Time Trap

by Nicholas Fisk

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; YA Science Fiction

Synopsis

A teenager in the late 21st century discovers a way to travel in time as a way to escape the dystopian world he inhabits, only to learn that time travel introduces dangers of its own.

Release date: December 12, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

Do you know what circular insanity is? It’s the sort of insanity that takes you full circle to the point from which you started.

For example – do you know a song that goes There’s a hole in my bucket, Eliza, Eliza? I bet you don’t. A century and more before your time, that song. This is 2079. When was Eliza last sung, I wonder? 1970, 1980, 2001? Never mind – the song shows just what is meant by circular insanity. It’s a joke duet sung by a stupid boy and a girl to a sad, silly, whining tune. The boy holds a bucket with a hole in it. He sings –

There’s a hole in my bucket, Eliza, Eliza,

There’s a hole in my bucket, Eliza, a hole.

With what shall I mend it, Eliza, Eliza,

With what shall I mend it, Eliza, with what?

She replies. She tells the boy to mend the bucket with straw.

He says, with what shall I cut it?

She says, with a knife.

The knife is blunt. With what shall I sharpen it, he asks.

She says, with a stone.

He says, with what shall I wet the stone?

She says, with water.

He says, in what shall I fetch it, Eliza, Eliza?

She says, in a bucket.

And he says – ah, you’ve guessed it – he says,

But there’s a hole in my bucket, Eliza, Eliza !

That’s circular insanity. And circular insanity is what I’m suffering from.

Circular insanity and my Galactic Uncle Lipton.

He’s not really my uncle, of course. I began calling him uncle years ago, when I was young and his magic was still real and alive to me. Now it’s a habit.

There he is, over there with the other Oldies. You’re seeing him at his worst. Just look at him ! It’s his tot time, his ‘Cheers, chaps !’ time. He’s beginning to nudge and wink and hunch his shoulders. He’s reaching into his back pocket. Now it’s out, the leather-bound antique silver flask, almost hidden in his big paw. Nudge, wink, chortle. Some of the other old phonies are looking embarrassed – look, one’s walking away ! – but Galactic Uncle Lipton takes no notice, he tips the silver flask over the Bevvie mug. Glig-glog-glug. Chortle wink nudge. Aaaaah ! Smack-smack ! Uncle Lipton has had his little tot ! Uncle Lipton has defied the NO ALCOHOL notices on the wall ! The daring of him ! The defiance of authority ! The reckless courage of the man ! Uncle Lipton is a deuced fine chap !

But not really, of course. What I know and he knows and the others don’t know is that Uncle Lipton has Official Authority to drink himself rotten. The Official Authority wants him to drink himself into a seizure – would go down on its hands and knees to beg him to kill himself with the stuff.

Now is your cue to look me straight in the eye and say ‘Very well. They want him to die. And how about you, Dano Gazzard? Do you want him to die?’ And I’m supposed to flinch and look uneasy, before answering ‘Of course not !’ What else can I answer? I’m as much a part of Uncle Lipton as his silver flask (ask him to show you the hallmark, he’ll like that). I’m tied to Uncle. He’s got me in his pocket, just like that flask. And I’ll never get out of it as long as Uncle Lipton lives. Because if he goes, I’d go. If I want to live, I have to want Uncle Lipton to live. I have to help him to keep alive, actually help him…

There’s another reason. Although I sound bitter about Uncle Lipton – although I make him sound just a fat old relic – there’s still that magic I mentioned. The magic began in my childhood, in the days when there was only one person in the world who could tell me stories and truths that made me hold my breath. He picked on me because, as he used to tell me, ‘You’ve got imagination, boy. You’re different.’ I picked on him for just the same reason. I can see myself now, sitting at his feet, wide-eyed and boggling, while he transported me light-years away from 2079 and the Homebody Unit. I can see him, too – not booming and shouting, not the Uncle Lipton of the Bevvie Lounge – just a big, quiet, deep-voiced, rumbling figure who might at any moment dig up yet another treasure from his limitless store.

