A Thursday Next Digital Collection: Novels 1-5 (27 page)

“And that's it?” asked Bowden in surprise.

“How do you mean?”

“Well, the ending does sound a bit of an anticlimax. We try to make art perfect because we never manage it in real life and here is Charlotte Brontë concluding her novel—presumably
something which has a sense of autobiographical wishful thinking about it—in a manner that reflects her own disappointed love life. If I had been Charlotte I would have made certain that Rochester and Jane were reunited—married, if possible.”

“Don't ask me,” I said, “I didn't write it.” I paused. “You're right, of course,” I murmured. “It is a crap ending. Why, when all was going so well, does the ending just cop out on the reader? Even the
Jane Eyre
purists agree that it would have been far better for them to have tied the knot.”

“How, with Bertha still around?”

“I don't know; she could die or something. It is a problem, isn't it?”

“How do you know it so well?” asked Bowden.

“It's always been a favorite of mine. I had a copy of it in my jacket pocket when I was shot. It stopped the bullet. Rochester appeared soon after and kept pressure on my arm wound until the medics arrived. He and the book saved my life.”

Bowden looked at his watch.

“Yorkshire is still many miles away. We shan't get their until— Hello, what's this?”

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.”

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

“You're being windy, Bowden.”

“True. Do you know what will happen if we fail?”

“We won't. It's a doddle. Dad was in the ChronoGuard; he told me all about this sort of thing. The secret is in the spheres. In four hours we could be seeing a major global disaster occurring right in front of our eyes. A rent in time so large we won't know for sure that the here-and-now isn't the there-and-then. The rout of civilization, panic in the streets, the end of the world as we know it. Hey, kid!—”

I had seen a young lad bouncing a basketball on the road. The boy reluctantly gave it to me and I returned to Bowden, who was waiting uneasily by the car. We put the hood down and Bowden sat in the passenger seat, clutching the basketball grimly.

“A basketball?”

“It's a sphere, isn't it?” I replied, remembering Dad's advice all those years ago. “Are you ready?”

“Ready,” replied Bowden in a slightly shaky voice.

I started the car and rolled slowly up to where the traffic police stood in shocked amazement.

“Are you sure you know what you're doing?” asked the young officer.

“Sort of,” I replied, truthfully enough. “Does anyone have a watch with a second hand?”

The youngest traffic cop took his watch off and handed it over. I noted the
real
time—5:30
A
.
M
.—and then reset the hands to twelve o'clock. I strapped the watch onto the rear-view mirror.

The sergeant wished us good luck as we drove off, yet his thoughts were more along the lines of “sooner you than me.”

Around us the sky was lightening into dawn, yet the area around the vehicles was still night. Time for the trapped cars had stood still, but only to observers from the outside. To the occupants, everything was happening as normal, except that if they looked behind them they would witness the dawn breaking rapidly.

The first fifty yards seemed plain enough to Bowden and me, but as we drove closer the car and bike seemed to speed up and by the time we had drawn level with the green car we were both moving at about sixty miles per hour. I glanced at the watch on the rear-view mirror and noted that precisely three minutes had elapsed.

Bowden had been watching what was going on behind us. As he and I drove toward the instability the officers' movements seemed to accelerate until they were just a blur. The cars that had been blocking the carriageway were turned around and directed swiftly back down the hard shoulder at a furious rate. Bowden also noticed the sun rising rapidly behind us and wondered quite what he had let himself in for.

The green sedan had two occupants; a man and a woman. The woman was asleep and the driver was looking at the dark hole that had opened up in front of them. I shouted to him to stop. He wound down his window and I repeated myself, added “SpecOps!” and waved my ID. He dutifully applied his brakes and his stoplights came on, puncturing the darkness. Three minutes and twenty-six seconds had elapsed since we had begun our journey.

From where the ChronoGuard were standing, they could just see the brake lights on the green sedan come languidly on
in the funnel of darkness that was the event's influence. They watched the progress of the green sedan over the next ten minutes as it made an almost imperceptible turn toward the hard shoulder. It was nearly 10
A
.
M
. and an advance ChronoGuard outfit had arrived direct from Wareham. Their equipment and operatives were being airlifted in an SO-12 Chinook helicopter, and Colonel Rutter had flown ahead to see what needed to be done. He had been surprised that two ordinary officers had volunteered for this hazardous duty, especially as nobody could tell him who we were. Even a check of my car registration didn't help, as it was still listed as belonging to the garage I had bought it from. The only positive thing about the whole damn mess, he noted, was the fact that the passenger seemed to be holding a sphere of some sort. If the hole grew any bigger and time slowed down even more it might take them several months to reach us, even in the fastest vehicle they had. He lowered the binoculars and sighed. It was a stinking, lousy, lonely job. He had been working in the ChronoGuard for almost forty years, Standard Earth Time. In logged work time he was 209. In his own personal physiological time he was barely

28. His children were older than him and his wife was in a nursing home. He had thought the higher rates of pay would compensate him for any problems, but they didn't.

As the green sedan fell quickly away behind us, Bowden again looked back and saw the sun rising faster and higher. A helicopter arrived in a flash with the distinctive “CG” motif of the ChronoGuard. Ahead of us now there was only the motorcyclist, who seemed to be perilously close to the dark, swirling hole. He wore red leathers and was driving a top-of-the-range Triumph motorcycle, ironically enough about the only bike capable of escape from the vortex if he had known what the
problem was. We had taken another six minutes to catch up with him and as we approached a roaring sound started to rise above the wind noise; the sort of scream a typhoon might make as it passed over the top of you. We were still about twelve feet behind and finding it difficult to keep up. The speedometer needle on the Porsche touched ninety as we roared along together. I blew my horn but the screaming drowned it out.

“Get ready!” I shouted to Bowden as the wind whipped our hair and the air tugged at our clothes. I flashed my lights at the bike again and at last he saw us. He turned around and waved, mistook our intent for a desire to initiate a race, kicked down a gear and accelerated away. The vortex caught him in an instant and he seemed to stretch out and around and inside out as he flowed rapidly into the instability; within what appeared to be a second he had gone. As soon as I thought we could get no closer I stamped on the brakes and yelled:

“Now!”

Smoke poured off the tires as we careened across the tarmac; Bowden threw the basketball, which seemed to swell in size with the hole, the ball flattening to a disc and the hole stretching out to a line. We saw the basketball hit the hole, bounce once and let us through. I glanced at the watch as we tipped through into the abyss, the basketball shutting out the last glimpse of the world we had left behind as we dropped through to Elsewhere. Up until the point we passed the event, twelve minutes and forty-one seconds had elapsed. Outside it had been closer to seven hours.

“Motorcycle's gone,” remarked Colonel Rutter. His second-in-command grunted in reply. He didn't approve of non-Chronos attempting his work. They had managed to maintain the job's mysticism for over five decades with the wages to suit; have-a-go heroes could only serve to weaken people's undying trust in
what they did. It wasn't a difficult job; it just took a long time. He had mended a similar rent in spacetime that had opened up in Weybridge's municipal park just between the floral clock and the bandstand. The job itself had taken ten minutes; he had simply walked in and stuck a tennis ball across the hole while outside seven months flashed by—seven months on double pay plus privileges, thank you very much.

The ChronoGuard operatives set up a large clock facing inward so any operatives within the field's influence would know what was happening. A similar clock on the back of the helicopter gave the officers outside a good idea of how slow time was running within.