One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

  I stared wide-eyed as Sprockett drove the cab through the paintings of Gainsborough at over a hundred miles per hour. We shot through early landscapes, dodged past Cornard Wood and then burst into portraiture at John Plampin, then twisted and turned past a dozen or so well-dressed dignitaries, who for their part looked as startled and horrified as we did. We went between the knees of Mr. Byam and at one point nearly knocked the hat off Mrs. Siddons. But still the Roadmaster stuck to us like glue, not able to fire at us with the constant movement but awaiting the opportunity with a certain calm detachment. We doubled back around The Blue Boy as Sprockett searched for the exit.

  “Can you see a way out, ma’am?”

  “There!” I said, having heard a lowing in the distance, “behind the third cow from the left in The Watering Place.”

  We passed The Harvest Wagon for a second time as Sprockett lowered the nose and accelerated across the painted landscape, the Roadmaster still close behind. We turned sharp left as the Duchess of Devonshire loomed up in front of us, and there was a thump as we collided with something. The Roadmaster behind us had misjudged the turn and struck the duchess on the shins, the resulting explosion scattering metal fragments that hit the back of the cab with a metallic rattle.

  In another second we were clear, none the worse for our rapid traverse aside from a brace of partridge that had jammed in the wipers and cracked the screen.

  “What did they hit?” asked Sprockett.

  “The Duchess of Devonshire—took off both legs.”

  “She’ll be a half portrait from now on. Whoops.”

  The third Roadmaster had appeared in front of us, and another eraserhead had taken the “taxi” light off the roof and blasted a hole into Classic Bedford Single-Deckers, releasing several Plaxton-bodied coaches to tumble out into the void.

  “We’re causing too much damage,” I said, catching sight of the now-chaotic movement of the Oversize Books, some of them on fire, others locked in collision and one, Detroit’s Muscle Cars, falling to earth in a slow death spiral, the huge forces breaking apart the book and spilling 1972 Dodge Chargers across the BookWorld. “We need to leave the Oversize Books section.”

  “Logically, it places us in grave danger, ma’am.”

  “But we are endangering others, Sprockett.”

  “I place our chances of survival in open orbit at less than 1.7 percent, ma’am.”

  “Nevertheless,” I said, “we are causing more destruction and death than we are worth.”

  His eyebrow pointer clicked to “Puzzled.” “I do not understand.”

  “It’s the right thing to do, Sprockett. Not for us but for them.”

  “Is this compassion, ma’am? The following of the correct course irrespective of the outcome?”

  The Duplex-5s were never great at this sort of stuff.

  “You should always place others before yourself.”

  “Even if it means certain destruction?”

  “Yes, Sprockett, that’s exactly what it means.”

  He buzzed to himself for a moment in deep thought.

  “Thank you for explaining it to me, ma’am,” he replied. “I think I understand now.”

  He peeled away from the Oversize Books and headed off into clear air. The last Buick Roadmaster was close on our tail, and with no books to take cover behind, the end didn’t seem far off. I pulled out my pistol and attempted to load it, but all the cartridges had spilled out of my pockets and into the foot well, and with Sprockett’s constant bobbing and weaving they were proving almost impossible to pick up.

  But just then the car stopped moving about and all was calm. I seized the opportunity to grab an armor-piercing round and flick it into my pistol.

  “Sprockett?”

  He wasn’t moving. I thought at first he might have run down or been hit, but then I noticed that his eyebrow pointer was stuck firmly on “Thinking.” He had committed his entire mainspring to his thought processes and had shut down all motor functions to enable him to think faster. When I looked at his spring-tension indicator, I could see it visibly moving—Sprockett was thinking, and thinking hard.

  The Buick Roadmaster gained ground until it was no more than ten yards away. The Man in Plaid in the passenger seat leaned out the window, took careful aim and fired.

