Overtime by Tom Holt

of you. We all use the channel that runs round the edge of the main hall. That’s through the door immediately behind you.’
    â€˜Thank you.’
    An empty bladder, Guy always felt, gives you a whole new perspective on things. Problems which had seemed insurmountable a few minutes before gradually begin to take on a new perspective. When he came back into the study a few minutes later, he was feeling much more able to cope.
    â€˜Well,’ he said. ‘Blondel, eh?’
    â€˜Yes indeed.’
    â€˜Pleased to, er, meet you.’ Guy smiled weakly. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I write songs too. That is, I, well, dabble a bit, you know.’
    A very brief flicker of pain flashed across Blondel’s eyes, and for a moment Guy wondered what he’d said; then he understood. It was the pain of a man who, for nine hundred years, probably more, has had strangers say to him, ‘Let me just hum you a few bars, I expect it’s the most awful rubbish really,’ and has then had to perjure his soul by disagreeing. Guy changed the subject quickly.
    â€˜So,’ he said, ‘how do you do it? The time travelling, I mean. Does it just come naturally, or ...?’
    â€˜Good Lord, no,’ Blondel said, smiling. ‘Not a bit of it. My agents fixed it for me. You see,’ he said, standing up and opening a drawer of his filing cabinet, ‘they originally come from the twenty-fifth century.’
    Guy swallowed. ‘Oh yes?’
    â€˜They do indeed.’ From the drawer, Blondel produced a bottle of port. ‘Have some?’ he asked. ‘2740. It’s going to be one of the best years on record, so they say. Mind you, it all tastes the same to me.’
    Guy shook his head. The thought of drinking something that hadn’t been grown yet did something unpleasant to his stomach lining.
    â€˜In the twenty-fifth century,’ Blondel said, ‘time travel will be as familiar as, say, air travel is to you. It’ll be so commonplace that they’ll need to advertise it on posters to persuade people to use it instead of other, more convenient methods. “Let the clock take the strain. We’ve already got there.” That sort of thing. You sure you won’t join me?’
    Guy, who didn’t wish to appear rude, accepted a glass.
    â€˜Now,’ Blondel went on, ‘orthodox time travel operates on a system called Bluchner’s Loop. It’s very technical and I really don’t understand how it works, but it’s something about the law of conservation of reality. The Fourth Law of Thermodynamics,’ Blondel frowned, then shrugged. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘I read an article about it once in Scientific Oceanian but it was all Greek to me. Anyway, it means that when a person travels in time, then time sort of heals up after him as soon as he’s moved on; it means that whatever he does in the past, for example, the present and the future will be exactly the same as if he’d never been there. In other words, I couldn’t stop the Napoleonic Wars by going back in time and poisoning Napoleon in his cot. No matter how many times I killed Napoleon in infancy, he’d still be there in 1799 overthrowing the Directorate. All right so far?’
    â€˜More or less,’ said Guy. ‘Very good port, this.’
    â€˜Like San Francisco,’ Blondel agreed. ‘That’s orthodox time travel. My agents - the group of people who became my agents - found another way of travelling through time. It wasn’t nearly as safe as the orthodox way, but it meant you could take things with you. The orthodox way, you see, only lets you take yourself; which can be awfully embarrassing, so they tell me. It means, for example, you run the risk of turning up at Queen Victoria’s wedding with no clothes on. Another?’
    â€˜Thanks.’
    â€˜There’s another bottle after we’ve finished this,’