Overtime. Part 48

Blondel looked round. Come to think of it, the place did have a distinctly frisked look. 'What makes you think they were tax men?' he asked.

'Just look at the place, for G.o.d's sake.'

Blondel scratched his head. 'Good point,' he said; then he thought of something. 'My dear chap,' he said, 'what must you think of me? Do let me help you out of those ropes. They look awfully uncomfortable.'

Once freed from his bonds, Giovanni immediately ran across the room, upended a tubular metal chair and fished around for something inside one of the legs. After a short, frantic burst of activity he produced a tight roll of papers and waved it round his head in relief.

'It's all right,' he said, 'they didn't find it.'

'Oh yes?' Blondel said. 'What's that?'

'Er...'

'Do you know,' Blondel went on, 'I don't think they were from the Revenue at all.'

'No?' Giovanni paused, balanced on one leg, in the act of stuffing the papers inside his sock. 'Customs and Excise, you reckon?'

'Maybe,' Blondel replied. 'Or perhaps they were some of the Antichrist's people.'

'You think so?'

Blondel picked up something from the floor and displayed it on the palm of his hand. 'Look at this,' he said. 'It's a b.u.t.ton off a tunic. See there, that's the arms of the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes. I think they're on to us already.'

'Phew!' Giovanni said. 'Thank G.o.d for that. I thought we were in trouble there for a minute.' He sat down and pulled his shoe back on.

'How long since they left?' Blondel asked. He threw the b.u.t.ton up in the air and caught it. 'Not long, I don't imagine.'

'Dunno,' Giovanni replied. 'Five minutes, maybe, perhaps ten.'

'And it wasn't Pursuivant and Clarenceaux or any of that lot.

Giovanni shook his head. 'I'd have recognised them,' he said. 'Like I said, this lot were frightening.' He reached out for his briefcase and started riffling through papers.

'Ten minutes,' Blondel repeated, 'and not Pursuivant and Clarenceaux. So it must be the other squad.' He turned to the Galeazzo brothers. 'If I were you,' he said, 'I'd head for the wardrobe. The other wardrobe. Now.'

'But you said...'

'Now. If it'll help create an illusion of urgency, pretend there's a party of Department of Trade investigators coming up the stairs.

Very shortly afterwards, the wardrobe door slammed, hard. Blondel started to count to ten. Give them a head start, he reckoned, and then follow. Because if he was right, the gentlemen who would very shortly be coming back were not the sort of people he wanted to meet.

Every military and paramilitary outfit has an elite force of some kind, a hand-picked bunch of utterly ruthless and determined professionals who think nothing of dyeing perfectly good balaclava helmets jet black and cutting holes in them. The Chastel des Larmes Chaudes is no exception. It has the Time and Motion department.

Some special units are trained to operate in specific conditions, such as mountains or the arctic. The TAM is designed to operate in time.

They know how to live off the land, snaring lost opportunities and roasting them on spits; how to blend imperceptibly into the temporal landscape, disguised as fleeting moments; how to ambush unsuspecting hostile forces by attacking them before they've even been born. Intensive training has taught them to withstand the devastating metabolic effects of rapid time travel, which can only too easily lead to a meal being digested before it is eaten. And they can follow a trail through history better than the combined postgraduate resources of all the universities in the world.

The TAM is recruited exclusively from temporal misfits -men who have somehow or other fallen out of their own time, anachronisms; as can readily be deduced from the narrow lapels and flared trousers of their battledress uniforms. As might be expected, therefore, they are pitiless, determined and incorrigibly unpunctual.

It stands to reason, then, that when the Chastel des Larmes Chaudes sees fit to turn the TAM loose, it's probably had enough of messing about.

Once Zeitsturmbahnfuhrer Uhrwerk had satisfied himself that Blondel wasn't hiding under the floorboards or inside the sofa cushions, he started to search for the time door. He was equipped with the latest in Chronological Anomaly Detectors and it didn't take him long to find the right wardrobe door. The fact that it was open and palpably led nowhere helped, of course.

'Right, men, follow me,' he snapped. 'Synchronise your watches.'

The platoon laughed dutifully. Zeitsturmbahnfuhrer Uhrwerk was essentially a one-joke man.

It was dark in the tunnel, but TAM soldiers are equipped with both foresight and hindsight, and can if necessary navigate by sound alone, listening out for their own future m.u.f.fled curses as they stub their toes on concealed obstacles. It was not long before they picked up the trail. The litter of bent and distorted historical potentials, imperceptible to the naked eye, were easily detected by the CADs. The squad broke into a run.