  The eraserhead is one of a series of special-function cartridges that can be chambered within the large-caliber pistol common among BookWorld law enforcers. A long history of implausibly survivable bullet wounds in Thriller and Crime had rendered characters in the BookWorld invulnerable to small-caliber weapons, so the Textual Disrupter was designed to instantly break the bonds that hold graphemes together. A well-placed eraserhead can reduce anything in the BookWorld to nothing more than text—titanium, diamond, Mrs. Malaprop’s sponge cake—anything. The effective range in the pistol was limited to less than forty feet, but the shoulder-mounted, rocket-propelled eraserhead was effective up to a hundred yards, though highly inaccurate.

  The eraserhead struck the back of the cab, and the entire trunk section, spare tire, bumper, jack and wheel brace burst into a cloud of individual letters, leaving only the rear part of the chassis and the back axle. One more shot and they would erase me and half of the cab. Two more shots and we would be nothing but a few thousand scrap letters, orbiting at the gravopause until nudged up to the moon or down to the BookWorld.

  I fired my own pistol in reply, but the armor-piercing round simply passed through the Roadmaster’s windshield and left-side rear door pillar, doing no lasting damage at all. I watched with detached fascination as the passenger reloaded, took aim and fired.

  The cab dodged sideways, and the eraserhead flew wide.

  “Sprockett?”

  “I was thinking, ma’am. I was calculating.”

  I noticed then with a sense of horror that we were climbing. We were moving above the gravopause.

  “Sprockett,” I said nervously, “if we get too high, we’ll be pulled into the gravitational dead spot. We’ll never get out.”

  “As I said, ma’am, I was calculating. Do as I instruct and there is an 18 percent probability that we will survive.”

  “Those aren’t good odds.”

  “On the contrary, ma’am. Next to the 98.3 percent possibility of being erased, they’re staggeringly good.”

  “They may not follow,” I said, looking around.

  “They’re Men in Plaid,” replied Sprockett, “and painfully dogged. They’ll follow.”

  I watched the Roadmaster, and after pausing momentarily it was soon following our slow fall towards the moon. Although not gaining, it was certainly keeping pace.

  “Do you have any armor-piercing rounds left, ma’am?”

  I said that I did.

  “Have them at hand, and use them only when I say.”

  The long fall towards the moon was conducted at a greatly increased velocity. I peered over Sprockett’s shoulder and noted that the speedometer went only as fast as .5 Absurd, and we exceeded that speed within half a minute. The glass on the instrument shattered. The moon went from the size of a pea to an orange and to a soccer ball, and as we moved ever closer, I could see that the small moon was about a quarter of a mile in diameter and was indeed made of accreted junk—bits of books that had been nudged from the gravopause and lost. Pretty soon the moon was the biggest object in the sky, and just when we were less than five hundred feet from the surface, Sprockett rolled inverted and pulled the cab into a tight orbit. I felt a lurch as we accelerated rapidly, had time to see several people on the surface waving at us desperately, and then we were off and around and away again, flung out back towards the gravopause in a slingshot maneuver.

  “Now we will see if my calculations are correct,” murmured Sprockett, his eyebrow pointer clicking to “Doubtful”, then “Apologetic,” then back to “Doubtful” again before settling on “Worried.”

  I looked around. The Roadmaster was gaining, perhaps as a result of its greater mass, but we were still out of r
ange of the eraserhead. We cannoned on, still at speeds in excess of Absurd, but all the while slowly decelerating. Sprockett had hoped we would be able to reach the gravopause again, but if he had miscalculated and we fell short by even a few feet, we would fall inexorably back towards the moon and end our days playing cribbage and I Spy with the unfortunate souls who were already there.

  “Fire at the Roadmaster, ma’am.”

  “They’re out of range.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  So I did, and the shot missed by a mile, and Sprockett nodded and pointed towards a lone copy of World Hotel Review that was orbiting at the gravopause and thereby offering us a convenient yardstick of where safety lay.

  I could feel ourselves slow down, and the needle from the shattered speedometer was now reading .25 Absurd and slowing by the second. World Hotel Review was less than half a mile away, and it seemed doubtful we would make it.

