The Friday Project An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
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This ebook first published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2013
Copyright © Brian Aldiss 2013
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2013
Brian Aldiss asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
FIRST EDITION
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007482085
Ebook Edition © August 2013 ISBN: 9780007482092
Version: 2014-10-03
I was browsing in Albert’s, down Cecil Court, when I saw another customer slipping books under his coat. Indignation high, I made a grab at him, but he had seen my glance and was out of the shop before you could say ‘Limited signed edition’.
I followed hot-foot (crepes always do that to me). Luckily, he did not run far. He had something that looked to my wild glance like a car, hidden behind a pile of crates in a hotel yard. As I jumped on to the running board, I realised it was a queer make. It had no steering wheel, no driving wheels. A publisher? The wild thought flashed through my head, and then my quarry at the dashboard flipped a lever …
London was gone! At least, the old one had disappeared. It simply blurred and vanished, and a new one of smooth stone and metal took its place. We seemed not to have moved. I was bowled over; indeed, when the fugitive opened his door, I was knocked over.
‘Never impede a passing time machine,’ he said, helping me up.
‘Time machine?’ I queried. Could that really be the hideous explanation of the strangeness around about me?
‘What year is this?’ I asked.
‘2054,’ he said.
‘You’re sure your watch isn’t fast?’
‘Look friend, I’ve got no time for jokes. I’ve got just an hour off duty to snatch some lunch, and then I must be back into the past again. Goodbye.’
By the time I had come out of the nearest thing a non-yogi gets to a trance, he had gone. I was stranded a century into the future! To think that a love of law and order should result in this, when I had only meant to pop out of the bank for five minutes. And what would they say there if I did not return? ‘He said he’d be back in no time.’ How right they were!
Abruptly my misery vanished. My time traveller had said he was coming back in an hour! Then I was saved – I had an hour, just an hour, to look around in. Immediately I was filled with a thousand curiosities, but I knew there was time to gratify only one.