A Tale of Time City

“Cousin Marty’s waiting outside,” Jonathan Lee Walker said soothingly. “Let me take your bag.” He put out his hand. Vivian snatched the string bag out of his way and he picked up her suitcase from the platform instead and marched away with it across the station.

Vivian hurried after him, with her gas mask banging at her back, to rescue her suitcase. He strode straight to the Waiting Room and opened the door. “Where are you going?” Vivian panted.

“Short cut, my dear V.S.,” he said, holding the door open with a soothing smile.

“Give me my suitcase!” Vivian said, grabbing for it. Now she was sure he was a robber. But as soon as she was through the door, Jonathan Lee Walker went galloping noisily across the bare boards of the little room towards the blank back wall.

“Bring us back, Sam!” he shouted, so that the room rang. Vivian decided he was mad, and grabbed for her suitcase again. And suddenly everything turned silvery.

“Where is this?” Vivian said. They were crowding one another in a narrow silvery space like a very smooth telephone booth. Vivian turned desperately to get out again and knocked a piece of what seemed to be the telephone off the wall. Jonathan whirled round like lightning and slammed the piece back. Vivian felt her gas mask dig into him and hoped it hurt. There was nothing but a bare silvery wall behind her.

In front of Jonathan, the smooth silvery surface slid away sideways. A small boy with longish nearly-red hair looked anxiously in at them. When he saw Vivian, his face relaxed into a fierce grin with two large teeth in it. “You got her!” he said, and he took what may have been an earphone out of his left ear. It was not much bigger than a pea, but it had a silvery wire connecting it to the side of the silver booth, so Vivian supposed it was an earphone. “This works,” he said, coiling the wire into one rather plump hand. “I heard you easily.”

“And I got her, Sam!” Jonathan answered jubilantly, stepping out of the silver booth. “I recognised her and I got her, right from under their noses!”

“Great!” said the small boy. He said to Vivian, “And now we’re going to torture you until you tell us what we want to know!”

Vivian stood in the booth, clutching her string bag, staring at him with a mixture of dislike and amazement. Sam was the sort of small boy Mum called “rough” – the kind with a loud voice and heavy shoes whose shoelaces were always undone. Her eyes went to his shoes – such shoes! – puffy white footgear with red dots. Sure enough, one of the red and white ties of those shoes was trailing on the marble floor. Above that, Sam seemed to be wearing pyjamas. That was the only way Vivian could describe his baggy all-over suit with its one red stripe from his right shoulder to his left ankle. The red clashed with his hair, to Vivian’s mind, and she had never seen a boy so much in need of a haircut.

“I told you, Sam,” Jonathan said, dumping Vivian’s suitcase on a low table Vivian could dimly see behind Sam, “that it’s no good thinking of torture. She probably knows enough to torture us instead. We’re going to try gentle persuasion. Do please come out of the booth, V.S., and take a seat while I get out of this disguise.”

Vivian took another look at the blank, shiny back wall of the booth. Since there seemed no way out that way, she went forward. Sam backed away from her looking just a mite scared, and that made her feel better, until the door of the booth slid shut behind her with a quiet hushing sound and cut out most of the light in the room beyond. It seemed to be night out there, which was probably what had given her the idea that Sam was running around in pyjamas.

What dim light there was came from some kind of street lights shining through a peculiar-shaped window, but there was enough of it for Vivian to see she was in some kind of ultra-modern office. There was a vast half-circle of desk at the far end, surrounded by things that reminded Vivian of a telephone-exchange. But the odd thing was that the desk, instead of being of steel or chromium as she would have expected a modern desk to be, was made of beautifully carved wood that looked very old and gave off silky reflections in the low bluish light. Vivian looked at it doubtfully as she sat in an odd-shaped chair near the booth. And she nearly leaped straight up again when the chair moved around her, settling into the same shape that she was.

But Jonathan started tearing off his clothes then, right in front of her. Vivian sat stiffly in the form-fitting chair wondering if she was mad, or if Jonathan was, or if she ought to look away, or what. He flung off his grey flannel jacket first. Then he undid his striped tie and threw that down. Then – Vivian’s face turned half away sideways – he climbed out of his long grey flannel trousers. But it was all right. Underneath, Jonathan was wearing the same kind of suit as Sam, except that his had dark-coloured diamonds down the legs and sleeves.

“Great Time!” he said, as he dropped the trousers on top of the jacket. “These clothes are vile! They prickle me even through my suit. How do Twenty Century people bear it? Or these?” He plucked his glasses off his nose and pressed a knob on the belt that went round his suit. A flicker sprang into being across his eyes, shifting queerly in the blue light. The fold in his eyelids was much plainer to see like that. Vivian saw that Sam had the same fold. “A sight function is so much simpler,” Jonathan said. He pulled the striped school cap off his head and let about a foot of plaited hair tumble out of it across his shoulder. “That’s better!” he said as he hurled the cap down too and rubbed his neck under the pigtail to loosen the tight hair there.

Vivian stared. Never had she seen a boy with such long hair! In fact, she had a vague notion that boys were born with their hair short back and sides and that only girls had hair that grew long. But Jonathan had twice as much hair as she had. Perhaps he was Chinese and she had been spirited away to the Orient. But Sam was not Chinese. Whoever heard of a red-haired Chinaman?

“Who are you?” she said. “Where is this?”

Jonathan turned to her, looking very lordly and solemn – and not particularly Chinese. “We are Jonathan Lee Walker and Samuel Lee Donegal,” he said. “We’re both Lees. My father is the thousandth Sempitern. The Sempitern is the head of Time Council in Chronologue, in case you didn’t have those in your day. And Sam’s father is Chief of Time Patrol. We feel this qualifies us to talk to you. Welcome back. You have just come through Sam’s father’s private time-lock and you are now once more in Time City.”

