Overtime (9 page)

‘Fire away.'

‘How do you do that?'

‘What?'

‘Go through doors,' Guy said, ‘that lead to ... well, this.'

Blondel laughed. ‘This is how we travel through time,' he said. ‘My agents taught me.'

‘I see.' Guy walked along in silence for a while. He was getting a crick in the neck from keeping his head ducked. ‘Er, how does it work?' he asked.

‘On the principle of Bureauspace,' Blondel replied. ‘Are you all right with the saddlebags or shall I carry them for a bit?'

‘No, no, that's fine,' Guy said. ‘What's Bureauspace?'

Blondel stopped under a torch and looked at a little book. He was actually rather shorter than he looked, Guy noticed, and didn't have to lower his head to avoid the ceiling. ‘This way,' he said at last. ‘I thought we'd taken a wrong turning back there, but it's all right. Now then, the proper name for it is the Bureaucratic Spatio-Temporal Effect, but we call it Bureauspace for short. It's really very simple, once you grasp the fundamental concept.'

‘Oh good,' said Guy. He had the awful feeling that this was going to be one of those questions you regret asking.

‘It's like this,' Blondel said. ‘Oh, left here, by the way. Mind your head.'

‘Ouch.'

‘At the heart of all bureaucratic organisations,' Blondel said, ‘there's a huge lesion in the fabric of space and time. It's like a sort of ...' Blondel thought hard. ‘It's like the gap between the sofa-cushions of time and space. Things fall into it, get lost and then get washed out again. In the meantime, they've been whirled round all through time and space until they end up more or less where they started. That's how the system works. They're all well aware of it in the public services, only they call it going through channels. However, it has its advantages.'

Guy stopped just in time to avoid walking into a pillar. ‘Oh yes?' he said.

‘Yes indeed.' Blondel had halted again and was screwing up his eyes to read small print by the light of a very dim torch. ‘You see,' he said, ‘all bureaucracies are one bureaucracy. The British Ministry of Works is in fact the same organisation as the Turkish Home Office, the Tresor Royale of Louis XIV and the Roman Senate's sub-committee on Drains and Sewers. They had different notepaper for each department, but they're all basically the same thing. And all bureaucracies are built over this lesion in the fabric of space and time, what Marcus Aurelius would have called the Great Chesterfield. This is why, sometimes, when the system breaks down, you get an income tax demand that should have been sent to the Shah of Persia, while the Archbishop of Verona gets your electricity bill.'

‘I thought so.'

‘Sorry?'

‘Never mind,' Guy said. ‘Go on, please.'

‘Well then,' said Blondel, ‘once you've realised that fact, you can make use of it. We are presently in a duct in the bowels of the Civil Service. What they call the Usual Channels. Or, if you prefer, we've fallen down behind the back of God's filing cabinet. Right now we're directly underneath the Finance and General Purpose Committee of the Anglo-Saxon Folkmoot. Over there somewhere is the National Bank of the Soviet Union, and that corridor on your right leads under the commissariat division of the grand council of Genghis Khan. You soon find your way about down here. It's a bit like the Phantom of the Opera.'

‘But how did we get here?' Guy asked.

‘Easy.' Blondel stopped and rubbed his eyes. ‘You'll have noticed how, in every public building ever constructed, from the Ziggurat of Ur to the Coliseum to Chichester Cathedral to Broadcasting House, there are always lots and lots of doors marked
Private, staff only, do not enter.
Yes?'

‘Yes,' said Guy.

‘Well then,' Blondel said, grinning, ‘haven't you ever wondered where they lead to?'

‘No,' Guy admitted.

‘Of course not,' Blondel said. ‘You're brought up not to. Nobody knows, that's the whole point. I mean, you've never actually seen anyone going in or out of them, have you?'

‘Guy shook his head.

‘Well,' said Blondel, ‘now you know. They all lead down here. Which means,' he yawned, closing his little book and putting it away in his purse, ‘that wherever there's a public building of any description - library, town hall, railway station, government ministry, kennel for the King's Wolfhounds -' Blondel sniffed and pointed upwards ‘- sewage farm, manhole cover, orbiting space station, anything like that - there's a gateway to the whole of time and space, and all you have to do is knock three times and enter. It's as simple as that. It certainly beats all that mucking about with transmat beams. Ah,' he said, ‘I think we've arrived.'

