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.