For the first time in a very long time, Blondel wasn't sure where to go next. His basic instincts told him to head for the Chastel de Nesle, bolt the doors behind him and get Isoud to heat up a huge cauldron of boiling mashed potato for pouring on the heads of would-be besiegers. The thing to remember about basic instincts, however, is that they don't always work. If beavers and rabbits used their brains instead of following their natural instincts, fur coats would be rather more expensive.

The alternative, of course, was to try and lose them somewhere in time; but that was rather like trying to drown a fish. The third alternative, standing his guard and fighting it out with cold steel, made his basic instincts look quite intelligent by comparison.

Standing at a fork in the tunnel, Blondel hesitated and tried to reach a decision. The right hand fork led, via the Icelandic Foreign Office and the Cultural Revolution pension scheme, to the Chastel de Nesle. The left hand fork led to DVLC. He had no idea what lay beyond. To the best of his knowledge, n.o.body did.

Behind him, he heard the sound of heavy boots and the distant m.u.f.fled swearing noises of men learning by mistakes they never got around to making. He turned left. Robert Frost would have been proud of him.

To get to DVLC you have to pa.s.s through some undeniably hairy situations, as anyone who has ever tried to get hold of a replacement logbook for a 1978 Cavalier will confirm. First you have to go past the Arts and Heritage secretariat of the Long Parliament (watch out for splinters of broken stained gla.s.s underfoot), then turn left at the Irish Postmaster General's office, circa 1916 (a terrible beauty is born, so be ready to duck) and left again through the Spanish Feudal System. It's at this point that it's all too easy to get lost. The through route across the Customs and Excise of the later Byzantine empire is, well, byzantine in its complexity, and if you aren't careful you can easily find yourself in the Ottoman Ministry of Works; which is remarkably like being dead, only not as restful. You'll know you're on the right road if you come to a long corridor which you try running down only to find that you're either staying exactly where you are or moving slightly backwards. That means you're in driving licence application territory.

The main thing to remember, once you're there, is not to go through any of the doors.

Blondel stopped, selected a door at random, opened it and fell through. These guys, he told himself, know the score. They'll never follow me in through here.

The true nature of Time has puzzled the best brains in the human race throughout history; but only because n.o.body has ever grasped the fact that the stuff comes in two quite different isotopes.

There is Time; and there is Overtime.

Time is the shortest distance between two events. Overtime is the scenic route. In Overtime, things happen in the same order as they do in Time, but temporal units have different values of magnitude. To put it another way, an egg boiled for three minutes in Overtime would penetrate steel plate.

The trick is to be able to tell which system is in force on any given occasion. There are no hard and fast rules, but here are a couple of examples of situations where you can expect to find Overtime:

(a) Public transport; for instance, someone who arrives at an airport two hours early will have to wait another two hours because his plane is late getting in, whereas someone who turns up three minutes before takeoff will invariably find that the plane left three minutes early.

(b) Government departments; consider how entirely different temporal concepts apply when you want them to do something, and when they want you to do something. It's a little-known but revealing fact that the supertemporal forces inside the IRS Headquarters in Washington are so strong all the clocks in the building had to be specially designed by Salvador Dali.

The effects of mixing Time and Overtime were harnessed by a pioneer firm of time-travel agents, who used them to make it possible for their clients to take relaxing and indefinite holidays in the past or the future. In order to travel, holidaymakers booked an ordinary holiday with an ordinary package tour company. Three weeks before the holiday, they sent their pa.s.sports off for renewal. Two days before the departure date, they cancelled the holiday.

The result of sending the pa.s.sports off was the creation of a ma.s.sive Overtime field which would ensure that the pa.s.sports would take at least four months to process. Cancelling the holiday broke the field, bringing the most tremendous pressure to bear on the Time/Overtime interface and tearing holes in it large enough for human beings to pa.s.s through. The time-holiday was spent in Overtime, which meant that you could spend six weeks in Renaissance Florence and still be home in time to go to work the morning after you'd left.

In other words, the earth's temporal system, which was installed on the afternoon of the fifth day by a team of contractors found by G.o.d in the Golden Pages under the trading name of Cheap 'n' Cheerful Chronological Engineers, is a cla.s.sic example of a Friday afternoon job, and fundamentally unstable. If Man had stayed put in the Garden of Eden, where the chronostat is jammed stuck at half past six on a summer afternoon, it wouldn't have mattered. Once Adam cut loose, however, it was inevitable that any sudden violent dislocation - a successful Crusade, for example -could knock the entire thing into the middle of next week. Or possibly worse.

Accordingly, on the eighth day, G.o.d telephoned his lawyers and began asking all sorts of questions about product liability.

Blondel stared, and grabbed at the doorframe to stop himself falling. The problem was that the doorframe wasn't there any more.