‘Over my dead body.’
As if in reply there was a gentle pok sound and a single bullet hole appeared in the windshield of the shuttle. Someone had decided they could take Kaylieu out anyway. My temper flared and I tried to yell out in anger but no sound came from my lips. My legs felt weak and I fell to the floor in a heap, the world turning grey about me. I couldn’t even feel my legs. I heard someone yell ‘Medic!’ and the last thing I saw before the darkness overtook me was Kaylieu’s broad face looking down at me. He had tears in his eyes and was mouthing the words ‘We’re so sorry. So very, very sorry.’
5. Vanishing Hitch-hikers
‘Urban legends are older than congress gaiters but far more interesting. I’d heard most of them, from the dog in the microwave to ball lightning chasing a housewife in Preston, to the fried dodo leg found in a SmileyFriedChicken, to the carnivorous Diatryma supposedly re-engineered and now living in the New Forest. I’d read all about the alien spaceship that crash-landed near Lambourn in 1952, the story that Charles Dickens was a woman and that the president of the Goliath Corporation was actually a 142-year-old man kept alive by medical science in a bottle. Stories about SpecOps abound, the favourite at present relating to “something odd” dug up in the Quantock Hills. Yes, I’d heard them all. Never believed any of them. Then one day, I was one…’
I opened one eye, then the other. It was a warm summer’s day on the Marlborough downs. A light zephyr brought with it the delicate scent of honeysuckle and wild thyme. The air was warm and small puffy clouds were starting to tinge red from the setting sun. I was standing by the side of a road in open country. In one direction I could see a lone cyclist; in the other the road wound away into the distance past fields in which sheep grazed peacefully. If this was life after death then a lot of people had not much to worry about and the Church had delivered the goods after all.
‘Psssst!’ hissed a voice close at hand. I turned to see a figure crouched behind a large Goliath Corporation billboard advertising buy-two-get-one-free grand pianos.
‘Dad—?’
He pulled me behind the hoarding with him.
‘Standing there like a tourist, Thursday!’ he snapped crossly. ‘Anyone would think you wanted to be seen!’
I regarded my father as a sort of time-travelling knight errant, but to the ChronoGuard he was nothing less than a criminal. He threw in his badge and went rogue seventeen years ago when his ‘historical and moral’ differences brought him into conflict with the ChronoGuard High Chamber. The downside of this was that he didn’t really exist at all in any accepted terms of the definition; the ChronoGuard had interrupted his conception in 1917 by a well-timed knock on his parents’ front door. But despite all this Dad was still around, and I and my brothers had been born. ‘Things,’ Dad used to say, ‘are a whole lot weirder than we can know.’
He glanced nervously up and down the road.
‘How are you, by the way?’ he asked.
‘I think I was just accidentally shot dead by a SpecOps marksman.’
He laughed for a while, then suddenly stopped when he saw I was serious.
‘Goodness!’ he said. ‘You do live an exciting life. But never fear. You can’t die until you’ve lived, and you’ve barely started that at all. What’s the news from home?’
‘A ChronoGuard officer turned up at my wedding bash wanting to know where you were.’
‘Lavoisier?’
‘Yes; do you know him?’
‘I should think so.’ My father sighed. ‘We were partners for nearly seven centuries.’
‘He said you were very dangerous.’
‘No more dangerous than anyone else who dares speak the truth. How’s your mother?’
‘She’s fine, although you might try and clear up that misunderstanding about Emma Hamilton.’
‘Emma and I… I mean Lady Hamilton and I are simply “good friends”. There’s nothing to it, I swear.’
‘Tell her that.’
‘I try, but you know what a temper she has. I only have to mention I’ve been anywhere near the turn of the nineteenth century and she gets in a frightful strop. What else is happening?’
‘We found a thirty-third play by Shakespeare.’
‘Thirty-three?’ echoed my father. ‘That’s odd. When I took the entire works back to the actor Shakespeare to distribute there were only eighteen.’
‘Until yesterday there have always been thirty-two.’
‘Hmm,’ he replied, brow furrowed. Dad’s work in the timestream could be tricky to get your head round sometimes
‘Perhaps the actor Shakespeare started writing them himself?’ I suggested
‘By thunder, you could be right!’ exclaimed my father. ‘He looked a bright spark. Tell me, how many comedies are there now?’
‘Fifteen,’ I replied.
‘But I only gave him three. They must have been so popular he started writing new ones himself!’
‘It would explain why all the comedies are pretty much the same,’ I added. ‘Spells, identical twins, shipwrecks—’
‘—usurped dukes, men dressed as women,’ continued my father. ‘You could be right’
‘But wait a moment—’ I began. But my father, sensing my disquiet over the seemingly impossible paradoxes, silenced me with his hand.
‘One day you’ll understand and everything will be more different than you can, at present, possibly hope to imagine.’
I must have looked blank for he continued:
‘Remember, Thursday, that scientific thought—indeed, any mode of thought, whether it be religious or philosophical or anything else—is just like the fashions that we wear—only much longer lived. It’s a little like a boy band.’
‘Scientific thought a boy band? How do you figure that?’
‘Well, every now and then a boy band comes along. We like it, buy the records, posters, parade them on TV, idolise them right up until—’
‘—the next boy band?’ I suggested.
‘Precisely. Aristotle was a boy band. A very good one but only number six or seven. He was the best boy band until Isaac Newton, but even Newton was transplanted by an even newer boy band. Same haircuts—but different moves.’
‘Einstein, right?’
‘Right. Do you see what I’m saying?’
‘I think so.’
‘Good. So try and think of maybe thirty or forty boy bands past Einstein. To where we would regard Einstein as someone who glimpsed a truth, played one good chord on seven forgettable albums.’
‘Where is this going, Dad?’
‘I’m nearly there. Imagine a boy band so good that you never needed another boy band ever again. Can you imagine that?’
‘It’s hard. But yes, okay.’
‘Now think of a boy band so good you never needed any more music—or anything else for that matter.’
He let this sink in for a moment.
‘When we reach that boy band, my dear, everything becomes a lot easier to understand. And you know the best thing about it? It’s so devilishly simple.’
‘When is this boy band discovered?’
Dad suddenly turned serious.
‘That’s why I’m here. Perhaps never. Did you see a cyclist on the road?’
‘Yes’
‘Well,’ he said, consulting the large chronograph on his wrist, ‘in ten seconds that cyclist will be knocked over and killed.’
‘And?’ I asked, sensing that I was missing something.
He looked around furtively and lowered his voice.
‘Well, it seems that right here and now is the key event whereby we can avert whatever it is that destroys every single speck of life on this planet!’
I looked into his earnest eyes.
‘You’re not kidding, are you?’
He shook his head.
‘In December 1985, your 1985, for some unaccountable reason, all the planet’s organic matter turns to… this.’
He withdrew a plastic specimen bag from his pocket. It contained a thick pinkish opaque slime. I took the bag and shook it curiously as we heard a loud screech of tyres and a sickly thud; a few moments later a broken body and a twisted bicycle landed close by.