by Tom Holt
‘In about half an hour’s time,’ Ganger replied. ‘In the future,’ he added quickly. ‘Okay?’
In fact, there are a great many things about the Department of Time which require extreme caution until you’re used to how they work. You need a postgraduate degree in temporal theory just to walk through the revolving door if you want to come out in the same century you entered. This explains why Ganger and Staff went in via the coal shute.
They found Jane sitting on her own in a large office, behind a desk you could have played football on, hunched over a thick pile of papers, a calculator and a six-handed clock. She looked up as they walked in and frowned.
‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You’re late.’
Staff did a quick but violent double-take; Ganger merely smiled.
‘I forgot,’ he said. ‘We should have known that you’d have seen today’s rushes yesterday. Were we held up in traffic?’
Jane nodded. ‘It’s the one good thing about the old system,’ she said. ‘You can always take an advance look at what unforseen things are going to happen in the next few days. Gives you a chance to know what not to expect. Encourages sloppy planning, though.’
Ganger took his usual seat on the edge of the desk, noticing as he did so that the papers which covered the rest of it to a depth of six inches had been specially cleared away for him. Nice touch. ‘Any progress so far?’ he asked.
Jane shrugged. ‘Depends,’ she said. ‘That’s the tiresome thing about the whole set-up, really.’ She sighed. ‘For instance,’ she went on, ‘I finally managed to persuade the personnel people to try out some new staff rosters. Nobody liked the sound of them at first, but we negotiated a bit, and finally everyone agreed to give them a month’s trial, starting on the twentieth.’
Staff nodded. ‘Well done you,’ he said. ‘So where’s the problem?’
‘The problem,’ Jane replied wryly, ‘is that out there on the shop floor, it’s been the nineteenth for the last three days. The same twenty-four hours, over and over again. I think it’s called working to rule.’
Ganger clicked his tongue sympathetically. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘it was a nice try. Come on, let’s go and have some lunch. I thought we might try . . .’
‘I know,’ Jane interrupted. ‘I booked us a table.’
‘I recommend the veal,’ Ganger said judicially, his finger traversing the menu. ‘They do a very . . .’
‘No thanks,’ Jane replied. ‘I didn’t like it. There was too much tarragon, or something like that. I think I’ll just have spaghetti.’
Staff looked up, with an artificially neutral expression on his face. ‘What did I have?’ he said.
‘Scampi,’ Jane replied, without looking up. ‘It was cold, but you didn’t want to make a fuss and send it back.’
‘Thanks,’ Staff said quietly. ‘In that case, I’ll try the osso bucco.’
‘In fact.’ Ganger leaned forward and pushed the menu aside from in front of Jane’s face. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘there’s not much point in us having this meeting, since you already know everything we said.’
Jane shrugged. ‘Well,’ she replied, ‘I may, but you don’t. I can tell you, though, it was a complete waste of . . . a complete wash-out,’ she corrected herself. ‘We didn’t achieve anything.’
Ganger exchanged glances with Staff, and grinned. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Smart move, huh?’
Jane looked at him blankly. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘Think.’ Ganger leaned back and snapped a breadstick. ‘This meeting’s already taken place, right? Nothing can change that, sure, but that doesn’t mean to say you’ve still got to go through with having the veal. You can have something nice instead. True?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Likewise,’ he continued, after he’d cleared his throat of bread shrapnel, ‘we don’t have to reach the same depressing conclusions I gather we’re going to reach in what I would call the Authorised Version. Do you follow me?’
Jane bit her lip thoughtfully. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I certainly don’t remember you saying that. You mean . . .’
‘Exactly.’ Ganger smiled. ‘The first version is strictly for the cameras.You realise that we were all under surveillance, of course.’
‘Were we?’ Jane asked. ‘Or rather, are we?’
‘Definitely.’ Ganger unfolded his napkin and tucked a corner of it behind the knot of his tie. ‘But the version the cameras will see is the Authorised Version. This one’s one hundred per cent off the record.’
