One of Our Thursdays Is Missing

30. High Orbit

Sprockett reversed the cab out of the garage, engaged the Technobabble™ Swivelmatic vectored-ion plasma drive and powered vertically upwards from Parody Valley and Vanity. I was pressed back into my seat by the acceleration and the ascent angle, and I might have been frightened had my mind not been tumbling with what we’d discovered so far—or even with what we had still yet to find out. Within a few minutes, we were hanging in the heavens a couple of thousand feet from the surface, right at the cruising altitude of local books that were being moved around Fiction. Below us the islands that made up the Fiction Archipelago were laid out in precise detail.

“Would it be impertinent to point out that visiting another island in the BookWorld without transit papers is strictly forbidden?”

“What does Thursday Next care for transit papers?”

“I would politely point out that you’re not her, ma’am.”

“I might as well be. I have a shield and I look like her. Who can say I’m not?”

“Who indeed, ma’am?”

I looked behind us and out to sea. Biography was situated beyond Artistic Criticism, and it was unlikely that any books would be going that way at this lower level. I wound down the window, poked my head out and looked up. Several miles above us, I could see the high-level books crisscrossing the sky, their journey made less arduous by traveling at the precise altitude where the force of gravity from below cancels the force of gravity from above—the gravopause. At that height you could usually find someone going your way—so long as you could get up there. The Technobabble™ drive on the cab would get us to local traffic height, but after that we were on our own.

We had to wait a nail-biting two and three-quarters minutes, every second worrying that the Plaids would spot us.

“Buckle up, ma’am,” said Sprockett. “Looks like someone’s been discovered.”

As we watched, an entire section of Vanity Island seemed to fall away. A book had been accepted into the mainstream and was rising from the flanks of Mount Sleeper, trailing the debris of a ramshackle group of shameless Zadie Smith rip-offs that had been unwisely built on top of it.

The settings—mostly of a winter scene in London, it appeared—rotated slowly about its axis as it rose vertically to meet us, and just as it transitioned into forward flight, Sprockett stepped on the throttle and accelerated to meet the book, which loomed as large as eight cathedrals in the windscreen. As soon as we were close enough, Sprockett slewed the vehicle to a stop on the side of a dream sequence—a picnic the family had once spent on a grassy hill in spring, where a silver pond alive with bulrushes lay within the dappled glade of beech trees.

“Congratulations on the publication,” I said to a small boy who was playing with a tin train, and he waved shyly in return. We weren’t there for long. Piggybacking around the BookWorld was a dark art that needed calm nerves and good timing; within a few minutes, Sprockett lifted off again and made the short hop to a historical novel that was moving up to join the High Stream in order to make its way to History for fact-checking. They looked less friendly in this book, so Sprockett simply fired one of the vehicle’s two grapnels into the soft intratextual matrix to which the book’s settings were bolted, and we began the tow into the high orbit dangling on the end of a slender length of steel cable.

“Okay,” I said as we moved steadily upwards, the cab’s altimeter winding around like a top, “how’s this for a scenario? Thursday is investigating something that requires her to stay out of sight. She hides out in Vanity, somewhere near Sargasso Plaza. The Mediocre Gatsby always hangs out there, waiting for fares. He takes her to Biography and the following day picks her up to go to the Council of Genres. He piggybacks The Murders on the Hareng Rouge, which is heading—ISBN already scrubbed—towards the Ungenred Zone to be scrapped. Somewhere above Aviation the rhetorical device is activated. The book explodes into a zillion fragments within a fraction of a second, taking with it Thursday, Mediocre, and the TransGenre Taxi. It’s just another book coming to grief that would be swiftly investigated, and then as swiftly dismissed as an accident.”

“Barmouth Blaster?” asked Sprockett, offering me a cocktail.

“Thank you.”

“So we were right—it wasn’t an attack on the book at all,” murmured Sprockett, adding the ice and lemon to the cocktail shaker along with half a can of Red Bull, a Mucinex and two onions. “It was a hit on the taxi—with Thursday Next inside. Which means that Mediocre must have been bribed to take the particular book—”

“But knew nothing of the reason. He was tricked into attending his own execution, as well as Thursday’s.”

We sat in silence for some minutes as we were towed ever upwards, thinking about what we had just uncovered. In the RealWorld such a convoluted method of murder would be faintly ridiculous, but in the BookWorld all murders happened this way.

“Your Barmouth Blaster, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

“Ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“Why was Ms. Next murdered?”

There were at least seventy-two people who had tried to kill her over the years, and narrowing it down was going to be tricky. I decided to head for the most obvious.

“Without Thursday the Racy Novel peace talks might well fail. Who would benefit most from a genre war in the north of the island?”

“Men in Plaid,” said Sprockett.

“Hardly likely,” I replied. “They’re probably mopping up for someone else—or simply want to find Thursday—or are just being wicked for the hell of it.”

“You misunderstand me, madam,” he said politely. “I mean Men in Plaid— behind us!”

I turned and looked out the cab’s rear window. Sprockett was right. Far below was not one Buick Roadmaster but three. They would also have Technobabble™ Scramjamcious Gravitational Flux Throb-O-Tron Torque Converter drive systems and, knowing the Men in Plaid, ones considerably more advanced than ours and twice as nonsensical.

