“Fri,” I said, “have you thought any more about the time industry?”

“Lots,” he said, “and the answer’s still no.”

Landen and I exchanged looks.

“Have you ever wondered,” remarked Friday in a languid monotone from behind a curtain of oily hair, “how nostalgia isn’t what it used to be?”

I smiled. Dopey witticisms at least showed he was trying to be clever, even if for the greater part of the day he was asleep.

“Yes,” I replied, “and imagine a world where there were no hypothetical situations.”

“I’m serious,” he said, mildly annoyed.

“Sorry!” I replied. “It’s just difficult to know what you’re thinking when I can’t see your face. I might as well converse to the side of a yak.”

He parted his hair so I could see his eyes. He looked a lot like his father did at that age. Not that I knew him then, of course, but from photographs.

“Nostalgia used to have a minimum twenty years before it kicked in,” he said in all seriousness, “but now it’s getting shorter and shorter. By the late eighties, people were doing seventies stuff, but by the mid-nineties the eighties-revival thing was in full swing. It’s now 2002, and already people are talking about the nineties-soon nostalgia will catch up with the present and we won’t have any need for it.”

“Good thing, too, if you ask me,” I said. “I got rid of all my seventies rubbish as soon as I could and never regretted it for a second.”

There was an indignant plock from Pickwick.

“Present company excepted.”

“I think the seventies are underrated,” said Landen. “Admittedly, fashion wasn’t terrific, but there’s been no better decade for sitcoms.”

“Where’s Jenny?”

“I took her dinner up to her,” said Friday. “She said she needed to do her homework.”

I frowned as I thought of something, but Landen clapped his hands together and said, “Oh, yes! Did you hear that the British bobsled team has been disqualified for using the banned force ‘gravity’ to enhance performance?”

“No.”

“Apparently so. And it transpires that the illegal use of gravity to boost speed is endemic within most downhill winter sports.”

“I wondered why they managed to go so fast,” I replied thoughtfully.

Much later that night, when the lights were out, I was staring at the glow of the streetlamps on the ceiling and thinking about Thursday1-4 and what I’d do to her when I caught her. It wasn’t terribly pleasant.

“Land?” I whispered in the darkness.

“Yes?”

“That time we…made love today.”

“What about it?”

“I was just thinking-how did you rate it? Y’know, on a one-to-ten?”

“Truthfully?”

“Truthfully.”

“You won’t be pissed off at me?”

“Promise.”

There was a pause. I held my breath.

“We’ve had better. Much better. In fact, I thought you were pretty terrible.”

I hugged him. At least there was one piece of good news today.

The stupidity surplus had been beaten into second place by the news that the militant wing of the no-choice movement had been causing trouble in Manchester. Windows were broken, cars overturned, and there were at least a dozen arrests. With a nation driven by the concept of choice, a growing faction of citizens who thought life was simpler when options were limited had banded themselves together into what they called the “no-choicers” and demanded the choice to have no choice. Prime Minister Redmond van de Poste condemned the violence but explained that the choice of choice over “just better services” was something the previous administration had chosen and was thus itself a no-choice principle for the current administration. Alfredo Traficcone, MP, leader of the opposition Prevailing Wind Party, was quick to jump on the bandwagon, proclaiming that it was the inalienable right of all citizens to have the choice over whether they have choice or not. The no-choicers had suggested that there should be a referendum to settle the matter once and for all, something that the opposition “choice” faction had no option but to agree with. More sinisterly, the militant wing known only as NOPTION was keen to go further and demanded that there should be only one option on the ballot paper-the no-choice one.

It was eight-thirty, and the girls had already gone to school.

“Jenny didn’t eat her toast again,” I said, setting the plate with its uneaten contents next to the sink. “That girl hardly eats a thing.”

“Leave it outside Friday’s door,” said Landen. “He can have it for lunch when he gets up-if he gets up.”

The front doorbell had rung, and I checked on who it might be through the front-room windows before opening the door to reveal…Friday. The other Friday.

“Hello!” I said cheerily. “Would you like to come in?”

“I’m in a bit of a hurry,” he replied. “I just wondered whether you’d thought about my offer of replacement yesterday. Hi, Dad!”

Landen had joined us at the door. “Hello, son.”

“This,” I said by way of introduction, “is the Friday I was telling you about-the one we were supposed to have.”

“At your ser vice,” said Friday politely. “And your answer? I’m sorry to push you on this, but time travel has still to be invented and we have to look very carefully at our options.”

Landen and I glanced at each other. We’d already made up our mind.

“The answer’s no, Sweetpea. We’re going to keep our Friday.”

Friday’s face fell, and he glared at us. “This is so typical of you. Here I am a respected member of the ChronoGuard, and you’re still treating me like I’m a kid!”

“Friday!”

“How stupid can you both be? The history of the world hangs in the balance, and all you can do is worry about your lazy shitbag of a son.”

“You talk like that to your mother and you can go to your room.”

“He is in his room, Land.”

“Right. Well…you know what I mean.”

Friday snorted, glared at us both, told me that I really shouldn’t call him “Sweetpea” anymore and walked off, slamming the garden gate behind him.

I turned to Landen. “Are we doing the right thing?”

“Friday told us to dissuade him from joining the ChronoGuard, and that’s what we’re doing.”

I narrowed my eyes, trying to remember.

“He did? When?”

“At our wedding bash? When Lavoisier turned up looking for your father?”

“Shit,” I said, suddenly remembering. Lavoisier was my least favorite ChronoGuard operative, and on that occasion he had a partner with him-a lad of about twenty-five who’d looked vaguely familiar. We figured it out several years later. It was Friday himself, and his advice to us was unequivocal: “If you ever have a son who wants to be in the ChronoGuard, try to dissuade him.” Perhaps it wasn’t just a complaint-perhaps it had been…a warning.

Landen placed a hand on my waist and said, “I think we should follow his best advice and see where it leaves us.”

“And the End of Time?”

“Didn’t your father say that the world was always five minutes from total annihilation? Besides, it’s not until Friday evening. It’ll work itself out.”

I took the tram into work and was so deep in thought I missed my stop and had to walk back from MycroTech. Without my TravelBook I was effectively stuck in the real world, but instead of feeling a sense of profound loss as I had expected, I felt something more akin to relief. In my final day as the LBOCS, I had scotched any chance of book interactivity or the preemptive strike on Speedy Muffler and the ramshackle Racy Novel, and the only worrying loose end was dealing with slutty bitchface Thursday1-4. That was if she hadn’t been erased on sight for making an unauthorized trip to the Outland. Well, I could always hope. Jurisfiction had gotten on without me for centuries and would doubtless continue to do so. There was another big plus point, too: I wasn’t lying to Landen quite as much. Okay, I still did a bit of SpecOps work, but at least this way I could downgrade my fibs from “outrageous” to a more manageable “whopping.” All of a sudden, I felt really quite happy-and I didn’t often feel that way. If there hadn’t been a major problem with Acme’s overdraft and the potential for a devastating chronoclasm in two and a half days, everything might be just perfect.