Johnny and the Bomb Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Read On

  About the Author

  Also by Terry Pratchett

  Copyright

  About the Book

  It’s May 21, 1941, thought Johnny. It’s war.

  Johnny Maxwell and his friends have to do something when they find Mrs Tachyon, the local bag lady, semi-conscious in an alley… as long as it’s not the kiss of life.

  But there’s more to Mrs Tachyon than a squeaky trolley and a bunch of dubious black bags. Somehow she holds the key to different times, different eras – including the Blackbury Blitz in 1941. Suddenly now isn’t the safe place Johnny once thought it was as he finds himself caught up more and more with then…

  TERRY

  PRATCHETT

  A JOHNNY MAXWELL story

  JOHNNY

  AND THE

  BOMB

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank the Meteorological Office, the Royal Mint and my old friend Bernard Pearson – who, if he doesn’t know something, always knows a man who does – for their help in the research for this book. When historical details are wrong, it’s my fault for not listening. But who knows what really happened in the other leg of the Trousers of Time?

  Chapter 1

  After the Bombs

  It was nine o’clock in the evening, in Blackbury High Street.

  It was dark, with occasional light from the full moon behind streamers of worn-out cloud. The wind was from the south-west and there had been another thunderstorm, which freshened the air and made the cobbles slippery.

  A policeman moved, very slowly and sedately, along the street.

  Here and there, if someone was very close, they might have seen the faintest line of light around a blacked-out window. From within came the quiet sounds of people living their lives – the muffled notes of a piano as someone practised scales, over and over again, and the murmur and occasional burst of laughter from the wireless.

  Some of the shop windows had sandbags piled in front of them. A poster outside one shop urged people to Dig For Victory, as if it were some kind of turnip.

  On the horizon, in the direction of Slate, the thin beams of searchlights tried to pry bombers out of the clouds.

  The policeman turned the corner, and walked up the next street, his boots seeming very loud in the stillness.

  The beat took him up as far as the Methodist chapel, and in theory would then take him down Paradise Street, but it didn’t do that tonight because there was no Paradise Street any more. Not since last night.

  There was a lorry parked by the chapel. Light leaked out from the tarpaulin that covered the back.

  He banged on it.

  ‘You can’t park that ’ere, gents,’ he said. ‘I fine you one mug of tea and we shall say no more about it, eh?’

  The tarpaulin was pushed back and a soldier jumped out. There was a brief vision of the interior – a warm tent of orange light, with a few soldiers sitting around a little stove, and the air thick with cigarette smoke.

  The soldier grinned.

  ‘Gi’us a mug and a wad for the sergeant,’ he said, to someone in the lorry.

  A tin mug of scalding black tea and a brick-thick sandwich were handed out.

  ‘Much obliged,’ said the policeman, taking them. He leaned against the lorry. ‘How’s it going, then?’ he said. ‘Haven’t heard a bang.’

  ‘It’s a 25-pounder,’ said the soldier. ‘Went right down through the cellar floor. You lot took a real pounding last night, eh? Want a look?’

  ‘Is it safe?’

  ‘’Course not,’ said the soldier cheerfully. ‘That’s why we’re here, right? Come on.’ He pinched out his cigarette and put it behind his ear.

  ‘I thought you lot’d be guarding it,’ said the policeman.

  ‘It’s two in the morning and it’s been pissing down,’ said the soldier. ‘Who’s going to steal an unexploded bomb?’

  ‘Yes, but …’ The sergeant looked in the direction of the ruined street.

  There was the sound of bricks sliding.

  ‘Someone is, by the sound of it,’ he said.

  ‘What? We’ve got warning signs up!’ said the soldier. ‘We only knocked off for a brew-up! Oi!’

  Their boots crunched on the rubble that had been strewn across the road.

  ‘It is safe, isn’t it?’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Not if someone drops a dirty great heap of bricks on it, no! Oi! You!’

