'I see that as good news,' put in Bowden. 'You can have them searching in places where they won't find any Danish books. Just be careful. Flanker has been suspicious ever since we said we were too busy to find out who was planning to smuggle copies of The Concept of Dread to Wales for safe-keeping.'
Bowden laughed and lowered his voice.
'It wasn't an excuse.' He chuckled. 'We actually were too busy — gathering copies of banned books ready for transportation to Wales!'
Victor grimaced.
'I really don't want to hear this, Bowden. If you get caught we'll all be for the high jump!'
'Some things are worth going to jail for, Victor,' replied Bowden in an even tone. 'As LiteraTecs we swore to uphold and defend the written word — not indulge a crazed politician's worst paranoic fantasies.'
'Just be careful.'
'Of course,' replied Bowden, 'it might come to nothing if we can't find a way to get the books out of England — the Welsh border shouldn't be a problem since Wales aligned itself with Denmark. I don't suppose you have any ideas how to get across the English border post?'
'I'm not sure,' I replied. 'How many copies of banned books do you want to smuggle anyway?'
'About four truckloads.'
I whistled. Things — like cheese, for instance — were usually smuggled in to England. I didn't know how I'd get banned books out.
'I'll give it a shot. What else is going on?'
'Usual stuff,' replied Bowden. 'Faked Milton, Jonson, Swift . . . Montague and Capulet street gangs . . . someone discovered a first draft of The Mill on the Floss entitled The Sploshing of the Weirs. Also, the Daphne Farquitt Specialist Bookshop went up in smoke.'
'Insurance scam?'
'No — probably anti-Farquitt protesters again.'
Farquitt had penned her first bodice-ripping novel in 1932 and had been writing pretty much the same one over and over again ever since. Loved by many and hated by a vitriolic minority, Farquitt was England's leading romantic novelist.
'There's also been a huge increase in the use of performance-enhancing drugs by novelists,' added Victor. 'Last year's Booker speed-writing winner was stripped of his award when he tested positive for Cartlandromin. And only last week Handley Paige only narrowly missed a two-year writing ban for failing a random dope test.'
'Sometimes I wonder if we don't have too many rules,' murmured Victor pensively, and we all three sat in silence, nodding thoughtfully for a moment.
Bowden broke the silence. He produced a piece of stained paper wrapped in a cellophane evidence bag and passed it across to me.
'What do you make of this?'
I read it, not recognising the words but recognising the style. It was a sonnet by Shakespeare — and a pretty good one, too.
'Shakespeare — but it's not Elizabethan; the mention of Basil Brush would seem to indicate that — but it feels like his. What did the Verse Metre Analyser say about it?'
'Ninety-one per cent probability of Will as the author,' replied Victor.
'Where did you get it?'
'Off the body of a down-and-out by the name of Shaxtper killed on Tuesday evening. We think someone has been cloning Shakespeares.'
'Cloning Shakespeares? Are you sure? Couldn't it just be a ChronoGuard "temporal kidnap" sort of thing?'
'No. Blood analysis tells us they were all vaccinated at birth against rubella, mumps and so forth.'
'Wait — you've got more than one?'
'Three,' said Bowden. 'There's been something of a spate recently.'
'When can you come back to work, Thursday?' asked Victor solemnly. 'As you can see, we need you.'
I paused for a moment.
'I'm going to need a week to get my life into gear first, sir. There are a few pressing matters that I have to attend to.'
'What, may I ask,' said Victor, 'is more important than Montague and Capulet street gangs, cloned Shakespeares, smuggling Kierkegaard out of the country and authors using banned substances?'
'Finding reliable childcare.'
'Goodness!' said Victor. 'Congratulations! You must bring the little squawker in some time. Mustn't she, Bowden?'
'Absolutely.'
'Bit of a problem, that,' murmured Victor. 'Can't have you dashing around the place only to have to get home at five to make Junior's tea. Perhaps we'd better handle all this on our own.'
