Terry Pratchett - Johnny and the Bomb

The sodium lights made the night cold as ice.

The newspaper blew on again, and wrapped itself around a yellow litter bin in the shape of a fat dog with its mouth open.

Something landed in an alleyway and groaned.

"Tick tick tick! Tickety Boo! Ow! National ... Health ... Service ... "

The interesting thing about worrying about things, thought Johnny Maxwell, was the way there was always something new to worry about.

His friend Kirsty said it was because he was a natural worrier, but that was because she didn't worry about anything. She got angry instead, and did things about it, whatever it was. He really envied the way she decided what it was and knew exactly what to do about it almost instantly. Currently she was saving the planet most evenings, and foxes at weekends.

Johnny just worried. Usually they were the same old worries - school, money, whether you could get AIDS from watching television, and so on. But occasionally one would come out of nowhere like a Christmas Number One and knock all the others down a whole division.

Right now, it was his mind.

"It's not exactly the same as being ill," said Yoless, who'd read all the way through his mother's medical encyclopedia.

"It's not being ill at all. If lots of bad things have happened to you it's healthy to be depressed," said Johnny. "That's sense, isn't it? What with the business going down the drain, and Dad pushing off, and Mum just sitting around smoking all the time and everything. I mean, going around smiling and saying, "Oh, it's not so bad" - that would be mental."

"That's right," said Yoless, who'd read a bit about psychology as well.

"My Bran went mental," said Bigmac. "She- ow!"

"Sorry," said Yoless. "I wasn't looking where I put my foot but, fair's fair, you weren't either."

"It's just dreams," said Johnny. "It's nothing mad."

Although, he had to admit, it was dreams during the day, too. Dreams so real that they filled his eyes and ears.

The planes ...

The bombs ...

And the fossil fly. Why that? There'd be these nightmares, and in the middle of it, there'd be the fly. It was a tiny one, in a piece of amber. He'd saved up for it and done a science project on it. But it wasn't even scary-looking. It was just a fly from millions of years ago. Why was that in a nightmare?

Huh. School teachers? Why couldn't they be like they were supposed to be and just chuck things at you if you weren't paying attention? Instead they all seemed to have been worrying about him and sending notes home and getting him to see a specialist, although the specialist wasn't too bad and at least it got him out of Maths.

One of the notes had said he was "disturbed". Well, who wasn't disturbed? He hadn't shown it to his mum. Things were bad enough as it was.

"You getting on all right at your grandad's?" said Yoless.

"It's not too bad. Grandad does the housework most of the time anyway. He's good at fried bread. And Surprise. Surprise."

"What's that?"

"You know that stall on the market that sells tins that've got the labels off?"

"Yes?"

"Well, he buys loads of those. And you've got to eat them once they're opened."

"Yuk."

"Oh, pineapple and meatballs isn't too bad."

They walked on through the evening street.

The thing about all of us, Johnny thought, the sad thing is that we're not very good. Actually that's not the worst part. The worst part is we're not even much good at being not much good.

Take Yoless. When you looked at Yoless you might think he had possibilities. He was black. Technically. But he never said "Yo", and only said "check it out" in the supermarket, and the only person he ever called a mother was his mother. Yoless said it was racial stereotyping to say all black kids acted like that but, however you looked at it, Yoless had been born with a defective cool. Trainspotters were cooler than Yoless. If you gave Yoless a baseball cap he'd put it on the right way round. That's how, well, Yoless was. Sometimes he actually wore a tie.

Now, Bigmac ... Bigmac was good. He was good at Maths. Sort of. It made the teachers wild. You could show Bigmac some sort of horrible equation and he'd say "x=2.75" and he'd be right. But he never knew why. "It's just what it is," he'd say. And that was no good. Knowing the answers wasn't what Maths was about. Maths was about showing how you worked them out, even if you got them wrong. Bigmac was also a skinhead. Bigmac and Bazza and Skazz were the last three skinheads in Blackbury. At least, the last three who weren't someone's dad. And he had LOVE and HAT on his knuckles, but only in Biro because when he'd gone to get tattooed he fainted. And he bred tropical fish.

As for Wobbler ... Wobbler wasn't even a nerd. He wanted to be a nerd but they wouldn't let him join. He had a Nerd Pride badge and he messed around with computers. What Wobbler wanted was to be a kid in milk-bottle-bottom glasses and a deformed anorak, who could write amazing software and be a millionaire by the time he was twenty, but he'd probably settle for just being someone whose computer didn't keep smelling of burning plastic every time he touched it.

And as for Johnny ...

... if you go mad, do you know you've gone mad? If you don't, how do you know you're not mad?

"It wasn't a bad film," Wobbler was saying. They'd been to Screen W at the Blackbury Odeon. They generally went to see any film that promised to have laser beams in it somewhere.

"But you can't travel in time without messing things up," said Yoless.

"That's the whole point," said Bigmac. "That's what you want to do. I wouldn't mind joining the police if they were time police. You'd go back and say, "Hey, are you Adolf Hitler?" and when he said, "Achtung, that's me, ja" ... Kablooeee! With the pump-action shotgun. End of problem."

"Yes, but supposing you accidentally shot your own grandfather," said Yoless patiently.

"I wouldn't. He doesn't look a bit like Adolf Hitler."

"Anyway, you're not that good a shot," said Wobbler. "You got kicked out of the Paintball Club, didn't you?"

"Only `cos they were jealous that they hadn't thought of a paintball hand grenade before I showed them how."

"It was a tin of paint, Bigmac. A two-litre tin."

"Well, yeah, but in contex" it was a hand grenade."

"They said you might at least have loosened the lid a bit. Sean Stevens needed stitches."

"I didn't mean actually shooting your actual grandfather," said Yoless, loudly. "I mean messing things up so maybe you're not actually born or your time machine never gets invented. Like in that film where the robot is sent back to kill the mother of the boy who's going to beat the robots when he grows up."

"Good one, that," said Bigmac, strafing the silent shops with an invisible machine gun.

"But if he never got born how did they know he'd existed?" said Yoless. "Didn't make any sense to me."

"How come you're such an expert?" said Wobbler.

"Well, I've got three shelves of Star Trek videos," said Yoless.

"Anorak alert!"

"Nerd!"

"Trainspotter!"

"Anyway," said Yoless, "if you changed things, maybe you'd end up not going back in time, and there you would be, back in time, I mean, except you never went in the first place, so you wouldn't be able to come back on account of not having gone. Or, even if you could get back, you'd get back to another time, like a sort of parallel dimension, because if the thing you changed hadn't happened then you wouldn't have gone, so you could only come back to somewhere you never went. And there you'd be - stuck."

They tried to work this out.

"Huh, you'd have to be mad even to understand time travel," said Wobbler eventually.

"Job opportunity for you there, Johnny," said Bigmac.

"Bigmac," said Yoless, in a warning voice.