than me,’ he mumbled. ‘I tried to get him to talk about the war like the teacher said but he tells me to shut up about it.’

  ‘You’re so local, aren’t you,’ said Kirsty. ‘I can’t imagine much happening here—’

  ‘Something did happen,’ said Johnny. He pulled out Mrs Tachyon’s chip paper and jabbed at the front page with his finger. ‘At 11.07pm on May 21, 1941. Bombs! Real bombs! They called it the Blackbury Blitz. And this is the paper from the day after. Look.’ He rummaged among the stuff on his desk and pulled out a photocopy. ‘See? I got a copy of the same page out of the library! But this paper’s real, it’s new!’

  ‘If she is … from the past … why does she wear an old ra-ra skirt and trainers?’ said Kirsty.

  Johnny glared angrily at her. She had no right not to care about Paradise Street!

  ‘Nineteen people got killed! In one night!’ he said. ‘There wasn’t any warning! The only bombs that fell on Blackbury in the whole of the war! The only survivors were two goldfish in a bowl! It got blown into a tree and still had water in it! All the people got killed!’

  Kirsty picked up a felt-tipped pen, but it didn’t write because it had dried up. Johnny had a worldclass collection of pens that didn’t work.

  She had this infuriating habit of appearing not to notice him when he was excited about something.

  ‘You know you’ve still got Thomas the Tank Engine on your wallpaper?’ she said

  ‘What? Have I? Gosh, I hadn’t realized,’ said Johnny, with what he hoped was sarcasm.

  ‘It’s OK to have Thomas the Tank Engine when you’re seven, and it’s quite cool to have it when you’re nineteen, but it’s not cool at thirteen. Honestly, if I wasn’t here to help from time to time, you just wouldn’t have a clue.’

  ‘Grandad put it up a couple of years ago,’ said Johnny. ‘This was my room when I stayed with them. You know grandparents. It’s Thomas the Tank Engine until you die.’

  Then there was the click of the front door opening.

  ‘Your grandad?’ hissed Kirsty.

  ‘He always goes shopping in town on Thursdays!’ whispered Johnny. ‘And Mum’s at work!’

  ‘Who else has got a key?’

  ‘Only me!’

  Someone started to climb the stairs.

  ‘But I can’t meet me!’ said Johnny. ‘I’d remember, wouldn’t I? Yo-less says if you meet yourself the whole universe explodes! I’d remember that happening!’

  Kirsty picked up the bedside lamp, and glanced at the design on it.

  ‘Good grief, the Mr Men, you’ve still got Mr—’

  ‘Shutupshutupshutup. What’re you going to do with it?’

  ‘Don’t worry, you won’t feel a thing, I learned how to do this in self-defence classes—’

  The doorhandle turned. The door opened a fraction.

  Downstairs, the phone rang.

  The handle clicked back. Footsteps went downstairs again.

  Johnny heard the phone picked up. A distant voice said: ‘Oh, hi, Wobbler.’

  Kirsty looked at Johnny and raised her eyebrows.

  ‘Wobbler phoned,’ said Johnny. ‘About going to the movies yest— tomorrow. I just remembered.’

  ‘Were you on the phone long?’

  ‘Don’t … think so. And I went to get a sandwich afterwards.’

  ‘Where’s your phone?’

  ‘In the front room.’

  ‘Let’s go, then!’

  Kirsty opened the door and darted down the stairs, with Johnny trailing behind her.

  His coat was on the coat rack. He was also wearing it. He stood and stared.

  ‘Come on,’ hissed Kirsty.

  She was almost at the bottom when the door started to open.

  Johnny opened his mouth to say: oh, yes, I remember, I had to go and get my wallet to see if I’d got any money.

  He desperately wanted not to meet himself. If the entire universe exploded, people would be bound to blame him afterwards …

  … and there was a flash in front of his eyes.

  The black car slid surreptitiously out of a side road just before a sign indicating that it was about to enter BLACKBURY (twinned with Aix-et-Pains).

  ‘Nearly there, Sir John.’

  ‘Good. What time are we in?’

  ‘Er … quarter past eleven, sir.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I meant. If time was a pair of trousers, what leg would we be in?’

  It occurred to Hickson the chauffeur that this might be quite a difficult million pounds to earn.

  ‘They all got mixed up today, you see,’ said a voice from the seat behind him.