‘But why did your bicycle have three speeds, Uncle?’ ‘Ah, that was because –’ and he’d tell me, and I’d imagine myself riding through a forest (a forest ! Thousands of real trees, big trees !) on a green bicycle, pedalling mile after mile …

‘But when you were in space, drinking liquids, what happened if you spilled a drop? What did the spilled stuff do?’ ‘Ah, well, that could be amusing. You see –’ and he’d tell me, and I’d see myself as an astronaut, an adventurer at the controls of a metal township hurtling through nothingness on its way to an incredible destination.

Nobody else in the Homebody Unit wanted to know these things. I did. Nobody – except a few Topmosts of the Official Authority – knew Uncle Lipton’s secret. I alone did – and you must admit, it’s an amazing secret. The fact is (and it is a fact, not just another of Uncle Lipton’s Bevvie Lounge stories) that he might live for another hundred years … and has already lived one hundred and thirty-seven years!

As I say, no one here in Homebody Unit 362 knows that But then, nobody in Unit 362 knows anything very much. They just amble about doing their thing. A pretty dull thing it is. The old ones drink True T and Coffymost and all the other synths in the Bevvie Lounge. Some of them drink gallons a day, I swear they do. Sometimes, when they get their Senior Citizen Credits and it’s a Saturday night – they can drink alcohol then – they lash out and buy each other Wizzky or Brand-E or = Gin. Some of them even pretend to get drunk on the stuff though it isn’t strong enough to wiffle a mouse. None of them has even tasted the real thing, of course (but I have. In the 1940s).

Then we’ve got the Primers, the middle-aged ones. Primers because they’re supposed to be in the prime of life. I can only just bring myself to write about them. Even the ones with jobs or the ones with filled Kiddie Quotas (the full quota is two children, precisely two; when I was an evacuee in the 1940s, one of the kids I was with came from a family of nine children) – even the Primers with something to do, something real in their lives, are just Permitted Proudies. The Official Authority permits them to be proud of their zoomdrive cars, proud of their horrible homes (I’d call them hutches), proud of their ten-foot-square back gardens (look ! a real shrub !) – yes and proud of their Partners, their wives. Proud even of them ! They like being Proudies.

But I’ve got pride too and I will not, repeat will not, write about the Partners. I suppose there was some dignity for women in the days when they had jobs or became wives – when they actually had to do something, bring up children, cook and worry and be nice when they didn’t feel like it. But this is 2079 and the State brings up the children. They hardly see their parents until they are Teens. So the Primers haven’t anything to do, and the Partners …

Look, I could tell you everything you need to know about the typical Partner in Unit 362 or any other Unit simply by showing you the only thing she ever reads, the Catalogue. You press the buttons and up comes the Catalogue on the Viddy wall – endless beauty aids, endless things to make you thin here, sticking out there, firm or soft or pneumatic or bunjy in the other place … endless paints and wigs and stilts and uplifts and soothers and smoothers. The Catalogue is the only thing they ever read, I really mean it.

Then there’s us. Oh, you’d just love us. The Hopefuls, they call us, the Teens. First I was a Bud, then a Blossom or Kiddie, and now I’m a Hopeful, a Teen. Just like the others, I’ve got a skimmer that can do 100 mph before you even hit the plus-drive booster. I’ve got all the sportsgear in the Catalogue. I’ve even got some muscles left over from that brief period when I lived in the 1940s, one hundred and thirty-something years ago, when I was twelve.

But back to the present. In the last two years, I’ve experienced all the official stuff – the Grand Adventure (twice), Onward !, Your Awakening Body, the lot. Just like all the others, I might actually do something one day, not just sit facing the Viddy wall. I’ve already killed three people with my skimmer, but that hardly counts – they were all Senior Citizens. I mean really do something, something real, something you can’t talk yourself out of if it goes wrong (Teen skimmer accidents, for instance, are officially O.K., like beatings up).

No, I want something with meaning. Something like the 1940s, the only time I really lived and did things.

But of course I couldn’t have done those things with. . .