the more she knew about Time City, the easier it would be to get home. But she understood most of it rather less than she had understood Jonathan explaining how his belt worked. She did dimly grasp that her own century seemed to be in an uproar and that when Sempitern Walker talked about “the source of the trouble” he might have meant the Time Lady. And she gathered that learned people in Time City kept watch on the rest of history and tried to push it into behaving the way Time City wanted.
I think that’s rather a cheek! she thought.
The ladies finally gave everyone water and wine in matching tumblers made of thousands of jewel-like bits of glass. Then they left and everyone began to eat. Vivian’s sense of danger returned. She knew she would make awful mistakes and everyone would realise she was not Cousin Vivian. She watched Jonathan and Jenny carefully and did what they did. And it was quite easy. The main difference in Time City manners was that you were allowed to pick up most of the food in your fingers and dip it into little bowls of bright-tasting sauce. The white surface of the table made any drips vanish like magic. Vivian was so relieved to find she could manage after all that she barely felt nervous when Mr Enkian and Dr Wilander began asking her questions.
“How do you feel to be back in civilisation?” Mr Enkian said. “It must be quite a change after a Twenty Century slum.”
“We don’t live in a slum!” Vivian said indignantly. “We live in Lewisham! It’s respectable. A lot of people have cars there.”
“Have you seen any slums?” grunted Dr Wilander, looking up from his dishes. The ladies had given him twice as many without being asked. He probably needed them, Vivian thought, considering the size of him.
“Not really,” she said. “Mum won’t let me go down to Peckham Rye. It’s very rough there. Policemen walk in pairs.”
“But your parents go there, of course,” asserted Mr Enkian.
“No they don’t,” said Vivian. “Nobody goes to slums if they can help it. But Mum goes through on a bus sometimes on her way to the West End.”
“And your father?” growled Dr Wilander.
“I don’t know,” Vivian said sadly. “I haven’t seen him for ages. As soon as there was the threat of war, the Ministry moved him to a secret Government Establishment and it’s so hush-hush that he hardly gets home for weekends now. Mum says at least that means he won’t be called up into the army to get killed.”
“I call that a shrewd move on Lee’s part,” Mr Enkian said. “It’s not an Observer’s job to get himself killed.”
Sempitern Walker leaned forward with a look of puzzled agony. “I thought your parents had settled in a quarter called Islington?”
This gave Vivian a jolt. Her mind seemed to have played a strange trick on her. It had allowed her to tell one lie, saying she was Vivian Lee, but otherwise it had settled for lying by telling the absolute truth about everything else. She had to think quickly. “Yes, but we moved,” she said. “Mum wasn’t happy with my school there.” That made another lie. And she hoped hard that nobody would ask her about Islington because she had never been there in her life.
“Tell us about your school,” said Jenny.
Vivian heaved a sigh of relief and began to talk. She talked about school, clothes, buses and the underground and how you sheltered there from bombs if you had no shelter of your own. She described the air-raid shelter that made a hump in the middle of her own back lawn. Meanwhile, she dipped dry little dumplings and long crisp leaves into sauce and ate them as if she had been doing it all her life. She sipped wine – it tasted to her as if it had gone off – and went on to films, where she was a true expert. Mickey Mouse, Snow White, Shirley Temple and Bing Crosby took her through the time when the ladies brought more dishes, and she ate what was in those almost without noticing.
Then she went on to jazz. But a grunted question from Dr Wilander brought her back to the War. She told them about coupons, and the dark curtains she helped Mum make for blackout, and how there were tank traps on the roads and an anti-aircraft emplacement up on the common. She described big silver barrage balloons over London. She told them Mr Chamberlain was so good he was no good and she imitated an air-raid siren. It was such fun to be the centre of attention like this that she even offered to sing them Hang out your washing on the Siegfried Line. But they asked about gas attacks instead.
Vivian explained that this was the real threat. Then she went on to the way the Government was sending all the children out of London. She began describing the hot, noisy train, and very nearly went on to say that she was being sent to Cousin Marty herself, but she stopped herself in time. “They all had labels,” she said. “Just like luggage.”
“This is a bit puzzling, my love,” Jenny said. She looked at Dr Wilander. “When were the evacuations in World War Two? Twenty Century’s not my study.”
“Always some months after war was declared,” Dr Wilander grunted. “That varies a bit, since it’s an Unstable Era, but it’s usually declared midway through 1939.” His shrewd little eyes swivelled to Vivian. “When was this war declared?”
Vivian felt very uneasy, because it looked as if someone had noticed something wrong in what she had been saying, but she answered with the truth. “Last Christmas in 1938, of course.”
She was amazed at the consternation this produced. Everyone stared at her and at one another. Jonathan, who had not said one word up to then, or even looked at her, now gazed at her in obvious horror. Jenny looked quite as horrified.
“It’s moved right back!” she said. “Ranjit, it’s gone critical! I think all the Observers should be recalled right away!”
“Our information seems to be wholly out of date,” Mr Enkian said disgustedly. “What is Time Patrol thinking of?”
“I’ll find out,” Sempitern Walker said, and he pressed a stud on his belt.
Dr Wilander, popping crisp pancakes into his mouth by twos, said, “Not really so surprising. Three days ago there was a strong source of chronons in September 1939, and we know it’s causing chaos. It’s just surprising that the outbreak of war rolled backtime so fast. But—” his big jaw champed and his little eyes once more rolled round to Vivian, “—that Government of yours is pretty inefficient, don’t you agree? Only just getting the kids out now.”
“It’s been phoney war up to now,” Vivian said apologetically.
“Still no excuse,” grunted Dr Wilander.
Pale Elio slipped into the room. Sempitern Walker whispered to him and sent him out again.
“At this rate,” pronounced Mr Enkian, “that century is going to be splitting the atom in the twenties, with all that follows.”
“They’ve got to do it at some point, you fool,” Dr Wilander growled. “Life in the next Fixed Era depends on it.”
“Not if they learn to do it during the War,” Mr Enkian snapped, “with a wave of chaos rolling uptime at them. There won’t be the next Fixed Era then. The only bit of Earth left will be Time City, and that’s decaying fast!”
“Nonsense!” snarled Dr Wilander.
“Gentlemen,” said Sempitern Walker, loudly and boringly. “We are all agreed that there is a crisis both for Time City and for history, and we are all agreed that we will prevent it if we can. We will not sacrifice the art of the seventies nor deprive the Hundreds of their expansion to the stars…”
He went on talking. Heaviness descended again. The ladies came to take away the second course and give everyone frothy little mountains of sweet stuff. Vivian had just dug a spoon into hers – it smelt as good as butter-pie – when the door crashed aside to let a wide sandy-haired man pounce into the room. Vivian jumped and dropped her spoon.
“What’s this about an update on the moveback?” he said.
He looked