A young lad in the front row was the next to ask a question.

  “How can you surf a time wave that is squillions of years in the future?”

  “Because it isn’t. It’s everywhere, all at once. Time is like a river, with the source, body and mouth all existing at the same time.”

  Friday turned to me and said in a very unsubtle whisper, “Is this going to take long?”

  “Keep quiet and pay attention.”

  He looked heavenward, sighed audibly and slouched deeper in his chair.

  Scintilla carried on, “The time industry is an equal-opportunity employer, has its own union of Federated Timeworkers and a pay structure with overtime payments and bonuses. The working week is forty hours, but each hour is only fifty-two minutes long. Time-related holidays are a perk of the ser vice and can be undertaken after the first ten years’ employment. And also, to make it really attractive, we will give each new recruit a Walkman and vouchers to buy ten CDs of your—”

  He stopped talking, because Friday had put up his hand. We noticed that the other members of the ChronoGuard were staring in dumb wonderment at Friday. The reason wasn’t altogether clear until it suddenly struck me: Scintilla hadn’t known that Friday was going to ask a question.

  “You…have a question?”

  “I do. The question is, ‘Tell me the question I’m going to ask.’”

  Scintilla gave a nervous laugh and looked around the audience in an uncomfortable manner. Eventually he hazarded a guess:

  “You…want to know where the toilet is?”

  “No. I wanted to know if everything we do is preordained.”

  Scintilla gave out another shrill, nervous laugh. Friday was a natural, and they all knew it. The thing was, I think Friday did, too—but didn’t care.

  “A good point and, as you just demonstrated, not at all. Your question was what we call a ‘free radical,’ an anomalous event that exists in de pen dent of the Standard History Eventline, or SHE. Generally, SHE is the one that must be obeyed, but time also has an annoying propensity for random flexibility. Like rivers, time starts and finishes in generally the same place. Certain events—like gorges and rapids—tend to stay the same. However, on the flat temporal plain, the timestream can meander quite considerably, and when it moves toward danger, it’s up to us to change something in the event-past to swing the timestream back on course. It’s like navigation on the open seas, really, only the ship stays still and you navigate the storm.”

  He smiled again. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Apocalypse avoidance is only one area of our expertise. Patches of bad time that open spontaneously need to be stitched closed, ChronoTheft is very big in the seventh millennium, and the total eradication of the Dark Ages by a timephoon is requiring a considerable amount of effort to repair, and—”

  He stopped talking, because Friday had inexplicably raised his hand once again.

  “Why don’t you tell us about the downside?” asked Friday in a sullen voice from beneath a curtain of hair. “About time aggregations and leaks in the gravity suits that leave cadets a molecule thick?”

  “That’s why we’re here,” explained Scintilla, attempting to make light of the situation, “to clear up any small matters of misrepresentation that you might have heard. I won’t try to convince you that accidents haven’t happened, but like all industries we take health and safety very seriously.”

  “Son,” I said, laying a hand on his arm, “hear what he has to say first.”

  Friday turned and parted his long hair so I could see his eyes. They were intelligent, bright—and scared.

  “Mum, you told me about the accidents—about Dad’s eradication and Filbert Snood. Why do you want me to work for an industry that seems to leave its workers dead, non ex is tent or old before their time?”

  He got up and made for the exit, and we followed him as Scintilla attempted to carry on his talk, although firmly rattled. But as we tried to leave, a ChronoGuard operative stood in our way.

  “I think you should stay and listen to the pre sen ta tion,” he said, addressing Friday, who told him to get stuffed. The Chrono took exception to this and made a grab for him, but I was quicker and caught the guard’s wrist, pulled him around and had him on the floor with his arm behind his back.

  “Muumm!” whined Friday, more embarrassed than outraged. “Do you have to? People are watching!”

  “Sorry,” I said, letting go of the guard. Scintilla had excused himself from his talk and came over to see what was going on.

  “If we want to leave, we leave,” growled Landen.

