Serial Sunday: Running Out Of Time, Part III

Edited by David Flin.

Written by:

Heath Aberdeen

Falisha Adiguna

Eesha Haq

Teddy Harrison

Jaiden-David Hinds

Ame Lock

Eden Murray

Betsy Street

Chapter Six.

Brian and Mary looked in awe at the huge pile of books that had arrived. It was going to take them all day just to sort through them.

With all the books they had on asteroids and all the books they had on magic, surely they could come up with something to save the world?

“The only problem is, will anyone know we did it?” Brian said.

“Isn’t saving the world the important bit?”

“I guess. But it would be nice for people to know that we did it.”

*****

The last gem was miles away. So far away that they had to travel in a flying tube.

Their talkie-watches were really useful. Whenever they were asked to show some ticket or another, they would put the talkie-watch next to whatever device the person was holding out. Then the watch would beep a few times at the device, and shortly afterwards the person holding the device would be happy.

The computers here are very stupid,” Mei said. “They don’t even know why a bird can fly but a fly can’t bird.”

Several people gave them strange looks as they waited for the flying tube to be ready.

There seemed to be a lot of waiting involved to get on the plane. First they had to queue to get a ticket. Then they had to queue to show that they had got a ticket. Then they had to queue so that someone could check their luggage, even though they didn’t have any luggage. Then they had to queue so they could take off the metal that they were wearing to prove that they weren’t wearing any metal.

“That was stupid,” Toby said, as they waited in a vast hall filled with shops charging eye-watering amounts for ordinary stuff.

Then they had to wait for over an hour before they could queue again to show the ticket they’d already shown so that they could walk through a flexible metal tube so they could sit in a rigid metal tube.

“Where are we going to?” Jason asked.

“New York. The original New York. Not New New York or Newer New York or Seventeen Times New York. The original New York,” Mei replied.

“And there’s New Yorghurt,” Jason added.

“If there’s a New York, then there must have been a York. What happened to it?” Toby asked.

“I guess it just got abandoned,” said Eliana. “Lots of places got abandoned in history, like Sarum.”

“Or like Eboracum,” added Mei.

It was noisy on the plane. There was a constant, low drone from outside. They looked outside and saw the sea some distance below looking as though it was crawling past them.

They got very bored. It took hours for the plane to get to New York.

After they got off of the flying tube, they looked up in awe at the tall buildings.

“How did they build them?” Toby asked. “They don’t have gravity neutralisers. How did they get stuff up there in the first place?”

They walked around, suggesting ways that these buildings could have been built. While they looked up, they weren’t paying much attention to the cars around them.

There was suddenly a crescendo of horns and angry shouts around them. They looked around and saw people pointing at them and angry men leaning out of the windows of yellow cars and shouting strange words at them.

“Get back on the sidewalk,” was the gist of what they were shouting.

“What’s a sidewalk?” Jason asked. This seemed to infuriate everyone even more. They pointed, and the children got the impression that the sidewalk was the bit of concrete where the cars weren’t and a huge crush of people were.

“Youse ain’t from round here, ain’t you,” a man in one of the yellow cars shouted.

“Oh, no,” said Jason. “We’re from Nauril, from a thousand years in the future.”

People looked strangely at him. Still, at least the children were no longer being crushed by the crowd which was keeping some distance from them.

“They’re just some kooks from California,” said one.

“Canadians,” said another.

“Australian,” said a third person. “Nauril is a place in New Zealand.”

At last the children now had room to walk and they were able to head towards the gem.

“It’s above the ground, I’m sure of it,” Mei said. “It could be in one of these tall buildings, only it doesn’t feel like it’s very high up. Not compared to these tall buildings.”

They walked and walked, and soon came to a broad area filled with people and lights and cars and noise.

They found themselves in an incredibly busy, incredibly bright part of the city. Bright lights flashed on giant buildings reaching up into the sky. Signs flashed across enormous television screens dozens of yards wide.

Cars honked their horns constantly, and there were thousands and thousands and thousands of people about.

“Times Square,” Mei read from a sign. “It’s busy, isn’t it.”

They continued through the streets of New York, heading in the direction the gem was. They reached a stony beach looking out at a small island with a big statue on it.

“That’s where the gem is,” Eliana said, pointing at the statue.

There was a boat that was taking people out to the island so they could look at the statue. The children joined the queue and soon the ferry left for the island.

A long poem was chiselled into the base beneath the statue, which all the people who came on the ferry seem fascinated by.

“It’s up there,” Eliana said, pointing upwards.

