‘Er …’ said Yo-less again.

‘They shot at me,’ said Bigmac. ‘A real bullet! I heard it hit the actual wall!’

‘Er …’ said Yo-less.

‘Oh, what’s the matter with you?’ said Kirsty.

‘Er … where’s Wobbler?’

They looked around.

‘Oh, no …’ said Johnny.

They were Wobblerless.

‘I ain’t going back!’ said Bigmac, backing away. ‘Not to get shot at!’

‘He wouldn’t have wandered off again, would he?’ said Kirsty.

‘No,’ said Johnny. ‘He must still be there!’

‘Look, get a grip, will you?’ said Kirsty. ‘You said the church doesn’t get hit! He’s OK.’

‘Yes … but he’s OK in 1941!’

‘S’posing something goes wrong?’ said Bigmac. ‘He didn’t come back this time, s’posing we go back and all get stuck? I’ll get shot!’

‘You think you’ve got problems?’ said Yo-less. ‘I’d have to learn to play the banjo.’

‘Will you all stop panicking and think for a moment?’ said Kirsty. ‘This is time travel. He’s always going to be there, whenever we go back! Of course we ought to go and get him! But we don’t have to rush.’

Of course, it was true. He’d always be there, thought Johnny. They could go back in ten years time and he’d still be there. Just like something on a tape – you could play it, and fast forward, and rewind, and it would always be there. And later that night, the bombs would land in Paradise Street – and that night would always be there. For ever. Every second, always there. Like little fossils.

Kirsty hauled the trolley away and pushed it down the steps towards the pavement.

‘His mum ’n dad’ll worry,’ said Yo-less, uncertainly.

‘No, they won’t,’ said Kirsty. ‘Because we can bring him back to right here.’

‘Really? Why can’t we see us doing it, then?’ said Yo-less. ‘You mean any minute we’re just going to pop up with Wobbler and say “hi, us, here’s Wobbler, see you later”?’

‘Oh, good grief,’ said Kirsty. ‘I can’t think about that. You can’t think about time travel with a logical mind.’

Yo-less turned and looked at Johnny’s face.

‘Oh, no,’ he said. ‘He’s off again …’

Everything’s there waiting, Johnny thought. That’s the thing about time. It doesn’t matter how long it takes to build a time machine. We could all die out and evolution could start again with moles or something, it could take millions of years, but sooner or later someone will find out how to do it. It might not even be a machine. It might just be a way of understanding what time is, like everyone was scared of lightning and then one day someone said, look, you can store it in little bottles and then it was just electricity. But it wouldn’t actually matter, because once you’d worked out how to use it, everything would be there. If someone ever finds a way of travelling in time, ever, in the entire history of the universe, then they could be here today.

And then he thought of the bombers, nosing through the clouds over the houses and the footballers and all those clean doorsteps …