I looked at Dad and saw him bite his lip. He rubbed his temples and sighed.
‘No.’
‘What?’ exclaimed Lavoisier.
‘No,’ I repeated. ‘Dad, don’t do it. I’ll get Jack Schitt out or just live on my own—or something!’
He smiled and rested his hand on my shoulder.
‘Bah!’ went Lavoisier. ‘As hideously self-righteous as each other!’
He nodded to his men, who raised their weapons. But Dad was quick. I felt him grasp my shoulder tightly and we were off. The sun rose quickly as we leapt forward, leaving Lavoisier and the others several hours away before they realised what had happened.
‘Let’s see if we can lose him!’ muttered my father. ‘As for that Chamber stuff—bullshit. Landen’s eradication was murder, pure and simple. In fact, it’s just the sort of information I need to bring Lavoisier down!’
Days amounted to no more than brief flashes of alternate dark and light as we hurtled into the future.
‘We’re not at full speed,’ Dad explained. ‘He might overtake me without thinking. Keep an eye out for—’
Lavoisier and his cronies appeared for no more than the briefest glimpse as they moved past us into the future. Dad stopped abruptly and I staggered slightly as we returned to real time. We moved off the road as a fifties-style truck drove past, horn blaring.
‘What now?’
‘I think we shook him off. Blast!’
We were off again—Lavoisier had reappeared. We lost him for a moment but pretty soon he was back again, keeping pace with us.
‘I’m too old to fall for that one!’ He smiled.
Soon after two of his cronies reappeared as each one found us and matched the speed at which we were moving through history.
‘I knew you’d come,’ said Lavoisier triumphantly, walking towards us slowly as the time flashed past, faster and faster. A new road was built where we were standing, then a bridge, houses, shops. ‘Give yourself up. What do you hope to gain from all this? You’ll have a fair trial, believe me.’
The two other ChronoGuard operatives grabbed my father and held him tightly.
‘I’ll see you hang for this, Lavoisier! The Chamber would never sanction such an action. Give Landen back his life and I promise you I will say nothing.’
‘Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?’ replied Lavoisier scornfully. ‘Who do you think they’re going to believe? You with your record or me, third in command at the ChronoGuard? Besides, your clumsy attempt to get Landen back has covered any tracks I might have made getting rid of him!’
Lavoisier aimed his gun at my father. The two ChronoGuard held on to him tightly to stop him accelerating away, and we buffeted slightly as he tried. I had a sudden thought.
‘Do you guys cross picket lines?’
The ChronoGuard agents looked at one another, then at the chronographs on their wrists, then at Lavoisier. The taller of the two was the first to speak.
‘She’s right, Mr Lavoisier, sir. I don’t mind bullying and killing innocents, and I’ll follow you beyond the crunch normally, but—’
‘But what?’ asked Lavoisier angrily.
‘—but I am a loyal Timeguild member. I don’t cross picket lines.’
‘Neither do I,’ agreed the other agent, nodding to his friend. ‘Likewise and truly.’
Lavoisier smiled engagingly.
‘Listen here, guys, I’ll personally pay—’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Lavoisier,’ replied the operative, slightly indignantly, ‘but we’ve been instructed not to enter into any individual contracts.’ And in an instant they were gone as December arrived and the world turned pink. What was once the road was now a few inches of the same pink slime that Dad had shown me. We were beyond 12 December 1985, and where before there had been growth, change, seasons, clouds, now there was nothing but a never-ending landscape of shiny opaque curd.
‘Saved by industrial action!’ said Dad, laughing. ‘Tell that to your friends at the Chamber!’
‘Bravo,’ replied Lavoisier sardonically, ‘bravo. I think we should just say au revoir, my friends—until we meet again.’
‘Do we have to make it au revoir?’ I asked. ‘What’s wrong with goodbye?’