‘It’ll never have taken place, you see,’ Staff broke in. ‘So we can say what we like without fear of being overheard. It was his idea,’ he added generously. ‘This fellow here’s got a brain like a pinball machine, but it does come in handy when the going gets devious.’
‘I see,’ Jane said, and in doing so told the truth. In exactly the same way, she could see a whole page of Chinese without understanding a word of it. ‘So, what do we talk about?’
Staff poured himself a glass of mineral water, examined it carefully to make sure it was still there, and drank it. ‘We felt it was time we sort of took stock,’ he said gravely. ‘See where we’ve reached, and so forth.’
‘In other words,’ Ganger went on, smoothly catching the narrative relay baton from his colleague, ‘it’s work-in-progress time. Mid-term report, if you like. Okay?’
Jane nodded. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘And before you start, if you want to call it a day, that’s fine by me.’
The two senior officials looked at each other in surprise.
‘Whatever makes you say that?’ Staff demanded. ‘Don’t tell me you don’t find the work challenging enough.’
Jane laughed sourly. ‘Oh, it’s challenging all right,’ she said. After a moment’s pause, she folded her arms and set her face in a grim, nobody-leaves-until-the-culprit-owns-up expression. ‘I must say,’ she said, ‘I do think you two might have warned me before I started.’
‘Didn’t we?’ Ganger said innocently. ‘I thought we . . .’
‘Did you hell as like,’ Jane interrupted angrily. ‘You told me you wanted someone with a fresh perspective and no vested interests to sort out the way this Administration of yours works. That’s fine. Maybe I might be able to help you with that, a little bit. What you didn’t tell me was that you want me just as part of some horrible office-politics thing of your own. Well, I’m sorry, but no.’
Ganger, for once, looked confused. At least, he wasn’t smiling, and without a smile to hold them together his features tended to sag like an unpropped clothes-line. ‘Hold on,’ he said. ‘That’s not . . .’
Jane ignored him. ‘Let me just give you an example,’ she said. ‘Take this Time thing. You wanted me to sort it out. Everybody seems to acknowledge it needs sorting out. Fine. I thought about it, and I think I’ve come up with an answer that works.’
Staff’s eyebrows shot up like the price of gold in an oil crisis. ‘You have?’ he said. ‘How?’
Jane frowned. ‘It’s really very simple,’ she said. ‘Instead of having it all just lying about and slopping around, all like-an-ever-rolling-stream-bears-all-its-sons-away sort of thing, you should put the whole thing on rails.Then everyone’d know exactly where it was meant to be going and we wouldn’t have any more of those dreadful flashbacks.’
‘What flashbacks?’
‘Then everyone’d know exactly where it was meant to be going and we wouldn’t have any more of those dreadful flashbacks.’
‘What flashbacks?’
‘Then everyone’d know exactly where it was meant to be going and we wouldn’t have any more of those dreadful flashbacks.’
‘What flashbacks? All right,’ Staff admitted, ‘point taken. But just think of the . . .’
‘And don’t say it was because of the cost,’ Jane interrupted. ‘Again, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that you finance it by bringing in private capital. The share-holders put up the cost of building the track, and in return they get a
slice of the tolls and fares in perpetuity.’ She thought for a moment, and smiled. ‘And boy, do I mean perpetuity. But nobody’s done it, have they? And nobody’s going to do it either. I checked the files.’
‘You did what?’
‘I checked the files.’
‘You did what?’
‘Hang on,’ Jane said, and she banged the side of the table with the flat of her hand. ‘Loose connection somewhere, probably. Sorry, yes, I checked the files. It’s a funny feeling, you know, reading about what you’re going to do in a dusty old file you find at the back of a pile of old boxes in the cleaning cupboard. Anyway, there it all was, and guess what? The idea was completely ignored, and I left the Department after fourteen days with absolutely nothing to show for it. Now then.’ She leaned her elbows on the table and gave Staff the sort of look that would have made a mammoth in an ice-floe in Siberia start wondering where the sudden nip in the air was coming from. ‘What’s it all in aid of?’ she asked. ‘I mean . . .’
