Overtime Tom Holt

by Overtime (lit)

'Coming,' Blondel said.

  He tracked the noise to the smaller of the two wardrobes and opened it. A quick glance revealed three bound and muffled investment consultants.

  'My dear fellow,' Blondel said, gently removing the sock from Giovanni's mouth, 'whatever's been going on?'

  Giovanni gurgled, made a noise like a rasp on formica, and said, 'Revenue.'

  'I beg your pardon?'

  'I think,' Giovanni muttered, 'they were from the Revenue. Looking for receipts or something.'

  'Who?'

  'The men,' Giovanni replied. 'The men who searched the place. We tried to stop them but...'

  Blondel looked round. Come to think of it, the place did have a distinctly frisked look. 'What makes you think they were tax men?' he asked.

  'Just look at the place, for God's sake.'

  Blondel scratched his head. 'Good point,' he said; then he thought of something. 'My dear chap,' he said, 'what must you think of me? Do let me help you out of those ropes. They look awfully uncomfortable.'

  Once freed from his bonds, Giovanni immediately ran across the room, upended a tubular metal chair and fished around for something inside one of the legs. After a short, frantic burst of activity he produced a tight roll of papers and waved it round his head in relief.

  'It's all right,' he said, 'they didn't find it.'

  'Oh yes?' Blondel said. 'What's that?'

  'Er...'

  'Do you know,' Blondel went on, 'I don't think they were from the Revenue at all.'

  'No?' Giovanni paused, balanced on one leg, in the act of stuffing the papers inside his sock. 'Customs and Excise, you reckon?'

  'Maybe,' Blondel replied. 'Or perhaps they were some of the Antichrist's people.'

  'You think so?'

  Blondel picked up something from the floor and displayed it on the palm of his hand. 'Look at this,' he said. 'It's a button off a tunic. See there, that's the arms of the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes. I think they're on to us already.'

  'Phew!' Giovanni said. 'Thank God for that. I thought we were in trouble there for a minute.' He sat down and pulled his shoe back on.

  'How long since they left?' Blondel asked. He threw the button up in the air and caught it. 'Not long, I don't imagine.'

  'Dunno,' Giovanni replied. 'Five minutes, maybe, perhaps ten.'

  'And it wasn't Pursuivant and Clarenceaux or any of that lot.

  Giovanni shook his head. 'I'd have recognised them,' he said. 'Like I said, this lot were frightening.' He reached out for his briefcase and started riffling through papers.

  'Ten minutes,' Blondel repeated, 'and not Pursuivant and Clarenceaux. So it must be the other squad.' He turned to the Galeazzo brothers. 'If I were you,' he said, 'I'd head for the wardrobe. The other wardrobe. Now.'

  'But you said...'

  'Now. If it'll help create an illusion of urgency, pretend there's a party of Department of Trade investigators coming up the stairs.

  Very shortly afterwards, the wardrobe door slammed, hard. Blondel started to count to ten. Give them a head start, he reckoned, and then follow. Because if he was right, the gentlemen who would very shortly be coming back were not the sort of people he wanted to meet.

  Every military and paramilitary outfit has an elite force of some kind, a hand-picked bunch of utterly ruthless and determined professionals who think nothing of dyeing perfectly good balaclava helmets jet black and cutting holes in them. The Chastel des Larmes Chaudes is no exception. It has the Time and Motion department.

  Some special units are trained to operate in specific conditions, such as mountains or the arctic. The TAM is designed to operate in time.

  They know how to live off the land, snaring lost opportunities and roasting them on spits; how to blend imperceptibly into the temporal landscape, disguised as fleeting moments; how to ambush unsuspecting hostile forces by attacking them before they've even been born. Intensive training has taught them to withstand the devastating metabolic effects of rapid time travel, which can only too easily lead to a meal being digested before it is eaten. And they can follow a trail through history better than the combined postgraduate resources of all the universities in the world.

