He leaned closer. “Don’t tell a soul, but he was someone named Steve Schultz of the Toast Marketing Board. I think I might have recruited him, or he might have approached me to help—I’m not sure. History has rewritten itself so many times I’m really not sure how it was to begin with—it’s a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it’s been repainted eight times. All I can say is that everything turned out okay—and that things are far weirder than we can know. But the main thing is that Goliath now answers to the Toast Marketing Board and Kaine is out of power. The whole thing has been rubber-stamped into historical fact, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

“Dad?”

“Yes?”

“How did you manage to jump Schultz or Zvlkx or whoever he was all the way from the thirteenth century without the ChronoGuard spotting what you were up to?”

“Where do you hide a pebble, Sweetpea?”

“On a beach.”

“And where do you hide a thirteenth-century impostor saint?”

“With . . . lots of other thirteenth-century impostor saints?”

He smiled.

“You sent all twenty-eight of them forward just to hide St. Zvlkx?”

“Twenty-seven, actually—one of them was real. But I didn’t do it alone. I needed someone to whip up a timephoon in the Dark Ages as cover. Someone with remarkable skills as a time traveler. An expert who can surf the time line with a skill I will never possess.”

“Me?”

He chuckled. “No, silly—Friday.”

The little boy looked up when he heard his name and chewed a crayon, made a face and spat the bits on Pickwick, who jumped up in fright and ran away to hide.

“Meet the future head of the ChronoGuard, Sweetpea. How did you think he survived Landen’s eradication?”

I stared at the little boy, who stared back, and smiled.

Dad looked at his watch. “Well, I’ve got to go. Nelson’s up to his old tricks again. Time waits for no man, as we say.”

44.

Final Curtain

Neanderthals Make New Year’s “At Risk” List