In front of them was a door.

‘For a while,' Blondel was saying, ‘I thought they might have King Richard down here. You know, filed away in the archives, bound hand and foot with red tape. But they haven't, I've looked.'

‘Where are we?' Guy asked.

‘You'll see,' Blondel smiled. ‘Ready?'

 

‘Usher,' said Oliver Cromwell, ‘take away that bauble.'

Behind the Speaker's chair, a door opened. Not many people had ever noticed it was there, probably because it had
staffe onlie
painted on it in gold leaf.

Slowly, and with infinite misgivings, the usher rose to his feet and walked towards the table on which the Great Mace lay. Cromwell's face remained implacable.

‘It's his warts,' explained a colonel to the Member for Ashburton. ‘When they're playing him up he can be that difficult...'

On the back benches a solitary figure rose. The usher stopped dead in his tracks. He knew that history was being made; he was also acute enough to guess that the production of history, like coal-mining, is a highly hazardous occupation.

‘Mr Protector,' said the solitary figure, ‘by what right...?'

Behind the Speaker's chair, Guy froze. He had a horrible feeling - not unlike the sensation of discovering that the large bowl of water one has just upset all over one's host's carpet had originally contained one's host's goldfish - that he knew exactly where he was, and when.

‘Come on,' Blondel hissed, ‘you're dawdling again.'

‘Yes, but...'

But Blondel wasn't there. Instead he was standing in front of the Speaker, showing him a raggedly little scrap of paper. The Speaker, having read it, nodded and called upon Blondel to speak. Apparently he was under the impression that Blondel was the Member for Saffron Walden.

Actually, Blondel didn't so much speak as sing; he sang
L'Amours Dont Sui Epris,
and had got as far as
Remembrance dou vis
before the big spotty man who'd been talking when they came in shouted to a couple of guards to take this something-or-other and throw him in the river.

It was, Guy realised, a time for swift and positive action. He started trying to back through the door he'd just come through on his hands and knees.

Blondel had turned round and was glaring at Cromwell with a sort of paint-stripping fury in his eyes.

‘Who are you calling a—' Then he noticed that a halberdier was trying to annex his collar, kicked the man neatly in the groin and jumped up on the table with the mace on it, his sword in his hand.

‘Oh
hell
...' said Guy to himself.

If he'd had time to analyse his reluctance to get involved, he would have said to himself that this was a crucial moment in the development of English Parliamentary democracy, and that if he loused it up he would probably be responsible for a new Dark Age of royal supremacy and baronial repression. As it was, time was short. Very tentatively, he stood up and drew his revolver.

‘Excuse me,' he said.

The Lord Protector, the Long Parliament and an assortment of officials and soldiers turned and looked at him. In a brief instant of total perception, Guy realised that he hadn't shaved, his fingernails were dirty, his left sock had a hole in it, he was probably going to die very soon, his jacket was too big and his hair badly needed combing. He said ‘Er.'

Blondel, meanwhile, had jumped down from the table, sheathed his sword, picked up the mace and clobbered two halberdiers with it. Then he swatted Black Rod across the kneecaps, stunned the Member for Kings Langley, caught the usher a savage blow on the funny bone and fell over. The guard who had felled him, rather unsportingly from behind, with a bound copy of Bracton, drew back his arm for another blow...

‘Freeze!' shouted Guy.

Of all the peculiar situations he had found himself in recently, Guy felt, this had to be the loopiest. Here he was, Flight Lieutenant Guy Goodlet, bachelor, twenty-six, until the outbreak of war a respectable bank official, standing on the floor of the House of Commons pointing a loaded revolver at Oliver Cromwell. However, despite the ludicrous nature of what he was doing, it had to be admitted that he seemed to be having the desired effect. Nobody seemed terribly interested in doing anything just at that moment. The entire House was frozen, like a group of statues assembled by a dangerously eccentric collector.