  The TAM is recruited exclusively from temporal misfits -men who have somehow or other fallen out of their own time, anachronisms; as can readily be deduced from the narrow lapels and flared trousers of their battledress uniforms. As might be expected, therefore, they are pitiless, determined and incorrigibly unpunctual.

  It stands to reason, then, that when the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes sees fit to turn the TAM loose, it's probably had enough of messing about.

  Once Zeitsturmbahnfuhrer Uhrwerk had satisfied himself that Blondel wasn't hiding under the floorboards or inside the sofa cushions, he started to search for the time door. He was equipped with the latest in Chronological Anomaly Detectors and it didn't take him long to find the right wardrobe door. The fact that it was open and palpably led nowhere helped, of course.

  'Right, men, follow me,' he snapped. 'Synchronise your watches.'

  The platoon laughed dutifully. Zeitsturmbahnfuhrer Uhrwerk was essentially a one-joke man.

  It was dark in the tunnel, but TAM soldiers are equipped with both foresight and hindsight, and can if necessary navigate by sound alone, listening out for their own future muffled curses as they stub their toes on concealed obstacles. It was not long before they picked up the trail. The litter of bent and distorted historical potentials, imperceptible to the naked eye, were easily detected by the CADs. The squad broke into a run.

  For the first time in a very long time, Blondel wasn't sure where to go next. His basic instincts told him to head for the Chastel de Nesle, bolt the doors behind him and get Isoud to heat up a huge cauldron of boiling mashed potato for pouring on the heads of would-be besiegers. The thing to remember about basic instincts, however, is that they don't always work. If beavers and rabbits used their brains instead of following their natural instincts, fur coats would be rather more expensive.

  The alternative, of course, was to try and lose them somewhere in time; but that was rather like trying to drown a fish. The third alternative, standing his guard and fighting it out with cold steel, made his basic instincts look quite intelligent by comparison.

  Standing at a fork in the tunnel, Blondel hesitated and tried to reach a decision. The right hand fork led, via the Icelandic Foreign Office and the Cultural Revolution pension scheme, to the Chastel de Nesle. The left hand fork led to DVLC. He had no idea what lay beyond. To the best of his knowledge, nobody did.

  Behind him, he heard the sound of heavy boots and the distant muffled swearing noises of men learning by mistakes they never got around to making. He turned left. Robert Frost would have been proud of him.

  To get to DVLC you have to pass through some undeniably hairy situations, as anyone who has ever tried to get hold of a replacement logbook for a 1978 Cavalier will confirm. First you have to go past the Arts and Heritage secretariat of the Long Parliament (watch out for splinters of broken stained glass underfoot), then turn left at the Irish Postmaster General's office, circa 1916 (a terrible beauty is born, so be ready to duck) and left again through the Spanish Feudal System. It's at this point that it's all too easy to get lost. The through route across the Customs and Excise of the later Byzantine empire is, well, byzantine in its complexity, and if you aren't careful you can easily find yourself in the Ottoman Ministry of Works; which is remarkably like being dead, only not as restful. You'll know you're on the right road if you come to a long corridor which you try running down only to find that you're either staying exactly where you are or moving slightly backwards. That means you're in driving licence application territory.

  The main thing to remember, once you're there, is not to go through any of the doors.

  Blondel stopped, selected a door at random, opened it and fell through. These guys, he told himself, know the score. They'll never follow me in through here.

  The true nature of Time has puzzled
the best brains in the human race throughout history; but only because nobody has ever grasped the fact that the stuff comes in two quite different isotopes.

  There is Time; and there is Overtime.

  Time is the shortest distance between two events. Overtime is the scenic route. In Overtime, things happen in the same order as they do in Time, but temporal units have different values of magnitude. To put it another way, an egg boiled for three minutes in Overtime would penetrate steel plate.

  The trick is to be able to tell which system is in force on any given occasion. There are no hard and fast rules, but here are a couple of examples of situations where you can expect to find Overtime:

  (a) Public transport; for instance, someone who arrives at an airport two hours early will have to wait another two hours because his plane is late getting in, whereas someone who turns up three minutes before takeoff will invariably find that the plane left three minutes early.