Before anyone could speak, they became aware of someone standing over them, radiating disapproval. Staff was the first one to remember how his voice worked.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘To start with, I think we’re all having the melon . . .’
‘You maybe,’ said the waitress, her notebook closing like a carnivorous plant. ‘Her, no. She’s barred, OK?’
Ganger and Staff looked at each other. ‘I beg your pardon?’
The waitress tutted like a distant machine-gun. ‘Your lady friend,’ she replied. ‘Calls herself a waitress. Insults my best customers, leaves without saying nothing, then thinks she can waltz in here ordering melon. No way. Out. There’s a Burger King two blocks down the street,’ she added venomously. ‘Say Rosa sent you.’
Idyllic. It was the only word to describe it.
In the far distance, a soft mist hung lightly over the blue hills. The long grass, still littered with pearly drops of dew, smelt fresh and clean. The slightest of breezes arched the long, stiff necks of the flowers that grew beside the gently murmuring stream. Here and there, a few sheep with pink bows tied round their necks lay under the shade of attractively gnarled oak trees, chewing slowly and counting humans. In the porch of the little loaf-shaped cottage, a young mother with a baby on her knee rocked slowly backwards and forwards crooning an ancient lullaby:
‘O abeth cynan sianon
Cor-ara llana reanon
Y-tal ny rhian myanon . . .’1
Bjorn materialised, fell about five feet out of nothing-ness, landed heavily on all fours, recovered and looked about him. His senses took in all the available information and made a correct assessment.
‘Oh shit,’ he said. ‘Not again.’
‘Have a nice day, now.’
‘Yes, thanks,’ Staff replied absent-mindedly, and lifted the tray. He steered it back towards the corner table, hampered in doing so by the fact that he could only just see over the top of the chips.
‘Oh,’ said Jane. ‘I thought I asked for the Double Chilli Nutburger with regular onions.’
‘Did you?’ Staff gave her a long look, combining threats with entreaties.
‘However,’ Jane added quickly, ‘this looks simply delicious, whatever it . . .’
‘Right,’ Ganger interrupted. ‘Here we all are. To business. ’
He twitched his handkerchief out of his top pocket and tucked it into his collar. The other two gave him hard, cold looks which he entirely failed to notice.
‘Agenda time,’ he went on. ‘If we start off generally considering (a) our overall aim and objectives, (b) our achievements to date, (c) . . .’
‘Your tie’s just gone in the barbeque sauce,’ said Jane.
‘(c),’ Ganger continued, moving his tie slightly, ‘obstacles to be overcome, (d) . . .’
Staff coughed meaningfully. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘all right, we get the point. There’s no need to be so damned ceremonious about it all.’
Ganger frowned at him; that is to say, he smiled at him with added eyebrows.
‘(d) . . .’ he said firmly.
Jane shook her head. ‘Sorry to butt in,’ she said, ‘but can we start now? Only, I do have work I ought to be getting on with.’ She stopped, and a sound like a laugh heard through a bacon-slicer came out of her mouth. ‘Mind you,’ she added, ‘for the life of me I can’t see the point. Can you?’
Ganger lowered his head and stirred his coffee with a pencil. Staff turned a chunk of crisp, golden something or other round in his fingers and stared into the salt-cellar.
‘Can you?’ Jane repeated.
There was a moment of complete silence, except for the sound of 163 people eating and talking loudly in the background. Ganger removed his pencil from the coffee, wiped it carefully on the paper napkin and put it back in his inside pocket.
‘Perhaps,’ he said slowly, ‘we ought to explain.’
Jane blinked, said ‘Oh,’ and instinctively reached for a chip. Ganger’s elbow was in the way. Ah, but Man’s reach must exceed Man’s grasp, or what’s a Heaven for?
‘Go on,’ she said, her mouth full.
Staff put down his crisp, golden whatever, which was moulting a sticky red and yellow sauce down the back of his hand, making him look like a wounded Martian. Then he looked Jane in the eye.
