Johnny and the Bomb

Terry Pratchett

Summary

Mrs. Tachyon the bag-lady is not the sort of person you'd normally choose to hang out with. But when Johnny Maxwell and his friends find her semi-conscious in an alley, they have to do something ... as long as it's not the kiss of life.

The more time Johnny spends with her, the more he finds that Mrs. Tachyon isn't the ranting old nutter everyone thinks she is. She seems to hold the key to different times, different eras -- including the Blackbury Blitz in 1941. Suddenly now isn't the safe place Johnny once though it was, as he finds himself bound up more and more with then...

Quotes

"Oh, pineapple and meatballs isn't too bad."

[Yo-less] 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.

Wobbler's wasn't even a nerd. He wanted to be a nerd but they wouldn't let him join.

They generally went to see any film that promised to have laser beams in it somewhere.

Bigmac: "I wouldn't mind joining the police if they were the 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."
Yo-less: "Yes, but supposing you accidentally shot your own grandfather."
Bigmac: "I wouldn't. He doesn't look a bit like Adolf Hitler."

"Huh, you'd have to be mad even to understand time travel," said Wobbler eventually.

"Job opportunity for you there, Johnny," said Bigmac.

"What kind of looney tests did you have?" said Bigmac. "Big needles and electric shocks and that?"

"No, Bigmac," sighed Johnny. "They don't do that. They just ask you questions."

"What, like 'are you a looney?'"

"Anyway, no-one's proved the dinosaurs did die out."

"Oh, yeah, right, sure, they're still around, are they?"

"I mean p'raps they only come out at night, or are camoflaged or something..."

"A brick-finished stegosaurus? A bright red Number 9 brontosaurus?"

"Hey, neat idea. They'd go round pretending to be a bus, right, and people could get on -- but they wouldn't get off again."

When an early ape had cautiously got down out of its tree and wobbled awkwardly along the ground, trying out this new "standing upright" idea all the younger apes were talking about, this was exactly the kind of snarl it hated to hear.

It said to every muscle in the body: run away and climb something. And possibly throw down some coconuts, too.

Johnny cautiously pulled the trolly upright. Guilty clung to it, hissing.

"He likes you," said Bigmac.

"How can you tell?"

"You've still got both eyes."

It's me, [Johnny] thought, as the procession went down the street. It's like on the Lottery, only it's the opposite. There's this big finger in the sky and it comes through your window and flicks you on the ear and says "It's YOU -- har har har". And you get up and think you're going to have a normal day and suddenly you're in charge of a trolly with one squeaky wheel and an insane cat.

According to Sergeant Comely of Blackbury police station, Bigmac was guilty of every unsolved crime in the town, whereas in real life he was probably only guilty of ten per cent, maximum.

No-one looking at Bigmac would think he was innocent of anything.

"Is that you?" said a female voice. It wasn't exactly an unpleasant one, but it had a sharp penetrating quality. It seemed to be saying that if you weren't you, then it was your fault. Johnny recognized it instantly. It was the voice of someone who dialed the wrong numbers and then complained that the phone was answered by people she didn't want to speak to.

Yo-less had explained about this sort of thing. He'd said that if one of his ancestors had joined Attila the Hun's huge horde of millions of barbarians and helped them raid Ancient Rome, people would've definitely remembered that one of them was black.

Kasandra took charge of things. She was the most organized person Johnny knew. In fact she was so organized that she had too much organization for one person, and it overflowed in every direction.

Kasandra wasn't good at friends. She told him so herself. She'd said it was because of a character flaw, only because she was Ki-- Kasandra, she thought it was a character flaw in everyone else.

"I've got a thing about hospitals, if you must know. They're full of sick people."

"Yes, yes," said Ms. Partridge, hurriedly. When she'd started the job, less than a year ago, she'd firmly believed that everything that was wrong with the world was the fault of Big Business and the Government. She believed even more firmly now that it was all the fault of Bigmac.

When all else failed, she tried being reasonable.

"There's no sense in getting excited about Mrs. Tachyon," said Kasandra. "If she's really been a bag lady here for years and years, then there's a whole range of perfectly acceptable explainations without having to resort to far-fatched ones."

"What's an acceptable explaination?" said Johnny.

"She's an alien, possibly."

Kasandra was good at knowing things that were hushed up by the government, especially considering that they had been, well, hushed up.

