Lost in a good book (8 page)

“Listen to me, Kaylieu. If you don’t make any threatening movements they may not open fire.”

“We thought of that,” said the neanderthal as he pulled an imitation automatic from his tunic.

“They will fire,” he said as Cricklade Station hove into view a half mile up the line. “We carved it from soap—
Dove
soap,” he added. “We thought it ironic.”

We approached Cricklade at full speed; I could see SpecOps- 14 vehicles parked on the road and black uniformed SWAT teams waiting on the platform. With a hundred yards to run, the power to the Skyrail abruptly cut out and the shuttle skidded, power off, towards the station. The door to the driver’s compartment swung open and I squeezed in. I grabbed his soapy gun and threw it to the floor. Kaylieu wasn’t going to die, at least not if I could help it. We rumbled into the station. The doors were opened by SO-14 operatives and all the Irma Cohens rapidly evacuated. I put my arm round Kaylieu. It was the first time I had done so to any neanderthal and I was surprised by how hard the muscles were—and how warm to the touch.

“Move away from the thal!” said a voice from a bullhorn.

“So you can shoot him?” I yelled back.

“He threatened the lives of commuters, Next. He is a danger to civilized society!”

“Civilized?” I shouted angrily. “Look at you!”

“Next!” said the voice. “Move aside. That is a
direct
order!”

“You
must
do as they say,” said the neanderthal.

“Over my dead body.”

As if in reply there was a gentle
POK
sound and a single bullet hole appeared in the windshield of the shuttle. Someone had decided he could take out Kaylieu anyway. My temper flared and I tried to yell out in anger but no sound came from my lips. My legs felt weak and I fell to the floor in a heap, the world turning gray about me. I couldn’t even feel my legs. I heard someone yell:
Medic!
and the last thing I saw before the darkness overtook me was Kaylieu’s broad face looking down at me. He had tears in his eyes and was mouthing the words
We’re so sorry. So very, very, sorry.

5.
Vanishing Hitchhikers

Urban legends are older than congress gaiters but far more interesting. I’d heard most of them, from the dog in the microwave to ball lightning chasing a housewife in Preston, to the fried dodo leg found in a Smiley Fried Chicken, to the carnivorous
Diatryma
supposedly reengineered and now living in the New Forest. I’d read all about the alien spaceship that crash-landed near Lam-bourn in 1952, the story that Charles Dickens was a woman and that the president of the Goliath Corporation was actually a 142- year-old man kept alive in a bottle by medical science. Stories about SpecOps abound, the favorite at present relating to “ something odd” dug up in the Quantock Hills. Yes, I’d heard them all. Never believed any of them. Then one day, I
was
one. . . .

THURSDAY NEXT
,
A Life in SpecOps

I
OPENED ONE EYE
, then the other. It was a warm summer’s day on the Marlborough downs. A light zephyr brought with it the delicate scent of honeysuckle and wild thyme. The air was warm and small puffy clouds were tinged red from the setting sun. I was standing by the side of a road in open country. In one direction I could just see a lone cyclist moving towards where I stood and in the other the road wound away into the distance past fields in which sheep grazed peacefully. If this was life after death, then a lot of people had not much to worry about and the Church had delivered the goods after all.

“Psssst!”
hissed a voice close at hand. I turned to see a figure crouched behind a large Goliath Corporation billboard advertising buy-two-get-one-free grand pianos.

“Dad—?”

He pulled me behind the billboard with him.

“Don’t stand there like a tourist, Thursday!” he snapped crossly. “Anyone would think you
wanted
to be seen!”

“Hi, Dad!” I said fondly, giving him a hug.

“Hello, hello,” he said absently, glancing up and down the road and consulting the chronograph on his wrist and muttering: “fundamental things apply as time goes by. . . .”

