Johnny and the Bomb

by Terry Pratchett

  But his boots dug into the floor and he rose out of his chair like a missile going off. His feet barely touched the table top. He went past the policeman’s shoulder with his legs already making running motions. Fear gave him superhuman acceleration. Ms Partridge might make cutting remarks but she wasn’t allowed to use bullets however much she wanted to.

  Bigmac landed in the doorway, turned at random, put his head down and charged. It was a hard head. It hit someone around belt level. There was a shout and a crash.

  He saw another gap and headed for it. There was another crash, and the sound of a telephone smashing on the floor. Someone yelled at him to halt or they’d fire.

  Bigmac didn’t stop to find out what’d happened. He just hoped that a pair of 1990s Doc Martens that had been practically bought legally by his brother off a man with a lorry full of them were much better for dodging and running than huge police boots.

  Whoever had been shouting stop or they’d fire … fired.

  There was a crack and a clang somewhere ahead of Bigmac, but he turned down a corridor, ran under the outstretched arms of another policeman, and out into a yard.

  A policeman was standing next to a Jurassic bicycle, a huge machine that looked as if it were made of drainpipes welded together.

  Bigmac went past him in a blur, grabbed the handlebars, swung onto the saddle and rammed his feet onto the pedals.

  ‘Ere; what’re you doin’—’

  The policeman’s voice faded behind him.

  The bike swung out into the lane behind the station.

  It was a cobbled street. The saddle was solid leather. Bigmac’s trousers were very thin.

  ‘No wonder everyone was very depressed,’ he thought, trying to cycle standing up.

  ‘Nyer nyer nyer. Spy spy spy.’

  ‘Shut up!’ said Wobbler. ‘Why don’t you run away to London?’

  ‘Ain’t gonna run away to London now,’ said the boy. ‘’S’lot more fun catchin’ spies here.’

  They were back in the heart of the town now. The boy trailed behind Wobbler, pointing him out to passers-by. Admittedly, no one seemed to be about to arrest him, but he was getting some odd looks.

  ‘My brother Ron’s a policeman,’ said the boy. ‘He’ll come up from London and shoot you with his gun.’

  ‘Go away!’

  ‘Sharn’t!’

  Opposite the entrance to Paradise Street was a small church. It was a non-conformist chapel, according to Yo-less. It had a shut-up, wet Sunday look. A couple of elderly evergreen trees on either side of the door looked as though it’d take a shovel just to get the soot off their leaves.

  The three of them sat on the steps, watching the street. A woman had come out and was industriously scrubbing her doorstep.

  ‘Did this chapel get hit?’ said Kirsty.

  ‘You mean will. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘It’s still here … I mean, in 1996,’ said Yo-less. ‘Only it’s just used as a social hall. You know, for keep-fit classes and stuff. I know, ’cos I come here for Morris Dance practice every Wednesday. Will, I mean.’

  ‘You?’ said Kirsty. ‘You do Morris Dancing? With sticks and hankies and stuff? You?’

  ‘There’s something wrong?’ said Yo-less coldly.

  ‘Well … no … no, of course not … but … it’s just an unusual interest for someone of – your—’

  Yo-less let her squirm for a bit and then said, ‘Height?’ He dropped the word like a weight. Kirsty shut her mouth.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  Another woman appeared, next door to the one scrubbing her front doorstep, and started scrubbing her doorstep.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ said Kirsty.

  ‘I’m thinking,’ said Yo-less.

  Somewhere in the distance a bell went off, and kept on going off.

  ‘I’m thinking, too,’ said Johnny. ‘I’m thinking: we haven’t seen Bigmac for ages.’

  ‘Good,’ said Kirsty.

  ‘He might be in some trouble, I mean,’ said Johnny.

  ‘What do you mean, might be?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘And we haven’t seen Wobbler, either,’ said Johnny.

  ‘Oh, you know Wobbler. He’s probably hiding somewhere.’

  Another woman opened the door on the other side of the street and entered the doorstep scrubbing competition.

  Kirsty straightened up.

