“Stranger things have happened.”

I stepped out of the loop cell and was back in the bluey greenness of T.J. Maxx among the time-frozen customers, with Friday at my side.

“Think she’s telling the truth?” he asked.

“If she is, it makes no sense at all, which is a point in her favor. If she’d told me what I wanted to hear, I’d have been more suspicious. Did she say anything else to me she might have made me forget?”

Aornis, with her power of memory distortion and erasure, was wholly untrustworthy-she could tell you everything, only to make you forget it a few seconds later. At her trial the judge and jury were merely actors-the real judge and jury watched it all on CCTV. To this day the actors in the courtroom still have no idea why that “frightfully pleasant girl” was in the dock at all. Friday ran over what he had witnessed her saying, and we managed to find an exchange that she’d erased from my recollection: that she was going to bust out of T.J. Maxx with the help of someone “on the outside.”

“Any idea who that might be?” I asked. “And why did she shield it from me?”

“No idea-and it’s probably just her being manipulative; my guess is the recollection will be on time release-it’ll pop into your head in a few hours.”

I nodded. She’d done something similar to me before.

“But I wouldn’t worry,” added Friday. “Temporal Enloopment has a hundred percent past-present-future escape-free record; she’d have to bend the Standard History Eventline to get out.”

I left Aornis to her never-ending wait at the checkout, and Friday powered down the visitors’ interface. The manager popped back into life as time started up again.

“Did you get all you need?” she asked pleasantly.

“I hope so,” I replied, and followed Friday from the store. “Thanks,” I said, giving him a motherly hug and a kiss.

“Mum,” he said in a serious tone.

“What?”

“There’s something I need to suggest to you, and you’re going to have to think really carefully before you reply.”

“What is it?”

“It’s Friday. The other Friday. We’ve got two and a half days to the End of Time. Does it seriously look like he’s going to join the ChronoGuard?”

“It’s possible.”

“Mum-truthfully?”

“No.”

“We’re running out of options fast. My director-general older self is still absent at the End of Time, so I had a word with Bendix, and he suggested we try…replacement.”

“What do you mean?”

“That your Friday is removed and I take his place.”

“Define ‘removed.’”

Friday scratched his head.

“We’ve run several timestream models, and it looks good. I’m precisely the same age as him, and I’m what he would be like if he hadn’t gone down the bone-idle route. If ‘replacement’ isn’t a good word for you, why not think of it as just rectifying a small error in the Standard History Eventline.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want to murder my son and replace him with yourself? I only met you ten minutes ago.”

“I’m your son, Mum. Every memory, good or bad is as much a part of me as it is the Friday at home. You want me to prove it? Who else knows about the BookWorld? One of your best friends is Melanie Bradshaw, who’s a gorilla. It’s true she let me climb all over the furniture and swing from the light fixtures. I can speak Courier Boldand Lorem Ipsum and even unpeel a banana with my feet-want me to show you?”

“No,” I said. “I accept that you’re my son. But you can’t kill the other Friday-he’s done nothing wrong. I won’t let you.”

“Mum! Which Friday would you rather have? The feckless, lazy ass or me?”

“You don’t understand what it is to be a mother, Friday. The answer’s no. I’ll take the Friday I’m dealt.”

“I thought you might say that,” he said in a harsher manner. “I’ll report back to Scintilla, but if the ChronoGuard feels there’s no alternative, we might decide to go ahead anyway-with or without your permission.”

“I think we’ve spoken enough,” I said, keeping my anger at bay. “Do one thing for me: Tell me how long you think I have until they might take that action.”

He shrugged. “Forty-eight hours?”

“Promise?”

“I promise,” said Friday. “By the way, have you told Dad about all your Jurisfiction work? You said you were going to.”

“I will-soon, I promise. Good-bye, darling.”

And I kissed him again and walked away, boiling with inner rage. Fighting with the ChronoGuard was like fighting city hall. You couldn’t win. Every way I looked at it, Friday’s days were numbered. But, paradoxically, they weren’t-the Friday I had just spoken to was the one I was meant to have and the one I’d met in the future, the one who made sure he escaped Landen’s eradication and the one who whipped up the timephoon in the Dark Ages to cover up St. Zvlkx’s illegal time fraud. I rubbed my head. Time travel was like that-full of impossible paradoxes that defied explanation and made theoretical physicists’ brains turn to something resembling guacamole. But at least I still had two days to figure out a way to save the lazy good-for-nothing loafer that was my son. Before then, though, I needed to find out just how Goliath had managed to send a probe into fiction.

I hopped on the Skyrail at the Brunel Shopping Centre and went the three stops to Swindon’s Clary-LaMarr Travelport, where I caught the bullet train to Saknussemm International. From there I jumped on the next Overmantle Gravitube with seconds to spare and was at James Tarbuck Graviport in Liverpool in a journey time of just over an hour. The country’s hyperefficient public transport network was the Commonsense Party’s greatest achievement so far. Very few people used cars for journeys over ten miles these days. The system had its detractors, of course-the car-parking consortiums were naturally appalled, as was the motorway ser vice industry, which had taken the extraordinary step of producing decent food in order to win back customers.

I made good use of the time by calling Landen and telling him all about the alternative Friday’s offer: to replace our idle and mostly bedridden headbanger of a son with a well-groomed, upright and responsible member of society, and Landen had agreed with me-that we’d keep the smelly one we had, thank you very much. Once I’d tubed to Tarbuck, I took the high-speed Ekrano-plane all the way to the distinctly unimaginatively titled Goliathopolis on what had once been the Isle of Man. Despite losing nearly everything during the dramatic St. Zvlkx adventure back in 1988, the vast multinational had staged an impressive comeback-mostly, it was said, by hiding its net worth and filing for bankruptcy on a subsidiary company that conveniently emerged from the distant past to take a lot of the flak. Timefoolery was suggested, but despite an investigation by the ChronoGuard’s Fiscal Chronuption Unit, which looked very closely at such matters, no wrongdoing had been found-or could be proved. After that it didn’t take long for the corporation to reestablish itself, and Goliathopolis was once again the Hong Kong of the Western Hemisphere, a forest of glassy towers striding up the hillside toward Snaefell.

Even before we left the dock at Tarbuck International, I had the idea that I was being watched. As the Goliath ground-effect transport jetted across the Irish Sea, several of the Goliath employees on the craft looked at me cautiously, and when I sat down in the coffee shop, the people near me moved away. It was kind of flattering, really, but since I had trounced the corporation in the very biggest way possible at least once, they clearly regarded me as something of a threat. How big a threat was revealed to me when we docked at Goliathopolis forty minutes later. There was a welcoming committee already waiting for me. But I don’t mean “welcoming committee” in the ironic sense of large men with no necks and blackjacks-they had laid out the red carpet, bedecked the jetty with bunting and put on a baton-twirling demonstration by the Goliathopolis Majorettes. More important, the entire upper echelons of Goliath management had turned out to greet me, which included the president, John Henry Goliath V, and a dozen or so of his executive officers, all of whom had a look of earnest apprehension etched upon their pasty faces. As someone who’d cost the company dearly over the past two decades, I was clearly feared-and possibly even revered.