What eventually happened was Blondel made a jump for it, a halberdier standing to his immediate right - not the one with the copy of Bracton, a different one - took a mighty slash at his head with a large sword, and Guy, more by way of a nervous twitch than with malice aforethought, pulled the trigger. There was a loud bang (the acoustics of the House are excellent) and everybody started yelling at once. Oddly enough, the only thought passing through Guy's mind was ‘Oh fuck, I've shot Cromwell, Mr Ashton will never forgive me.' Mr Ashton had been Guy's history teacher, and was a great advocate of Cromwell and the seventeenth-century republican movement as a whole. In fact he had once lent Guy a copy of the collected works of John Lilburne, which Guy had always intended to read.

That was it, actionwise, as far as Guy was concerned, and the guard who had been stalking him for the last five minutes would have had no difficulty in grabbing and disarming him if he hadn't been hit over the head with the Great Mace of England first.

‘Come
on,'
Blondel shouted in his ear. ‘This way.'

A moment later the door marked
Staffe onlie
had closed behind them and three guards were unsuccessfully trying to lever it open with their halberds. Cromwell, meanwhile, picked up his hat and dusted it off. There was a hole in it. Pity. New hat, too.

‘Order!' he shouted.

The halberdiers stood up, looked at their bent spear-heads, shrugged and returned to their posts. The Long Parliament sat down. Cromwell resumed his seat.

‘Well anyway,' he said, ‘that's got rid of the mace.'

The negotiations had reached a critical stage.

With a practised hand the senior partner motioned a waiter to bring a fresh pot of coffee and five more pipes of tobacco.

‘But if we withdraw all our clients' money from the South Sea Company,' the broker was saying, ‘isn't that going to cause a crisis of confidence?'

‘Maybe,' said the senior partner. ‘So what?'

‘But...' The broker, lost for words, waved his hands about. His colleague took up the argument.

‘If the public get the idea that there's something wrong with the South Sea Company,' he said, ‘the effects could be catastrophic. There would be an immediate collapse. The economy of the nation - of Europe even - would -'

The senior partner cut him short with a wave of his hand. ‘Listen,' he said, ‘Mr, er ...'

‘Smith,' said the broker's friend, ‘Adam Smith.'

‘Mr Smith,' the senior partner went on, ‘you haven't answered my question. So what? All your funds will be safely invested in Second Crusade 67% Unsecured Loan Stock. What possible difference will it make to you if the whole British economy crumbles away into dust?'

Mr Smith's lower lip quivered slightly. ‘But that's—' he started to say.

‘In fact,' the senior partner went on, ‘what could be better, from your point of view? Sell now, reinvest, buy back at the bottom of the market, make a double killing. The wonderful part of it is that, thanks to the unique facilities offered by our Simultaneous Equities Managed Fund, your money can be invested in both the Second Crusade and the slow but steady regrowth of the British economy at the same time. Well, concurrently, anyway. There is a technical difference, but I don't want to blind you with science.'

‘I ...' Mr Smith stuttered, but his friend the broker stopped him.

‘Actually,' he was saying, ‘I rather like the sound of that.'

The senior partner smiled. ‘That's the spirit,' he said. ‘Now, if we can move on to the topic of life assurance, we offer a wide range of tailor-made retrospective endowment policies which—'

‘Hold on,' Mr Smith interrupted, ‘hold on just a moment.'

The partners turned and looked at him. ‘Well?' they said.

‘Gentlemen.' Mr Smith calmed himself down into an effort. ‘You may not be aware of this,' he said, ‘but I am by profession a student of economic theory; in fact, I pride myself on being on the verge of a breakthrough in monetary analysis which will, I sincerely believe, revolutionise the practice of economic planning in Europe, and my view is—'

‘You mean,' said the senior partner slowly, ‘
The Wealth of Nations
?'

Smith's jaw dropped. ‘You've heard of my book?'

‘Naturally.'

‘But that's impossible,' Smith replied. ‘Why, I only completed the final draft today. In fact, I have it with me now. I'm taking it to my publisher.'