Molly and Rocky burst out of the waiting room and scanned the station. There was no sign of the baby snatcher. A shrill voice filled the dome of the egg building.
“Magnifloat for Vector Three. Two minutes until departure time.”
“Do you think he’s on that?” Rocky read the signs for directions. “It’s over there!” They ran toward a set of stairs and hurtled down them three steps at a time. Petula bounced around in her bag. At the bottom was an indoor platform where a tatty white bullet-shaped train had pulled up.
“He’s gone!” hissed Rocky, panicking.
“He’ll be in first class,” Molly replied.
Rapidly but calmly, so as not to draw attention to themselves, they picked their way along the platform, dodging the bustling crowd buying wonton dumplings at a kiosk and stealing quick looks inside the train.
“There he is!” Molly nodded subtly toward a seat. “I’d recognize that weird hair anywhere. Now we should get inside a different carriage.” With a swish the grubby white doors of the magnifloat opened.
“It’s got no wheels,” Rocky observed as Molly stepped inside, “which is probably how it got its name. I wonder what magni stands for—magnificent or magnet? When you put two magnets together they either stick or they move apart—they kind of hover away from each other. Maybe it’s kept up by magnets.”
Molly looked to the left, where people sat in single or double egg-shaped spaces. Some had screens pulled down in front of their faces and were watching TV. Others were staring out of the window or reading from palm-sized electronic gadgets. Most had removed their coats and wore clothes made of strange plastics or shiny nylon. Lots had muddy shoes, but Molly noticed that this didn’t make the floor dirty. For strangely the floor of the magnifloat was sucking up the dirt. She and Rocky sat down in a two-seater egg.
“What’s this thing with eggs?” Rocky wondered.
“Maybe they worship chickens,” Molly replied quietly. Then she reached into the rucksack and pulled Petula out. While she was giving her a good cuddle, there was a hiss and the magnifloat rose up off the ground.
“Prepare for departure!” the loudspeaker announced in a Chinese accent. The magnifloat purred, then started to move. It glided out of the covered station into the cold. Molly marveled at the futuristic snow-proof chalets that flashed past the window. She wondered what had happened to their home, Briersville Park.
Within seconds they had picked up speed and their surroundings became a blur. Molly and Rocky sat back in their egg seat and inspected the colored control panel. Rocky pressed a button. At once a screen flapped down in front of his eyes, displaying a choice of red squares with numbers on them. Rocky pressed number one.
USING YOUR CONTROL DISC, PRESS NUMBER OF DESIRED CHANNEL, read the screen. Finding a detachable keyboard in his left armrest, Rocky pressed number four, and at once a newsreader’s face shone out from a circle.
“Now for the weather,” said a healthy-faced woman. “It will be warmer tomorrow with temperatures of minus ten degrees Celcius, dropping to minus fifteen at night.”
“Crumbs!” said Molly. “We need to get Petula a coat. I wonder why it’s so cold here now. I mean, it’s mad—a century after our time it got boiling hot, and then a hundred and fifty years after that it’s the complete opposite.”
“Look, in the corner there’s a question box,” said Rocky. He began tapping the keypad.
The screen flashed and then answered: The period around 2100 was hot, due to massive global warming. The same global warming brought the temperatures of Africa, southern Europe, and South America to such heights that there were massive droughts. This heat melted the polar ice caps and warmed up the seas. The sea, when warm, could no longer keep the Gulf Stream running. This was a current that brought warm Caribbean seawater and good weather to northern Europe. Once the Gulf Stream stopped, northern Europe received no more warm water from the south. Instead, it got the weather it should always really have had, that of other countries with a latitude 45° North. This is how, by 2250, northern Europe has cold, cold winters and more extreme weather conditions than before. Meanwhile, the rest of Europe was not affected. Southern Europe has become so hot that it is now practically uninhabitable. Africa is a complete desert.
“Oh that’s horrible,” said Molly. “Ask it a fun question, Rocky.”
“Okay.” Rocky tapped in a question, the answer pinging up instantly.
Toilets in the year 2250 look like this. A picture of a toilet not dissimilar in shape to those in Molly and Rocky’s time appeared on the screen. There are many variations on this design. The modern toilet will weigh and analyze a person’s excretions and give a diagnosis of the person’s health, including recommendations on what fuel food that person should be eating and what fluids they should be drinking. Waste is carried to sewer power plants to convert into electricity.
“Wow!” said Molly. “A toilet that weighs your poo and tells you whether you’re eating the right food!”
“Cool,” said Rocky. “Can’t wait to try one.”
At that moment there was a bleeping noise by Molly’s leg. She jumped, then looked down and saw a low metal vacuum-cleaner-type object by her feet. The top of it suddenly lit up with the words: Magnifloat tokens, please.
“Uh-oh, I think it wants us to pay,” said Molly. She glanced about the carriage and then felt inside her new coat pocket. She pulled out a handful of glassy disks. “Whoops!” she whispered. “We took those girls’ money.” She investigated another pocket to see what else the coats held. There she found some hard disks with MAGNIFLOAT TOKEN embossed on them.
