“Look,” said Jeremy. “It’s just a game.”
It was a board game. A bit like Monopoly, but instead of street names it had the names of exciting places, such as the Acropolis, the White House, and Mount Everest. On each of these squares was a perfect little model. On the square named Mount Everest was an exquisite little mountain with what looked like real snow on top. Lucy reached out to touch it, then pulled her hand away. “It’s cold,” she said, reaching for the Acropolis, “and that’s hot. What is this game?”
“It’s called Destruction,” said Jeremy, holding up the lid and reading the blurb. “‘The game that never ends. Once you start, you just can’t stop. Fun, fun, fun.’ Strange . . .”
“What?” asked Lucy.
“That’s exactly what the billboards said at the racetrack. ‘Fun, fun, fun’ and ‘Once you start, you just can’t stop.’ I always try to notice the details. It’s a kind of game.” His face had turned very pale. He was looking closely at a model of the Tower of London. “Can you lend me your magnifying glass?” he asked.
“I don’t have a magnifying glass.” Jem sighed. “Or a knife, or a slingshot, or a jet pack.”
“There’s a zoom on my camera phone,” said Lucy, pointing her jelly phone at the model of St. Pancras.
“What on earth is that?” asked Jeremy.
“It’s something interesting about the future,” said Lucy. “Take a look.”
Jeremy looked into the lens, then turned very solemn. Lucy looked and went solemn, too.
What they saw when they looked through the zoom was beautiful, but also terrifying. The model of the Tower of London was perfect in every detail. They could even see bird poo on the ramparts. Even more amazing — they could see a little row of ravens parked on Tower Green.
“Oh!”
One of the ravens — no bigger than a grain of rice — had flapped into the air and was flying. Lucy’s hand swung away in surprise, so that now they were looking at the top of Everest. The snow on the summit was not still — as it would be on a model. It was whirling around in little gusts, as though there were a wind up there.
“Look at the Acropolis,” said Jeremy. Like the other models, the Acropolis was perfect in every detail, right down to the crowd of tourists — the size of ants — that swarmed around it. The frightening thing was that these tiny tourists were moving. They were pointing and hurrying and gathering together. They were tiny ant-size people.
“These are not models,” said Jeremy.
“What are they, then?”
“Try to pick one up.”
Gingerly Lucy took the model of the Tower of London between her fingers and tried to pick it up. It wouldn’t move.
“It’s so heavy!” she said. “It must weigh a ton.”
“It probably weighs hundreds of tons. You see, my father invented a device called the Miniaturizer. If you point it at a thing and activate it, it sucks all the air out from between that thing’s atoms.”
“So it shrinks things.”
“Yes.”
“You see, he wanted Britain to win the Space Race but he knew we couldn’t afford to keep building bigger and bigger rockets, and then he had this brilliant idea — what if we just had very small astronauts?”
“So that model of the Tower of London . . .”
“The Tower of London is on your desk.”
“But wouldn’t people have noticed if the Tower of London were missing? Or the Pyramids?”
“Maybe they have. Let’s go and see the news.”
The children hurried downstairs. Lucy flicked through the channels until she found twenty-four-hour news:
. . . scenes of panic all over Athens today as the Acropolis joins the recent list of famous places and buildings worldwide that have simply disappeared. Greeks woke up today to find nothing but a huge hole where only last night the Acropolis had been. The incident follows a similar incident last week when the celebrated Mount Everest was extracted from the Himalayas like a tooth, leaving nothing but an unsightly cavity . . .
“I suppose it is actually quite stylish,” said Lucy, “having the actual Acropolis in your bedroom.”
“My father kept the Miniaturizer top secret because he knew that if it fell into the hands of an evil genius it would be the most terrible weapon ever invented. Especially if you don’t read the instructions.”
“Well, falling into the hands of an evil genius is exactly what it has done,” said Lucy. “Tiny Jack has got it.”
On the television, a journalist was interviewing an elderly lady whose whole family had gone on holiday to Greece and had disappeared along with the Acropolis.
