He sat down again, and, heartened by his contribution, the remainder of the ex–potential timeworkers joined in. There was someone who would have worked as part of the Retrosnatch Squad who was unhappily not going to see his sixtieth year due to a car accident, and a youthful Bendix Scintilla, whose future self we had met a few years back when he was giving a ChronoGuard recruitment talk. He was eighteen and would now work in engineering until vanishing without trace in Kettering not long before his fifty-fifth birthday. Braxton’s son Gordon was also here, to give a much-needed positive take on the proceedings. He was slated to suffer a fatal time aggregation when his gravity suit leaked, first day at cadet school. Now he gets to be fifty-six. He wasn’t the only one. A girl named Lauren would have been fed alive to pterosaur infants next April during an assignment in the Cretaceous that went badly wrong, but now she succumbs to gruppling bongitiasis at age forty-four.

“Go, me!” she announced happily at the end of it. “I would have suffered a fatal time aggregation,” said another attendee, “twenty-two years from now. Now I die falling from the roof while attempting to adjust the TV aerial—on exactly the same day. Whoop-de-do.”

“What was the program you would be wanting to watch?” The attendee looked at his summary. “Er . . . a repeat of, The Very Best of ‘The Adrian Lush Show Repeats Again,’ Part 7. Serious bummer.”

In this way those in the room told of their differing destinies, and we offered as many encouraging noises as we could, although the practical help this afforded was questionable. The last person to speak was Gavin Watkins.

“I might be unique in this room,” he said in a loud, clear voice, “in that according to my summary, I would not have been a distinguished member of the ChronoGuard. After an early career helping to map the twenty-fifth century, I see that my later career seems to consist mostly of disciplinary hearings and suspensions. Bored and in need of cash due to an expensive Precambrian tourism habit, I accept a hefty bribe in 2028 to undertake an illegal eradication.”

“What sort of bribe?” said someone.

“A Titian—The Battle of Cadore.”

“You hate Titian,” said someone else. “You’d have had nowhere to hang it.”

“I change my mind and grow to love him, apparently,” said Gavin, “and I guess I must have had somewhere to hang it . . . moron.”

“Okay, okay,” said Jimmy-G soothingly, “this won’t happen, and what’s more, it won’t happen twenty-four years from now. Go on, Gavin.”

“Right. Well, I was caught—we all were, of course—and spent two years in an enloopment facility before being released due to a technicality. Not a great career, but better than what I get now. Friday Next will murder me in three days’ time!”