Up in the Clouds to . . .
Under a Cloud . . .
Dad screwed up his eyes.
There was a rattle of metal.
A shatter of glass.
“Now are we dead?” asked Dad, with his fingers over his eyes.
Dad opened his fingers a smidgeon and peeped out of the car. They had landed safely. Safely for Chitty, that is; not safely for the racing car on top of which she had landed. It was squashed like a bug. A young man was clambering out, waving at them as he ran away. Inexplicably he seemed to be smiling even though his car was crushed.
“Everyone all right?” asked Mum.
The Pott twins were staring back up at the sky, trying to spot Big Ben. But the sky was empty.
“What happened? What’s that whining noise?” said Jem. It sounded like the noise a supercharged four-litre mosquito might make as it dive-bombed the back of your neck. But it wasn’t a supercharged four-litre mosquito. It was a supercharged four-litre sports car. A Bentley Blower, painted racing green just like Chitty, thundered past Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, blasting her with smoke and dust. Jem glimpsed the glint of goggles as the driver glanced back at them, probably trying to figure out how a huge aerocar came to be parked on top of another car.
Another racing car roared by — a Mercedes, its great bonnet curved down toward its radiator, like a great hound chasing a scent.
Now came a Bugatti, bellowing like a war elephant.
“I think we may have landed in the middle of a race,” said Dad. “Chitty never could resist a . . .” He didn’t finish the sentence. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang slithered off the roof of the crushed car, flopped onto the track, and leaped forward.
“No, Chitty, please,” moaned Dad, pushing his foot down on the brake. “No racing. The word today is save Little Harry.” Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s engines laughed loud and long. Somehow Dad had stamped on the accelerator instead of the brake.
Up ahead, the racing cars in the pack were jockeying for position as they powered into a bend. Chitty did not try to move to the outside. She did not try to take them on the inside. She blazed up to the bumper of the Bugatti, headlights glaring, Klaxon blaring. When the car tried to wiggle out of her way, she slithered up alongside and shouldered it clear off the track.
“Sorry! Sorry!” yelled Dad, still trying to gain control of Chitty. Her front wheels were now parallel with the back wheels of the Mercedes. They were so close that Jem could hear the jabber of its furious pistons. Dad tried to move Chitty over, to give the other driver room, but somehow when he tried to steer left, Chitty’s nose swung sharp right and she smacked the Mercedes out of the way.
The next bend was different. It was not just a flat curve. The track tipped almost sideways as it ran over a steep bank. The car ahead of them — the racing-green Bentley — sped toward it. At the top of the bank it leaped into the air so high that they could see a wedge of blue sky between its undercarriage and the road. It clunked back onto the track and whizzed off.
It was, Jem thought, actually quite cool. He wished he were in the front with Dad, telling him when to speed up and slow down.
“Foot down, Mr. Tooting!” roared Jeremy. “And brake a bit now . . .” He was so calm, as though he went motor racing every afternoon after lunch.
“Oh, the futility of it all.” Lucy sighed, examining her nails. “We’ll all be mangled in a meaningless motor race. Is there anything less dignified than alliteration?”
“I can’t look,” squealed Jemima, covering her eyes.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang steamed into the elbow of the bend, soared into the air, then landed right on the Bentley’s bumper. Sparks flew. Chrome clashed against chrome.
“Go, Dad! Faster!” yelled Jem. “We can win this!”
“Do you think so?” Dad gunned the accelerator. Two tons of Bentley skipped into the air, somersaulted like a metal bunny rabbit, and crashed into the hay bales.
“Look out!”
Dad had taken his eyes off the track to see what had happened to the crashed car. Now he saw some kind of hut right on his racing line.
Wood splintered.
Glass broke.
The hut collapsed around them.
Chitty stalled in a cloud of smoke and splinters.
“Remarkable stability and phenomenal speed.” A man in blue coveralls emerged from a shattered window frame. “And the brakes . . . one hundred and twenty miles per hour to a dead stop in no time at all. What kind of car is this?”