“Those poor people,” said Mum, passing round a plate of square chips. “To think their family is here in our house and we can’t help them. Your father was right.”
“About square potatoes?”
“About tidying up after you play. The Tooting family is going to tidy up that game. We’re going to put every mountain, every monument, back where it belongs.”
“How are we going to do that?”
“We’ll track down Tiny Jack, get this Miniaturizer gizmo back off him. Then we’ll just have to maximize all the things he’s miniaturized. Perhaps Commander Pott can invent a Maximizer?”
No sooner had she finished speaking than a piercing ring tone shrieked from the jelly phone. Tiny Jack’s profile picture grinned up at them from the screen.
“It’s him,” whispered Lucy. “It’s Tiny Jack.”
“Give that to me,” commanded Mum.
“Hello, dear Tootings!” cackled Tiny Jack’s voice over the speakerphone. “Are we having fun, fun, fun? Wanna play a game of hide-and-seek?”
“Certainly not,” snapped Mum. “Why on earth would we play with you? You’ve abducted Little Harry. You’ve practically destroyed the Himalayas. You’ve created panic in Greece and London. You are a very naughty boy.”
“I know. Ha-ha-ha-ha. But naughty boys are more fun.”
“Not in my book. We’re not playing any games with you.”
“Ha! You think I care? I’m the greatest car thief in history. I stole Chitty Chitty Bang Bang — the most famous, most expensive, most marvellous car ever built.”
“Hmmm, debatable,” said Lucy.
“What was that?”
“Chitty might be the most marvellous, but she’s not the most expensive. That’s got to be the Apollo Lunar Rover. It cost thirty-eight million dollars.”
There was a trembling silence on the other end of the phone and then the line went dead.
“You certainly told him, Mrs. Tooting,” said Jeremy.
“Thank you, Jeremy.”
All this time Dad had been working away at the Chronojuster. The problem was that as he didn’t actually know how it worked, it was hard for him to figure out how to fix it.
“We could ask Chitty,” said Jem, when Dad came in for a breather.
“If she could talk.”
“But she does talk in her own way. She flashes up those messages.”
“That’s true. Jem, you crank up the engine. Jeremy, want to give me a hand?”
Jem turned the hand crank while Dad and Jeremy sat in the front seat. The engine coughed into life. On the dashboard, dials spun and lights flickered . . . until the message light burned with one steady, insistent word:
ANTIFREEZE
“But she doesn’t need antifreeze,” said Jeremy. “She’s air-cooled, and besides, it’s the height of summer. Maybe the warning light is faulty.”
Another message flashed up:
DE-ICER
Then . . .
AND BE QUICK ABOUT IT!
“Why on earth would a car need de-icer in the middle of summer?” said Jeremy.
“If Chitty Chitty Bang Bang says she wants antifreeze,” said Jem, “it’s probably best to give it to her. I’ll go and see if we’ve got any.”
When Jem hurried through the kitchen on his way to the shed for antifreeze, Mum and Lucy were still discussing
Tiny Jack’s phone call. “You told him, all right,” agreed Lucy, “but I’m not sure you told him the right thing. After all, we do want to find him, don’t we? We are playing hide-and-seek with him.”
“Oh,” said Mum. “Yes, we are.”
“But if he was asking us to play hide-and-seek,” said Jem, “that might be a trap. We have to find him in our own way.”
“Exactly,” agreed Mum.
“So,” said Lucy, “which way is that?”
“The North Pole,” said Jemima, looking up from her drawing pad.
“What?”
“That’s where Mother and Father would have come down when Big Ben landed.”
“How do you know?” said Lucy.
“Simple. I took the speed at which they were losing height, and the speed at which they were travelling, and I plotted their trajectory onto this Mercator’s projection of the world, using the lines of longitude as my guide . . .”
“That’s impressive,” said Mum.
“And surprising,” said Lucy.
“Why surprising?”
“Because I thought . . .”