  (b) Government departments; consider how entirely different temporal concepts apply when you want them to do something, and when they want you to do something. It's a little-known but revealing fact that the supertemporal forces inside the IRS Headquarters in Washington are so strong all the clocks in the building had to be specially designed by Salvador Dali.

  The effects of mixing Time and Overtime were harnessed by a pioneer firm of time-travel agents, who used them to make it possible for their clients to take relaxing and indefinite holidays in the past or the future. In order to travel, holidaymakers booked an ordinary holiday with an ordinary package tour company. Three weeks before the holiday, they sent their passports off for renewal. Two days before the departure date, they cancelled the holiday.

  The result of sending the passports off was the creation of a massive Overtime field which would ensure that the passports would take at least four months to process. Cancelling the holiday broke the field, bringing the most tremendous pressure to bear on the Time/Overtime interface and tearing holes in it large enough for human beings to pass through. The time-holiday was spent in Overtime, which meant that you could spend six weeks in Renaissance Florence and still be home in time to go to work the morning after you'd left.

  In other words, the earth's temporal system, which was installed on the afternoon of the fifth day by a team of contractors found by God in the Golden Pages under the trading name of Cheap 'n' Cheerful Chronological Engineers, is a classic example of a Friday afternoon job, and fundamentally unstable. If Man had stayed put in the Garden of Eden, where the chronostat is jammed stuck at half past six on a summer afternoon, it wouldn't have mattered. Once Adam cut loose, however, it was inevitable that any sudden violent dislocation - a successful Crusade, for example -could knock the entire thing into the middle of next week. Or possibly worse.

  Accordingly, on the eighth day, God telephoned his lawyers and began asking all sorts of questions about product liability.

  Blondel stared, and grabbed at the doorframe to stop himself falling. The problem was that the doorframe wasn't there any more.

  Which was reasonable enough; you don't need a doorframe on a cave, and a cave was quite definitely what Blondel had just come out of. A cave opening directly on to the sheer side of a cliff. Oh well.

  Four seconds later he was relieved to find himself in water. It could just as easily have been rock, or sun-baked earth, or a thick brown bush, but it wasn't. Having thrashed his way to the surface again and spat out a newt, Blondel trod water for a moment and tried to work out what was going on.

  He was still, he gathered, in a cave; a cave inside a cave; a cavern. High above him he could see the roof, with a tasteful display of stalactites. The entrance he had fallen out of was one of several. There were crudely-made ladders tied to the walls, which led down to the narrow strip of beach, or whatever you liked to call it, that ran round the edge of the pool he was currently bobbing about in.

  It was perishing cold, too.

  With slow strokes he swam to the edge and pulled himself out. As he did so, he noticed a pair of feet directly in front of him. He stayed where he was.

  It was hard for feet to look menacing, but these ones seemed to have the knack. It wasn't so much the size of them or the inordinately bizarre cut of the toenails. It wasn't even the context. The feeling of being in deep trouble was a purely intuitive one, but Blondel had always had an excellent working relationship with intuition. He looked up.

  The owner of the feet stood about five foot four and was distinctly hairy. What little of his face was visible through the undergrowth had a simian look, mostly to do with the jaw, which looked as if it had been carelessly left out in the sun and had melted. As if that wasn't off-putting enough, there was a heavy-looking rock in the stranger's hands, and he probably wasn't lifting it over his head like that simply to exercise his pectoral muscles. For one thing, they didn't look like they needed it. Blondel ducked, and a moment later the rock hit the patch of beach he'd just been using.

  'Steady on,' Blondel said, resurfacing a few feet out into the pond. The stranger grunted irritably and picked the rock up. It looked unpleasantly as if what he lacked in intellectual stature he made up for in dogged persistence.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Blondel saw another, similar figure approaching. This one was carrying a stone axe, and gave every indication of having been woken up from a badly needed sleep. There were others following. Bad news.

