“I can’t think,” said Sam. “I’m hungry. She is too. She told me.”
“My automat’s on the blink again,” Jonathan said. “What do you want if I can get it to work?”
“Forty-two Century butter-pie,” Sam said, as if it was obvious.
Jonathan went to a thing on the wall facing Vivian which she supposed must be a musical instrument. It had keys like a piano and pipes like a church-organ and it was decorated all over with gilt twiddles and garlands, which were a little worn and peeling, as if the instrument had seen better days. Jonathan pounded at the white keys. When nothing happened, he banged at the organ-pipes. The thing began to chuff and grunt and to shake a little, at which Jonathan kicked it fiercely lower down. Finally, he took up what seemed 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. “Yummee!” 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 so marvellous 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 Leonov admit that. So that was where V.S. comes in.”
“Who is she?” said Vivian.
“The Time Lady,” said Sam. “She’s on the rampage.”
“Yes, but we had to work that out,” said Jonathan, “by putting the talk in the Chronologue together with what the stories say. Chronologue was being very scientific, talking about someone coming up through the First Unstable Era in a wave of temporons and chronons, causing wars and changes everywhere. But I guessed it had to be the Time Lady. The story says that Faber John and his wife quarrelled about the way to rule Time City, and she tricked him into going down under the city and falling asleep there. They say he’s still there, and as long as he sleeps, the City is safe. But if it’s in danger he’ll wake up and come to our rescue. We’re going by the stories. We know you—the Time Lady hates Faber John and the City, because he saw how she’d tricked him at the last minute and threw her out into history. We think she’s trying to get back and destroy the City now it’s nearly worn out.”
“That’s the bit I didn’t understand,” Sam said. He was cross-legged on the floor, licking the stick of his butter-pie.
“It is a bit puzzling,” Jonathan said. Vivian could see he was very pleased with himself for working it out. “Chronologue seemed to be sure that the Time Lady would be quite reasonable when they found her and explained about the crisis. I think the quarrel she had with Faber John must have been political in some way.”
He looked questioningly at Vivian. Vivian caught the flicker of his flickering eyes and began to wonder if Jonathan did believe she was just a normal person from the Twentieth Century after all. But at that moment she bit through into the middle of the butter-pie. And it was hot. Runny, syrupy hot.
“It’s goluptuous when you get to the warm part, isn’t it?” Sam said, watching her with keen attention. “You want to let it trickle into the cold.”
Vivian did so and found Sam’s advice was excellent. The two parts mixed were even better than the cold part alone. It sent her rather dreamy again. When Sam grinned at her, a wide cheeky grin with two big teeth in the middle of it, she found herself thinking that Sam was not so bad after all. But she did her best to keep to the subject.
“I still don’t understand what made you think the Time Lady was me,” she said.
Jonathan started to say something. Then he changed his mind and said something else. “Because of the name, you see. Faber John’s wife was called Vivian. Everyone knows that. And Faber really means Smith. So when I heard Chronologue say that you—she was on that evacuee train, I worked out that she must be posing as a girl called Vivian Smith.”
“And we said V.S. when we talked