‘It’s like this,’ he said. ‘What we told you about the Administration being right up a tree and needing an outside view and a new broom and that sort of thing is absolutely kosher and on the level. You know that, you’ve seen for yourself. But there’s more to it than that.’
‘Yes?’
‘Absolutely.’ Ganger, leaning forward to emphasise the importance of his words, froze; then he slowly lifted his arm, inspected his elbow and shuddered. ‘But really, it’s all part of the same thing. I mean yes, the Administration is in a real mess. But how do you think it got that way?’
Jane thought for a moment. ‘Things do,’ she said.
‘Of their own accord, you mean?’ Staff said. ‘Entropy theory and its application to practical office management. It’s true enough, as far as it goes . . .’
‘Too right,’ Jane interrupted. ‘Ask anyone who’s ever been responsible for paperclip distribution. I never believed in black holes and time warps until they put me in charge of the stationery cupboard one week.’
‘But,’ Staff went on, ‘it’s not the whole story. You see, things in their natural state don’t naturally gravitate into a mess. For instance, if you pour sand out of a bucket on to the ground, it forms a nice neat cone. If you spill water, you get a lovely pool with the sides all nicely level and a precisely flat top. It’s only work that flops about all over the place if you drop it.’
‘That’s because work isn’t natural, you see,’ Ganger interjected through a jawful of bap. ‘That’s your basic thermodynamics.’
‘Is it?’
Ganger nodded, and wiped his lips neatly with the corner of his napkin. ‘Work,’ he said, ‘is defined as the result of applying energy to a stationary mass . . .’
‘That’s filing, surely,’ Jane murmured. Ganger ignored her.
‘. . . Which in turn results in the mass acquiring momentum,’ he went on, ‘which leads on to movement, which creates friction . . .’
‘Depends what you move. I once moved someone else’s pot plant because it gave me hay fever, and there was friction for weeks after that.’
‘. . . Which dissipates energy, resulting in entropy.’ He picked up a lemon-scented paper towel and began absent-mindedly folding it in ever-diminishing squares. ‘Because of entropy,’ he continued, ‘work sort of frays at the edges. Bits come loose and fall off.These in turn become random particles of disorientated matter, possessing momentum but not direction . . .’
‘Ah,’ Jane said. ‘You mean auditors.’
‘These particles wander about, collide with other bodies, and thereby create other little chips and splinters of disorientated matter. And eventually . . .’
‘Eventually,’ Jane interru
pted, ‘they end up in some poor devil’s in-tray at a quarter past five on a Friday afternoon. I know, I’ve been there.’
Ganger looked down at his fingers. The paper towel had by now become so infinitesimally small that for all practical purposes it had ceased to exist. ‘It’s these little bits of stray work that cause all the hassle,’ he said. ‘But it’s not in-trays they end up in. It’s people.’
‘So,’ Staff said, ‘in order to solve the problems, you first have to solve the people. Agreed?’
Jane shrugged. As an original discovery, she felt the statement was on a par with trying to patent the wheel in 1986. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But what’s this got to do with . . . ?’
‘Tell her,’ Staff said. Ganger opened his mouth and left it open. If a medieval cook had been passing, he’d instinctively have stuck an apple in it.
‘Well,’ Ganger said at last, ‘what do you do if you’ve got a blocked drain? Get a drain-rod and give it a good sharp poke. And that’s what we’re trying to do. Trouble is,’ he said, looking away, ‘it’s not as straightforward as that, quite.’
‘Oh?’ Jane said. ‘Why not?’
‘Because,’ Staff replied.
‘Ah,’ Jane said, nodding. ‘Now I get you.’ She frowned. ‘But where do I come in?’ she said.
‘Simple,’ Ganger answered. ‘You’re the drain-rod, as per the original brief. Except that we didn’t tell you about the people, only about the problems.’
‘Exactly,’ said Jane. ‘Why was that?’
Staff shifted uncomfortably in his seat. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the thing is, you coming to work for the Administration was strictly our idea, Ganger’s and mine. We were supposed to clear it with all sorts of people: committees, departmental managers, sub-committees, all that sort of thing. But we didn’t.’