Out of Time

 

 

John Marsden was in the second year of a law degree at Sydney University when his life suddenly changed. Sitting in the Law School cafeteria one afternoon he watched as the doors opened and a tidal wave of final year students washed in for their evening classes. One look at the tsunami of men in dark suits convinced John he was in the wrong place.

He left law school that same day, never to return.

It took him ten years and many false starts to find a job he liked, but in 1979 he began a teaching career at All Saints College Bathurst, where he enjoyed the contact with people, and the creativity, that teaching offered.

Teaching also introduced John to teenage fiction. He admired the works of authors like Paul Zindel, Robert Cormier and Patricia Wrightson. In 1988 John entered this field with his novel
So Much To Tell You.
Since then he has published twenty-eight other works, including fiction, non-fiction and picture books.

 

Also by John Marsden

So Much to Tell You

The Journey

The Great Gatenby

Staying Alive in Year 5

Out of Time

Letters from the Inside

Take My Word for It

Looking for Trouble

Tomorrow. . . (Ed.)

Cool School

Creep Street

Checkers

For Weddings and a Funeral (Ed.)
This I Believe (Ed.)

Dear Miffy

Prayer for the 21st Century

Everything I Know About Writing

Secret Men's Business

The Rabbits

Norton's Hut

Marsden on Marsden

Winter

The
Tomorrow
Series

Tomorrow, When the War Began

The Dead of the Night

The Third Day, the Frost

Darkness, Be My Friend

Burning for Revenge
The Night is for Hunting
The Other Side of Dawn

The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

First published 1990 in Pan hardback
First Pan paperback edition published 1991 by Pan Macmillan Publishers Australia
Second Pan paperback edition published 1994 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
This Pan edition published 2001 by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited
1 Market Street, Sydney

Reprinted 1993, 1994 (twice), 1995, 1996 (twice), 1997, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002

Copyright © ILM Pty Ltd 1990

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

National Library of Australia
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Marsden, John.
Out of time.
ISBN 0 330 27236 5.
I. Title.
A823.3

Printed in Australia by McPherson's Printing Group

 

 

CONTENTS

 

Also by John Marsden

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Out of Time

 

 

 

to my parents, with love

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Mrs Thora Dearnley for her typing and patient re-typing. Also to Natalie Deans, Poss Herbert and Justin Lee for stories.

And special thanks to Penny Hueston, Roxarne Burns and James Fraser at Pan.

B
ROWSING THROUGH
The Book of Lists
late one night, James read this paragraph, as he pulled at his bottom lip with an anxious finger:

On July 6, 1944, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus was giving a performance in Hartford, Conn., before 7,000 paid [sic] customers. A fire broke out: 168 persons died in the blaze and 487 were injured. One of the dead, a small girl thought to be six years old, was unidentified. Since no one came to claim her and since her face was unmarred, a photograph was taken of her and distributed locally, and then throughout the U.S. Days passed, weeks and months passed, but no relative, no playmate, no one in the nation came forward to identify her. She remains unknown to this day.'

James put the book down and gazed out of his open bedroom window. It was dark outside, a kind of molten dark that slid endlessly through the window. James sat at the edge of the island of light created by his desk lamp. He turned the light off and let the black fill the room. It was a warm night. The flyscreen that had been on the window sat propped against the wall where it had rested for two months, discarded and dusty.

There was a huge tree outside the window. It blocked much of the view but was itself a view. Old and oak, it was a treasury of hollow places. In its dark green curves dwelt old air, unbreathed pockets. Possums ran along the branch that led right to James' window. When not fighting or mating they fed from his long friendly fingers.

It seemed that the tree itself was reaching into the room: if the windows were closed it brushed and scratched against them. When the windows were open it became a living curtain of green. The boy was not sure whether the tree was friendly or not. On the whole he thought he liked it, but sometimes when he was in bed and the lights were out, it scared him with its incessant rubbing on the glass.

The soft sweet dark air flooded around James. He was no longer sure where his room ended and the night began. Across the square in one of the old laboratories a light came on. Directly above it a thin rind of crescent moon showed pale in the sky; pale compared to the solid artificial light in the distant lab. ‘Artificial light,' James wondered, ‘what does that mean, “artificial”?' He held out his hands to the darkness and let it wash between his fingers. Then, possum-like, he swung out across the windowsill onto the nearest branch of the oak, crawled along it and squeezed down the trunk to the ground. Behind him the house still squatted.

James ran around the edges of the square, like the last line of a wave on a beach, that is, in shallow curves and fretting lines. Nowhere did he take the shortest
distance between two points. He merged with shadows and slipped easily through the cool patches under the trees. The big brick lab, Building H, two dull stories high, opaque and severe, kept its blind eyes closed as he swerved past it. He was running towards the light. The light came from an old weatherboard building at the centre of a cluster of small storage sheds and garages. It was, as James knew, Lab 17, the smallest of the network of old laboratories. The night was warm, and so the door, defying the regulations, was half-open. James, head down, with the over-confidence born of familiarity, came sliding in as if on a skateboard. He tumble-turned against the first workbench and ran into a corner, hiding between two globes of the world, one old, one new. From there he peered at the man working at the front bench.