  “Of course!” agreed Scintilla, motioning with a flick of his head for the Chrono to move off. “You can go whenever you want.” He looked at me; he knew how important it was to get Friday inducted, and knew I knew it, too.

  “But before you go,” he said, “Friday, I want you to know that we would be very happy to have you join the time industry. No minimum academic qualifications, no entrance exam. It’s an unconditional offer—the first we’ve ever made.”

  “And what makes you think I’d be any good at it?”

  “You can ask questions that aren’t already lodged in the SHE. Do you think just anyone can do that?”

  He shrugged. “I’m not interested.”

  “I’m just asking for you to stay and hear what we have to say.”

  “I’m…not…interested,” replied Friday more forcefully.

  “Listen,” said Scintilla, after looking around furtively and lowering his voice, “this is a bit unofficial, but I’ve had a word with Wayne Skunk, and he’s agreed to let you play a guitar riff on the second track of Hosing the Dolly.”

  “It’s too late,” said Friday, “it’s already been recorded.”

  Bendix stared at him. “Yes—and by you.”

  “I never did anything of the sort!”

  “No, but you might. And since that possibility exists, you did. Whether you actually do is up to you, but either way you can have that one on us. It’s your solo in any case. Your name is already in the liner notes.”

  Friday looked at Scintilla, then at me. I knew how much he loved Strontium Goat, and Scintilla knew, too. He had Friday’s complete ser vice record, after all. But Friday wasn’t interested. He didn’t like being pushed, cajoled, bullied or bribed. I couldn’t blame him—I hated it, too, and he was my son, after all.

  “You think you can buy me?” he said finally, and left without another word.

  “I’ll catch up,” I said as he walked out with Landen.

  While the swinging doors shut noisily behind them, Scintilla said to me, “Do I need to emphasize how important it is that Friday joins the ChronoGuard as soon as possible? He should have signed up three years ago and be surfing the timestream by now.”

  “You may have to wait a little longer, Bendix.”

  “That’s just it,” he replied. “We don’t have much time.”

  “I thought you had all the time there was.”

  He took me by the arm, and we moved to a corner of the room.

  “Thursday—can I call you Thursday?—we’re facing a serious crisis in the time industry, and as far as we know, Friday’s leadership several trillion bang/crunch cycles from now is the only thing that we can depend on—his truculence at this end of time means his desk is empty at the other.”

  “But there’s always a crisis in time, Bendix.”

  “Not like this. This isn’t a crisis in time—it’s a crisis of time. We’ve been pushing the frontiers of time forward for trillions upon trillions of years, and in a little over four days we’ll have reached the…End of Time.”

  “And that’s bad, right?”

  Bendix laughed. “Of course not! Time has to end somewhere. But there’s a problem with the very mechanism that controls the way we’ve been scooting around the here and now for most of eternity.”

  “And that is?”

  He looked left and right and lowered his voice. “Time travel has yet to be invented! And with the entire multiverse one giant hot ball of superheated gas contracting at incalculable speed into a point one trillion-trillionth the size of a neutron, it’s not likely to be.”

  “Wait, wait,” I said, trying to get this latest piece of information into my head. “I know that the whole time travel thing makes very little logical sense, but you must have machines that enable you to move through time, right?”

  “Of course—but we’ve got no idea how they work, who built them or when. We’ve been running the entire industry on something we call ‘retro-deficit-engineering.’ We use the technology now, safe in the assumption that it will be invented in the future. We did the same with the Gravitube in the fifties and the microchip ten years ago—neither of them actually gets invented for over ten thousand years, but it helps us more to have them now.”

  “Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. “You’re using technology you don’t have—like me overspending on my credit card.”

  “Right. And we’ve searched every single moment in case it was invented and we hadn’t noticed. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Rien.”

  His shoulders slumped, and he ran his fingers through his hair.

