Overtime. Part 53

'Shortly before the date scheduled for the Day of Judgement,' Mountjoy intoned, 'My Lord, on the advice of his legal advisers, took out a public liability policy. Part of the package offered by the insurance broker, it appears, was a free radio alarm clock, which subsequently failed to go off on a rather important occasion. As soon as My Lord has finished with you, Master de Nesle, I rather fancy he means to take the matter up with the broker in question.'

Blondel, who had closed his eyes in the interests of mirth suppression, opened them again and nodded. 'Fair enough,' he said, 'we'll scrub round the alarm clock. But don't you think a deal whereby you give me two relatively unimportant civilians in return for two high-ranking clerics and the Antichrist is a bit, well, one-sided. If you'll forgive the pun,' he added.

'It depends,' Mountjoy replied luminously. 'Unimportant to us. Unimportant, indeed, to history. But unimportant to you ...'

Blondel frowned, and noticed something out of the corner of his eye. 'h.e.l.lo,' he said, 'is that my old friend Clarenceaux under all that oilcloth? How's things, Clarenceaux?'

Clarenceaux, who had set in a position that was half standing to attention and half frozen rigid by the cold, stared straight in front and replied, 'Sir.'

'Bad as that, are they?'

'Sir.'

'Oh well,' said Blondel sympathetically. 'Stiff upper lip and all that.'

'Sir. Ran out of my size again, sir,' Clarenceaux explained. 'Quartermaster said it'd soon bed down, sir.'

'I see.' Blondel shrugged and turned back to Mountjoy. 'Tell you what I'll do,' he said, 'and I'm cutting my own throat, I really am. I'll let you have the two Popes and the Antichrist, you give me the King and Guy, and you can keep La Beale Isoud. Now I can't say fairer than that, can I?'

Mountjoy, for all his phosph.o.r.escent detachment, was shocked. 'You'd sacrifice your own sister?' he said.

Blondel tried to look innocent. 'Absolutely,' he said. 'A man's first duty is to his king, and next to that, to his fellow knights. Sisters just do the washing.'

Mountjoy's brain turned like the dials of a fruit machine. He remembered what the warder had told him the woman had said when he brought her her rations. They had enough trouble filling the existing staff vacancies without looking for another warder. 'I wouldn't dream of it,' he said.

'Pity.' Blondel sighed. 'Right, then, this is my very last offer, take it or leave it. You release Richard, Guy and Isoud, and you can have your lot back plus me.'

'You?'

'Certainly. You can ship me off to the Archive of your choice, and I promise you faithfully that you won't know I'm there.

Mountjoy shook his head, diffusing second-hand rain. 'That would be, Messire, because you weren't there. You've been in one Archive already and escaped. We wouldn't be able to sleep at night. No, our terms are quite straightforward. Goodlet and La Beale Isoud in return for My Lord and Their Excellencies. Otherwise...'

'Otherwise what?' Blondel asked innocently.

'Otherwise,' Mountjoy replied, 'your sister and your friend won't even be fond and fragrant memories. They will never have existed. Do I make myself plain?'

'Absolutely, my dear fellow,' Blondel replied. 'After all,' he added, 'it'll just mean we're back to where we started.'

'Not quite,' Mountjoy said. 'If we were back where we started, none of this would be necessary.'

'Sorry?'

'I said,' Mountjoy repeated, 'if we were back where we started, none of this

'No,' Blondel interrupted, 'you're wrong there. If you were back where you started, then I wouldn't be here. We'd all be in the future, surely.'

'That's not the point,' Mountjoy retorted. 'If we were back where we started, then you wouldn't be here, but we would.'

Blondel shook his head. 'But surely in that case we wouldn't be we, we'd just be you.'

'That's what I said.'

'No, what you said was -'

'Hold on,' Clarenceaux interrupted. 'I think I see what's gone wrong. Mountjoy is taking a view of events as they would have occurred in Basic Time, while Blondel is looking at it all from an Overtime-based perspective which would naturally lead him to interpret...'

He stopped. He had this feeling that everybody in the world was looking at him.

'Sorry,' he said, and died of embarra.s.sment.

'Anyway,' Blondel said, 'I suppose it's a deal, then. Shake on it?'

'No thank you.'

'Suit yourself.' He stepped out from under the tree and opened his umbrella. 'I'll meet you back here, same time, same place, this week. All right?'

'Agreed.'

'Ciao, then,' Blondel said, and walked away over the bridge.

Half an hour later, a battered red pick-up came and collected Clarenceaux and took him back to the depot. Because of an acute shortage of embarra.s.sment neurons at Central Dispatching they had to close off the circuits and double-bank the guilt centres to make up; with the result that, in the six weeks until he next died and they had a chance to take him to bits and do the job properly, he had a distressing tendency to burp in mixed company and then feel awful about it for days afterwards.

Blondel was driving the cart. It was difficult, because the cart was about seven inches wider than the tunnel, and it was only because of strange distortions caused by anomalies in the temporal field that he was able to get the blasted thing through at all. The key thing was, at all costs, not to meet himself coming the other way.

'Hold tight, everybody,' he said, 'this is our turning.'

Giovanni looked up to see a low, narrow doorway the size of a coal chute, with a picture of a cart in a red circle with a diagonal line through it stencilled on its central panel. Although he was used to this sort of thing, he closed his eyes and ducked.

It was already dark when they reached the bridge. It was also raining. Of course.

Under a tree by the side of the road at the other end, Blondel could see Mountjoy, Clarenceaux and, of course, himself, working out the terms of the exchange. At least there would be reliable witnesses in the event of any dispute about the terms. He made a chuck-chuck noise to the horse, pulled his hood down over his face and asked Marco if the lanterns were ready.

Two carts waiting at opposite ends of the bridge, in the pouring rain. For a while they just sat there. Then, on one cart, a lantern flashes three times. Then a lantern flashes three times on the other cart. The first cart flashes back four times. The signal is reciprocated.

There is no known reason for this performance, which is believed to be compulsory on these sorts of occasions. Presumably it's just tradition.

He had kept calm up till now; but the other cart hadn't moved, and Blondel began to worry. In keeping with the rest of his character, on the rare occasions when Blondel went to pieces, he went to very small, very numerous, very fast-moving pieces. In fact, you could use him to shoot clay pigeons with.

'For G.o.d's sake,' he muttered, 'what do they think they're playing at? Marco, you stupid idiot, don't just sit there, flash 'em some more. Come on, for G.o.d's sake.'

The other cart remained still. It flashed back; five flashes and then one more for luck. Blondel demanded angrily of the world in general what the h.e.l.l that was supposed to mean.

Marco coughed politely. 'Maybe they're trying to remind you it s a one-way street, boss,' he said.