Johnny and the Bomb Read Online Free PDF Page A

windowpane for a while and then went back to sleep.
    And the bags moved.
    They moved like frogs in oil, slithering very slowly around each other. They made a rubbery, squeaky noise, like a clever conjurer trying to twist an animal out of balloons.
    There were other noises, too. Guilty didn’t pay them much attention because you couldn’t attack noises, and besides, he was pretty well used to them by now.
    They weren’t very clear. They might have been snatches of music. They might have been voices. They might have been a radio left on, but slightly off station and two rooms away, or the distant roar of a crowd.
     
     
     
    Johnny met Kasandra outside the police station.
    “You’re lucky I’ve got some spare time,” she said. “Come on.”
    Sergeant Comely was on the desk. He looked up as Johnny and Kasandra came in, then looked back at the book he was writing in, and then looked up again slowly.
    “You?”
    “Er, hello, Sergeant Comely,” said Johnny.
    “What is it this time? Seen any aliens lately?”
    “We’ve come about Mrs. Tachyon, Sergeant,” said Kasandra.
    “Oh yes?”
    Kasandra turned to Johnny.
    “Go on,” she said. “Tell him.”
    “Er…” said Johnny. “Well…me and Wobbler and Yo-less and Bigmac…”
    “Wobbler and Yo-less and Bigmac and I,” said Kasandra.
    Sergeant Comely looked at her.
    “All five of you?” he said.
    “I was just correcting his grammar,” said Kasandra.
    “Do you do that a lot?” asked the sergeant. He looked at Johnny. “Does she do that a lot?”
    “All the time,” said Johnny.
    “Good grief. Well, go on. You, not her.”
    When Sergeant Comely had been merely PC Comely, he’d visited Johnny’s school to show everyone how nice the police were, and had accidentally locked himself into his own handcuffs. He was also a member of the Blackbury Morris Men. Johnny had actually seen him wearing bells around his knees and waving two hankies in the air. These were important things to remember at a time like this.
    “Well…we were proceeding along…” he began.
    “And no jokes.”
     
     
     
    Twenty minutes later, they walked slowly down the steps of the police station.
    “Well, that wasn’t too bad,” said Kasandra. “It’s not as though you were arrested or anything. Have you really got her cart?”
    “Oh, yes.”
    “I liked the look on his face when you said you’d bring Guilty in. He went quite pale, I thought.”
    “What’s next-of-kin mean? He said she’d got no next-of-kin.”
    “Relatives,” said Kasandra. “Basically, it means relatives.”
    “None at all?”
    “That isn’t unusual.”
    “Yes,” said Johnny, “but generally there’s a cousin in Australia you don’t know about.”
    “Is there?”
    “Well, apparently I’ve got a cousin in Australia, and I didn’t know about her till last month, so it can’t be that unusual.”
    “The state of Mrs. Tachyon is a terrible Indictment of Society,” said Kasandra.
    “What’s indictment mean?”
    “It means it’s wrong.”
    “That she’s got no relatives? I don’t think you can get them from the Governm—”
    “No, that she’s got no home and just wanders around the place living on what she can find. Something Ought to Be Done.”
    “Well, I suppose we could go and see her,” said Johnny. “She’s only in St. Mark’s.”
    “What good would that do?”
    “Well, it might cheer her up a bit.”
    “Do you know you start almost every sentence with ‘Well’?”
    “Well—”
    “Going hospital visiting won’t do anything about the disgusting neglect of street people and the mentally ill, will it?”
    “Probably not. She just might be a bit cheered up, I suppose.”
    Kasandra walked in silence for a moment. “It’s just that…I’ve got a thing about hospitals, if you must know. They’re full of sick people.”
    “We could take her something she likes. And she’d probably be glad to know that Guilty is okay.”
    “They smell bad, too,” said Kasandra, not