“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?”