  ‘Right, sir. If I see any trousers, sir, you just tell me what leg to drive down.’

  Chapter 5

  The Truth is Out of Here

  Johnny was still on the stairs. Kirsty was still in front of him. The door was shut. His coat wasn’t on the coat rack. The Blackbury Shopper, which was delivered on Fridays and stayed on the hall table until someone threw it away, was indeed on the table.

  ‘We’ve time travelled again, haven’t we,’ said Kirsty, calmly. ‘I think we’re back to where we started. Possibly …’

  ‘I saw the back of my own head!’ whispered Johnny. ‘My actual own back of my own head! Without mirrors or anything! No one’s ever done that since the Spanish Inquisition! How can you be so calm about this?’

  ‘I’m just acting calm,’ said Kirsty. ‘This is even worse wallpaper, isn’t it? Looks like an Indian restaurant.’

  She opened the front door, and slammed it again.

  ‘You know I said that if you started getting too interested in mysterious occult things these men in black cars turn up?’

  ‘Yes? Well?’

  ‘Look through the letterbox, will you?’

  Johnny levered it open with a finger.

  There was a car pulling up outside. It was black. Utterly. Black. Black tyres, black wheels, black headlights. Even the windows were darker than a pair of Mafia sunglasses. Here and there were bits of chrome, but they only made the blackness blacker by comparison.

  It stopped. Johnny could just make out the shadow of the driver behind the tinted glass.

  ‘’S … just … coincidence,’ he said.

  ‘Your grandad often gets visitors like this, does he?’ Kasandra demanded.

  ‘Well …’ He didn’t. Someone came round on Thursday to collect his football pools coupon and that was about it. Grandad was not one for the social whirl.

  The car door opened. A man got out. He was wearing a black chauffeur’s uniform. The car door shut. It shut with the kind of final, heavy thonk that only the most expensive car doors can achieve, because they are lined with money.

  Johnny let go of the letterbox and jumped back. A few seconds later, someone banged heavily on the door.

  ‘Run!’ whispered Kasandra.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The back door? Come on!’

  ‘We haven’t done anything wrong!’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Kasandra opened the back door and hurried down the path and into the garage, dragging Johnny behind her. The trolley was still in the middle of the floor.

  ‘Get ready to open the big doors and don’t stop for anything!’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Open the doors now!’

  Johnny opened the
m, because practically anything was better than arguing with Kirsty.

  The little garage area was empty, except for someone washing their car.

  Johnny was nearly knocked aside as the trolley rattled out, with Kasandra pushing determinedly on the handle. It rattled across the concrete and lurched uncertainly into the alleyway that led to the next road.

  ‘Didn’t you see that programme about the flying saucer that crashed and these mysterious men turned up and hushed it all up?’ said Kasandra.

  ‘No!’

  ‘Well, did you even hear about the flying saucer crashing?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘See?’

  ‘All right, but in that case how come there was a TV programme about it, then?’

  A car edged around the corner into the road.

  ‘I can’t waste time answering silly questions,’ said Kasandra. ‘Come on.’

  She shoved the trolley as hard as she could. It rolled down the sloping pavement, the squeaky wheel bouncing and juddering over the slabs.

  The car turned the corner very slowly, as though driven by someone who didn’t know the area very well.

  Johnny caught up with Kir-Kasandra and clung to the handle because the trolley was rocking all over the pavement.

  The trolley, under its heavy load, began to pick up speed.

  ‘Try to hold it back!’

  ‘I’m trying! Are you?’

  Johnny risked a look behind. The car seemed to be catching up.

  He jumped onto the trolley.

  ‘What are you playing at?’ said Kirsty, who was far too worried to remember any new names now.

  ‘Come on!’

  He grabbed her hand and pulled her up on the other side of the cart. Now she was no longer holding the handle, it surged forward.

  ‘Do you think this is really a time machine?’ he said, as the rushing wind made the bags flutter.

  ‘It must be!’

  ‘D’you see that film where the car travelled in time when it went at eighty-eight miles an hour?’

  They looked down. The wheels were screaming. Smoke was coming out of the axles. They looked up the hill. The car was catching them up. They looked down the hill. There were the traffic lights. The Blackbury by-pass was a solid wall of thundering traffic.

  Then they looked up into each other’s frightened faces.

  ‘The lights are red! The lights are red! I don’t want to die!’ said Kirsty. ‘I haven’t even been to university!’