'No,' I said with an assertiveness that made them both jump. 'No, I'm coming back to work. I just need to sort a few things out. Does SpecOps have a creche?'
'No.'
'Ah. Well, I suspect I shall think of something. If I get my husband back there won't be a problem. I'll call you tomorrow.'
There was a pause.
'Well, we have to respect that, I suppose,' said Victor solemnly. 'We're just glad that you're back. Aren't we, Bowden?'
'Yes,' replied my ex-partner, 'very glad indeed.'
8
Time Waits for No Man
'SpecOps-12 are the ChronoGuard, the governmental department dealing with temporal stability. It is their job to maintain the integrity of the Standard History Eventline (SHE) and police the timestream against any unauthorised changes or usage. Their most brilliant work is never noticed, as changes in the past always seem to have been that way. It is not unusual in any one ChronoGuard work shift for history to flex dramatically before settling back down to the SHE. Planet-destroying cataclysms generally happen twice a week but are carefully re-routed by skilled ChronoGuard operatives. The citizenry never notice a thing — which is just as well, really.'
COLONEL NEXT QT. CG (nonexst) — ( Upstream/Downstream (unpublished)
I wasn't done with SpecOps yet. I still needed to figure out what my father had told me at our first meeting. Finding a time traveller can be fraught with difficulties, but since I passed the ChronoGuard office almost exactly three hours after our last meeting, it seemed the obvious place to look.
I knocked at their door and, hearing no answer, walked in. When I was last working at SpecOps we rarely heard anything from the mildly eccentric members of the time-travelling elite, but when you work in the time business, you don't waste it by nattering — it's much too precious. My father always argued that time was far and away the most valuable commodity we had and that temporal profligacy should be a criminal offence — which kind of makes watching Celebrity Kidney Swap or reading Daphne Farquitt novels a crime straight away.
The room was empty and, from appearances, had been so for a number of years. At least, that's what it looked like when I first peered in — a second later some painters were decorating it for the first time, the second after that it was derelict, then full, then empty again. It continued like this as I watched, the room jumping to various different stages in its history but never lingering for more than a few seconds in any one particular time. The ChronoGuard operatives were merely smears of light that moved and whirled about, momentarily visible to me as they jumped from past to future and future to past. If I had been a trained member of the ChronoGuard perhaps I could have made more sense of it, but I wasn't, and couldn't.
There was one piece of furniture that remained unchanged whilst all about raced, moved and blurred in a never-ending jumble. It was a small table with an old candlestick telephone upon it. I stepped into the room and lifted the receiver.
'Hello?'
'Hello,' said a pre-recorded voice, 'you're through to the Swindon ChronoGuard. To assist with your enquiry we have a number of choices. If you have been the victim of temporal flexation, dial one. If you wish to report a temporal anomaly, dial two. If you feel you might have been involved in a time crime . . .'
It gave me several more choices, but nothing that told me how to contact my father. Finally, at the end of the long list, it gave me the option for meeting an operative, so I dialled that. In an instant the blurred movement in the room stopped and everything fell into place — but with furniture and fittings more suited to the sixties. There was an agent sitting at the desk, a tall and u
ndeniably handsome man in the blue uniform of the ChronoGuard, emblazoned at the shoulder with the pips of a captain. As he himself had predicted, it was my father, three hours later and three hours younger. At first, he didn't recognise me.
'Hello,' he said, 'can I help you?'
'It's me, Thursday.'
'Thursday?' he echoed, eyes wide open as he stood up. 'My daughter Thursday?'
I nodded and he moved closer.
'My goodness!' he exclaimed, scrutinising me with great interest. 'How wonderful to see you again! How long's it been? Six centuries?'
'Two years,' I told him, not wanting to confuse a confusing matter even further by mentioning our conversation this morning, 'but why are you working for the ChronoGuard again? I thought you went rogue?'
'Ah!' he said, beckoning me closer and lowering his voice. 'There was a change of administration and they said they would look very closely at my grievances if I'd come and work for them at the Historical Preservation Corps. I had to take demotion and I won't be reactualised until the paperwork is done, but it's working out quite well otherwise. Is your husband still eradicated?'
