Johnny and the Bomb

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

"Our Ron said there was something in the paper about German parachuters landing disguised as nuns," said the boy, backing away. "Seems to me you could've been a parachuter, if it was a big parachute."

"All right, I'm English," said Wobbler.

"Oh, yeah? Who's the Prime Minster, then?"

Wobbler hesitated.

"I don't think we've done that at school," he said.

"You don't get no lessons in knowing about Winston Churchill," said the boy dismissively.

"Hah, you're just trying to mess me around," said Wobbler. "Cos I know for a fact we've never had a black Prime Minister."

"You don't know nuffink," said the boy, grabbing his battered suitcase. "And you're fat."

"I don't have to stand here listening to you," said Wobbler, heading off down the road.

"spy spy spy," said the boy.

"Oh, shut up."

"An" you wobble. I saw that Goering on the newsreels. You look jus" like him. An" you're dressed up all fu

Wobbler sighed. He was fairly used to this, only not so much these days because once he'd just been fat and now he was big and fat.

"And you're stupid," he said. "But at least I could get slimmer."

Biting sarcasm didn't work.

"Spy spy spy! Nasty nasty Nazi!"

Wobbler tried walking faster.

"I'm goin" to tell Mrs Density an" she can telephone our Ron and he can come an" arrest you!" shouted the boy, jumping along behind him.

Wobbler tried walking faster still.

"He's got a gun, our Ron."

A man went by slowly on his bike.

"He's a spy," said the boy, pointing at Wobbler. "I'm arresting him for our Ron."

The man just gri

"Our Ron says you spies send Morse code messages to Nazi submarines by flashing torches," said the boy.

"We're twenty miles from the sea," said Wobbler, who'd almost broken into a run.

"You could stand on something high. Nyer nyer nyer. Spy spy spy."

It was just plain stupid, thought Bigmac, as he watched the two plumes of steam in front of him.

What kind of idiots built a car without power steering or synchromesh gears and put in brakes apparently operated by string? He was practically doing the world a favour by taking the car off the road.

Not just off the road, in fact, but over the pavement and across a flowerbed and into the Alderman Bowler Memorial Horsetrough.

The plumes of steam were quite pretty, really. There were little rainbows in them.

"Well, now," said a voice, as someone opened a car door, "what do we have here?"

"I think I banged my head," said Bigmac.

A large hand encircled his arm and pulled him out of the car. Bigmac looked up into two round faces that had "policeman" written all over them. There was room for quite a lot of things to be written all over them. They were very large faces.

"That is Dr Roberts" car," they said, "and you, my lad, are in for it. What's your name?"

"Simon Wrigley," mumbled Bigmac. "Ms Partridge knows all about me ... "

"She does, does she? And who's she?"

Bigmac blinked at the two faces which miraculously flowed together and became one.

He'd quite liked Ms Partridge. She was nasty. The two social workers he'd had before had made out that he was wet, whereas Ms Partridge made it clear that if she had her way Bigmac would have been strangled at birth. You could respect someone like that. They didn't make you feel like some kind of a useless nerd.

Something prodded at his memory.

"When is this?" he said, rubbing his head.

"You can start by telling me where you live-" The policeman leaned closer. There was something about Bigmac that bothered him.

"What do you mean, when is this?" he said.

"What year?"

The policeman had fairly fixed ideas about what should happen to car thieves, but they usually knew what year it was.

"It's 1941," he said, and straightened up. His eyes narrowed.

"Who's the captain of the England cricket team?" he said.

Bigmac blinked.

"What? How should I know?"

"Who won the Boat Race last year?"

"What boat race?"

The policeman looked again.

"And what's that on your belt?"

Bigmac blinked again, and looked down.

"I didn't nick it," he said quickly. "It's only a transistor, anyway."

"What's that wire going into your ear?"

"Don't be daft. It's only the earphone-"

The policeman's hand landed on his shoulder with the kind of thud that suggested it wasn't going to let go in a hurry.

"You come along with me, Fritz," he said. "I wasn't born yesterday."

Bigmac's brain drifted into focus. He looked at the uniform, and at the crowd behind it, and it began to dawn on him that he was all alone and a long, long way from home.

"I wasn't born yesterday, either," he said. "Does that help?"

Joh

"They'll blow up Paradise Street tonight," said Joh

"Where's that?" said Yoless.

"Here. It's where the sports centre was ... will be, I mean."

"Never heard of it."

"Yes. I did say. It got blown up. And you know the fu

"There's something fu

"It was by accident! The Germans had meant to bomb the big goods yard at Slate! But they got a bit lost and the weather turned bad and they saw the railway yards here and dropped all their bombs and went home. Everyone was in bed because the air raid sirens didn't go off in time!"

"All right, all right, I know, you've told me before, and all about Adolf and Stalin. It's very sad but you shouldn't get worked up about it," said Kirsty. "It's history. That sort of thing happens in history."

"Aren't you listening? It hasn't happened yet. This is now. It's going to happen tonight."

They stared at the geraniums.

"Why haven't we gone back yet?" said Kirsty. "We've been here ages."

"How should I know?" said Joh

"And we just happened to go to somewhere you know all about," said Yoless. "That's a bit strange, in my opinion."

It had worried Joh

"I don't want to stay here, that's definite," said Yoless. "Being Little Black Sambo wasn't my idea of a full life."

Joh

"I'm going to see Paradise Street," he said.

"That's a very bad idea," said Kirsty. "I told you, anything you do affects the future."

"I'm only going to have a look."

"Oh yes? I find that very hard to believe, actually."

"She's right," said Yoless, 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."

"Huh. Or he was a very big man, perhaps," said Kirsty.

The trolley bumped off the pavement, rattled across a road, and clanked up the pavement on the other side.

"What're you going to do?" said Kirsty. "Knock on people's doors and say, "Excuse me, some bombers are going to bomb this street tonight."?

"Why not?"

"Because they'll lock you up, that's why," said Yoless.

Right," said Kirsty. "It'll be just like the man who trod on Yoless's dinosaur."

"It may have been some sort of insect, now I come to think of it," said Yoless. "Anyway, there's nothing you can do. It's already happened, otherwise how come you know about it? You can't mess up history." The trolley stopped so quickly that they ran into the back of Joh