When giant footprints had appeared around the town centre during some snow last year there had been two theories. There was Kir-- Kasandra's, which was that it was Bigfoot, and Johnny's, which was that it was a combination of Bigmac and two "Giant Rubber Feet, A Wow at Parties!!!!" from the Joke Emporium in Penny Street. Ki-- Kasandra's theory had the backing of so many official sources in the books she'd read that it practically outweighed Johnny's, which was merely based on watching him do it.

"Haven't you ever wondered what'd happen if a flying saucer landed in your garden? Or you found some sort of magical item that let you travel in time? Or some old cave with a wizard that'd been asleep for a thousand years? ... 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."

"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.

Johnny had a world-class collection of pens that didn't work.

"Didn't you see that [TV] 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?"

Yo-less shrugged. "You don't have to be dumb to be weird," he said. "If you're brainy you can be even weirder. It's all that intelligence looking for something to do."

"Someone's chasing us," Johnny panted, as they caught up.

"Brilliant!" said Bigmac. "Who?"

"Some people in a big black car," said Johnny. "Only ... they've vanished..."

"Oh, an invisible big black car," said Yo-less.

"I see them all the time," said Bigmac.

Bigmac: "I wish I had my five-megawatt laser cannon."
Yo-less: "You haven't got a laser cannon."
Bigmac: "I know, that's why I wish I had one."

"You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs anymore." said Yo-less. "It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons."

The rest of the universe said that time wasn't an object, it was just Nature's way of preventing everything from happening at once, and Mrs. Tachyon had said: that's what you think...

"Perhaps it's the Depression," said Johnny. "My grandad's always going on about when he was growing up in the Depression."

"No TV, everyone wearing old-fashioned clothes, no decent cars," said Bigmac. "No wonder everyone was depressed."

Bigmac wasn't a criminal, he was just around when crimes happened. This was because of stupidity. That is, other people's stupidity. Mainly other people's stupidity in designing cars that could go from 0-120mph in ten seconds and then selling them to even more stupid people who were only interested in dull things like fuel consumption and what colour the seats were.

"I'm not stupid. I've read old book. We're back in golliwog history. Plucky niggers and hooray for the Empire. She called me Sambo."

"Look," said Kirsty, still reading the newspaper. "This is the olden days. She didn't mean it ... you know, nastily. It's just how she was brought up. You people can't expect us to rewrite history, you know."

Johnny suddenly felt as though he'd stepped into a deep freeze. It was almost certainly the you people. Sambo had been an insult, but you people was worse, because it wasn't even personal.

Wobbler wheezed along the road. And he did wobble. It wasn't his fault he was fat, he'd always said, it was just his genetics. He had too many of them.

Wobbler had never bothered much with history. As far as he was concerned it was something that had happened to other people.

"If you're'n American, where's your gun?"

"Don't be daft, Americans don't all have guns," said Wobbler. "Lots of them don't have guns. Well ... some don't, anyway."

"She's right," said Yo-less, trying to keep up. "You shouldn't mess around with Time. I read this book where a man went right back in time and trod on ... on a dinosaur, and changed the whole future."

"A dinosaur?" said Kirsty.

"I think it was a dinosaur. Maybe they had small ones."

"...there was hardly anything else about the raid until a couple of years afterwards."

"You mean the government hushed it up?" said Kirsty.

"Makes sense, I suppose," said Yo-less gloomily. "I mean, you don't want to say to the enemy, 'Hey, you missed your target, have another go.'"

"I haven't spied for anyone!" shouted Bigmac. "I don't know how to spy! I don't even like Germany! My brother got sent home from Munich for stitching up one of their football supporters with a scaffolding pole even though it wasn't his fault!"

Such rock-solid evidence of anti-German feeling did not seem to impress the sergeant.

Bigmac wasn't an athlete. If there was an Olympic Sick Note event, he would've won the 100 metres I've Got Asthma, the half marathon Lurk in the Changing Rooms, and the freestyle Got to Go to the Doctor.

[Johnny] 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 trolly full of time. School never taught you anything that was useful in real life. There probably wasn't a single text book that told you what to do if it turned out you were living next door to Elvis Presley.

"Haven't you got a safe?"

"No."

"What happened if the Crown Jewels were found in the gutter, then?"

"We'd put them in the Lost Property cupboard," said the sergeant promptly. "And then ring up the King. If his name was in them, of course."

"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!"

"I think we should try to tell people about the bombs," said Johnny. "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'?"

"I really don't know what I'm doing!"

"Yes, but you've never really know what you're doing, have you?" said Kirsty.

"That's right," said Yo-less. "So you've had a lot of practice."

