Friday took a deep breath. “Mum? Like…duh. He’s a younger version of me and the future director-general. If we get rid of him, we get rid of ourselves. He’s clever, I’ll grant him that. But if he can stop time travel from being discovered, then he knows how it was invented in the first place. We need to speak to him. Now-where is he?”
“I don’t rat out my son, son,” I said in a mildly confusing way.
“I’m your son, Mum.”
“And I wouldn’t rat you out either, Sweetpea.”
Friday took a step forward and raised his voice a notch. “Mum, this is important. If you have any idea where he is, then you’re going to have to tell us-and don’t call me Sweetpea in front of my friends.”
“I don’t know where he is-Sweetpea-and if you want to talk to me in that tone of voice, you’ll go to your room.”
“This is beyond room, Mother.”
“Mum. It’s Mum. Friday always calls me Mum.”
“I’m Friday, Mum-your Friday.”
“No,” I said, “you’re another Friday-someone he might become. And do you know, I think I prefer the one who can barely talk and thinks soap is a type of TV show?”
Friday glared at me angrily. “You’ve got ten hours to hand him over. Harboring a time terrorist is a serious offense, and the punishment unspeakably unpleasant.”
I wasn’t fazed by his threats.
“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” I asked.
“Of course!”
“Then, by definition, so does he. Why don’t you take your SO-12 buddies and go play in the timestream until dinner?”
Friday made a harrumph noise, turned on his heels and departed, with his friends following quickly behind.
I closed the door and walked through to the hall where Landen was leaning on the newel post staring at me. He’d been listening to every word.
“Pumpkin, just what the hell’s going on?”
“I’m not sure myself, darling, but I’m beginning to think that Friday’s been making monkeys out of the pair of us.”
“Which Friday?”
“The hairy one that grunts a lot. He’s not a dozy slacker after all-he’s working undercover as some sort of historical fundamentalist. We need some answers, and I think I know where to find them. Friday may have tricked his parents, the SHE and half the ChronoGuard, but there’s one person no teenage boy ever managed to fool.”
“And that is?”
“His younger sister.”
“I can’t believe it took you so long to figure out,” said Tuesday, who agreed to spill the beans on her brother for the bargain price of a new bicycle, a thirty-pound gift card to MathWorld and lasagna three nights in a row. “He didn’t stomp on Barney Plotz either-he forged the letters and the phone call. He needed the time to conduct what he called his…investigations. I don’t know what they were, but he was at the public library a lot-and over at Gran’s.”
“Gran’s? Why Gran’s? He likes his food.”
“I don’t know,” said Tuesday, thinking long and hard about it. “He said it was something to do with Mycroft and a chronuption of staggering proportions.”
“That boy,” I muttered grimly, “has got some serious explaining to do.”
30. Now Is the Winter
One of the biggest wastes of money in recent years was the Anti-Smite shield, designed to protect mankind (or Britain, at the very least) from an overzealous deity eager to cleanse the population of sin. Funded initially by Chancellor Yorrick Kaine, the project was halted after his ignominious fall from grace. Canceled but not forgotten, the network of transmission towers still lies dotted about the country, a silent testament to Kaine’s erratic and somewhat costly administration.
My mother answered the door when we knocked, and she seemed vaguely surprised to see us all. Landen and I were there as concerned parents, of course, and Tuesday was there as she was the only one who might be able to understand Mycroft’s work, if that was what was required.
“Is it Sunday lunchtime already?” asked my mother.
“No, Mother. Is Friday here?”
“Friday? Goodness me, no! I haven’t seen him for over-”
“It’s all right, Gran,” came a familiar voice from the living-room door. “There’s no more call for subterfuge.”
“It was Friday-our Friday, the grunty, smelly one, who up until an hour ago was someone we thought wouldn’t know what “subterfuge” meant, let alone be able to pronounce it. He had changed. There seemed to be a much more upright bearing about him. Perhaps it was because he wasn’t dragging his feet when he walked, and he actually looked at us when he spoke. Despite this, he still seemed like a sad-teenager cliché: spots, long unkempt hair, and with clothes so baggy you could dress three people out of the material and still have enough to make some curtains.
“Why don’t you tell us what’s going on?” I asked.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
I fixed him with my best “Son, you are in so much trouble” look. “You’d be amazed what I can understand.”
“Okay,” he said, drawing a deep breath. “You’ve heard that the ChronoGuard is using time-travel technology now in the almost certain knowledge that it’s invented in the future?”
“I get the principle,” I replied somewhat guardedly, as I still had no idea how you could use something that had yet to be invented.
“As weird as it might seem,” explained Friday, “the principle is sound. Many things happen solely because of the curious human foible of a preconceived notion’s altering the outcome. More simply put: If we convince ourselves that something is possible, it becomes so. It’s called the Schrödinger Night Fever principle.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s simple. If you go to see Saturday Night Fever expecting it to be good, it’s a corker. However, if you go expecting it to be a crock of shit, it’s that, too. Thus Saturday Night Fever can exist in two mutually opposing states at the very same time, yet only by the weight of our expectations. From this principle we can deduce that any opposing states can be governed by human expectation-even, as in the case of retro-deficit-engineering, the present use of a future technology.”
“I think I understand that,” said Landen. “Does it work with any John Travolta movie?”
“Only the artistically ambiguous ones,” replied Friday, “such as Pulp Fiction and Face/Off. Battlefield Earth doesn’t work, because it’s a stinker no matter how much you think you’re going to like it, and Get Shorty doesn’t work either, because you’d be hard-pressed not to enjoy it, irrespective of any preconceived notions.”
“It’s a beautiful principle,” I said admiringly. “Yours?”
“Sadly not,” replied Friday with a smile. “Much as I’d like to claim it, the credit belongs to an intellect far superior to mine-Tuesday. Way to go, sis.”
Tuesday squirmed with joy at getting a compliment from her big brother, but still none of it made any real sense.
“So how does this relate to Mycroft and time travel?”
“Simple,” said Friday. “The obscenely complex technologies that the ChronoGuard uses to power up the time engines contravene one essential premise that is at the very core of science: that disorder will always stay the same or increase. More simply stated, you can put a pig in a machine to make a sausage, but you can’t put a sausage in a machine to make a pig. It’s the Second Law of Thermodynamics. One of the most rigid tenets of our understanding of the physical world. You can’t reverse the arrow of time to make something unhappen-whether it be unscrambling eggs or unmaking a historical event.”