Lost in a Good Book

5. Vanishing Hitch-hikers

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.

‘On the twelfth of December at 20.23, give or take a second or two, all organic material—every plant, insect, fish, bird, mammal and the three billion human inhabitants of this planet—will start turning to that. End of all of us. End of Life—and there won’t be that boy band I was telling you about. The problem,’ he went on as a car door slammed and we heard feet running towards us, ‘is that we don’t know why. The ChronoGuard are not doing any upstreaming work at present; Downstreamers seem to be unaffected—’

‘Why is that?’

‘Industrial action. Upstreamers are on strike for shorter hours. Not actually fewer hours, you understand, it’s just the hours that they do work they want to be, er, shorter.’

‘So while they are on strike the world could end? Isn’t that sort of daft?’

‘From an industrial action viewpoint,’ said my father, thinking about it carefully, ‘I think it’s a very good strategy indeed. I hope they can thrash out a new agreement in time.’

‘But that’s crazy!’

Dad shrugged.

‘I’m not in the Timeguild any more, Sweetpea. I went rogue, remember?’

‘So what can we do?’ I asked.

‘The centre of the disaster is unclear,’ replied my father as he patted his pockets for his pipe. ‘All my efforts to jump straight there have failed. I’ve run trillions of timestream models and the outcome is the same—whatever happens here and now somehow relates to the aversion of the crisis. And since the cyclist’s death is the only event of any significance for hours in either direction, it has to be the key event. The cyclist must live to ensure the continued health of the planet.’

We stepped out from behind the billboard to confront the driver, a youngish man who was visibly panicking.

‘Oh my God!’ he said as he stared at the twisted body at our feet. ‘Oh my God! Is he—?’

‘At the moment, yes,’ replied my father in a matter-of-fact sort of way as he filled his pipe.

‘I must call an ambulance!’ stammered the man. ‘He could still be alive!’

‘Anyway,’ continued my father, ignoring the motorist completely, ‘the cyclist obviously does something or doesn’t do something, and that’s the key to this whole stupid mess.’

The motorist stopped wringing his hands for a moment and looked at the pair of us suspiciously

‘I wasn’t speeding, you know,’ he said quickly. ‘The engine might have been revving but it was stuck in second…’

‘Hang on!’ I said, slightly confused ‘You’ve been beyond 1985, Dad—you told me so yourself!’

‘I know that,’ replied my father grimly, ‘so we’d better get this absolutely right.’

‘There was a low sun,’ continued the driver, as he thought hard, ‘and he swerved in front of me!’

‘Male guilt avoidance syndrome,’ explained my father. ‘It’s a recognised medical condition by 2054.’

Dad held me by the arm and there was a series of rapid flashes, an intense burst of noise and we were about a half-mile and five minutes in the direction from which the cyclist had come. He rode past and waved cheerily.

We returned the wave and watched him pedal off.

‘Don’t you stop him?’

‘Tried. Doesn’t work. Stole his bike—he borrowed a friend’s. Diversion signs he ignored and the pools win didn’t stop him either. I’ve tried everything. Time is the glue of the cosmos, Thursday, and it has to be eased apart—try to force events and they end up whacking you on the frontal lobes like a cabbage from six paces. Lavoisier will have locked on to me by now. The car is due in thirty-eight seconds. Hitch a ride and do your best.’

‘Wait!’ I said. ‘What about me?’

‘I’ll take you out again after the cyclist is safe.’

‘Back to where?’ I asked suddenly. I had no desire to return to the moment I’d left. ‘The SpecOps marksman, Dad, remember? Can’t you put me back, say, thirty minutes earlier?’

He smiled and gave me a wink.

‘Give my love to your mother. Thanks for helping out. Well, time waits for no man, as we—’

But he was gone, melted into the air about me. I paused for a moment and put out a thumb to hail the approaching Jaguar. The car slowed and stopped and the motorist, oblivious to the impending accident, smiled and asked me to hop aboard.

I said nothing, jumped in and we roared off.

‘Just picked the old girl up this morning,’ he mused, more to himself than me. ‘Three point eight litres with triple DCOE Webers. Six cylinders of big cat—lovely!’

‘Mind the cyclist,’ I said as we rounded the bend. The driver stamped on the brake and swerved past the man on the bike.

‘Bloody cyclists!’ he exclaimed. ‘A danger to themselves and everyone else. Where are you bound, little lady?’

‘I’m, ah… visiting my father,’ I explained, truthfully enough.

‘Where does he live?’

‘Everywhere,’ I replied.

‘—wireless seems to be dead,’ announced Bowden, keying the mike and turning the knob. ‘That’s odd.’

I picked up the Skyrail ticket as the shuttle approached high on the steel tracks.

‘What are you doing’’ asked Bowden.

‘I’m going to take the Skyrail; there’s a Neanderthal in trouble.’

‘How do you know?’

I frowned.

‘Call it déjà vu this time. Something’s going to happen… and I’m part of it.’

I left my partner and walked briskly up to the station, showed my ticket to the inspector and climbed the steel steps to the platform. The doors of the shuttle hissed open and I stepped inside, this time knowing exactly what I had to do.