I said that I did.
“Have them at hand, and use them only when I say.”
The long fall towards the moon was conducted at a greatly increased velocity. I peered over Sprockett’s shoulder and noted that the speedometer went only as fast as .5 Absurd, and we exceeded that speed within half a minute. The glass on the instrument shattered. The moon went from the size of a pea to an orange and to a soccer ball, and as we moved ever closer, I could see that the small moon was about a quarter of a mile in diameter and was indeed made of accreted junk—bits of books that had been nudged from the gravopause and lost. Pretty soon the moon was the biggest object in the sky, and just when we were less than five hundred feet from the surface, Sprockett rolled inverted and pulled the cab into a tight orbit. I felt a lurch as we accelerated rapidly, had time to see several people on the surface waving at us desperately, and then we were off and around and away again, flung out back towards the gravopause in a slingshot maneuver.
“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 r
ange 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.”