  ‘Why’re we acting so miserable?’ she said. ‘We’re Nineties people. We should be able to think of something. We could … we could …’

  ‘We could ring up Adolf Hitler,’ Yo-less suggested. ‘Can’t remember his phone number, sorry, but directory inquiries in Germany’re bound to know.’

  Johnny stared glumly at the shopping trolley. He hadn’t expected time travel to be this hard. He thought of all those wasted lessons when they could have been telling him what to do if some mad woman left him a trolley full of time. School never taught you anything that was useful in real life. There probably wasn’t a single textbook that told you what to do if it turned out you were living next door to Elvis Presley.

  He looked down the length of Paradise Street, and felt Time streaming past him. Yo-less and Kirsty faded away. He could feel them there, though, as insubstantial as dreams, as the light faded from the sky and the footballers went indoors and the wind got up and the clouds rolled in from the south-west and the town went to sleep and the bombers came out of the east and fire rained down on the houses and the allotments and the people and the goalposts chalked on the wall and all the nice, clean, white doorsteps …

  Captain Harris turned Bigmac’s watch over.

  ‘Amazing,’ he said. ‘And it says “Made In Japan”.’

  ‘Fiendishly cunning,’ said the police sergeant.

  The captain picked up the radio.

  ‘Japanese again,’ he said. ‘Why? Why put it on the back? See here. Made in Japan.’

  ‘I thought it was all rice,’ said the sergeant. ‘That’s what my dad said. He was out there.’

  Captain Harris fiddled one of the tiny headphones into his ear and moved a switch. He listened to the hiss that was due to be replaced by Radio Blackbury in forty-eight years’ time, and nodded.

  ‘It’s doing something,’ he said. His thumb touched the wavechange switch, and he blinked.

  ‘It’s the Home Service,’ he said. ‘Clear as a bell!’

  ‘We could have the back off it in no time,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘No,’ said Sergeant Harris. ‘This has got to go to the Ministry. The men in white coats can have a look at it. How can you get valves to fit in this? Where’s the aerial?’

  ‘Very small feet,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Sorry, sergeant?’

  ‘That’s what my dad said. Japanese. The women. Very small feet, he said. So maybe they’ve got small hands, too. Just a thought.’ The sergeant tried to extend his line of technological speculation. ‘Good for making small things? You know. Like ships in bottles?’

  The captain put the tiny radio back in the box.

  ‘I’ve seen people do them,’ said the sergeant, still anxious to be of assistance. ‘You get a bottle, then you get a lot of very thin thread—’

  ‘He’s the best actor I’ve ever seen, I know that,’ said Captain Harris. ‘You could really think he was just a stupid boy. But this stuff … I just can’t believe it. It’s all very … odd.’

  ‘We’ve got every man out after him,’ said the sergeant. ‘And the inspector has called out the army from West Underton. We’ll have him in no time.’

  The captain sealed the box with sticky tape.

  ‘I want this guarded,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll keep an eye on it in the main office.’

  ‘No. I want it secure.’

  ‘Well, there’s an empty cell. Actually there’s someone in it but I’ll soon have ’em out.’

  ‘More secure than that.’

  The sergeant scratched an ear.

/>   ‘There’s the Lost Property cupboard,’ he said. ‘But there’s important stuff in it—’

  ‘Lost Property cupboard! Haven’t you got a safe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’d happen if the Crown Jewels were found in the gutter, then?’

  ‘We’d put ’em in the Lost Property cupboard,’ said the sergeant promptly. ‘And then ring up the King. If his name was in them, of course. Look, it’s a good thick door and there’s only one key and I’ve got it.’

  ‘All right, take out what’s in there and put it in your cell and put the box in the cupboard,’ said the captain.

  ‘Chief Inspector won’t like that. Very important stuff, Lost Property.’

  ‘Tell him we can co-operate in a very friendly fashion now or if he prefers he can take a call from the Chief Constable in two minutes,’ said Captain Harris, putting his hand on the phone. ‘One way or the other, hmm?’

  The sergeant looked worried. ‘You serious about this, sir?’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘That stuff’s not going to go off bang or anything, is it?’

  ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’

  Five minutes later the sergeant walked down to the cells with his arms full of the contents of the cupboard, and a put-upon expression on his face. He put them on a bench in the corridor and fished out his keys. Then he pulled aside the hatch in a cell door.

  ‘You all right, old girl?’

  ‘That’s what you think. Talk about a blue pencil! You can tell he’s a lad, can’t yer, Mister Shadwell?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the sergeant, opening the door.

  The old lady sat on the bed. She was so short that her feet swung several inches above the floor. And there was a cat on her lap. It growled when it saw the sergeant – a slow, rising growl which suggested that, if there was any attempt to pick the cat up, it was all going to end in claws.

  The sergeant had long ago stopped worrying about how the cat could get into the cells. It happened every time. There wasn’t room via the windows and it certainly couldn’t have got in through the door, but every night the old lady was in the cells, the cat would be in there, too, in the morning.

  ‘Finished your breakfast, have you?’

  ‘Millennium hand and shrimp,’ said Mrs Tachyon happily.

  ‘Good. Then you just come along with me. It’s a nice day outside,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Beam me up, Scotty,’ said Mrs Tachyon, standing up and following him obediently. The sergeant shook his head sadly.

  She trailed behind him into the station yard where, under a bit of canvas the sergeant had thrown over it the night before, there was a wire trolley loaded down with bags.

  Mrs Tachyon looked at it.

  ‘No one nicked anything?’ she said.

  She was like that, the sergeant thought. Mad as a hatter most of the time and then suddenly a sentence’d come out at you like a razor blade in candy floss.

  ‘Now then, old love, as if anyone’d touch that lot,’ he said, as kindly as possible.

  ‘Points win prizes. Hats.’

  The sergeant reached under the trolley and produced a pair of boots.

  ‘These belonged to my mum,’ he said. ‘She was going to throw ’em out, but I said, there’s still some good leather on them—’

  Mrs Tachyon snatched them out of his hand. In seconds they were somewhere in the pile of bags on the trolley.

  ‘It’s a small step for a man,’ said Mrs Tachyon.

  ‘Yes, they’re size sixes,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Ah, Bisto. It’s a great life if yer don’t weaken, but of course they’ve put a bridge there now.’

  The sergeant looked down at the trolley.

  ‘Dunno where you get this stuff from,’ he said. ‘What’re these bags made of, love? Looks like rubber or something.’

  ‘Obbly Obbly Ob. Weeeed!’ said Mrs Tachyon. ‘I told them, but no one listens to a teapot. Fab!’

  The sergeant sighed, put his hand in his pocket and produced a sixpence.

  ‘Get yourself a cup of tea and a bun,’ he said.

  ‘Hats. That’s what you think,’ said Mrs Tachyon, taking it.

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  The sergeant headed back into the police station.

  He was used to Mrs Tachyon. When nights were cold you’d sometimes hear a milk bottle smash on the step outside. This was technically a crime, and it meant that Mrs Tachyon was looking for somewhere warm for the night.

  Not on every cold night, though. That was a puzzler, and no mistake. Last winter it had been very nippy indeed for quite a long time and the lads had got a bit worried. It came as quite a relief when they’d heard the crash of breaking glass and the cry of ‘I told ’em! That’s what you think!’ Mrs Tachyon came and went, and no one knew where she came from, and you never found out where she’d gone …

  Beam me up, Snotty? Mad as a hatter, of course.

  But … strange, too. Like, after you’d given her something you ended up feeling as if she’d done you a favour.

  He heard the rattle of the trolley behind him, and then a sudden silence.

  He turned around. The trolley, and Mrs Tachyon, had gone.

  Johnny felt the hereness of here. It’d happen here, not in some far-off country full of odd names and foreign people with thick moustaches shouting slogans.

  It’d happen here, where there were public libraries and zebra crossings and people who did the football pools.

  Bombs would come crashing through roofs and ceilings and down to the cellars, and turn the world white.

  And it would happen, because as Yo-less said, it had happened. It was going to have happened, and he couldn’t possibly stop it, because if he did find some way of stopping it, then he wouldn’t know about it happening, would he?

