“Why, that was you good people, of course! In order not to keep you from your busy schedules, this meeting actually takes no time at all. The moment you arrived was precisely the time you left, only out the other entrance so you wouldn’t meet yourselves.”
As soon as he said it, a twitter of understanding and wonderment went through the small group. I’d experienced the ChronoGuard in the past, so these sorts of cheap parlor tricks didn’t impress me, but for many of the people present, to whom time was immutable, it was something new and exciting. Scintilla had been doing this show for many years and knew how to get an audience’s attention.
“Time is odd,” said Bendix, “very odd. It’s odder than almost anything you can think of. What you consider the usual march of time-effect rather quaintly following cause and so forth-is actually a useful illusion, impressed upon you by rules of physics so very benign that we consider them devised by Something Awfully Friendly indeed; if it weren’t for time, everything would happen at the same instant and existence would become tiresomely frenetic and be over very quickly. But before we get into all that, let’s have a show of hands to see who is actually considering a career in time?”
Quite a few hands went up, but Friday’s was not among them. I noticed Scintilla staring in our direction as he asked, and he seemed put out by Friday’s intransigence.
“Yes, miss, you have a question?”
He pointed to a young girl sitting in the back row with her expensive-looking parents.
“How did you know I was going to ask a question?”
“That was your question, wasn’t it?”
“Um…yes.”
“Because you’ve already asked it.”
“I haven’t.”
“Actually, you have. Everything that makes up what you call the present is in reality the long distant past. The actual present is in what you regard as the far-distant future. All of this happened a long time ago and is recorded in the Standard History Eventline, so we know what will happen and can see when things happen that weren’t meant to. You and I and everything in this room are actually ancient history-but if that seems a bit depressing, let me assure you that these really are the good old days. Yes, madam?”
A woman just next to us hadn’t put up her hand, of course, but was clearly thinking of it.
“So how is it possible to move through time?”
“The force that pushes the fabric of time along is the past at-tempting to catch up with the future in order to reach an equilibrium. Think of it as a wave-and where the past starts to break over the future in front of it, that’s the present. At that moment of temporal instability is a vortex-a tube, in surfing parlance-that runs perpendicular to the arrow of time but leads to everything that has ever happened or ever will happen. Of course, that’s greatly simplified, but with skill, training, a really good uniform and a bit of aptitude, you’ll learn to ride the tube as it ripples through the fabric of space-time. Yes, sir?”
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.”