by Georgia Byng
The float stopped at the end of Briersville High Street. A set of tanned triplets all dressed in yellow buttonless dungarees began laughing and pointing at Molly and Rocky. Their mother tutted and pulled them away. Rocky bent his head around the float to see whether the man was getting off. He wasn’t. A woman in a short sleeveless denim dress walked past and gave him a wink.
“Looks like jeans are timeless,” said Rocky and he laughed. “I’d love to go into that shoe shop and check out the sneakers of the future!”
But Molly wasn’t listening. She was frowning with worry as she considered the time-traveling baby snatcher. For the more she thought about his sinister crime, the more complicated she realized it was. Had he known that she and her brother had been born? If so, why had he gone to all the trouble of fetching one of them? Did he need a twin for something? For an experiment? How long had it taken him to trawl through time and find them? Maybe he had just chanced upon them. Maybe he’d just popped into the hospital to get the first baby he could. But even if any old baby would have done, why did this man with his peculiar quiff of gray hair want a baby at all?
The float’s route now curved, and they began heading out of town. It was far more built up than in their time, and the whole place felt foreign. This was mainly down to all the exotic colorful flowers growing in planters and because of the intense heat. Before long they were in the open countryside—a landscape that was browner and drier than it had ever been before, with olive trees growing in lines into the distance. The float stopped. They were at some sort of station.
“Watch Dr. Elvis now,” said Rocky, peering around. “He’s getting off.”
Molly clutched her gems and checked to see that the red and green scars were still open and swirling.
“Quick,” she said, pushing Rocky off the ledge and holding his arm at the same time. “We need to keep up with him, remember. He might be planning to hop to another time.” They hid behind a bush.
The snatcher, meanwhile, had sat down on a metal bench. He reached inside his jacket and fiddled with something, then, pulling his hand out, dropped a plastic tag on the ground. From inside his jacket the baby began to cry, except that it sounded like more of a miaowing than a crying—so much so that a straw-hatted woman walking past exclaimed, “You need to get that kitten some milk.”
As she spoke a gust of warm wind blew about the station, making her cotton skirt flap and whisking up the snatcher’s discarded tag. Along with some other pieces of litter, the breeze danced them in a whirl of air before depositing the tag near Molly’s feet. She picked it up. It was her twin brother’s hospital band—well, half of it. The snatcher had torn it from the baby’s wrist, so that the I. and O of LOGAN were missing. GAN TWIN, the remainder of the hospital bracelet’s letters read. Molly showed it to Rocky, then put it in her pocket and continued watching the snatcher.
He had ignored the straw-hatted woman completely, for he was distracted by something else. He was concentrating on pressing buttons on some gadget embedded on his sleeve. Then suddenly, his black tailored jacket swelled up. Like a smooth bud flowering into a puff of blossom, it changed. Instead of being sleek and shiny, it was now shaggy and heavy.
“I think he knows something that we don’t,” said Rocky, putting on his Puffa jacket and scarf. The man tucked the baby, who had now stopped crying, deeper inside his jacket and pulled up a hood from the back of his collar. He looked at the crystal in his hand. Molly concentrated on her gems.
“Here we go.” She let her gems throw out a new invisible lasso. And just as she did, she, Rocky, and Petula were tugged out of the moment and transported forward in time.
Once again warm time winds caressed their cheeks and the world became a blur. Above them the sky flitted through its costumes of colors. The sun and moon streaked across its vista like comets as the days and nights flashed by. Storms of rain rattled over their safe bubble, and then the canopy above seemed darker for longer. The bush in front of them shot up, becoming a colossal wave of leaves, only to disappear and be replaced by a tree that grew and grew, its trunk thickening every second. Then the world materialized.
And what a different world it was! Molly roughly calculated that they had stopped about another hundred and fifty years into the future. Gone was the hot weather. It had been replaced by wet and freezing cold.
Shivering, Molly untied her anorak from around her waist and put it on. Inside the rucksack, Petula’s fur bristled.
