Overtime. Part 43

'I beg your pardon?'

'In the study, miss,' George said. 'Just this minute gone in, miss.

The door flew open again, and this time it was a man.

'Come on,' the man said to the lady, 'we'd better get back.'

The lady turned. 'Mr Goodlet,' she said, 'what's going on?'

'The door,' said the man. 'It had No Entry on it. Didn't you see?'

The lady looked puzzled. 'What do you mean? Oh,' she added. 'It was one of those doors, was it?'

George coughed deferentially. 'He's in the study, sir,' he said.

'Exactly,' said the man to the lady, ignoring George. 'So here we are. We'd better find a town hall or something quick. With luck, we might just be able to find our way back to precisely the right moment. Have you got one of those maps?'

'What maps?'

'Ah,' the man said, 'that means you probably haven't. Never mind.' He turned and faced George. 'Excuse me,' he said.

'He's in the -'

'Which way to the town hall?' the man asked.

George frowned. 'What town hall, sir?' he asked.

'All right then,' said the man, 'what about a police station. Army barracks. Magistrate's court. Something like that.'

George couldn't help shuddering. In court, at his age, and all for one lousy pigeon. He started to whimper.

The noise had obviously reached the study, because Sir Isaac came out. He was holding a cold towel to his head, and he wasn't looking happy.

'Will you please,' he said, 'keep the noise down?'

'Sorry,' the man said. 'I wonder if you could help us. We're looking for a public building.'

Sir Isaac gave them a look, as if trying to work out what on earth they were on about. A thought occurred to him, painfully. 'If you're desperate,' he said, 'you can use the one at the bottom of the kitchen garden.'

'No, thank you,' the man replied, 'a public building. Like a corn exchange or a guildhall or something like that. Something with No Entry on the door.'

'I ...' Sir Isaac said. 'Look, I don't want to seem inhospitable, but if this is some sort of a joke ...'

'Really,' the man replied, 'this is an emergency, so if you could just ...'

Sir Isaac closed his eyes. He had known it help sometimes. 'George,' he said, 'escort these people to the Munic.i.p.al Hall.'

'Yes, Sir Isaac.'

The man was staring; looking at Sir Isaac's clothes and his periwig, apparently making some connection in his mind.

'Sir Isaac?' he said.

'Yes,' said Sir Isaac, 'that's right. Now if you'll just -'

'Sir Isaac Newton?'

'That's right. Do I know you?'

The man was looking at him with something resembling awe. 'The Sir Isaac Newton? The Sir Isaac Newton who discovered gravity?'

'I beg your ...' Sir Isaac stopped suddenly. In his ale-clogged mind, something suddenly clicked into place. 'Gravity!' he exclaimed. 'Yes, of course, that's it! Gravity!'

The man was looking sheepish. 'Whoops,' he said, 'there I go again, putting my foot in it.'

Sir Isaac's face was alight with joy. 'My dear sir,' he said, 'how can I ever ..

But the man and the woman had gone.

In the beginning, G.o.d created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And G.o.d saw that it had potential, if it was handled properly.

Originally, he had in mind a three-tiered development programme, with a residential area of high-quality executive starter-homes, a business and light industrial park and a s.p.a.cious, purpose-built shopping precinct, all centred round a general amenity area and linked with a grid-pattern road layout. It was good; and maybe it wouldn't have won any design awards, but it would have done the job and returned something like 400 per cent on the initial outlay.

The problem was the Eden (Phase II) Area Plan, and it was the same old story all over again. You hire an architect, he draws the plans, the quant.i.ty surveyor does the costings, the contractor does the schedules, everything's ready to roll and some s.h.i.+ny-trousered bureaucrat refuses to grant planning permission. And there you are, with a thousand billion acre site, eighty billion supernatural brickies, forty million miles of scaffolding, nine hundred thousand JCBs (all balanced on the head of a pin) and terminal planning blight.

G.o.d, however, has patience. With a shrug of his shoulders, he walked away from the whole mess and occupied himself with a forty billion acre office development on Alpha Centauri. By the time he'd finished that, plus a little infilling in Orion's Belt and a couple of nice barn conversions in the Pleiades, there had been a number of changes in the political makeup of Eden County Hall. At long last, there Were people in charge there whom he could do business with.

Of course, there had to be a public enquiry; there always is. But the problem was that, since the earth was still without form and void, there were no human beings, therefore no public, therefore there could be no enquiry and the previous decision would have to stand. Deadlock.

It was then that the venture capital consortium funding the project, Beaumont Street Retrospective Developments Inc., took a hand. The three members of the consortium were admittedly domiciled millions of years in the future, but they were all bona fide human beings, and they would be delighted to hold an enquiry. No problem.

The result of their deliberation was that the whole purpose of planning controls is to preserve the environment; but no development can actually damage the environment in the long term, because eventually, in the fullness of time, the physical laws of entropy will have effect, the world will come to an end, the Void will creep back, matter will implode into nothingness, and everything will be exactly the same as it originally was. The proposed development was, therefore, strictly temporary, and planning consent was not required for temporary structures.

In the end, they did a deal: G.o.d was granted a ten billion year lease, the paperwork was tidied up, bulldozers rolled, and the rest is theology. Almost.

It was, of course, the lawyers who c.o.c.ked it up. When they sublet the development to the human race, there was some sort of snarl-up in the small print, and when the Antichrist turned up in AD 1000 to serve notice to quit, the human race grinned smugly, pointed to the appropriate page and refused to budge.

The various flies on the wall of G.o.d's office that afternoon of 31st December AD 1000 all agree that the ensuing meeting was stormy. There was a free and frank exchange of views, which resulted in the Antichrist being turned into a skeleton and split down the middle (or as we would say nowadays, promoted sideways); the upshot was that the Antichrist was sent off to find a loophole in the lease, which he did.

One of the conditions of the lease was that Mankind was obliged to wors.h.i.+p the Landlord regularly and according to the forms prescribed by Mother Church. The Antichrist therefore immediately founded a rival church, presided over by Anti-Popes, with the aim of subverting religion, destroying faith, and nipping in to get the locks changed and the suitcases out on the street before 1690. It worked well to begin with, and eviction proceedings were actually under way when a minor human potentate called Richard Coeur de Lion started in motion a chain of events which would inevitably lead to universal peace, a return to the True Faith, and the building of the New Jerusalem. And there was absolutely nothing that anybody could do about it.

Until, that is, the Antichrist overheard a minor Chastel des Larmes Chaudes functionary by the name of Pursuivant remarking that it would have been better all round if Richard had never been born. Something fell into place in the Antichrist's mind, and the result was the concept of time revision, editing and the Archives. All they had to do was edit Richard out of history, and they could have Mankind out of there in a hundred years flat, with a ma.s.sive bill for dilapidations thrown in.

It would have worked, if it hadn't been for one Blondel, a courtier, who inconveniently refused to accept that Richard had never existed, and started looking for him everywhere. As long as Blondel knew Richard had existed, Richard would have to continue to exist. The man was, to put it mildly, a menace.