One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

27. Back Early

I found Professor Plum working on his Large Metaphor Collider. As soon as he saw me, he pressed a couple of buttons on his mobilefootnoterphone, uttered a few words and smiled at me.

“Oh!” he said in some surprise. “You’re back.”

“What happened? I wasn’t meant to come back for another four hours!”

“Transfictional travel isn’t an exact science,” he replied with a shrug. “Sometimes you’ll pop back early for no adequately explained reason.”

“Can you send me out there again? I was right in the middle of something important.”

“If Bradshaw allows it, I’ll be more than happy to.”

“Please?”

“There are safety issues,” he explained. “The more you stay out there, the less time you can spend there. Bradshaw used to travel across quite often, but these days he can barely stay out for ten minutes before popping back.”

I thought about the excitement I’d felt just as I was about to kiss Landen and the potential chain of events that might have occurred from there on in.

“I really need to get back, Professor. Lives . . . um, depend on it.”

“Whose lives?”

Commander Bradshaw had appeared in the laboratory. But he didn’t walk in, he had bookjumped in. I hadn’t seen that for a while; it was considered very common and was actively discouraged. The Ungenred Zone and Racy Novel, to name but two, even had antijump sieves set up on their borders—large sails of a fine mesh that snagged the punctuation in one’s description and brought one down to earth with a thump.

“I’m very busy,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Walk with me.”

So I walked with Bradshaw out of the labs, past the frog-footman, who followed at a discrete distance and up the stairs.

“So,” said Bradshaw, “how did you get on?”

“Not very well. Lots happened, but I’ve got no way of knowing which of the facts were significant and which weren’t.”

“The RealWorld is like that. It’s possible that nothing was significant or that everything was. It scares the bejesus out of me, I can tell you—and I don’t scare easily. Anything on Thursday’s whereabouts?”

I told him about the locked room at Acme.

“Hmm,” he said, “ definitely in here somewhere. I’ll ask Professor Plum to attempt another Textual Sieve triangulation.” He thought for a moment. “How were Landen and the kids?”

“As good as might be expected. Permission to speak honestly, sir?”

“I welcome nothing else.”

“Is it possible that Thursday is alive and well but just suffering some bizarre mental aberration?”

He stared at me. “You think you might be Thursday?”

I shrugged. “Landen seems to think so. I saw Jenny, and I could do things—fight, think on my feet and disarm a man in under a second. Things I never knew I could do.”

He smiled and patted my arm. “It’s not uncommon to have feelings of elevated status after visiting the RealWorld. It’ll soon pass.”

“But could I tell if I were real? Could anyone tell?”

“There are lots of signs,” said Bradshaw, “but here’s the easiest: What am I doing now?”

“I don’t know.”

“How about now?”

“As far as I can tell, you’re not doing anything at all.” Bradshaw took his finger off my nose and smiled. “I suppressed my action line. The real Thursday could have seen what I was doing, but you had to rely on the description. You’re fictional, my dear, through and through.”

“But I could be just thinking you did that—the same as I thought I saw Jenny, and all my backstory about being the written Thursday. I could be . . . delusional.”

“And part of this delusion is you thinking you might be delusional? And me here right now talking to you?”

“I suppose so.”

“Pull yourself together, girl,” he snapped, “and don’t be such a bloody fool. If you were Thursday, you’d be saving the BookWorld, not blundering around the Outland like a petulant bull in a china shop. This is Fiction, not Psychology.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“That’s okay. Now, is there anything else to report?”

I told him about Jenny, the comment about Lyell and how Goliath had developed a Green Fairy and wanted to know where the Austen Rover had ended up.

“Goliath is an ongoing thorn,” said Bradshaw grimly, “but we’re dealing with the problem. Anything else?”

I thought for a moment. If I couldn’t trust Bradshaw, I couldn’t trust anyone.

“This morning Jobsworth and Red Herring asked me to pretend to be Thursday and go to the peace talks on Friday.”

“We thought they might.”

“Should I go?”

“It would be my advice that you shouldn’t. Don’t be insulted by this, but civilians are ill equipped to deal with anything beyond that which is normally expected of them. The BookWorld is fraught with dangers, and your time is best served bringing as many readers as you can to your series, then keeping them.”

“Can I go back to the RealWorld?”

“No.”

“I have unfinished business. I did go on a somewhat risky mission for you—I could have ended up erased or dead—or both.”

“You have the gratitude of the head of Jurisfiction,” he said.

“That should be enough. He’s not your husband, Thursday. He’s Thursday’s. Go back to your book and just forget about everything that’s happened. You’re not her and never can be. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. Appreciate a girl who knows when to call it a day. The frog guy will see you out. Good day.”

And so saying, he turned on his heel and walked into the ballroom. The door closed behind him, leaving me confused, drained and missing Landen. I thought of going to find Whitby to cry on his shoulder, but then I remembered about the nuns.

“Damn,” I said, to no one in particular.

The frog-footman saw me to the front door, then handed me the Rubik’s Cube I’d lent him.

“Here,” he said. “It’s got me flummoxed, I can tell you.”

Despite his working on the puzzle during my absence the cube had remained resolutely unsolved—all six sides were still the same unbroken colors.