  The moon came out from behind the clouds. They could make out a figure at the other end of what remained of the street, near the wall of the pickle factory.

  The sergeant skidded to a halt.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he whispered. ‘It’s Mrs Tachyon.’

  The soldier stared at the small figure that was dragging some sort of cart through the rubble.

  ‘Who’s she?’

  ‘Let’s just take it quietly, shall we?’ said the policeman, grabbing his arm.

  He shone his torch and set his face into a sort of mad friendly grin.

  ‘That you, Mrs Tachyon?’ he said. ‘It’s me, Sergeant Bourke. Bit chilly to be out at this time of night, eh? Got a nice warm cell back at the station, yes? I daresay there could be a big hot mug of cocoa for you if you just come along with me, how about that?’

  ‘Can’t she read all them warning signs? Is she mental?’ said the soldier, under his breath. ‘She’s right by the house with the bomb in the cellar!’

  ‘Yes … no … she’s just different,’ said the sergeant. ‘Bit … touched.’ He raised his voice. ‘You just stay where you are, love, and we’ll come and get you. Don’t want you hurting yourself on all this junk, do we?’

  ‘Here, has she been looting?’ said the soldier. ‘She could get shot for that, pinching stuff from bombed-out houses!’

  ‘No one’s going to shoot Mrs Tachyon,’ said the sergeant. ‘We know her, see? She was in the cells the other night.’

  ‘What’d she done?’

  ‘Nothing. We let her kip in a spare cell in the station if it’s a nippy night. I gave her a tanner and pair of ole boots what belong to me mum only yesterday. Well, look at her. She’s old enough to be your granny, poor old biddy.’

  Mrs Tachyon stood and watched them owlishly as they walked, very cautiously, towards her.

  The soldier saw a wizened little woman wearing what looked like a party dress with layers of other clothes on top, and a woolly hat with a bobble on it. She was pushing a wire cart on wheels. It had a metal label on it.

  ‘Tes-co,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Dunno where she gets half her stuff,’ muttered the sergeant.

  The trolley seemed to be full of black bags. But there were other things, which glittered in the moonlight.

  ‘I know where she got that stuff,’ muttered the soldier. ‘That’s been pinched from the pickle factory!’

  ‘Oh, half the town was in there this morning,’ said the sergeant. ‘A few jars of gherkins won’t hurt.’

  ‘Yeah, but you can’t have this sort of thing. ‘Ere, you! Missus! You just let me have a look at—’

  He reached towards the trolley.

  Some sort of demon, all teeth and glowing eyes, erupted from it and clawed the skin off the back of his hand.

  ‘Blast! ’
Ere, help me get hold of—’

  But the sergeant had backed away. ‘That’s Guilty, that is,’ he said. ‘I should come away if I was you!’

  Mrs Tachyon cackled.

  ‘Thunderbirds Are Go!’ she chortled. ‘Wot, no bananas? That’s what you think, my old dollypot!’

  She hauled the trolley round and trotted off, dragging it behind her.

  ‘Hey, don’t go in there—’ the soldier shouted.

  The old woman hauled the trolley over a pile of bricks. A piece of wall collapsed behind her.

  The last brick hit something far below, which went boink.

  The soldier and the policeman froze in mid-run.

  The moon went behind a cloud again.

  In the darkness, there was a ticking sound. It was far off, and a bit muffled, but in that pool of silence both men heard it all the way up their spines.

  The sergeant’s foot, which had been in the air, came down slowly.

  ‘How long’ve you got if it starts to tick?’ he whispered.

  There was no one there. The soldier was accelerating away.

  The policeman ran after him and was halfway up the ruins of Paradise Street before the world behind him suddenly became full of excitement.

  It was nine o’clock in the evening, in Blackbury High Street.

  In the window of the electrical shop, nine TVs showed the same picture. Nine televisions projected their flickering screens at the empty air.

