A Tale of Time City Read Online Free PDF Page A

to be an ordinary school ruler and pried at a long flap under the pipes.
    “Well, it’s done the butter-pies,” he said, peering inside. “But the Twenty Century function seems to have broken. There’s no pizza and no bubble-gum. Do you mind food from other centuries?” he asked Vivian rather anxiously.
    Vivian had never heard of pizza, though she thought it sounded Italian and not like the English food she was used to at all. She was past being surprised at anything by this time. “I could eat a
dinosaur
!” she said frankly.
    “You almost have to,” Jonathan said, carrying an armful of little white flowerpots over to the empty frame beside Vivian’s chair. He dumped them into the air above it, and they stayed there, standing on nothing. “Butter-pie,” Jonathan said, handing a pot with a stick poking out of it to Sam. “Otherwise it’s done you algae soup, malty soy, two carob cornpones and fish noodles.”
    Sam pulled the stick out of his pot with a yellow nubbly ice cream on the end of it. “Yumm
ee
!” he cried and bit into it like an ogre.
    “Er—which is which?” Vivian asked, looking at the strange marks on the other pots. “I can’t read these words.”
    “Sorry,” Jonathan said. “Those are Universal Symbols from Thirty-nine Century.” He sorted out the pots for her and took a butter-pie for himself. The pots, Vivian found, were sort of stuck to the air. She had to give a little pull to get them loose. She discovered that you peeled back the lid, and if you needed a spoon or a fork, the lid shrivelled itself into a spoon or fork shape. Algae soup was not at all pleasant, like salty pond water. But malty soy was nice if you dipped the cornpone in it. The fish noodles were—
    “I’d rather eat Dad’s fishing bait,” Vivian said, putting that pot quickly down.
    “I’ll get you a butter-pie,” Jonathan said.
    “And another one for me,” Sam put in.
    The church-organ received another banging, two more kicks and a punch in the delivery-flap and Vivian and Sam received a pot with a stick each. Jonathan threw the empty pots into a frame beside the organ, where they vanished.
    “Now we
must
talk,” he said, while Vivian dubiously lifted the nubbly lump out of its pot. “We’ve all broken the law and we daren’t be caught. It would have been all right if V.S. was really V.S. but she isn’t, so we’ve got to think how to hide her.”
    Vivian was getting very tired of being called V.S. She would have objected if she had not at that moment bitten into the butter-pie. Wonderful tastes filled her mouth, everything buttery and creamy she had ever tasted, with just a hint of toffee, and twenty other even better tastes she had never met before, all of it icy cold. It was somarvellous that she simply said quietly, “You owe me an explanation. What were you trying to do?”
    “Save Time City of course,” Sam said juicily out of the middle of his butter-pie. “We listened to the Chronologue. That’s how we knew where you’d be.”
    “There’s a passage between the Chronologue and here,” Jonathan explained. “But it’s been chained up ever since my father was elected Sempitern and I got curious about it. So Sam shorted it out for me and—anyway, we found it led to the Chronologue and, if we opened the door a crack, we could hear what they were all talking about. They were debating the crisis—”
    “Only I couldn’t understand a word,” Sam said, as if this was rather clever of him. “It wasn’t like the stories.”
    “It wasn’t!” Jonathan said feelingly. “It was all about polarities and chronons and critical cycles, but I understood the part about Time City being nearly worn out. It’s used one bit of space and time too often, you see, and they were trying to find a way to move it to another bit. The City’s held in place by things called polarities, which are put out into history like anchors, but no one except Faber John ever understood how it was done. I heard Dr.