Beep, beep, beep! the little robot now beeped as if impatient. Molly held up the biggest token and, hoping it was the correct slot on the machine, pushed it in.
Destination? the screen now read.
Molly wasn’t sure. “Err. Wherever this will take us, please,” she said.
The robot whirred and then, where its tongue might have been, spat out two shiny triangular tickets.
Arrival time—ten minutes. Have a good trip. Swiveling its metal frame and extending three silver aerials on its lid, the robot whizzed off to the next passenger.
Molly looked at her hard glassy ticket. Return.
London Sheng, it read.
“Dr. Elvis might not be going there,” Molly said. “We’ll have to check on him at every station.”
“Definitely,” said Rocky. “Oh, wow, now that is what I call crazy!” he added in a whisper. Molly looked up and saw what Rocky was talking about. A woman in a turquoise jumpsuit was walking past, and trotting behind her on a lead was a dog, or was it a cat? The creature had the body of a dog but the tail and head of a cat, and it was blue.
Petula tilted her head and tried to understand its smell.
“That thing’s been genetically engineered,” Rocky said.
“Wow,” Molly exclaimed. Then a silver object outside the train caught her attention. “And how about that?” She pointed. A small machine with a woman and two children inside it was flying alongside the train. The two kids smiled and waved at Molly.
“That must be bad when they have accidents in the air!” Rocky observed. “But I wouldn’t mind having one.”
Molly and Rocky grilled the computer. They found out that the population of their country, the total number of people living there, was one quarter the size it had been in their time.
“That’s amazing,” Rocky commented. “I wonder why it shrunk.” He tapped in this question and in a millisecond had his answer. “Ah, so people had fewer babies, that’s why, and—Oh no!”
“What?”
“There was a flu plague that wiped out millions and millions of people!”
“Crumbs!”
Rocky asked the screen more.
“And look …” he said. “Look how much of the rain forest has been wiped out! It says,” Rocky continued, “‘Since the destruction of the rain forest, thousands of miles of green algae are now grown on all the seas to make oxygen for humans to breathe.’ Not very nice for swimming.”
“But nice for breathing,” Molly pointed out.
They also found out that the language in their country had changed. It now had lots of Chinese words in it because Chinese people and their culture had spread all over the globe.
“‘Dishes like bird’s nest soup and bamboo shoots, bean curd, and noodles are very popular,’” Rocky read. “‘The knife and fork are things of the past. People eat with chopsticks.’”
“I’m useless with chopsticks,” said Molly. “I can never get the food to my mouth.”
“So you’d be even skinnier if you lived now.”
Petula smelled the catty-doggy creature and felt very disoriented. She didn’t understand the scents of this place. So many were the same and yet slightly different. She was still getting whiffs of the sinister man, two carriages in front, holding the Molly-smelling baby. The sourness coming from him made her feel very uneasy. Again she desperately tried to send a message to Molly to take them all home.
Please let’s go back, she begged with a quiet bark.
Molly stroked Petula’s forehead. “Don’t worry,” she said, giving her dog a squeeze.
Ten minutes later the magnifloat was nearing another station—a city station. They approached a mass of tall, ice-crusted buildings surrounding frozen lakes. Molly put Petula back into the rucksack. “Sorry,” she apologized, giving the pug’s ears a gentle rub.
The magnifloat doors opened and Molly and Rocky stepped out into the freezing city. As they did, there was a hissing noise and their new coats did a miraculous thing: Each puffed up so that the smooth velvet was now a mass of thick, bristly fur.
“Whoa! Cool design,” Rocky exclaimed, patting his chest. But they didn’t stop to marvel at the coats for long, because the snatcher, instead of walking toward the escalators with all the other passengers, began heading toward an orange robotic station cleaner that was scrubbing the floor.
“Grab my arm, Rocky, if you don’t want to get left behind.” Instinctively Molly reached for her gems. In the next second the man with the quiff reached for his. Quickly, Molly sent out another time-travel lasso to follow him. With another BOOM, Molly, Rocky, and Petula were whipped out of that time, and the platform was suddenly left bare.
On the other side of the magnifloat tracks, a shriveled hundred-and-sixty-year-old man saw them go. He smiled and shook his head. Science was amazing, he thought. Next time he traveled he would buy whatever ticket those children had bought.
“Where’s he going?” Molly exclaimed in a whisper. The world whisked past them, billions of its seconds flitting by in a moment. “Feels like two hundred years have passed!” she declared with horror. “Two hundred and fifty!” And then they stopped, half a millennium away from their own time. “We’ve gone forward five hundred years!”
Molly and Rocky were stunned. The station had metamorphosed into some kind of airport. Sleek jet planes parked in neat lines stretched away into the distance. The snatcher made his way toward an aircraft that bore a resemblance to a fly. He was climbing its steps and nodding at the pilot.
Molly quickly lifted herself, Rocky, and Petula, into a time hover. In this state they were just a few seconds behind the man’s time, and although they could easily see their surroundings, no one could see them.
They ran to the insectlike plane. Hurriedly they mounted the stairs and walked straight through the man, who was speaking into some sort of device on his sleeve.
“This is so weird,” said Molly. “Where is he going? And why?”