He didn’t have time to answer as I felt Dad tense and we accelerated faster through the timestream. The pink slime was washed away, leaving only earth and rocks, and as I watched the river moved away from us, meandered off into the flood-plain and then snaked back, swept under our feet, and then undulated back and forth like a snake before finally being replaced by a lake. We moved faster, and soon I could see the earth start to buckle as the crust bent and twisted under the force of plate tectonics. Plains dropped to make seas, and mountains rose in their place. New vegetation established itself as millions of years swept past in a matter of seconds. Vast forests grew and fell in seconds. We were covered, then uncovered, then covered again, now by sea, now by rock, now surrounded by an ice sheet, now a hundred feet in the air. More forests, then a desert, then mountains rose rapidly in the east, only to be scoured flat a few moments later.
‘Well,’ said my father, ‘Lavoisier in the pocket of Goliath. Who’d have thought it?’
‘Dad,’ I asked as the sun grew visibly bigger and redder, ‘how do we get back?’
‘We don’t go back,’ he replied. ‘We can’t go back. Once the present has happened, that’s it. We just carry on going until we return to where we started. Sort of like a roundabout. Miss an exit and you have to drive around again. There are just a few more exits and the roundabout is much, much bigger.’
‘How much bigger?’
‘A shitload. Quiet, now—we’re nearly there!’
And all of a sudden we weren’t nearly there, we were there, back at breakfast in my apartment, Dad turning the pages of the newspaper.
‘Well, we tried, didn’t we?’ said my father.
‘Yes, Dad, we did. Thanks.’
‘Don’t worry,’ he said gently, ‘even the finest eradications leave something behind for us to reactualise from. There is always a way—we just have to find it; Sweetpea, we will get him back—I’m not having my grandchild without a father.’
It did reassure me, and I thanked him.
‘Good!’ he said, closing his newspaper. ‘By the way, did you manage to get any tickets for the Nolan Sisters’ concert?’
‘I’m working on it.’
‘Good show. Well, time waits for no man, as we say—’
He squeezed my hand and was gone. The world started up again, the TV came back on and there was a muffled plocking from Pickwick, who had managed to lock herself in the airing cupboard again. I let her out and she ruffled her feathers in an embarrassed fashion before going off in search of her water dish.
I went into work but there was precious little to do. We had a call from an enraged Mrs Hathaway34 demanding to know when we were going to arrest the ‘unlick’d bear-whelp’ who had cheated her, and another from a student who wanted to know whether we thought Hamlet’s line was ‘this too too solid flesh’ or ‘this too too sullied flesh’, or even perhaps ‘these two-toed swordfish’. Bowden spent the morning mouthing the lines for his routine, and by noon there had been two attempts to steal Cardenio from Vole Towers. Nothing serious; SO-14 had doubled the guard. This didn’t concern SpecOps 27 in any way, so I spent the afternoon surreptitiously reading the Jurisfiction instruction manual, which felt a little like flicking through Bunty during school. I was tempted to have a go at entering a work of fiction to try out a few of their ‘handy book-jumping tips’ (page 28) but Havisham had roundly forbidden me from doing anything of the sort ‘until I was more experienced’. By the time I was ready to go home I had learned a few tricks about emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34), read about the aims of the Bowdlerizers (page 62), a group of well-meaning yet censorious individuals hell-bent on removing obscenities from fiction. I also read about Heathcliff’s unexpected three-year career in Hollywood under the name of Buck Stallion and his eventual return to the pages of Wuthering Heights (page 71), the forty-six abortive attempts to illegally save Beth from dying in Little Women (page 74), details of the Character Exchange Program (page 81), using holorimic verse to flush out renegade book people, or PageRunners as they were known (page 96), and how to use spelling mistakes, misprints and double negatives to signal to other Prose Resource Operatives in case emergency book evacuation procedures (page 34) failed (page 105). I was just learning about protocols relating to historical novels (page 122) when it was time to clock off. I joined the general exodus and wished Bowden good luck with his routine. He didn’t seem in the least nervous, but then he rarely did.