A mistake has happened, Vivian thought miserably. And it seemed to be a mistake ten thousand times wilder than any of the mistakes she had imagined on the train. She pressed her lips together. I will not cry! she told herself. “I don’t understand a word you’re saying. What do you mean, ‘Welcome back’? Where is Time City?”

“Come, come now, V.S.,” Jonathan leant one hand on the back of the peculiar chair, in the way Inquisitors did in the kind of films Mum preferred Vivian not to see. “Time City is unique. It is built on a small patch of time and space that exists outside time and history. You know all about Time City, V.S.”

“No I don’t,” said Vivian.

“Yes you do. Your husband built the City,” Jonathan said, with his flicker-covered folded eyes staring eerily into Vivian’s. “We want you to tell us how to wake Faber John, V.S. Or if he isn’t sleeping under the City, tell us how to find him.”

“I haven’t got a husband!” Vivian said. “Oh, this is mad!”

Sam, who was breathing noisily and rustily on the other side of Vivian, said, “She looks awfully stupid. Do you think she had her brain damaged in the Mind Wars?”

Vivian sighed and looked rather desperately round the strange dark office. Was it really outside time? Or were they both mad?

Both of them seemed to have it fixed in their heads that she was some other Vivian Smith. So how was she going to convince them that she was not?

“Her brain’s all right,” Jonathan said confidently. “She’s just acting stupid so we’ll think we’ve made a mistake.” He leant over Vivian again. “See here, V.S.,” he said persuasively, “we’re not asking for ourselves. It’s for Time City. This patch of time and space here is almost worn out. The City is going to crumble away unless you tell us how to find Faber John so that he can renew the City. Or if you hate him too much, you could tell us where the polarities are and how to renew those. That isn’t too much to ask, is it, V.S.?”

“Don’t keep calling me Vee-Ess!” Vivian almost shrieked. “I’m not—”

“Yes you are, V.S.,” said Jonathan. “You were spotted coming up the First Unstable Era in a wave of chronons. We heard Chronologue discussing it. We know you are. So how do we wake Faber John, V.S.?”

“I don’t know!” Vivian screamed at him. “I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not her! I don’t know you and you don’t know me! I was being evacuated from London to stay with Cousin Marty because of the War, and you can just take me back! You’re a kidnapper!” Tears came streaming down her face. She scrabbled to get her handkerchief out of the string bag. “And so are you!” she added to Sam.

Sam leaned forward and breathily inspected her face. “She’s crying. She means it. You got the wrong one by mistake.”

“Of course I didn’t!” Jonathan said scornfully. But when Vivian found her handkerchief and looked at him with her face mostly hidden in it, she could tell he was beginning to have doubts.

Vivian did her best to strengthen those doubts. “I’ve never ever heard of Faber John, or Time City either,” she said, trying to stop herself sobbing. “And you can see I’m too young to have a husband. I won’t be twelve until just after Christmas. We’re not in the Middle Ages, you know.”

Sam nodded knowingly. “She is. She’s just an ordinary Twenty Century native,” he pronounced.

“But I recognised her!” Jonathan said. He wandered uneasily across the office. A sort of darkening to his flickering face told Vivian that he was beginning to suspect that he had been a fool – and he was the sort of boy who would do anything not to look a fool. Vivian knew he would take her straight back to the station and try to forget about her if she could convince him properly.

So she sniffed away what she hoped were the last of her tears and said, “I know it says Vivian Smith on my label, but Smith’s a very common name. And Vivian’s quite common too. Look at Vivien Leigh.”

This misfired a little. Jonathan turned and stared at her. “How do you know her?” he said suspiciously.

“I don’t. I mean – she’s a film star,” Vivian explained.

She could see this meant nothing to Jonathan. He shrugged. “We could go through her luggage,” he suggested to Sam. “That might prove something.”

Vivian would have liked to go and sit on her suitcase and clutch the string bag to her and refuse indignantly, but she said with desperate bravery, “Do what you like. Only you’re to take me back to the station if you don’t find anything.”

“I might,” said Jonathan. Vivian was fairly sure that meant that he would. She tried not to mind too much when Jonathan dragged the suitcase over into a beam of light from the odd-shaped window, where he began briskly unpacking it. Sam attended to the string bag. Vivian spread it out on her knee for him, because that took her mind off Jonathan going into all her new winter underwear, and wished Sam would not breathe so heavily. The first thing Sam found was her sandwiches.

“Can I eat these?” he said.

“No,” said Vivian. “I’m hungry.”

“I’ll give you half,” Sam said, plainly thinking he was being generous.

Jonathan stood up holding Vivian’s new liberty bodice with suspenders attached to hold up her winter stockings. “Whatever do you use this for?” he asked, really puzzled by it.

Vivian’s face went fiery hot. “Put that down!” she said.

“Corsets,” Sam suggested with his mouth full.

There was a sort of buzzing from outside somewhere. Light came on and swiftly grew bright from all the corners of the room. It showed Jonathan standing frozen by the window with the liberty bodice in one hand and Vivian’s best jumper in the other. Vivian saw that the flicker over his eyes hardly showed in bright light, and that the diamonds on his suit were dark purple. Sam was frozen too, with a third sandwich in his hand.

“Someone’s coming!” Jonathan whispered. “They must have heard her yelling.”

“They make regular rounds,” Sam whispered back hoarsely.