Lost in a good book (30 page)

The air was warmer now, and as my father checked his chronograph again we started to decelerate. The six months we had spent there had passed in barely thirty minutes. By the time we had returned to one day per day, it was night again.

“I don’t see anyone, do you?” he hissed.

I looked around; the road was deserted. I opened my mouth to speak but he put a finger to his lips. At that moment a Morris 8 saloon appeared around the corner and drove rapidly down the road. It swerved to avoid a fox, skidded sideways off the road and landed upside down in the river. I wanted to get up, but my father held me with a pinched grip. The driver of the car—who I assumed was Billden—broke the surface of the river, then quickly dived back to the car and resurfaced a few moments later with a woman. He dragged her to the bank and was just about to return to the submerged vehicle when a tall man in a greatcoat appeared from nowhere and placed his hand on Billden’s arm.

“Now!” said my father and we dashed from the safety of the copse.

“Leave him!” yelled my father. “Leave him to do what he has to do!”

My father grabbed the interloper, and with a sharp cry the man vanished. Billden looked confused and made a run for the river, but in a few short moments a half-dozen ChronoGuard had dropped in, Lavoisier amongst them. One of the agents rugby-tackled Landen’s father before he could return to rescue Landen. I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

I yelled,
“NO!”
and pulled out my gun and aimed it at the man who held Billden.

The next thing I knew I was disarmed, sitting on the ground and feeling shocked and disoriented after my brief enloopment. It was how I imagine a stuck record might feel. Two SO-12 operatives stared at me while my father and Lavoisier talked in angry voices close by. Billden was breathing heavily and sobbing into the damp earth, holding his still-unconscious wife.

“Bastards!” I spat. “My husband’s in there!”

“
So
much to learn,” muttered Lavoisier as I got to my feet and stood by my father’s side. “The infant Parke-Laine is
not
your husband, he is an accident statistic—or not. It rather depends on your father.”

“A lackey for the Goliath Corporation, Lavoisier?” said Dad quietly. “You disappoint me.”

“Greater need prevails, Colonel. If you’d handed yourself in I wouldn’t have had to take these extreme measures. Besides, the ChronoGuard can’t function without corporate sponsorship.”

“And in return you do a few favors?”

“As I said, greater needs prevail. And before you start waving charges of corruption at me, this combined Goliath/Chrono-Guard operation has been fully sanctioned by the Chamber. Now, it’s so simple even you can understand it. Give yourself up and your daughter can have her husband back—whether or not she decides to help Goliath. As you can see, I am in a
very
generous mood.”

I looked at Dad and saw him bite his lip. He rubbed his temples and sighed. He had spent years fighting corruption in the ChronoGuard, and despite Landen’s being so close to reactualization, I wasn’t going to see Dad lose his liberty over either of us. What had he said?—“No one is truly dead until they are forgotten.” Landen was still strong in my memory—we
would
have another chance.

As Dad opened his mouth to reluctantly agree, I said: “No.”

“What?” exclaimed Lavoisier.

“No,” I repeated. “Dad, don’t do it—I’ll get Jack Schitt out— or
something!
”

Dad smiled and rested his hand on my shoulder.

“Bah!” went Lavoisier. “Each as hideously self-righteous as the other!”

He nodded to his men, who raised their weapons. But Dad was quick. I felt him grasp my shoulder tightly and we were off. The sun rose quickly as we leapt forward in time, leaving Lavoisier and the others several hours away before they realized what had happened.

“Let’s see if we can lose him!” muttered my father. “As for that Chamber stuff—bullshit. Landen’s eradication was murder, pure and simple. In fact, it’s just the sort of information I need to bring Lavoisier down!”

Days amounted to no more than brief flashes of alternate dark and light as we hurtled into the future. But the odd thing was, we didn’t actually move physically from the place we were standing. The world just aged about us.

