“Oooh!” murmured Tuesday, who twigged it first. “They’ve been mining the Now!”
“Exactly, sis,” said Friday, sweeping the hair from his eyes. “The Short Now is the direct result of the time industry’s unthinking depredations. If the ChronoGuard continues as it is, within a few years there won’t be any Now at all, and the world will move into a Dark Age of eternal indifference.”
“You mean TV could get worse?” asked Landen.
“Much worse,” replied Friday grimly. “At the rate the Now is being eroded, by this time next year Samaritan Kidney Swap will be considered the height of scholarly erudition. But easily digestible TV is not the cause-it’s the effect. A Short Now will also spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification.”
There was a bleak silence as we took this on board. We could see it all now. Short attention spans, a general malaise, no tolerance, no respect, no rules. Short-termism. No wonder we were seeing Outlander ReadRates go into free fall. The Short Now would hate books; too much thought required for not enough gratification. It brought home the urgency to find the recipe, wherever it was: Without unscrambled eggs, there was no time travel, no more depredation of the Now, and we could look to a brighter future of long-term thought-and more reading. Simple.
“Shouldn’t this be a matter for public debate?” asked Landen.
“What would that achieve, Dad? The ChronoGuard doesn’t have to disprove that the reduction of the Now is caused by humans-they only have to create doubt. They’ll always be Short Now deniers, and the debate will become so long and drawn out that as soon as we realize there is a problem, we won’t care enough to want to do anything about it. This issue is not for debate-the ChronoGuard cannot get hold of that recipe. I’m staking my career on it. And believe me, I would have had an excellent career to stake.”
There was silence after Friday’s speech. We all realized that he was right, of course, but I was also thinking about how proud I was of him and how refreshing it was to hear such eloquence and moral lucidity from such a grubby and disheveled individual who was wearing a WAYNE SKUNK IS THE BALLOCKS T-shirt.
Polly sighed, breaking the silence. “If only Mycroft were alive. we could ask him where he put it.”
And then I understood.
“Aunt,” I said, “come with me. Friday-you, too.”
It was dusk by now, and the last rays of evening light were shining through the dusty windows of Mycroft’s workshop. It seemed somehow shabbier in the twilight.
“All those memories!” breathed Polly, hobbling across the concrete floor with Friday holding her arm. “What a life. Yes indeed, what a life. I’ve not been in here since before he…you know.”
“Don’t be startled,” I told her, “but I’ve seen Mycroft twice in here over the past two days. He came back to tell us something, and until now I had no idea what it was. Polly?”
Her eyes had filled with tears as she stared into the dim emptiness of the workshop. I followed her gaze, and as my eyes became accustomed to the light, I could see him, too. Mycroft’s opacity was low, and the color seemed to have drained from his body. He was barely there at all.
“Hello, Poll,” he said with a smile, his voice a low rumble. “You’re looking positively radiant!”
“Oh, Crofty!” she murmured. “You’re such a fibber-I’m a doddering wreck ready for the scrap heap. But one that has missed you so much!”
“Mycroft,” I said in a respectful whisper, “I don’t want to keep you from your wife, but time is short. I know why you came back.”
“You mean it wasn’t Farquitt or the chairs?”
“No. It was about the recipe for unscrambled eggs.”
“We need to know,” added Polly, “where you left it.”
“Is that all?” laughed Mycroft. “Why, goodness-I put in my jacket pocket!”
He was beginning to fade, and his voice sounded hollow and empty. His post-life time was almost up.
“And after that?”
He faded some more. I was worried that if I blinked, he’d go completely.
“Which jacket, my darling?” asked Polly.
“The one you gave me for Christmas,” came an ethereal whisper, “the blue one…with the large checks.”
“Crofty?”
But he had vanished. Friday and I rushed to support Polly, who had gone a bit wobbly at the knees.
“Damn!” said Friday. “When does he next come back?”
“He doesn’t,” I said. “That was it.”
“Then we’re no closer to knowing where it is,” said Friday. “I’ve been through all his clothes-there isn’t one with blue checks in his closet.”
“There’s a reason for that,” said Polly, her eyes glistening with tears. “He left it on the Hesperus. I scolded him at the time, but now I see why he did it.”
“Mum? Does this make any sense to you?”
“Yes,” I said with a smile. “It’s somewhere the ChronoGuard can’t get to it. Back in 1985, before he used the Prose Portal to send Polly into ‘I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud,’ he tested it on himself. The jacket is right where he left it-in the teeth of an Atlantic gale inside Henry Longfellow’s poem ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’”
“Inside the BookWorld?”
“Right,” I replied, “and nothing-repeat, nothing-would compel me to return there. In two days the ChronoGuard will be gone, and the slow repair of the Now can begin. You did good, Sweetpea.”
“Thanks, Mum,” he said, “but please-don’t call me Sweetpea.”
31. Spending the Surplus
The Commonsense Party’s first major policy reversal of perceived current wisdom was with the scrapping of performance targets, league standings and the attempt to make subtle human problems into figures on a graph that could be solved quickly and easily through “initiatives.” Arguing that important bodies such as the Health Ser vice should have the emphasis on care and not on administration, the Commonsense Party forced through legislation that essentially argued, “If it takes us ten years to get into the shit, it will take us twenty years to get out-and that journey starts now.”
We stayed at Mum’s for dinner, although “dinner” in this context might best be described as a loose collection of foodstuffs tossed randomly into a large saucepan and then boiled for as long as it took for all taste to vanish, never to return. Because of this we missed Redmond van de Poste’s Address to the Nation, something that didn’t really trouble us, as the last address had been, as they always were, unbelievably dreary but astute and of vital importance. It was just so good to talk to Friday again one-to-one. I’d forgotten how pleasant he actually was. He lost no time in telling me that he was going to have to stay undercover as a lazy good-for-nothing until the ChronoGuard had ceased operations-and this meant that I shouldn’t even attempt to wake him until at least midday, or two on weekends.
“How convenient,” I observed.
Tuesday had been thoughtful for some time and finally asked, “But can’t the ChronoGuard go back to the time between when Great-Uncle Mycroft wrote the recipe and when he left it on the Hesperus?”
“Don’t worry,” said Friday with a wink. “It was only twenty-eight minutes, and the older me has it covered at the other end. The only thing we have to do is make sure the recipe stays in ‘The Wreck of the Hesperus.’ We can win this fight with nothing more than inaction, which as a teenager suits me just fine.”
It was only as we were driving home that I suddenly thought of Jenny.
“Oh, my God!” I said in a panic. “We left Jenny at home on her own!”
Landen took hold of my arm and squeezed it, and I felt Friday rest his hand on my shoulder.