“Lamp! Over here!” Casper was unmarked at the entrance to the garage, and he’d played enough rugby to know this was a good thing. “Chuck it!”
Anemonie lunged, but not in time to deflect Lamp’s mighty lob as the Time Toaster soared into the air…
…and landed with a CRASH! about fifty centimetres in front of Lamp’s feet.
“You broke it.” Anemonie sneered with disdain at the crumpled heap on the floor. “How’m I gonna sell a big lump of broken metal?” With a huff, she stomped from the garage, spitting on the floor as she left.
Once Anemonie’s steel-toed footsteps had faded far into the distance, Casper began to pick up the shattered pieces of what used to be Lamp’s Time Toaster, and place them on the central workbench. “So… how bad is it?”
Lamp hadn’t spoken yet. In fact, he hadn’t even moved. He was still in the same stretched position as he had been when he threw the Time Toaster, like a statue of the world’s worst ballerina. Slowly, he let his arms drop and his gaze fix on the pile of scrap. At the top of the pile, a single green light was flashing: the bottle cap marked BROKKIN.
Lamp smiled weakly. “At least that bit’s still working.”
And so the boys began the painstaking task of fitting the Time Toaster’s pieces back together. Casper had to pop over to Mrs Trimble’s shop to buy two more pots of glue and a yo-yo. By the time he came back, the queue at the bus stop had mostly filtered away. Sandy Landscape, the village gardener, who’d joined at the very back, was now taking his turn to sniff the brand-new seats and knock on the glass walls. Happy all was in order, he murmured some words of approval and strolled back up the street.
Casper smiled as the muddy man passed.
“Mornin’, Casper.” Sandy Landscape doffed his floppy hat. “You ent seen me goat, ’ave yer?”
“Have you checked your goat pen?”
Sandy looked impressed. “Now that I ain’t. But I shall check there next. Thankee, Casper.” And he trotted off to look in the place where he always found his goat.
Back in the garage, Casper found Lamp doing a little jig. “What’s going on?”
“I did a clever!” Lamp wiggled his hips and waved a spanner around. “Remind me to thank Anenemy for breaking my Time Toaster.”
“Why on earth would you want to thank her?”
“I think I put it back together wrong. Now it sends stuff rather than receives it.”
“That’s good!” said Casper. “I guess. Still just toast, though…”
“Not if you don’t want toast. I can send anything!”
“As long as it fits in the toaster.”
“Not any more.” Lamp waddled across to a dark corner of his garage and returned with a tartan tin full of old biscuits. He stretched two red wires from one of the many holes still left in the Time Toaster and stuck them to the tin with two squares of tape. With a flourish of his hand and a shout of “Let’s TIME!”, Lamp tugged down on the toaster handle and the machine coughed into action.
When the smoke cleared this time, however, there was no toast. In fact, rather than anything new, something was missing. The biscuit tin, and the biscuits inside it, had completely vanished.
At first Casper thought Lamp had scoffed a secret snack under the smokescreen, but then he would have had to eat the tin too, and tins aren’t that tasty.
“Someone in caveman times is gonna have a lovely treat,” smiled Lamp.
The biscuit tin had gone. Through time. Casper found himself short of breath. “But this is… amazing! Will it send anything?”
“So far I’ve tried it with a colouring pencil, that biscuit tin and one of my shoes. I think that covers most things.”
Casper hadn’t noticed until then that one of Lamp’s sponge shoes was missing.
“All you need is a big enough container to put stuff in, and it’ll send that stuff through time! Including us!” Lamp couldn’t help but start his jig again.
“Including us? But that means…” Casper’s mind raced with the possibilities. “But this is huge!” he gasped. “Lamp, this is proper time travel, not just prehistoric toast.”
“I know!” Lamp beamed. “I’m going to go and cuddle a Viking!”
“We’ve got to be careful here.”
History was being made in this garage. Casper just wanted to make sure they knew exactly what history they were making before they blundered through time and killed Henry VIII or something. “Do you have any control over where we go?”
“Course!” said Lamp.
“And if something goes wrong we could come right back?”
“S’pose,” Lamp shrugged.
“So all we need is a big enough container. Something that can carry us both, and the Time Toaster itself, through time.”
“Yep; it’s got to be big and made of glass.”
“Why glass?”
“So we can see where we’re going.”
Casper thought for a long second. “Then I know just what we can use.”
Lamp lugged the Time Toaster under one arm. “Is it far?” he huffed.
“Just round the corner.”
One step out of Lamp’s garage and a turn to the left, and Casper could see it: Corne-on-the-Kobb’s oven-fresh bus shelter.
Glinting in the autumn sunlight like Mrs Trimble’s lost glasses, the brand-new bus shelter was the perfect vehicle for Lamp’s Time Toaster. Casper trailed down the road after Lamp, picking up the bits that fell off his friend’s invention.
“Do you really need this?” asked Casper, scooping up a party blower that had dropped out of a singed crack in the toaster’s base.
“Only if we’re having a party.” Lamp wheezed onwards, a mostly melted toothbrush rattling out of the Time Toaster as he went.
The installation was simple enough, but it took time. Lamp had to glue the Time Toaster snugly to one glass wall and feed the red wires into the timetable board. Just as he was about halfway through, the shape of a girl appeared round the corner.
“Oy!” came the ear-splitting screech of Anemonie Blight. “Wotcha doing?”
This time Casper was quick off the mark. “Don’t tell her, Lamp! Pretend it’s something else.”
“Got it,” grinned Lamp, turning to call back to Anemonie. “It’s not a time machine any more, Lemony. It’s a…” Lamp’s tummy rumbled. “Casper,” he whispered, “I can’t think of any things that aren’t time machines.”
There was a long moment of silence before Anemonie began to march towards the bus shelter.
“Oh, cripes.” Casper’s heart raced as his eyes flicked from Lamp’s unfinished upgrade job to the stomping girl. “If you can’t get this working, we have to run now.”
“I