  “Fire at them again.”

  So I reloaded and did as he asked, and at his insistence I continued to fire.

  “Is there a point to this?” I asked after firing five times and managing only to clip a wing mirror.

  “If we can make them angry and act irrationally, there is every point to it, ma’am. The cab has no power remaining. I am relying on our momentum to reach the gravopause.”

  I realized then what his calculations had been for, although I failed to see what we had gained, aside from twenty extra minutes, and a never-before-seen view of the moon. The Men in Plaid would simply wait until we were once more within range and then finish us off.

  The gravopause was barely one hundred yards distant when they fired again. We were now moving at less than a fast walking pace and had drifted sideways. The last armor piercer I’d fired had sent us in a gentle end-over-end spinning motion, which, while not unpleasant, was certainly disconcerting.

  The first eraserhead took away the front left side of the car and the second the back axle. I returned fire at Sprockett’s request, and an odd sight we must have seemed, two helplessly drifting cars less than thirty feet apart, trading shots.

  “I hope this was part of your plan, Sprockett. That was my last round, and I missed them again. I think my poor marksmanship has squandered our chances.”

  “Au contraire, ma’am. Every shot you fire pushes us farther towards the gravopause—and every shot they fire stops them from reaching it.”

  I frowned and stared out the window. The passenger in the Roadmaster pointed his weapon and fired straight at us, but the disrupting power of the eraserhead evaporated a few feet short of the battered cab in a sparkle of light. The Men in Plaid had acted irrationally, and as we drifted behind World Hotel Review and safety, the Roadmaster hung in space for a moment and then started to fall away in a slow trajectory that would eventually find it, a few weeks hence, adding permanently to the moon’s mass.

  I breathed a sigh of relief, rewound Sprockett—who had redlined without my realizing it—and sat back in my seat.

  “Well done,” I said. “You’ve just earned yourself an extra week’s paid holiday.”

  “I seek only to serve,” said Sprockett, his eyebrow clicking from “Nervous” to “Contented.”

  He fired the last remaining grapnel into the back of World Hotel Review, then hailed a distress signal, and we were taken on board.

  “The name’s Thursday Next,” I said to the duty book officer, a frightfully dapper individual who was also manager of the Hotel Ukraina in Moscow, a place that we soon learned “offers a wide range of modern conveniences to suit both the business and leisure traveler.”

  “I’d like to use your book-to-Fiction footnoterphone link,” I added, flashing Thursday’s badge. “And after that I’ll need to requisition a small family-run guesthouse in Ghent to take me all the way to Biography.”

  “Certainly,” said the manager, eager to help someone he thought was a Jurisfiction agent in distress. “How about the Hotel Verhaegen? It provides elegant guest rooms in the heart of historic Ghent and offers contemporary style in an authentic eighteenth-century residence.”

  “It sounds perfect.”

  “This way.”

  As we made our way to the Belgium section of the book, we caught a glimpse of the Roadmaster, now a tiny speck in the distance.

  31.

  Biography

  Although Outlander authors kill, maim, disfigure and eviscerate bookpeople on a regular basis, no author has ever been held to account, although lawyers are working on a test case to deal with serial offenders. The mechanism for transfictional jurisdiction has yet to be finalized, but when it is, some authors may have cause to regret their worst excesses.

  Bradshaw’s BookWorld Companion (16th edition)

  The Hotel Verhaegen landed on the lawn outside one of the biographical tenements. I sat for several moments in silence in the lobby. For some odd reason, my left leg wouldn’t stop shaking, and when I tried to speak, it sounded like I was hyphenated. I’d been fine on the trip down, but as soon as I started to think about the Men in Plaid who’d tried so hard to kill us, I suddenly felt all hot and fearful. I thought for a moment it might have been a virus I’d picked up from the RealWorld until I realized I was in mild shock.

  I rested for ten minutes, and after downing one of Sprockett’s restoratives and writing “Very nice” in the guest book, I stepped from the Verhaegen, which lifted off behind us. The manager wasn’t going to hang around—the Pay and Display fees in Biography were ridiculous.

