The Better Mousetrap by Tom Holt

the slip.’
    ‘Oh. You mean-I thought you liked—’
    ‘Me?’ Frank shook his head industriously. ‘Not a bit of it. Don’t like dogs, and as a general rule dogs don’t like me. Usually it’s ears back and deep growling as soon as they clap eyes on me. Which is fine,’ he added. ‘Nothing harder than trying to be friends with someone you can’t stand just because they happen to like you, and even more so with bloody dogs. Mind you, he’s wandered off before, and just when I think it’s safe and I can carry on with my life, I go through the Door and there he is, curled up on the other side and waiting for me, you know, the way they do.’
    Mr Sprague grinned unpleasantly. ‘You’ll miss him,’ he said.
    ‘No chance,’ Frank said quickly. ‘Doglessness means not having to go around with a pocketful of plastic bags, not to mention eating food that hasn’t got a wet, snuffly nose in it. You know what? For the first time in ages, I feel like I really have a future.’
    Mr Sprague nodded. ‘You more than most people. Several, in fact.’
    Frank smiled bleakly. ‘Time-travel jokes,’ he said. ‘When I retire, I’m going to put them all in a book, provided there’s still enough rainforest left to provide that much paper. Anyhow, mustn’t keep you, I know you’re a busy man. Although,’ he added, grinning faintly, ‘by the time I meet you again, this little chat won’t have happened, so I needn’t feel quite so guilty about it. Be seeing—’
    ‘Hold on,’ Mr Sprague said, frowning as an unpleasant thought occurred to him. ‘What you just said. Does that mean well, does it mean there’s great chunks of my life, when I’m talking to you, or working on cases that you end up making never happen …’ His mouth was unaccountably dry, though he did his best not to let it show. ‘What I mean is, what happens to them? And what about the man who’s talking to you right now? Do I get, well, rewound or something, and then recorded over after you’ve—?’
    Frank beamed at him. ‘You know,’ he said cheerfully, ‘you always ask me that. Cheerio.’
    The Door opened in a red-brick wall in a dusty courtyard shaded from the oppressive sun by an ancient fig tree. It disturbed the concentration of a big stocky man with a long grey beard as he sat under the tree sketching a design for some sort of machine. He looked up, recognised Frank Carpenter and
    nodded.
    ‘How’s it coming?’ Frank said, in a somewhat archaic dialect of Italian, although of course the words had been modern English when he framed them in his mind. One of the things he loved about the Door was its attention to detail.
    ‘Bloody thing,’ the man replied. ‘I mean, birds don’t have this problem. They just hop off the edge of the nest and it happens. They don’t have to give themselves headaches figuring out surface-to-weight ratios.’ As he spoke, he was doodling a man’s head in the margin. ‘The way I see it, if God had meant us to fly he’d have given us—’
    ‘Imagination,’ Frank said. ‘And a pair of opposable thumbs. Stick at it and you’ll get there in the end, you’ll see.’
    The man glanced down at his piece of paper, then looked up. There was a faint gleam of cunning behind his eyes. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘you know all about this stuff, where you come from.’
    ‘When I come from,’ Frank corrected him. ‘And yes, we know, but I don’t, if you follow me. Specialisation, it’s the curse of our age. Whereas your lot-we have a saying, in my time: Renaissance man. Means a man who can do pretty much anything if he sets his mind to it.’
    The grey-bearded man muttered something vulgar, crumpled up the sheet of paper and threw it away. ‘Oh, come on,’ he said. ‘One little hint wouldn’t kill you.’
    ‘Not me, maybe.’ Frank sighed. He didn’t like saying no to people, particularly those he’d admired for as long as he could remember. ‘Look at it this way,’ he said. ‘If I told you, it’d