“She’s a Paragon Panther,” said Jeremy. “The only one ever built.”
“Really? Are you sure? I seem to have seen her somewhere before.”
“You saw her in a painting,” said Lucy. “The one that’s hanging around your neck.”
“Good heavens!” said the man in the coveralls. “You’re right.” A framed oil painting had crashed onto his head when Chitty smashed the roof in. It showed a racing-green Paragon Panther crossing the winning line at a glamorous racetrack.
Dad read the inscription on the back aloud:
“That’s the Count?” said Lucy, taking a closer look at the picture. “That’s not much of a likeness.”
“How could you possibly know?” asked the man in the coveralls.
“I met him,” said Lucy, “in New York.”
“But you can’t have done. He died in 1924.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” said Lucy.
“At least we know why Chitty brought us here,” said Dad. “She won an important race here in 1922, and she just couldn’t resist winning it one more time.”
“What did we win?” asked Jeremy. “What was the name of the race? Is there a trophy?”
“Today,” said the man in the coveralls, “was not a race. Today was a mystery. A mix-up. An accident waiting to happen.”
The driver of the green Bentley was limping toward them, his face drawn and weary, his eyes cast down. Oh, no, thought Jem, he’s going to fight Dad for crashing into him. Behind him, battered and bruised, came the Mercedes driver, and behind her the driver of the car they’d crushed.
Jem got ready to run and hide.
“Quick!” said Jeremy, pulling a slingshot out of his pocket. “Grab your slingshot.”
“I haven’t got a slingshot,” admitted Jem.
“You’ve got no slingshot!?” gasped Jeremy.
“Are you the driver of this magnificent machine?” asked the man from the green Bentley.
“In a way,” said Dad. “Sometimes it seems like she’s got a mind of her own. I’m so sorry about —”
“Don’t apologize,” said the woman from the Mercedes. “You saved my sanity. I was going crazy out there.”
“Me too,” said the Bugatti driver, shaking Dad’s hand.
“We’ve been going round and round out there for hours.”
“We didn’t mean to have a race. We were just looking for a parking space.”
“Mmmmmm.”
“We’re the Essex Vintage Automobile Club. This was supposed to be our annual picnic. A nice day out at this historic racetrack. The car park was full, so we nosed around a bit, and the next thing we knew . . .”
“Our cars were whizzing around the track. Round and round. We were getting dizzy. It seemed to be going on forever.”
“Horrible feeling, whizzing around a racetrack, trapped in a car you can’t control.”
“Can’t figure out what happened,” said the Mercedes driver. “I’d had a bit of trouble with the camshaft. But nothing like this. I’m just very grateful that you came along to rescue us.”
“Oh, please don’t mention it,” said Dad.
“He’s always rescuing people,” explained Mum. “Rescuing people and fixing things, it’s what he does. He’s sort of a mixture of a superhero and a very good mechanic.”
“Terrific driver, too,” said the man in the blue coveralls. “Do you realize that you just drove the fastest lap ever recorded here?”
“No, really?” said Dad. “It was n
othing. Can I have it in writing?”
“Do we get a trophy?” asked Jeremy again.
“Pardon me for asking,” said Jemima, “and excuse me for interrupting, but really, have you all gone stark-staring mad?! We’re supposed to be trying to rescue my parents and find Big Ben! Did I miss something? Have we now decided to stop off for a jolly little race?”
“Sorry,” said Jeremy. “Races are so exhilarating that you do tend to forget . . .”
“Can we please get back up in the air?”
“Yes, of course,” said Dad, sweeping the broken glass from Chitty’s bonnet and dragging the splintered woodwork out from under her bumper.
“If you could just move the wall aside,” said Dad, “we’ll get ready for takeoff.”
“I think you may be just a little bit too late,” said Lucy.
“How do you mean?”
“The cars in the race — they may be old-fashioned, but look at the drivers; what are they doing?”
“They’re calling for help on their . . . oh . . . on their mobile phones.”
“Exactly. We’re not in 1966 anymore. This is the twenty-first century.”