  Maybe Mrs Tachyon collected Time. Johnny felt in a way that he couldn’t quite put into words that Time wasn’t just something that was on clocks and calendars but lived in people’s heads, too. And if that meant you had to think like this, no wonder she sounded mad.

  ‘Are you all right?’ said a voice, a long way away.

  Miraculously, the rubble became houses again, the light came up, the football rattled against the goal in the warm afternoon air.

  Kirsty waved a hand in front of his face.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘I was just … thinking,’ said Johnny.

  ‘I hate it when you switch off like that.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  Johnny stood up.

  ‘We didn’t come back here by accident,’ he said. ‘I was thinking a lot about tonight, and we ended up coming here just in time. I don’t know why. But we’ve got to do something, even if there’s nothing we can do. So I’m going to—’

  A bicycle came around the corner. It was bouncing up and down on the cobbles and the skinny figure riding it was a mere blur. It clanked to a halt in front of them.

  They stared at the cyclist. He was shaking so much he looked slightly out of focus.

  ‘Bigmac?’

  ‘Ur-ur-ur—’ shuddered Bigmac.

  ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’ said Kirsty.

  ‘Ur-ur-ur-n-n-nineteen? H-h-hide the bike!’

  ‘Why?’ said Kirsty.

  ‘I didn’t do anything!’

  ‘Ah,’ said Yo-less, knowingly. ‘It’s like that, is it?’

  He picked up the bike and wheeled it into the sooty shrubs.

  ‘Like what?’ said Kirsty, looking bewildered.

  ‘Bigmac always never does anything,’ said Johnny.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Yo-less. ‘There can’t be anyone in the whole universe who’s got into so much trouble for things he didn’t do in places he wasn’t at that weren’t his fault.’

  ‘Th-th-they shot at me!’

  ‘Wow!’ said Yo-less. ‘You must’ve not done anything really big this time!’

  ‘Th-there was th-this c-car—’

  The ringing Jo
hnny had heard before started again, somewhere behind the buildings.

  ‘Th-that’s a police car!’ said Bigmac. ‘I tried to give them the slip down Harold Wilson Drive and – it wasn’t there! And one of them shot at me! With an actual gun! Soldiers aren’t supposed to shoot people!’

  They dragged the trembling Bigmac into the horrible bushes. Kirsty gave him her mac to stop him shivering.

  ‘All right, game over. I said game over!’ he moaned. ‘Let’s pack it in, all right? Let’s go home!’

  ‘I think we should try to tell people about the bombs,’ Johnny said. ‘Someone might listen.’

  ‘And if they ask how do you know, you’ll say you’re from 1996, will you?’

  ‘Maybe you could … you know … write a note,’ said Yo-less. ‘Slip it into someone’s letterbox?’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ said Kirsty, hotly. ‘What should we write? “Go for a long walk” perhaps? Or “Wear a very hard hat”?’

  She stopped when she saw Johnny’s expression.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Wobbler!’ said Yo-less.

  They turned. Wobbler was toiling along the street. It took some effort for Wobbler to manage a run, but when he did so, there was also something terribly unstoppable about him.

  He spotted them, and changed direction.

  ‘Am I glad to see you,’ he panted. ‘Let’s get out of here! Some loony kid chased me all the way down the hill. He kept shouting out that I was a spy!’

  ‘Did he try to shoot you?’ said Bigmac.

  ‘He threw stones!’

  ‘Hah! I got shot at!’ said Bigmac, with a sort of pride.

  ‘All right,’ said Kirsty. ‘We’re all here. Let’s go.’

  ‘You know I don’t know how!’ said Johnny.

  The bags lay there in the trolley. There were the words ‘Shop At Tescos’ on a piece of metal on the front of the wire. Probably Mr Tesco just owned a tiny grocery shop or something back here, Johnny thought wildly. Or hadn’t been born yet.

  ‘It’s your mind that works it,’ said Kirsty. ‘It must be. You go where you’re thinking.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ said Yo-less. ‘That’s like magic.’

  Johnny stared at the trolley again. ‘I could … try,’ he said.

  A police car went by, a street away.