  A newspaper blew along the deserted pavement until it wrapped around the stalks in an ornamental flowerbed. The wind caught an empty lager can and bowled it across the pavement until it hit a drain.

  The High Street was what Blackbury District Council called a Pedestrian Precinct and Amenity Area, although no one was quite sure what the amenities were, or even what an amenity was. Perhaps it was the benches, cunningly designed so that people wouldn’t sit on them for too long and make the place untidy. Or maybe it was the flowerbeds, which sprouted a regular crop of the hardy perennial Crisp Packet. It couldn’t have been the ornamental trees. They’d looked quite big and leafy on the original drawings a few years ago, but what with cutbacks and one thing and another, no one had actually got around to planting any.

  The sodium lights made the night cold as ice.

  The newspaper blew on again, and wrapped itself around a yellow litter bin in the shape of a fat dog with its mouth open.

  Something landed in an alleyway and groaned.

  ‘Tick tick tick! Tickety Boo! Ow! National … Health … Service …’

  The interesting thing about worrying about things, thought Johnny Maxwell, was the way there was always something new to worry about.

  His friend Kirsty said it was because he was a natural worrier, but that was because she didn’t worry about anything. She got angry instead, and did things about it, whatever it was. He really envied the way she decided what it was and knew exactly what to do about it almost instantly. Currently she was saving the planet most evenings, and foxes at weekends.

  Johnny just worried. Usually they were the same old worries – school, money, whether you could get AIDS from watching television, and so on. But occasionally one would come out of nowhere like a Christmas Number One and knock all the others down a whole division.

  Right now, it was his mind.

  ‘It’s not exactly the same as being ill,’ said Yo-less, who’d read all the way through his mother’s medical encyclopedia.

  ‘It’s not being ill at all. If lots of bad things have happened to you it’s healthy to be depressed,’ said Johnny. ‘That’s sense, isn’t it? What with the business going down the drain, and Dad pushing off, and Mum just sitting around smoking all the time and everything. I mean, going around smiling and saying, “Oh, it’s not so bad” – that would be mental.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Yo-less, who’d read a bit about psychology as well.

  ‘My gran went mental,’ said Bigmac. ‘She— ow!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Yo-less. ‘I wasn’t looking where I put my foot but, fair’s fair, you weren’t either.’

  ‘It’s just dreams,’ said Johnny. ‘It’s nothing mad.’

  Although, he had to admit, it was dreams during the day, too. Dreams so real that they filled his eyes and ears.

  The planes …

  The bombs …

  And the fossil fly. Why that? There’d be these nightmares, and in the middle of it, there’d be the fly. It was a tiny one, in a piece of amber. He’d saved up for it and done a science project on it. But it wasn’t even scary-looking. It was just a fly from millions of years ago. Why was that in a nightmare?

  Huh. School teachers? Why couldn’t they be like they were supposed to be and just chuck things at you if you weren’t paying attention? Instead they all seemed to have been worrying about him and sending notes home and getting him to see a specialist, although the specialist wasn’t too bad and at least it got him out of maths.

  One of the notes had said he was ‘disturbed’. Well, who wasn’t disturbed? He hadn’t shown it to his mum. Things were bad enough as it was.

  ‘You getting on all right at your grandad’s?’ said Yo-less.

  ‘It’s not too bad. Grandad does the housework most of the time anyway. He’s good at fried bread. And Surprise Surprise.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘You know that stall on the market that sells tins that’ve got the labels off?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Well, he buys loads of those. And you’ve got to eat them once they’re opened.’

  ‘Yuk.’

  ‘Oh, pineapple and meatballs isn’t too bad.’

  They walked on through the evening street.

  The thing about all of us, Johnny thought, the sad thing is that we’re not very good. Actually that’s not the worst part. The worst part is we’re not even much good at being not much good.

