The Eyre Affair_ A Novel - Jasper Fforde [234]
“I’m too old to fall for that one!” smiled Lavoisier.
Soon after, two of his cronies reappeared as each one found us and matched the speed we were moving through time.
“I knew you’d come,” said Lavoisier triumphantly, walking towards us slowly as the time flashed past, faster and faster. A new road was built where we were standing, then a bridge, houses, shops. “Give yourself up. You’ll have a fair trial, believe me.”
The two other ChronoGuard operatives grabbed my father and held him tightly.
“I’ll see you hang for this, Lavoisier! The Chamber would never sanction such an action. Give Landen back his life and I promise you I will say nothing.”
“Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?” replied Lavoisier scornfully. “Who do you think they’re going to believe? You, with your record, or me, third in command at the ChronoGuard? Besides, your clumsy attempt to get Landen back has covered any tracks I might have made getting rid of him!”
Lavoisier aimed his gun at my father. The two ChronoGuards held on to Dad tightly to stop him accelerating away, and we buffeted slightly as he tried. Things, to say the least, looked bad. From the makes of the cars on the road I could see we were approaching the early eighties. It wouldn’t be long before we arrived at 1985. I had a sudden thought. Wasn’t there ChronoGuard industrial action happening sometime soon?
“Say,” I said, “do you guys cross picket lines?”
The ChronoGuard agents looked at each other, then at the chronographs on their wrists, then at Lavoisier. The taller of the two was the first to speak.
“She’s right, Mr. Lavoisier, sir. I don’t mind bullying and killing innocents, and I’ll follow you beyond the crunch normally, but—”
“But what?” asked Lavoisier angrily.
“—but I am a loyal TimeGuild member. I don’t cross picket lines.”
“Neither do I,” replied the other agent, nodding to his friend. “Likewise and truly.”
Lavoisier smiled engagingly.
“Listen here, guys, I’ll personally pay—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lavoisier,” replied the operative with a hint of indignation, “but we’ve been instructed not to enter into any individual contracts.”
And in an instant they were gone as December arrived and the world turned pink. What had once been the road was now a few inches of the same pink slime that Dad had shown me. We were beyond the 12th December 1985, and where before there had been growth, change, seasons, clouds, now there was nothing but a never-ending landscape of shiny opaque curd.
“Saved by industrial action!” said Dad, laughing. “Tell that to your friends at the Chamber!”
“Bravo,” replied Lavoisier wryly. He lowered his pistol. Without his cronies to hold on to Dad and stop him escaping, there was little he could do. “Bravo. I think we should just say au revoir, my friends—until we meet again.”
“Do we have to make it au revoir?” I asked. “What’s wrong with goodbye?”
He didn’t have time to answer as I felt Dad tense and we accelerated faster through the timestream. The pink slime was washed away, leaving only earth and rocks, and as I watched, the river moved away from us, meandered off into the flood plain and then swept under our feet and undulated back and forth like a snake before finally being replaced by a lake. We moved faster, and soon I could see the earth start to buckle as the crust bent and twisted under the force of plate tectonics. Plains dropped to make seas and mountains rose in their place. New vegetation reestablished itself as millions of years swept past in a matter of seconds. Vast forests grew and fell. We were covered, then uncovered, then covered again, now in a sea, now inside rock, now surrounded by an ice sheet, now a hundred feet in the air. More forests, then a desert, then mountains rose rapidly in the east, only to be scoured flat a few moments later.
“Well,” said my father as we traveled through time, “Lavoisier in the pocket of Goliath. Who’d have thought it?”
“Dad?” I asked as the sun grew visibly bigger and redder. “How do we get back?”
“We don’t go back,” he replied. “We can’t go back. Once the present has happened, that’s it. We just