“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.
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.
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.