Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon

  “Here they come!” she cried. “At least they’re safe.” She trained her father’s binoculars on the flying car.

  “Daddy on the moon!” whooped Little Harry.

  “Oh,” said Jemima. “Oh, dear. No.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “Oh, no, what?” Lucy was getting impatient.

  “Little Harry was right. They’re not all aboard.”

  “What? Who’s missing?”

  “Father is missing.”

  “Oh, dear.”

  “And Mr. Tooting.”

  “No!”

  “And Jeremy.”

  “You mean . . . Tiny Jack is coming back alone?”

  “Yes. He must have left the others behind on the moon.”

  “You can’t leave someone behind on the moon,” said Lucy. “The lack of pressure would mean that they would —”

  “Please, Lucy. No details,” said Mum.

  “But surely he can’t have left them?” said Jemima.

  “Well, now, that was a bit naughty,” said Nanny, who had joined them at the window. “I will give him a bit of a talking-to about that when he gets home. Marooning guests on the moon — honestly.”

  Lucy checked the binoculars. There was no doubt about it, Tiny Jack was all alone. Chitty seemed to be towing something. It looked like a shopping cart with a satellite dish on the back.

  “Oh, no!” said Lucy. “Oh, no, no, no. This is all my fault.”

  “Lucy, what are you talking about?”

  “I was the one who told him about it. He’d never even heard of it until I mentioned it.”

  “What is? What’s happening?”

  “Tiny Jack is the world’s greatest car thief. So why did he go to the moon on the thirtieth of July 1971?”

  “He’s going to make Chitty Chitty Bang Bang the first car on the moon,” said Mum.

  “He’s going to fly the flag for British engineering,” said Jemima.

  “He’s going to steal the Apollo Lunar Rover, the moon buggy, the most expensive car ever built — thirty-eight million dollars. And what made him think of it? I did. I told him all about it.”

  “Thirty-eight million dollars.” Nanny chuckled. “And it doesn’t even have a car alarm. They really were asking for it.”

  “I don’t suppose they expected anyone would go to the bother of travelling all the way to the moon to steal a car,” said Lucy.

  “Doing the unexpected is the essence of the art of the thief,” said Nanny.

  “But . . .” protested Jemima, “. . . he said he was going to plant the Union Jack.”

  “He told a lie. It’s really very difficult to steal things if you only tell the truth. When we stole the Sphinx do you think he said, ‘Hello, I’m stealing the Sphinx?’ No, he said, ‘Hello, I know just the man to repair that nose.’”

  “This is terrible,” said Mum. “The Apollo moon landings were live on television. Millions of people are going to see your father steal a car. The whole world will think he’s a car thief!”

  “Daddy would never be an accomplice to a crime,” said Jemima. “I’m sure he’ll stop him.”

  “I’m afraid he’s already been an accomplice,” said Mimsie.

  “What?”

  “How did Tiny Jack get here? With burst-proof bubbles and antigravity paint. Your father and I have already helped him on his way.”

  “And I was the one who told him about the moon buggy,” said Lucy. “I thought I was being clever, but I put the idea in his head.”

  “We all helped him,” said Mum. “If it weren’t for us, he would never have had the Diamond As Big As Your Head.”

  “You’ve all been so helpful.” Nanny smiled, backing out of the room. “I almost won’t enjoy doing this.”

  They heard a click as she locked the door behind her.

  “Hey! Wait! What are you doing?” shouted Mum.

  “I do apologize for the inconvenience, Mrs. Tooting,” Nanny called from the other side of the door. “You’ve been a true inspiration to me. Your commitment to tidying up has inspired me to do some de-cluttering of my own.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Mum.

  “The Toy Box,” yelled Nanny from the other side of the door, “really is a box. It’s held down by a few catches, here”— they heard the snap of a metal catch being undone —“and here”— another snap. “As you can hear, I’ve undone those catches. This sound”— clunk —“is me strapping a small explosive charge onto the side of the box. When I detonate the charge, it will shoot the Toy Box up into space. Since there is no friction in space, the box will just keep going on and on into deeper and deeper space . . .”

  “Bang!” yelled Little Harry.

