Frozen in Time (30 page)

‘We couldn’t find anything significant,’ went on Chambers, ‘so we decided to put a sleeper—an undercover operative—in place in Amhill, just on the off-chance that the professor himself was still alive and might one day come back. We placed her in the library. Her job was to keep her ear to the ground and report to us if anything occurred around Darkwood House or connected with the old Emerson case.’

‘She was working for
you
!’ Ben tried to stand up, on shaky legs, suddenly full of fear again.

‘Yes, she
was
working for me,’ said Chambers, while Uncle Jerome grabbed Ben’s shoulders.

‘Wait, Benedict,’ he said. ‘Hear him out.’

‘She immediately noticed that you were interested in the Emerson history and so she made sure one of the library’s security cameras recorded you all. She had studied the files for a long time—including family photos—and she could not believe what she saw, as soon as she laid eyes on Freddy and Polly. Just couldn’t believe it … but she worked out that the only possible answer was your father’s research—cryonics.’

‘So you sent her with men to get us! Inject us! Kidnap us!’ said Ben, through gritted teeth.

‘No, Ben—of course not. We didn’t even know ourselves until yesterday. Tara Chapman didn’t send the tape to us—she sent it to Russia. She was … well, what you would call a double-agent. They’d convinced her to pass information to them, not us, not long after she was put in place. As soon as they realized what she was saying was probably true, they sent in their own people to help her find and abduct you all.’

‘We did come for you!’ said Uncle Jerome. ‘As soon as I realized that I
had
to get help to you. Should have just been straight about it from the start. Would’ve saved a lot of trouble. We sent men to Percy’s place too—he left me a message and we guessed he might be in trouble—and they ended up chasing you and Freddy across the town! We got to the house just in time to find three men’s bodies on the driveway and Freddy screaming his head off.’

‘That spy woman must have known how to start the car with its wires. Father showed me how to do that once, on our old Austin,’ said Freddy. ‘She jumped into the front seat and was driving off seconds later, even though I still had the key!’

‘That was brilliant, when you took the key,’ remembered Ben. ‘How did you do that? You couldn’t see!’

‘Well, after a while my eyesight came back. Once I’d got my breath back I could see well enough to come on after you. I saw you crack that man with the camera. You were super cool! Then I hid behind the car when the others came up, and reached in and got the key while they were all distracted by you and your killer bicycle pump!’

Ben grinned as he remembered. Then he gulped. The lightning. ‘Are those men dead?’

‘Well, they were OK when we packed them off on a plane to Moscow this morning,’ said Chambers. ‘Some minor burns and concussion … I think the one you hit with the camera had the worst headache.’

‘You did what? You sent them home?’ Freddy looked aghast.

‘We negotiated with the Russian president,’ said Chambers. ‘Turns out they had something we wanted rather badly, so we sent them back their men.’

‘What did they have that you could possibly want that badly?’ said Freddy, angrily.

‘I guess you should see for yourself,’ said Chambers and walked to a side door of the room. ‘Come on in,’ he said, to someone beyond it.

The door opened and a man who looked about the same age as Ben and Rachel’s dad walked in. He wore a brown suit, and a grey tie. He looked dazed as he stared at Polly and Freddy. Ben couldn’t work out who this might be. He had been hoping for an old man … Polly and Freddy’s father. He felt a surge of disappointment.

Then Polly cried out and ran to the man, flinging her arms around him. ‘Daddy! Daddy! Oh, Daddy! Daddy!’

Rachel and Ben stared at each other in amazement. Where was the ninety-one year old?

Then, of course, they realized what Professor Henry Emerson had done. He had built another cryonic chamber for the Russians—and then managed to get inside it himself.

The young man before them … because really, he
was
still a young man, knelt down and put his arms around his daughter and his face creased with emotion. He looked across the room at his son. Freddy’s face was hard—almost angry—also holding back tears.

‘Father,’ he said, standing up and clenching his fists at his sides. ‘I have to tell you something. Sir, I have to say this!’

‘Go on, Frederick,’ said his father.

‘You oughtn’t to have done it. You really oughtn’t to have put Polly in there. It was jolly well not right— do you know? It’s been the most awful week for her.’ Freddy gulped and bit back down on his lip. His eyes glittered.

His father got up and walked across to him, Polly holding tight to his arm. He put his hand on Freddy’s green pyjamaed shoulder and nodded. ‘Well said, my boy. Well said. I agree wholeheartedly. Can you forgive me?’

‘Of course,’ said Freddy, in a strangled voice, and flung his arms around the man. ‘It’s been all right really, I suppose.’ He sniffed and gulped. ‘Quite a hoot with Ben and Rachel—just wait till you try a Whopper.’

‘And Pot Noodle!’ piped up Polly.

Ben and Rachel had the good grace to look ashamed.

‘Can I help anyone, please? Who’s next, please? You want fries with that? D’you want to go large for another thirty p?’

Professor Henry Emerson winced amid the racket of shouting staff, sizzling deep-fat fryers, and hyperactive children. ‘You’re telling me people come here … from
choice
?’ he asked. He watched, mesmerized, as Polly proudly opened his carton in front of him on the plastic-topped table.

‘Here you are—it’s a Whopper! Not a fib, but a burger! In a round roll. It’s super when you try it, honestly, Daddy! Try it!’

Professor Emerson reached into the carton as if he were about to de-fuse a bomb and retrieved the large burger. Polly nodded at him excitedly. ‘Go on! Just take a bite!’

He paused and looked around. ‘Can you not get plates and cutlery here? It
is
a restaurant after all.’

‘No!’ said Polly. ‘It’s not that
kind
of restaurant. Oh, Daddy—you’ve got such a lot to learn. Just bite it!’

