THE H-BOMB GIRL by Stephen Baxter (beach books txt) 📕

Bernadette shrugged. “People see what they expect to see.” She looked at the “phone” gadget, which nestled in the palm of her hand, slim and beautiful. “I’m having a souvenir.” She slipped the phone into her pocket.

Laura hissed, “Bern, put it back.”

Bernadette put her fingers to her lips. “They’ll hear you.”

Joel was stuffing the cards back into the leather wallet. And he looked again at the “driving licence.” “Laura,” he said. His voice was flat. “You ought to have a look at this.”

“We need to go—”

“I mean it. Look.”

Beside the picture of Miss Wells there was a list of details. There was a name, but it wasn’t “Wells.”

1 Mann

2 Laura Mary

3 Date of birth 6-9-48 United Kingdom

4 Date of issue 12-3-07…

Bern looked at this, and at Laura. “Let me guess what your birthday is.”

“Shut up.”

“And what your middle name is. And you must have been born in 1948, the same as me—”

Laura couldn’t deal with this. “Shut up.”

“What about this other date?” Joel whispered. “Do you think this means 1907? No, of course not. Two thousand and seven. Forty-odd years from now.” He looked at Laura. “When you will be about sixty.”

“Like Miss Wells,” Bern whispered. “Blimey, H-Bomb Girl. Miss Wells isn’t your auntie. She’s—”

There were footsteps.

Bern shoved the wallet back in the locker and slipped on the padlock, and they all hid in the shadows.

Friday 19th October. 9:30 p.m.

Just in from the school.

The front door had been unlocked. There was no sign of Mort. A wireless boomed out from upstairs, Mum’s room. Mum was probably sleeping off the wine she’d drunk during the day.

Laura wrote down her thoughts as they came to her.

I can’t believe it.

What if it’s true?

It would make sense. All those times when Miss Wells said things like, “One day they will call you baby boomers.” As if she knew about the future.

And, “Who can you trust if not me?”

And when she talked about Mum she called her “Mum.”

How can she be here? I mean, how can I be here? What do I want?

Why do I hate her so much?

It had been easier when she had just thought Miss Wells was a spy.

She wished she had somebody to talk this over with.

Restless, she went downstairs. She made herself a cup of tea, and a jam sandwich. Alone in the parlour with the telly, she glanced at a newspaper, the Liverpool Echo, to see what was on. Steptoe and Son.

She couldn’t be bothered. She was too shaken up for the telly. She prowled around the living room, and the parlour, avoiding all Mort’s neatly stacked stuff, his shirts and his socks. She walked past the old dear’s rows of books on their shelves. Unread Reader’s Digest editions of classics, Dickens and Jane Austen.

Something looked different.

She ran her finger along the shelf before the books. There was plenty of dust. It had been dusty when they moved in, and nobody had done much housekeeping since.

But there was a space where there was no dust at all.

She stood back, just looking at this gap in the dust, about eighteen inches long. She pulled the books off the shelf, stacking them on the coffee table.

There was something tucked away behind the books.

She reached in. It was a kind of tile, eighteen inches square, made of black plastic. It had a couple of symbols on it, an apple with a chunk bitten out of it, and a little silver panel that said “Intel.” Laura thought it was solid at first, but it had a seam running around its edge.

Remembering Bernadette and the phone, she stuck her fingernails into the seam, and carefully prised the tile open.

It was like a giant version of the “phone,” with a flat screen in the lid, and buttons in the base. No, not buttons. They were keys, set out in the QWERTYUIOP layout of the typewriters she was learning to use at school. But the keys were just flat pads.

And, after a couple of seconds, just like the phone, the screen lit up. Swirling patterns ran across it, in colour, unlike the silvery black-and-white of the telly. Images coalesced, of a green Earth in an iron fist, and a slogan written underneath: PEACE THROUGH WAR.

Whatever it meant, whatever this gadget was for, the slogan proved Mort really was working with Miss Wells.

Then a message appeared: “Computer ready, Colonel Mortinelli. Wireless link established to central server. Please enter password.”

Laura had seen computers. Her class in Wycombe had been taken to a bank processing centre in London. Computers were boxes the size of wardrobes with lights and dials, and with tapes and punched cards and paper tapes whirring away. This couldn’t be a computer. So what, then?

Half of her didn’t believe this was happening. It was so like a scene in James Bond it wasn’t true.

She would much rather have found nothing but dust behind these books, just as she would rather have found nothing but fag packets in Miss Wells’s locker. With every new bit of evidence she found, it became more obvious that something very odd was happening to her, that she was the centre of a strange and silent conspiracy, even at school, even in her own home.

And she was becoming more and more convinced that it was all about the Key, a nuclear bomber starter key that she wore around her neck, on the eve of a nuclear war.

She folded up the “computer,” put it back on its shelf, and restored the books.

Then she washed the last dishes, locked the front and back doors, checked all the downstairs windows were closed, and went to bed.

Chapter 10

Saturday 20th October. 9 a.m.

One week to Black Saturday. And then what?

Here’s a spooky thought. If Miss Wells is me from the future, then she must know what happened on Black Saturday. Or will happen. She’s not just guessing.

I’ll find out in a week. I don’t think I want to know.

Phone call at 7 a.m. Ran downstairs to