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By Root 2487 0

him to the other hip, as he was a bit of a lump. After what seemed like several hours but was, I suspect, less than ten seconds, the door opened to reveal . . . Landen, every bit as tall and handsome and as large as life as I had wished to see him all these past years. He wasn’t as I remembered him—he was way better than that. My love, my life, the father of my son—made human. I felt the tears start to well up in my eyes and tried to say something, but all that came out was a stupid snorty cough. He stared at me, and I stared at him, and then he stared at me some more, and I stared at him some more, and then I thought perhaps he didn’t recognize me with the short hair, so I tried to think of something really funny and pithy and clever but couldn’t, so I shifted Friday to the other hip, as he was becoming even more of a lump with every passing second, and said, rather stupidly:

“It’s Thursday.”

“I know who it is,” he said unkindly. “You’ve got a bloody nerve, haven’t you?”

And he shut the door in my face.

I was stunned for a moment and had to recover my thoughts before I rang the doorbell again. There was another pause that seemed to last an hour but I suspect was only fractionally longer—thirteen seconds, tops—and the door opened again.

“Well,” said Landen, “if it isn’t Thursday Next.”

“And Friday,” I replied, “your son.”

“My son,” replied Landen, deliberately not looking at him, “right.”

“What’s the matter?” I asked, tears starting to well up again in my eyes. “I thought you’d be pleased to see me!”

He let out a long breath and rubbed his forehead. “It’s difficult—”

“What’s difficult? How can anything be difficult?”

“Well,” he began, “you disappear from my life two and a half years ago. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of you. Not a postcard, not a letter, not a phone call—nothing. And then you just turn up at my doorstep as though nothing has happened and I should be pleased to see you!”

I sort of breathed a sigh of relief. Sort of. Somehow I’d always imagined Landen’s being uneradicated as just a simple sort of meeting each other after a long absence. I hadn’t ever thought that Landen wouldn’t know he had been eradicated. When he was gone, no one had known he had ever existed, and now that he was back, no one knew he had gone. Not even him.

“Ever heard of an eradication?” I asked.

He shook his head.

I took a deep breath. “Well, two and a half years ago, a chronupt member of SO-12 had you killed at the age of two in an accident. It was a blackmail attempt by a Goliath Corporation member called Brik Schitt-Hawse.”

“I remember him.”

“Right. And he wanted me to get his half brother out of ‘The Raven,’ where Bowden and I had trapped him.”

“I remember that, too.”

“O-kay. So all of a sudden you didn’t exist. Everything we had done together hadn’t happened. I tried to get you back by going with my father to your accident in 1947, was thwarted and chose to live inside fiction while little Friday was born and return when I was ready. Which was now. End of story.”

We stared at each other for another long moment that might also have been an hour but was probably only twenty seconds. I moved Friday to the other hip again, and then finally he said, “The trouble is, Thursday, that things are different now. You vanished from my life. Gone. I’ve had to carry on.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, suddenly feeling very uneasy.

“Well, the thing is,” he went on slowly, “I didn’t think you were coming back. So I married Daisy Mutlar.”

25.

Practical Difficulties Regarding Uneradications

Danish Person Sought

A man of Danish appearance was sought yesterday in connection with an armed robbery at the First Goliath Bank in Banbury. The man, described as being “of Danish appearance,” entered the bank at 9:35 and demanded the teller hand over all the money. Five hundred pounds in sterling and a small amount of Danish kroner held in the foreign-currencies department were stolen. Police described this small sum of kroner as of “particular significance” and pledged to wipe out the menace of Danish criminality as soon