  “Listen, if Friday doesn’t retake his seat at the head of the ChronoGuard and use his astonishing skills to somehow save us, then everything that we’ve worked toward will be undone as soon as we hit Time Zero.”

  “I think I get it. Then why is Friday not following his destined career?”

  “I’ve no idea. We always had him down as dynamic and aggressively inquisitive when he was a child—what happened?”

  I shrugged. “All kids are like that today. It’s a modern thing, caused by too much TV, video games and other instant-gratification bullshit. Either that—or kids are exactly the same and I’m getting crusty and intolerant in my old age. Listen, I’ll do what I can.”

  Scintilla thanked me, and I joined Friday and Landen outside.

  “I don’t want to work in the time industry, Mum. I’d only break some dumb rule and end up eradicated.”

  “My eradication was pretty painless,” reflected Landen. “In fact, if your mother hadn’t told me about it, I never would have known it happened.”

  “That doesn’t help, Dad,” grumbled Friday. “You were reactualized—what about Granddad? No one can say whether he exists or not—not even him.”

  I rested my hand on his shoulder. He didn’t pull away this time.

  “I know, Sweetpea. And if you don’t want to join, no one’s going to make you.”

  He was quiet for a while, then said, “Do you have to call me Sweetpea? I’m sixteen.”

  Landen and I looked at each other, and then we took the tram back home. True to his word, Bendix had slipped us back a few minutes to just before we went in, and as we rattled home in silence, we passed ourselves arriving.

  “You know that yellow rod Bendix showed us?” said Friday, staring out the window.

  “Yes?”

  “It was a half second of snooker ball.”

  15.

  Home Again

  Noting with dismay that most cross-religion bickering occurred only because all the major religions were convinced they were the right one and every other religion was the wrong one, the founders of the Global Standard Deity based their fledgling “portmanteau” faith on the premise that most religions want the same thing once all the shameless, manipulative power play had been subtracted: peace, stability, equality and justice—the same as the nonfaiths. As soon as they found that centralizing thread that unites all people and made a dialogue of sorts with a Being of Supreme Moral Authority mostly optional, the GSD flourished.

  Friday went to his room in a huff as soon as we got in. Mrs. Berko-Boyler told us that the girls were fine and that she had folded all the washing, cleaned the kitchen, fed Pickwick and made us all cottage pie. This wasn’t unusual for her, and she scoffed at any sort of payment, then shuffled off home, muttering darkly about how if she’d killed her husband when she’d first thought of it, she’d be “out of prison by now.”

  “Where’s Jenny?” I asked Landen, having just gone upstairs to check. “She’s not in her room.”

  “She was just in the kitchen.”

  The phone rang, and I picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Millon,” came a soft voice, “and I’m sorry to call you at home.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Look out the window.”

  I did as he asked and saw him wave from his usual spot between the compost heap and the laurels. Millon de Floss, it should be explained, was my official stalker. Even though I had long ago dropped to the bottom of the Z-class celebrity list, he had insisted on maintaining his benign stalkership because, as he explained it, “we all need a retirement hobby.” Since he had shown considerable fortitude during a sojourn into the Elan back in ’88, I now counted him as a family friend, something that he always denied, when asked. “Friendship,” he intoned soberly, “always damages the pest factor that is the essence of the bond between stalker and stalkee.” None of the kids were bothered by him at all, and his early-warning capabilities were actually very helpful—he’d spotted Felix8, after all. Not that stalking was his sole job, of course. Aside from fencing cheese to the east of Swindon, he edited Conspiracy Theorist magazine and worked on my official biography, something that was taking longer than we had both thought.

  “So what’s the problem? You still up for the cheese buy this evening?” I asked him.

  “Of course—but you’ve got visitors. A car on the street with two men in it and another man climbing over the back wall.”

  I thanked him and put the phone down. I’d made a few enemies in the past, so Landen and I had some prearranged contingency measures.

  “Problems?” asked Landen.

  “It’s a code yellow.”

