AS GERTIE STOOD in the pouring rain, watching Kolt fiddle with the lock of an old green car, she discovered quickly that her North African linen cloak was not waterproof.
“Blast this thing!” Kolt muttered. “Of all the times it has to jam!”
“So where’s the time machine?” Gertie asked, trying not to shiver as rain lashed her bare legs. Kolt looked up from his jiggling of the door handle.
“You’re looking at it,” he said, extending his arms. “This is the amazing one and only Time Cat.”
As if the old green automobile heard the compliment—the door suddenly swung open. Gertie and Kolt clambered inside, completely soaked.
“Despite the tricky handle,” Kolt said, water dripping off the end of his nose, “the Time Cat is quite brilliant and has only let me down 397 times.”
“That seems like a lot.”
Kolt chuckled. “Not for a British car, Gertie—it might even be a record.”
“So now we just drive back to Earth?”
“Er, not exactly, but the fact that you know what a car and driving both are is a great clue because if you were from the 1800s, you might see this as some kind of horseless carriage, or if you’d come from the thirty-fifth century, you’d have no idea what it was—except for maybe one of those mobile, automated dental surgeries that crawl through cities searching for people with bad teeth. The fact you know this is a car tells me you’re from the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, which narrows it down to about two hundred years!”
“Why do you call it the Time Cat?”
“Because it’s a feline of sorts, as this particular motor vehicle is from England, where it was known as a Jaguar—which is a rather ferocious sort of cat. The actual time machine is nothing more than a small plain wooden box created from inside the B.D.B.U. with a space for your key. It’s in the glove compartment if you want to take a look.”
Gertie pushed the button, then opened the varnished wooden door. Inside she found a small wooden box, barely large enough for a keyhole.
“Take out the time machine,” Kolt said. “Do you have your key?”
Gertie checked her pockets, but she had left it in her denim overalls, which were hanging up in the Sock Drawer.
“Well, never mind,” Kolt said. “We’ll use mine as we’re in a hurry, but in the future you must never forget to bring your own key.”
“I promise,” Gertie said.
Kolt hesitated for a moment.
“It hurts me to say it, but a few decades ago, an inexperienced and nervous Keeper made the grave mistake of getting snatched without his key and time machine, which is why the Losers can now travel to any point in history that Vispoth decides is where they can cause most trouble.”
“Vispoth is the Losers’ totally insane supercomputer?”
“Well remembered, though for a long time my lost time machine and key wouldn’t work for them. The B.D.B.U. must have simply shut them down—but then the Losers fed them into Vispoth and it found a way to link the multiverse compass with the graviton bridge, thus overriding the B.D.B.U. Still, the Losers can only go where Vispoth sends them.”
The rain was now like a river on the windshield of the Time Cat. For a moment, Gertie thought the sea was upon them, and at any second they might be washed off the cliff. Kolt was still fiddling with the controls, pushing buttons and turning knobs.
“Is a little air conditioning too much to ask?” he shouted at the spinning dials. “Come on!”
“How are we going to drive in this weather?”
“We don’t drive on Skuldark,” Kolt explained. “I modified this old but rather striking automobile so that we could drive once we get to the other side of the graviton bridge, which connects our dimension to the dimension on Earth where the object is going.”
“So will I learn how to drive the Time Cat?”
“Technically, you don’t need the Time Cat, Gertie, just the time machine. Simply insert your key into the little box, put the box anywhere on your person, then within a few seconds, the B.D.B.U. sends you where you need to be.
“However . . .” Kolt went on, still pushing buttons on the dashboard of the old car. “Either accidentally or on purpose, that demented old book, every now and then, has sent me to the completely wrong place. I once showed up on the wing of a fighter jet dressed in the donkey costume of a dancing boy from the court of Queen Cassandane Shahbanu. You should have seen the pilot’s face when I waved hello.”
Then Kolt demonstrated how to check the Time Cat’s power by tapping a round gauge with a white needle.
“Sometimes it sticks,” he said. “But I’ve adapted the car to run on Skuldarkian seawater. If you ever forget to check the levels and run out of juice somewhere in time, grab the time machine from the glove box, insert your key into the lock, say the Keeper’s motto, It could always be worse, and you’ll be back home in no time at all. The Time Cat has a way of finding its own way home—as without the time machine, it’s technically lost—though I’ve never worked out how it learned to park itself in the garden every time.”
Just then, sparks exploded from a nest of exposed wires under the steering wheel.
“Aarggh!” Kolt shouted. “With a classic like this, Gertie, there’s always something in need of fixing. Rome wasn’t built in a day—though I sometimes wish it hadn’t been built at all!”
As Kolt entered the time coordinates on the dashboard, orange numbers flashed on a screen in the middle of the steering wheel.
An explosion of thunder ripped the sky in two—but Gertie felt safe inside the Time Cat with the Persea branch in her cloak. There was even carpet, and a glass case on the backseat with EMERGENCY PEACH CAKE AND MOONBERRY JUICE written on the outside.
When Kolt fed his key into the tiny time machine, the Time Cat began rattling violently. “I’m rather attached to this old thing, which is against Keeper policy, but I’ll explain that later.”
“What’s happening?” Gertie said. “Why is it shaking so much?”
“That’ll be the photon relay warming up. I like to think of it more as a purring, actually. . . .”
Then, with an intense fizzing sensation, an ear-shattering pop, more violent rattling, a scream of excitement from Gertie, and the side mirror falling off—they disappeared.