Lost in a good book (29 page)

He handed two half documents over. One was a picture of a young woman striding out of a shop laden down with carrier bags and parcels. Her face, tantalizingly enough, was the part that had been destroyed by the shredder. I turned the picture over. On the back was a penciled note: “A.H. leaves Dorothy Perkins having shopped with a stolen credit card.”

“The ‘A.H.’ means Acheron Hades,” explained Lamme in a confident tone. “We were allowed to read part of his file. He can lie in thought, deed and action.”

“I know. I wrote it. But this
isn’t
Hades. Acheron doesn’t resolve on film.”

“Then who is it that we’re after?” asked Slorter.

“I have no idea. What was on the other document?”

This was simply a handwritten page of notes, compiled by Walken about whoever it was they were watching. I read:

“... 9:34: Contact with suspect at Camp Hopson sales. 11:03: Elevenses of carrot juice and flapjack—leaves without paying. 11:48: Dorothy Perkins. 12:57: Lunch. 14:45: Continues shopping. 17:20: Argues with manager of Tammy Girl about returned leg warmers. 17:45: Lost contact. 21:03: Reestablished contact at the HotBox nightclub. 23:02: A.H. leaves the HotBox with male companion. 23:16: Contact lost. . . .”

I put down the sheet.

“It’s not exactly how I’d describe the work of a master criminal, now is it?”

“No,” replied Slorter glumly.

“What were your orders?”

“Classified,” announced Lamme, who was getting the hang of SpecOps-5 work, right at the point I didn’t want him to.

“Stick to you like glue,” said Slorter, who understood the situation a lot better, “and reports every half hour sent to SO-5 HQ in three separate ways.”

“You’re being used as live bait,” I told them. “If I were you I’d go back to SO-23 and -28 just as quick as your legs can carry you.”

“And miss all this?” asked Slorter, replacing her dark glasses and looking every bit the part. SO-5 would be the highest office for either of them. I hoped they lived long enough to enjoy it.

By ten-thirty the exhibition was pretty much over. I sent Gran home in a cab fast asleep and a bit tipsy. Saveloy tried to kiss me goodnight but I was too quick for him, and Duchamp
₂₉₂₄
had managed to sell an installation of his called
The Id Within VII— in a Jar, Pickled.
Zorf refused to sell any paintings to anyone who couldn’t see what they were, but to neanderthals who
could
see what they were he gave them away, arguing that the bond between a painting and an owner should not be sullied by anything as obscenely sapien as cash. The flattened tuba was sold too, the new owner asking Joffy to drop it round to him, and if he wasn’t at home to just slip it under the door. I went home via Mum’s place to collect Pickwick, who hadn’t come out of the airing cupboard the entire time I was in Osaka.

“She insisted on being fed in there,” explained my mother, “and the trouble with the other dodos! Let one in and they
all
want to follow!”

She handed me Pickwick’s egg wrapped in a towel. Pickwick hopped up and down in a very aggravated manner and I had to show her the egg to keep her happy, then we both drove home to my apartment at the same sedate twenty miles per hour and the egg was safely placed in the linen cupboard with Pickwick sitting on it in a cross mood, very fed up with being moved about.

22.
Travels with My Father

The first time I went traveling with my father was when I was much younger. We attended the opening night of
King Lear
at the Globe in 1602. The place was dirty and smelly and slightly rowdy, but for all that, not unlike a lot of other opening nights I had attended. We bumped into someone named Bendix Scintilla, who was, like my father, a lonely traveler in time. He said he hung around in Elizabethan England to avoid ChronoGuard patrols. Dad said later that Scintilla had been a truly great fighter for the cause but his drive had left him when they eradicated his best friend and partner. I knew how he felt but did not do as he did.

THURSDAY NEXT
,
Private Diaries

D
AD TURNED UP
for breakfast. I was just flicking through that morning’s copy of
The Toad
at the kitchen table when he arrived. The big news story was the volte-face in Yorrick Kaine’s fortunes. From being a sad politically dead no-hoper he was polling ahead of the ruling Teafurst party. The power of Shakespeare. The world suddenly stopped, the picture on the TV froze up and the sound became a dull hum, the same tone and pitch as it was the moment Dad arrived. He had the power to stop the clock like this; time ground to a halt when he visited me. It was a hard-won skill—for him there was no return to normality.