'I'm afraid so. Any chance . . . ?'
He winced.
'I'd love to, Sweetpea, but I've really got to watch my Ps and Qs for a few decades. Do you like the office?'
I looked at the sixties decor in the tiny room.
'Bit small, isn't it?'
My father, who was clearly in an ebullient mood, grinned. 'Oh yes, and over seven hundred of us work here. Since we could not all be here at one time, we simply stretch the usage out across the timestream like a long piece of elastic.'
He stretched his arms wide as if to demonstrate.
'We call it a timeshare.'
He rubbed his chin and looked around.
'What's the time out there?'
'It's 14 July 1988.'
'That's a stroke of good fortune,' he said, lowering his voice still further. 'It's a good job you've turned up. They've blamed me for the 1864 war between Germany and Denmark.'
'Was it your fault?'
'No — it was that clot Bismarck. But it doesn't matter. They've transferred me to another division inside the Historical Preservation Corps for a second chance. My first assignment occurs in July 1988, so local knowledge right now is a godsend. Have you heard of anyone named Yorrick Kaine?'
'He's Chancellor of England.'
'That figures. Did St Zvlkx return tomorrow?'
'He might.'
'Okay. Who won the Superhoop?'
'That's Saturday week,' I explained. 'It hasn't happened yet.'
'Not strictly true, Sweetpea. Everything that we do actually happened a long, long time ago — even this conversation. The future is already there. The pioneers that ploughed the first furrows of history into virgin timeline died aeons ago — all we do now is try and keep it pretty much the way it should be. Have you heard of someone named Winston Churchill, by the way?'
I thought for a moment.
'He was an English statesman who seriously blotted his copybook in the Great War, then was run over by a cab and killed in 1932.'
'So, no one of any consequence?'
'Not really. Why?'
'Ah, no reason. Just a little pet theory of mine. Anyway, everything has already happened — if it hadn't, there'd be no need for people like me. But things go wrong. In the normal course of events, time flies back and forth from the end of then until the beginning of now like a shuttle on a loom, weaving the threads of history together. If it encounters an obstacle then it might just flex slightly and no change will be noticed. But if that obstacle is big enough — and Kaine is plenty big enough, believe me — then history will veer off at a tangent. And that's when we have to sort it out. I've been transferred to the Armageddon Avoidance Division, and we've got an apocalyptic disaster of life-extinguishing capability, Level III, heading your way.'
There was a moment's silence.
'Does your mother know you wear your hair this short?'
'Is it meant to happen?'
'Your hair?'
'No, the Armageddon.'
'Not at all. This one has an Ultimate Likelihood Index rating of only twenty-two per cent: "not very likely".'
'Nothing like that incident with the Dream Topping, then,' I observed.
'What incident?'
'Nothing.'
'Right. Well, since I'm on probation — sort of — they thought they'd start me on the small stuff.'
'I still don't understand.'
'It's simple,' began my father. 'Two days after the Superhoop President Formby will die of natural causes. The following day Yorrick Kaine proclaims himself dictator of England. Two weeks after that, following the traditional suspension of the press and summary executions of former associates, Kaine will declare war on Wales. Two days after a prolonged tank battle on the Welsh Marches, the United Clans of Scotland launch an attack upon Berwick-upon-Tweed. In a fit of pique Kaine carpet-bombs Glasgow and the Swedish empire enter on Scotland's side. Russia joins Kaine after their colonial outpost of Fetlar is sacked — and the 'war moves to mainland Europe. It soon escalates into an apocalyptic shoot-out between the African and American superpowers. In less than three months the earth will be nothing but a steaming radioactive cinder. Of course,' he added, 'that is a worst-case scenano. It'll probably never happen, and if you and I do our jobs properly, it won't.'
'Can't you just kill Kaine?'