“We’re in the future!” said Jemima.
“It’s the future for you,” said Lucy. “This is the present for us.”
“If we’re in the future,” said Jemima, “then whatever was about to happen to Daddy and Mimsie . . .”
“Has already happened,” said Lucy. “In fact, it happened fifty years ago.”
Jeremy and Jemima and Mum instinctively looked up through the broken roof of the hut into the sky.
“Little Harry,” whispered Mum.
“When we bumped into Big Ben, the impact must have knocked the Chronojuster,” said Dad. “Don’t worry. I’ll give it a pull now and we’ll be back in 1966 in eeeehhhh, ohhhhh, grrrrr . . . No. It’s stuck. Never mind. We’ll go back to our house and I can work on it in my workshop. Drat this car. Whenever you set off to go somewhere, she takes you somewhere else. She may be beautiful, but she can’t be trusted.”
No, thought Jem to himself, as he jumped out to turn the hand crank, the thing about Chitty is that you can always trust her. She’s brought us here for a reason. We just don’t yet know what it is.
As Jem settled down next to Lucy she whispered, “Does this race remind you of anything?” It certainly did. He and Lucy had once been trapped in cars that would not stop going round and round a racetrack, when they were on Tiny Jack’s yacht, Château Bateau.
“Yes,” said Jem so softly that only she could hear. “It’s definitely Tiny Jack’s doing. He must be somewhere near.”
They both shuddered. But neither of them said anything to the others.
“The interesting question is,” said Lucy, “how did he do it? When he did it to us, we were on his yacht, on his racetrack, in his cars. To take control of all the racing cars on a track, that’s a lot more impressive . . .”
“And more dangerous and more evil.”
“That’s what I meant. Imagine if he does it on the motorway.”
The route to Basildon lay mostly along the famous M25 motorway. The Pott children sat in silence, thinking about their parents. Jem sat thinking about how terrible it would be if Tiny Jack took control of all the cars on the motorway. Lucy sat thinking about Little Harry. “If he did survive whatever happened to supersonic Big Ben,” she said, “he would be fifty-three years old now.”
“Thank you, Lucy.”
“It’s strange to think that somewhere out there —”
“That’s enough, Lucy.”
“This motorway,” said Jeremy. “Where does it go? The sun was straight ahead of us to start with, then it was on our right, and now it’s moving over to the left. Are we going round in circles?”
“Yes, we are. Well spotted. It’s a circular motorway. It goes all the way round London so people don’t have to drive through it.”
“Why on earth would anyone want to go round London instead of through it? London is the most exciting city on Earth,” said Jemima.
“Because there are so many cars,” explained Mum.
“Daddy said cars would be extinct by 1979, all except Chitty, who is an immortal masterpiece.”
“Yes,” said Jeremy, looking around. “Are you sure this is the future? Where are the jet packs and the antigravity boots?”
“They haven’t been invented yet.”
“Yes, they have. Daddy invented them. And antigravitational houses that could float up above the clouds on overcast days. And why are people doing their own shopping? Why aren’t their robots doing it for them?”
“We do have robots,” said Lucy, “but they’re not as exciting as you might think. They’re mostly building even more cars. There hasn’t been a lot of progress in the field of personal transport.”
“We’ve got the Internet, though,” said Dad, so proudly that the Pott children got the impression that he had invented it himself.
“The what?”
“It’s a kind of invisible global network that allows people all over the world to show each other photographs of amusing cats,” explained Mum. “Look! There’s World of Leather! And Basildon Services!”
But the Pott children weren’t listening. The more they drove around the motorway, the quieter they became. Jem knew what they were thinking. He was thinking the same thought himself. It was this: If the world is not full of Commander Pott’s brilliant inventions, that can only mean one thing — that something terrible had happened to the Commander and Mimsie before they could tell the world about them.
Soon they were parked outside the Tootings’ little terraced house in Zborowski Terrace.
The moment they stepped out onto the pavement, the automatic front door swung open and its electronic voice squeaked, “Do come in. The kettle is on.”