The Over-50's Keep-Fit class was in full wheeze. The tutor had long ago given up expecting everyone to keep up, so she just pressed on in the hope that people would do what they could manage and, if possible, not actually die while on the premises.

It was amazing what you could get away with. Ten-legged aliens would be immediately accepted in Blackbury if they were bright enough to ask the way to the Post Office and complain about the weather. People had a way of just not seeing anything that common sense said they whouldn't see.

Kirsty normally dealt with the terrible and the unexpected by getting angry with it.

The waitress hurried back with the water, and then produced a notebook and looked expectantly at them all with the bright, brittle smile of someone who is expecting to be sacked at any moment.

"Would you like another milkshake? I personally wouldn't, if I were you. I know how they're made."

"Are you a millionare?" said Bigmac.

"Oh, no. I was a millionare back in 1955. I'm a billionare now."

The boys glanced up at the manager, who suddenly looked like a man praying to the god of everyone who has to work while wearing a namebadge saying "My name is KEITH."

"We were going to go back," said Johnny. "Honestly."

"Good. But, you see ... it's not just a case of going back. It's going back and doing the right things."

"I mean ... well, I've never seen you looking so ... you know ... cool."

"That's why it's a disguise," said Yo-less.

"The man said they wore this in 1941," said Bigmac defensively.

"Yes, but don't you think that people might notice it's a German uniform?"

"Why're you wearing that fur coat, Kirsty?" said Johnny. "You always say that wearing the skins of dead animals is murder."

"Yeah, but she only says it to old ladies in fur coats," muttered Bigmac under his breath. "Bet she never says it to Hell's Angels in leather jackets."

"I miss old Wobbler."

"Why?" said Kirsty.

"'Cos I don't throw straight."

"Er..." said Yo-less. "This isn't magic, is it?"

"I don't think so," said Johnny. "It's probably just very, very, very strange science."

"Oh, good," said Yo-less. "Er ... what's the difference?"

"Who cares?" said Kirsty.

"What'll happen to me?"

"You'll just have to stay here," said Johnny.

"No way! This is the olden days! It's awful! I went past a cinema and it's all old movies! In black and white! And there was this cafe and you know what they'd got chalked on a board in front? 'Meat and two veg'! What kind of food is that? Even Hong Kong Henry's takeaway tells you what kind of meat!"

"My grandad always goes on about how they used to have so much fun when he was a kid even though they didn't have anything," said Bigmac.

"Yes, but everyone's grandad says that," said Kirsty. "It's compulsory."

"Look for something to hide behind," said Johnny. "Like another planet."

"I'll just go off and play with my dolls, I expect," said Kirsty.

"That's a good idea. Have a tea party," said the policeman, who apparently didn't know withering scorn when he heard it.

"We've already messed up the future once! Everything we do affects the future!"

"It always has. It always will. So what?"

The cat that was better than a guard dog opened one eye and yawned. It was true. No-one would want to be bitten by that mouth. It would be like being savaged by a plague factory.

"Oh, wow," she said. "Precognition. You're probably a natural medium."

"Er, I'm a size eleven," said Johnny.

Bigmac was on the floor with Wobbler on top of him. Wobbler might not know how to fight, but he did know how to weigh.

"He was probably in a state of heightened awareness," said Yo-less. "I've read about them."

"What ... drugs?" said Kirsty suspiciously.

"Me? I don't even like coffee!" said Johnny. The world had always seemed so strange in any case that he'd never dared try anything that'd make it even weirder.

Bigmac and Wobbler weren't in trouble, if only because there had been so much trouble just recently that there was, for a while, no more to get into.

"You get bombed and they give you a cup of tea?" said Bigmac.

"I s'pose it's better than getting bombed and never ever getting one again," said Wobbler.

Before time travelling to any extent, Johnny thought, you should always get your alibi sorted out.

"People have to forget what really happened because ... well, it didn't happen. Not here."

"We can remember what really happened," said Kirsty.

"Perhaps that's because you're hyper-intelligent and I'm mega-stupid," said Johnny.

[Mrs. Tachyon] probably is mad, he thought. Or eccentric, anyway. ... But she wouldn't do things like dropping bombs on Paradise Street. You have to be sane to think of things like that.

She's totally round the bend. But perhaps she gets a better view from there.

Mrs. Tachyon remembered everything, and had long ago given up wondering whether the things she remembered had already happened or not. Take life as it was going to come was her motto. And if it didn't come, go and fetch it.