  “Sp-Sprockett,” I said as we walked across the car park, “where d-d-did you learn to d-drive like that?”

  “My cousin Malcolm, ma’am.”

  “He’s a r-racing driver?”

  “He’s a racing car. Is madam all right?”

  “Madam is surprised she didn’t scream, vomit and then pass out. I owe you my life, Sprockett.”

  “A good butler,” intoned Sprockett airily, “should save his employer’s life at least once a day, if not more than once.”

  Luckily for us, the island of Biography had elected to maintain parts of the Great Library model during the remaking, so while the Geographic model gave it the appearance of a low-lying island mostly covered with well-kept gardens, exciting statuary and dignified pavilions of learning, the biographical subjects themselves lived in twenty-six large tower blocks, each designated by a single letter painted conveniently on the front. The lobby of the apartment building was roomy and bright and was connected to a game room, where D. H. Lawrence was playing H. P. Lovecraft at Ping-Pong, and also a cafeteria, where we could see Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther discussing the struggles of faith over conscience. In the lobby were eight different Lindsay Lohans, all arguing over which biographical study had been the least correct.

  Even before I’d reached the front desk, I knew we were in luck. The receptionist recognized me.

  “Hello again, Miss Next,” he said cheerfully. “How did the peace talks go?”

  “They’re not until Friday.”

  “How silly of me. You can go straight up. I’ll ring ahead to announce you.”

  “Most kind,” I replied, still unsure whom Thursday had seen. “Remind me again the floor?”

  “Fourth,” said the receptionist, and he turned to the telephone switchboard.

  We took the brass-and-cast-iron elevator, which was of the same design as the one in the Great Library—the two buildings shared similar BookWorld architecture. Even the paint was peeling in the same places.

  “How long do you think before the Men in Plaid catch up with us?” asked Sprockett as the elevator moved upwards.

  “I have no idea,” I replied, opening my pistol and chambering my last cartridge, a disrupter that was nicknamed “the Cherry Fondue,” as it was always the last one in the box, and extremely nasty, “but the Hotel Verhaegen won’t give them any clues—you signed the register as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dueffer,’ yes?”

  “Y-e-es,” said Sprockett, his eyebrow pointer clicking to “Apologetic.” r />
  “Problems?”

  “Indeed, ma’am. In an unthinking moment, I may have written ‘choice of oils open to improvement’ in the comments section of the visitor’s book.”

  “We’ll just have to hope they’re not curious.”

  I replaced the weapon in my shoulder holster, and the lift doors opened on the fourth floor. We walked out and padded noiselessly down the corridor. We walked past Lysander, Lyons, Lyndsay, Lynch and Lynam before we got to the Lyells.

  “Charles Lyell, Botanist,” read the name on the first door.

  “Is botany boring?” Thursday asked.

  “I suspect that it isn’t, ma’am, given there is an entire island committed to little else.”

  The next door was for “Sir James Lyell, Politician.”

  “Boring, ma’am?” inquired Sprockett.

  “Politicians’ lives are never boring,” I assured him, and we moved to the next.

  “‘Sir Charles Lyell, Geologist,’” I read. “Is geology more or less boring than politics or botany?”

  Sprockett’s pointer flicked to “Bingo.”

  “I believe, ma’am, that as regards boring, geology is less to do with tediousness and more to do with . . . drilling.”

  “Genius,” I remarked, mildly annoyed that I hadn’t thought of it myself. Sir Charles Lyell was the father of modern geology. If Thursday had come to him, she was after the finest geological advice available in the BookWorld. I knocked on the door in a state of some excitement, and when I heard a shrill “Enter,” we walked in.

  The room was a spacious paneled study, the walls covered with bookcases and a large walnut desk in the center. It was not tidy; papers were strewn everywhere, and a chair was overturned. The pictures were crooked, and a plant pot lay on its side. The wall safe, usually hidden behind a painting of a rock, was open and empty.