'Not that easy. Time is the glue of the cosmos, Sweetpea, and it has to be eased apart — you'd be surprised how strongly the historical timeline tends to look after despots. Why do you think dictators like Pol Pot, Bokassa and Idi Amin live such long lives and people like Mozart, Jim Henson and Mother Teresa are plucked from us when relatively young?'
'I don't think Mother Teresa could be thought of as young.'
'On the contrary — she was meant to live to a hundred and twenty-eight.'
There was a pause.
'Okay, Dad — so what's the plan?'
'Right. It's incredibly complex and also unbelievably simple. To stop Kaine gaining power we have to seriously disrupt his sponsor, the Goliath Corporation. Without them, his power is zero. To do that we need to ensure . . . that Swindon wins the Superhoop.'
'How is that going to work?'
'It's a causality thing. Small events have large consequences. You'll see.'
'No, I mean, how am I going to get Swindon to win? Apart from Kapok and Aubrey Jambe and perhaps "Biffo" Mandible, the players are, well, crap — not to put too fine a point on it. Especially when you compare them to their Superhoop opponents, the Reading Whackers.'
'I'm sure you'll think of something, but keep an eye on Kapok — they'll try to get to him first. You'll have to do this on your own, Sweetpea, I've got my own problems. It seems Nelson getting killed at the beginning of the battle of Trafalgar wasn't French History Revisionists after all. I talked to someone I know over at the ChronoGendarmerie and they thought it amusing that the Revisionists should even attempt such a thing; advanced timestream models with Napoleon emperor of all Europe bode very poorly for France — they're much better in the long run with things as they are meant to be.'
'So who is killing Nelson?'
'Well, it's Nelson himself. Don't ask me why. Now, what did you want to see me about?'
I had to think carefully.
'Well. . . nothing, really. I met you three hours ago and you said we'd spoken so I came here to find you, then I suppose I should ask you to figure out who's trying to kill me this morning, which you wouldn't have been able to do if I hadn't met you this morning, and I only met you this morning because I've just told you right now I might be assassinated . . .'
Dad laughed.
'It's a bit like having a tumble dryer in your head, Sweetpea. Sometimes I don't know whether I'm thening or nowing. But I'd better check this assassin out, just in case.'
'Yes,' I said, more confused than ever, 'I suppose you should.'
9
Eradications Anonymous
GOLIATH BACK KAINE AND WHIG PARTY
The Goliath Corporation yesterday renewed its support for Chancellor Kaine at a party to honour England's leader. At a glittering dinner attended by over 500 heads of commerce and governmental departments, Goliath pledged to continue its support of the Chancellor. In reply Mr Kaine gratefully acknowledged their support and announced a package of measures designed to assist Goliath in the difficult yet highly desirable change to faith-based corporate status, as well as funding for several ongoing weapons programmes, details of which have been classified.
Article in The Toad, 13 July 1988
Hamlet and I arrived home to find a TV news crew from Swindon-5 waiting for me outside the house.
'Miss Next,' said the reporter, 'can you tell us where you've been these past two years?'
'No comment.'
'You can interview me,' said Hamlet, realising he was something of a celebrity out here.
'And who are you?' asked the reporter, mystified.
I stared at him and his face fell.
'I'm . . . I'm . . . her cousin Eddie.'
'Well, Cousin Eddie, can you tell us where Miss Next has been for the past two years?'
'No comment.'
And we walked up the garden path to the front door.
'Where have you been?' demanded my mother as we walked in the door.
'Sorry I'm late, Mum — how's the little chap?'
'Tiring. He says that his Aunt Mel is a gorilla who can peel bananas with her feet while hanging from the light fixtures.'
'He talked?'
Friday was using the time-honoured international child signal to be picked up — raising his arms in the air — and when I did so he gave me a wet kiss and started to chatter away unintelligibly.
'Well, he didn't exactly say as much,' admitted Mum, 'but he drew me a picture of Aunt Mel which is pretty conclusive.'
'Aunt Mel a gorilla?' I laughed, looking at the picture, which was unequivocally of . . . well, a gorilla. 'Quite an imagination, hasn't he?'
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