  Take Yo-less. When you looked at Yo-less you might think he had possibilities. He was black. Technically. But he never said ‘Yo’, and only said ‘check it out’ in the supermarket, and the only person he ever called a mother was his mother. Yo-less said it was racial stereotyping to say all black kids acted like that but, however you looked at it, Yo-less had been born with a defective cool. Trainspotters were cooler than Yo-less. If you gave Yo-less a baseball cap he’d put it on the right way round. That’s how, well, yo-less Yo-less was. Sometimes he actually wore a tie.

  Now, Bigmac … Bigmac was good. He was good at maths. Sort of. It made the teachers wild. You could show Bigmac some sort of horrible equation and he’d say ‘x=2.75’ and he’d be right. But he never knew why. ‘It’s just what it is,’ he’d say. And that was no good. Knowing the answers wasn’t what maths was about. Maths was about showing how you worked them out, even if you got them wrong. Bigmac was also a skinhead. Bigmac and Bazza and Skazz were the last three skinheads in Blackbury. At least, the last three who weren’t someone’s dad. And he had LOVE and HAT on his knuckles, but only in Biro because when he’d gone to get tattooed he fainted. And he bred tropical fish.

  As for Wobbler … Wobbler wasn’t even a nerd. He wanted to be a nerd but they wouldn’t let him join. He had a Nerd Pride badge and he messed around with computers. What Wobbler wanted was to be a kid in milk-bottle-bottom glasses and a deformed anorak, who could write amazing software and be a millionaire by the time he was twenty, but he’d probably settle for just being someone whose computer didn’t keep smelling of burning plastic every time he touched it.

  And as for Johnny …

  … if you go mad, do you know you’ve gone mad? If you don’t, how do you know you’re not mad?

  ‘It wasn’t a bad film,’ Wobbler was saying. They’d been to Screen W at the Blackbury Odeon. They generally went to see any film that promised to have laser beams in it somewhere.

  ‘But you can’t travel in time without messing things up,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘That’s the whole point,’ said Bigmac. ‘That’s what you want to do. I wou
ldn’t mind joining the police if they were time police. You’d go back and say, “Hey, are you Adolf Hitler?” and when he said, “Achtung, that’s me, ja” … Kablooeee! With the pump-action shotgun. End of problem.’

  ‘Yes, but supposing you accidentally shot your own grandfather,’ said Yo-less patiently.

  ‘I wouldn’t. He doesn’t look a bit like Adolf Hitler.’

  ‘Anyway, you’re not that good a shot,’ said Wobbler. ‘You got kicked out of the Paintball Club, didn’t you?’

  ‘Only ’cos they were jealous that they hadn’t thought of a paintball hand grenade before I showed them how.’

  ‘It was a tin of paint, Bigmac. A two-litre tin.’

  ‘Well, yeah, but in contex’ it was a hand grenade.’

  ‘They said you might at least have loosened the lid a bit. Sean Stevens needed stitches.’

  ‘I didn’t mean actually shooting your actual grandfather,’ said Yo-less, loudly. ‘I mean messing things up so maybe you’re not actually born or your time machine never gets invented. Like in that film where the robot is sent back to kill the mother of the boy who’s going to beat the robots when he grows up.’

  ‘Good one, that,’ said Bigmac, strafing the silent shops with an invisible machine gun.

  ‘But if he never got born how did they know he’d existed?’ said Yo-less. ‘Didn’t make any sense to me.’

  ‘How come you’re such an expert?’ said Wobbler.

  ‘Well, I’ve got three shelves of Star Trek videos,’ said Yo-less.

  ‘Anorak alert!’

  ‘Nerd!’

  ‘Trainspotter!’

  ‘Anyway,’ said Yo-less, ‘if you changed things, maybe you’d end up not going back in time, and there you would be, back in time, I mean, except you never went in the first place, so you wouldn’t be able to come back on account of not having gone. Or, even if you could get back, you’d get back to another time, like a sort of parallel dimension, because if the thing you changed hadn’t happened then you wouldn’t’ve gone, so you could only come back to somewhere you never went. And there you’d be – stuck.’