“I’m very grateful to her . . . and you,” I managed to stammer.
“So I look upon you as an investment,” replied Herring, “and a long-standing favor to a valued colleague. Which is why we are here now. Do you understand?”
“I think so.”
“Good.”
“That’s good,” said Lockheed, as if I might not have heard what Herring said. The regional commander waved a hand at the wreckage.
“Easy one for you to cut your teeth on. It has all the signs of being another unprecedented event that despite all expectations has become repeatedly unrepeatable. Don’t let me down, will you? Wrap it up nice and neat and don’t get all showy or anything. Fiction has a 99.97 percent book-safety record, and the last thing we want is the residents of this fair island worried that the fabric of their world is prone to shredding itself at the drop of a participle, hmm?”
“I’ll do my very best to discover that it’s an unrepeatable accident,” I told him, “and with indecent haste.”
“Very good. Twenty-four hours should suffice, yes?”
“I’ll see what I can do, sir, and I’d like to thank you for the opportunity.”
“No need. Lockheed?”
“Yes, sir?”
Herring snapped his fingers impatiently, and the rather harassed Lockheed passed him a clipboard.
“These are the reported items of debris,” Herring said, handing the clipboard straight to me without looking at it. “Not good, having narrative falling from the skies, so let’s keep it simple, eh? Wheels within wheels, Thursday.”
“Wheels within wheels,” added Lockheed earnestly.
“Wheels within wheels, sir. Would you thank Miss Next for me when you see her?”
“When next I see her. She’s very busy.”
He then looked at Sprockett, who was standing off from the group, being unobtrusive. “Who’s that?”
“Sprockett,” I replied, “my butler.”
“I didn’t know you had a butler.”
“Everyone needs a butler, sir.”
“I have no argument with that. Duplex-3, is he?”
“Duplex-5, sir.”
“The Fives were prone to be troublesome without sufficient winding. I’ll let you get on. You can call Lockheed anytime you want for guidance. Any questions?”
I thought of asking him if he had seen the real Thursday Next recently but decided against it. The red-haired gentleman had spoken of “being able to trust no one but myself,” and besides, I didn’t want to look a fool if the man on the tram really was a murderous nutjob.
“No questions, sir.”
“Good luck, Miss Next.”
He gave me a half smile, shook my hand and vanished.
“I’ll be off, too,” said Lockheed, handing me a business card and a folder full of health-and-safety literature. “Commander Herring is a great and good man, and you are lucky to have been given this opportunity to converse. He doesn’t usually speak to people as low as you.”
“I’m honored.”
“And so you should be. I was his assistant for three years before he deigned to look me in the eye. One of my proudest moments. If you need me, the JAID offices are at Norland Park.”
And he walked off. Eager not to waste the opportunity I had just been given, I turned my attention to the wreckage.
The chunk of book had splintered off the main novel as it broke up. But this wasn’t pages or ink or anything; it was a small part of setting. Despite the ragged textual word strings that were draped across and the graphemes lying scattered on the floor nearby, the misshapen lump seemed to be a room from a house somewhere. It had landed on the asphalt covering of the car park and cracked the surface so badly that the textual matrix beneath the roadway was now visible. The battered section had landed upside down just behind Lola Vavoom’s Delahaye Roadster, which had prevented her from reversing too quickly from her parking place, breaking through the barriers and falling eighty feet to her death. It had always been a suspicious accident, but nothing untoward was ever found to suppose it wasn’t just that—an accident.
“Will this take long, dahling?” asked Lola, who was dressed in tight slacks and a cashmere sweater with a pink scarf tied around her hair. Her eyes were obscured by a pair of dark glasses, and she was casually sitting on the trunk of her car smoking a small Sobranie cigarette.
“As long as it must,” I said, “and I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Do your best, dear,” she intoned patronizingly, “but if I’m not dead in mysterious circumstances by teatime, someone is going to have some serious explaining to do.”
I turned my attention to the wreckage. Spontaneous breakups were uncommon but not unheard of, and it was JAID’s job to try to find the cause so that other books wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Losing a cast of a thousand or more was not just a personal tragedy, but expensive. When a book-club edition of War and Peace had disintegrated without warning a few years ago as it passed over Human Drama, all those within the debris field were picking brass buttons and lengthy digressions out of their hair for a week. The JAID investigator assigned to the case painstakingly reconstructed the book, only to find that a batch of verbs had been packed incorrectly at the aft expansion joint and had overheated. Punctuation lock had no effect, and in a last desperate attempt to bring the book under control, the engineers initiated Emergency Volume Separation. A good idea, but undertaken too quickly. The smaller and lighter Epilogues could not alter course in time and collided with Volume Four, which in turn collided with Volume Three, and so forth. Of the twenty-six thousand characters lost in the disaster, only five survived. Verb quality control and emergency procedures were dramatically improved after this, and nothing like it had happened since.
“It seems to be a bed-sitting room of some variety,” murmured Sprockett as he peered inside the large lump of scrap. “Probably ten pounds a week—furnished, naturally.”
“Naturally.”
“Are we looking for anything in particular?”
“An International Standard Book Number,” I said, “an ISBN. We need to know what the book is and where it came from before we can start trying to figure out what went wrong. It’s sometimes harder than it seems. The wreckage is often badly mangled, widely scattered—and there are a lot of books out there.”
We stepped into the upside-down bed-sitting room, all its contents strewn around inside. It was well described, so it was either a popular book given depth and color by reader feedback, or pre-feedback altogether. The room hadn’t been painted for a while, the carpets were threadbare, and the furniture had seen better days. It might seem trivial, but it was these sorts of clues that allowed us to pinpoint which book it was from.
“Potboiler?” I suggested.
“It’s from HumDram if it is,” replied Sprockett as he picked up a torn Abbey Road album. “Post-1969, at any rate.”
We searched for half an hour amongst the debris but found no sign of an ISBN.
“This book could be any one of thousands,” said Sprockett.
“ Millions.”
With nothing more to see here, we stepped back outside the bed-sitting room, and I laid a map of the BookWorld on the hood of Lola’s car and marked where the section had been found. This done, I called in Pickford Removals, and within twenty minutes the bed-sitting room had been loaded onto the back of a flatbed for onward delivery to the double garage at the back of my house. This was ostensibly to allow the books in which they had landed to carry on unhindered. Not that a ton of tattered paragraph would necessarily be a problem. The entire cast of A Tale of Two Cities has steadfastly ignored a runaway pink gorilla that has evaded capture for eighty-seven years but, as far as we know, has not been spotted by readers once.
“I’m sorry to have troubled you,” I said to Lola, who stubbed out her cigarette and climbed into her car. She stomped on the accelerator, and the Delahaye shot across the car park, drove straight through the wooden barrier behind her and landed with a crunch on top of the Mairzy Doats sandwich bar ten stories below.