  “But why?”

  “Tiny Jack has completed his collection, stolen the world’s most expensive car. Everything else is just clutter. Get rid of the clutter. You are the clutter. Good-bye.”

  “But what will become of us?” said Jemima.

  “Intelligent question,” said Nanny.

  “Bang-Bang!” yelled Little Harry.

  “In fact,” said Nanny, “the lack of physical friction in space means that the Toy Box will keep drifting. Since you’re unlikely to hit any physical object, you’ll continue to drift. Forever. And Ever. I’ll be commencing countdown shortly.”

  “Why do villains always talk so much when they’re about to kill you?” Lucy wondered aloud. “Surely they must know that just gives the hero more time to come to the rescue.”

  “What hero?” asked Jemima. As she said this, the glass dome above their heads shattered into a million little pieces. Thanks to weightlessness, the shards of glass floated harmlessly around the room like unusually bright snow.

  “Ga GOOO ga!”

  The mighty radiator of the racing-green Chitty Chitty Bang Bang thrust itself through the crystal blizzard and into the room. Jem was at the wheel.

  “Anyone need a lift?” he said.

  “Ah,” said Jemima. “That hero.”

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” said Harry. It was what he’d been trying to say all along.

  Nanny heard the racket on the other side of the door. She scrabbled with the lock. She got the door open just in time to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s license plate — GEN II — disappearing backward through the hole in the shattered dome. When Nanny hurried into the Toy Box, Chitty flashed her headlights at her, flipped her indicators, and was gone.

  Nanny stormed back to the door, pulled it open, and — to her astonishment — found herself looking at the Château Bateau swimming pool a hundred feet below. In reversing out through the dome, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang had dragged the Toy Box free of its moorings. It was now cheerfully waltzing through the air. Nanny leaped back. The stars whirled by beyond the shattered dome above her head. Bits of broken glass danced in the air around her. As she struggled to close the door she seemed to hear the echo of her own voice saying, “Since there is no friction in space, this box will just keep going on and on into deeper and deeper space . . .”

  “In theory,” said Lucy, as she settled in the front seat of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, “the box will keep drifting forever until, perhaps, the Nanny turns into a storm of angry protons.”

  “How did you know that we needed to be rescued, Jem?” asked Jemima.

  “I didn’t,” said Jem. “Chitty did.”

  “Engage sun dome and switch on the oxygen fountain,” said Lucy as they neared the skin of the giant bubble. “We’re going to the moon.”

  “Really?”

  “Tiny Jack has marooned Dad, Jeremy, and the Commander on the moon.”

  “Marooned?” gasped Jem. “But they don’t have space suits! Won’t they be . . .”

  “Don’t think about it,” said Mum. “Just drive.”

  Jemima took some crocheting out of her pocket. The wool danced in and out of her fingers.

  “You’re flying through space and you’re doing crochet?” said Lucy.

  ?
??There’s a lot of space to get through. Crochet helps pass the time.”

  After a while Mum said, “Does anyone have a pen?”

  “Pens don’t write in space,” said Mimsie, without looking up. “I do have a pencil. It’s in my pocket. Help yourself.”

  “After we’ve foiled Tiny Jack,” said Mum, “we are going to go and tidy up history. I’m making a to-do list . . .”

  “Your list is going to be longer than that,” said Lucy, who had been scanning the Earth through Pott’s Patent Superbinoculars. She passed them to Mum. “They say you can see the Great Wall of China from space. But can you?”

  Mum raised the binoculars. “Wow!” she said. “These are amazing. I can see roads and rivers and houses.”

  “But no Great Wall. And look at Britain.”

  Mum swung the binoculars across the Earth. Mountains and oceans swirled by. “These are fabulous! That spiky bit at the top of Great Britain, that must be Scotland. Those blue bits are the lochs. Those sunny green bumps, they must be the Pennines. That must be Birmingham . . .”

  “Try to find Basildon.”

  Mum looked down toward London and then went very quiet. Where Basildon should be, there was nothing but a hole in the ground. “Tiny Jack has miniaturized it to make pieces for his game of Destruction.”

  Quietly, solemnly, Mum added “Basildon” to her list.

