Odd things happened in Blackbury. Things like this . . .
One bright Friday morning only a few years ago a man in a bright-yellow jacket and safety helmet came to see Professor Miriam Oxford, curator of the Blackbury Museum.
“Good morning,” he said, “I’m Fred Robertson, and I’m the foreman up at the sand and gravel quarry on Even Moor. We thought you’d like to see this.”
He opened the bag he was carrying and plonked a huge great fossil shell on the professor’s desk. (The fossil was one of those curly ones, like a snail shell.)
“What a fine specimen!” said Professor Oxford.
“Yes, but you listen to it,” said Fred.
“Listen to it? Oh, you mean like we used to do with the seashells when we were kids? Well, that’s a lot of nonsense, really.”
But Professor Oxford listened. Now, if you put a seashell to your ear you hear the sound of the sea. You know that. So if it’s a fossilized seashell you can hear the sound of the sea as it was millions of years ago, when the waves broke on strange and curious seashores. And the professor heard the ancient sea, and the puffing and grunting of reptiles on the shore, and the cries of things which surely couldn’t have been seagulls.
“You listen on,” said Fred. “You ain’t heard nothing yet.”
With her mouth open the professor went on listening. And above the pounding of the surf she heard a voice, singing “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?”*
She began to sing along with the voice:
“He’s as bad as old Antonio,
Left me on my own-ee-o,
Has anybody here seen Kelly?
Kelly from the Isle—”
She stopped, remembering how she couldn’t really sing very well.† “Incredible!” she said.
“That’s what we all thought,” said Fred. “Sometimes he sings, and sometimes he whistles. That’s not all we found. Look here.” He produced a pair of fossilized sunglasses and a fossilized copy of the BLACKBURY AND WEST GRITSHIRE GAZETTE, dated next Monday. The paper was hard as a lump of slate, but you could still just make out the writing.
“They were with the shell,” said Fred.
“Well, I’ve never—” began the professor.
There was suddenly a terrific commotion in the street outside. There was a prehistoric monster walking down the High Street! It was slightly transparent—walking through things without harming them—but of course, that’s no great consolation. It was only there for a few minutes before it went fuzzy and vanished.
“Hmm, a triceratops,” said the professor. “A harmless herbivore—it eats veg, I mean. What’s going on?”
After that first day some very odd things started to happen around Blackbury. There was the static electricity, for one thing. It didn’t hurt anybody, but everything in the town sometimes hummed and crackled as though it was in a thunderstorm. And several times ghostly prehistoric monsters wandered through the town as if it wasn’t there, like great big ghosts.
And sometimes from the fossilized seashell on Professor Oxford’s desk would come the voice of someone singing “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” on an ancient and far-off seashore.
The professor called a special meeting.
“There’s no doubt about it,” she said. “The fossilized newspaper we found proved it. Someone has gone back in time millions of years, probably to where the sand and gravel quarry is now. You’ve found some other fossils, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” said Fred Robertson, the site foreman. “Yesterday we found a fossilized deck chair. This bloke must have left it there. But the oddest thing is up at the site. You’d better come and look.”
They went up to the quarry on the mysterious Even Moor—and there they saw the seashore.
Millions of years before there had been a muddy sea over most of what was now South Gritshire, and the shore had come up to Even Moor. Then it had hardened into stone. It was quite usual for quarry workers to find dinosaur footprints in it. But what Fred pointed out was the fossilized footprint of a left-hand Wellington boot.
“That settles it,” said Miriam Oxford. “Someone from our time has discovered some kind of time travel. Just think of the possibilities for science! We’ve got to find them!” She stared around. There was only one house near the quarry.
“That belongs to old Bill Posters,” said Fred. “He’s an old-age pensioner. I shouldn’t think he knows anything about this. He collects butterflies, you know.”
“Hush!” hissed the professor.
From the cottage suddenly came the sound of someone whistling a familiar tune—“Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?”
“It’s him!” shouted the professor, dashing toward the cottage and banging on the door. Immediately her hair stood on end and blue sparks flashed from her fingers.
Then she realized that the door wasn’t really locked. Inside, the cottage was dark and rather dusty and full of ornaments. An old-fashioned television was on in the corner, but its screen was all crackly and fuzzy, as though it wasn’t tuned in properly. There were the remains of someone’s breakfast—a boiled egg—on the table, and a white cat was dozing in front of the fire.
Professor Oxford stormed around the house. There was no one there. Then she heard the singing again. It seemed to be coming from outside the back door this time, so she wrenched it open—and stepped out into blazing sunlight.
She was standing on a beach of orange sand.
A sluggish, muddy sea broke on the shore, and in the yellow sky the sun looked white and bigger than usual. There were gray cliffs in the distance, and, not far from the shore, something big and finny was wallowing in the sea.
The professor still had her hand on the door handle. She hurriedly stepped back, slammed the door behind herself, and then leaned against it.
