A Tale of Time City

“Then why didn’t you tell me? Quick!” Jonathan whispered. He bundled everything back into the suitcase and shoved the lid down. Sam seized the string bag and a handful of Vivian’s skirt with it and dragged. It was clear to Vivian that something frightening was about to happen. She let Sam tow her across the marble floor and round behind the huge carved desk.

“Hide!” he said. “Come on!”

There was a deep hollow inside the half-circle of desk, so that a person’s knees could swivel this way and that to reach the banks of switches. Sam pushed Vivian into it and dived in after her.

Before Vivian had a chance even to sit up properly, Jonathan came scrambling into the space too, dragging the suitcase behind him. Vivian ended up half-lying on her side with a clear view through the space at the bottom of the desk. She could see her last sandwich in its paper lying in the middle of the marble floor, and the heap of Jonathan’s grey flannel suit beside it.

Jonathan saw them too. “Damn!” he whispered, and he was off after them and back again while Vivian was still being shocked to hear him swear. “Don’t make a sound!” he said to her breathlessly. “If they find us, they might even shoot you!”

Vivian looked from his face to Sam’s, not sure if she believed this. They both had that tense look people have in films when gangsters are looking for them with guns. This made everything completely unreal to Vivian, like a film. She reached out and took her last sandwich from Jonathan before Sam’s stretching hand quite got to it. She bit into it. It made her feel better to chew bread she had watched Mum butter and sardines she had helped Mum mash. It told her that real life was still there somewhere.

She was still eating when a door rumbled and the light grew stronger. Two sets of heavy, clacking boots marched into view across the grey-veined white floor. Vivian watched them under the desk, clumping hither and thither, as the people wearing them checked the room. Beside her, she could feel Jonathan beginning to shake and Sam puffing little tiny snorts in an effort to breathe quietly, but she could not believe in any of it and she went on calmly eating her sandwich.

“Seems all right in here,” the owner of one pair of boots said, in a rumbling murmur.

“Funny though,” murmured the other. This one sounded like a woman. “I can smell fish – sardines. Can you smell sardines?”

Vivian stuffed the rest of the sandwich into her mouth and held both hands across it in order not to giggle. Jonathan’s face was white and the lordly look had somehow crumpled away from it entirely. Vivian saw that he had gone from being the Inquisitor to being a scared boy in bad trouble. Sam was holding his breath. His face was going a steadily darker red and his eyes were rolling at Vivian and the sandwich, quite horrified. She could tell they were both very frightened indeed, but she still wanted to laugh.

“No,” said the rumbling man’s voice. “Don’t smell a thing.”

“Then I’ll blame you,” said the woman, “if the Chief gets attacked by a mad sardine tomorrow.” They both laughed. Then the woman said, “Come on,” and the boots clacked away.

The door rumbled. After a while the lights dimmed. As soon as they did, Sam let out his breath in a near roar and threw himself on his face, gasping.

“I’m dying!” he panted.

“No you’re not,” Jonathan said. His voice had gone shrill and quavering. “Shut up and sit up. We’ve got to think what to do!”

Vivian knew Jonathan’s nerve had broken. It was time for her to be firm. “I’ll tell you what to do,” she said. “Open that silver booth again and put me back in it and send me back to the station to meet Cousin Marty.”

“No, we absolutely won’t,” Jonathan said. “We can’t. If we use it again that will make three times and the computer will register it. It always checks the odd numbers anyway, in case an agent goes out and gets lost. And they’ll find out we’ve broken the law. They’ll be on to us at once. We’re right in the middle of Time Patrol Building here. Don’t you understand?”

2 COUSIN VIVIAN (#ulink_50606dc6-f01a-54b4-80a6-5b6f82ac6aa5)

“No I don’t understand!” said Vivian. She could see well enough that the clacking boots had jolted both boys back to a sense of whatever passed for real life in this place. She thought: they were having an adventure up till then. Now it’s not fun any more.

She was angry. “What’s this law you’ve broken? What about me?”

“Twenty Century’s part of an Unstable Era,” Jonathan said. “It’s against the law even to take a thing out of an Unstable Era, and taking a person out is much worse. Putting a person back in after they’ve seen Time City is the worst crime you can commit.”

“They’ll send us out into history for it,” Sam said in a shocked whisper, and shivered. Jonathan, Vivian noticed, shivered much harder. “What will they do to her?”

“Something even worse,” Jonathan said, and his teeth chattered slightly.

“Well, you might have thought!” Vivian said. “What am I going to do now?”

Jonathan got to his knees. “I thought I did think!” he groaned as he crawled out from under the desk. He turned to face Vivian. His face looked pinched and frightened in the murky blue light. “I was quite sure you were… Look, can you give me your word of honour on the god Mao or Kennedy or Koran, or whatever you worship, that you really are just a plain person from Twenty Century and nothing to do with Faber John?”

“I give you my Bible oath,” said Vivian. “But you ought to know when a person’s real and telling the truth without it.”

Jonathan, to her surprise, took this rather well. “I do know,” he said. “I began to see something had gone wrong by the look on your face when you saw my pigtail – but I still don’t understand it! Let’s get out of here and think what to do.”

Crouching in the space behind the desk, they repacked Vivian’s suitcase and tried to cram Jonathan’s grey flannel clothes into it too. Only the trousers went in. They had to stuff the jacket into the string bag and the cap and tie into Vivian’s gas mask case. Sam took that. Jonathan carried the suitcase and Vivian hung on to the string bag. She felt that if she let go of it for an instant she might stop being Vivian Smith and turn into someone else completely.

