A Tale of Time City. Diana Wynne Jones

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      I’d better not get mixed up in that, Vivian thought. That was one worry she could avoid. She hung back in the middle of the platform, hoping Cousin Marty would realise.

      But none of the waiting crowd looked at her. “I’m not having all the dirty ones!” someone was saying, and this seemed to be taking everyone’s attention. “Give me two clean and I’ll take two dirty to make four. Otherwise I’m leaving.”

      Vivian began to suspect that her worry about her Cousin Marty not being there was going to be the right one. She pressed her mouth against her teeth in order not to cry – or not to cry yet.

      A hand reached round Vivian and spread out the label on the string bag. “Ah!” said someone. “Vivian Smith!”

      Vivian whirled round. She found herself facing a lordly-looking dark boy in glasses. He was taller than she was and old enough to wear long trousers, which meant he must be at least a year older than she was. He smiled at her, which made his eyes under his glasses fold in a funny way along the eyelids.

      “Vivian Smith,” he said, “you may not realise this, but I am your long-lost cousin.”

      Well, Vivian thought, I suppose Marty is a boy’s name. “Are you sure?” she said. “Cousin Marty?”

      “No, my name’s Jonathan Walker,” said the boy. “Jonathan Lee Walker.”

      The way he put in that Lee made it clear he was very proud of it for some reason. But Vivian knew there was something peculiar about this boy, something not as it should be that she could not pin down, and she was far too worried to wonder about his name. “It’s a mistake!” she said frantically. “I was supposed to meet Cousin Marty!”

      “Cousin Marty’s waiting outside,” Jonathan Lee Walker said soothingly. “Let me take your bag.” He put out his hand. Vivian snatched the string bag out of his way and he picked up her suitcase from the platform instead and marched away with it across the station.

      Vivian hurried after him, with her gas mask banging at her back, to rescue her suitcase. He strode straight to the Waiting Room and opened the door. “Where are you going?” Vivian panted.

      “Short cut, my dear V.S.,” he said, holding the door open with a soothing smile.

      “Give me my suitcase!” Vivian said, grabbing for it. Now she was sure he was a robber. But as soon as she was through the door, Jonathan Lee Walker went galloping noisily across the bare boards of the little room towards the blank back wall.

      “Bring us back, Sam!” he shouted, so that the room rang. Vivian decided he was mad, and grabbed for her suitcase again. And suddenly everything turned silvery.

      “Where is this?” Vivian said. They were crowding one another in a narrow silvery space like a very smooth telephone booth. Vivian turned desperately to get out again and knocked a piece of what seemed to be the telephone off the wall. Jonathan whirled round like lightning and slammed the piece back. Vivian felt her gas mask dig into him and hoped it hurt. There was nothing but a bare silvery wall behind her.

      In front of Jonathan, the smooth silvery surface slid away sideways. A small boy with longish nearly-red hair looked anxiously in at them. When he saw Vivian, his face relaxed into a fierce grin with two large teeth in it. “You got her!” he said, and he took what may have been an earphone out of his left ear. It was not much bigger than a pea, but it had a silvery wire connecting it to the side of the silver booth, so Vivian supposed it was an earphone. “This works,” he said, coiling the wire into one rather plump hand. “I heard you easily.”

      “And I got her, Sam!” Jonathan answered jubilantly, stepping out of the silver booth. “I recognised her and I got her, right from under their noses!”

      “Great!” said the small boy. He said to Vivian, “And now we’re going to torture you until you tell us what we want to know!”

      Vivian stood in the booth, clutching her string bag, staring at him with a mixture of dislike and amazement. Sam was the sort of small boy Mum called “rough” – the kind with a loud voice and heavy shoes whose shoelaces were always undone. Her eyes went to his shoes – such shoes! – puffy white footgear with red dots. Sure enough, one of the red and white ties of those shoes was trailing on the marble floor. Above that, Sam seemed to be wearing pyjamas. That was the only way Vivian could describe his baggy all-over suit with its one red stripe from his right shoulder to his left ankle. The red clashed with his hair, to Vivian’s mind, and she had never seen a boy so much in need of a haircut.

      “I told you, Sam,” Jonathan said, dumping Vivian’s suitcase on a low table Vivian could dimly see behind Sam, “that it’s no good thinking of torture. She probably knows enough to torture us instead. We’re going to try gentle persuasion. Do please come out of the booth, V.S., and take a seat while I get out of this disguise.”

      Vivian took another look at the blank, shiny back wall of the booth. Since there seemed no way out that way, she went forward. Sam backed away from her looking just a mite scared, and that made her feel better, until the door of the booth slid shut behind her with a quiet hushing sound and cut out most of the light in the room beyond. It seemed to be night out there, which was probably what had given her the idea that Sam was running around in pyjamas.

      What dim light there was came from some kind of street lights shining through a peculiar-shaped window, but there was enough of it for Vivian to see she was in some kind of ultra-modern office. There was a vast half-circle of desk at the far end, surrounded by things that reminded Vivian of a telephone-exchange. But the odd thing was that the desk, instead of being of steel or chromium as she would have expected a modern desk to be, was made of beautifully carved wood that looked very old and gave off silky reflections in the low bluish light. Vivian looked at it doubtfully as she sat in an odd-shaped chair near the booth. And she nearly leaped straight up again when the chair moved around her, settling into the same shape that she was.

      But Jonathan started tearing off his clothes then, right in front of her. Vivian sat stiffly in the form-fitting chair wondering if she was mad, or if Jonathan was, or if she ought to look away, or what. He flung off his grey flannel jacket first. Then he undid his striped tie and threw that down. Then – Vivian’s face turned half away sideways – he climbed out of his long grey flannel trousers. But it was all right. Underneath, Jonathan was wearing the same kind of suit as Sam, except that his had dark-coloured diamonds down the legs and sleeves.

      “Great Time!” he said, as he dropped the trousers on top of the jacket. “These clothes are vile! They prickle me even through my suit. How do Twenty Century people bear it? Or these?” He plucked his glasses off his nose and pressed a knob on the belt that went round his suit. A flicker sprang into being across his eyes, shifting queerly in the blue light. The fold in his eyelids was much plainer to see like that. Vivian saw that Sam had the same fold. “A sight function is so much simpler,” Jonathan said. He pulled the striped school cap off his head and let about a foot of plaited hair tumble out of it across his shoulder. “That’s better!” he said as he hurled the cap down too and rubbed his neck under the pigtail to loosen the tight hair there.

      Vivian stared. Never had she seen a boy with such long hair! In fact, she had a vague notion that boys were born with their hair short back and sides and that only girls had hair that grew long. But Jonathan had twice as much hair as she had. Perhaps he was Chinese and she had been spirited away to the Orient. But Sam was not Chinese. Whoever heard of a red-haired Chinaman?

      “Who are you?” she said. “Where is this?”

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