The Complete Short Stories

‘In a hurry, Newman?’ Stacey asked dryly. He sauntered down the aisle to Conrad, smiling sardonically. Baffled, and face reddening with embarrassment, Conrad fumbled open his exercise book, read out the prcis. A few minutes later, without waiting for the timer, Stacey dismissed the class.

‘Newman,’ he called out. ‘Here a moment.’

He rummaged behind the rostrum as Conrad approached. ‘What happened then?’ he asked. ‘Forget to wind up your watch this morning?’

Conrad said nothing. Stacey took out the timer, switched off the silencer and listened to the pip that buzzed out.

‘Where did you get it from? Your parents? Don’t worry, the Time Police were disbanded years ago.’

Conrad examined Stacey’s face carefully. ‘It was my mother’s,’ he lied. ‘I found it among her things.’ Stacey held out his hand and Conrad nervously unstrapped the watch and handed it to him.

Stacey slipped it half out of its sleeve, glanced briefly at the yellow face. ‘Your mother, you say? Hmh.’

Are you going to report me?’ Conrad asked.

‘What, and waste some over-worked psychiatrist’s time even further?’

‘Isn’t it breaking the law to wear a watch?’

‘Well, you’re not exactly the greatest living menace to public security.’ Stacey started for the door, gesturing Conrad with him. He handed the watch back. ‘Cancel whatever you’re doing on Saturday afternoon. You and I are taking a trip.’

‘Where?’ Conrad asked.

‘Back into the past,’ Stacey said lightly. ‘To Chronopolis, the Time City.’

Stacey had hired a car, a huge battered mastodon of chromium and fins. He waved jauntily to Conrad as he picked him up outside the public library.

‘Climb into the turret,’ he called out. He pointed to the bulging briefcase Conrad slung on to the seat between them. ‘Have you had a look at those yet?’

Conrad nodded. As they moved off around the deserted square he opened the briefcase and pulled out a thick bundle of road maps. ‘I’ve just worked out that the city covers over 500 square miles. I’d never realized it was so big. Where is everybody?’

Stacey laughed. They crossed the main street, cut down into a long treelined avenue of semi-detached houses. Half of them were empty, windows wrecked and roofs sagging. Even the inhabited houses had a makeshift appearance, crude water towers on home-made scaffolding lashed to their chimneys, piles of logs dumped in over-grown front gardens.

‘Thirty million people once lived in this city,’ Stacey remarked. ‘Now the population is little more than two, and still declining. Those of us left hang on in what were once the distal suburbs, so that the city today is effectively an enormous ring, five miles in width, encircling a vast dead centre forty or fifty miles in diameter.’

They wove in and out of various back roads, past a small factory still running although work was supposed to end at noon, finally picked up a long, straight boulevard that carried them steadily westwards. Conrad traced their progress across successive maps. They were nearing the edge of the annulus Stacey had described. On the map it was overprinted in green so that the central interior appeared a flat, uncharted grey, a massive terra incognita.

They passed the last of the small shopping thoroughfares he remembered, a frontier post of mean terraced houses, dismal streets spanned by massive steel viaducts. Stacey pointed up at one as they drove below it. ‘Part of the elaborate railway system that once existed, an enormous network of stations and junctions that carried fifteen million people into a dozen great terminals every day.’

For half an hour they drove on, Conrad hunched against the window, Stacey watching him in the driving mirror. Gradually, the landscape began to change. The houses were taller, with coloured roofs, the sidewalks were railed off and fitted with pedestrian lights and turnstiles. They had entered the inner suburbs, completely deserted streets with multi-level supermarkets, towering cinemas and department stores.

Chin in one hand, Conrad stared out silently. Lacking any means of transport he had never ventured into the uninhabited interior of the city, like the other children always headed in the opposite direction for the open country. Here the streets had died twenty or thirty years earlier; plate-glass shopfronts had slipped and smashed into the roadway, old neon signs, window frames and overhead wires hung down from every cornice, trailing a ragged webwork of disintegrating metal across the pavements. Stacey drove slowly, avoiding the occasional bus or truck abandoned in the middle of the road, its tyres peeling off their rims.

Conrad craned up at the empty windows, into the narrow alleys and side-streets, but nowhere felt any sensation of fear or anticipation. These streets were merely derelict, as unhaunted as a half-empty dustbin.