“No matter what, it’s nice to be home.” Mum sighed. Everywhere was neat and tidy and smelling of fresh air and clean laundry.
“Wait a minute . . .” said Mum. “Our house isn’t normally neat and tidy and doesn’t normally smell of fresh air and clean laundry.”
“No,” said Lucy. “Last time we were here, we had the Christmas tree up. The place was full of tinsel and cards because Tiny Jack fooled us into thinking it was Christmas.”
“Always Christmas and never winter,” Mum said, remembering.
They stood listening to the empty house. Someone had been in and tidied up. Maybe they were still there. As they stood, thinking and listening, they began to notice other little changes about the place. The map of the world that Dad had won for punctuality when he was at school was now elegantly framed and mounted on the wall. The cups that Lucy had won for dancing when she was a little girl were arranged along the mantelpiece. School photographs that had languished forgotten in drawers were now gleaming in frames.
“Tiny Jack has been back,” said Dad.
“This is still our home,” said Mum. “Moving a few pictures around doesn’t change that. I’m not going to be frightened in my own house. Children, you must be starving. You haven’t eaten a thing in fifty years. I’ve brought some of Commander Pott’s square potatoes with me. I’ll make some chips.”
Seeing Mum slicing potatoes filled the others with confidence. This was their home, and they were not going to let Tiny Jack make them feel uncomfortable.
“Come on,” said Dad. “Let’s see if we can’t shift that Chronojuster.”
“OK,” said Jem.
“Actually, I was talking to Jeremy,” said Dad. “He knows the car better than any of us.”
“Right-ho,” said Jeremy. “Got any oil?”
“There’s some WD-40 in the cupboard. Jem, go and get it for Jeremy.”
Feeling sad, Jem got the can of oil and handed it to Jeremy. Then he went to his room for a lie-down.
“Has anyone got a pen and paper? I like to scribble when I’m feeling tense,” said Jemima.
“Why don’t you take Jemima up to your room, Lucy, and do some drawing?”
“No, thanks,” said Lucy. “I’ll bring the pen and paper down.”
She got a drawing pad and pen for Jemima, and then joined Jem in his room. “That kid,” she hissed. “She likes to scribble when she’s tense.”
“I thought I’d be able to talk to Jeremy about Chitty,” said Jem, “but he’s just . . .”
“So much better than you are at everything.”
“Yeah. Thanks for putting that so clearly.”
“No problem. I’m an intellectual. That’s what I do.”
They both lay staring at the ceiling, relishing the comfortable quiet of each other’s company.
The door opened. Jeremy looked in. “Chronojuster’s looking a bit better,” he said.
“Great,” said Jem. “Toilet’s that way, if that’s what you’re looking for.”
Jeremy looked around the room.
“If you’re hoping to find a robot that makes your bed or a carpet that does your homework,” snapped Lucy, “forget it. The future is rubbish — it’s official.”
“I see,” said Jeremy, turning dejectedly to leave the room. Jem felt a stab of sympathy. Of course what Jeremy had really been hoping to see was one of his father’s inventions. Some memory of what the Commander had done.
“You can look at the Internet if you like,” offered Jem.
But Jeremy had spotted something on the end of the bed. “You haven’t unwrapped all your Christmas presents,” he said, “even though it’s July.”
Jem and Lucy stared at the package. It was a large, immaculately wrapped box.
“Who’s it from?”
“No label.”
Jem and Lucy looked at each other, each thinking the same thought. What if this was from Tiny Jack?
“Why don’t you open it and see what it is?” said Jeremy, bending down to pick it up.
“Don’t touch that!” warned Jem. “It may contain high explosives.”
“Or poisonous spiders,” added Lucy.
Jeremy reached into his pockets and pulled out a pair of goggles and a set of earplugs.
“You carry blast-proof goggles with you?” said Lucy.
“They’re very useful,” said Jeremy. “For instance . . .” He began to unwrap the present. “It weighs a ton!” The others put their fingers in their ears and screwed up their eyes.
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon Page 6