  “Let’s hope we catch him,” said Jem, “before he shrinks London or New York or Beijing.”

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!” whooped Little Harry.

  “Yes, we’re riding in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” agreed Mum.

  “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang!” insisted Little Harry.

  This time Jem remembered that Little Harry is always right. He looked where his brother was pointing. Far ahead, in space, a tiny ball of golden light was speeding toward them. It passed them in a blur — Tiny Jack on his way back to Château Bateau.

  “It’s Tiny Jack,” said Jem. “In his golden Chitty.”

  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang quivered. Her springs squeaked, wires twitched. Handles and switches rattled in their fittings as though she were being pulled toward some terrible magnet.

  “Chitty wants to go after him,” said Jem, struggling with the wheel.

  “No!” It was Jemima. She looked horrified. “That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Tiny Jack’s golden Chitty and our own dear racing-green Chitty are both the same car but from different times. Imagine if you went into a room and you were already in there as an old woman . . .”

  “That would be interesting,” said Mimsie.

  “It could be disastrous,” said Jemima. “One thing can’t be two things. I have the feeling that if the two Chitties touched, something terrible would happen. Perhaps the whole universe would short-circuit or close up like a book that time has finished reading. Don’t you think, Lucy?”

  “You thought of all that while you were crocheting?”

  “I think better when I crochet.”

  “Could you show me how to do it?”

  “Moon! Moon! Moon!” sang Little Harry. For there it was, hanging over them, blinding, vast, and empty.

  “How will we ever find them?” Mimsie sighed.

  Lucy took out her jelly phone. “We’ll ring Dad,” she said. “The jelly phones seemed to work everywhere in time and space.” The vast silence of space seemed to pivot around the tinny ringing of the phone. “Answer, answer,” muttered Lucy.

  “Hello?!”

  “Dad?!”

  “I’m on the moon!”

  “Yes, we know. We’re coming to rescue you.”

  “I’m on the moon!”

  “Yes. Where exactly are you?”

  “Hello? Hello? I’m on the moon.”

  The phone went dead. “Never mind,” said Lucy. “Think about it logically. They stole the moon buggy. Everyone knows that landed on the Marsh of Decay at the foot of the Lunar Apennines.”

  “But how do we know what is where?” said Mimsie. “Jem doesn’t have a map. My Jeremy always has maps.”

  “I don’t need a map,” said Jem. “I’m barely steering. Chitty knows the way. She’s been here before, just not in this colour scheme.”

  The airstream of their green Chitty Chitty Bang Bang spread a duvet of dust over the Marsh of Decay. Even through the dust they could see a flicker of bright lights ahead as though a constellation had fallen out of the sky onto the lunar surface. It was starlight playing across the dome of the burst-proof bubble. They saw as they drew nearer that the bubble was huge. The whole of the lunar module, including the empty buggy-container, sat beneath its dome.

  Chitty landed herself neatly just a few metres away, and Jem drove her slowly, carefully, through the membrane of the bubble.

  Mum rushed to embrace Dad. Mimsie embraced the Commander and Jeremy.

  “Are these the first kisses on the moon?” said Dad. “Can someone take a picture?”

  “OK, now you’ve spoiled the entire moon for me,” said Lucy, and climbed back into the racing-green Chitty.

  She was not the only unhappy face. The two NASA astronauts — still in their space suits — were sitting on the steps of the module, looking glum.

  “I can see that it would be frustrating,” said Dad, “coming all this way for a drive and finding that someone has nicked your car.”

  “The moon buggy!” exclaimed Mum, taking out her paper and pencil. “I need to add that to the list.”

  “Chaps won’t take off their space suits,” said the Commander. “Even though we’ve told them they’re quite safe inside the bubble.”

  “Safe,” said Dad, “but cold.”

  “They think we’re aliens. Or possibly Russian. They won’t let us in the module.”

  “They think,” said the Commander, “that we had something to do with the theft of their lunar vehicle. Because your father jimmied the door off the pod.”

  “And you hooked it up to Tiny Jack’s tow hook,” said Dad.