Mr Woodforde at first glance looked more like an accountant than a physicist. A man of about seventy, he was completely bald and dressed in a neat dark pinstripe suit. He was small and wrinkled and had a mouth full of gold-capped teeth. His skin had the greyish colour of a heavy smoker. His eyes hung like fried eggs, in bags of age.

At James' entrance he looked up briefly, then returned to his work. He wrote down a series of numbers before speaking. His voice was surprisingly rounded and rich and resonant.

‘How fortunate that I wasn't delicately balancing a vial of sulphuric acid above a tray of water,' he remarked. James smirked from between the two
globes. He liked the formal way Mr Woodforde spoke. For the next few minutes there was a silence in the lab: only the little sounds of pen on paper, the door whining with an occasional movement of air, trees giving a shrug of leaves outside the windows. James emerged from his shelter shyly, by degrees. He doodled with his finger along a side bench, traced an oblique path towards the blackboard at the front of the lab, followed his own course there. He took a piece of chalk and wrote on the blackboard: ‘MY NAME IS JAMES, ABSOLUTELY.' Then he wriggled around the front sink to where Mr Woodforde was standing, and stood behind him, looking around his elbow at the papers and equipment spread across the table. Mr Woodforde showed no awareness of his presence, except to mutter:

‘Look on, you enforcers of the Official Secrets Act, and despair.'

He continued to work in silence on a small circuit board, until, his eyes tired, he nudged it away and put down his pliers.

‘I can't believe it's going to work. Everything tells me it's going to work, except for my instincts. With everything else I've achieved it's been the other way round.' He sighed and turned to James, who gazed impassively into his face. ‘You know, James,' he said, ‘revenge is a wonderful motive. If they hadn't rushed me in here to make room for all the fancy Americans, I would have happily eked out my time doing research on superconductors. Now, there they are in their brand-new maximum-security fortress, working out how to detect
low-flying mosquitoes, while the forgotten old man works in a shed out the back winning a Nobel Prize. And the second greatest satisfaction I'll get out of all this is to be able to clench my fist and render my radius and ulna perpendicular to my humerus.' He chuckled and interpreted: ‘Bend my arm at the elbow.' Then he added thoughtfully, ‘I know the greatest satisfaction will be to. . . well, I'll use the cliché. . . “go where no man has gone before”. But there's a failure of my imagination somewhere. Maybe that's why I don't really think it'll work. I can't imagine it.' He glanced again at the boy, who was watching him with respect. ‘I've said too much again. But who knows how much of it you absorb? And I don't think you're likely to be suborned by foreign agents. You've got the perfect defence. Funny,' he mused, ‘I hadn't thought about this being used for defence purposes, but no doubt someone will think of an application.' He sighed and turned back to his work. ‘No sleep, no food, no exercise. I can't run on adrenalin all the time.'

JAMES SAT IN
class with books spread around him. A mosaic of books, each one open, each with its story to tell. James swam in the colours and words, swam deep, emerging only once to glance shyly around the room. Bright parrots startled across one page onto another, snakes tumbled out of there to writhe in an ecstasy of confusion among the silent pyramids, sand blew
through the Andes into the eyes of flat-faced knights on over-developed horses. James traced a journey through them all, a route that ignored time and borders and politics. He dipped his hand into history as he wandered among geography.

One of the biggest books at his table was called
Minter's Illustrated Atlas of the World and All It Contains.
James had not seen it before and was not surprised to find, when he opened it, an inscription at the front stating: ‘A Gift to the Library from Daniel Woodforde.' As he scanned its brightly coloured pages a name on a map caught his eye. It was a map of the state of Connecticut, in the U.S. The name swam in his mind. Gradually the colours of the map gave way to a charcoal vision. James saw an army of lost people marching out of the book: a little girl came from Connecticut to join a line of Incas and conquistadors from Peru; they in turn met up with nameless bloated bodies rising out of the sea, mad World War II survivors from Pacific islands, and desperate beaten millions of Kampucheans. From Melbourne came a shy dark man in the clothing of 1942. From Russia came thousands of soldiers – illiterate peasants who, conscripted in World War II and later discharged, ignorant of the name or location of their own villages, spent the rest of their lives wandering Russian roads in search of their homes. And from all over the world came the saddest figures in history, the Unknown Soldiers of every country, the unidentified men and women, the brave and the frightened, the pale and the lost.

James quailed before the crowds. He understood in some part of his being how much they wanted to be recognised. But he knew they wanted even more. Perhaps he understood how inseparable their needs were. But the numbers panicked him. He could think only of one at a time. He slammed the book shut and left the room.