At last Professor Emerson did as his daughter told him and took a bite out of his Whopper. His eyebrows shot up while they all waited, breathlessly, for his verdict. After a few munches he nodded. ‘Not bad,’ he said. ‘Certainly a lot better than Russian food.’

‘Did you really meet the Russian president?’ asked Freddy, poking his straw into the top of his Coke cup.

‘Both of them—the one in 1956
and
the one in 2009,’ said Professor Emerson and there was a
hint
of pride in his voice, thought Ben. ‘Khrushchev wasn’t called a president back then, of course. Then it was the Soviet Union and they didn’t have such titles, but that’s really what he was. He was fascinated by my cryonic chamber research and personally asked me to work on it for the Soviets. I said I would build it for him, but only on the condition that he would let me go home afterwards. He wouldn’t agree. He said not in his lifetime. So I suggested that he let me go home
after
his lifetime. We agreed that he would most likely be long gone after fifty years—and so when my work was complete, a few months later, he wrote a letter to the leader of the country, to be opened in 2007. In the letter he told whomsoever it might concern that my cryonically frozen body would be found in a research facility in an underground bunker in a province of Chernobyl, and I was to be woken and sent home.’

‘Chernobyl!’ gasped Ben, through a mouthful of chips and ketchup. ‘You were in Chernobyl! But that’s where they had the nuclear disaster! How did you survive?’

‘So they
did
drop the bomb!’ Freddy sat up, his eyes wide. ‘Father—you were right!’

Professor Emerson smiled and shook his head. ‘No, Frederick. They didn’t. It was an accident in a nuclear power plant—quite close to the research facility I was sleeping in. It happened nearly thirty years after they put me into stasis. They had long ago abandoned the cryonic experiment, because I hadn’t given them the final part of my research—the part that stops animals dying after they get re-animated. They couldn’t solve that and so, like my old friends in Britain, they gave up and spent their money elsewhere. They left me in place, because they were told to, and because they didn’t know what else to do. Then of course, after the Chernobyl disaster, nobody could get to me if they tried—not without great risk. And I was the least of their worries. I might be there still if someone hadn’t found the old letter from Khrushchev. They put on their radiation-proof outfits and came to awaken Sleeping Beauty. It was the most extraordinary thing. It took me days to believe that I wasn’t really still in 1957.’

‘I know exactly what you mean!’ said Polly, biting into her Whopper with feeling.

‘But it is fantastic out there,’ said Freddy, his eyes drifting to the expanse of glass at the front of Burger King and out onto London’s Oxford Street where countless shoppers, tourists, and locals moved in a colourful, never-ending procession.

‘They put spikes through their skin!’ whispered Polly. ‘Just because they want to!’

Her father’s eyebrows went a notch higher.

‘And they don’t just pierce their ears—they pierce their tummy buttons! Truly! Girls of
my
age! Can you believe it?’

‘I really don’t want to.’

‘
Everyone
has a motorcar and there are more sweets than you’ve ever seen in your life,’ said Freddy.

‘And Coca-Cola comes in tins,’ went on Polly. ‘And you can get money out of brick walls.’

‘They’re called cash points,’ laughed Rachel.

‘And people talk all the time on tiny, tiny little phones clipped to their ears and look quite, quite mad!’ added Polly.

‘And …’ Freddy looked reverent, ‘I just saw a TV screen the size of a
door
!’

His father shot him a look. ‘Oh really, Frederick. Now you’re going too far.’

‘We’ll take him into Comet next week,’ said Ben and Uncle Jerome nodded, with a smile.

‘Don’t you worry, sir,’ said Uncle Jerome. ‘You’re going to absolutely love it! Science is going off the scale! DNA, gene therapy, string theory, chaos—oh— a new planet, we have
nine
now, don’t you know … unless you take away Pluto, which turned out not to be a planet after all … and then …’

The two scientists fell into a riveting discussion about DNA then and Freddy, Polly, Ben, and Rachel grinned at each other.

‘Would you go back?’ asked Rachel. ‘If you could?’

Polly and Freddy looked at each other. ‘I don’t know,’ said Freddy. ‘It would be awfully hard now, knowing all of this is to come … and having to wait until I was sixty-six to get to it.’

‘And we’d miss you two,’ said Polly. ‘I don’t know what we’d have done without you.’

‘I do,’ said Freddy. ‘We’d’ve stayed asleep for another fifty years! No—it’s been super. You saved our lives—both of you.’ Ben grinned at Rachel. By now they had shared their stories and he was as proud of her as she was of him.

‘We can’t thank you enough,’ went on Freddy. ‘And … well, it’s going to be jolly hard to get along without you.’

‘It’s only for the term though,’ said Rachel. ‘You’ll be back at home with us in the school holidays. You’re both much better off back at boarding school. You won’t meet anyone like Lorraine Kingsley where you’re going. It’s one of the country’s best schools, too! And you’re not far from us at all, so we’ll be able to pop up and see you on weekends sometimes. We might be able to bring Bessie.’

‘Oh, gosh, yes—that’d be super!’ said Polly. ‘Imagine! I’ll be at the same school as Freddy! They have a girls’ wing and a boys’ wing. Would you ever believe such a thing? We’ll be able to meet up and have a midnight feast!’

They finished up their junk food with enthusiasm. ‘Isn’t it the tops, Daddy?’ said Polly, as her father screwed up his napkin and put it inside the burger carton.

‘Polly—no! It’s
not
the tops!’ said Rachel, earnestly. ‘You really should only eat it every so often. Your hotpot is miles better—and much healthier. Do remember that. Burgers and stuff are just treats. And look … not too many sweets or Pot Noodles, either. OK?’