There was a woman wearing a bright orange jacket. She was telling everyone about the statue, pointing things out, like how one of the arms had twisted over the years and was now close to the spikes on the crown. She then asked if everyone was feeling fit because there were 354 steps inside the statue, and 162 of them were a tight spiral staircase.

“And there’s no elevator,” she added. She opened a door in the base and everyone went inside.

“The gem is straight above us,” Eliana said.

There were concrete stairs ahead of them, going up to a platform, and another set of stairs going up in the other direction above that, and then another, and then another and another.

There were 22 sets of stairs in total, and then a long, long narrow iron spiral staircase.

They eventually reached a room with a window high up on the wall.

“We’re now in the crown,” the woman in the orange jacket said.

“It’s still above us,” Eliana whispered.

“What’s up there?” Toby asked the woman.

“That’s the torch. You used to be able to go up there, but it’s been closed off because the ladders are unsafe. But you get a great view from here, out of the crown.”

The children stood up and peered out of the narrow slits. They looked out across the sea, with the wind blowing in through the window slits.

“Why is there no glass in the windows?” someone asked the woman.

“Air conditioning,” the woman replied. “The statue was built before air conditioning had been invented, and it’s not possible to install it now. These windows keep the statue cool in summer; hot air rises, so the air at the bottom rises and eventually goes out the windows, and the cooler air sinks.”

“And what about in the winter?” someone asked.

“No-one visits in winter, and we don’t open. Ice forms on the stairs, and you can see how dangerous that would be.”

While this discussion was taking place, the children whispered to each other, wondering how they were going to reach the gem fragment.

“We can’t squeeze through these windows,” Toby said. “They’re too small.”

“And we haven’t got any way of reaching out,” added Eliana.

They discussed different ways they could reach the gem.

“Maybe someone slim,” said Jason. “Eliana is the thinnest.”

“If I can get through the window, how am I going to get up to the gem? Fly?” Eliana said.

Finally, Mei interrupted. “We don’t need to reach it. Sugarlemon can fly and fetch it. She’s small enough to get out through the window, and we can meet her back down on the ground.”

Sugarlemon didn’t seem impressed by the idea. She didn’t like flying too high off the ground. In fact, she didn’t much like flying at all. It was hard work.

“One of us could climb out,” suggested Eliana.

“How? We can’t squeeze through the grille,” Jason replied. “Not even Toby, and he’s the smallest. How about we try to find a secret passage? There’s always a secret passage.”

“Look at the size of this room. There’s only enough space for the wall. There’s nowhere a secret passage could be,” said Toby. “Maybe we could climb up the outside when we get back down.”

Eliana snorted. “It’s what, 300 feet to climb? It’s slippery with sea spray. None of us are much good at climbing.”

“I know,” said Mei. “Sugarlemon can go. She can fly and she can fit through the grille.”

Mei explained what she wanted Sugarlemon to do. Sugarlemon gave one sour look at the grille and walked over to a corner of the room to lick her wings clean. Mei had to speak quite firmly to Sugarlemon to get her to agree.

“Will you do it for a hot dog?”

Sugarlemon liked the idea of eating a hot dog. Dogs usually chased cats, and she wanted to chase back.

Chapter Seven.

They now had the four gem fragments and each of them held one. They could each feel the fragment they held starting to pull towards each other.

“OK. How do we use these to get back?” Jason asked.

Everyone looked at each other. They had become so involved in collecting the gem fragments that they had forgotten they had to work out some way of getting back.

“They’re infused with teleport energy,” Mei said.

“Yes, but how do we use that energy?” Toby asked.

“Do we want to go back?” Jason said. “I mean, the orphanage wasn’t that great, and there’s a whole bunch of interesting stuff here.”

“There is, but I think it’s too dangerous to stay here too long. The longer we stay here, the more likely we are to change things. Who knows what will happen then? It’s possible that things will get changed in a way that means we don’t get born, and if we don’t get born, we will never have existed.”

“Hang on,” said Eliana. “If that happened, we wouldn’t exist, which means we couldn’t go back in time to change things, which means we wouldn’t change things to stop us existing, which means we would exist,” Eliana replied.

“But then if we did exist, we would go back...” Jason started to say.

“Yes, it’s a time paradox. That’s why we need to go back and make sure it doesn’t happen,” Toby said.

“But how do we get back?” Eliana wailed.

“You idiots,” said a voice.

The children looked around and saw no-one. The talkie-watches were silent.

“Who’s speaking?” Mei asked.

“Us,” said the invisible voice. “The gem. Stop holding us apart and let us get back together.”

“What will happen then?” Jason asked.