The station in front of them had changed dramatically. The building was now egg shaped. Pines and wintry conifers grew in its forecourt. The fields stretching away were muddy and icy. The grapevines and olive trees were gone. In their place grew low, bristly, hardy plants.
“It’s like a different country,” Molly whispered, her teeth chattering. “What happened to the heat wave?”
“I don’t know. It’s weird—but quick! He’s moving.”
The two friends hurriedly followed the man with the quiff past pale-faced people in long thick coats.
“Where ‘r’ yawer thick cots?” said an old woman in a heavy Chinese accent. She tugged at her own green fuzzy cape. “You catch flu in fancy dress. And you know how dangerous flu can be! We don’t want more epidemic, do we?”
Molly nodded at her, watching the snatcher as he stepped into the egg-shaped building. “You’re completely right,” she said distractedly. “But eggs will be eggs,” she added nonsensically. She and Rocky swiftly followed the kidnaper.
Inside, it was bright and spacious. Warm air blasted through rusty grilles in the floor, and strange music, like Chinese notes mixed with country and western, came from tinny-sounding speakers in the ceiling. In a metal box near the entrance a stall called Wangs advertised its wares.
Green Tea, Noodles, Pickled Ginger
Glittering electronic numbers and words flickered on black screens high up on the walls. The man inspected a timetable and then turned to look at another. Worried that he might look directly at them next, Molly and Rocky quickly slipped into the station’s glass-walled waiting room. Shrinking down on seats, they hoped they were invisible.
Molly reached into Rocky’s rucksack and put her hands around Petula’s neck to give her a stroke. “I’m so sorry, Petula. This is so boring for you, isn’t it? Maybe you should have stayed at home.” Petula licked her hand. Then she gave a growl.
Molly looked up. Two teenage girls were sitting on the bench opposite. Each was dressed in a waterproof velvety coat and in pointed boots that were seamlessly joined to the bottom of their drainpipe trousers. They looked like vampires as they were all in black, although the fatter girl had green hair and a gold tooth; the other had pink hair. They began to snigger.
“Raided your granny and grandpa’s wardrobes?” they asked, smiling snidely. “Think you’ll start a retro trend? Think ‘old-fashioned’ is cool?”
Molly gave them a cold stare. It was amazing, she thought. Rudeness was rudeness, whatever century you were in.
“Is it so bad to look different?” she countered. “Maybe you’re scared to look different.”
Rocky glanced out of the window. “Still waiting,” he said.
“Oooh! We’ve got a hard nut here!” laughed the teenager with the metal tooth. “What have you got to say for yourself then, Bog Eyes?”
Bog Eyes was a name Molly had been called when she was younger by bullies in the orphanage. They’d said her closely set green eyes were the color of a bog. Hearing the nickname again, Molly saw red.
“Hmm,” sighed Rocky, raising his eyebrow to the teenager. “You know, you shouldn’t have said that.”
At once Molly summoned her hypnotic power. Her hypnotism was like a volcano that lay dormant inside her, but when she called on it, it could rise and erupt. She didn’t need the full force of it this minute. A small vent of hypnotic lava would sort this person out. Molly’s body warmed and tingled as her hypnotic powers flowed through her blood and surged up toward her eyes. Then she let the teenager have it. She bor
ed her hypnotic gaze straight at the girl’s pupils. At once it was as if the girl had received an electric charge. Her head swung bolt upright.
“Sassy, what you doin’?” her friend said, waving a hand in front of the first teenager’s face. Then she looked at Molly too. Both now sat stiffly like robots.
“You are now under my power,” Molly began. “Take off your coats and give them to us.” The two girls dumbly undid their strange plastic-cum-velvet coats. Underneath, one wore a rubbery vest, the other a metallic shirt. “You,” continued Molly, “will sit quietly in this waiting room for three hours, speaking to no one.” Then Molly and Rocky put on the futuristic coats.
“They’re much too big for us,” Rocky said, “and they’re too thin for this freezing weather.”
“Maybe, but they’ll be good disguises,” Molly replied.
