The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next 1)

There appeared to be an accident on the motorway ahead. Two dozen or so cars had stopped in front of us and when nothing moved for a couple of minutes I pulled onto the hard shoulder and drove slowly to the front of the queue. A traffic cop hailed us to stop, looked doubtfully at the bullet holes in the paintwork of my car and then said:

“Sorry, ma’am. Can’t let you through—”

I held up my old SpecOps-5 badge and his manner changed.

“Sorry, ma’am. There’s something unusual ahead.”

Bowden and I exchanged looks and got out of the car. Behind us a crowd of curious onlookers was being held back by a POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape. They stood in silence to watch the spectacle unfold in front of their eyes. Three squad cars and an ambulance were on the scene already; two paramedics were attending to a newborn infant who was wrapped up in a blanket and howling plaintively. The officers were all relieved that I had arrived—the highest rank there was sergeant and they were glad to be able to foist the responsibility onto someone else, and someone from SO-5 was as high an operative as any of them had even seen.

I borrowed a pair of binoculars and looked up the empty motorway. About five hundred yards away the road and starry night sky had spiraled into the shape of a whirlpool, a funnel that was crushing and distorting the light that managed to penetrate the vortex. I sighed. My father had told me about temporal distortions but I had never seen one. In the center of the whirlpool, where the refracted light had been whipped up into a jumbled pattern, there was an inky black hole, which seemed to have neither depth nor color, just shape: a perfect circle the size of a grapefruit. Traffic on the opposite motorway had also been stopped by the police, the flashing blue lights slowing to red as they shone through the fringes of the black mass, distorting the image of the road beyond like the refraction on the edge of a jam jar. In front of the vortex was a blue Datsun, the bonnet already starting to stretch as it approached the distortion. Behind that was a motorcycle, and behind this and closest to us was a green family sedan. I watched for a minute or so, but all the vehicles appeared motionless on the tarmac. The rider, his motorcycle and all the occupants of the cars seemed to be frozen like statues.

“Blast!” I muttered under my breath as I glanced at my watch. “How long since it opened up?”

“About an hour,” answered the sergeant. “There was some kind of accident involving an ExcoMat containment vehicle. Couldn’t have happened at a worse time; I was about to come off shift.”

He jerked a thumb in the direction of the baby on the stretcher, who had put his fingers in his mouth and stopped yelling. “That was the driver. Before the accident he was thirty-one. By the time we got here he was eight—in a few minutes he’ll be nothing more than a damp patch on the blanket.”

“Have you called the ChronoGuard?”

“I called ’em,” he answered resignedly. “But a patch of bad time opened up near Tesco’s in Wareham. They can’t be here for at least four hours.”

I thought quickly.

“How many people have been lost so far?”

“Sir,” said an officer, pointing up the road, “I think you had better see this!”

We all watched as the blue Datsun started to contort and stretch, fold and shrink as it was sucked through the hole. Within a few seconds it had disappeared completely, compressed to a billionth of its size and catapulted to Elsewhere.

The sergeant pushed his cap to the back of his head and sighed. There was nothing he could do.

I repeated my question.

“How many?”

“Oh, the truck has gone, an entire mobile library, twelve cars and a motorcycle. Maybe twenty people.”

“That’s a lot of matter,” I said grimly. “The distortion could grow to the size of a football field by the time the ChronoGuard get here.”

The sergeant shrugged. He had never been briefed on what to do with temporal instabilities. I turned to Bowden.

“Come on.”

“What?”

“We’ve a little job to do.”

“You’re crazy!”

“Perhaps.”

“Can’t we wait for the ChronoGuard?”

“They’d never get here in time. It’s easy. A lobotomized monkey could do it.”

&n

bsp; “And where are we going to find a lobotomized monkey at this time of night?”