“Hello, Dad,” I said brightly. “How are things?”

“Well, it depends,” he replied. “Have you heard of Winston Churchill yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Blast!” he muttered, sitting down and raising his eyebrows at the newspaper headline:
Chimp Merely Pet, Claims Croquet Supremo.
“How’s your mother?”

“She’s well. Is the world still going to end next week?”

“Looks like it. Does she ever talk about me?”

“All the time. I got this report from SpecOps forensics.”

“Hmm,” said my father, donning his glasses and reading the report carefully. “Carboxy-methyl-cellulose, phenylalanine and hydrocarbons. Animal fat? Doesn’t make any sense at all!”

He handed back the report.

“I don’t get it,” he said quietly, sucking the end of his spectacles. “That cyclist lived and the world
still
ended. Maybe it’s not him. Trouble is, nothing else happened at that particular time and place.”

“Yes it did,” I said in a sober voice.

“What?”

I picked up the evidence bag with the pink goo inside.

“You gave me this.”

Dad snapped his fingers.

“That must be it. My handing you the bag of slime was the key event and
not
the death of the cyclist. Did you tell anyone where that pink goo came from?”

“No one.”

He thought for a bit.

“Well,” he said at last, “unlike hindsight, avoiding Armageddons is not an exact science. We may have to let events lead us for a while until we can figure it out. How is everything else going?”

“Goliath eradicated Landen,” I replied glumly.

“Who?”

“My husband.”

“Oh!” he said, suddenly thoughtful. “Any particular reason?”

“Goliath want Jack Schitt out of ‘The Raven.’ ”

“Ah!” he exclaimed. “The old blackmail routine. I’m sorry to hear that, sweetpea. But listen, don’t be downhearted. We have a saying about reactualizing eradicatees that goes like this: ‘No one is truly dead until they are forgotten.’ ”

“So,” I answered slowly, “if I forgot about him, then he
would
be gone?”

“Precisely,” remarked my father, helping himself to some coffee. “That’s why I’m having so much trouble reactualizing Churchill and Nelson—I have to find someone who remembers them as they were so I can figure out where things might have gone awry.” He laughed for a moment and then got up.

“Well, get dressed, we’re leaving!”

“Where to?”

“Where?” he exclaimed. “Why, to get your husband back, of course!”

This
was
good news. I quickly dashed into the bedroom to pull some clothes on while Dad read the paper and had a bowl of cereal.

“Schitt-Hawse told me they had the summer of 1947 sewn up so tight not even a transtemporal gnat could get in there,” I told him, breathless from preparation.

“Then,” replied my father thoughtfully, “we will have to outsmart them! They will expect us to arrive at the right time and the right place—but we won’t. We’ll arrive at the right place but at the
wrong
time, then simply wait. Worth a try, wouldn’t you say?”

I smiled.

“Definitely!”

I was conscious of a series of rapid flashes and there we were in a blacked-out Humber Snipe, driving alongside a dark strip of water on a moonlit night. In the distance I could see searchlights crisscross the sky and the distant thump-thump-thump of a bombing raid.

“Where are we?” I asked.

Dad changed down a gear.

“Approaching Henley-on-Thames in occupied England, November 1946.”

I looked out at the river again, an uncomfortable feeling starting to develop in the pit of my stomach.

“Is this . . . is this where Landen—you know—in the car accident?”

“This is
where
it happens, but not
when.
If I were to jump straight there, Lavoisier would be on to us like a shot. Ever played Kick the Can?”

“Sure.”

“It’s a bit like that. Guile, stealth, patience—and a small amount of cheating. Okay, we’re here.”

We had reached an area of the road where there was a sharp bend. I could see how an inattentive motorist might easily misjudge the road and end up in the river. I shivered.

We got out and Dad walked across the road to where a small group of silver birches stood amidst a tangle of dead bracken and brambles. It was a good place to observe the bend in the road; we were barely ten yards away. Dad laid down a plastic carrier bag he had brought and we sat on the grass, leaning up against the smooth bark of a large birch.