“How far to the gravopause?” I asked.

“We’re almost there.”

Despite the gravopause’s usefulness for getting about, one had to be careful. If you had the misfortune to move above this altitude and had insufficient thrust to escape, you could be caught in the dead center of the sphere forever. There was a small moon in the gravitational dead spot made from accreted book traffic that had accidentally fallen in and been unable to escape. From the dizzying heights we had now reached, I could actually see the moon above us, no bigger than a pea.

Within a half minute more, we had reached the gravopause. Sprockett cast off the towline, and we drifted onwards, safely in orbit. All that was required now was to coast along until we were above Biography and then dip the cab into a downwards trajectory and let gravity take over.

“Ma’am, would you wind me up?” said Sprockett. “I can see fun and games ahead, and I wouldn’t want to risk spring depletion at an inopportune moment.”

I leaned forward and wound him until his indicator was just below the red line. I felt his bronze outer casing flex with the increased tension.

“The Men in Plaid are gaining,” I said, looking behind us.

The three Roadmasters were in V formation about a half mile away and had just reached the gravopause. At the rate they were going, they would be upon us in under five minutes.

“I’m going to head for that cluster of book traffic,” announced Sprockett, opening the throttle and accelerating towards a loose gaggle of several hundred books that all appeared to be heading in the same direction. As we drew closer, I could see that they were mostly nonfiction and of considerable size. It was the renegade Oversize Books section, on their way to their new home.

They grew dramatically in size as we approached, and as we passed between John Deere Tractors and Clarice Cliff Tableware, they towered over us like skyscrapers.

“Hold tight,” said Sprockett, and he pulled the cab hard over and darted behind Lighthouses of Maine.

“They’re still behind us!” I barked, peering out the rear windshield as the Monhegan Island Light Station flashed past on our left-hand side, foghorn blaring. “Or at least one is.”

“They only attack one at a time,” replied Sprockett, his eyebrow flicking past “Indignant” to “Peeved,” “and in that respect they’re very like baddies in seventies martial-arts movies. Hold tight.”

Sprockett skimmed past Best of National Geographic so close I could taste the hot dust of the Serengeti, then pulled up sharply in front of Chronicle of Britain. I felt myself pressed hard into my seat. My vision grew gray, then faded out entirely. My arms and head felt intolerably heavy, and a second later I was unconscious as Sprockett—his body designed to tolerate up to 17.6 Gs—pulled the cab into an almost vertical climb. I came around again as soon as he reached the top of the book, and he immediately plunged the cab into a near-vertical dive.

“Still behind us?”

They were. I could see the emotionless features of the Plaids as they edged closer. Sprockett corkscrewed around Knitting Toy Animals for Pleasure and Profit as the passenger in the Roadmaster leaned out the window and fired a shot, which flew wide to blow a ragged hole in Knitting Toy Animals as we sped on, and a blue knitted giraffe named Natalie began a long, slow fall to the Text Sea, sixteen miles below.

“These Men in Plaid are made of stern stuff,” said Sprockett, his eyebrow pointer clicking from “Peeved” to “Puzzled” to “Indignant,” then almost to “Severely Peeved” before settling on “Peeved” again. “Hold tight.”

The Oversized Books were now moving in a more random fashion as they tried to avoid us, and Sprockett dived to get more speed, then pulled up and headed towards where What Do People Do All Day? and ABC with Dewin the Dog were about to collide, cover to cover. There was barely a ten-foot gap on either side as we flew between them, and the gap narrowed as we moved on. I barely had a chance to wave a cheery hello to a worried-looking Lowly Worm as the covers closed together a split second before we shot out the other side. The Roadmaster was less fortunate, and there was a tremendous detonation as the car was crushed between the two books, the worried shouts of Scarry’s folk mixing with Dewin the Dog’s furious barking.

“Do you see the others, ma’am?” asked Sprockett as he swerved hard to miss the Greatest Oversize Book of All Time but the abrupt sideways movement caused a ventral compressor stall on the Technobabble™ drive, and we went spiraling downwards out of control until Sprockett achieved an emergency relight.

“On the left!” I yelled as the second Roadmaster swept past, a shot from an eraserhead removing half the rear bumper and a fender. Sprockett jinked hard, spiraled up for a second, then shot past Cooking for Fusspots and Helmut Newton Nudes.

“Rewind me again, ma’am, if you please,” said Sprockett, hauling sideways on the wheel to avoid the Times Atlas. The exertions on his frame had depleted his spring at a furious rate—I’d have to remain conscious, if only to rewind him.

“Watch out!”

It was too late. We had taken a hard left at The Titanic Revisited and were met by a group of Oversize Books that had bunched together tightly for self-protection. There was no time to avoid them and all we could see was a saber jet fragmenting in front of us as we loomed ever closer to Lichtenstein Prints. But just when I thought we were dead for sure, Sprocket pulled the wheel hard over and we entered The Works of Thomas Gainsborough through a small thermal-exhaust port near the preface.

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 range 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.