One of Our Thursdays Is Missing (Thursday Next 6)

We had to wait a nail-biting two and three-quarters minutes, every second worrying that the Plaids would spot us.

“Buckle up, ma’am,” said Sprockett. “Looks like someone’s been discovered.”

As we watched, an entire section of Vanity Island seemed to fall away. A book had been accepted into the mainstream and was rising from the flanks of Mount Sleeper, trailing the debris of a ramshackle group of shameless Zadie Smith rip-offs that had been unwisely built on top of it.

The settings—mostly of a winter scene in London, it appeared—rotated slowly about its axis as it rose vertically to meet us, and just as it transitioned into forward flight, Sprockett stepped on the throttle and accelerated to meet the book, which loomed as large as eight cathedrals in the windscreen. As soon as we were close enough, Sprockett slewed the vehicle to a stop on the side of a dream sequence—a picnic the family had once spent on a grassy hill in spring, where a silver pond alive with bulrushes lay within the dappled glade of beech trees.

“Congratulations on the publication,” I said to a small boy who was playing with a tin train, and he waved shyly in return. We weren’t there for long. Piggybacking around the BookWorld was a dark art that needed calm nerves and good timing; within a few minutes, Sprockett lifted off again and made the short hop to a historical novel that was moving up to join the High Stream in order to make its way to History for fact-checking. They looked less friendly in this book, so Sprockett simply fired one of the vehicle’s two grapnels into the soft intratextual matrix to which the book’s settings were bolted, and we began the tow into the high orbit dangling on the end of a slender length of steel cable.

“Okay,” I said as we moved steadily upwards, the cab’s altimeter winding around like a top, “how’s this for a scenario? Thursday is investigating something that requires her to stay out of sight. She hides out in Vanity, somewhere near Sargasso Plaza. The Mediocre Gatsby always hangs out there, waiting for fares. He takes her to Biography and the following day picks her up to go to the Council of Genres. He piggybacks The Murders on the Hareng Rouge, which is heading—ISBN already scrubbed—towards the Ungenred Zone to be scrapped. Somewhere above Aviation the rhetorical device is activated. The book explodes into a zillion fragments within a fraction of a second, taking with it Thursday, Mediocre, and the TransGenre Taxi. It’s just another book coming to grief that would be swiftly investigated, and then as swiftly dismissed as an accident.”

“Barmouth Blaster?” asked Sprockett, offering me a cocktail.

“Thank you.”

“So we were right—it wasn’t an attack on the book at all,” murmured Sprockett, adding the ice and lemon to the cocktail shaker along with half a can of Red Bull, a Mucinex and two onions. “It was a hit on the taxi—with Thursday Next inside. Which means that Mediocre must have been bribed to take the particular book—”

“But knew nothing of the reason. He was tricked into attending his own execution, as well as Thursday’s.”

We sat in silence for some minutes as we were towed ever upwards, thinking about what we had just uncovered. In the RealWorld such a convoluted method of murder would be faintly ridiculous, but in the BookWorld all murders happened this way.

“Your Barmouth Blaster, ma’am.”

“Thank you.”

“Ma’am?”

“Yes?”

“Why was Ms. Next murdered?”

There were at least seventy-two people who had tried to kill her over the years, and narrowing it down was going to be tricky. I decided to head for the most obvious.

“Without Thursday the Racy Novel peace talks might well fail. Who would benefit most from a genre war in the north of the island?”

“Men in Plaid,” said Sprockett.

“Hardly likely,” I replied. “They’re probably mopping up for someone else—or simply want to find Thursday—or are just being wicked for the hell of it.”

“You misunderstand me, madam,” he said politely. “I mean Men in Plaid—behind us!”

I turned and looked out the cab’s rear window. Sprockett was right. Far below was not one Buick Roadmaster but three. They would also have Technobabble™ Scramjamcious Gravitational Flux Throb-O-Tron Torque Converter drive systems and, knowing the Men in Plaid, ones considerably more advanced than ours and twice as nonsensical.

“How far to the gravopause?” I asked.

“We’re almost there.”

Despite the gravopause’s usefulness for getting about, one had to be careful. If you had the misfortune to move above this altitude and had insufficient thrust to escape, you could be caught in the dead center of the sphere forever. There was a small moon in the gravitational dead spot made from accreted book traffic that had accidentally fallen in and been unable to escape. From the dizzying heights we had now reached, I could actually see the moon above us, no bigger than a pea.

Within a half minute more, we had reached the gravopause. Sprockett cast off the towline, and we drifted onwards, safely in orbit. All that was required now was to coast along until we were above Biography and then dip the cab into a downwards trajectory and let gravity take over.

“Ma’am, would you wind me up?” said Sprockett. “I can see fun and games ahead, and I wouldn’t want to risk spring depletion at an inopportune moment.”

I leaned forward and wound him until his indicator was just below the red line. I felt his bronze outer casing flex with the increased tension.

“The Men in Plaid are gaining,” I said, looking behind us.

The three Roadmasters were in V formation about a half mile away and had just reached the gravopause. At the rate they were going, they would be upon us in under five minutes.