Free Tempus Fugitive by Nicola Rhodes Page A

it over, she took hold of Denny’s hand and would not let go. 
    ‘Um,’
    ‘Oh let him go,’ said Tamar.  ‘You can’t keep him, not yet.’ 
    Captain Tamar let go of him reluctantly.  ‘I suppose so,’ she let her gaze linger on him, longingly.  ‘See you soon?’ she asked hopefully.
    ‘Stop fishing,’ said Tamar.  ‘Close file.’
    The cabin vanished and they were back in the file room, the last thing they heard was ‘Goodbye.’
    ‘I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that she’s about to be captured by the Spaniards and end up back in the bottle again,’ said Tamar.

~ Chapter Five ~
    I t was a bright, sunny day, which made a pleasant change.  They were quite obviously in a small town or suburb in the mid to late twentieth century.  The streets were quiet, and there were few cars about. The street they stood on was mostly taken up by a large comprehensive school.  And it was evidently late afternoon, probably midweek.
    With few people or vehicles as clues, it was surprising how difficult it was to judge the decade.  Houses and streets changed so little in reality.  Not at all how science fiction writers once foresaw the march of progress.  There was a red telephone box on the corner.  This only meant that it could be any time between the fifties and the eighties.  Denny narrowed it down further when he spotted a turquoise mini parked in a driveway. It had to be the sixties or later he said. Even the few people they could see afforded little in the way of data.  Fashions in the twentieth century changed far less than those same science fiction writers could ever have conceived.  As Denny pointed out.  ‘Have you ever seen anybody wearing a tinfoil jumpsuit, in real life?’
    And Tamar, doyenne of style, agreed that the girl in the miniskirt could be from either the late sixties, early seventies or any time after the early eighties.  Or she could just be from the mid-seventies and be behind the fashion; it was impossible to tell.  An elderly lady in a headscarf could as easily be from the forties or last week. 
    If they could only see into the inside of the houses, they might have a better idea, technology being a far better guide than the people themselves. 
    I do not undertake to explain their fascination with this conundrum, except to say that it is possible that it would strike anyone else in the same way, were they to find themselves in this position.  In every other file they had entered they had found it relatively easy to identify the time period within a few years.  Only the modern world, it seemed, was so uniform and unchanging.  Denny and Tamar felt quite determined to find out when they were before they left.  It was strange when you think about it.  Here, they had no reason to hang around, nobody had seen them (and it would probably not have mattered much if they had) Tamar could not sense Askphrit, and nothing peculiar was going on, and yet they did not want to leave.
    ‘I reckon it’s the ’eighties,’ said Denny. 
    ‘’Sixties,’ countered Tamar.  ‘It’s so quiet; that’s because, all the men are at work and the women are at home.  They didn’t have two car families in the sixties; that’s why most of the driveways are empty.’ 
    ‘In the ’eighties the women would be at work too,’ argued Denny.  ‘That’s why they aren’t out in the street talking or gardening or whatever.’
    ‘Could even be the nineties then,’ mused Tamar, ‘by that reckoning.’
    ‘No,’ said Denny, positively.  ‘They didn’t have those red telephone boxes by that time, they’d all gone.’
    ‘You do notice some funny things,’ observed Tamar.  ‘Let’s look at the sign on outside the school, see what year it was built; that might narrow it down a bit.’ 
    They wandered over.  The sign read Mill Lane Comprehensive.  Built 1968.  This then was inconclusive.  
    ‘Well, we can’t ask anyone,’ said Tamar.  ‘Not unless we want to be taken