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.'
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 undeniably 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.'