One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

“Thank you,” replied the frog-footman, and he sat crosslegged on the floor, twisting the cube this way and that as he tried to scramble the faces.

I knocked on the door, and it was soon answered by a small man in a brown boiler suit that was liberally covered in oil stains, food and science merit badges.

“Good Lord!” he said when he saw me. “Thursday? Come inside quick.”

Once safely away from the prying ears of the frog-footman, I explained who I was—or, more important, who I wasn’t—and showed Professor Plum the authorization from Bradshaw.

“Did he give you a code word?”

“What?”

“A code word.”

“The commander didn’t say anything about a code word.”

“Correct. There is no code word—but only Bradshaw would know that. Follow me.”

The basement was twice the size of a cathedral and quite full to capacity with machinery. An army of technicians scurried around looking purposeful while lights blinked on and off as arcs of electricity discharged into the air at regular intervals.

“That’s mostly for effect,” explained Plum as we moved among the machines. “It’s sometimes of equal importance to have a machine’s form and function in equilibrium. Who wants an italicizer that can be carried around in the pocket? Much better to have a large device that flashes lights randomly and occasionally goes bzzz.”

I agreed, even if I’d never seen an italicizer, much less used one.

“All this technology,” I mused. “Is there any limit to what you can do?”

“If there is, we haven’t found it,” replied Plum. “We can figure out most technologies, and those that we can’t are subcontracted to Technobabble™ Industries, which can usually cobble something together. The good thing about being in the BookWorld is that we aren’t hampered by anything as awkward as physical laws. The RealWorld must be hideously annoying to do science in, but given how difficult it is, I suppose breakthroughs are of greater value. In here, for example, perpetual-motion machines are quite feasible.”

“What’s stopping us from using them?”

“Finding a way to make them stop. Once we’ve figured that out, we’ll have perpetual engines in every minicab and bus in the BookWorld.”

He paused while I stared at a machine that could transform dark humor to sarcasm and then back again with no loss of narrative mass.

“As you know,” continued Plum, “the Council of Genres permits us to suspend the rules of physics in order that we can develop the somewhat unique technologies that the BookWorld requires. See this?”

We had stopped next to a large machine that seemed to be nothing but a riveted tube about a yard thick running through the entire length of the workshop. It appeared through one wall and then vanished out the other. If I hadn’t known any better, I would have thought it a throughput pipe or a footnoterphone conduit.

“This is just a small part of the Large Metaphor Collider.”

“What does that do?”

Professor Plum stopped for a moment at the control panel. “You know we’ve got a serious metaphor deficit at present?”

I nodded. The problem was well documented. Most of Fiction’s rhetorical power, dramatic irony and pathos were brought naturally by the mighty Metaphoric River that snaked about the island. But the huge influx of novels in the past century had exacted a burden on the waterway as the much-needed metaphor was abstracted on a massive scale, and these days it was no longer considered possible that the river could supply all of Fiction’s requirements, hence the trade in raw metaphor and JurisTech’s attempts to synthesize it.

“This collider,” continued Professor Plum, “will take depleted metaphor—simile, in effect—and accelerate it in a circular trackway over eighteen miles long to a velocity approaching ninety-five percent of absurd, at which point it will be collided with indisputable fact. There is a brief flash of energy as the two different modes of communication are fused together and then explode in a burst of high-energy subcomprehension particles. We then record the event as traces on a sheet of onionskin paper.”

“The flimsy blue variety?”

“Exactly. In this manner we hope not only to figure out the individual building blocks of STORY in order to have a better understanding of how it all works but also to use it as a way of extracting usable quantities of metaphor from even the most prosaic, tired or clumsily constructed simile.”

“Does it work?”

“I was just about to test it. You can help if you want.”

I said I would be delighted, and Plum pointed me in the direction of a lidded crucible that was steaming gently to itself.

“You’ll find some tongs and gloves over there—I need that simile in the accelerator chamber.”