  The two NASA astronauts had got to their feet. They were staring at Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  “Paragon Panther,” shouted the Commander, “wrecked at Brooklands in 1922. I found her in an old garage, restored her myself in 1963.”

  “And I restored her again,” said Dad, “in . . . you know, the future. Found her . . . all over the world, really. She was in pieces.”

  Little Harry peered up into the astronauts’ masks.

  “Ice cream!” he yelled. “Ice cream!”

  “They can’t hear you, inside their space suits,” said Dad. “I tried writing a few things down for them, but it didn’t seem to help.”

  Dad’s notes:

  “Oh, how I wanted a space suit like that when I was little,” said Dad. “I can’t believe we’re standing here with real live NASA astronauts! Can we get a photograph? Lucy! Where’s your jelly phone?”

  Lucy was still sulking in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, practising her crochet. Every now and then she would look up at Planet Earth. Africa was just turning into view. Lucy thought of all the places she had been in Chitty. Places that seemed so far apart but which now seemed so close together they were all the same place. Earth. She could blot the whole planet out of the picture by squinting at her thumb. For some reason, this thought bothered her.

  “Come on, Lucy,” said Mum. “When are we ever going to have another opportunity to get a photograph of our entire family on the moon?” Mum wanted both families in the photograph, so they had to persuade one of the astronauts to take the picture. The other one stood in the middle with his two thumbs up. This all took some time. Maybe looking at the smiling families through the lens of the camera phone reminded the astronaut of his home and family. For whatever reason, as Jem was cranking Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s engine, ready for the return journey, the astronaut tapped on the glass of the sun dome.

  “Ice cream!” bawled Little Harry.

  Jem could sort of see what he meant. The astronaut did look a bit like some kind of strange extraterrestrial
ice-cream man as he reached in and handed out little silver parcels.

  Oh! It turned out they were ice cream! There was a straw in one end, and if you sucked hard you got a mouthful of some slightly chewy, very vanilla-ish, definitely space ice cream.

  “If you don’t mind I’ll save mine for later,” said Commander Pott.

  Dad climbed into the driving seat and tried the starter motor. Nothing happened.

  “Probably best if I drive,” said the Commander. “After all, this is a kind of voyage, and I was in the Navy.”

  “I just drove this car all the way to the moon from Basildon,” said Dad. “I’ve really got the feel of her.”

  “If you two are going to bicker,” said Mimsie, “then I’ll drive, because I’ve never learned how to, and space is the ideal place, as there’s nothing to bump into.”

  But no matter how hard Jem cranked the engine, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang would not start.

  “Have you checked the petrol?” asked Mimsie.

  The fuel gauge showed zero.

  “Got the feel of her!?” snorted the Commander. “You didn’t even notice that she was thirsty.”

  “Now that I come to think of it,” said Dad, “I haven’t put petrol in her since Dover. I suppose that is quite a long way.”

  “It’s a quarter of a million miles,” said the Commander. “Chitty is very fuel efficient, but if you’re planning to travel a quarter of a million miles, you should probably put a drop in the tank.”

  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was stuck on the moon with no petrol.

  The golden Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was at that very moment back at Château Bateau, sliding through the membrane of the burst-proof bubble with Tiny Jack at the wheel. She glided in to land next to the Sphinx. Tiny Jack jumped out and set about unhooking the moon buggy from its moorings. As he busied himself with the clasps and hooks, he practised the great speech he had been composing in his head. “Yes, this is it. I’ve excelled even my own excellence . . . no, my excellent self. I have excelled my own excellence . . . you see before you . . . no. Look at me, everyone!”

  Once the buggy was unhooked, he drove it round the pool a couple of times to get the hang of it. He thought about hiding it in the palm trees for a while and then unveiling it when everyone was there to see it. But then he thought how much more brilliant it would be if everyone came down and found him already sitting on it . . . no, standing on it. Yes! He stood on the back of the moon buggy and called at the top of his voice, “Look what I’ve got!!! Come and see, everyone!!!” He couldn’t wait to see their faces. This must be the greatest, most amazing and daring car theft ever. “It’s my bestest ever birthday present to myself!! Come on down and bring your cameras. Hello? HELLOOOOOOO!!!”