“Now what?”

“We wait for six months.”

“
Six months?
Dad, are you crazy? We can’t sit here for six months!”

“So little time, so much to learn,” mused my father. “Do you want a sandwich? Your mother leaves them out for me every morning. I’m not mad keen on corned beef and custard, but it has a sort of eccentric charm—and it does fill a hole.”

“Six months?” I repeated.

He took a bite from his sandwich.

“Lesson one in time travel, Thursday. First of all, we are
all
time travelers. The vast majority of us manage only one day per day. Now if we accelerate ourselves like
so
—”

The clouds gathered speed above our heads and the trees shook faster in the light breeze; by the light of the moon I could see that the pace of the river had increased dramatically; a convoy of lorries sped past us in sudden accelerated movement.

“This is about twenty days per day—every minute compressed into about three seconds. Any slower and we would be visible. As it is, an outside observer might
think
he saw a man and woman sitting at the bottom of these trees, but if he looked again we would be gone. Ever thought you saw someone, then looked again only to find them gone?”

“Sure.”

“ChronoGuard traffic moving through, most likely.”

The dawn was breaking and presently a German Wehrmacht patrol found our abandoned car and dashed around looking for us before a breakdown truck appeared and took the car away. More cars rushed along the road and the clouds sped rapidly across the sky.

“Pretty, isn’t it?” said my father. “I miss all this, but I have so little time these days. At fifty daypers we would still have to wait a good three or four days for Landen’s accident; I’ve a dental appointment, so we’re going to have to pick it up a bit.”

The clouds sped faster; cars and pedestrians were nothing more than blurs. The shadow of the trees cast by the sun traversed rapidly and lengthened in the afternoon sun; pretty soon it was evening and the clouds were tinged with pink before the rapidly gathering gloom overtook the day and the stars appeared, followed by the moon, which arced rapidly across the sky. The stars spun around the pole star as the sky grew bluer with the early dawn and the sun began its rapid climb in the east.

“Eight and one-half thousand daypers,” explained my father. “This is my favorite bit. Watch the leaves!”

The sun now rose and set in under ten seconds. Pedestrians were invisible to us as we were to them, and a car had to be parked for at least two hours for us to see it at all. But the leaves! They turned from green to brown as we watched, the outer branches a blur of movement, the river a soft undulating mirror without so much as a ripple. The plants died off as we watched, the sky grew more overcast and the spells of dark were now much longer than the light. Flecks of light showed along the road where traffic moved, and opposite us an abandoned Kübelwagen was rapidly stripped of spares and then dumped upside down in the river.

“I’d never get bored of this, Dad. Do you travel like this all the time?”

“Never this slow. This is just for tourists. We usually approach speeds of ten billion or more daypers; if you want to go backwards you have to go faster still!”

“Go backwards by going forwards faster?” I queried, confounded by the illogicality of it.

“That’s enough for now, sweetpea. Just enjoy yourself and watch.”

I pulled myself closer to him as the air grew chilly and a heavy blanket of snow covered the road and forest around us.

“Happy New Year,” said my father.

“Snowdrops!” I cried in delight as green shoots nuzzled through the snow and flowered, their heads angling towards the low sun. Then the snow was gone and the river rose again and small amounts of detritus gathered around the upturned Kübelwagen, which rusted as we watched. The sun flashed past us higher and higher in the sky and soon there were daffodils and crocuses.

“Ah!” I said in surprise as a shoot from a small shrub started to grow up my trouser leg.

“Train them
away
from your body,” explained my father, diverting the course of a bramble trying to ensnare him with the palm of his hand. My own shoot pushed against my hand like a small green worm and moved off in another direction. I did the same with the others that threatened me, but Dad went one further and with a practiced hand trained his bramble into a pretty bow.

“I’ve known students literally rooted to the spot,” explained my father. “It’s where the phrase comes from. But it can be fun, too. We had an operative named Jekyll who once trained a four-hundred-year-old oak into a heart as a present for her boyfriend.”