I regarded my father as a sort of time-traveling knight errant, but to the ChronoGuard he was nothing less than a criminal. He threw in his badge and went rogue seventeen years ago when his “historical and moral” differences brought him into conflict with the ChronoGuard High Chamber. The down-side of this was that he didn’t really exist at all in any accepted terms of the definition; the ChronoGuard had interrupted his conception in 1917 by a well-timed knock on his parents’ front door. But despite all this Dad
was
still around and I and my brothers
had
been born. “Things,” Dad used to say, “are a whole lot weirder than we
can
know.”

He thought for a moment and made a few notes on the back of an envelope with a pencil stub.

“How are you, by the way?” he asked.

“I think I was just accidentally shot dead by a SpecOps marksman.”

He burst out laughing but suddenly stopped when he saw I was serious.

“Goodness!” he said. “You
do
live an exciting life. But never fear. You can’t die until you’ve lived, and you’ve barely started
that
at all. What’s the news from home?”

“A ChronoGuard officer turned up at my wedding bash wanting to know where you were.”

“Lavoisier?”

“Yes; do you know him?”

“I should think so,” sighed my father. “We were partners for nearly seven centuries.”

“He said you were very dangerous.”

“No more dangerous than anyone else who dares speak the truth. How’s your mother?”

“She’s fine, although you might try and clear up that misunderstanding about Emma Hamilton.”

“Emma and I—I mean
Lady Hamilton
and I—are simply ‘good friends.’ There’s nothing to it, I swear.”

“Tell
her
that.”

“I try, but you know what a temper she has. I only have to mention I’ve been anywhere
near
the turn of the nineteenth century and she gets in a frightful strop.”

I looked around.

“Where are we?”

“Summer of ’72,” he replied. “All well at work?”

“We found a thirty-third play by Shakespeare.”

“Thirty-three?” echoed my father. “That’s odd. When I took the entire works back to the actor Shakespeare to distribute there were only
eighteen.
”

“Perhaps the actor Shakespeare started writing them himself?” I suggested.

“By thunder you could be right!” he exclaimed. “He looked a bright spark. Tell me, how many comedies are there now?”

“Fifteen.”

“But I only gave him
three.
They must have been so popular he started writing new ones himself!”

“It would explain why all the comedies are pretty much the same,” I added. “Spells, identical twins, shipwrecks—”

“—usurped Dukes, men dressed as women,” continued my father. “You could be right.”

“Wait a moment—!” I began. But my father, sensing my disquiet over the many seemingly impossible paradoxes in his work in the timestream, silenced me with his hand.

“One day you’ll understand and everything will be more different than you can, at present, possibly hope to imagine.”

I must have looked blank, for he checked the road again, leaned against the back of the billboard and continued:

“Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought, indeed,
any
mode of thought whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else, is just like the fashions that we wear—only much longer-lived. It’s a little like a boy band.”

“Scientific thought a boy band? How do you figure
that?
”

“Well, every now and then a boy band comes along. We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on TV, idolize them right up until—”

“—the next boy band?” I suggested.

“Precisely. Aristotle was a boy band. A very good one, but only number six or seven. He was the best boy band until Isaac Newton, but even Newton was transplanted by an even
newer
boy band. Same haircuts—but different moves.”

“Einstein, right?”

“Right. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“That the way we think is nothing more than a passing fad?”

“Exactly. Hard to visualize a new way of thinking? Try this. Go thirty or forty boy bands
past
Einstein. Where we would regard Einstein as someone who
glimpsed
a truth, played one good chord in seven forgettable albums.”

“Where is this going, Dad?”

“I’m nearly there. Imagine a boy band so good that you never needed another boy band ever again—
or even any more music.
Can you imagine that?”

“It’s hard. But yes, okay.”

He let this sink in for a moment.

“When we reach
that
boy band, my dear,
everything
we have ever puzzled about becomes crystal clear—and we will kick ourselves that we hadn’t thought of it earlier!”

“We will?”

“Sure. And you know the best thing about it? It’s so devilishly
simple.
”

“I see,” I replied, slightly dubiously. “And when is this amazing Boy Band discovered?”