Transferring the bottle of water and the various bits and pieces that they’d brought with them into these big coats, Molly passed her anorak and Rocky’s sleeveless Puffa and his slicker to the girls.
“Wear these,” she said. The two teenagers obeyed.
“You shouldn’t be afraid of looking different,” Molly advised. “Variety is the spice of life.”
“Molly,” said Rocky, “Dr. Elvis has gone.”
Four
Molly and Rocky burst out of the waiting room and scanned the station. There was no sign of the baby snatcher. A shrill voice filled the dome of the egg building.
“Magnifloat for Vector Three. Two minutes until departure time.”
“Do you think he’s on that?” Rocky read the signs for directions. “It’s over there!” They ran toward a set of stairs and hurtled down them three steps at a time. Petula bounced around in her bag. At the bottom was an indoor platform where a tatty white bullet-shaped train had pulled up.
“He’s gone!” hissed Rocky, panicking.
“He’ll be in first class,” Molly replied.
Rapidly but calmly, so as not to draw attention to themselves, they picked their way along the platform, dodging the bustling crowd buying wonton dumplings at a kiosk and stealing quick looks inside the train.
“There he is!” Molly nodded subtly toward a seat. “I’d recognize that weird hair anywhere. Now we should get inside a different carriage.” With a swish the grubby white doors of the magnifloat opened.
“It’s got no wheels,” Rocky observed as Molly stepped inside, “which is probably how it got its name. I wonder what magni stands for—magnificent or magnet? When you put two magnets together they either stick or they move apart—they kind of hover away from each other. Maybe it’s kept up by magnets.”
Molly looked to the left, where people sat in single or double egg-shaped spaces. Some had screens pulled down in front of their faces and were watching TV. Others were staring out of the window or reading from palm-sized electronic gadgets. Most had removed their coats and wore clothes made of strange plastics or shiny nylon. Lots had muddy shoes, but Molly noticed that this didn’t make the floor dirty. For strangely the floor of the magnifloat was sucking up the dirt. She and Rocky sat down in a two-seater egg.
“What’s this thing with eggs?” Rocky wondered.
“Maybe they worship chickens,” Molly replied quietly. Then she reached into the rucksack and pulled Petula out. While she was giving her a good cuddle, there was a hiss and the magnifloat rose up off the ground.
“Prepare for departure!” the loudspeaker announced in a Chinese accent. The magnifloat purred, then started to move. It glided out of the covered station into the cold. Molly marveled at the futuristic snow-proof chalets that flashed past the window. She wondered what had happened to their home, Briersville Park.
Within seconds they had picked up speed and their surroundings became a blur. Molly and Rocky sat back in their egg seat and inspected the colored control panel. Rocky pressed a button. At once a screen flapped down in front of his eyes, displaying a choice of red squares with numbers on them. Rocky pressed number one.
USING YOUR CONTROL DISC, PRESS NUMBER OF DESIRED CHANNEL, read the screen. Finding a detachable keyboard in his left armrest, Rocky pressed number four, and at once a newsreader’s face shone out from a circle.
“Now for the weather,” said a healthy-faced woman. “It will be warmer tomorrow with temperatures of minus ten degrees Celcius, dropping to minus fifteen at night.”
“Crumbs!” said Molly. “We need to get Petula a coat. I wonder why it’s so cold here now. I mean, it’s mad—a century after our time it got boiling hot, and then a hundred and fifty years after that it’s the complete opposite.”
“Look, in the corner there’s a question box,” said Rocky. He began tapping the keypad.
The screen flashed and then answered: The period around 2100 was hot, due to massive global warming. The same global warming brought the temperatures of Africa, southern Europe, and South America to such heights that there were massive droughts. This heat melted the polar ice caps and warmed up the seas. The sea, when warm, could no longer keep the Gulf Stream running. This was a current that brought warm Caribbean seawater and good weather to northern Europe. Once the Gulf Stream stopped, northern Europe received no more warm water from the south. Instead, it got the weather it should always really have had, that of other countries with a latitude 45° North. This is how, by 2250, northern Europe has cold, cold winters and more extreme weather conditions than before. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe was not affected. Southern Europe has become so hot that it is now practically uninhabitable. Africa is a complete desert.