“Now, I must think slowly about this,” she said to herself. “Here is a kitchen. It’s musty and rather dark, and this is the twenty-first century, and this is twenty-one miles from the sea.”
She opened the door a crack. Where the gray fields of Even Moor should have been the sea was still rolling in.
“But that looks very much like millions of years ago,” she said in wonder.
“I say! Hello there!” shouted a man who was paddling in the sea. He had his trousers rolled up to his knees, a handkerchief knotted on his head, and a butterfly net in his hand.
Professor Oxford stepped through the door again and onto the sand. The man with the butterfly net came trotting toward her and shook her hand.
“Well well well,” he said. “Do you know, you’re the first person I’ve seen for days!”
“You must be Bill Posters,” said the professor.
“That’s me!” said Bill Posters. “I say, there’s some yellow butterflies over here with wings almost a meter across—very odd.”
As they walked across the sand, the professor gazed intently at lizards and shells, and at last she said, “This proves it. Your back door somehow opens onto a beach several hundred million years ago! I doubt if there are even any dinosaurs yet.”
“Amazing,” said Bill Posters. “You know, I’ve wondered a bit myself. I thought at first this was some kind of South Sea island.”
A giant blue-and-green dragonfly swooped overhead.
“It’s my old television that caused this, I think,” said Bill. “Did you see it on when you went indoors? There was a sizzling noise in it the other week and now every time you switch it on you get all this”—he waved an arm at the sea, sand, and yellow sky—“just outside the back door.”
A small blue beetle trotted over the sand. The sun was very hot.
“Of course, if anyone was to switch it off while we were here we could be stuck,” said Bill Posters conversationally.
They glanced back at the hazy outline of the cottage on the beach. And inside, as the worried men from the quarry came in to look for the professor, one of them turned the fuzzy television off. The cottage disappeared.
“Oh dear,” said Bill Posters.
Well, at first it wasn’t too bad. They made a fire out of dried seaweed and ferns, and scraped giant limpets off the rocks to make a fish stew which was really rather good. The sun set and the stars came out—and they were a lot brighter and quite different from the ones we get today. Bill sang his favorite song again, and they fell into a peaceful sleep.
Next morning they thought they had better explore in case there were any dangerous animals around. The great young sun blazed down as they strolled along the beach, and odd winged lizards whizzed overhead. Everything was very fresh and new. Out in the sea curious sea creatures snorted and splashed.
“This would be just the place to retire to,” said Bill Posters.
The professor grunted. She was really more interested in filling her pockets with shells and stones and bits of grass and thinking of the enormously interesting scientific things she’d be able to do if ever she got back to Blackbury University.
Around lunchtime they clambered over some rocks at the end of the bay, and Bill Posters wiped his brow and said, “I’d really like a glass of lemonade about now.”
And in front of them they saw, up against a gray cliff, a pub. It was thatched. Roses grew around the door. There was a painted sign in front of it which said “The Dog and Dinosaur.”
“It’s the sun,” said Professor Oxford. “It’s affecting our heads. That is a figment of our imagination.”
“Well, I’m going to have a figment of iced lemonade,” said Bill, and set off at a trot.
Inside the Dog and Dinosaur it was cool and dim, and a little man in a white coat was polishing glasses behind the bar.
“Good morning,” he said conversationally. “Another lovely day. Of course, it always is here. When are you from?”
The professor and Bill Posters looked out at the gray sea and the big young sun.
“Er . . . what do you mean, when are we from?” asked the professor after a pause.
The barman of the Dog and Dinosaur said, “Don’t you know? How did you get here? Wonky-television method, I suppose. Oh. Here, you’re not Bill Posters, are you?”
Bill said yes because things had got beyond him.
The barman grinned and shook their hands. Then he explained how Bill’s discovery that a wonky television could produce time traveling had become world famous. And once the doors to time travel were opened, why, everyone wanted to have a go too.
He himself was from 2055, said the barman, and by his time millions of people were time traveling. That was why he had opened his pub in the Carbonaceous age.
“Most people spend their holidays in the Jurassic period,” he added. “The dinosaurs, you know. Interesting. Very popular.* We really get more senior citizens here, like your good old selves. It’s so peaceful. Nothing much is due to happen on this stretch of seashore for another million years.”
“I say, can you get us back home?” asked the professor.
“Of course,” said the barman. “But come back soon. Bring some friends!” He twiddled a dial on a shelf, there was a slight zipppp!, and the familiar outline of Even Moor, all gray and heathery, appeared in a doorway.
A moment after they stepped through they were alone. And then they were back in Bill’s kitchen.
Well, everything that happened next had to happen. Soon a party of scientists from Blackbury University were studying Bill’s wonky television to find out how the time traveling worked. Miriam Oxford spent a lot of time on news programs too, explaining it all.
And Bill Posters?
He disappeared mysteriously, leaving a little note that only the professor understood. It said:
I’m going for a drink and a bit of peace and quiet where there’s no hubbub . . . at the Dog and Dinosaur.