Time Bomb (Part Three)

I might never see the pub again. It was an unthinkable situation; trapped in the past, in an open-air prison, with countless other fellow time travellers consigned to this fate by our chronological captors. They claimed that they didn't want our 21st century influence on their simple society, but really, what harm could it possibly do?

Global warming. Nuclear meltdowns. Mass terrorism. Simon Cowell. How I'd come to miss these simple pleasures of my own time. Never again would I be able to walk in circles round a charity-mugger whilst pretending to be blind and deaf. Never again would I lob a plantpot at the telly when that stupid meerkat came on the screen. I was lost forever.

Even so, at least I was not alone. And on speaking to my fellows, I soon became aware that the future was perhaps not so bleak.
"We've got the ham," my barrack-mate Jazz confided, "we just don't know if it's shit enough."
Each of us, the hundred-odd inmates of this time camp, had independently stumbled across the discovery that the secret to time travel lay within ASDA wafer-thin ham. No other ham could conduct time-particles so efficiently. Sadly, the only ham we could obtain in the past was thickly-cut, thoroughly tasty, and generally looked like it had been sourced from an actual animal of some kind.
"Still," Jazz continued hopefully, "we've sliced it as thinly as we can, and run it under the hot tap until it's all wet and discoloured. Hopefully that'll do."
I prayed he was right.

We had all arrived in the past in different ways. I'd accidentally nicked Andy's time machine. Jazz had inadvertently designed a ham-stuffed kite that had dragged him through a time-portal while he was helping his niece win a junior fliers' competition. Our other barrack-mates - Marty, Bill and Ted - had even more outlandish tales to tell. But together, we resolved to smash our way out of this comfortable and tranquil hellhole.

It was no easy task. First, we needed a vehicle to carry us into the future. We persuaded our captors to lend us the use of one of their primitive tractors that we might create our own arable land for cultivation; they were only too happy to oblige. Secondly, given the limited quantity of ham available to us, we had to work out how to transport over a hundred inmates in one journey, with a single tractor.

This was a stumbling block.

Nevertheless, it is with no small measure of pride that I confess myself the deviser of "the pyramid scheme". That is, I decided that if we were all to balance ourselves on top of the tractor, with Jazz behind the wheel, we'd stand a chance. Of course, it took practise. Every Sunday afternoon, we went on manoeuvres around the prison grounds with every inmate forming a human pyramid atop the tractor. We convinced the guards that it was a form of religious worship, and sang songs to assist the illusion. Many was the Sunday that our heroic tractor could be seen chugging past the pavilion, our bodies interlocked on its roof, belting out the collected works of Madonna, Will Smith and the Bay City Rollers.

Though we perfected our sur-tractor gymnastics quickly, it soon became apparent that we would never successfully return to our own time unless we could get the tractor to a sufficient speed. We needed velocity. We needed a steep slope.

We needed to break out of the camp.

We counted down the days to that fateful Sunday, and when it rolled around, conducted ourselves as we did on every other Sabbath. We began our acrobatic tractor work-out with "Holiday", followed it up with "Getting Jiggy With It", and halfway through "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y Night", we were rolling downhill towards the perimeter fence, accelerating at a pace that caused some drifting in key among the tenor section of the choir.

The guards scattered before our juggernaut. We didn't leap over the fence, but rather flattened it in a thunderous storm that would undoubtedly have made the Bay City Rollers proud. I myself was stood on the roof of the tractor cab, wind blustering about my head, my shoulders straining with the weight of the bodies above, and my feet quivering as the ham directly beneath them came alive.

We shot down the hill, faster, faster, faster. As our speed grew, our balance on the tractor grew more wobbly, and still we did not leap forward in time. The ham vibrated, but without any effect. And just when we thought all hope was lost, a bright ball of light appeared ahead; at first just the size of a marble, but swelling quickly to become a tennis ball, a football, a beachball, until finally it engulfed the whole tractor, and the pyramid, and me.

It was some time before I awoke. When I did, I had a pint in front of me.

At long last, I was in the pub! In my own time! No more beautiful, pristine prison camps! No more wonderful food being given to me for free! Just terrible television, economic depression, appalling Tory government, and a life of living off ASDA produce.

I picked up my pint, and had a long, long sip.



[THE END]