“So let’s suppose I slowed down,” I said to Landen. “What would I do?”

“As Braxton suggests: become chief librarian.”

“Aside from that.”

“You could start a restaurant. You do really good Sunday roasts.”

“A restaurant that only opens one day a week is destined to fail,” I pointed out.

“Then that’s our unique selling point—Sunday lunches . . . on weekdays.”

“You’ve got it all planned out, haven’t you?”

“No, I’m making it up as I go along.”

“A restaurateur?”

“Okay, maybe not. But your career path has been heading in only one direction for a while now, and, biggest fan or not, I don’t want to lose you.”

“And I don’t want to be lost.”

“Then tell Braxton you’ve changed your mind. That you’ll take the job.”

And at that moment the assistant manager walked back in.

“That’s all cleared with head office,” he said with a smile. “If it were anyone but you, Detective Next, we’d not entertain the idea. In fact, helping you now makes me feel like what I should be doing. I received my Letter of Destiny last week. I would have been running all the enloopment facilities for SO-12 after I was retired from field duty when a jump to the sixteenth century dumped me in the forty-fifth due to a gimbal-lock precession error on the fluxgates.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ve absolutely no idea. I didn’t get the ChronoGuard career. I got the retailing one. Ask me about monthly sales figures, dismissal procedures and weekend comparison stats and I’m your man. This way.”

He led us through to the security office, which was of a larger-than-normal size. On the main console were several smaller monitors that surrounded a central, larger one, and they all looked a bit dusty. In fact, the whole room looked very disused, and several cardboard boxes of wire hangers and security tags were lying on the floor.

“No one has used this place since they switched off the enloopment engines two years ago,” said Jimmy-G. “Before my time, I might add.”

After the facility was shut down, the prisoners had been transferred to conventional prisons, but Aornis Hades was different. With a rap sheet that included extortion, blackmail, thought crimes, theft, torture and murder, she had her sentence commuted to quadruple life with added life. She was transferred out, but that was the last anyone heard from her. Quite where she was transferred to, who had transferred her and whether she ever got there was anyone’s guess. It was why looping was so perfect for her. No one to memory-manipulate.

The assistant manager threw several switches, and after a wait of several minutes for the valves to warm up, the central monitor sprang into life. Jimmy-G punched in the date and rough time, and a broad image of the shop’s interior appeared.

“Here,” said Jimmy-G, “it’s easier if you do it. If you want to change cameras, use this switch. To shuttle back and forth, it’s this knob here.”