IT WAS THREE
o'clock in the afternoon in Mr Woodforde's Lab 17. Strips of dusty sunlight stretched across the books and tables. The light husks of dead insects lay still on the window. Mr Woodforde was perched on a high stool, a jeweller's glass screwed into his eye as he worked on some electronic circuitry. James was playing with a cobweb at the end of the same bench. He strummed it lightly with a finger, watching its spider hang on grimly, hunched into a corner of the web.

‘Damn!' Mr Woodforde said. James left the web and came to him. He sat on the opposite side of the bench, watching with interest. Mr Woodforde leant back, took the glass out of his eye and rubbed his face with tired fingers. Then he laughed delightedly.

‘Pretty close,' he said. ‘Pretty close. And the closer I get, the prettier it is.' James slid across the bench for a better view. He thought at first that he was looking at nothing more than a mathematical calculator. Mr Woodforde had assembled all the pieces into a black case that resembled either a calculator or a remote control for a television. There were four panels of
buttons, two aerials and a screen, but they were all on a small enough scale to be fitted into a hand-sized case.

‘I'm just working on mechanical details now,' Mr Woodforde explained. ‘Design trivia.' He muttered to himself, almost humming it as a tune: ‘Latitude on the top line, longitude on the second, date on the third, time on the fourth. Or date up the top? Doesn't really matter.' He stood looking out the window for a minute. ‘In an emergency what you'd need is a return key. Put your home coordinates in the memory, along with the time. That's easy. Could save a life. Could be my life that's saved.' He looked up at the blackboard and James followed his glance. Written there was a series of numbers: 150° 50' 51”, 34° 15' 21”.

‘Very important numbers, James,' Mr Woodforde commented. ‘They tell you where you are. These numbers pin us to this spot, as surely as a butterfly that's stuck on a board with a thumb tack. Doesn't matter where you're located on the surface of this earth, a series of half a dozen numbers can put you within a block of home. I tell you what, those numbers are carved into my memory forwards, backwards and inside out. If I find myself in the middle of a battle in the Dardanelles in 1915, I may well be keen to get home in a hurry. But I like the idea of a return key.'

In the distance a church bell rang. James pushed himself up from the bench and stretched onto the floor. He began a circuitous route towards the door. Mr Woodforde was doing calculations on the blackboard, ignoring him. But as the boy reached the door the man called out:

‘Oh here. I nearly forgot. Got a book for you. Thought you might like it. I've finished with it.' He threw it to James, who darted and caught it then ran out of the lab, looking at the book's title as he went.

It was called
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells.

THE SCHOOL TEEMED
with life. James was reminded of a film he had seen in Science, a film of maggots consuming the corpse of a sheep. The film had been speeded up: two or three days compressed into ten minutes. The effect had been startling. The maggots swarmed with energy, a frantic mass. In ten minutes they reduced the sheep's body to a forlorn skeleton, white bones sticking up like tree branches in winter, like a school at weekends.

It was the 12.30 bell that had spilt the school into this froth of movement. Bare playgrounds and empty corridors streamed with people. Their voices bubbled and foamed. In their wake came James, books held to his chest, gliding down the corridor like a canoeist. Most of the crowd turned left, onto the bitumen playground, but James turned right, into the library. Without looking up or around he crossed the carpet to a corner near the heater. He nestled down on the floor and glanced along the nearest shelf. It was the H section. Hardy:
Jude the Obscure
, Hare, Harker, Harnett, Harris, Harrison:
Legends of the Fall.
The title intrigued him. He took it out and flicked through it, but it looked too difficult. He put it back and continued his perusal.
Haser, Hastings, Hautzig, Hawthorne, Hayes, Hazzard. He ran his finger down the spine of
The Endless Steppe
, but he had read it twice already.

A little frustrated he went back up a shelf and found Guest:
Ordinary People.
He had heard older kids talking about this book. He took it down, opened it, spent a few moments flirting with the cover, the title page, the acknowledgements, and then with a deep sigh of satisfaction, began reading the first paragraph.

THE HOME RUN
by the Sisters of Mercy was at the end of a lane in the backyard of the town, a place of dumped cars and old shacks and abandoned projects. The river ran close by; the same river that in other places moved with slow dignity but here dribbled contemptuously past, an ooze of grey soapy water. Despite the nuns' occasional tired admonitions the kids played near it, by it, in it. A few had been drowned over the years; no-one could remember how many.

The orphanage had a name, though not many noticed it or remembered it: the Maria Torreon Home. It had been endowed by an Army General who had lost his wife years before, and still dolefully mourned for her.

Most of the nuns were Mexican, though there were a few outsiders – Nicaraguans mostly, and an Italian-English nun named Sister Agnes, who had been there forever. Occasionally someone from North
America would come for a short term on an exchange program, while one of the Mexican sisters went to Los Angeles to take her place. The only member of the community to look forward to these exchanges was the one going to California.