“We’re not at full speed,” Dad explained. “He might overtake me without thinking. Keep an eye out for—”

Lavoisier and his cronies appeared for no more than the briefest glimpse as they moved past us into the future. Dad stopped abruptly and I staggered slightly as we returned to real time. We moved off the road as a fifties-style truck drove past, horn blaring.

“What now?”

“I think we shook him off. Blast—!”

We were off again—Lavoisier had reappeared. We lost him for a moment but pretty soon he was back again, keeping pace with us, matching our speed as we moved through history. As Dad slowed down slightly, so did Lavoisier. As he accelerated, Lavoisier did the same. It was like a transtemporal game of follow the leader.

“I’m too old to fall for that one!” smiled Lavoisier.

Soon after, two of his cronies reappeared as each one found us and matched the speed we were moving through time.

“I knew you’d come,” said Lavoisier triumphantly, walking towards us slowly as the time flashed past, faster and faster. A new road was built where we were standing, then a bridge, houses, shops. “Give yourself up. You’ll have a fair trial, believe me.”

The two other ChronoGuard operatives grabbed my father and held him tightly.

“I’ll see you hang for this, Lavoisier! The Chamber would
never
sanction such an action. Give Landen back his life and I promise you I will say nothing.”

“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?” replied Lavoisier scornfully. “Who do you think they’re going to believe? You, with your record, or me, third in command at the ChronoGuard? Besides, your clumsy attempt to get Landen back has covered any tracks I might have made getting rid of him!”

Lavoisier aimed his gun at my father. The two ChronoGuards held on to Dad tightly to stop him accelerating away, and we buffeted slightly as he tried. Things, to say the least, looked bad. From the makes of the cars on the road I could see we were approaching the early eighties. It wouldn’t be long before we arrived at 1985. I had a sudden thought. Wasn’t there ChronoGuard industrial action happening sometime soon?

“Say,” I said, “do you guys cross picket lines?”

The ChronoGuard agents looked at each other, then at the chronographs on their wrists, then at Lavoisier. The taller of the two was the first to speak.

“She’s right, Mr. Lavoisier, sir. I don’t mind bullying and killing innocents, and I’ll follow you beyond the crunch
normally,
but—”

“But what?” asked Lavoisier angrily.

“—but I
am
a loyal TimeGuild member. I don’t cross picket lines.”

“Neither do I,” replied the other agent, nodding to his friend. “Likewise and truly.”

Lavoisier smiled engagingly.

“Listen here, guys, I’ll
personally
pay—”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Lavoisier,” replied the operative with a hint of indignation, “but we’ve been instructed not to enter into any individual contracts.”

And in an instant they were gone as December arrived and the world turned pink. What had once been the road was now a few inches of the same pink slime that Dad had shown me. We were beyond the 12th December 1985, and where before there had been growth, change, seasons, clouds, now there was nothing but a never-ending landscape of shiny opaque curd.

“Saved by industrial action!” said Dad, laughing. “Tell
that
to your friends at the Chamber!”

“Bravo,” replied Lavoisier wryly. He lowered his pistol. Without his cronies to hold on to Dad and stop him escaping, there was little he could do. “Bravo. I think we should just say
au revoir,
my friends—until we meet again.”

“Do we have to make it
au revoir?
” I asked. “What’s wrong with
goodbye?
”

He didn’t have time to answer as I felt Dad tense and we accelerated faster through the timestream. The pink slime was washed away, leaving only earth and rocks, and as I watched, the river moved away from us, meandered off into the flood plain and then swept under our feet and undulated back and forth like a snake before finally being replaced by a lake. We moved faster, and soon I could see the earth start to buckle as the crust bent and twisted under the force of plate tectonics. Plains dropped to make seas and mountains rose in their place. New vegetation reestablished itself as millions of years swept past in a matter of seconds. Vast forests grew and fell. We were covered, then uncovered, then covered again, now in a sea, now inside rock, now surrounded by an ice sheet, now a hundred feet in the air. More forests, then a desert, then mountains rose rapidly in the east, only to be scoured flat a few moments later.