“You thought I would be bad at math just because I’m a girl?”
“No, I thought you would be bad at math because you always act like such a fluffy-headed muppet.”
“I’m not sure what those words mean, but I think what you’re saying is that I don’t like to be too showy-offy about my brains.”
“Your math is good up to a point,” said Lucy. “But there’s something you’ve forgotten.”
“If you’re talking about the displacement caused by the centrifugal force of the Earth’s rotation, don’t worry — I’ve taken it into account. Having factored that into the equation, I think they came down exactly here . . . Look, someone has written something there already.”
She pointed to the North Pole on the map that Dad had won for punctuality at school. Someone had indeed already written something there. The word “Dad.”
“That’s funny,” said Jem, leaning over them. “On the day that Dad lost his job at Very Small Parts for Very Big Machines, we all sat down and talked about where in the world we’d like to go and then marked it on this map. Lucy said Egypt, Mum said Paris, I said El Dorado, Dad said the North Pole. Dad’s the only one who hasn’t been to his destination of choice.”
“This is hardly the time to go off on a jaunt,” said Jeremy, who had come in to see what was taking Jem so long.
“But don’t you see? Jemima says your parents landed at the North Pole. Chitty is asking for antifreeze. The North Pole is marked on the map. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is trying to tell us something.”
“Tell us what?”
“She’s telling us to go to the North Pole. Everyone, get your coats!”
There is no land at the North Pole. Only a constantly shifting cap of ice, floating on the dark Arctic seas.
At the top of the Earth, all the world’s lines of longitude meet. So the North Pole is in every time zone at the same time.
What time is it at the North Pole?
It is all the time.
What difference does time make here anyway? The sun rises in March and doesn’t set until September. One day lasts half a year.
If ever a place had no need of a clock, this was it.
Yet there is a clock here. A very big clock.
Rising out of the ice is something like a huge inverted icicle. It is the tower of Big Ben. It crash-landed on the ice fifty years ago. It sticks there like a spindle through a humming top. Very slowly the pack ice rotates around it.
Flying low over the pack ice, her big, bold headlights searching through the swirling snow, her wipers valiantly swishing back and forth to keep the windscreen clear, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang is heading for the Pole.
Inside, the Tootings and the Pott children were wrapped up in every jumper, every pair of socks, every coat, and every pair of gloves they had been able to lay their hands on before they left Zborowski Terrace. Chitty’s great leather top was stretched above them and fastened to the windscreen. Even so, they were cold. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had wings, and ejector seats, and tyres that could turn into propellers in the water. What she did not have was heating.
“How do we know we’re going the right way?” asked Mum.
“Do you want me to come and sit in the front and read the map?” asked Jem eagerly. “I could swap places with Jeremy.”
“There’s no point,” said Jeremy. “The map just looks like a blank page. Everything is flat and white.”
“Couldn’t you stop and ask directions?” said Mum.
“Stop where? Ask who?” snapped Dad. They were always having this argument.
“The nearest permanent land is called Coffee Club Island,” said Lucy.
“There,” said Mum. “You’d like a coffee, wouldn’t you? I’m sure the people there will know the way . . .”
“It’s seven hundred kilometres away,” said Lucy.
“Oh,” said Mum. “Well, never mind, I’ve got a flask of coffee here.” She produced the flask of coffee. “I just wish I could be certain we were heading in the right direction.”
“Why not just use your compass?” asked Jeremy.
“Haven’t got one,” said Dad.
Jeremy looked at Jem. Jem shrugged. Jeremy tried not to look as if he thought a boy who didn’t carry a compass was only one step up from a boy who consistently forgot to wear trousers. He took off his right shoe. “My compass is embedded in the sole of my shoe. It’s another of Father’s inventions.” He carefully placed his shoe upside down on top of the gearstick so Dad could see the needle, quivering, pointing northward over the unrelenting ice.