Dad suddenly turned serious.

“That’s why I’m here. Perhaps never—which would be frightfully awkward in the grand scheme of things, believe me. Did you see a cyclist on the road?”

“Yes?”

“Well,” he said, consulting the large chronograph on his wrist, “in ten seconds that cyclist will be knocked over and killed.”

“And—?” I asked, sensing that I was missing something.

He looked around furtively and lowered his voice.

“Well, it seems that right here and now is the key event whereby we can avert whatever it is that
destroys every single speck of life on this planet!
”

I looked into his earnest eyes.

“You’re not kidding, are you?”

He shook his head.

“In December 1985,
your
1985, for some unaccountable reason, all the planet’s organic matter turns to . . .
this.
”

He withdrew a plastic specimen bag from his pocket. It contained a thick pinkish opaque slime. I took the bag and shook it curiously as we heard a loud screech of tires and a sickly thud. A moment later a broken body and twisted bicycle landed close by.

“On the 12th December at 20:23, give or take a second or two, all organic material—every plant, insect, fish, bird, mammal and the three billion human inhabitants of this planet—will start turning to
that.
End of all of us. End of Life—and there won’t be that boy band I was telling you about. The problem is—” he went on as a car door slammed and we heard feet running towards us—“that we don’t know
why.
The ChronoGuard are not doing any upstreaming work at present.”

“Why is that?”

“Labor dispute. They’re on strike for shorter hours. Not actually
less
hours, you understand, just the hours that they do work they want to be—er—shorter.”

“So while the upstreamers are on strike the world could end and everyone will die, including them? But that’s crazy!”

“From an industrial action viewpoint,” said my father, furrowing his brow and going silent for a moment, “I think it’s a very good strategy indeed. I hope they can thrash out a new agreement in time.”

“And we’ll know if they don’t because the world ends?” I remarked sarcastically.

“Oh, they’ll come to some arrangement,” explained my father, smiling. “The dispute regarding
under
time rates lasted almost two decades—time’s easy to waste when you’ve got lots of it.”

“Okay,” I sighed, unwilling to get too embroiled in SO-12 labor disputes, “what can we do about averting this crisis?”

“Global disasters are like ripples in a pond, Sweetpea. There is
always
an epicenter—a place in time and space where it all begins, however innocuously.”

I began to understand. I looked around at the summer’s evening. The birds were twittering happily and barely a soul could be seen in any direction.

“This is the epicenter?”

“Exactly so. Doesn’t look like much, does it? I’ve run trillions of timestream models and the outcome is the same—whatever happens here and now somehow relates to the averting of the crisis. And since the cyclist’s death is the only event of any significance for hours in either direction, it
has
to be the key event. The cyclist
must
live to ensure the continued health of the planet!”

We stepped out from behind the billboard to confront the driver, a youngish man who was dressed in flares and black leather jacket. He was visibly panicking.

“Oh my God!” he said as he stared at the broken body at our feet. “Oh my God! Is he—?”

“At the moment, yes,” replied my father in a matter-of-fact sort of way as he filled his pipe.

“I must call an ambulance!” stammered the man. “He could still be alive!”

“Anyway,” continued my father, ignoring the motorist completely, “the cyclist obviously
does
something or
doesn’t
do something, and that’s the key to this whole stupid mess.”

“I wasn’t speeding, you know,” said the motorist quickly. “The engine might have been revving, but it was stuck in second . . .”

“Hang on!” I said, slightly confused. “You’ve been beyond 1985, Dad—you told me so yourself!”

“I know that,” replied my father grimly, “so we’d better get this
absolutely
right.”

“There was a low sun,” continued the driver as he thought hard, “and he swerved in front of me!”

“Male guilt avoidance syndrome,” explained my father. “It’s a recognized medical condition by 2054.”

Dad held me by the arm and there was a series of rapid flashes and an intense burst of noise, and we were about a half mile and five minutes in the direction the cyclist had come. He rode past and waved cheerily.