“Well,” said my father as we traveled through time, “Lavoisier in the pocket of Goliath. Who’d have thought it?”

“Dad?” I asked as the sun grew visibly bigger and redder. “How do we get back?”

“We don’t go back,” he replied. “We
can’t
go back. Once the present has happened, that’s it. We just carry on going until we return to where we started. Sort of like a roundabout. Miss an exit and you have to drive around again. There are just a few more exits and the roundabout is much, much, bigger.”

“How much bigger?”

“A lot.”

“How
much
of a lot?” I persisted.

“A lot of a lot. Quiet now—we’re nearly there!”

And all of a sudden we weren’t
nearly
there, we
were
there, back at breakfast in my apartment, Dad turning the pages of the newspaper and me running out from my bedroom having just got dressed. I stopped in mid-stride and sat down at the table, feeling deflated.

“Well, we tried, didn’t we?” said my father.

“Yes Dad,” I replied, staring at the floor, “we did. Thanks.”

“Don’t worry,” he said kindly. “Even the finest eradications leave
something
behind for us to reactualize from. There is always a way—we just have to find it. Sweetpea, we
will
get him back—I’m not having my grandchild without a father.”

His determination did reassure me, and I thanked him.

“Good!” he said, closing his newspaper. “By the way, did you manage to get any tickets for the Nolan Sisters concert?”

“I’m working on it.”

“Good show. Well, time waits for no man, as we say—”

He squeezed my hand and was gone. The world started up again, the TV came back on, and there was a muffled plocking from Pickwick, who had managed to lock herself in the airing cupboard again. I let her out and she ruffled her feathers in an embarrassed fashion before going off in search of her water dish.

I went in to work, but there was precious little to do. We had a call from an enraged Mrs. Hathaway
₃₄
, demanding to know when we were going to arrest the
unlick’d bear-whelp
who had cheated her, and another from a student who wanted to know whether we thought Hamlet’s line was
this too too solid flesh
or
this too too sullied flesh,
or even perhaps
this two-toed swordfish.
Bowden spent the morning mouthing the lines for his routine, and by noon there had been two attempts to steal
Cardenio
from Vole Towers. Nothing serious; SO-14 had doubled the guard. This didn’t concern SpecOps-27 in any way, so I spent the afternoon surreptitiously reading the Jurisfiction instruction manual, which felt a little like flicking through a girls’ magazine during school. I was tempted to have a go at entering a work of fiction to try out a few of their “handy bookjumping tips” (page 28), but Havisham had roundly forbidden me from doing anything of the sort until I was more experienced. By the time I was ready to go home I had learned a few tricks about emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) and read about the aims of the Bowdlerizers (page 62), who were a group of well-meaning yet censorious individuals hell bent on removing obscenities from fiction. I also read about Heathcliff’s unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name of Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of
Wuthering Heights
(page 71), the forty-six abortive attempts to illegally save Beth from dying in
Little Women
(page 74), details of the Character Exchange Program (page 81), using holorimic verse to flush out renegade book people, or PageRunners as they were known (page 96), and how to use spelling mistakes, misprints and double negatives to signal to other PROs in case emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) failed (page 105). But there weren’t only pages of instructions. The last ten or so pages featured hollowed-out recesses which contained devices that were far too deep to have fitted in the book. One of the pages contained a device similar to a flare gun which had “Mk IV TextMarker” written on its side. Another page had a glass panel covering a handle like a fire alarm. A note painted on the glass read:
IN UNPRECEDENTED EMERGENCY* BREAK GLASS.
The asterisk, I noted somewhat chillingly, related to the footnote:
*Please note: personal destruction does NOT count as an unprecedented emergency.
I was just learning about writing brief descriptions of where you are by hand to enable you to get back (page 136) when it was time to clock off. I joined the general exodus and wished Bowden good luck with his routine. He didn’t seem in the least nervous, but then he rarely did.