Rocky shrugged, shook his head, and looked about the aircraft.
An air hostess in a tailored purple uniform and a purple and white skullcap stood in the plane’s aisle. Her hair was short and functional. Her eyes were vacant, as if there was nobody in. Molly instantly recognized the signs—she had been hypnotized. Her purple outfit, with its tailored cropped top, elbow-length sleeves, and tight purple skirt showed her belly button. To the left, in the fly’s eye part of the plane, was a pilot also in purple. Still in their time-hover bubble, Molly and Rocky stepped past a round-faced elderly Chinese woman with blue eyes.
“Where shall we hide?” Molly whispered, her heart pounding. “I think we should materialize soon, as I’m not sure I’ll be able to time-hover on board a fast-moving object.”
Rocky nodded. “How about that luggage cubicle? Shall we risk it?”
So the two got as comfortable as they could behind a suitcase and Molly brought them into the moment. Immediately their ears were bombarded with the noises of the airport and the hum of the aircraft’s air-conditioning. Molly kept a tight hold on both her crystals and on Rocky’s arm, in case they needed to disappear again in a hurry. The man appeared in the entrance to the aircraft.
Through a gap between the seats, Molly saw the Chinese woman leaping to attention. The snatcher passed her the baby.
“It’s a boy,” he said. “Could have been a girl—there were two of them. You’re in charge of it now.”
“What a sweet little dumpling you are. What an angel,” the woman gushed.
“Hope you’re not talking to me,” the man with the quiff replied with a conceited laugh. Then he settled into a large reclining seat in front of hers and pressed a button to make it flat. Slipping a blackout visor over his eyes, he lay down.
The woman bent over the baby boy and smiled and cooed at him even though he was still asleep. “I’m so pleased to meet you,” she said fondly. “Now, you’d better go in this cot.”
Molly gave Rocky a perplexed look. The woman had evidently been expecting the baby. She seemed to be some sort of nanny. Where were they all going? Molly didn’t like it. Things were getting more and more mysterious.
Now a sign at the front of the plane flashed: BUCKLE UP SEATBELTS, and the flight attendant with the empty eyes checked that all passengers were secure before she sat down too. The engine started. When it reached a peak of whirring the aircraft pivoted on its wheels and headed toward a runway. There, the engines picked up more speed, until they made a zinging noise.
Takeoff was like going up in a fast elevator. Like a jack released from its box, the flying machine shot up in the air. Molly’s stomach felt as though she’d left it on the runway. She nearly screamed. Squashed in their cubicle, she and Rocky looked out the window at the twenty-sixth century world below. It was a scene of pine trees and snow and frozen lakes. Molly could hardly believe how her country had changed. People living here now would ski and skate and sledge. As they flew over domes and skyscrapers they passed other buglike aircraft. Below them were tiny flying machines that seemed to be coasting at the height of houses. Then they came to the sea. The flycopter tilted upward, and a red light on the seat displays read: Propellers folding. Wings unfolding. There was a loud kerrrchank noise on either side of the aircraft. And then, with the red signs warning Upward thrust, a huge jet engine sound whooshed from the back of the plane, and they shot up into the sky. When they were high above the clouds the plane leveled out and accelerated. They were heading somewhere very, very fast.
“We’re heading southeast,” Rocky said, examining his compass.
After fifteen minutes, the clouds cleared and the earth below became visible again. It was now snowless, and they were whizzing over mountains. The pilot’s voice came over the loudspeaker: “Mont Blanc approaching. Five minutes till landing.” The red signs flashed: Downward motion, and on time the aircraft tipped its nose to start circling toward the ground.
“Mont Blanc?” Rocky whispered. “If that’s Mont Blanc, this is Switzerland and those mountains are the Alps. But they’ve usually got snow on them, even in summer, and in winter they should look like white meringues and should be covered in skiers and snow-boarders.” Molly peered out of the window. They were approaching a vast, gray mountain range with a huge, moatlike lake around the bottom of the biggest mountain. Rocky went on. “And that lake must be Lake Geneva. But I don’t remember it being nearly as big as that in my atlas.”
Propellers up, the warning signs declared. Again there was a kerrrchank as the aircraft converted itself from plane to helicopter.
Now they were closer to Mont Blanc, Molly saw it was no ordinary mountain. Fantastic silver buildings with turrets were jutting out of the top of it, and its side bore holes through which flycopters were entering and exiting, looking like bees buzzing to and from a hive. But the aircraft they were in wasn’t going to the grand mountaintop city. Instead, it approached the lake at the foot of it, where there was another sparkling city. Some of the houses were palatial, surrounded by beautiful gardens with pools and tall trees. Around these smart houses were lush green fields dissected by small roads, paths, and canals and punctuated with tiny ponds and a few simple buildings. But this expanse of greenness wasn’t everywhere. Beyond the massive lake was another town, a scruffy place with colored houses and bare, arid scrubland stretching away into the distance.
The flycopter buzzed toward the biggest of all the palaces, bringing them directly over a circular targetlike landing pad. Then it descended.
“At last,” said the man with the quiff, slipping off his eye visor. “Hope Her Little Highness appreciates this.”