“Not at all,” I replied politely. “In fact, I think it’s rather fetching.”
“Do you really?” said the toad with a smile.
“Who are you talking to?” asked the man, looking up from his paper.
“The toad.”
The man looked around. “What toad?”
“What did the man just say?” asked the toad.
“I like your books,” said the woman on the other side of me. “When are we going to see some more?”
“Five is all you’ll get,” I said, happy to get away from the man-toad. “What are you seeing Captain Phantastic for?”
“I’m head of the Metaphor Allocation Committee,” she explained. “Once we move to the Metaphor Credit Trading System, those books with excess metaphor will be able to trade it on the floor of the Narrative Device Exchange. Naturally, more complex figurative devices such as hypothetical futures and analogy and simile trust funds will have to be regulated; we can’t have hyperbole ending up as overvalued as it was—the bottom dropped out of the litotes market, which, as anyone will tell you, was most undesirable.”
“Most undesirable,” I remarked, having not understood a word. “And how will Captain Phantastic help with all this?”
She shrugged. “I just want to run the idea past him. There might be a historical precedent that could suggest collateralized metaphor obligations might be a bad idea. Even so,” she added, “we might do it anyway—just for kicks and giggles. Excuse me.”
While we’d been talking, Captain Phantastic had been dealing with each inquiry at lightning speed. This wasn’t surprising, as the Records Office relied on nothing as mundane as magnetic storage, paper filing or even a linked alien supermind. It had in its possession instead a single elephant with a prodigiously large memory. It was efficient and simple, and it required only buns, hay and peanuts to operate.
When it was my turn, I walked nervously into his office.
“Hello,” said the elephant in a nasally, trumpety, blocked-nose sort of voice. I noticed he was dressed in an unusual three piece pin-striped suit, unusual in that not only did it have a watch fob the size of a saucepan in the waistcoat pocket, but the pinstripes were running horizontally.
“So how can I help?”
“Jurisfiction Accident Investigation Department,” I said, holding up my shield. I paused as a sudden thought struck me. Not about elephants, or even of a toad with a man growing out of its bottom, or of the volatile metaphor market. I suddenly thought about lying. Of subterfuge. It was wrong, but in a right kind of way, because I had finally figured out what the leaden feeling was. It was a deficiency of Right Thing to Do—and I needed to remedy the shortfall, and fast.
“We’re investigating a crashed book out in Conspiracy,” I said, tearing up the accident report behind my back, “and we need some background information on The Murders on the Hareng Rouge by Adrian Dorset.”
“Of course,” trumpeted the elephant. “Take a seat, Miss . . . ?”
“Next. Thursday Next. But I’m not—”
“It’s all right,” he said, “I know. I know everything. More even than the Cheshire Cat. And that’s saying something. I’m Captain Phantastic, by the way, but you can call me ‘the Captain.’ You and I haven’t met, but the real Thursday and I go back a ways—even partnered together during the whole sorry issue surrounding The Cat in the Hat III—Revenge of the Things. Did you hear about it?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t.”
“No matter.” And he sniffed at me delicately for a moment with his trunk.
“Do you have a chicken living in your house?”
“A dodo.”
“Would that be Lorina?”
“We call her Pickwick these days, but yes.”
“Tell her that Captain Phantastic is still waiting for that date she promised.”
I wasn’t aware that Pickwick dated elephants—or anyone, come to that.
“Did she promise you recently?”
“Eighty-six years, three months, and two days ago. Would you like me to relate the conversation? I can do it word for word.”