First Among Sequels (Thursday Next 5)

“And what makes you think I’d be any good at it?”

“You can ask questions that aren’t already lodged in the SHE. Do you think just anyone can do that?”

He shrugged. “I’m not interested.”

“I’m just asking for you to stay and hear what we have to say.”

“I’m…not…interested,” replied Friday more forcefully.

“Listen,” said Scintilla, after looking around furtively and lowering his voice, “this is a bit unofficial, but I’ve had a word with Wayne Skunk, and he’s agreed to let you play a guitar riff on the second track of Hosing the Dolly.”

“It’s too late,” said Friday, “it’s already been recorded.”

Bendix stared at him. “Yes—and by you.”

“I never did anything of the sort!”

“No, but you might. And since that possibility exists, you did. Whether you actually do is up to you, but either way you can have that one on us. It’s your solo in any case. Your name is already in the liner notes.”

Friday looked at Scintilla, then at me. I knew how much he loved Strontium Goat, and Scintilla knew, too. He had Friday’s complete service record, after all. But Friday wasn’t interested. He didn’t like being pushed, cajoled, bullied or bribed. I couldn’t blame him—I hated it, too, and he was my son, after all.

“You think you can buy me?” he said finally, and left without another word.

“I’ll catch up,” I said as he walked out with Landen.

While the swinging doors shut noisily behind them, Scintilla said to me, “Do I need to emphasize how important it is that Friday joins the ChronoGuard as soon as possible? He should have signed up three years ago and be surfing the timestream by now.”

“You may have to wait a little longer, Bendix.”

“That’s just it,” he replied. “We don’t have much time.”

“I thought you had all the time there was.”

He took me by the arm, and we moved to a corner of the room.

“Thursday—can I call you Thursday?—we’re facing a serious crisis in the time industry, and as far as we know, Friday’s leadership several trillion bang/crunch cycles from now is the only thing that we can depend on—his truculence at this end of time means his desk is empty at the other.”

“But there’s always a crisis in time, Bendix.”

“Not like this. This isn’t a crisis in time—it’s a crisis of time. We’ve been pushing the frontiers of time forward for trillions upon trillions of years, and in a little over four days we’ll have reached the…End of Time.”

“And that’s bad, right?”

Bendix laughed. “Of course not! Time has to end somewhere. But there’s a problem with the very mechanism that controls the way we’ve been scooting around the here and now for most of eternity.”

“And that is?”

He looked left and right and lowered his voice. “Time travel has yet to be invented! And with the entire multiverse one giant hot ball of superheated gas contracting at incalculable speed into a point one trillion-trillionth the size of a neutron, it’s not likely to be.”

“Wait, wait,” I said, trying to get this latest piece of information into my head. “I know that the whole time travel thing makes very little logical sense, but you must have machines that enable you to move through time, right?”

“Of course—but we’ve got no idea how they work, who built them or when. We’ve been running the entire industry on something we call ‘retro-deficit-engineering.’ We use the technology now, safe in the assumption that it will be invented in the future. We did the same with the Gravitube in the fifties and the microchip ten years ago—neither of them actually gets invented for over ten thousand years, but it helps us more to have them now.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said slowly. “You’re using technology you don’t have—like me overspending on my credit card.”

“Right. And we’ve searched every single moment in case it was invented and we hadn’t noticed. Nothing. Zip. Nada. Rien.”

His shoulders slumped, and he ran his fingers through his hair.