  Landen understood and without a word dashed off toward the front of the house. I opened the back door and crept out into the garden, took the side passage next to the dustbins and slipped behind the summer house. I didn’t have to wait long, as a man wearing a black coverall and a balaclava helmet came tiptoeing up the path toward where I was hidden. He was carrying a sack and a bag of marshmallows. I didn’t waste any time on pleasantries; I simply whacked him hard on the chin with my fist, and when he staggered, momentarily stunned, I thumped him in the chest, and he fell over backward with a grunt. I pulled off the balaclava to reveal a man I recognized—it was Arthur Plunkett of the Swindon Dodo Fanciers Guild.

  “For GSD’s sake, Arthur,” I said, “how many times do I have to tell you that Pickwick’s not for sale?”

  “Uuuuh,” he said, groaning and wheezing as he tried to regain his wind.

  “Come on, idiot,” I said as I heaved him up and rested him against the back of the summer house. “You know better than to break into my house—I can be dangerously protective of my family. Why do you think I’m the only one in Swindon able to leave my car unlocked at night?”

  “Ooooooh.”

  “Wait here,” I said to him, and trotted back indoors. I could be dangerous, but then so could Landen, even with one leg. The front door was open, and I could see him hiding behind the privet hedge. I ran low across the lawn and joined him.

  “It’s only dodo fanciers,” I hissed.

  “Again?” he replied. “After what happened last time?”

  I nodded. Clearly, Pickwick’s Version 1.2 rarity was a prize worth risking a lot for. I looked across the road to where a Buick was parked by the curb. The two men inside were wearing dark glasses and making a lot of effort to be inconspicuous.

  “Shall we stop them?”

  “No,” giggled Landen. “They won’t get far.”

  “What have you done?” I asked in my serious voice.

  “You’ll see.”

  As we watched, Arthur Plunkett decided to make a run for it—well, a hobble for it, actually—and came out through the gate and limped across the road. The driver of the car started up the engine, waited until Plunkett had thrown himself in the back, then pulled rapidly away from the curb. They got about twenty feet before the cable that Landen had tied around their rear axle whipped tight and, secured to a lamppost at the other end and far too strong to snap, it tore the axle and most of the suspension clear from the back of the car, which then almost pitched up onto its nose before falling with a crunch in the middle of the road. After a short pause, the three men climbed shakily out of the car and then legged it off down the street, Plunkett behind.

  “Was that really necessary?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” admitted Landen through a series of childish giggles. “But I’d always wanted to try it.”

  “I wish you two would grow up.”

  We looked up. My brother Joffy and his partner, Miles, were staring at us over the garden gate.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, getting up from where we’d been crouched behind the hedge and giving Landen a heave to get him on his feet. “It’s just a normal evening in Swindon.” I looked around, as the neighbors had come out to gawk at the wreck of the Buick and motioned Joffy and Miles inside. “Come on in for a cup of tea.”

  “No tea,” said Joffy as we walked into the house. “We’ve just had a tankerful at Mum’s—can’t you hear me slosh as I walk?”

  “And enough Battenberg cake to fill the Grand Canyon,” added Miles in a stuffed-with-cake sort of voice.

  “How’s the carpet business, Doofus?” asked Joffy as we stood in the hall.

  “Couldn’t be better—how’s the faith-unification business?”

  “We’ve nearly got everyone,” said Joffy with a smile. “The atheists came on board last week. Once we’d suggested that ‘god’ could be a set of essentially beneficent physical rules of the cosmos, they were only too happy to join. In fact, apart from a few scattered remnants of faith leaders who can’t quite come to terms with the loss of their power, influence and associated funny hats, it’s all looking pretty good.”

  Joffy’s nominal leadership of the British Archipelago Branch of the Global Standard Deity was a matter of considerable import within the Next family. The GSD was proposed by delegates of the 1978 Global Interfaith Symposium and had gathered momentum since then, garnering converts from all the faiths into one diverse religion that was flexible enough to offer something for everyone.