We turned our backs and plodded painfully back toward the exit. I had badly underestimated the extra effort required to walk back up the dilation gradient, and even with Friday helping me it was slow going. We’d only gotten halfway across the car park when the power packs finally failed. We purged the suits and found ourselves five hours away. It took us only ten minutes to walk to the main gate and the demonstrators, but we lost another forty minutes in the process—it was now past ten o’clock at night. I was sweating buckets and had to be helped out of the suit, trying hard not to scream with the pain.

“How was the Manchild?” asked George.

“Good for another ten years—his time,” I said.

They all looked solemn.

“He said he wanted to be buried in the churchyard next to his mother,” said another of the villagers in a respectful tone. “I’d best book a funeral for the spring.”

I called Landen on the landline to tell him we were okay, which was just as well, as he was beginning to worry, and he reported that another St. Zvlkx book had been vandalized in a private collection in Guildford. There had been two Special Library Services guards on duty supplied by the Surrey Bentalls Center for All Your Shopping Needs Library Service, and they were now both in hospital—one on the critical list.

Friday and I recovered with tea and some specially baked scones, kindly prepared for us by the villagers, and we then headed back toward town.

“What did he mean,” said Friday after we had driven along in silence for ten minutes, “about ‘Sometimes we do our best work without even knowing it’?”

“I don’t know, Sweetpea,” I said, already drifting off into an exhausted drowse. “Why not sleep on it? I know I’m going to.”

I leaned my head against the door pillar, my leg feeling as though it were on fire. I tried to gather my thoughts over what had happened, but it was too much effort, and in an instant I was in deep, grateful slumber.

29. Wednesday: Dodo Buffer

29.

Wednesday: Dodo Buffer

The first dodo was brought back to life in 1966, and that was the official start of the home-cloning revolution. “Dodo 1A” lived a year before being dismantled for inspection, and the second dodo wasn’t sequenced until 1971, as a precursor to the popular home-cloning kit. A Dodo V1.2 made from a Genome Dynamics kit in early 1978 is the earliest still living, and the model has been steadily improving since then. The latest GD-V10 is a huge improvement upon early models, able to undertake basic double-entry bookkeeping, and it can be updated wirelessly through a home network.

Haynes Dodo Manual