A Tale of Time City Read Online Free PDF Page B

Think of something, Sam!”
    There was a long silence. Sam sat on the floor with his face in his fists. Jonathan leant against the wall, chewing the end of his pigtail. Vivian licked the last of her butter-pie off its stick and, for a while, could think of very little else except that she wished she could have another one. But I
will
get home! she told herself, sleepily twiddling the stick in her fingers. I
will
, whatever he says!
    “I know!” Sam said at last. “Pretend she’s our cousin!”
    Jonathan leapt away from the wall. “That’s
it
!” he shouted. “That’s clever, Sam!”
    “I
am
clever,” said Sam. “You work out the details.”
    “And that’s easy,” said Jonathan. “Listen, V.S., you are Vivian Sarah Lee. Your father is Sam’s uncle and mine. Have you got that?” He danced round the room, pointing at Vivian until she nodded. “Good. You’ve been away from Time City since you were six, because your parents are Observers on station in Twenty Century. That’s all true. Got it? But they’ve sent you home because the era’s getting more unsettled and there’s a War on. This is brilliant!” he said to Sam. “It will explain why she doesn’t know anything. And my mother’s bound to have her to live here, because Lee House is shut up—and we can even go on calling her V.S.!”
    Sam rose from the floor and breathed heavily into Vivian’s face.“She doesn’t look like a Lee,” he said critically. “Her eyes are wrong and her hair curls.”
    “A lot of Lees don’t have the eyefold,” Jonathan said. “I don’t think Cousin Vivian does. Her cheekbones are the right shape.”
    “Will you both stop staring and criticizing!” Vivian said. “There’s nothing wrong with my face. The lady in the woolshop says I look almost like Shirley Temple.”
    “Who’s he?” said Sam, and Jonathan said, “Who are you, V.S.?”
    “What?” said Vivian.
    “She’s almost asleep,” Sam said, leaning even closer to Vivian’s face.
    He was right. The long and worrying day, followed by the peculiar events of the last hour, were suddenly too much for Vivian. Or maybe it was the butter-pie. There began to be gaps in what she noticed. She heard Jonathan saying airily, “Oh, we can hide her in one of the archaic rooms. She’ll be more at home there.” At this, Vivian noticed that Jonathan seemed to have bounced back from his scare in the ultra-modern office and become once more the lordly, confident boy who met her at the station. This made her feel uneasy, but before she could work out why, they were telling her to get up and come along.
    She almost forgot the precious string bag. She turned round for it and yelped. She found she had been sitting on nothing in a yellow framework, just like the flowerpots from the church-organ. She tried to reach through it for the bag. But the nothing stopped her hand and she had to grope underneath it before she could take hold of the string handles.
    Next thing she noticed, they were going along a corridor. Then Jonathan was sliding a door aside and saying to Sam, “Mind you take those keys back
now
. And don’t get caught doing it.”
    “I know what I’m doing,” Sam retorted, and trotted off down the hallway with the trailing tic of his puffy shoe flapping on the carpets.
    After that Vivian noticed she was in bed, a rather hard, scratchy bed, with blue street light coming in from somewhere. What a lot of Vivians! she thought sleepily. And then: I’ll have another butter-pie before I go home tomorrow.
    And after that, Vivian noticed that it was daytime again and woke up. She turned over under a heavy, scratchy coverlet embroidered with lines of thin brown people and smelling of dust, and knew at once where she was. She was in Time City, in the middle of a horrendous mistake. Oddly enough, although this was quite frightening, Vivian found it rather exciting too. She had always wanted to have an adventure, the way people did in films. And here she was having