“Oh that’s horrible,” said Molly. “Ask it a fun question, Rocky.”
“Okay.” Rocky tapped in a question, the answer pinging up instantly.
Toilets in the year 2250 look like this. A picture of a toilet not dissimilar in shape to those in Molly and Rocky’s time appeared on the screen. There are many variations on this design. The modern toilet will weigh and analyze a person’s excretions and give a diagnosis of the person’s health, including recommendations on what fuel food that person should be eating and what fluids they should be drinking. Waste is carried to sewer power plants to convert into electricity.
“Wow!” said Molly. “A toilet that weighs your poo and tells you whether you’re eating the right food!”
“Cool,” said Rocky. “Can’t wait to try one.”
At that moment there was a bleeping noise by Molly’s leg. She jumped, then looked down and saw a low metal vacuum-cleaner-type object by her feet. The top of it suddenly lit up with the words: Magnifloat tokens, please.
“Uh-oh, I think it wants us to pay,” said Molly. She glanced about the carriage and then felt inside her new coat pocket. She pulled out a handful of glassy disks. “Whoops!” she whispered. “We took those girls’ money.” She investigated another pocket to see what else the coats held. There she found some hard disks with MAGNIFLOAT TOKEN embossed on them.
Beep, beep, beep! the little robot now beeped as if impatient. Molly held up the biggest token and, hoping it was the correct slot on the machine, pushed it in.
Destination? the screen now read.
Molly wasn’t sure. “Err. Wherever this will take us, please,” she said.
The robot whirred and then, where its tongue might have been, spat out two shiny triangular tickets.
Arrival time—ten minutes. Have a good trip. Swiveling its metal frame and extending three silver aerials on its lid, the robot whizzed off to the next passenger.
Molly looked at her hard glassy ticket. Return.
London Sheng, it read.
“Dr. Elvis might not be going there,” Molly said. “We’ll have to check on him at every station.”
“Definitely,” said Rocky. “Oh, wow, now that is what I call crazy!” he added in a whisper. Molly looked up and saw what Rocky was talking about. A woman in a turquoise jumpsuit was walking past, and trotting behind her on a lead was a dog, or was it a cat? The creature had the body of a dog but the tail and head of a cat, and it was blue.<
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Petula tilted her head and tried to understand its smell.
“That thing’s been genetically engineered,” Rocky said.
“Wow,” Molly exclaimed. Then a silver object outside the train caught her attention. “And how about that?” She pointed. A small machine with a woman and two children inside it was flying alongside the train. The two kids smiled and waved at Molly.
“That must be bad when they have accidents in the air!” Rocky observed. “But I wouldn’t mind having one.”
Molly and Rocky grilled the computer. They found out that the population of their country, the total number of people living there, was one quarter the size it had been in their time.
“That’s amazing,” Rocky commented. “I wonder why it shrunk.” He tapped in this question and in a millisecond had his answer. “Ah, so people had fewer babies, that’s why, and—Oh no!”
“What?”
“There was a flu plague that wiped out millions and millions of people!”
“Crumbs!”
Rocky asked the screen more.
“And look …” he said. “Look how much of the rain forest has been wiped out! It says,” Rocky continued, “‘Since the destruction of the rain forest, thousands of miles of green algae are now grown on all the seas to make oxygen for humans to breathe.’ Not very nice for swimming.”
“But nice for breathing,” Molly pointed out.
They also found out that the language in their country had changed. It now had lots of Chinese words in it because Chinese people and their culture had spread all over the globe.
“‘Dishes like bird’s nest soup and bamboo shoots, bean curd, and noodles are very popular,’” Rocky read. “‘The knife and fork are things of the past. People eat with chopsticks.’”
“I’m useless with chopsticks,” said Molly. “I can never get the food to my mouth.”