“Right,” said Friday, “and that’s what I’ve been doing with Polly for the past two weeks—trying to find where Mycroft put it. Once I’ve got the recipe, I can destroy it: The possibility of time travel drops to zero, and it’s good night, Vienna, for the ChronoGuard.”

“Why would you want that?”

“The less you know, Mum, the better.”

“They say you’re a dangerous historical fundamentalist,” I added cautiously. “A terrorist of time.”

“But they would say that, wouldn’t they? The Friday you met—he’s okay. He’s following orders, but he doesn’t know what I know. If he did, he’d be trying to destroy the recipe, the same as me. The Standard History Eventline is bullshit, and all they’re doing is trying to protect their temporal-phony-baloney jobs.”

“How do you know this?”

“I become director-general of the ChronoGuard when I’m thirty-six. In the final year before retirement, at seventy-eight, I’m inducted into the ChronoGuard Star Chamber—the ruling elite. It was there that I discovered something so devastating that if it became public knowledge would shut down the industry in an instant. And the time business is worth six hundred billion a year—minimum.”

“Tell them what it is,” said Polly, who’d been standing at his side. “If anything happens to you, then at least one of us might be able to carry on.”

Friday nodded and took a deep breath. “Has anyone noticed how short attention spans seem to have cast a certain lassitude across the nation?”

“Do I ever,” I replied, rolling my eyes and thinking of the endlessly downward clicking of the Read-O-Meter. “No one’s reading books anymore. They seem to prefer the mind-numbing spectacle of easily digested trash TV and celebrity tittle-tattle.”

“Exactly,” said Friday. “The long view has been eroded. We can’t see beyond six months, if that, and short-termism will spell our end. But the thing is, it needn’t be that way—there’s a reason for it. The time engines don’t just need vast quantities of power—they need to run on time. Not punctuality, but time itself. Even a temporal leap of a few minutes will use up an infinitesimally small amount of the abstract concept. Not the hard clock time but the soft stuff that keeps events firmly embedded in a small cocoon of prolonged event—the Now.”

“Oooh!” murmured Tuesday, who twigged it first. “They’ve been mining the Now!”

“Exactly, sis,” said Friday, sweeping the hair from his eyes. “The Short Now is the direct result of the time industry’s unthinking depredations. If the ChronoGuard continues as it is, within a few years there won’t be any Now at all, and the world will move into a Dark Age of eternal indifference.”

“You mean TV could get worse?” asked Landen.

“Much worse,” replied Friday grimly. “At the rate the Now is being eroded, by this time next year Samaritan Kidney Swap will be considered the height of scholarly erudition. But easily digestible TV is not the cause—it’s the effect. A Short Now will also spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification.”