At the door of the office, Sam produced a rattling bunch of – not keys. They were little squares that might have been made of plastic. He fitted one into a slot beside the door. “Pinched them from my father,” he explained in a loud proud whisper. The door slid aside, and then slid shut behind them when they were through, just as if it had known. They stole along a number of high corridors, where lights flicked on and off in the distance and round corners as the two guards went on their rounds. Unnerving though this was, it gave Vivian enough light to see that the building was all made of marble, with the same ultra-modern look as the office – except that there were carvings and sculptures up where the walls met the ceiling which did not look modern at all. Vivian glimpsed angel-faces in the dimness, winged lions and people who seemed to be half horses. It was like a dream.

I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls! Vivian thought. Perhaps I’ve fallen asleep on the train and this is all a dream I’m having. Though this was a comforting thought, she doubted it. Nobody could have slept on that noisy train.

They tiptoed down a narrow marble stair which led to what was obviously a grand entrance hall. This was much better lit. Vivian could see big glass doors in the distance, and a curving row of silver booths like the one she had come through. There must have been a hundred of them – with another hundred of them curving round the opposite wall, although her view of those was partly blocked by a gigantic marble stairway. This was a true marvel. The stone steps were moving. The three of them had to hide under it while a lady guard walked slowly across the open space with her hand on some sort of gun at her belt, and Vivian could hear the moving steps softly rumbling above them. She wondered how on earth it worked.

The guard walked out of sight behind a large circular installation in the centre of the hall. Jonathan and Sam led Vivian on a dash the other way, into the back of the building, where there were more corridors and, at last, a small back door. Sam stopped and fitted another card into a slot, and that door opened to let them out.

They went suddenly from ultra-modern to very old. Outside, they were in a narrow lane of crooked little stone houses. There was a round blue light fixed to one of the houses in the distance, which showed that the lane was cobbled, with a gutter down the middle. The air was fresh and cool. It made Vivian feel rather heady and giddy.

Sam and Jonathan plunged down towards the dark end of the lane. The cobbles dug into the underside of Vivian’s feet as she trotted after them. There was a thick old archway there, black as night underneath, and after that they came into a blue-lit courtyard, where they went scuttling towards a building like a church.

“No, it’s always left unlocked,” Jonathan whispered to Sam, as he bounded up the steps to the church-place, with his pigtail flying. “And I left both doors to the Annuate unfastened just in case.” Sure enough, the mighty door clicked and swung smoothly to let them in.

Quite a small church! Vivian thought in surprise. But it didn’t smell like a church!

It smelt warmer and more dusty than a church. It was harder to see than any place she had been in so far, because the blue street lighting came in through high-up coloured windows. Bars of misty blue-green light showed up leather-covered seats not quite like pews, and a splotch of dark violet light rested on a throne-thing at one end with some kind of glittering canopy above it. A slant of orange-blue on a wall gave Vivian a glimpse of one of the most beautiful paintings she had ever seen.

“That’s Faber John’s Seat,” Jonathan whispered, pointing to the throne as he led the way down an aisle. “This is the Chronologue, where the Time Council meets.”

“We unlocked a door and listened to them,” Sam said.

“That’s how we heard about the crisis and the plans to intercept you – I mean the real V.S.,” Jonathan explained.

They moved to the right and Vivian found herself facing a shining thing misted with more violet light, that seemed to crown the end of a row of seats. It was like a winged sun and it seemed to be studded with jewels.

“The Sempiternal Ensign,” Jonathan whispered. “Solid gold. That’s the Kohinoor diamond in the left wing and the Star of Africa’s in the right.” He gave the thing a fond pat as they passed it.

This was too much for Vivian. I must be dreaming! she decided. I know both those diamonds are somewhere else.

“Given to Time City by the Icelandic Emperor in Seventy-two Century,” Jonathan added as he undid a small heavy door. But Vivian felt too dreamlike to attend. She went dreamily down a long dark passage, through a door that creaked horribly and out into a place like a stately home, where they hurried up what seemed endless dark wooden stairs. This dream keeps getting things wrong! Vivian thought, as her legs began to ache. There ought to be a lift or a moving stair at least! She did not start thinking properly until she found herself sitting in another peculiar chair in a large room where all the furniture seemed to be empty frames, like a playground full of climbing-frames. Jonathan put a light on and leant against the door. “Phew!” he said. “Safe so far. Now we have to think hard.”

“I can’t think,” said Sam. “I’m hungry. She is too. She told me.”

“My automat’s on the blink again,” Jonathan said. “What do you want if I can get it to work?”

“Forty-two Century butter-pie,” Sam said, as if it was obvious.

Jonathan went to a thing on the wall facing Vivian which she supposed must be a musical instrument. It had keys like a piano and pipes like a church-organ and it was decorated all over with gilt twiddles and garlands, which were a little worn and peeling, as if the instrument had seen better days. Jonathan pounded at the white keys. When nothing happened, he banged at the organ-pipes. The thing began to chuff and grunt and to shake a little, at which Jonathan kicked it fiercely lower down. Finally, he took up what seemed to be an ordinary school ruler and pried at a long flap under the pipes.

“Well, it’s done the butter-pies,” he said, peering inside. “But the Twenty Century function seems to have broken. There’s no pizza and no bubble-gum. Do you mind food from other centuries?” he asked Vivian rather anxiously.

Vivian had never heard of pizza, though she thought it sounded Italian and not like the English food she was used to at all. She was past being surprised at anything by this time. “I could eat a dinosaur!” she said frankly.