THE H-BOMB GIRL, Stephen Baxter [ereader for android txt] 📗

this rotten communication.” He sighed. “I don’t believe anybody really wants to go to war. But the next twenty-four hours will be critical.”

Black Saturday, Laura thought. “Dad—”

But the phone started beeping in her ear, and though she tried to cram in more money, she got no more time.

Laura held on to the handset, even when it fell silent. She didn’t want to face Joel. Hearing Dad’s voice for the first time in days affected her more than she expected. After all, last night she’d read about how he was due to die, when the first wave of Russian missiles landed on the military targets on Sunday morning, less than forty-eight hours from now. And she hadn’t even been able to tell him goodbye.

Joel said, “Hey, look.”

Something glinted in the sky. It was a milk bottle, filled with some brownish fluid, with a bit of burning cotton wool stuck in the neck. Spinning over the roof of a house, it looked quite beautiful.

The bottle landed, and fire splashed over the road.

“A Molotov cocktail,” Joel said. “You wonder where they got the petrol.”

A mob erupted from an alleyway only fifty yards from the phone kiosks. They threw rocks and bricks, and waved crowbars and wrenches, and hurled more petrol-bombs. As they ran into the road a force of police came the other way. In their helmets and black uniforms the scuffers ran in formation, with bits of wood held in front of them, improvised shields.

The rioters were mostly men, young and angry, but there were some older men, a few women, and even kids, ten or eleven or twelve. All hungry, Laura supposed, all frightened.

Joel said, “Those scuffers haven’t got their numbers on their coats. That’s against the law.”

The two forces clashed in the middle of the road. Rioters fell under blows from truncheons, but the police were being battered as well. One scuffer went down, his uniform on fire. The fires from the petrol bombs started to gather together into a major blaze.

A shell whistled up into the air from the police lines. It landed among the rioters and white gas splashed.

“Tear gas,” Laura said. She took a handkerchief from her blazer pocket and stuck it over her mouth, and pulled Joel away.

As they ran back to their hole in the ground, she heard the muffled pops of gunfire.

Lunch was more tinned rice, tinned beans, black tea.

Joel sat alone, eating his lunch in the shadows. Bern cradled Nick, who was sleeping again, his hands clamped around his head. Bern had barely said a word all day.

Laura sat with Mum and Agatha. “We’ve got family business to sort out. And you need to know who we’re hiding from, Mum.”

At last, she tried to explain the whole truth to Mum.

“So let me get this straight,” Mum said. “Miss Wells, your teacher, is actually yourself, from the future. The year two thousand and something.”

“2007,” said Agatha.

“I think so.”

“And you,” Mum turned to Agatha, “are Laura’s daughter. My granddaughter. And, you say, you’re older than me. But you won’t even be born until 1967. Five years from now.”

Agatha just looked back steadily.

“And you grew up after an atomic war.” Mum, on impulse, cupped Agatha’s cheek. “You poor thing. You’ve had a rotten life, haven’t you? That’s why you’re so—joyless.”

Agatha closed her eyes and leaned into Mum’s hand.

Laura stared. “You’re taking this very calmly, Mum.”

She shot back, “You don’t think much of your mother, do you, Laura? I’m not some sort of imbecile. This business of time travel. I did watch Quatermass, you know. And a couple of years ago there was that rather good film with Rod Taylor. What was it called?”

“The Time Machine,” Nick said. His voice was muffled by his hands.

Laura turned. “I didn’t know you were awake.”

“I’m not,” Nick said. “I just fancied Rod Taylor.”

Mum said, “As for all this business of meeting a granddaughter who’s older than me, if you’re brought up a Catholic you get used to believing two impossible things before breakfast. Compared to the Mystery of the Holy Trinity, a time-travel paradox is a piece of cake!” She actually laughed. “But there are some things I don’t understand.”

Laura nodded. “Like what?”

“You said Miss Wells is your future self.” She turned to Agatha. “That would make Miss Wells your mother, wouldn’t it? And,” she said to Laura, “the diary says you, well, darling, you die, in 1970. You’d only be about twenty-two. So how could you live to be sixty-something to become Miss Wells, and come back here in a time machine?”

Laura opened her mouth, and closed it. “I hadn’t thought of that.” She hadn’t put all these things together, the presence of Miss Wells, Agatha, her own death in the diary. “I suppose I’m not used to thinking this way.”

“There’s no paradox,” Agatha said. “Miss Wells is your future self. But she’s not the future self who became my mother.”

Mum asked, “How can that be? You’re both from the future.”

“But from different futures.”

“Woah,” Nick called weakly. “I think we just crashed through another conceptual barrier.”

Laura tried to get her head around this. “OK. OK. Agatha, you came back from your atom-war future.”

“We say, the ‘Sunday War timeline’,” Agatha said.

“But Miss Wells isn’t from that timeline,” Joel called over. “She’s from a different timeline. Is that right? What kind of future is that?”

“You’d have to ask Miss Wells.”

Mum said, “If you’re all from these different timelines, how can you all be coming back to the same place? Liverpool 1962?”

“Because this is where they all branch off from,” Agatha said. “All the histories.”

Laura thought she understood. The timelines were like roads leading off from a roundabout: Agatha’s Sunday War, Miss Wells’s unknown future, maybe other possibilities. There was a different version of herself in each of the futures, each marching down her own road. And 1962 was the roundabout, the place all the different histories met.

“I suppose it all depends on the way the Cuba crisis works out. Peace, or nuclear war.” This was the crucial point in human