In the corner of the room was an unsteady looking pine sapling. One of the base soldiers had pulled it out of the forest and dragged it upstairs to the dormitory when he found out the children weren’t going home for the holidays. Now it sat in a cleaning bucket which was too small for its weight, and the children kept the glorified twig upright by leaning it against a filing cabinet. To try and cheer up the bedraggled plant, Simon had hung test tubes filled with coloured liquid from its branches. Unfortunately he only had three to spare.
“We’ve got to decorate this thing properly and get a bigger pot,” he grunted.
“You think I should put up a stocking?” Barn asked solemnly. “I always got a sock filled with oranges on Christmas day.”
“You sure it’s wasnae a sack filled with chocolate oranges?” Dave smirked.
“Sorry Barn,” Simon said regretfully. “If Santa tried to come down a chimney here, they’d shoot him for trespassing on government property.”
The large boy went back to reading the comic, but his bottom lip was trembling.
“Now look what ye’ve done, ya bam. Barn’s in a total huff.”
Simon hunkered down beside him.
“Listen,” he said confidentially. “I’ve been working on a special Christmas present and you’ll see it tomorrow. You’re going to love it. Everyone is.”
“I dinnae want some toilet roll cover that you crocheted yersel.” Diddy Dave launched his cap at Simon who swatted it away. It whizzed past Jimmy Hicks and the boy looked round, startled.
“Whit ye thinking there Hicksy?” Dave called. “Yiv no said nothing for an hour.”
Barn and Simon looked expectant. All of the children in the dormitory had phenomenal mental skills of some sort or other, but Jimmy Hick’s IQ was off the scale. It was possible that, someday, one of his ideas would change the world.
“I was wondering what to wear tonight.”
“Eh?”
“I want to look good.” Jimmy Hicks nodded solemnly to himself. “I’m going on a date.”
“Ye dancer! You chasin’ booty, man?”
“Is it Leslie from next door?” Simon asked.
Jimmy Hicks nodded again. “I think she likes me in black.”
Barn sat up and looked around, bright blue eyes narrowing in his heavy face. The dormitory was clean and antiseptic. Rows of neatly made beds, each with an adjoining locker, lined the walls. Steel mesh latticed the tinted glass in the windows.
Simon guessed what was puzzling the larger boy.
“With all those fashion problems on your mind, Jimmy,” he pointed out. “You probably just forgot we’re inside a top secret base.” .
“Aye. Where ye gonnae take her?” Dave jeered. “The canteen?”
“I thought about a moonlight stroll through the forest and then watch the sun rise over the mountains.”
“That sounds romantic,” Simon agreed. “All you have to do is get past the armed guards, closed circuit cameras topped with lasers and double barbed wire fence.”
“Aye Romeo. Then figure oot how tae get back in, know?”
Jimmy Hicks smiled and his eyes sparkled with dark glee.
“I already have.”
There was a snort of derision from the corner.
Cruickshanks, the last of the teens in the room, rolled over in his bunk and raised a disbelieving eyebrow. He was a handsome boy with platinum blonde hair and bright green eyes. He could be friendly and charming when he wanted. He just didn’t want to very often.
“How do you propose to get in and out of the base undetected?” he said casually. The others nodded in unison, intrigued as to how their friend intended to pull off this near-impossible feat.
“I’ll need everyone’s help of course.” Jimmy Hicks smiled.
“Oh aye?” Dave grunted. “An whit’s in it fur us?”
“You got anything more interesting to do on Christmas Eve?” Jimmy nodded at the bare dormitory. “If we pull this off we’ll able to sneak off the base whenever we want. No more monthly jaunts to some tiny village in the middle of nowhere.”
Barn gave a loud yawn. “I like the village.”
“That’s because ye look like a farm animal, big man.”
“I like any outside,” Barn replied, nonplussed. “I’ll help.”
“This will get us into a lot of trouble, won’t it?” Simon jotted down a few more symbols on his pad, then frowned and scored them out again.
“Only if we’re caught.”
“Simon. If you never got into trouble you wouldn’t be in here.” Cruickshank sat up on the bed, interested despite himself.
“Point taken. Count me in then.”
“Me too.” Diddy Dave glanced across at Cruickshank. “What about you blondie? Gonnae be sociable for a change?”
“It depends how feasible this plan is.” Cruickshank lay back on his bed and put his hands behind his head.
“Yir a moany wee bampot, Crooky, know that?”
“I’ll try being nicer if you try being prettier.”
“Go on then Hicksy,” Dave urged. “Tell us how you think you’re gonnae get aff the base.”
Jimmy grinned.
“We’re going to have some unexpected help,” he said.
10.05
“You know the great thing about the virtual simulations they develop in this place?” Jimmy Hicks stood up and beckoned to the other boys. “They’re so realistic it’s hard to tell them from the genuine article.”
“That’s gen-up,” Diddy Dave leered. “If I had wan o those machines, I’d programme in maself, Taylor Swift, a desert island and nae boat.”
“Let me show you something.” Jimmy opened a door in the corner of the dormitory and stepped into the ‘project room’. The other boys followed him.
The project room was a large laboratory used solely by the children. During the day, when they weren’t working on one of Pinewood’s existing projects, the lab functioned as a classroom. On one wall was a huge whiteboard covered in equations and next to that an equally large computer screen. The centre of the room was criss-crossed by benches covered in test tubes and glass vials. Each child had his own bench and workstation, complete with computer.
The children were encouraged to pursue their own scientific projects in the spare time they had◦– not that there was much else for them to do. They were supplied with any equipment and materials that the other labs weren’t using, though nothing flammable or combustible was allowed. Cruickshank had blown up his father’s garden shed when he was seven.
Jimmy switched on his computer and began tapping keys. Dave and Barn sat down next to him but Simon drifted over to the corner of the lab where a piece of apparatus shaped like a turbine engine rested on a bench. He hunkered down and began writing formulas in his book again. Diddy Dave glanced across.
“You back at that nippy thing? It’s never gonnae work, man, know what I’m saying?”
Simon frowned and kept writing.
The ‘Machine’ was his pet project, almost an obsession, and he spent all his spare time on it. Though all the kids had dabbled with the Machine at one time or another, only Simon believed it might actually work.
The Machine was an apparatus the children had designed to send an object through time.
10.07
“Ever wonder how they train the personnel here?” Jimmy Hicks asked his companions. “They use simulations. Stands to reason really.”
He hit a button on his computer and the screen on the wall fizzed into life. It was filled by the image of Major Cowper, head of base security. Cowper was a formidable looking man, with shoulders like an ox, bristling black eyebrows and a moustache to match. Barn and Dave gave a start.