“There’s only one way to find out,” said the voice.

The children brought the gem fragments together. There was a blinding flash and then they were gone...

...

...and they arrived back on Nauril. The only thing was that there was something strange about it.

They felt heavier. The city wasn’t swaying slightly as it floated above the settling Earth. It was on the ground and it wasn’t sinking. The Earth was solid now.

They looked upwards. There were no cars flying, as there used to be, but instead there were carpets flying around with people sitting on them. Small, one-person carpets, larger 4-person carpets, and a few massive, slow-moving carpets with dozens of people on them.

“We’re back home,” Toby said.

“Only this isn’t home,” Eliana added.

“Something strange is going on,” said Mei.

“That’s it!” Jason shouted. “That can be our motto. Something strange is going on.”

Chapter Eight.

As the years passed, Brian and Mary got to know more and more about asteroids, and more and more about magic. They became experts. People knew they were interested in astronomy, although no-one knew about their interest in magic.

They studied how they would use magic to prevent an asteroid from hitting the Earth. They discovered a lot of ways that wouldn’t work.

Blasting it with a magic bolt to shatter it would just mean that a lot of bits of asteroid would hit rather than one big one – and the bits would destroy the world just as much as a single big one.

They thought about a shield that would bounce the asteroid away, but they couldn’t make a strong enough shield.

They thought about trying to shrink the asteroid, making it smaller. They could do this, but it would still weigh the same and it would still destroy the world. It would probably punch a hole right through from one side to the other.

Then they discovered a magic lodestone. This acted like a kind of magnet, drawing things towards it. If it worked on an asteroid, they could then send it up and use the lodestone to deflect the asteroid, making it miss the Earth entirely.

It took them a long time to get things ready. When they were nearly ready, other astronomers spotted the approaching asteroid.

“It’s going to pass close to the Earth,” they said.

As it got closer, they said: “It’s going to pass very close to the Earth.”

As it got closer still, they said: “It’s going to hit the Earth, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it, but don’t worry.”

People started to panic, but Mary and Brian had some magic that could save the Earth.

No-one believed in magic, but Brian and Mary went ahead anyway. They put the lodestone on a rocket and sent the rocket to pass near the asteroid.

This caused the asteroid to move closer to the lodestone, slightly changing the course it was on. It wasn’t much, but it was enough.

People were pleased that the world hadn’t been destroyed. Mary and Brian became heroes, and people now believed in magic. So many people wanted to learn about magic that magic schools sprang up everywhere.

Chapter Nine.

The children walked around Nauril, staring at the strange sights. They’d already seen the flying carpets, and they saw dwarves with bushy beards and elves with fairy wings and dragons and unicorns and all sorts of things.

“What’s going on?” Jason asked.

“Whatever it is, it’s very strange,” Mei said.

“Maybe we could just, you know, ask someone,” suggested Eliana.

“Ask them what? Ask them why there are flying carpets? Everyone seems used to them, which means they’ve been around for a long time, which means no-one would know a time when there weren’t any flying carpets. There isn’t a sign of a car anywhere, which means no-one will have a clue what they are,” Jason said emphatically.

“And why is the Earth back together again?” Eliana asked. “It’s like it was never destroyed.”

Toby thought for a moment. “I think that’s the answer,” he said. “I think the world was never destroyed.”

“But it was,” Mei replied. “We know that it was.”

“Yes, but we changed things. We went back and we told Brian and Mary about the asteroid. Maybe that changed things.”

They walked along the streets thinking about this.

“No-one’s got any talkie-watches,” Eliana said eventually. She pointed to a dwarf who was looking at a small crystal ball on his wrist and he was talking into it.

They walked, almost without thinking, to where the orphanage was. When they got there, they saw that it was a bit different from what it had been when they had left. It looked pretty much the same as when they had left it, but it had a new name.

Brian and Mary’s Orphanage for Magically Inclined Orphans.

“I guess Mary and Brian did stop the asteroid after all,” said Toby.

They walked a bit further and saw another sign.

Pet Shop for Aldarin Falcats.

Jason put his hand in his pocket, fiddling with the gem absent-mindedly. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “We’ve been to the past. I wish we could go to the future and see what things are like there.”

As he said this, there was a bright, blinding light and a deep hum. They felt a sudden shift of the ground. When the light had faded, they found themselves in...

...But that is a story for another day.

--

Running Out of Time is collected and on sale at Amazon now.

---

Discuss this Article

---

David Flin has written & edited a large number of alternate history books and all-ages novels, and edited Comedy Throughout the (P)Ages and How To Write Alternate History.