Johnny and the Bomb by Terry Pratchett Read Free Book Online Page B

in the cement,” he said. “They’ve been…there…ages…”
    Kasandra knelt down to look at the footprints he’d been standing in. They were ingrained with dust and dirt, but she made him take off his sneaker and held it upside down by the print.
    It matched exactly.
    “See?” she said triumphantly. “You’re standing in your own footprints.”
    Johnny stepped gingerly aside and looked at the footprints where he’d been standing. There was no doubt they’d been there a long time.
    “Where did you go?”
    “Back in time…I think. There was a man building this place, and a dog.”
    “A dog,” said Kasandra. Her voice suggested that she would have seen something much more interesting. “Oh, well. It’s a start.”
    She shifted the cart. It was standing in four small grooves in the concrete. They were dirty and oily. They’d been there a long time too.
    “This,” said Kasandra, “is no ordinary shopping cart.”
    “It’s got Tesco written on it,” Johnny pointed out, hopping up and down as he replaced his shoe. “And a squeaky wheel.”
    “Obviously it’s still switched on or something,” Kasandra went on, ignoring him.
    “And that’s time travel, is it?” said Johnny. “I thought it’d be more exciting. You know—battles and monsters and things? And it’s not much fun if all we can do is—Don’t touch it!”
    Kasandra prodded a bag.
    The air flickered and changed.
    Kasandra looked around her. The garage hadn’t changed in any way. Except—
    “Who repaired your bike?” she said.
    Johnny turned. His bike was no longer upside down with a wheel off but leaning against the wall, both tires quite full.
    “You see, I notice things,” said Kasandra. “I am remarkably observant. We must have gone into the future, when you’ve mended it.”
    Johnny wasn’t sure. He’d torn three inner tubes already, plus he’d also lost the thingy from the inside of the valve. Probably no time machine could ever go so far into the future that he’d be good at cycle repair.
    “Let’s have a look around,” said Kasandra. “Obviously where we go is controlled by some factor I haven’t discovered yet. If we’re in the future, the important thing is to find out which horses are going to win races, and so on.”
    “Why?”
    “So we can bet money on them and become rich, of course.”
    “I don’t know how to bet!”
    “One problem at a time.”
    Johnny looked though the grimy window. The weather didn’t look very different. There were no flying cars or other definite signs of futurosity. But Guilty was no longer under the bench.
    “Granddad has a racing paper,” he said, feeling a bit light-headed.
    “Let’s go, then.”
    “What? Into my house?”
    “Of course.”
    “Supposing I meet me?”
    “Well, you’ve always been good at making friends.”
    Reluctantly, Johnny led the way out of the garage. Garden paths in the future, he noted, were made of some gritty gray substance that was amazingly like cracked concrete. Back doors were an excitingly futuristic faded blue color, with little dried flakes where the paint had bubbled up. His was locked, but his ancient key still fitted.
    There was a rectangle on the floor consisting of spiky brown hairs. He wiped his feet on it, and looked at the time measurement module on the wall. It said ten past three.
    The future was amazingly like the present.
    “Now we’ve got to find a newspaper,” said Kasandra.
    “It won’t be a lot of help,” said Johnny. “Granddad keeps them around until he’s got time to read them. They go back months. Anyway, everything’s normal. This doesn’t look very futuristic to me.”
    “Don’t you even have a calendar?”
    “Yes. There’s one on my bedside clock. I just hope I’m at school, that’s all.”
    According to the clock, it was the third of October.
    “The day before yesterday,” said Johnny. “Mind you, it could be the clock. It doesn’t work very well.”
    “Yuk. You sleep in here?” said