  'Excuse me,' Blondel said, in the most nonchalant voice he could find, 'but could any of you gentlemen direct me to the nearest -There was a loud and disconcerting splash in the water about a foot from where he was standing, and a wave hit him in the face. The rock, probably. That one or one just like it. Blondel dived down again and resurfaced some way further out.

  It was difficult to know what to do for the best. If these were, as Blondel suspected, cavemen, there was a fair chance that if he stayed there long enough they would probably catch some disease or other from him to which they had not yet had a chance to build up an immunity, and die. On the other hand, that might well take some time, and the water was quite distressingly cold. So Blondel decided to try his other option. He sang L'Amours Dont Sui Epris.

  With hindsight, Blondel realised, he'd been expecting a bit much there. The romance tradition of chansons and trouveres, though considerably more accessible than many other musical genres, isn't entirely suited for absolute novices. He might have done better, he felt, with something a bit more basic, such as Baa Baa Black Sheep. That might have had them standing in the aisles. As it as, they threw rocks.

  Having resurfaced ten yards further out, Blondel decided to try a little lateral thinking. On the one hand, there were rather a lot more of them now, and some of them seemed to have grasped the principle of the slingshot. If one chose to look on the bright side, though, one couldn't help noticing that they weren't terribly good marksmen. It might be worth giving it another ten minutes to see if there was any chance of them wiping themselves out with stray missiles.

  A feeling of acute numbness in his toes argued against that, and Blondel came to the conclusion that getting cramp and drowning wasn't exactly the most positive step he could think of at this juncture; so he chose the least inhabited part of the beach and started to swim towards it. He was just about to come within easy boulder range and was wondering if this was the best he could do when an idea struck him, with a number of small, fast-moving stones.

  It might justifiably be said that leaving it until now to reveal that Blondel had had a small, high-volume, waterproof personal stereo in his jacket pocket from the outset smacks of rather meretricious storytelling; however, since Blondel had only just remembered it himself, the omission is probably justifiable. He hadn't given the thing a second thought since he'd acquired it, as his introductory free gift on taking out a Galeazzo Brothers With Profits Ten Year Endowment Policy, just before the concert. Now he realised that even the things you get given for free can sometimes come in very handy. He trod water, fished the thing out, removed the h
eadphones, turned the volume to maximum and switched it on.

  It was an added bonus that the machine contained a tape of the massed bands of the Royal Marines playing The Ride of the Valkyries, although since all tapes for which one does not have to pay money have exactly the same thing on them, it probably was only to be expected. At any rate, it worked. The cavemen dropped their improvised weapons and fled. All except one, who reacted rather like a rabbit caught in the headlights of a fleet of oncoming lorries. The noise seemed to paralyse him, his knees gave way and he sat down heavily on a short, thick log. Perhaps, Blondel said to himself, the poor chap isn't a music lover. Or perhaps, rather more likely, he is a music lover.

  He clambered out of the water, shook himself and started to squelch up the beach, trying not to startle the dazed caveman, who was sitting with his head between his knees, whimpering. Unfortunately the band chose that moment to launch into the Soldier's Chorus from Faust, and that seemed to do it for the caveman. He lurched violently and disturbed the log, which started to roll slowly towards the water.

  Feeling slightly ashamed of himself, Blondel switched the music off and helped the caveman to his feet. He tried to apologise in sign language, but he didn't seem to be getting through, somehow.

  'Come on, old chap,' he said. 'You run along and we'll say no more about it...'

  The log rolled to the edge of the water and fell in. Blondel realised that the caveman, far from being paralysed with fear, was concentrating single-mindedly on the log and what it was doing.

  'We'll,' the caveman repeated. 'We'll!'

  He scampered to the water, fished the log out, lugged it back up the beach and set it rolling again. 'We'll!' he yelled.

  'Oh bother!' said Blondel to himself, 'I've done it again.' Then he trudged off to find the tunnel.

  Back in the tunnel, Blondel felt simultaneously relieved, dry and very, very lost. The last feeling was the worst, and it wasn't helped by the discovery that the water in the cave pool had turned his map to sticky and illegible porridge. It would have to be intuition again. He turned left and ran down the tunnel.