“Please?”
“There are safety issues,” he explained. “The more you stay out there, the less time you can spend there. Bradshaw used to travel across quite often, but these days he can barely stay out for ten minutes before popping back.”
I thought about the excitement I’d felt just as I was about to kiss Landen and the potential chain of events that might have occurred from there on in.
“I really need to get back, Professor. Lives . . . um, depend on it.”
“Whose lives?”
Commander Bradshaw had appeared in the laboratory. But he didn’t walk in, he had bookjumped in. I hadn’t seen that for a while; it was considered very common and was actively discouraged. The Ungenred Zone and Racy Novel, to name but two, even had antijump sieves set up on their borders—large sails of a fine mesh that snagged the punctuation in one’s description and brought one down to earth with a thump.
“I’m very busy,” he said, glancing at his watch. “Walk with me.”
So I walked with Bradshaw out of the labs, past the frog-footman, who followed at a discrete distance and up the stairs.
“So,” said Bradshaw, “how did you get on?”
“Not very well. Lots happened, but I’ve got no way of knowing which of the facts were significant and which weren’t.”
“The RealWorld is like that. It’s possible that nothing was significant or that everything was. It scares the bejesus out of me, I can tell you—and I don’t scare easily. Anything on Thursday’s whereabouts?”
I told him about the locked room at Acme.
“Hmm,” he said, “definitely in here somewhere. I’ll ask Professor Plum to attempt another Textual Sieve triangulation.” He thought for a moment. “How were Landen and the kids?”
“As good as might be expected. Permission to speak honestly, sir?”
“I welcome nothing else.”
“Is it possible that Thursday is alive and well but just suffering some bizarre mental aberration?”
He stared at me. “You think you might be Thursday?”
I shrugged. “Landen seems to think so. I saw Jenny, and I could do things—fight, think on my feet and disarm a man in under a second. Things I never knew I could do.”
He smiled and patted my arm. “It’s not uncommon to have feelings of elevated status after visiting the RealWorld. It’ll soon pass.”
“But could I tell if I were real? Could anyone tell?”
“There are lots of signs,” said Bradshaw, “but here’s the easiest: What am I doing now?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about now?”
“As far as I can tell, you’re not doing anything at all.” Bradshaw took his finger
off my nose and smiled. “I suppressed my action line. The real Thursday could have seen what I was doing, but you had to rely on the description. You’re fictional, my dear, through and through.”
“But I could be just thinking you did that—the same as I thought I saw Jenny, and all my backstory about being the written Thursday. I could be . . . delusional.”
“And part of this delusion is you thinking you might be delusional? And me here right now talking to you?”
“I suppose so.”
“Pull yourself together, girl,” he snapped, “and don’t be such a bloody fool. If you were Thursday, you’d be saving the BookWorld, not blundering around the Outland like a petulant bull in a china shop. This is Fiction, not Psychology.”
“I’m sorry, sir.”