“I don’t want to work in the time industry.”

“Listen,” I said, my voice rising as I finally lost patience, “get your lazy butt out the door-okay?”

He knew better than to argue with angry-determined Mum. Landen knocked on the partition wall, and a minute later our neighbor Mrs. Berko-Boyler was on the doorstep wearing a pink quilted dressing gown, her hair in curlers.

“Good evening, Mrs. Berko-Boyler,” I said.

“Is it?” she said with a snarl. “Is it really?”

“We’ll be about an hour,” explained Landen, who was more skilled at dealing with our volatile yet oddly helpful neighbor.

“Do you know the last time Mr. Berko-Boyler took me out anywhere?” she asked, scowling at all three of us.

“I’ve no idea.”

“Saturday.”

“Well, that’s not that long ago-”

“Saturday, October the sixth, 1983,” she said with a contemptuous sniff, and shuffled past us into the living room. “Nineteen years ago. Makes me sick, I tell you. Hello, Tuesday,” she said in a kindlier tone. “Where’s your sister?”

We walked down to the tram stop in silence. Friday’s lack of interest in the ChronoGuard was a matter not only of annoyance but surprise. The Standard History Eventline had him joining the industry three years ago on their Junior Time Scout program, something that he had failed to do despite our efforts and those of the ChronoGuard, which was as concerned as we were. But we couldn’t force him either-time was the glue of the cosmos and had to be eased apart-push destiny too hard and it had an annoying habit of pushing back. He had to join the ChronoGuard, but it had to be his decision. Every way you looked at it, time was out of joint.

The ChronoGuard had its regional offices in the old SpecOps building where I had worked at SO-27, the Literary Detectives. It was a large, no-nonsense Germanic design that had certainly seen better days. Landen and I walked into what had once been the main debriefing room, Friday shuffling in behind us, hands thrust deeply in his pockets and head nodding to the beat of his Walkman. Of course, this being the ChronoGuard, they already had a list of attendees from the forms we’d filled out at the end of the evening, which seemed to work quite well until a couple with a spotty kid in front of us found they weren’t on the list.

“Oh, dear,” said the woman at the registration desk in an apologetic tone. “But it seems that you don’t stay until the end of the presentation, so we’ve been unable to include you in the registration process. You’re going to have to come to the next careers presentation in six months’ time.”

The father of the group scratched his head for a moment, stopped to say something, thought better of it and then departed, arguing with his wife.

“Mr. and Mrs. Parke-Laine-Next and their son, Friday,” I said to the woman, who blinked for a few seconds, looked at Friday, gave a shy smile and then started to chatter and gush in a most unseemly manner.

“Mr. Next-Friday-how do you do? I’ve wanted to meet you again for the first time. May I shake you by the hand and congratulate you on-”

She stopped, realized she was being a bit previous and making a fool of herself, so coughed in an embarrassed manner before smoothing her skirt absently and sitting down again.

“Sorry. Welcome to the pre sen ta tion. Here are your badges and your information pack. If you would like to go in, Captain Scintilla will join you soon.”

We dutifully took our seats, and Friday slouched in a very obvious don’t-give-a-monkey’s manner until I told him to sit up straight, which he didn’t like but sat up nonetheless.

“What are we doing here?” he asked in a bored voice. “And why the time industry? What about plumbing or something?”

“Because your grandfather was a time operative.”

“Yeah,” he grunted, “and look what happened to him.”

Landen and I exchanged glances. Friday was right. Ending up not having existed wasn’t a terrific end to a promising career.

“Well!” said a youthful-looking man in the pale blue uniform of the ChronoGuard who up until now had been helping escort the previous group out of the room. “My name is Captain Bendix Scintilla, and I am head of ChronoGuard Recruitment. I’d like to welcome all of you to this ChronoGuard careers pre sen ta tion and hope that this short talk might go some way toward explaining what it is that we done. Did. Do. Anyhow, my aims are twofold: secondly, to try to demonstrate to the young people here that a career in the time industry is a very exciting prospect indeed and, firstly, to lift the lid on the Temporal Trade and explode a few common myths and misunderstandings. As I’m about to say, did say or would say, my name is Bendix Scintilla, and I was died on March sixteenth, 3291. I’m twenty-three years old in my own personal time, seven hundred and twenty-six in my elapsed work time, and you meet me twenty-seven percent through my life.”

He smiled, unaware that he was making very little sense. I was used to it, but by the manner in which the rest of the audience members were scratching their heads and looking at one another, they weren’t. Bendix picked up a solid bar of yellow plastic that was about three feet long, two inches wide and domed at either end.

“Does anyone know what this is?” he asked. There was silence, so he passed it to the nearest family and told them to pass it on. “Anyone who can guess wins a prize.”

The first family shrugged and passed it to us. Friday gave it the most cursory of glances, and I passed it on.

“Yes, sir?” asked Bendix, pointing to a man in the front row who was with his painfully thin wife and a pair of geeky-looking twins.

“Me?” said the man in a confused voice.

“Yes. I understand you have a question? Sorry, I should have explained. To save time I thought I’d ask you before you actually raised your hand.”

“Oh!” said the man, and then he shrugged and said, “I was wondering, since we were told this was the only open day for six months, just who the previous group filing out of the door was-and why were they looking at us in that extremely inquisitive manner?”

“Why, that was you good people, of course! In order not to keep you from your busy schedules, this meeting actually takes no time at all. The moment you arrived was precisely the time you left, only out the other entrance so you wouldn’t meet yourselves.”

As soon as he said it, a twitter of understanding and wonderment went through the small group. I’d experienced the ChronoGuard in the past, so these sorts of cheap parlor tricks didn’t impress me, but for many of the people present, to whom time was immutable, it was something new and exciting. Scintilla had been doing this show for many years and knew how to get an audience’s attention.

“Time is odd,” said Bendix, “very odd. It’s odder than almost anything you can think of. What you consider the usual march of time-effect rather quaintly following cause and so forth-is actually a useful illusion, impressed upon you by rules of physics so very benign that we consider them devised by Something Awfully Friendly indeed; if it weren’t for time, everything would happen at the same instant and existence would become tiresomely frenetic and be over very quickly. But before we get into all that, let’s have a show of hands to see who is actually considering a career in time?”