Frozen in Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

ceramic between the metal taps. It was dark red and looked almost fossilized under its light layer of dust.
    ‘What was all this for ?’ wondered Rachel. ‘Why would anybody want to live underground?’
    ‘Another door,’ said Ben, nodding off into the corner of the bathroom where a square of mottled glass was lit from behind. It made the hairs prickle on his neck again—because this light was different. It wasn’t the regulation orange that they’d grown used to over the past few minutes—but a soft, blue-white glow. ‘Come on.’
    The temperature dipped noticeably as they stepped into the next room. The last room, Rachel realized, as soon as the door had swung shut behind them. It was painted white and no more doors led on from it. One wall was filled with machinery—a kind of huge metal console with knobs and levers and buttons and three small screens, dead and showing nothing. From the top of the console three channels of tubes and wires and ducting pipes led up, across the ceiling and down into the centre of the room. Each group of pipes and wires descended to a large torpedo-shaped thing, which was bolted to the floor. The three torpedo things were lightly covered in dust and stood like small monoliths, silent and odd.
    ‘What is it?’ whispered Rachel, shivering with more than just the cold.
    Ben looked all around and up and down and still found it really hard to take even one step forward. He felt terrified and didn’t want to speak, because Rachel would hear it in his voice. His stammer was sitting in his clenched throat like an impatient cricket, waiting to mess up his words and drive a blush up his cheeks. He noticed that there was a kind of desk area protruding to one side of the console, and heaped upon it were books and notepads and even a couple of pencils, under a thin layer of dust. In fact, he thought, the dust wasn’t nearly as heavy as you’d expect, if this place had been here as long as the furniture and the tins of food suggested. Probably because it was underground and there wasn’t much down here to make dust. At last he found his feet and stepped towards the console. He cleared the dust off the open pages and saw spidery handwriting compressed into the narrow lines of the paper. There were figures and diagrams and words that he could barely read. It looked scientific, which was not surprising. This was a laboratory of some kind, surely.
    Rachel had gone over to one of the torpedo things. ‘You don’t think …’ she breathed, ‘that it could be a bomb …? Do you?’
    Ben shrugged. ‘C-could be, I suppose.’ She gulped. ‘But I don’t see why it would be bolted to the floor, if it was.’
    She reached out and gently wiped away the thin skin of dust. The torpedo thing gave up some dimly gleaming grey metal, reflecting the white orb-shaped light that hung above it. She took a spare floor cloth out of her pocket and gave it a more thorough wipe and then let out a shout of surprise. ‘It’s—look—it’s glass!’ Ben spun around and stepped over to see. ‘Or plastic or something,’ she went on. ‘Look!’ Set into the smooth curve of the torpedo was a glass window. It wasn’t a bomb—it was a chamber of some kind.
    ‘It’s like a—you know—a diving bell thingy,’ said Rachel, who had been to a sea life centre recently and seen a display of old diving equipment.
    Beneath the glass lay nothing except what looked like a cushioned leather base to the torpedo. It certainly did look a bit like a diving bell … sort of. ‘Does it open?’ he asked, and they began to wipe more dust away and run their hands over the chamber, trying to find buttons or levers or any clue at all to how they might get into it. But they found nothing other than a fine seam around the base of the torpedo, too narrow to even get a fingernail into.
    ‘Weird,’ said Ben, leaning back against the neighbouring torpedo, his arm wiping a track through the dust on its curved glass window. ‘Really