“Why on earth did you say you wanted to come here?” asked Mum. “I can see why Lucy wanted to see Egypt, or why Jem wanted to see El Dorado, but this is like very slowly reading a very thick book full of completely blank pages.”
“I just really love penguins,” said Dad.
No one said a word.
“What?” said Dad. “Why have you all gone quiet?”
“You’re going to be very disappointed, Mr. Tooting,” said Jemima. “There are no penguins at the North Pole. They live at the South Pole.”
“Ah . . . But come on. The North Pole. Imagine that. I mean, it’s north and it’s a pole.”
“You do know there’s no actual pole there, don’t you?” asked Lucy.
“What?” asked Dad, hastily adding that of course he knew that because everyone knew that. “Why would there be a pole?”
But there was a pole, pointing into the polar sky like a huge finger. No sooner had they seen it than they heard it. The tolling of the great bell swept toward them through the unending blizzard as though Big Ben were pleased to see them.
They sped toward it. They circled it once. The warm glow of its clock faces lit them. Dad tried to land alongside the main door but Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had other ideas. As her tyres touched ground, she swung round on her back wheels, driving a vast drift of snow to one side, so that, when she finally stopped, her exhaust pipe was almost touching the frozen door handle of Big Ben. Her engines carried on running, pouring smoke and steam and heat until the ice around the door melted. The Arctic wind pushed it open.
“In we go, children. Let’s try to keep warm, shall we?” sang Mum.
They dashed inside and pulled the door shut behind them. It was good to be out of the wind. But now they were in utter darkness, as though they were standing inside a huge column of granite.
It was dark but it was not quiet. The slowly moving pack ice ground against the outside of the building, groaning and creaking. It sounded like some great forsaken giant begging to be let in.
“The word today,” said Dad, “is Where is the light switch? The whole tower used to be lit up at night like a big birthday cake.”
“I think you’ll find that they plugged those lights into the main electricity supply,” said Lucy. “There isn’t one here.”
“Ah . . . Never min
d,” said Dad. “I’m sure Jeremy has got a box of matches. And a candle.”
A scratch. A splutter. Jeremy held the burning match over his head before lighting the candle. He stepped onto the first of the three hundred and ninety-three steps that led to the top of the tower. No one spoke. They were all thinking the same thing. Big Ben crashed here in 1966. Nearly half a century has passed. There was no food here. No hope of rescue. The passengers must be dead. Somewhere upstairs, almost certainly, lay the skeletons of Commander Pott, Mimsie, and Little Harry.
All her life, Lucy had been fascinated by graves and ghosts and skeletons. Now that she was finally standing in a great, Gothic, ice-bound grave, she couldn’t remember why. “Why did we come here?” she asked.
“Chitty Chitty Bang Bang brought us here,” said Jem, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze, “so somehow it will be all right.”
The three hundred and ninety-three steps of Big Ben snake up the inside of the building, getting steeper as they get higher, curling around a huge empty drop.
Then they stop.
At the top there is usually nothing but a vast, shadowy space where the bell — Big Ben itself — hangs like a small planet. Usually. Now that space was filled with wires and pipes and motors. A huge cylinder ran from the ground to the bell chamber. This had been the fuel tank that had powered Big Ben on its flight around the Earth. It had burned so much fuel so quickly that even now, fifty years later, it was still quite warm.
“Hello?” called Dad, though he knew there could be no one there. It just seemed the polite thing to do.
“Hello?” echoed back the caverns and corners of the tower.
The only other sound was the deep, sad creaking of the ice.
“Well, nobody home,” said Dad. “Let’s go.”
“There’s a light,” said Jeremy.
“I wish there weren’t.” Dad sighed.
Jeremy climbed the last few steps. There was a shelf, reaching out over the cobwebby void. On it was a tangle of wires. Snared in the wires was some kind of microphone, its head pointing down toward a little black machine. It had a row of big buttons along its front and a glass panel in its belly. Above the keys, glowing and fading, glowing and fading, was a tiny red light. Next to the machine was a laminated note in spidery handwriting:
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon Page 7